True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care — with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.

A Way become Way isn’t the perennial Way. A name become name isn’t the perennial name: the named is mother to the ten thousand things, but the unnamed is origin to all heaven and earth.

Laozi, Daodejing, Hinton tr. (Ch 1)

We are taught for the schoolroom, not for life.

Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius

No human life, not even the life of the hermit in nature’s wilderness, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

Be strong. Overflow with emotional and intellectual energy, and you will spread your intelligence, your love, your energy of action broadcast among others! This is what all moral teaching comes to.

Peter Kropotkin, Anarchist Morality

Those who have a propensity to philosophy … will never be tempted to go beyond common life, so long as they consider the imperfection of those faculties which they employ, their narrow reach, and their inaccurate operations.

David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Man is an animal, for the most part a creative one, prone to striving for a goal consciously and to engaging in the arts of engineering, that is, always and constantly forging new paths wherever they may lead. But the reason, maybe, that he wants sometimes to go off on a tangent is because he is predestined to forge this path, and perhaps also because however stupid the spontaneous man of action is in general, all the same the thought will sometimes occur to him that this path will almost always lead somewhere or other, and that the main thing is not where it leads but rather that it just goes somewhere.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

It is not enough to show how clever we are by showing how obscure everything is.

J. L. Austin, “A Plea for Excuses”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1956-7

The scientistic faith in a science that will one day not only fulfill, but eliminate, personal self-conception through objectifying self-description is not science, but bad philosophy.

Jürgen Habermas, “Acceptance Speech for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (14 October 2001)”

To be, in a word, unborable… It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.

David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (via quotespile)

Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anything other than a selfish decision?

David Foster Wallace, Consider The Lobster (via quotespile)