#phil

My philosophy is, unless you're sick and need help, why bother? ↗

— Jackie Collins

#help #need #philosophy #sick #unless

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that when you look into the darkness of the abyss the abyss looks into you. Probably no other line or thought more inspires or informs my work. ↗

— Michael Connelly

#darkness #informs #inspires #into #line

Being established in my life, buttressed by my thinking nature, fastened down in this transcendental field which was opened for me by my first perception, and in which all absence is merely the obverse of a presence, all silence a modality of the being of sound, I enjoy a sort of ubiquity and theoretical eternity, I feel destined to move in a flow of endless life, neither the beginning nor the end of which I can experience in thought, since it is my living self who think of them, and since thus my life always precedes and survives itself. ↗

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

#experience

Sit still with me in the shade of these green trees, which have no weightier thought than the withering of their leaves when autumn arrives, or the stretching of their many stiff fingers into the cold sky of the passing winter. Sit still with me and meditate on how useless effort is, how alien the will, and on how our very meditation is no more useful than effort, and no more our own than the will. Meditate too on how a life that wants nothing can have no weight in the flux of things, but a life the wants everything can likewise have no weight in the flux of things, since it cannot obtain everything, and to obtain less than everything is not worthy of souls that seek the truth. ↗

— Fernando Pessoa

#flux #life #meditation #nihilism #philosophy

New Year's Eve, we're going to be doing a concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra in Symphony Hall. It makes me feel good, because of all the people they could have had, they wanted me! We do have to do a little work with the rhythm section. ↗

— Barbara Cook

#concert #could #doing #eve #feel

Look, I like to fantasize that there's more to reality than what we have here, and that's why, from a young age, I just loved Philip K. Dick's books. ↗

— Don Coscarelli

#books #fantasize #here #i #just

The wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void. Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in Tibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and Nirvana. They are both helpless—one because he must not grasp anything, and the other because he must not let go of anything. The Tolstoyan’s will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil. But the Nietzscheite’s will is quite equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none of them are special. They stand at the crossroads, and one hates all the roads and the other likes all the roads. The result is—well, some things are not hard to calculate. They stand at the cross-roads. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#equality

And the political system is changing rapidly in this country, and we better realize that. The elephants or donkeys are not what younger people look to. They look at individual candidates' philosophy, and I think it's a different time and a different generation. ↗

— Richard M. Daley

#candidates #changing #country #different #donkeys

I enjoy getting things done. My philosophy is the edge, the edge of something. There's where we have to go in local government, in not only the philosophy but the creativity in people around you. They have to go to the edge. ↗

— Richard M. Daley

#creativity #done #edge #enjoy #getting

If we had this back, and in full measure; if society were infused by it, through and through, and men lived its life, and in its life, philosophy would take care of itself and the nature of our institutions would not matter. ↗

— Ralph A. Cram

#care #full #had #infused #institutions