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“Since this is a possible account, and if it were not so, things would come from night, and from “all things together,” and from what is not, these difficulties may be considered solved. There is something that is always moved with an unceasing motion, and this motion is circular (this is clear not only from argument but from the facts); so the first heaven would be eternal. There is, then, also something that moves it. And since what is moved and moves is intermediate, there is something that moves without being moved, being eternal, substance, and actuality. The object of desire and the object of thought move in this way: they move without being moved. The primary objects of desire and of thought are the same. For the object of appetite is what appears fine, while the primary object of wish is what is fine. And we desire something because it seems fine, rather than its seeming fine because we desire it; for thinking is the starting point.” — Aristotle, Metaphysics forage.com/aristotle/metaphy…

“That is why the Prophet (peace be upon him) spoke as he did to the man he had told to give his brother honey for diarrhea. When the diarrhea grew worse after he gave it, the man complained to him, and he said: “God has spoken the truth; it is your brother’s belly that has lied.” Indeed, we say that someone who forbids the study of the books of philosophy to one fit for them, because some of the lowest sort of people are thought to have gone astray through studying them, is like someone who forbids a thirsty man to drink cool, fresh water, so that he dies of thirst, because some people have drowned in it and died. For death by drowning in water is accidental, whereas death from thirst is essential and necessary. What has happened to this art happens to all the other arts. How many jurists there have been for whom jurisprudence was the cause of little piety and of immersion in worldly affairs! Indeed, we find that most jurists are like this, though their art in itself calls for nothing but practical virtue.” — Averroes, The Decisive Treatise forage.com/averroes/decisive…

“If we call the receptivity of our mind—its capacity to receive representations insofar as it is affected in some way—sensibility, then the faculty of producing representations itself, or the spontaneity of cognition, is the understanding. It lies in our nature that intuition can never be other than sensible: that is, it contains only the way in which we are affected by objects. The faculty of thinking the object of sensible intuition, by contrast, is the understanding. Neither of these properties is to be preferred to the other. Without sensibility no object would be given to us, and without understanding none would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind. It is therefore just as necessary to make one’s concepts sensible (that is…” — Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason forage.com/kant/critique-of-…

““Well, these beds turn out to be of three kinds. One is the one in nature, which I think we’d say a god made. Or who else?” “No one else, I think.” “And one the carpenter makes.” “Yes,” he said. “And one the painter makes, right?” “Let’s say so.” “So painter, bed-maker, god: these three are in charge of three kinds of bed.” “Yes, three.”” — Plato, Republic forage.com/plato/republic/#f…

“In my view—a view that must justify itself through the presentation of the system itself—everything turns on grasping and expressing the true not only as substance but equally as subject. At the same time, it should be noted that substantiality includes within itself the universal, or the immediacy of knowing, just as much as that immediacy which is being, or immediacy for knowing.” — G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit forage.com/hegel/phenomenolo…

“Nor does this reasoning prove only that morality does not consist in any relations that are the objects of science. If examined, it will prove with equal certainty that morality does not consist in any matter of fact that can be discovered by the understanding. This is the second part of our argument, and if it can be made evident, we may conclude that morality is not an object of reason. But can there be any difficulty in proving that vice and virtue are not matters of fact whose existence we can infer by reason? Take any action agreed to be vicious—willful murder, for instance.” — David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature forage.com/hume/treatise/#f1…

“To the laws of nature set out in Chapter 15, I would have this one added: “That every man is bound by nature, as far as he is able, to protect in war the authority by which he is himself protected in time of peace.” For he who claims a right of nature to preserve his own body cannot claim a right of nature to destroy the one by whose strength he is preserved; that is a plain contradiction of himself. And though this law may be derived by consequence from some of those already mentioned there, the times require that it be driven home and remembered.” — Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan forage.com/hobbes/leviathan/…

“Again, with the things that come to us by nature, we first acquire the capacities and later exercise the activities (this is clear with the senses: we did not get our senses from seeing often or hearing often; on the contrary, we had them and then used them, rather than getting them by using them). But the excellences we acquire by first exercising them, as happens with the crafts too. For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them: people become builders by building, for instance, and lyre players by playing the lyre. In the same way we become just by doing just things, moderate by doing moderate things, and brave by doing brave things. What happens in cities bears this out too: lawgivers make the citizens good by habituating them. This is what every lawgiver wants, and those who do not do it well miss the mark; this is what distinguishes a good constitution from a bad one.” — Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics forage.com/aristotle/nicomac…

“Since this Law is true and summons to the study that leads to knowledge of the truth, we Muslims know for certain that demonstrative study does not lead to anything contrary to what the Law has brought. For truth does not contradict truth; it agrees with it and bears witness to it. This being so, if demonstrative study leads to some kind of knowledge about some existing thing, then either the Law is silent about that thing or it mentions it. If the Law is silent about it, there is no conflict; it is like the rulings about which the Law is silent, which the jurist infers by legal reasoning by analogy. If the Law does speak of it, then the apparent sense of what it says either agrees with what demonstration has led to or disagrees with it. If it agrees, there is nothing to be said. If it disagrees, its interpretation (taʾwīl) must be sought.” — Averroes, The Decisive Treatise forage.com/averroes/decisive…

“In everything that is to provoke lively, convulsive laughter there must be something absurd (in which, therefore, the understanding in itself can find no satisfaction). Laughter is an affect arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing. This very transformation is certainly not gratifying to the understanding, yet indirectly it gives very lively gratification for a moment. So the cause must lie in the influence of the representation on the body and the body’s reciprocal effect on the mind. It does not lie in the representation being objectively an object of gratification (for how can a disappointed expectation gratify?), but solely in the fact that, as a mere play of representations, it produces an equilibrium of the vital forces in the body.” — Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment forage.com/kant/critique-of-…

“This, then, is one kind of arrangement. Next let’s discuss the teaching and transmission of these things themselves: how, to whom and when each of them should be done. A shipwright, when he lays the foundations of his craft, first lays down the keels and sketches the shapes of the vessels; and I seem to myself to be doing the same thing, trying to distinguish the shapes of lives according to the characters of souls—truly laying down their keels, and rightly considering by what means and in what ways of life we’ll best be carried through this voyage of life. Human affairs aren’t worth great seriousness; yet we do have to be serious about them—and that’s our misfortune. But since we’re where we are, perhaps it would suit us if we could go about it in some fitting way.” — Plato, Laws forage.com/plato/laws/#f1404

“These principles have given me a way of explaining naturally the union, or rather the conformity, of the soul and the organic body. The soul follows its own laws, and the body likewise its own; and they agree by virtue of the pre-established harmony among all substances, since they are all representations of one and the same universe.” — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Monadology forage.com/leibniz/monadolog…

“He had certainly not abandoned the worldly path that his parents had chanted over him like a spell, and he had gone ahead of me to Rome to study law. There, incredibly, he was carried away by an incredible craving for gladiatorial shows. He loathed and detested such things. But one day some of his friends and fellow students, coming back from lunch, happened to meet him on the way, and though he vehemently refused and resisted, they dragged him with a friendly violence into the amphitheater during the days of the cruel and deadly games. He said: “If you drag my body to that place, can you really fix my mind and my eyes on those shows? I will be there and yet absent, and so I will get the better of both you and them.” When they heard this they brought him along with them all the same, perhaps wanting to find out whether he could do what he said. When they arrived and had found what seats they could, the whole place was seething with the most savage pleasures.” — Augustine, Confessions forage.com/augustine/confess…

“I will write these traits down in two columns. I think you will practically recognize the two types of mental make-up I mean if I head the columns “tender-minded” and “tough-minded” respectively.” — William James, Pragmatism forage.com/james/pragmatism/…

“One should prefer impossibilities that are probable to possibilities that are unconvincing. Stories should not be built out of irrational parts. Ideally they should contain nothing irrational at all; failing that, it should lie outside the plot—like Oedipus not knowing how Laius died—and not inside the play, like the people reporting the Pythian games in the Electra, or the man in the Mysians who comes from Tegea to Mysia without speaking. So to say that the plot would otherwise have been ruined is ridiculous: one should not construct such plots in the first place. If a poet does include something irrational and it seems it could be made more reasonable, even an absurdity may be admitted. Even the irrational elements in the Odyssey about his being put ashore would clearly be intolerable if a poor poet had handled them; as it is, the poet makes the absurdity disappear by sweetening it with his other merits.” — Aristotle, Poetics forage.com/aristotle/poetics…

“In the Northern Darkness there is a fish, and its name is Kun. Kun is so big that no one knows how many thousand li it measures. It transforms into a bird, and its name is Peng. Peng’s back is so broad that no one knows how many thousand li it measures. When it rouses itself and flies, its wings are like clouds hanging from the sky. When the sea heaves, this bird sets off for the Southern Darkness. The Southern Darkness is the Pool of Heaven. The Qi Xie is a record of marvels. The Xie says: “When Peng journeys to the Southern Darkness, it thrashes the water for three thousand li, spirals up on the whirlwind ninety thousand li, and goes off on the gales of the sixth month.” Shimmering haze, specks of dust: living things blow one another about with their breath. The blue of the sky—is that its true color? Or is it only that it is so far away and has no end? Looking down from up there, Peng would see just the same, and that is all. Besides, if water is not piled up deep enough, it will not have the strength to bear a large boat. Pour a cup of water into a hollow in the floor, and a blade of grass will be a boat on it; set the cup down there and it sticks, because the water is shallow and the boat is big. If wind is not piled up deep enough, it will not have the strength to bear great wings. So only at ninety thousand li, with the wind all beneath it, can Peng ride the wind; with the blue sky on its back and nothing to block its way, only then will it set its course for the south.” — Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi forage.com/zhuangzi/zhuangzi…

“We have sufficiently proved in the Transcendental Aesthetic that everything intuited in space or in time, and hence all objects of an experience possible for us, are nothing but appearances, that is, mere representations, which, in the way they are represented—as extended beings or series of alterations—have no existence grounded in itself outside our thoughts. This doctrine I call transcendental idealism. The realist in the transcendental sense makes these modifications of our sensibility into things subsisting in themselves, and hence makes mere representations into things in themselves.” — Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason forage.com/kant/critique-of-…

“That’s why one person puts a vortex around the earth and so makes it stay in place beneath the heavens, while another props it up on a base of air, as if it were a broad kneading-trough. But the power by which things are now placed in the best way they could be placed—that they neither look for nor think has any divine strength. Instead they think they’ll someday find an Atlas stronger and more immortal than this, and better at holding everything together; they don’t think that the good, which binds, truly binds and holds anything together. Now, I’d gladly become anyone’s student to learn how such a cause works. But since I was deprived of it and couldn’t discover it myself or learn it from anyone else, would you like me, Cebes, he said, to give you a demonstration of how I’ve conducted my second voyage in search of the cause?” — Plato, Phaedo forage.com/plato/phaedo/#f52…

“Suppose that nothing is “given” as real except our world of desires and passions, that we can get down or up to no other “reality” than just the reality of our drives—for thinking is only a relation of these drives to one another —: is it not permitted to make the attempt and to ask the question whether this given does not suffice for understanding, on the basis of what is of its own kind, the so-called mechanistic (or “material”) world as well?” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil forage.com/nietzsche/beyond-…

“So for nearly six months, beginning with Rajab of the year 488 AH (AD 1095), I wavered between the pull of worldly appetites and the calls of the hereafter. In that month the matter passed beyond choice into compulsion, for God locked my tongue so that it was held back from teaching. I would struggle with myself to teach for a single day, to please the hearts of those who came to me, but my tongue would not utter a single word; I simply could not do it. This impediment of the tongue brought on a grief in my heart, and with it my power to digest and my relish of food and drink were lost: I could not swallow a sop of bread in broth, nor digest a single morsel. It went on to weaken my faculties, until the doctors gave up hope of treating me and said: “This is something that has come down upon the heart, and from there it has spread through the constitution. There is no treating it, except by the inmost self finding relief from the anxiety that has befallen it.”” — al-Ghazali, Deliverance from Error forage.com/ghazali/deliveran…