Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
In regard to the state of nature, Locke was less original than Hobbes, who regarded it as one in which there was war of all against all, and life was nasty, brutish, and short. But Hobbes was reputed an atheist. The view of the state of nature and of natural law which Locke accepted from his predecessors cannot be freed from its theological basis;
... See moreBertrand Russell • History of Western Philosophy
God (as Nietzsche famously declared) is dead. But in the unconscious, God is eternal.
Frank Tallis • Mortal Secrets
He now believed the desire to live to be more than philosophy, more than psychology, but rather, a primordial principle of physics.
Olivie Blake • The Atlas Paradox (Atlas Series Book 2)
“We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phanta
... See moreCapacious
Paul Kalanithi • When Breath Becomes Air
Descriptions like Nuland’s convinced me that such things could be known only face-to-face.
Paul Kalanithi • When Breath Becomes Air
The romantic spontaneity and courage are gone, the vision is materialistic and depressing. Ideals appear as inert by- products of physiology; what is higher is explained by what is lower and treated forever as a case of 'nothing but'—nothing but something else of a quite inferior sort. You get, in short, a materialistic universe, in which only the
... See moreWilliam James • The Collected Works of William James
The distinction we have drawn from Aristotle and Mill has been neglected in moral philosophy. We need a term for what is not-just-ameliorative. Since it makes life positively good, not merely better than it could be, and so explains why life is worth living at all, I call such value “existential.”