Passages about the good life

The first man who enclosed a piece of ground and took it into his head to say, this is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.

Man is naturally good, and it is our institutions alone that have made him bad.

I proclaim that justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger.

Glaucon imagines a ring that makes its wearer invisible and asks whether any man, just or unjust, would keep his hands off what he wanted.

Nothing in the world, or even out of it, can possibly be conceived which could be called good without qualification except a good will.

Act only according to that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

The desire and pursuit of the whole is what we call love.

Love is not a god and not a mortal, but something in between, a spirit born of Poverty and Resource, always needy, always scheming, never rich and never destitute.

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.

For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.

Such evil deeds could religion prompt.

Nothing can ever be begotten of nothing by divine will.

The existence of God can be proved in five ways.

Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God.

What do I know?

There is no desire more natural than that of knowledge.

Man is by nature a political animal.

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

A man cannot search either for what he knows or for what he does not know. He cannot search for what he knows, since he knows it, and in that case is in no need of searching; nor for what he does not know, for he does not know what to look for.

For seeking and learning are in fact nothing but recollection.

Men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things.

Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish; but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life.

Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes.

Above him there was now nothing but the sky, the lofty sky, not clear, but still immeasurably lofty, with grey clouds slowly creeping across it.

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves.

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Ye have heard that it was said of them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; but I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment.

Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, seashores, and mountains, but it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself.

Do not act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over thee. While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good.

Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smooths there, until a lovely face has grown upon his work.

Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become sunlike.

I would rather that my lyre were out of tune and discordant, and that the chorus I led should be, and that most men should disagree with me, than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself and contradict myself.

Nature herself shows that it is just for the better man to have more than the worse, and the more powerful than the less.

The foundation of justice is good faith, that is, steadiness and truthfulness in what is said and agreed.

There are two ways of settling a dispute: by discussion and by force. Since the first is proper to man and the second to beasts, we should resort to the second only when the first is not available.

Your sheep, that were wont to be so meek and tame and so small eaters, now, as I hear say, be become so great devourers and so wild, that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves.

For what justice is this, that a rich goldsmith or an usurer should have a pleasant and wealthy living, and in the meantime a poor labourer, a carter, a smith, without whom no commonwealth could continue, should get so hard and poor a living?

By God I mean an absolutely infinite being, that is, substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence.

Men believe themselves free because they are conscious of their volitions and their desire, and do not think, even in their dreams, of the causes by which they are disposed to want and to will.

In this best of all possible worlds, everything is for the best.

It is demonstrable that things cannot be otherwise than they are; for as all things have been created for some end, they must necessarily be created for the best end. Noses were made to carry spectacles, so we have spectacles.

The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things.

The worker therefore feels himself only when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home.

Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.

The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable. What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true?

Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest.

He who saw the Deep, the country's foundation, who knew the proper ways, was wise in all matters.

My friend, whom I loved so dear, who with me went through every danger, Enkidu, whom I loved so dear, who with me went through every danger: the doom of mortals overtook him.

Is it not a pleasure to learn and to repeat or practise from time to time what has been learnt? Is it not delightful to have friends coming from distant quarters?

What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.

If you associate with me, on the very day you will go home a better man, and the same the next day, and every day you will get better and better.

Zeus, fearing that our race would be wholly destroyed, sent Hermes to bring justice and shame to men, and ordered that all should have a share, for cities cannot exist if only a few share in them as in the other arts.

Let no one delay the study of philosophy while young nor weary of it when old; for no one is either too young or too old for the health of the soul.

Death is nothing to us; for that which is dissolved is without sensation, and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us.

Of things some are in our power, and others are not. In our power are opinion, movement towards a thing, desire, aversion; and in a word, whatever are our own acts. Not in our power are the body, property, reputation, offices, and in a word, whatever are not our own acts.

Men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things.

All their life was spent not by laws, statutes or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure. Their rule was this one clause: Do what you will.

I would rather have you learn nothing than learn such books under such masters, for their learning is but stupidity and their wisdom a sham, bastardising good and noble minds and spoiling the flower of youth.

What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; / The proper study of Mankind is Man.

All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee; / All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see; / All Discord, Harmony not understood; / All partial Evil, universal Good: / And spite of Pride, in erring Reason's spite, / One truth is clear, Whatever IS, is RIGHT.

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

Act so that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle of a universal legislation.

Consider the herd that is grazing beside you. It does not know what yesterday or today is, it leaps about, eats, rests, digests, leaps about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day.

There is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of the historical sense which injures and finally destroys the living thing, be it a man or a people or a culture.

For half a century the housewives of Pont-l'Eveque envied Madame Aubain her servant Felicite.

And when she breathed her last, she thought she saw, in the opening heavens, a gigantic parrot hovering above her head.

The Fox and the Grapes: unable to reach the grapes, the fox declared them sour and walked away.

The Tortoise and the Hare: slow and steady wins the race.

The text opens by warning that the Tao which can be named is not the eternal Tao, announcing directly that its own central subject, the way that underlies and generates all things, exceeds ordinary language's capacity to fully capture or define it.

The text repeatedly returns to water as its central image for genuine strength, observing that water wears down even the hardest stone not through force or direct confrontation but through patient softness and constant, yielding persistence over time.

Epicurus states in the Letter to Herodotus that the universe consists of bodies and void and nothing else, that bodies themselves are either compounds or the indivisible atoms from which compounds are formed, and that these atoms are infinite in number and move continuously through an infinite void.

He argues that the soul is a body made of especially fine particles distributed throughout the frame, and that it perishes along with the body's dissolution, since a soul separated from the body it was distributed through can no longer possess the sensation that constitutes its actual nature.

Now this, O monks, is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, old age is suffering, disease is suffering, death is suffering, union with what is unpleasant is suffering, separation from what is pleasant is suffering, not to get what one wants is suffering.

Now this, O monks, is the noble truth of the cause of suffering: it is that craving which leads to renewed existence, accompanied by delight and passion, seeking delight now here, now there, the craving for pleasure, the craving for existence, the craving for non-existence.

Merest breath, said Qohelet, merest breath. All is mere breath.

A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth endures forever. And the sun rises and the sun sets, and to its place it pants, and rises there again.

Inwood and Gerson translate and number the fragments and reports from Diogenes Laertius, Cicero, Plutarch, Stobaeus, Sextus Empiricus and others, arranged by topic, logic, physics, ethics, reconstructing Stoic doctrine's systematic architecture from scattered secondary sources.

The collection is the standard way for students to read what the Stoics actually argued about fate, the passions, virtue and the rational cosmos, giving readers direct access to positions otherwise recoverable only through this careful scholarly reconstruction.

Friendship can only exist between good men, Laelius insists, and by good he means those who act with such good faith, integrity, fairness and generosity that nothing base or self-serving is mixed into their conduct.

He tells his sons-in-law that he can bear Scipio's death because Scipio himself, at the height of his fortune, needed nothing further from life, and that his own grief is for his own loss rather than any harm that has come to his friend.

Cato tells Scipio and Laelius that old age is a heavy burden only for those who have nothing within themselves to rely on, while for those who look to their own resources, nothing that nature makes necessary can seem truly burdensome.

He argues that it is not by physical strength or speed that great things are achieved, but by deliberation, judgment and settled opinion, qualities old age does not diminish but actually tends to increase.

Horace advises seizing the day, trusting as little as possible in tomorrow, a piece of advice delivered within a specific ode addressing the shortness of life and the folly of relying on astrological calculation to predict how much time remains.

He claims to have built a monument more lasting than bronze and higher than the royal pyramids' structure, a boast that his poetry itself will outlast physical monuments, political power and even the erosion of time and weather that eventually destroys every material structure.

On Anger argues against Aristotle that anger is never useful, describes with unpleasant vividness what it does to a face and a household, and prescribes a daily examination of conscience, giving abstract philosophical argument concrete documentary force.

On Mercy is addressed to the young Nero, whose tutor Seneca was, and tries to persuade an absolute ruler that clemency is in his own interest, giving the treatise genuine biographical stakes beyond abstract political theory alone.

Thomas opens by declaring that whoever finds the correct interpretation of these hidden sayings will not taste death, establishing from the outset that genuine understanding of the collection's content, rather than mere belief or ritual practice, constitutes its actual promised path to salvation.

Jesus tells his disciples that the kingdom is not coming with observable signs people will point to, since the kingdom of the Father is already spread out upon the earth, and people simply do not see it, locating the kingdom as a present, perceivable reality rather than a future apocalyptic arrival.

The Moralia collects Plutarch's seventy-eight surviving essays, dialogues and lectures on everything other than biography, including practical advice on listening to lectures, controlling anger, distinguishing a flatterer from a friend and consoling the bereaved.

The collection includes a defence of eating no meat, staking out an unusually early and considered position on animal ethics that extends moral consideration to non-human creatures in ways anticipating considerably later philosophical developments on this question.

Pliny's private letters describe his villas, his reading and writing, court cases, the death of friends, and a haunted house, constructing a deliberately curated literary self-portrait of cultivated senatorial life rather than presenting raw, unrevised private correspondence.

In two letters to Tacitus, Pliny describes the eruption of Vesuvius in 79, in which his uncle the Elder Pliny died, giving history one of its most vivid firsthand eyewitness accounts of a natural catastrophe alongside genuine personal grief.

Epictetus states that men are disturbed not by the things that happen, but by their opinions about the things that happen, so that death itself is nothing terrible, since if it were it would have appeared so to Socrates, but the terror lies entirely in our own judgment that death is terrible.

He compares life to a play whose length and character the author has already determined, and insists that our own task is simply to act well the part that has been given us, whether that part is short or long, a beggar's or a king's, since choosing the role is not up to us but acting it well entirely is.

Scepticism is the ability to set appearances and arguments against one another so that the mind suspends judgement and tranquillity follows, a genuinely active method rather than mere passive absence of belief that Sextus lays out systematically.

The first book lays out the ten modes of Aenesidemus and the five modes of Agrippa for producing suspension of judgement, giving Pyrrhonism a systematic technical apparatus transforming skeptical practice into methodical, teachable technique.

I am Fortune. Inconstancy is my very essence, it is the game I never cease to play as I turn my wheel in its ever-changing circle.

No man can ever truly be secure until he has been abandoned by Fortune.

The poem begins by praising the awakening mind, confesses faults and generates the resolve, establishing the bodhisattva vow to attain enlightenment for the sake of all beings as the practice's central organizing and motivating principle throughout.

The chapter on patience argues against anger, and the meditation chapter teaches the exchange of self and other, offering a genuinely concrete practical technique for cultivating compassion through systematic contemplative exercise rather than abstract aspiration alone.

The idea of the philosopher, supreme ruler, prince, legislator and imam is but a single idea.

Human happiness cannot be attained except through the theoretical virtues, the deliberative virtues, the moral virtues and the practical arts, present in a nation or a city.

The First Cause is that from which the existence of every other existent originates, and it is one, whereas the things that come to be from it are of six ranks.

The human being is one of those things that cannot achieve, on his own, all the perfections for the sake of which he was equipped by his natural disposition, and so association with other human beings is necessary for him to achieve what he was made for.

It is natural for man, more than for any other animal, to be a social and political animal, living in a group.

Whenever several things are ordered to one end, one of them will be found to rule or direct the rest. For where there are many men together and each one is looking after his own interest, the multitude would be broken up and scattered unless there were also an agency to take care of what appertains to the common welfare.

The first book warns directly against learning pursued without humility, insisting that intellectual sophistication and theological knowledge accomplish little of genuine spiritual value if pursued without the corresponding interior humility that alone makes such learning actually useful to the soul.

The second book turns inward to the interior life, treating sustained self-examination and interior transformation, rather than external religious observance considered on its own, as the genuine substance of Christian spiritual practice the reader is being guided toward.

Penn's collection of some 850 numbered maxims and reflections, published anonymously while he was in hiding from political enemies in England, offers plain practical advice in the manner of Proverbs, grouped under headings such as Ignorance, Education, Luxury, Friendship, Government and Religion.

Penn's maxims carry a distinctive Quaker stress on simplicity, honesty, moderation, the inner light and the equal worth of all people, grounding practical worldly advice in a specific theological commitment to universal human dignity throughout the collection.

Johnson surveys mankind's actual desires across a geographic sweep from China to Peru, wealth, political power, learning, military glory, long life and beauty, arguing that each specific object of desire ultimately betrays those who actually succeed in obtaining it rather than merely those who fail to reach it.

Cardinal Wolsey rises to the height of political power before falling catastrophically, his eventual ruin serving as the poem's central English example demonstrating how political ambition, even when fully and successfully achieved, carries the mechanism of its own eventual betrayal within it.

Rasselas grows restless in the Happy Valley, an enclosed paradise where the royal children of Abyssinia are kept in engineered luxury specifically to prevent any restlessness, and finds that this manufactured contentment produces not happiness but a specific, gnawing dissatisfaction he cannot suppress or explain away.

Rasselas escapes with his sister Nekayah, her maid Pekuah, and the poet Imlac, and the group undertakes a systematic examination of different ways of living, the rich, the pastoral life, the hermit's withdrawal, and the reasoning philosopher, testing each option directly through observation rather than abstract argument alone.

Its foundation is sympathy, our capacity to imagine ourselves in another's situation and to feel a version of what they feel, and we approve of conduct when we can go along with it, locating moral judgment in genuinely psychological and social capacity.

We judge ourselves by imagining an impartial spectator looking on, converting sympathy's basic mechanism into disciplined self-assessment rather than leaving it as unmediated emotional reaction, a genuinely rigorous internal check against self-serving bias.

Rousseau argues that children should learn from things and experience rather than from books and precepts, that reasoning comes late, and that the aim is a man who is at once natural and fit to live among others, a considerable pedagogical challenge to inherited tradition.

This treatise on education is cast as the story of an imaginary pupil, Emile, raised by a tutor from infancy to marriage, letting Rousseau work out his educational theory through sustained fictional narrative rather than only abstract prescription.

Johnson states his critical opinions on figures like Milton and Gray without hedging, judging Milton's republican politics harshly even while praising Paradise Lost's genuine poetic achievement, and offering pointed criticism of Gray's odes that many contemporary readers found considerably less generous than expected.

The life of Cowley opens with Johnson's extended account of the metaphysical poets, a group he defines and critically evaluates as a distinct category, an influential piece of literary criticism that shaped how English poetry from this period would subsequently be classified and discussed.

Is there for honest poverty / That hings his head, an' a' that? / The coward slave, we pass him by, / We dare be poor for a' that!

The rank is but the guinea's stamp, / The man's the gowd for a' that.

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.

By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question.

On the Sufferings of the World argues that pain is the positive fact of life and pleasure only its absence, inverting the ordinary common-sense assumption about which condition requires explanation and treating suffering as existence's fundamental default state.

On the Vanity of Existence and On Suicide engage directly with self-destruction as a genuine philosophical question rather than a topic requiring polite avoidance, treating existence's fundamental worthlessness as demanding honest confrontation rather than comfortable denial.

Newman argues that a university exists to teach universal knowledge, that theology is a branch of knowledge and cannot be excluded without distorting the rest, challenging the emerging secular research university's own self-understanding at the moment that model was taking shape.

Newman argues that knowledge is its own end, most fully developed in the widely read fifth discourse, Knowledge Its Own End, pushing back against purely vocational or professional justifications for pursuing higher education and genuine understanding.

The long opening chapter, Economy, itemises the cost of the house and of his food and argues that most people work far more than they need to, spending their lives on what he calls the necessaries and then on luxuries that only hinder them.

Thoreau went to the woods because he wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if he could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when he came to die, discover that he had not lived.

Thoreau begins with the art of sauntering, which he derives from Sainte-Terre, the Holy Land, so that the walker becomes a kind of crusader, and says he needs four hours a day walking through woods and fields to keep his health and spirits.

He notices that his steps tend westward, and takes this as an emblem of the nation's movement toward wildness, the west being for him the wild and the future.

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and the novel opens on the Oblonsky household thrown into confusion by the husband's affair with the governess.

Anna, married to a senior official in Petersburg, falls in love with the officer Vronsky, leaves her husband and son for him, and is slowly destroyed by society's exclusion and her own jealousy, until she throws herself under a train.

After ten years alone on a mountain, the sage Zarathustra descends to teach that God is dead, that man is something to be overcome, and that the overman is the meaning of the earth, beginning his difficult mission among a humanity unready to receive it.

Through speeches, parables and encounters with disciples, a tightrope walker, a soothsayer and a menagerie of higher men, Zarathustra works out the implications of his teaching, discovering how difficult genuine transformation of values actually proves in practice.

I might have been a Schopenhauer, a Dostoevsky, if my life hadn't been wasted managing this estate for a man who isn't worth my little finger.

Look at these maps. This is what our district was forty years ago, and here it is now, forest after forest gone within a single lifetime, and something goes out of a people along with their trees.

Religion, for the purposes of the lectures, means the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.

The healthy-minded refuse to see evil and live in the sunshine; the sick soul cannot look away from it, and James, drawing on Tolstoy and Bunyan and a case he later admitted was his own, judges the sick soul's view the more complete.

John Tanner, a rich revolutionary who has written a book on the Life Force, is made guardian of Ann Whitefield and flees to Spain when he realises she means to marry him; she pursues and catches him, inverting conventional courtship dynamics with genuine comic force.

The third act, often played on its own as Don Juan in Hell, is a long debate among Don Juan, Doña Ana, the Statue and the Devil about whether life is going anywhere and what the superman would be, giving philosophical concerns direct dramatic voice.

Strether arrives in Paris as Mrs Newsome's ambassador, sent specifically to rescue her son Chad from what she believes is a corrupting affair with a bad woman and bring him home to Woollett, the family business, and an advantageous marriage his mother has already arranged.

Under Paris's spell, Strether tells a young man he meets in a garden to live all he can, since it's a mistake not to, a piece of advice that crystallizes his own growing conviction that Woollett's provincial caution has cost him chances he can no longer recover at fifty-five.

Reason in Common Sense lays out the naturalist basis, and the sentence that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it comes from this first volume, distilling the entire project's foundation into a single memorable formulation.

The volumes trace reason in society, from love and the family to patriotism; in religion, which Santayana treats as poetry mistaken for science; in art; and in science, which he defends as the only knowledge we have after this extended survey.

In What Men Live By a shoemaker takes in a naked stranger who proves to be an angel sent to learn three things: what dwells in men, what is not given to men, and what men live by, the last being love.

In How Much Land Does a Man Need the peasant Pahom is offered all the land he can walk round in a day, walks too far in his greed, and dies at the finish, needing only six feet from head to heel.

Tawney argues that modern industrial society is acquisitive, organised around rights to property and income without regard to the functions they serve, and that this makes it both unjust and unstable.

He proposes instead a functional society in which industry is treated as a profession, ownership is tied to service, and the standard of conduct is the purpose an activity serves rather than the wealth it yields.

Dewey argues that traditional philosophy has consistently mistaken the refined, polished objects arrived at through careful reflection, fixed essences, eternal truths, abstract universals, for a more real or more fundamental level of reality than the concrete, qualitative, ordinary experience those objects were actually abstracted from in the first place.

He describes nature as precarious and stable at once, a world genuinely subject to chance, change and hazard and yet also exhibiting real, dependable regularities, and argues that philosophy has typically overemphasized one of these two aspects at the expense of the other rather than holding both together as nature's actual, doubled character.

In training a child to activity of thought, above all things we must beware of what Whitehead calls inert ideas, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilised, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.

Do not teach too many subjects, and what you teach, teach thoroughly; let the main ideas be few and important, and let them be thrown into every combination possible.

The soul of the mystic remains itself, but it feels within it the same creative energy which manifests itself throughout the whole of creation. What is this energy? It is love.

Humanity groans, half crushed beneath the weight of its own progress. It has not sufficiently realized that its future is in its own hands. It is for it to decide, first of all, whether it wants to go on living.