Nuggets Of Wisdom from The Story Of Philosophy

1. To be a Philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live, according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.
2. Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge. Desire has its seat in the loins. Emotion has its seat in the heart. Knowledge has its seat in the head.
3. No man when conscious attains to true or inspired intuition, but rather when the power of intellect is fettered in sleep or by disease or dementia.
4. Where there is no strife there is decay; the mixture which is not shaken decomposes.
5. The noblest art appeals to the intellect as well as to the feelings, and this intellectual pleasure is the highest form of joy to which a man can rise.
6. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
7. He who has many friends has no friend.
8. He who has never learned to obey cannot be a good commander.
9. The secret of peace is not to make our achievements equal to our desires, but to lower our desires to the level of our achievements.
10. The inquiry of truth, which is the love-making or wooing of it; the knowledge of the truth, which is the praise of it; and the belief of the truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human natures.
11. Men ought to know that in the theatre of human life it is only for Gods and angels to be spectators.
12. Love your friend as if he were to become your enemy, and your enemy as if he were to become your friend.
13. If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin in doubts he shall end in certainties.
14. Minds are conquered not by arms but by the greatness of soul.
15. To hate is to acknowledge our inferiority and our fear; we do not hate a foe whom we are confident we can overcome.
16. That is just it, you must have the devil in you to succeed in any of the arts.
17. When once a nation begins to think, it is impossible to stop it.
18. For it is to him who masters our minds by the force of truth, and not to those who enslave them by violence, that we owe our reverence.
19. Man has the highest intelligence because he has the greatest wants and the widest mobility; beings without wants are also without mind.
20. Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
21. How much more suffering is caused by the thought of death than by death itself.
22. Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement.

I hope you like this small collection of insightful thoughts. Happy Reading!

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