Commonplace Book

At his trial, refusing to go into exile and keep quiet — a life without philosophical examination is no life for a human being.

The founding sentence of philosophy. For reflection, self-knowledge, intellectual courage.

After questioning a politician reputed to be wise.

The authentic source of “I know that I know nothing” — use against overconfidence and the Dunning–Kruger effect.

⚠ The slogan “I know that I know nothing” is a later compression; Socrates’ actual claim is more modest.

The last words of the Apology.

For facing death with philosophical calm.

Socrates’ last words. Asclepius was the god of healing — was death the cure for life?

For an enigmatic ending; Nietzsche read it as Socrates’ secret pessimism.

For illusion, propaganda, echo chambers, mistaking appearance for reality.

For the relation of wisdom and power; technocracy debates.

The famous “river fragment”, known in several ancient versions.

For change, impermanence, the self in flux.

Literally “a person’s character is his daimon (guiding spirit)”.

For fate versus freedom — fate comes from within.

For conflict as creative force; Hegel’s dialectic; Nietzsche’s agon.

For idealism, the unity of thought and reality, the limits of what can be thought.

For character as a lifelong pattern, not a single act.

For community, belonging, the social nature of human beings.

Plato said the same in the Theaetetus (155d) — philosophy begins in wonder.

For curiosity as the root of philosophy and science.

Where death is, I am not; where I am, death is not.

The classic argument against the fear of death.

For naturalism and conservation laws; the root of “ex nihilo nihil fit”.

On Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia.

For critique of religious violence.

For spiritual longing, the God-shaped hole.

For any concept we use easily but cannot define.

For procrastination and weakness of will (akrasia), with humour.

The madman in the marketplace — not a triumphant atheist, but a horrified witness to a cultural catastrophe.

For secularization and its consequences. Quote the whole — it is a lament, not a boast.

An aphorism from “Maxims and Interludes”.

For the danger of becoming what you oppose — in war, in politics, in obsession.

From “the military school of life”.

For resilience, post-traumatic growth.

Meaning makes suffering bearable. Viktor Frankl made it the motto of Man’s Search for Meaning.

For meaning and endurance.

Not merely to bear what is necessary, still less conceal it, but to love it.

For radical acceptance and affirmation of life.

Zarathustra’s first speech in the marketplace, while a tightrope-walker performs.

For human beings as unfinished, a transition rather than a goal.

Warning against the Last Man, who has no chaos left.

For creativity out of inner turmoil.

Against positivism — “facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations.”

For perspectivism; careful — Nietzsche is not saying anything goes.

⚠ From an unpublished notebook, not a book he finished.

Borrowed from Pindar (Pythian 2.72) — “become such as you are, having learned what that is.”

For self-realization and authenticity.

For art as justification of existence.

Reflection always comes after; we must act before we understand.

For decisions under uncertainty, regret, the limits of hindsight.

Like vertigo at an abyss — we fear our own possibility.

For existential anxiety, the burden of choice.

Kierkegaard distinguishes despair at not willing to be oneself from despair at willing to be oneself.

For authenticity and self-alienation.

⚠ A popular paraphrase, not a direct quotation.

Whether life is worth living is the fundamental question — everything else is secondary.

To bring any abstract debate back to what matters; pair with Hamlet’s “To be or not to be”.

The absurd hero, conscious of his fate, is superior to it.

For meaning without metaphysics, perseverance, the dignity of repetitive work.

Camus’s answer to Descartes — revolt reveals a solidarity among humans.

For solidarity, protest, the ethics of revolt.

For emotional detachment, the flatness of the absurd.

For peace after giving up hope; acceptance without consolation.

Revisiting the Roman ruins of his youth after years of war and darkness.

For resilience and inner light.

⚠ Often embellished into a longer motivational passage that Camus never wrote.

Condemned, because we did not create ourselves; free, because nothing determines us.

For responsibility without excuses.

The one-line definition of existentialism.

Three dead people locked in a room realize they are each other’s torturers — through the judging gaze.

For the gaze of others, social judgment, being trapped by how others see us.

⚠ Sartre later said it means that our relations with others are poisoned when we depend wholly on their judgment — not that other people are hell.

We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply.

For why literature matters; against comfortable reading.

For arbitrary power, bureaucracy, guilt without crime.

For alienation, sudden loss of identity, becoming a burden.

For missed chances, waiting for permission, the path only you could walk.

For the philosophy of language and poetry.

The refrain of Uddālaka’s teaching, repeated nine times.

For non-duality, compassion grounded in identity, the unity of self and world.

The pavamāna mantra, chanted for purification.

For the spiritual journey from ignorance to knowledge; a prayer that fits any tradition.

For apophatic thought — what cannot be described, only negated (compare negative theology).

Offered half of Yājñavalkya’s wealth, his wife asks whether the whole earth full of wealth would make her immortal. No — “then what should I do with it?”

For priorities, materialism versus meaning. Amartya Sen used it in Development as Freedom.

For the subject that cannot be an object — compare Kant’s transcendental “I” and Wittgenstein’s eye that does not see itself.

Vivekananda’s favourite verse.

For awakening, effort, the difficulty of the spiritual or intellectual path.

Yama’s teaching to Naciketas — nearly identical to Bhagavad Gītā 2.20.

For the immortality of the self; facing death.

The most quoted verse of the Gītā — for duty without attachment, process over outcome, Stoic-like equanimity.

On the indestructible Self — why Arjuna should not grieve.

For the eternal self, consolation in grief.

For reincarnation; death as transition.

For authenticity and vocation — your own path over imitation.

From the theophany of the universal form.

For the sublime terror of time and death. Oppenheimer’s paraphrase — “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

For impermanence and urgency.

For reconciliation and non-violence.

For the power of thought over experience; pair with Hamlet’s “thinking makes it so”.

For emptiness as relationality, not nothingness.

The half-verse summary of Advaita Vedānta.

⚠ The formula is traditionally attributed to Śaṅkara; its exact textual source is debated.

The closing of the second Critique. The first “thing” humbles us — we are specks in an infinite cosmos; the second elevates us — as moral beings we stand outside the mechanism of nature. It is engraved on Kant’s tomb in Königsberg.

For wonder, for the dignity of conscience, or to answer anyone who says science has made morality small.

Kant’s tribute to the sceptic who forced him to rethink everything.

When someone’s comfortable certainties have just been shaken — or to credit an opponent who made you think.

Kant on the difficulty of perfect government — the ruler is himself a human being who needs a master. Isaiah Berlin made it the title of a famous book.

Against utopias and perfectionist politics.

By limiting knowledge to appearances, Kant leaves God, freedom and immortality beyond disproof — matters for practical reason and faith, not theory.

When discussing whether reason can prove or disprove God.

The whole Kantian synthesis in eight words — rationalism without senses is empty; empiricism without concepts is blind.

The perfect one-liner for “theory vs. experience” arguments.

The foundational certainty of modern philosophy; for self-knowledge and doubt.

For methodical doubt and intellectual honesty.

Against the idea that reason alone motivates; for psychology over logic.

The famous end of the Enquiry — any book that contains neither mathematical reasoning nor experimental reasoning about facts.

Against empty metaphysics, jargon, unfalsifiable claims.

For rational belief, scepticism about extraordinary claims.

For the bundle theory of self — pair with the Buddha’s anattā.

Hume’s cure for sceptical despair — nature and company.

When philosophy has gone too far; for common sense and conviviality.

For scientific and compassionate understanding of human behaviour.

For the difficulty of wisdom and freedom.

God, perfectly good and wise, chose the best possible world, evils included.

For optimism and theodicy — usually with Voltaire’s irony.

⚠ The exact phrase is Voltaire’s mocking formula in Candide; Leibniz argues the thesis.

For empiricism and nurture over nature.

Philosophy understands an age only when it is ending.

For hindsight; why theory lags behind history.

For Hegel’s rationalism — read conservatively by the Right Hegelians, critically by the Left.

For holism against piecemeal truths.

For praxis over theory; carved on his tomb in Highgate.

For hedonic treadmill, pessimism, the restlessness of desire.

For genius and vision.

On the Upanishads, which he read in Anquetil-Duperron’s Latin Oupnek’hat.

For the Western reception of Indian philosophy.

The Tractatus on the subject as the limit of the world.

For how vocabulary shapes thought, and for learning languages.

The last proposition of the book — after throwing away the ladder.

For the limits of argument, the ineffable, or ending a pointless dispute.

Philosophy as therapy for confusions created by language.

For dissolving rather than solving a problem.

For debates that are really verbal confusions.

Against radical scepticism.

The first line of the volume on lived experience.

For gender as social formation rather than fixed nature.

Against the charge that existentialist freedom is selfish.

For how one group becomes the norm and another the deviation.

Against complacency; for the duty to remember others’ suffering.

For editing, writing, and speaking.

For perseverance after failure.

For beginnings disguised as endings.

For persistence — honestly understood.

⚠ Beckett’s context is bleak, not motivational — it is about the impossibility of art succeeding.

For endurance without hope.

For the brevity of life.

For dark comedy.

For pride, ambition, refusal to submit.

For the power of attitude — and its limits.

⚠ Spoken by Satan — and the poem shows him unable to escape his own Hell.

For the free-will theodicy.

Against censorship and book-burning.

Milton, gone blind, wonders how he can serve God.

For patience, disability, and unseen contributions.

For denial of mortality.

For a work that contains a world.

For non-violence — and the debate about its limits.

⚠ The epic also says violence in the service of dharma is a duty; the line continues in some versions with “and so is violence in the service of dharma”.

The first śloka — grief becoming verse.

For the origin of poetry in compassion.

Rāma accepting the defector Vibhīṣaṇa despite his allies’ suspicion.

For refuge, asylum and trust.

Ippolit mockingly reports that the Prince once said this. Myshkin never says it on stage; the line is asked about, not affirmed.

For the redemptive power of beauty and art. Solzhenitsyn built his Nobel lecture around it.

⚠ Often quoted as Dostoevsky’s own creed. In the novel it is reported second-hand, with irony.

Ivan’s argument that without immortality there is no ground for virtue — first reported by Miusov, later echoed by Dmitri and fatally taken up by Smerdyakov.

The classic statement of moral nihilism; to ask whether ethics needs God.

⚠ The exact sentence “If God does not exist, everything is permitted” is not in the novel. It is a compression of several passages.

After listing the tortures of children, Ivan refuses a harmony bought with their tears.

For the problem of evil, or for rejecting any utopia whose price is innocent suffering.

On the little girl locked in the freezing privy by her parents.

When abstractions are used to justify concrete cruelty.

What the people will inscribe on their banner, according to the Inquisitor — they will choose bread over freedom.

For welfare versus liberty, materialism, the politics of bread and circuses.

The Inquisitor’s accusation against Christ.

For Erich Fromm’s “escape from freedom”, authoritarianism, consumer comfort.

The dying youth Markel’s revelation, which shapes Zosima’s whole teaching.

For universal responsibility (Levinas loved this line), against blaming others.

From Zosima’s discourses, recorded by Alyosha.

For a non-literal hell; love as the meaning of life.

Zosima to the buffoon Fyodor Karamazov.

For self-deception — Sartre’s bad faith in Dostoevsky’s words.

One of the great opening lines — self-diagnosis as self-display.

For the modern anti-hero, self-loathing, the confessional voice.

Against a world fully explained by reason — he even admits “twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.”

Against technocracy, determinism, utopias of calculation.

Against rational egoism — the most advantageous advantage is one’s own free, even foolish, choice.

Against behavioural economics, social engineering, algorithmic prediction of humans.

Hyper-consciousness paralyses action — the Underground Man as a Hamlet in a mousehole.

For overthinking, anxiety, the intellectual’s paralysis.

Raskolnikov’s confession to Sonya — the murder was a test of whether he dared to “step over”.

For the will to power, the Napoleonic complex, ideas that kill.

To Sonya. The crime destroyed the criminal.

For how evil acts deform the doer; guilt as self-destruction.

In conversation with Porfiry about his article on extraordinary men.

For the price of depth and sensitivity.

Kirillov’s logic — if God is dead, the highest point of my self-will is to kill myself.

For the man-god, the Übermensch before Nietzsche, the logical suicide.

The revolutionary theorist describing his own system.

For how utopian revolutions end in tyranny — prophetic of the twentieth century.

The most famous opening in the Russian novel.

For the variety of failure versus the sameness of success — “the Anna Karenina principle”.

The narrator’s verdict on a life lived entirely by convention.

For conformity, the unexamined life, bad faith.

Dying, Ivan Ilyich discovers that logic does not make death believable.

For the gap between knowing and realizing; Heidegger’s “one dies” versus “I die”.

The question that finally opens him to truth.

For mid-life crisis, examined life, regret.

Tolstoy argued that social reform must begin with inner moral change.

For personal responsibility over activism.

⚠ A popular paraphrase; the wording is not Tolstoy’s own.

Arkady explains his friend Bazarov to his father and uncle.

The definition of Russian nihilism — use it when someone calls themselves a free thinker.

Bazarov’s utilitarian contempt for art.

For science versus the humanities; utility versus beauty.

Against Romantic reverence for nature.

For instrumental reason, the technological attitude (Heidegger’s “standing-reserve”).

Hamlet, alone (he thinks), weighs whether to endure life’s suffering or end it — and why fear of the afterlife stops us.

Any debate about suicide, nihilism, meaning, or choosing between endurance and action. Philosophy, literature and Shakespeare in one line.

Death as a land no one has come back from to report on.

For fear of death and the unknown; agnosticism about the afterlife.

Reflection paralyses action. “Conscience” means consciousness as much as moral scruple.

Against overthinking; for analysis paralysis; for the intellectual who never acts.

Hamlet holds the skull of the court jester who carried him on his back as a child.

Memento mori; mourning someone who brought joy; the vanity of wit and fame.

⚠ Often misquoted as “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well.”

Following the dust of great men to its humblest use.

Against pride, empire and power — every conqueror ends as dirt.

Spoken by the officer Marcellus as Hamlet follows the Ghost — corruption at the top of the state.

For institutional corruption, political rot, or anything that “smells wrong”.

⚠ Spoken by Marcellus, not Hamlet. Often misquoted as “something is wrong” or “something’s rotten”.

To Rosencrantz and Guildenstern — Denmark is a prison to Hamlet, though not to them.

For moral relativism, Stoic or Buddhist ideas that suffering lies in judgment, or perspectivism (Nietzsche).

Renaissance humanism’s hymn to man — undercut in the same breath by melancholy.

For humanism versus nihilism; human greatness and insignificance at once.

After seeing the Ghost, to his rationalist university friend.

Against narrow rationalism or scientism; for the limits of any system — Kant’s noumena in one line.

⚠ “Your philosophy” means philosophy in general, not Horatio’s personal philosophy.

His first soliloquy — wishing “this too too solid flesh would melt”.

For depression, ennui, Weltschmerz.

Before the fatal duel, Hamlet has stopped resisting fate.

For acceptance, amor fati, Stoic calm before what must come.

Hamlet’s last words.

For endings, death, and what cannot be said (compare Wittgenstein — “whereof one cannot speak”).

Pompous advice to his son Laertes from a man who spies on everyone.

For authenticity — with a wink, since Polonius is a hypocrite.

⚠ Spoken by Polonius, whom Shakespeare treats as a windbag. Quoting it as Shakespeare’s own wisdom misses the irony.

Polonius, aside, on Hamlet’s “mad” answers.

For strategies that look crazy but have logic.

⚠ Usually quoted “there’s method in my madness” — not Shakespeare’s wording.

Cordelia refuses to flatter, saying “Nothing, my lord.” Lear warns her that she will inherit nothing.

Ex nihilo nihil fit, in Shakespeare’s mouth. For causation, for silence, for refusing flattery.

The blinded Gloucester on the cruelty of the cosmos.

For the problem of evil, cosmic indifference, tragic fate.

In the storm, Lear looks at the half-naked “Poor Tom” and tears off his own clothes.

For what humans are without culture, property and status — the existential condition laid bare.

Lear holding the dead Cordelia. A line of pure trochees — the heartbeat of grief.

For irreversible loss.

Edgar to his despairing father.

For accepting death in its time; Stoic consolation.

On hearing of his wife’s death, near his own end.

The definitive line for nihilism and meaninglessness — the absurd before Camus.

The witches’ chant — the moral world turned upside down.

For moral inversion, propaganda, a transvaluation of values.

Sleepwalking, she tries to wash imagined blood from her hands.

For guilt that cannot be washed away.

Macbeth admits he has no reason to kill Duncan except ambition.

For overreach, hubris, the will to power without justification.

The melancholy Jaques’ “Seven Ages of Man”, ending in “mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

For social roles, the self as performance (Goffman, Sartre’s waiter), the stages of life.

Prospero ends the masque — the “cloud-capp’d towers” and “the great globe itself” shall dissolve.

For māyā, the dreamlike unreality of the world, and the brevity of life. Perfect beside Śaṅkara or Zhuangzi’s butterfly.

⚠ “Made on”, not “made of”.

Cassius tempting Brutus to conspire against Caesar.

For free will against fate, responsibility, Sartre before Sartre.

Caesar dismissing Calpurnia’s fears on the morning of the Ides.

For courage in the face of death.

Asked his lineage on the battlefield by Diomedes, the Trojan ally Glaucus answers that ancestry hardly matters — men come and go like leaves.

For mortality, the passing of generations, the vanity of pedigree.

The old king of Troy kneels before Achilles to ransom Hector’s body.

For reconciliation with an enemy, the humility of grief, shared humanity.

Achilles, in his rage after Patroclus’s death, refuses mercy to the young Lycaon.

For the terrible equality of death, and grief turned to cruelty.

In the underworld, Odysseus praises Achilles’ glory among the dead; Achilles rejects the consolation.

For life over glory; against romanticizing death.

Disguised as a beggar in his own house, Odysseus restrains his fury at the maids’ betrayal.

For patience, self-command, endurance. Plato quotes it in the Republic and Phaedo.

For unwelcome truths and the burden of knowledge.

The play’s closing words, echoing Solon’s warning to Croesus in Herodotus.

For the fragility of happiness and fortune.

Antigone to Creon, admitting she buried her brother against his decree.

The founding statement of conscience against unjust law.

The “Ode to Man” — deinos means both wonderful and terrible; human ingenuity can lead to good or to evil.

For human greatness and its danger — technology, ambition, power.

For mid-life crisis, losing one’s way, the beginning of every spiritual journey.

The last line of the inscription over the gate of Hell.

For hopeless places — usually with dark humour.

⚠ Often misquoted as “Abandon hope all ye who enter here”.

Ulysses urges his old companions on their last voyage beyond the known world — which ends in shipwreck.

For the thirst for knowledge — and its risks. Primo Levi recited it in Auschwitz.

The last line of the Divine Comedy.

For love as the principle of the universe; for endings.

Dante’s ancestor prophesies his exile.

For exile, dependence, homesickness.

For the realist’s reply to the idealist — and for tilting at windmills.

For liberty — written by a man who spent five years as a slave.

For inner conflict between earthly desire and higher aspiration.

For life over abstraction — with a wink about who says it.

⚠ Spoken by the devil, mocking a student — not Goethe’s sincere verdict on theory.

Faust, translating John’s Gospel, rejects “Word”, “Mind” and “Power” for “Deed”.

For action over words.

For striving as a moral ideal.

For ingratitude, especially of children.

Lear’s daughters strip him of his retinue, asking why he needs any knights at all.

For human dignity beyond bare necessity.

For injustice, privilege and hypocrisy in the justice system.

For art as a mirror that reveals guilt.

For resisting manipulation.