Luc Ferry > Quotes

“لو كنا خيّرين تقائياً وموجّهين طبيعياً نحو الخير لما كانت هناك حاجة لوصايا زجرية. لا بل نحن بعيدون كل البعد عن ذلك كما تلاحظ دون شك... إنما وفي أغلب الأوقات, نحن لا نجد صعوبة في معرفة مايجب القيام به من أجل العمل الصالح, لكننا لا نتوقف عن السماح لأنفسنا ببعض الاستثناءات, وذلك لأننا وبكل بساطة نفضل أنفسنا على الآخرين! لهذا السبب يدعونا الواجب الملزم للمزيد من "الضغط على الذات" ولبذل الجهود من أجل الاستمرار في التقدم والتحسن”
― Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living

“Greek philosophers looked upon the past and the future as the primary evils weighing upon human life, and as the source of all the anxieties which blight the present. The present moment is the only dimension of existence worth inhabiting, because it is the only one available to us. The past is no longer and the future has yet to come, they liked to remind us; yet we live virtually all of our lives somewhere between memories and aspirations, nostalgia and expectation. We imagine we would be much happier with new shoes, a faster computer, a bigger house, more exotic holidays, different friends … But by regretting the past or guessing the future, we end up missing the only life worth living: the one which proceeds from the here and now and deserves to be savoured.”
― Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living

“عندما انتزع نفسي من نفسي من اجل فهم الغير ، وعندما أوسع حقل تجاربي ، فإني اتفرد بما أنني أتجاوز ماهو خاص في وضعي الأصلي من أجل التوصل إما للعالمية أو على الأقل ، لمراعاة إمكانيات الإنسانية جمعاء”
― Luc Ferry, Apprendre à vivre

“اللزوم البرهاني ((وضع النفس فى موضع الآخرين من أجل فهم أفضل لوجهة نظرهم))”
― Luc Ferry , Apprendre à vivre

“Strength, beauty, intelligence – all natural gifts received at birth – are self-evidently qualities, but not on a moral plane. You can use your strength, your beauty or your intelligence to commit the most wicked crime, and you demonstrate by this alone that there is nothing inherently virtuous about natural gifts. Therefore, you can choose what use to make of them, whether good or bad, but it is the use that is moral or immoral, not the gifts themselves. ‘Free will’ becomes the determining factor of the morality of an action. With this idea, Christianity revolutionised the history of thought. For the first time in human history, liberty rather than nature had become the foundation of morality.”
― Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living

“Do not let your picture of the whole of your life confuse you, do not dwell upon all the manifold troubles which have come to pass and will come to pass; but ask yourself in regard to every passing moment: what is there here that cannot be borne and cannot be endured? Then remind yourself that it is not the future or the past that weighs heavy upon you, but always the present, and that this gradually grows less. (Meditations, VIII, 36)”
― Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living

“يلزمنا فعلاً أن نبتعد عن الواقع للحكم بصحته أو بسوئه , كما يجب اتخاذ مسافة بالنسبة لانتماءاتنا الطبيعية أو التاريخية لكي نكتسب مايسمى عادة "الفكر الناقد" الذي بدونه لا يمكن إطلاق أي حكم قيمي”
― Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living

“The present moment is the only dimension of existence worth inhabiting, because it is the only one available to us. (...)
Yet we live virtually all of our lives somewhere between memories, and aspirations, nostalgia and expectations.”
― Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living

“إننا بحاجة للآخرين لكي نفهم أنفسنا, وبحاجة إلى حريتهم وإلى سعادتهم إذا أمكن ذلك, لإتمام حياتنا الخاصة”
― Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living

“The problem, however, is that I have yet to meet anyone, materialist or otherwise, who was able to dispense with value judgements. On the contrary, the literature of materialism is peculiarly marked by its wholesale profusion of denunciations of all sorts. Starting with Marx and Nietzsche, materialists have never been able to refrain from passing continuous moral judgement on all and sundry, which their whole philosophy might be expected to discourage them from doing.”
― Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living

“Unable to bring himself to believe in a God who offers salvation, the philosopher is above all one who believes that by understanding the world, by understanding ourselves and others as far our intelligence permits, we shall succeed in overcoming fear, through clear-sightedness rather than blind faith.”
― Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living

“..the irreversibility of things is a kind of death at the heart of life and threatens constantly to steer us into time past- the home of
nostalgia, guilt, regret and remorse, the great spoilers of happiness.”
― Luc Ferry

“Nietzsche's case is an especially interesting one for whoever wishes to undertake a critical examination of the “neotraditionalist” path. Two main reasons justify this evaluation:

― Nietzsche's work, on the one hand, explicitly and in an exemplary manner articulates the critique of democratic modernity and the denunciation of the argumentative foundation of norms: in this way it permits us ―better than does the work of other philosophers― to grasp all that is involved, within the choice between tradition and argumentation, in the rejection of the latter.

― On the other and perhaps more important hand, the way Nietzsche went about this rejection illustrates in a particularly significant fashion one of the main difficulties this type of philosophical projects comes up against: the neotraditionalist avoidance of democratic modernity makes it necessary to look for and ―we insist on this― whatever could be today's analogue of a traditional universe: the analogue, for (as Nietzsche knew better than anyone) it is out of question that in a time when “God is dead”, tradition should function as it does in theological cultures, in which whatever renders the value of tradition “sacred” and gives it its power is never unrelated to its rootedness in the divine will or in the world order supposed to express this will.

Situating as he does his reflections at the same time after the “death of God” and after the (inseparably associated) discovery that the world once “dedivinized”, appears to be devoid of any order and must be thought of as “chaos”, Nietzsche take into account the end of cosmological and theological universe, an end that in general defines the intellectual and cultural location of the Moderns: we are thus dealing here, by definition and, we could say, at the stage of working sketch (since Nietzsche is, in philosophy, the very man who declared the foundations of the traditional universe to be antiquated), with a very peculiar mixture of antimodernism and modernity, of tradition and novelty ―which is why the expression “neotraditionalism” seems perfectly appropriate here, right down to the tension expressed within it. The question is of course one of knowing what such a “mixture” could consists of, both in its content and in its effects. Since, more than most of the representative of ordinary conservatism, Nietzsche cannot contemplate a naïve resumption of tradition, his “neo-conservative” approach permits us to submit the traditionalist option to an interrogation that can best examine its limitations and unintended consequences ―namely: what would a modern analogue of tradition consist of?”
― Luc Ferry, Why We Are Not Nietzscheans

“True knowledge is not to be had solely through a combat against error, bad faith and untruth, but more generally, through a combat against the illusions inherent in the sensible world.”
― Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living

“The Gods are not to be feared; death cannot be felt; the good can be won; what we dread can be conquered.”
― Luc Ferry

“For Rousseau, animals clearly possessed intelligence, sensibility, even the faculty of communication. Therefore it is not reason, or affectivity, or even language that differentiates the human being. On the contrary, everyone who has a dog knows perfectly well that the dog is more sociable and even more intelligent than, in some cases, certain human beings.”
― Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living

“To know one’s history, is, as in psychoanalysis, to work towards one’s own emancipation, and a democratic ideal of liberty of thought cannot dispense with the study of history, if it is to approach the present without prejudices.”
― Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living

“A further triumph is our spiritualisation of enmity. This consists in our profound understanding of the value of having enemies: in short, our doing and deciding the opposite of what people previously thought and decided … Throughout the ages the church has wanted to destroy its enemies: we, the immoralists and anti-Christians, see it as to our advantage that the church exists … Even in the field of politics, enmity has become spiritualised. Almost every party sees that self-preservation is best served if the opposite number does not lose its powers. The same is true of Realpolitik. A new creation, such as the new Reich, needs enemies more than it does friends: only by being opposed does it feel necessary; only by being opposed does it become necessary. Our behaviour towards our ‘inner enemy’ is no different: here, too, we have spiritualised enmity; here, too, we have grasped its value. (Twilight of the Idols, V, 3)”
― Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living

“Every philosophy is a façade-philosophy’ – such is the hermit’s judgement … Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hiding-place; every word is also a mask. (Beyond Good and Evil, 289)”
― Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living

“Aprender a viver, aprender a não mais temer em vão as diferentes faces da morte, ou, simplesmente, a superar a banalidade da vida cotidiana, o tédio, o tempo que passa, já era o principal objetivo das escolas da Antiguidade grega. A mensagem delas merece ser ouvida, pois, diferentemente do que acontece na história das ciências, as filosofias do passado ainda nos falam. Eis um ponto importante que por si só merece reflexão. Quando”
― Luc Ferry, Aprender a viver: Filosofia para os novos tempos

“Our history, especially that of the great religions, Christianity in particular, has given us a "hidden prejudice" in favor of the "beyond" at the expense of the "here and now" and this must be changed.
(quoted from The Age of Atheists" by Peter Watson, p 25)”
― Luc Ferry, L'homme-Dieu ou le sens de la vie

“My doctrine says, the task is to live your life in such a way that you must wish to live it again – for you will anyway! If striving gives you the highest feeling, then strive! If rest gives you the highest feeling, then rest! If fitting in, following and obeying give you the highest feeling, then obey! Only make sure you come to know what gives you the highest feeling, and then spare no means. Eternity is at stake! This doctrine is mild in its treatment of those who do not believe in it. It has neither hell nor threats. But anyone who does not believe merely lives a fugitive life in the consciousness of it. (Extract from Nietzsche’s 1881 notebook)”
― Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living

“لو كنا خيّرين تقائياً وموجّهين طبيعياً نحو الخير م كانت هناك حاجة لوصايا زجرية. لا بل نحن بعيدون ك البعد عن ذلك كم تلاحظ دون شك... إنما وفي أغلب الأوقات, نحن لا نجد صعوبة في معرفة مايجب القيام به من أجل العمل الصالح, لكننا لا نتوقف عن السماح لأنفسنا ببعض الاستثناءات, وذلك لأننا وبكل بساطة نفضّل أنفسنا على الآخرين! لهذا السبب يدعونا الواجب الملزم للمزيد من "الضغط على الذات" ولبذل الجهود من أجل الاستمرار في التقدم والتحسن”
― Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living

“هل يتبادر إلى ذهنك بأن مبدأ كل مشاكل الإنسان, ومبدأ الانحطاط والجبن, هو الخوف من الموت؟ درّب نفسك لمقاومته ولتنزع كل كلماتك وكل دراساتك وكل قراءاتك إلى ذلك وستدرك أن هذا هو السبيل الوحيد لأبناء البشر لكي يصبحوا أحراراً"
-أبيكتات”
― Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living

“Or as Seneca expresses it, in the Letters to Lucilius: ‘You must dispense with these two things: fear of the future, and the recollection of ancient ills. The latter no longer concerns me, the former has yet to concern me.”
― Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living

“sibylline”;”
― Luc Ferry, The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life

“the fundamental task that was originally that of Zeus: to struggle against the ceaselessly regrouping forces of chaos so that order may prevail over disorder, cosmos and concord over discord.”
― Luc Ferry, The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life

“write clearly, to refrain from obscure allusions or from supposing that my audience possesses any prior knowledge”
― Luc Ferry, The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life

“citadel,”
― Luc Ferry, The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life

“The whole sense of the voyage of Odysseus, which we shall trace or retrace in chapter three, starts here: the good life is the life reconciled to what is the case, the life lived in its natural place, within the cosmic order, and it behooves each of us to find this place and accomplish this voyage if we want one day to arrive in the harbor of wisdom, of serenity.”
― Luc Ferry, The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life