Transcendentia Quotes

“Good works, because they must be forgotten instantly, can never become part of the world; they come and go,leaving no trace. They truly are not of this world.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

“But hope is not about what we expect. It is an embrace of the essential unknowability of the world, of the breaks with the present, the surprises. Or perhaps studying the record more carefully leads us to expect miracles - not when and where we expect them, but to expect to be astonished, to expect that we don't know. And this is grounds to act.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power

“Il faut assigner le premier rang à la Beauté, qui est identique avec le Bien et dont dérive l'Intelligence qui est belle par elle-même.”
― Plotinus, Traités 1-6

“He(E.A.Poe) cannot be blamed for not saying clearly what beauty is. The greatest philosophers in the world acknowledge in the end that the best one can do is to recognize it when it is there.”
― Étienne Gilson

“6.41 Der Sinn der Welt muss ausserhalb ihrer liegen.”
― Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“According to Carnap,...... "reality"is a metaphysical term for which there is no legitimate use.......
We are interested in other people's loves and hates, pleasures and pains, because we are firmly persuaded
that they are as "real" as our own. We mean something we say this.”
― Bertrand Russell, An Inquiry Into Meaning and Truth

“Fair, kind and true' is all my argument,
'Fair, kind, and true' varying to other words;
And in this change is my invention spent,
Three themes in one, which wondrous scope affords.

'Fair, kind, and true,' have often lived alone,
Which three till now never kept seat in one.”
― William Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Sonnets

“Die Gedanken sind weder Dinge der Außenwelt noch Vorstellungen.
Ein drittes Reich muß anerkannt werden. Was zu diesem gehört, stimmt mit den Vorstellungen darin überein, daß es nicht mit den Sinnen wahrgenommen werden kann, mit den Dingen aber darin, daß es keines Trägers bedarf, zu dessen Bewußtseinsinhalte es gehört.”
― Gottlob Frege, Logical Investigations

“Le beau est le nécessaire, qui, tout en demeurant conforme à sa loi propre et à elle seule, obéit au bien.”
― Simone Weil

“Whose speechless song, being many, seeming one,
Sings this to thee: 'thou single wilt prove none.”
― William Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Sonnets

“Chapter VII
Of Simple Ideas of both Sensation and Reflection
1. Ideas of pleasure and pain.
There be other simple ideas which convey themselves into the mind by all the ways of sensation and reflection, viz. pleasure or delight,
and its opposite, pain, or uneasiness; power; existence; unity.”
― John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

“B626
Sein ist offenbar kein reales Prädikat, d.i. ein Begriff von irgend etwas, was zu dem Begriffe eines Dinges, oder gewisser Bestimmungen an sich selbst...

B627
Und so enthält das Wirkliche nichts mehr, als das bloss Mögliche. Hundert wirkliche Thaler enthalten nicht das mindeste mehr, als hundert mögliche...

Aber in meinem Vermögenszustande ist
mehr bei hundert wirklichen Thalern, als bei dem blossen Begriffe derselben, ( d.i. ihrer Moeglichkeit ).”
― Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft 2. Auflage

“The three greatest metaphysicians who ever existed - Plato, Aristotle and St.Thomas Aquinas - had no system in the idealistic sense of the word. Their ambition was not to achieve philosophy once and for all, but to maintain it and to serve it in ours. For us, as for them, the great thing is not to achieve a system of the world as if being could be deduced from thought, but to relate reality, as we know it, to the permanent principles in whose light all the changing problems of science, of ethics and of art have to be solved. A metaphysics of existence cannot be a system wherewith to get rid of philosophy, it is an always open inquiry, whose conclusions are both always the same and always new, because it is conducted under the guidance of immutable principles, which will never exhaust experience, or be themselves exhausted by it. For even though, as is impossible, all that which exists were known to us, existence itself would still remain a mystery. Why, asked Leibniz, is there something rather than nothing ?”
― Étienne Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience

“Wie wir „ursprünglich verstehen “, was Wahrheit ist, wenn wir erkennen, und was Gutheit ist, wenn unser Streben Erfüllung findet, so verstehen wir, was Schönheit ist, wenn jener „Glanz “ uns an die Seele rührt. Er begegnet uns in der sinnlichen Welt als das Strahlen des körperlichen Lichtes selbst, ohne das uns alle sinnliche Schönheit verborgen bliebe, als Farbenglanz und als Liebreiz körperlicher Gestalten. Aber er ist nicht an die Sinnenwelt gebunden. Es gibt eine geistige Schönheit : die Schönheit der Menschenseele,...”
― Edith Stein, Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt at an Ascent to the Meaning of Being

“Ein Zeug »ist« strenggenommen nie. Zum Sein von Zeug gehört je immer ein Zeugganzes, darin es dieses Zeug sein kann, das es ist. Zeug ist wesenhaft »etwas, um zu..«.”
― Martin Heidegger, Sein Und Zeit

“L'idée de l'infini consiste à penser plus qu'on ne pense.”
― Emmanuel Lévinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism