Jonathan Finger

“a pigeon would die of hunger next to a dish filled with choice meats and a cat next to a heap of fruit or grain, though either of them could get nourishment from the foods it disdains if only it had thought of trying them. This is why dissolute men give themselves over to the excesses that bring on fevers and death, because the mind perverts the senses and the will continues to speak when nature falls silent …”
― Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living

“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

“Not that we must resort to indifference, of course, which neither Stoic sage nor Buddhist monk would for a moment countenance: compassion and benevolence to others, indeed to all other forms of life, must remain the highest ethical imperative of our behaviour. But passion is not acceptable in the home of the wise man, and familial ties, when they become too binding, must be loosened. Which is why, like the Greek sage, the Buddhist monk lives, as much as possible, in a condition of solitude. (The word ‘monk’ derives from the Greek monos, meaning ‘alone’.) It is truly in solitude that wisdom can bloom, uncompromised by the difficulties associated with all forms of attachment. It is impossible, in effect, to have a wife or husband, children or friends without becoming in some degree attached to them. We must free ourselves of these ties if we wish to overcome the fear of death.”
― Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living

“There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life. But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, H. P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction