Tag: philosophy

The philosopher who cannot teach something valuable in a simple way to an ordinary man should retire. Perhaps in no other field is clarity a more necessary quality, and a more evident manifestation of mastery over the subject matter. There are many forgivable sins, and many defects that even scratch the thought of a philosopher; but from the moment that discourse, through him, makes the subject more confusing, the best he would do is to return quietly to his studies, if not abandon them forever and seek a new occupation.

It is possible to draw parallels between coetaneous lives and identify, in the vast majority of cases, decisive periods that occurred at very close ages in which similar themes emerged. It is necessary to see and compare them over and over again. This evident and verifiable fact is perhaps the strongest argument of those who assert that there is a correlation between time and individual existences, especially since it is noted that many of the themes which stand out do not occur as a result of convention or something induced by the environment: one notices, over and over again, periods when genius seems to manifest, and periods when luck seems to decide. From the moment one acquires enough courage to assume it, one can no longer bear the absence of the why…

What kills man is pride; it is what blurs the vision and clouds the living. Human dignity boils down to doing the best of what is possible, but what is possible never satisfies the pride. From it springs an insatiable yearning and a discontentment with what is enough to fill modest eyes. So it represents the disgust, the castration and the burial of the stimulus that, for many who never expected it, proved that the possible is sometimes distorted by the vision.

The more one understands about life, the more the capacity to accept limitations becomes necessary; in short, the more humility becomes indispensable. Curiously, nature seems to make it more difficult the more one knows, when knowing is also necessary to improve it. Therefore, to cultivate it is to act rationally against nature, which seems to be the greatest obstacle—and the most important one to overcome—to full intellectual development.