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aristotle
True happiness comes from gaining insight and growing into your best possible self. Otherwise all you're having is immediate gratification pleasure, which is fleeting and doesn't grow you as a person.
knowledge
aristotle
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
education;knowledge
aristotle
Before you heal the body you must first heal the mind
ethics
aristotle
The proof that you know something is that you are able to teach it
education;knowledge
aristotle
Those who are not angry at the things they should be angry at are thought to be fools, and so are those who are not angry in the right way, at the right time, or with the right persons.
null
aristotle
Whatever we learn to do, we learn by actually doing it; men come to be builders, for instance, by building, and harp players by playing the harp. In the same way, by doing just acts we come to be just; by doing self-controlled acts, we come to be self-controlled ; and by doing brave acts, we become brave.
education;knowledge
aristotle
The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor; it is the one thing that cannot be learned from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity of the dissimilar.
null
aristotle
The society that loses its grip on the past is in danger, for it produces men who know nothing but the present, and who are not aware that life had been, and could be, different from what it is.
history;ethics;knowledge
aristotle
The man who is truly good and wise will bear with dignity whatever fortune sends, and will always make the best of his circumstances.
knowledge;ethics
aristotle
The greatest of all pleasures is the pleasure of learning.
knowledge;education;history
aristotle
Fortune favours the bold.
null
aristotle
You are what you repeatedly do
null
aristotle
The quality of life is determined by its activities.
null
aristotle
You are what you do repeatedly.
null
aristotle
Anyone who has no need of anybody but himself is either a beast or a God.
null
aristotle
Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.
love
aristotle
Love well, be loved and do something of value.
love;ethics
aristotle
Philosophy begins with wonder.
null
aristotle
Plato is my friend, but truth is a better friend.
null
aristotle
At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.
ethics
aristotle
A promise made must be a promise kept.
ethics
aristotle
It is better for a city to be governed by a good man than by good laws.
politics;ethics
aristotle
Men become richer not only by increasing their existing wealth but also by decreasing their expenditure.
null
aristotle
Consider pleasures as they depart, not as they come.
ethics
aristotle
Dignity does not consist in possessing honors, but in deserving them.
ethics
aristotle
He who sees things grow from the beginning will have the best view of them.
knowledge;history;ethics;education
aristotle
Happiness is the reward of virtue.
ethics
aristotle
If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development
history;knowledge
aristotle
A friend is another I.
null
aristotle
He who hath many friends hath none.
ethics
aristotle
The hand is the tool of tools.
null
aristotle
Good moral character is not something that we can achieve on our own. We need a culture that supports the conditions under which self-love and friendship flourish.
ethics
aristotle
We give up leisure in order that we may have leisure, just as we go to war in order that we may have peace.
ethics
aristotle
We must be neither cowardly nor rash but courageous.
ethics;knowledge
aristotle
The true nature of anything is what it becomes at its highest.
knowledge
aristotle
To give away money is an easy matter and in any man's power. But to decide to whom to give it and how large and when, and for what purpose and how, is neither in every man's power nor an easy matter.
knowledge;ethics;politics
aristotle
A man's happiness consists in the free exercise of his highest faculties.
knowledge;ethics;education
aristotle
For what is the best choice for each individual is the highest it is possible for him to achieve.
knowledge;ethics;education
aristotle
Those who act receive the prizes.
ethics
aristotle
A man becomes a friend whenever being loved he loves in return.
love;ethics
aristotle
Character is that which reveals moral purpose, exposing the class of things a man chooses and avoids.
null
aristotle
Bad men are full of repentance.
ethics
aristotle
For we do not think that we know a thing until we are acquainted with its primary conditions or first principles, and have carried our analysis as far as its simplest elements.
knowledge
aristotle
Philosophy can make people sick.
politics
aristotle
Democracy appears to be safer and less liable to revolution than oligarchy. For in oligarchies there is the double danger of the oligarchs falling out among themselves and also with the people; but in democracies there is only the danger of a quarrel with the oligarchs. No dissension worth mentioning arises among the people themselves. And we may further remark that a government which is composed of the middle class more nearly approximates to democracy than to oligarchy, and is the safest of the imperfect forms of government.
politics;knowledge
aristotle
Civil confusions often spring from trifles but decide great issues.
ethics;politics
aristotle
All men by nature desire knowledge.
knowledge;education
aristotle
But is it just then that the few and the wealthy should be the rulers? And what if they, in like manner, rob and plunder the people, - is this just?
politics;ethics
aristotle
Definition of tragedy: A hero destroyed by the excess of his virtues
null
aristotle
Every rascal is not a thief, but every thief is a rascal.
null
schopenhauer
It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else.
null
schopenhauer
A high degree of intellect tends to make a man unsocial.
knowledge
schopenhauer
It is difficult to keep quiet if you have nothing to do
ethics
schopenhauer
The assumption that animals are without rights, and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance, is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.
null
schopenhauer
I observed once to Goethe that when a friend is with us we do not think the same of him as when he is away. He replied, "Yes! because the absent friend is yourself, and he exists only in your head; whereas the friend who is present has an individuality of his own, and moves according to laws of his own, which cannot always be in accordance with those which you form for yourself.
knowledge;ethics
schopenhauer
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
ethics;knowledge
schopenhauer
Thus, the task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees.
knowledge
schopenhauer
Pleasure is never as pleasant as we expected it to be and pain is always more painful. The pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don't believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other.
null
schopenhauer
at the death of every friendly soul
history
schopenhauer
arises from the feeling that there is
null
schopenhauer
To be alone is the fate of all great mindsa fate deplored at times, but still always chosen as the less grievous of two evils.
knowledge;ethics
schopenhauer
However, for the man who studies to gain insight, books and studies are merely rungs of the ladder on which he climbs to the summit of knowledge. As soon as a rung has raised him up one step, he leaves it behind. On the other hand, the many who study in order to fill their memory do not use the rungs of the ladder for climbing, but take them off and load themselves with them to take away, rejoicing at the increasing weight of the burden. They remain below forever, because they bear what should have bourne them.
knowledge;education
schopenhauer
There is not a grain of dust, not an atom that can become nothing, yet man believes that death is the annhilation of his being.
ethics;religion
schopenhauer
Human life, like all inferior goods, is covered on the outside with a false glitter; what suffers always conceals itself.
ethics
schopenhauer
Just as one spoils the stomach by overfeeding and thereby impairs the whole body, so can one overload and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment. For the more one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the mind is like a tablet that has been written over and over. Hence it is impossible to reflect; and it is only by reflection that one can assimilate what one has read. If one reads straight ahead without pondering over it later, what has been read does not take root, but is for the most part lost.
knowledge;ethics
schopenhauer
The highest, most varied and lasting pleasures are those of the mind.
null
schopenhauer
We seldom speak of what we have but often of what we lack.
knowledge;ethics
schopenhauer
Patriotism is the passion of fools and the most foolish of passions.
null
schopenhauer
Truth that is naked is the most beautiful, and the simpler its expression the deeper is the impression it makes.
ethics;education
schopenhauer
Restlessness is the hallmark of existence.
null
schopenhauer
Men best show their character in trifles, where they are not on their guard. It is in the simplest habits, that we often see the boundless egotism which pays no regard to the feelings of others and denies nothing to itself.
null
schopenhauer
Because Christian morality leaves animals out of account, they are at once outlawed in philosophical morals; they are mere 'things,' mere means to any ends whatsoever. They can therefore be used for vivisection, hunting, coursing, bullfights, and horse racing, and can be whipped to death as they struggle along with heavy carts of stone. Shame on such a morality that is worthy of pariahs, and that fails to recognize the eternal essence that exists in every living thing, and shines forth with inscrutable significance from all eyes that see the sun!
null
schopenhauer
Whoever wants his judgment to be believed, should express it coolly and dispassionately; for all vehemence springs from the will. And so the judgment might be attributed to the will and not to knowledge, which by its nature is cold.
ethics
schopenhauer
Our moral virtues benefit mainly other people; intellectual virtues, on the other hand, benefit primarily ourselves; therefore the former make us universally popular, the latter unpopular.
ethics
schopenhauer
The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.
education;ethics
schopenhauer
Life to the great majority is only a constant struggle for mere existence, with the certainty of losing it at last.
null
schopenhauer
The scenes and events of long ago, and the persons who took part in them, wear a charming aspect to the eye of memory, which sees only the outlines and takes no note of disagreeable details. The present enjoys no such advantage, and so it always seems defective.
history;knowledge
schopenhauer
The effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence.
null
schopenhauer
To become indignant at [people's] conduct is as foolish as to be angry with a stone because it rolls into your path. And with many people the wisest thing you can do, is to resolve to make use of those whom you cannot alter.
knowledge;ethics
schopenhauer
Necessity is the constant scourge of the lower classes, ennui of the higher ones.
null
schopenhauer
It is most important to allow the brain the full measure of sleep which is required to restore it; for sleep is to a man's whole nature what winding up is to a clock.
ethics;knowledge
schopenhauer
It is with trifles, and when he is off guard, that a man best reveals his character.
null
schopenhauer
A man of business will often deceive you without the slightest scruple, but he will absolutely refuse to commit a theft.
null
schopenhauer
The ultimate foundation of honor is the conviction that moral character is unalterable: a single bad action implies that future actions of the same kind will, under similar circumstances, also be bad.
ethics
schopenhauer
I've never known any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.
null
schopenhauer
What makes people hard-hearted is this, that each man has, or fancies he has, as much as he can bear in his own troubles.
ethics
schopenhauer
A good supply of resignation is of the first importance in providing for the journey of life.
ethics
schopenhauer
To desire immortality for the individual is really the same as wanting to perpetuate an error forever.
ethics
schopenhauer
The cause of laughter is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real project.
null
schopenhauer
He who can see truly in the midst of general infatuation is like a man whose watch keeps good time, when all clocks in the town in which he lives are wrong. He alone knows the right time; what use is that to him?
knowledge;love
schopenhauer
If a person is stupid, we excuse him by saying that he cannot help it; but if we attempted to excuse in precisely the same way the person who is bad, we should be laughed at.
ethics
schopenhauer
My body and my will are one.
null
schopenhauer
The ordinary method of education is to imprint ideas and opinions, in the strict sense of the word, prejudices, on the mind of the child, before it has had any but a very few particular observations. It is thus that he afterwards comes to view the world and gather experience through the medium of those ready-made ideas, rather than to let his ideas be formed for him out of his own experience of life, as they ought to be.
education
schopenhauer
One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind. In order to read what is good one must make it a condition never to read what is bad; for life is short, and both time and strength limited.
knowledge;ethics;education
schopenhauer
Many undoubtedly owe their good fortune to the circumstance that they possess a pleasing smile with which they win hearts. Yet these hearts would do better to beware and to learn from Hamlet's tables that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.
knowledge;education;ethics
schopenhauer
In the blessings as well as in the ills of life, less depends upon what befalls us than upon the way in which it is met.
knowledge;ethics
schopenhauer
It is only a man's own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them. For it is these that he really and completely understands. To read the thoughts of others is like taking the remains of someone else's meal, like putting on the discarded clothes of a stranger.
knowledge;ethics;education;history;love
schopenhauer
There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.
null
schopenhauer
Thus also every keen pleasure is an error and an illusion, for no attained wish can give lasting satisfaction.
ethics
schopenhauer
It is a clumsy experiment to make; for it involves the destruction of the very consciousness which puts the question and awaits the answer.
null
YAML Metadata Warning: The task_categories "conversational" is not in the official list: text-classification, token-classification, table-question-answering, question-answering, zero-shot-classification, translation, summarization, feature-extraction, text-generation, text2text-generation, fill-mask, sentence-similarity, text-to-speech, text-to-audio, automatic-speech-recognition, audio-to-audio, audio-classification, voice-activity-detection, depth-estimation, image-classification, object-detection, image-segmentation, text-to-image, image-to-text, image-to-image, image-to-video, unconditional-image-generation, video-classification, reinforcement-learning, robotics, tabular-classification, tabular-regression, tabular-to-text, table-to-text, multiple-choice, text-retrieval, time-series-forecasting, text-to-video, image-text-to-text, visual-question-answering, document-question-answering, zero-shot-image-classification, graph-ml, mask-generation, zero-shot-object-detection, text-to-3d, image-to-3d, image-feature-extraction, other

450 quotes by 9 philosophers (50 quotes each), labeled with the author and with a variable number of topic tags.

The quotes originally come from https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/mertbozkurt5/quotes-by-philosophers (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). The text of each quote has been cleaned of soft-hyphens (\xad) and other weird characters. The topic labeling has been done with a default HuggingFace zero-shot classifier pipeline with multi_labels.

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