Nature gave us the ability to heal ourselves. Conscious breathing and environmental conditioning are two tools that everyone can use to control their immune system, better their moods, and increase their energy. I believe that anyone can tap into these unconscious processes and eventually control their autonomic nervous system.
Without goals (2 words), without some purposeful anticipation, we live, Frankl said, only a 'provisional existence', a kind of marking time which is really a death in life.
[B]ecause an increase in the wealth of societies seems not to guarantee an increase in happiness, Epicurus would have suggested that the needs which expensive goods cater to cannot be those on which our happiness depends.
The truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away, I’m looking for the truth,” and so it goes away.
Banality is the adopted disguise of a very powerful will to abolish conscience.
A civilization, in contrast to a culture, was the product of its greatest minds, whether Western or Eastern. One of Strauss’s favorite quotations was from Aquinas: “The least knowledge one can have of the highest things is more desirable than the most certain knowledge one has of the lowest things.”
All this shows what from a general knowledge of pre-Socratic physics we should expect: that Greek thinkers in general take it for granted that mind belongs essentially to body and lives with it in the closest union, and that when they are confronted with reasons for thinking this union partial, occasional, or precarious, they are puzzled to know how this can be.
These activities were thus not activities of the ‘mind’, if that word refers to the self-critical activities called thinking. But neither were they activities of the ‘body’. To use a Greek word (for the Greeks had already made important contributions to this science of feeling) they were activities of the ‘psyche’, and no better word could have been devised for the study of them than psychology.
In the work of no other philosopher has the concept of appearance, and hence of semblance (of Erscheinung and Schein), played so decisive and central a role as in Kant.
In reality, democracy was the capstone of an edifice that had as its foundation the rule of law – to be precise, the sanctity of individual freedom and the security of private property rights, ensured by representative, constitutional government.
