More Aphorisms

34. I repeat myself to make my thoughts clearer to myself. And because I hope that they will one day feel natural.

99. Men who act the same, speak the same. It doesn’t matter that they act and speak the “same”, in the rigorous sense of the word (whatever that means), but only that they try to, and believe that they do.

118. As I do philosophy I sometimes feel that I am saying nothing at all. That bothers me until I remind myself that I must be onto something.

133. Trying to show not with language but with a new form of life. To live so that new words are brought into being, or that new definitions attach to words. To make of your life a philosophical example.

200. That the idea of evolution for many implies the strongest and best surviving and not the luckiest, is a misunderstanding that perhaps overwhelms the whole of the idea of evolution’s contribution.

211. The idea that this is not the only way to live--why does this not bother a man more?

221. When he is not working in the service of others, a man is encouraged to act in his own way in his leisure time, what he also calls his “free time”. Yet this leisure activity, which he believes is his own, often constitutes the economic life of another man. Examples: getting a gym membership to use weight machines; going on vacations in structured environments; going to bars and restaurants; watching television programs; etc. But a man does not act on his own unless he acts outside an economy. A man assumes a sameness when the totality of his action is an economic exchange within a society. He is nothing more than a member, a counterparty, a client and a customer, even when he believes he is acting on his own in his own free time. The irony of his sense of freedom is that it has been reshaped as an exchange with other men.

254. To be free is to refuse to be human when it is offered to you.