The Navel Gazers Greatest Hits

When they were younger, I told my children that when they went to college, if they learned to greet each new situation, condition, circumstance, happenstance, occurrence, individual, group, institution, faith and belief system with studied skepticism, analysis and reason preceding acceptance or rejection, I would be mighty pleased.

So, when Son Number One, A-Man The Elder, returned from a sojourn among the Eastern monks, determined to continue on his emerging spiritual path while reconciling it with the often less lofty ethical demands of the West - all with the goal of living a more positive and productive life, I thought, "Now, how cool is that?" 

But, when Son number Two, Jack The Lad,  following his very first college freshman class, phoned and greeted me with, "Hey Dad, guess what? I think, therefore I am" my mind panels boggled and I immediately hung up on him.

I know that I asked for it, but, while having raised one Great Thinker is fine, I simply don't have the brain expanse to spar with two. 

Well, the whole think-thing sent me searching for a bunch of smart retorts to toss at 'em just so they would know that I, too, once indulged in philosophical navel gazing; the difference being that I chose to sit in the back of the class and not the front like them two wise guys.

The list that follows is not necessarily the 50 greatest thoughts ever, but rather, the first 50 smart things I stumbled upon that someone else wrote (or in Socrates case, since it apparently never occurred to him to invest in a pencil, some other smart guy, like Plato, wrote for him).  

Here's the list and remember: Think smart and don't spend too much time picking at the why's and wherefores of your navel. 

1. “The unexamined life is not worth living” – Socrates
2. “There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance” – Socrates
3. “The only thing I know is that I know nothing” – Socrates
4. “That man is wisest who, like Socrates, realizes that his wisdom is worthless” – Plato
5. “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation” – Plato
6. “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit” – Aristotle
7. “He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god” – Aristotle
8. “Happiness is the highest good” – Aristotle
9. “Happiness lies in virtuous activity, and perfect happiness lies in the best activity, which is contemplative” – Aristotle
10.   “The greater the difficulty, the more glory in surmounting it” – Epicurus
11.   “In everything, there is a share of everything” – Anaxagoras
12.   “I think therefore I am” – René Descartes
13.  “One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another” – René Descartes
14.  “If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things” – René Descartes
15.  “God is not willing to do everything, and thus take away our free will and that share of glory which belongs to us” – Niccolo Machiavelli
16.  “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him” – Voltaire
17.  “He who thinks great thoughts, often makes great errors” – Martin Heidegger
18. “We live in the best of all possible worlds” – Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
19. “What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational” – G. W. F. Hegel
20.  “Only one man ever understood me, and he didn’t understand me” – G. W. F. Hegel
21.   “Whatever is reasonable is true, and whatever is true is reasonable” – G. W. F. Hegel
22. “God is dead!  He remains dead! And we have killed him.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
23.  “Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man's?” – Friedrich Nietzsche
24.  “The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation” – Jeremy Bentham
25. “Liberty consists in doing what one desires” – John Stuart Mill
26.  “To do as one would be done by, and to love one's neighbour as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality” – John Stuart Mill
27. “The life of man (in a state of nature) is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” – Thomas Hobbes
28. “A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion” – Sir Francis Bacon
29. “It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true” – Bertrand Russell
30.  “This is patently absurd; but whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities” –Bertrand Russell
31.  “Science is what you know.  Philosophy is what you don't know” – Bertrand Russell
32.  “I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong” – Bertrand Russell
33.   “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” – Ludwig Wittgenstein
34.  “If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil” – Baruch Spinoza
35.  “There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers” – William James
36.   “It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to out him in possession of truth” – John Locke
37.  “Good and evil, reward and punishment, are the only motives to a rational creature” – John Locke
38. “Life must be understood backward. But it must be lived forward ” – Søren Kierkegaard
39.  “Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck” – Immanuel Kant
40.  “Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but of how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness” – Immanuel Kant
41.  “Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits” – William James
42.  “History is Philosophy teaching by examples” – Thucydides
43.  “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing” Edmund Burke
44.  “Religion is the sign of the oppressed ... it is the opium of the people” – Karl Marx
45.  “Man is condemned to be free” – Jean-Paul Sartre
46.  “Everything that exists is born for no reason, carries on living through weakness, and dies by accident” – Jean-Paul Sartre
47.  “Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains” – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
48. “Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest” – Denis Diderot
49.  “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it” – Karl Marx
50. “It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence” – W. K. Clifford

     Bonus hit: "To be or not to be; that is the question". - Bill Shakespeare

And a few more:

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.” - Albert Einstein

"Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not." The Lorax Dr. Seuss

"Be true to yourself. But that's something everyone says and no one means. No one wants you to be yourself. They want you to be the version of yourself that they like." The Young Elites Marie Lu