Classical Philosophers

Plotinus:

or we are not cut off from our source nor separated from it, even though the bodily nature intervenes and draws us towards itself, but we breathe and maintain our being in our source, which does not first give itself and then withdraw, but is always supplying us, as long as it is what it is. But we are more truth alive when we turn towards it, and in this lies our well-being. To be far from it is isolation and diminution. In it our soul rests, out of reach of evil; it has ascended to a region out of reach of all evil; there it has a spiritual vision, and is exempt from passion and suffering; there it truly lives. For our present life, without God, is a mere shadow and mimicry of the true life.

--"The Enneads"

Socrates:

his is what my God commands: Make your first concern not for your bodies nor for your possessions, but for the highest welfare of your souls...Wealth does not bring goodness, but goodness brings wealth and every other blessing.

--"Apology" in The Last Days of Socrates recounted by Plato
5th Century BC

Kierkegaard:

o now with love. What love does, that it is; what it is, that it does-- and at one and the same time: at the very moment it goes out of itself (the direction outward) it is in itself (the direction inward); and at the very moment, it is in itself, it thereby goes out of itself -- so that this outgoing and this return, this return and this outgoing, are simultaneously one and the same.

When we say that "Love gives fearlessness," we mean by that, that the lover by his very nature makes others fearless; wherever love is present, it spreads fearlessness; one freely approaches the lover, for he drives out fear. Whereas the suspicious man frightens everyone away from him, whereas the cunning and the crafty spread fear and painful unrest about them, whereas the presence of the tyrant oppresses like the heavy pressure of sultry air- love gives fearlessness. But when we say that "love gives fearlessness," we also say at the same time something else, that the lover has fearlessness, just as it is said that love gives boldness on the day of judgment, that is, it makes the lover fearless in the judgment.

...God is love, and when a man from love forgets himself, how then could God forget him! No, while the lover forgets himself and thinks of the other man, God thinks of the lover. The self-lover is busy, he shrieks and shouts, and stands for his rights in order to make certain of not being forgotten - and yet, he is forgotten; but the lover who forgets himself, he is remembered by love. There is One who thinks of him, and thereby it comes to pass that the lover gets what he gives.

-- "Love Covereth A Multitude of Sins"
in A Kierkegaard Anthology

Martin Heidegger:

ecause Dasein ( the Self) is lost in the "they", it must first find itself. In order to find itself at all, it must be 'shown' to itself in its possible authenticity. In terms of its possibility, Dasein is already a potentiality-for-Being-its-Self, but it needs to have this potentiality attested.

As a phenomenon of Dasein, conscience is not just a fact which occurs and is occasionally present-at-hand. It 'is' only in Dasein's kind of being, and it makes itself known as a Fact only with factical existence and in it.

To the call of conscience there corresponds a possible hearing. Our understanding of the appeal unveils itself as our wanting to have a conscience. If the everyday interpretation knows a 'voice' of conscience…the 'voice' is taken rather as a giving-to-understand. In the tendency to disclosure which belongs to the call, lies the momentum of a push - of an abrupt arousal. The call is from afar unto afar. It reaches him who wants to be brought back.

And to what is one called when one is thus appealed to? To one's OWN SELF. …the call undoubtedly does not come from someone else with me in the world. The call comes from me and yet from beyond me and over me.

-- Being and Time

Giordano Bruno

ince a finite is a finite through union with its limiting opposite at their point of union, the Infinite must be that which can and does negate determination and limitation itself, and by so doing returns into itself indifferently and indeterminately all that is different and determinate. In this notion of infinity the negation or opposition has not disappeared completely, but has been incorporated within the Infinite and transcended by it. Infinity as such, therefore, would in a sense become one with all it comprehends in itself. The Infinite would thus be that which is its own "opposition," its own "determination," its own "end," and that which by its own nature is a "negation" of any and all determinations- it would be that which "determines" and "limits" itself. It would thus be self-determined, and would be "in" itself. This Infinite which "determines" itself must be self-sufficient, then, by definition, and at one and the same time have within itself all the "limits" and "opposites" which would "exist" in it as these finite determinations - determinations which are but particular participating contractions of the infinite essence.

It is the Infinite that can by determining itself return to itself, and while remaining one and self-sufficient reflect its particular participations. Again, by this inner negation of all particulars it necessarily becomes an affirmation of all of them, because the particular participating limitations have coincided in the Infinite, and have an existence as "related" to it.

-- The Infinite in Giordano Bruno

Leo Tolstoy

ne has but to understand Christ's teaching to understand that the world, not that which God gave for man's delight but the world men have devised for their own destruction, is a dream, and a very wild and terrible dream - the raving of a maniac from which one need but awake in order never to return to that, terrible nightmare."

-- Tolstoy's Confessions

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