Source identified
“And is the soul seen or not seen?”
Voice: Dialogue speaker · Socrates
Socrates advances the dialogue by separating what can be perceived directly from what must be examined through argument, preparing the discussion of body and soul.
Source note: Phaedo, Benjamin Jowett translation; Socrates asks the question during the dialogue’s argument about visible bodies and the unseen soul.
Source identified
“The world is my idea.”
Schopenhauer opens his system by arguing that the experienced world is always presented in relation to a knowing subject, making perception and consciousness conditions of the world as it is known.
Source note: The World as Will and Idea, Vol. I, First Book, §1, Haldane and Kemp translation, Project Gutenberg #38427. “Idea” translates Vorstellung in this historical philosophical vocabulary and should not be read as the everyday sense of a passing thought.
Source identified
“All things, then, seek the good.”
Boethius frames action as movement toward some perceived good, making the nature of genuine goodness central to understanding desire, purpose, and happiness.
Source note: The Consolation of Philosophy, Book III; H. R. James translation, during the argument that beings pursue preservation, unity, happiness, and ultimately the good.
Source identified
“What am I? A part of the infinite.”
Tolstoy frames the self as finite yet participating in something larger, shifting the question of meaning away from isolated individual duration toward a relation with the infinite.
Source note: My Confession, Leo Wiener translation; the question appears in Tolstoy’s investigation of how finite human life might be related to an infinite reality.
Source identified
“The world is a perpetual caricature of itself.”
Social appearances repeatedly exaggerate or contradict reality, making ordinary life look like an ongoing parody of its own pretensions.
Source note: Soliloquies in England, “Dickens”; Santayana uses caricature to describe the gap between living reality and conventional masks.
Source identified
“The heart has its reasons, which reason knows not.”
Human judgment includes forms of intuition, feeling, and commitment that cannot always be reduced to explicit logical argument.
Source note: Pensées; Pascal contrasts forms of knowing associated with the heart and with discursive reason.