SECTION · 27 ARTICLES
Stoicism, ikigai, mortality and the older ideas behind modern advice — with the attributions traced to where they come from.
BACKGROUND · ARNOLD BÖCKLIN, ISLAND OF THE DEAD, 1880 · THE MET, OPEN ACCESS
PHILOSOPHY & MEANING · 8 MIN
Several of the most shared "Buddha quotes" are not in the early Buddhist texts, including "The mind is everything". The "hot coal" image for anger comes from the Visuddhimagga, a Buddhist treatise written many centuries later, though the early texts do teach that anger harms the angry person first.
PHILOSOPHY & MEANING · 6 MIN
Confucius did not write the Analects. It is a collection of his sayings put together by later hands, and scholars disagree about how early.
PHILOSOPHY & MEANING · 8 MIN
Epicurus did say pleasure is the goal of life, but he defined it as "the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul", not feasting.
PHILOSOPHY & MEANING · 8 MIN
Existentialism was never a school the famous names all joined. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, of the major figures, only Sartre and Beauvoir explicitly called themselves existentialists; Camus denied it, and Kierkegaard died long before the word existed.
PHILOSOPHY & MEANING · 8 MIN
Almost everything we know about Diogenes comes from anecdotes written down centuries after he died, mostly by Diogenes Laertius. None of his own writings survive, if he wrote any.
PHILOSOPHY & MEANING · 9 MIN
"Et tu, Brute?" is Shakespeare's line. Suetonius and Cassius Dio say he died without a word, and report a Greek phrase, "you too, child?", only as something some people wrote; Plutarch has him cry out, but to Casca, not to Brutus.
PHILOSOPHY & MEANING · 8 MIN
Nobody knows for certain who Laozi was, or whether he existed. Even the earliest biography, written around 100 BC, hedges with "some say".
PHILOSOPHY & MEANING · 8 MIN
"The ends justify the means" is not in The Prince. The nearest passage says that people judge rulers by the outcome and tells a prince to rely on that: advice about how the crowd judges, not a moral rule.
PHILOSOPHY & MEANING · 11 MIN
Several tools say less than their popular versions. Hume asked that "a reason should be given" for moving from is to ought; Popper allowed that one counter-example is never enough in practice; Aristotle's mean is "relative to us", and some things have no right amount.
PHILOSOPHY & MEANING · 8 MIN
Most famous Nietzsche lines are real but trimmed. "What does not kill me makes me stronger" is about "me", and it sits under the heading "From life's school of war" in a section of barbed one-liners.
PHILOSOPHY & MEANING · 7 MIN
"The unexamined life is not worth living" is genuine, and Socrates says it at his trial, explaining why he cannot simply stop questioning people.
PHILOSOPHY & MEANING · 9 MIN
Philippa Foot wrote the version everything descends from in 1967, but it was a runaway tram, adapted from a pilot example, in a paper about abortion and the doctrine of double effect. The name "trolley problem" is Judith Jarvis Thomson's.
PHILOSOPHY & MEANING · 13 MIN
Twenty-two famous quotations traced to the text they came from. Two hold up as quoted. Eleven belong to somebody else.
PHILOSOPHY & MEANING · 4 MIN · 15 POINTS
Fifteen famous lines checked. Six belong to somebody else, two are genuine, and six are real but trimmed or misquoted, including three well-known lines from film and fiction. One is an origin story with no source.
PHILOSOPHY & MEANING · 11 MIN
Twelve pieces of modern advice, traced to where and when they were written. Nine are older than they look. Three are much newer.
PHILOSOPHY & MEANING · 5 MIN · 8 POINTS
Eight common fears, each with the passage a Stoic wrote about it: book and section, in a translation you can read free, so you can check it in context.
PHILOSOPHY & MEANING · 6 MIN
Carpe diem comes from Horace, Odes 1.11; the first three books of the Odes came out around 23 BC.
PHILOSOPHY & MEANING · 8 MIN
Stoicism began with Zeno of Citium in Athens around 300 BC. Secular mindfulness comes from Buddhist meditation, largely by way of Jon Kabat-Zinn, who founded the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1979.
PHILOSOPHY & MEANING · 9 MIN
Every one of the 18 quotes here comes from a named public-domain translation, with its book and section, so you can read it in context.
PHILOSOPHY & MEANING · 11 MIN
If you are in danger right now, the helplines at the top of this page matter more than anything below them. findahelpline.com lists helplines in more than 175 countries.
PHILOSOPHY & MEANING · 4 MIN
“Life in pink” is a word-for-word translation of la vie en rose. The French idiom voir la vie en rose means seeing things through rose-tinted glasses.
PHILOSOPHY & MEANING · 6 MIN
Media vita in morte sumus means “in the midst of life we are in death”. It is the first line of a medieval Latin antiphon, a short chant that English service books set at night prayer in the middle of Lent.
PHILOSOPHY & MEANING · 4 MIN
All three lines can be traced to Watts's own work: two to books he wrote, one to a lecture recorded in 1971 and published after his death.
PHILOSOPHY & MEANING · 7 MIN
“Invictus” is Latin for “unconquered”. It is a sixteen-line poem by William Ernest Henley (1849–1903) that ends “I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul.”
PHILOSOPHY & MEANING · 8 MIN
“Be the change you wish to see in the world” is not in Gandhi's writings. The nearest passage (Indian Opinion, 1913) reads: “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change.”
PHILOSOPHY & MEANING · 8 MIN
Ikigai is a Japanese word for something that makes life worth living. In Mogi's account it can be small and private, and it does not have to earn money.
PHILOSOPHY & MEANING · 6 MIN
Stoicism was founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium around 300 BC and named after the painted porch where its first teachers met. The three voices most people read are Epictetus, once enslaved; Seneca, Nero's tutor and adviser; and Marcus Aurelius, an emperor writing for himself.
