Explore philosophical ideas about existence, fear, death, ethics and everyday life. Read sourced passages and clearly labeled paraphrases, then follow the original works for context.
By Zhuangzi
The world is larger than the angle you happen to be standing at. A judgment that feels final from here may look very different from somewhere else. Leave a little room around what you think …
Read this selection ↗By Confucius
A good life is practiced in ordinary encounters. How you listen, how you treat a parent, how you keep a promise: these are not interruptions to becoming a decent person. They are where it ha…
Read this selection ↗By Nāgārjuna
Look closely at anything you call a thing. It depends on causes, conditions, language, and other things. Emptiness is not a claim that nothing exists. It challenges the idea that anything ex…
Read this selection ↗By Dōgen
Practice is not merely a staircase toward a life that begins later. Sitting, working, paying attention: the way you do this moment is already part of the life you are trying to understand.…
Read this selection ↗By Ibn Sina (Avicenna)
Most things we encounter could have been otherwise, or not existed at all. Follow the question of why they exist, and you reach a deeper question: can an explanation rest forever on things t…
Read this selection ↗By Anton Wilhelm Amo
Amo asks us to distinguish the body that senses from the mind that understands. Whatever answer you give, the distinction forces a harder question: what exactly do you mean when you say that…
Read this selection ↗By Simone Weil
Attention asks for more than waiting for your turn to speak. It asks you to make room for another person without immediately making their experience fit your own. Sometimes the first useful …
Read this selection ↗By Marcus Aurelius
You cannot command every event that arrives at your door. You can work on the judgment you bring to it, and the action that follows. The task is not to feel nothing. It is to keep your condu…
Read this selection ↗By Epicurus
The fear of losing life can consume the life you have. Epicurus asks whether every desire deserves your obedience, and whether friendship and ordinary pleasures might offer more peace than a…
Read this selection ↗By Simone de Beauvoir
A body is lived, not merely classified. What people call natural can carry generations of rules about sex, love, and who gets to choose. Freedom requires examining those rules and taking the…
Read this selection ↗By Jean-Paul Sartre
Circumstances shape what is possible without handing you a finished identity. Even refusing to choose has consequences. Sartre asks what happens when we hide behind a role instead of admitti…
Read this selection ↗By Albert Camus
You can ask the world for a final explanation and receive silence. Camus finds the absurd in that collision. His response is to face it clearly and keep living, without pretending the unansw…
Read this selection ↗