Freedom & Autonomy

Outer liberty and inner emancipation

True freedom requires both civic justice in society and philosophical mastery over one's own desires, fears, and prejudices.

20th century, Austria

Logotherapy & Existential Psychology

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

Viktor Frankl Man's Search for Meaning

✨ Create Card

19th–20th century, Bengal

Bengali Renaissance & Humanism

That side of our existence whose direction is towards the infinite seeks not wealth, but freedom and joy.

Rabindranath Tagore Gitanjali & Stray Birds

✨ Create Card

20th century, Germany/USA

Political Philosophy

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.

Hannah Arendt The Human Condition

✨ Create Card

20th century, France

Existential Feminism

I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.

Simone de Beauvoir The Ethics of Ambiguity

✨ Create Card

18th century, Prussia

Enlightenment Deontology

Metaphysics has as the proper object of its enquiries three ideas only: God, freedom, and immortality.

Immanuel Kant Critique of Practical Reason

✨ Create Card

19th century, India

Vedanta Philosophy

Karma is the eternal assertion of human freedom. If we can bring ourselves down by our karma, surely it is in our power to raise ourselves by our own karma.

Swami Vivekananda Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda

✨ Create Card

1st century BCE, Rome

Roman Republican Humanism

The evil was not in bread and circuses, per se, but in the willingness of the people to sell their rights as free men for full bellies and the excitement of the games which would serve to distract them from the other human hungers which bread and circuses can never appease.

Cicero De Officiis & Tusculan Disputations

✨ Create Card

4th–5th century CE, North Africa

Patristic Theology

There is no greater freedom than the freedom to obey.

Augustine of Hippo Confessions

✨ Create Card

17th century, France

Jansenist Philosophy & Mathematics

Do not imagine that it is less an accident by which you find yourself master of the wealth which you possess, than that by which this man found himself king.

Blaise Pascal Pensées

✨ Create Card

2nd century CE, Rome

Roman Stoicism

No thefts of free will reported.” (Hays translation)

Marcus Aurelius Meditations

✨ Create Card

1st century CE, Hierapolis

Greek Stoicism

No man is free who is not master of himself.

Epictetus Discourses & Enchiridion

✨ Create Card

4th century BCE, Athens

Platonic Academy

By the golden chain Homer meant nothing else than the sun.

Plato The Republic & Dialogues

✨ Create Card

4th century BCE, Stagira

Peripatetic Philosophy

If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost.

Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics

✨ Create Card

5th century BCE, China

Confucianism

Chi Wen Tzu always thought three times before taking action. When the Master was told of this, he commented, "Twice is quite enough.

Confucius The Analects (Lunyu)

✨ Create Card

6th century BCE, China

Classical Taoism

Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.

Laozi Tao Te Ching

✨ Create Card

19th century, Germany

Continental & Existential Philosophy

To draw up such a law–book as Manu’s means to lay before a people the possibility of future mastery, of attainable perfection—it permits them to aspire to the highest reaches of the art of life.

Friedrich Nietzsche Thus Spoke Zarathustra & Beyond Good and Evil

✨ Create Card

20th century, Algeria/France

Existentialism & Absurdism

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

Albert Camus The Myth of Sisyphus & Notebooks

✨ Create Card

19th century, Denmark

Christian Existentialism

A master and way out of the league that the rest of us play in.

Søren Kierkegaard Either/Or & Journals

✨ Create Card

19th century, Germany

German Idealism & Pessimism

Einstein, echoing Schopenhauer's exploration of free will in Zucker's 1945 translation, highlights humanity's ability to act on desires while lacking control over the desires themselves.

Arthur Schopenhauer Parerga and Paralipomena

✨ Create Card

17th century, Netherlands

Continental Rationalism

The real disturbers of the peace are those who, in a free state, seek to curtail the liberty of judgment which they are unable to tyrannize over.

Baruch Spinoza Ethics (Ethica)

✨ Create Card

19th century, Russia

Russian Literature & Christian Ethics

Patriotism … for rulers is nothing else than a tool for achieving their power-hungry and money-hungry goals, and for the ruled it means renouncing their human dignity, reason, conscience, and slavish submission to those in power. … Patriotism is slavery.

Leo Tolstoy War and Peace & A Calendar of Wisdom

✨ Create Card

19th century, Ireland

Aestheticism & Wit

Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. There lies its immense value. For what it seeks is to disturb monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.