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It is because we know happiness that we want to be happy, and since nothing is more certain than our wanting to be happy, our notion of happiness guides us in determining the respective goods that then became objects of our desires.

Hannah Arendt

To be sure, we are still aware that thinking calls not only for intelligence and profundity but above all for courage.
HANNAH ARENDT

Courage Intelligence Thinking
No human life, not even the life of the hermit in nature’s wilderness, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.
HANNAH ARENDT

Direction Human Life Nature Possible Presence Wild
Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
HANNAH ARENDT

Action Forgiveness Freedom
To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
HANNAH ARENDT

Road Sanity
Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identified with man’s freedom. ‘That a beginning be made man was created’ said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.
HANNAH ARENDT

Beginning Born Freedom Identify Man Philosophy
We first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves.
HANNAH ARENDT

Freedom Ourselves
There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking it-self is dangerous.
HANNAH ARENDT

Danger Philosophy Thinking
Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.
HANNAH ARENDT

Freedom Liberty Man Necessary Success Win
The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.
HANNAH ARENDT

Commitment Evil Greatness Human Person
Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.
HANNAH ARENDT

Force Love Nature Politics Powerful Reason
Wisdom is a virtue of old age, and it seems to come only to those who, when young, were neither wise nor prudent.
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Age Virtue Wisdom Young
Men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.
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Beginning Born Death Man
The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.
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Dream Perspective True
If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world-citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man.
HANNAH ARENDT

Oneself Right World
Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.
HANNAH ARENDT

Existence World
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
HANNAH ARENDT

Commitment Mistake Reveal

It is because we know happiness that we want to be happy, and since nothing is more certain than our wanting to be happy, our notion of happiness guides us in determining the respective goods that then became objects of our desires.

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It is because we know happiness that we want to be happy, and since nothing is more certain than our wanting to be happy, our notion of happiness guides us in determining the respective goods that then became objects of our desires.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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