determine my own life philosophy

I think I can do a better job than I did back in High School Philosophy class. I guess I should also plan to write it down. Then perhaps even share it.

...

• I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, make love to, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy.
  Anais Nin

this is the best quote I ever found about living instead of existing

there is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility is being superior to your former self

I found this sentence on a Radiohead site and think it´s an important one

“The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself” (Henry Miller)
this is probably why writers, painters and photographers see things, even worlds, in plain objects that are unrecognizable to people who only pass them by. there are this artist-moments when everyone of us notices a certain shade on a face or a certain detail and gets tangled up in beauty.

One always dies too soon—or too late. And yet one’s whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are your life, and nothing else.

part two; Life itself

1.Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.

2.Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.

3.One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.

4.There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers.

5.There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.

6.Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies.

Part one; Love

1.Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists…. When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence

2.Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one’s own self.

3.There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started out with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet which fails so regularly, as love.

that isnt yet part of my life philosophy but it definitely should become my leading thought: If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system (William James)

I am aware of the fact that I usually spend too much time thinking and contemplating, this quote makes me feel much better about this activity: “Nur der Denkende erlebt sein Leben. Am Gedankenlosen zieht es vorbei.” (only the one who thinks is aware of his life.life passes the thoughtless by) : Marie v. Ebner-Eschenbach