The whole philosophy
The best philosophy fits on a t-shirt. No lectures. No 400-page reading list. Wearable on request.
The ideas we carry come from everywhere thought has been thought — the Mediterranean and Persia, East Asia and the Indian subcontinent, the Ethiopian highlands, the Great Plains of North America, the Caribbean and South America. Wherever people have lived, they've run into the same handful of questions: how to endure, what to savor, when to doubt, why to begin again. The schools are just our way of shelving the answers.
But nobody wears a school. You wear the idea that introduces you. It starts the conversation so you don’t have to.
Those marks in our logo are Morse code. MIND on top, DABS below. Most people see mid-century abstraction; the curious see a message.
We think the best things reward a closer look — that's rather the whole philosophy.
“We ought not to be ashamed of appreciating the truth and of acquiring it wherever it comes from, even if it comes from races distant and nations different from us.”
Al-Kindi · Baghdad, ninth century
Our whole mission statement, written eleven hundred years early.
A note on our quotes
The ideas on our pieces have travelled a long way — some for more than two thousand years — passing through countless translations, notebooks, and retellings on the way to you. We present each one as it has come down to us, attributed to the thinker it belongs to.
A few are famous paraphrases, or the shortened versions the world has come to love, rather than word-for-word originals. Where that's true, we've kept the spirit of the idea over the letter of it — which is really what a dab is. Every quote is used in good faith and, to the best of our knowledge, sits in the public domain.
Think a line belongs to someone else, or would word it differently? We'd love to hear it. There's no wrong way to read a dab.
Get in touch
Questions, wholesale enquiries, a quote you think we've got wrong, or you just want to say hello — write us. We read every message.