Skip to main content
8 months 4 days ago

Liars ... when they speak the truth they are not believed.

0
0
5 months 1 day ago

A wise man rules his passions, a fool obeys them.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 49

The good is the idea, or unity of the conception of the will with the particular will. Abstract right, well-being, the subjectivity of consciousness, and the contingency of external reality, are in their independent and separate existences superseded in this unity, although in their real essence they are contained in it and preserved. This unity is realized freedom, the absolute final cause of the world. Addition.-Every stage is properly the idea, but the earlier steps contain the idea only in more abstract form. The I, as person, is already the idea, although in its most abstract guise. The good is the idea more completely determined; it is the unity of the conception of will with the particular will. It is not something abstractly right, but has a real content, whose substance constitutes both right and well-being.

0
0
Source
source
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Right translated by SW Dyde Queen's University Canada 1896 p. 123
7 months 3 weeks ago

One who liberates his country by killing a tyrant is to be praised and rewarded.

0
0
Source
source
Trans. J.G. Dawson (Oxford, 1959), 44, 2 in O’Donovan, pp. 329-30
5 months 1 day ago

Poverty is the lack of many things, but avarice is the lack of all things.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 236
5 months 3 weeks ago

Hegel's theological discussion repeatedly asks what the true relation is between the individual man and a state that no longer satisfies his capacities but exists rather as an 'estranged' institution from which the active political interest of the citizens has disappeared. Hegel defined this state with almost the same categories as those of eighteenth century liberalism: the state rests on the consent of the individuals, it circumscribes their rights and duties and protects its members from those internal and external dangers that might threaten the perpetuation of the whole.

0
0
Source
source
P. 32
7 months 2 days ago

But the man is a humbug - a vulgar, shallow, self-satisfied mind, absolutely inaccessible to the complexities and delicacies of the real world. He has the journalist's air of being a specialist in everything, of taking in all points of view and being always on the side of the angels: he merely annoys a reader who has the least experience of knowing things, of what knowing is like. There is not two pence worth of real thought or real nobility in him. But he isn't dull.

0
0
Source
source
Part of a diary entry dated "Wednesday-Wednesday 9-16 July", 1924, regarding Thomas Babington Macaulay
7 months 3 days ago

Ever from one who comes to-morrow Men wait their good and truth to borrow.

0
0
Source
source
Merlin's Song, II
7 months 3 weeks ago

The Yin based its propriety on that of the Xia, and what it added and subtracted is knowable. The Zhou has based its propriety on that of the Shang and what it added and subtracted is knowable. In this way, what continues from the Chou, even if 100 generations hence, is knowable.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

There stood Mucius, despising the enemy and despising the fire, and watched his hand as it dripped blood over the fire on his enemy's altar, until Porsenna, envying the fame of the hero whose punishment he was advocating, ordered the fire to be removed against the will of the victim.

0
0
6 months 4 weeks ago

If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

The next day as they were leaving Bethany, Jesus was hungry. Seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to find out if it had any fruit. When he reached it, he found nothing but leaves, because it was not the season for figs. Then he said to the tree, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” And his disciples heard him say it. The next day when they came out from Bethany, He was hungry. After seeing in the distance a fig tree with leaves, He went to find out if there was anything on it. When He came to it, He found nothing but leaves, because it was not the season for figs. He said to it, "May no one ever eat fruit from you again!"

0
0
Source
source
Mark 11:12-14 11:12-14
7 months 3 weeks ago

Man has three ways of acting wisely. First, on meditation; that is the noblest. Secondly, on imitation; that is the easiest. Thirdly, on experience; that is the bitterest.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

Yes perhaps, as the Sage says, "nothing worthy of proving can be proven, nor yet disproven"; but can we restrain that instinct which urges man to wish to know, and above all to wish to know the things which conduce to life, to eternal life? Eternal life, not eternal knowledge as the Alexandrian gnostic said. For living is one thing and knowing is another; and... perhaps there is an opposition between the two that we may say that everything vital is anti-rational, not merely irrational, and that everything rational is anti-vital. And this is the basis of the tragic sense of life.

0
0
3 months 3 days ago

The Bank of the United States... is one of the most deadly hostility existing, against the principles and form of our Constitution... An institution like this, penetrating by its branches every part of the Union, acting by command and in phalanx, may, in a critical moment, upset the government. I deem no government safe which is under the vassalage of any self-constituted authorities, or any other authority than that of the nation, or its regular functionaries. What an obstruction could not this bank of the United States, with all its branch banks, be in time of war! It might dictate to us the peace we should accept, or withdraw its aids. Ought we then to give further growth to an institution so powerful, so hostile?

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Albert Gallatin, 1803. ME 10:437
5 months 2 weeks ago

Emptiness simply prevents what is individual from insisting on itself.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

Justice respects man as living in society, and is the common bond without which no society can subsist.

0
0
7 months 4 days ago

I think if I had met him [Lenin] without knowing who he was, I should not have guessed that he was a great man; he struck me as too opinionated and narrowly orthodox. His strength comes, I imagine, from his honesty, courage, and unwavering faith-religious faith in the Marxian gospel, which takes the place of the Christian martyr's hopes of Paradise, except that it is less egotistical... I went to Russia a Communist; but contact with those who have no doubts has intensified a thousandfold my own doubts, not as to Communism in itself, but as to the wisdom of holding a creed so firmly that for its sake men are willing to inflict widespread misery.

0
0
Source
source
Part I, Ch. 3: Lenin, Trotsky and Gorky
6 months 3 weeks ago

Rest gives relish to labour.

0
0
Source
source
Of the Training of Children, 9 (Tr. Babbitt)
5 months 1 day ago

Solitude is the mother of anxieties.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 222
7 months 4 days ago

All human activity is prompted by desire. There is a wholly fallacious theory advanced by some earnest moralists to the effect that it is possible to resist desire in the interests of duty and moral principle. I say this is fallacious, not because no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because duty has no hold on him unless he desires to be dutiful. If you wish to know what men will do, you must know not only, or principally, their material circumstances, but rather the whole system of their desires with their relative strengths.

0
0
Source
source
(wav audio file of Russell's voice)
7 months 1 week ago

Since the law is good, the will, which is hostile to it, cannot be good.

0
0
Source
source
Thesis 87
6 months 3 weeks ago

Animals no doubt have different interests from humans, and may experience different pleasures and pains, but the principle of equal consideration for similar interests still holds, and pleasures and pains of similar intensity and duration should be given equal weight, whether they are experienced by humans or by animals.

0
0
Source
source
p. 342
6 months 4 weeks ago

With a few glorious and glaring exceptions, the shadow of Jim Crow was cast in its new glittering form expressed in the language of superficial diversity... The disarray of a scattered curriculum, the disenchantment of talented yet deferential faculty, and the disorientation of precious students loom large... To witness a faculty enthusiastically support a candidate for tenure then timidly defer to a rejection based on the Harvard administration's hostility to the Palestinian cause was disgusting... We all know the mendacious reasons given had nothing to do with academic standards... This kind of narcissistic academic professionalism, cowardly deference to the anti-Palestinian prejudices of the Harvard administration, and indifference to my Mother's death constitutes an intellectual and spiritual bankruptcy of deep deaths...

0
0
Source
source
Quoted in Civil rights activist Cornel West resigns from Harvard, By Jackie Salo, New York Post, July 13, 2021
8 months ago

Art is the activity that exalts and denies simultaneously. "No artist tolerates reality," says Nietzsche.

0
0
3 months ago

Often injustice lies in what you aren't doing, not only in what you are doing.

0
0
Source
source
IX. 5:223
7 months 2 days ago

Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.

0
0
Source
source
Men in Dark Times
7 months 4 days ago

The object of art - like every other product - creates a public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction, p. 12.
5 months 2 weeks ago

The uniting of Orthodoxy with state absolutism came about on the soil of a non-belief in the Divineness of the earth, in the earthly future of mankind; Orthodoxy gave away the earth into the hands of the state because of its own non-belief in man and mankind, because of its nihilistic attitude towards the world. Orthodoxy does not believe in the religious ordering of human life upon the earth, and it compensates for its own hopeless pessimism by a call for the forceful ordering of it by state authority.

0
0
Source
source
Nihilism On A Religious Soil
7 months 4 days ago

Certain forms of sex which do not lead to children are at present punished by the criminal law: this is purely superstitious, since the matter is one which affects no one except the parties directly concerned... The peculiar importance attached, at present, to adultery is quite irrational... Moral rules ought not to be such as to make instinctive happiness impossible.

0
0
7 months 2 days ago

The extreme nature of dominant-end views is often concealed by the vagueness and ambiguity of the end proposed.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter IX, Section 83, p. 554
6 months 3 days ago

Old forms of government finally grow so oppressive, that they must be thrown off even at the risk of reigns of terror.

0
0
Source
source
On Manners and Fashion
3 months 1 week ago

This letter, if judged by the novelty and profundity of ideas it contains, is perhaps the most substantial piece of writing in the whole literature of mankind.

0
0
Source
source
Symmetry (1952), quote on p. 138; referring to a letter by Évariste Galois to Auguste Chevalier from May 29, 1832, two days before Galois' death, containing a testamentary summary of Galois' discoveries
6 months 4 weeks ago

The world is all that is the case.

0
0
Source
source
(1) Original German: Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.
5 months 4 weeks ago

We are all secularised anarchists today.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

In all things success depends on previous preparation, and without such previous preparation there is sure to be failure. If what is to be spoken be previously determined, there will be no stumbling. If affairs be previously determined, there will be no difficulty with them. If one's actions have been previously determined, there will be no sorrow in connection with them. If principles of conduct have been previously determined, the practice of them will be inexhaustible.

0
0
8 months 1 day ago

Then we may begin by assuming that there are three classes of men—lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, lovers of gain?

0
0
7 months 4 days ago

In this third period (as it may be termed) of my mental progress, which now went hand in hand with hers, my opinions gained equally in breadth and depth, I understood more things, and those which I had understood before, I now understood more thoroughly. I had now completely turned back from what there had been of excess in my reaction against Benthamism. I had, at the height of that reaction, certainly become much more indulgent to the common opinions of society and the world, and more willing to be content with seconding the superficial improvement which had begun to take place in those common opinions, than became one whose convictions on so many points, differed fundamentally from them. I was much more inclined, than I can now approve, to put in abeyance the more decidedly heretical part of my opinions, which I now look upon as almost the only ones, the assertion of which tends in any way to regenerate society.

1
1
Source
source
(p. 229)
4 months 2 weeks ago

The punctuation of anniversaries is terrible, like the closing of doors, one after another between you and what you want to hold on to.

0
0
Source
source
Diary entry on the first anniversary of the kidnapping and death of her son Charles Augustus Lindbergh III (1 March 1932)
5 months 4 weeks ago

Why do you lack the strength to escape the obligation to breathe?

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

For such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; Yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves: For they see their own wit at hand, and other men's at a distance.

0
0
Source
source
The First Part, Chapter 13, p. 61
3 months 3 weeks ago

Life is that which is discontent, which struggles and seeks, which suffers and creates.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1 : Our life begins
3 months 2 weeks ago

But now persecution is good, because it exists; every law which originated in ignorance and malice, and gratifies the passions from whence it sprang, we call the wisdom of our ancestors: when such laws are repealed, they will be cruelty and madness; till they are repealed, they are policy and caution.

0
0
Source
source
Peter Plymley's Letters (1808), Letter V
4 months ago

The principles of the good society call for a concern with an order of being--which cannot be proved existentially to the sense organs--where it matters supremely that the human person is inviolable, that reason shall regulate the will, that truth shall prevail over error.

0
0
Source
source
p. 127
5 months 3 weeks ago

Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.

0
0
Source
source
19:14 (KJV)
3 months 1 week ago

To ascend to the origin of things and speculate on the creation, is not the business of the natural philosopher. An humbler field is sufficient for him in the endeavor to discover, as far as our faculties will permit; what are these primary qualities impressed on matter, and to discover the spirit of the laws of nature

0
0

Man... whatever the origin of his soul, if it is pure, noble, and lofty, it is a beautiful soul which dignifies the man endowed with it.

0
0
7 months 4 days ago

To understand the actual world as it is, not as we should wish it to be, is the beginning of wisdom.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia