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4 months 1 week ago

I have endeavoured to show that no absolute structural line of demarcation, wider than that between the animals which immediately succeed us in the scale, can be drawn between the animal world and ourselves; and I may add the expression of my belief that the attempt to draw a physical distinction is equally futile, and that even the highest faculties of feeling and of intellect begin to germinate in lower forms of life.

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Ch.2, p. 129
5 months 5 days ago

People with healthy self-esteem do not need to create pretend identities.

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5 months 4 days ago

...the Outsider's problem is the problem of denial of self-expression.

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Chapter Four The Attempt to Gain Control
6 months 3 weeks ago

We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. ...Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.

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Ch. 4
7 months 6 days ago

Custom renders love attractive; for that which is struck by oft-repeated blows however lightly, yet after long course of time is overpowered and gives way. See you not too that drops of water falling on rocks after long course of time scoop a hole through these rocks?

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Book IV, lines 1283-1287 (tr. Munro)
5 months 1 week ago

Man is a substantial emigrant on a pilgrimage of being, and it is accordingly meaningless to set limits to what he is capable of being.

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"Man has no nature"
6 months 3 weeks ago

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

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5 months 4 days ago

I realize the malady of the oppressed and disinherited masses only too well, but I refuse to prescribe the usual ridiculous palliatives which allow the patient neither to die nor to recover. One cannot be too extreme in dealing with social ills; besides, the extreme thing is generally the true thing. My lack of faith in the majority is dictated by my faith in the potentialities of the individual. Only when the latter becomes free to choose his associates for a common purpose, can we hope for order and harmony out of this world of chaos and inequality.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

When we reflect on the long and dense night in which France and all Europe have remained plunged by their governments and their priests, we must feel less surprise than grief at the bewilderment caused by the first burst of light that dispels the darkness.

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Author's Inscription: French Edition
3 months 6 days ago

For what else are you busied with except improving yourself every day, laying aside some error, and coming to understand that the faults which you attribute to circumstances are in yourself?

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5 months 2 weeks ago

It is difficult, it is impossible to believe that the Good Lord - "Our Father" - had a hand in the scandal of creation. Everything suggests that He took no part in it, that it proceeds from a god without scruples, a feculent god. Goodness does not create, lacking imagination; it takes imagination to put together a world, however botched. At the very least, there must be a mixture of good and evil in order to produce an action or a work.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Instead of noble men, let us have noble villages of men. If it is necessary, omit one bridge over the river, round a little there and throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.

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Editorial, Andhra Granthalayam, vol. 1, no. 2 (1939) p. 6
5 months 3 weeks ago

Half our days we pass in the shadow of the earth; and the brother of death exacteth a third part of our lives.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

We are not that we are, nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for that we are capable of being.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 37
6 months 3 weeks ago

No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that what has been written latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an improvement on what was written previously; and that every change means progress. Men who think and have correct judgment, and people who treat their subject earnestly, are all exceptions only. Vermin is the rule everywhere in the world: it is always at hand and busily engaged in trying to improve in its own way upon the mature deliberations of the thinkers.

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3 months 1 day ago

To gaze up from the ruins of the oppressive present towards the stars is to recognise the indestructible world of laws, to strengthen faith in reason, to realise the "harmonia mundi" that transfuses all phenomena, and that never has been, nor will be, disturbed.

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From the Author's Preface to Third Edition
4 months 4 weeks ago

In summary, then, the set theoretic 'needs' of physics are surprisingly similar to the set theoretic needs of pure logic. Both disciplines need some set theory to function at all. Both disciplines can 'live' - but live badly - on the meager diet of only predicative sets. Both can live extremely happily on the rich diet of impredicative sets. Insofar, then, as the indispensability of quantification over sets is any argument for their existence - and we will discuss why it is in the next section - we may say that it is a strong argument for the existence of at least predicative sets, and a pretty strong, but not as strong, argument for the existence of impredicative sets.

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Philosophy of Logic
2 months 4 weeks ago

When the mirror meets with an ugly woman, when a rare ink-stone finds a vulgar owner, and when a good sword is in the hands of a common general, there is utterly nothing to be done about it.

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p. 317
3 months 2 weeks ago

The good seed that nature plants in us is so slight and so slippery that it cannot withstand the least harm from wrong nourishment.

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Part 2
3 months 2 days ago

So in this idea, then, everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality. Not God in a politically kingly sense, but God in the sense of being the self, the deep-down basic whatever there is. And you're all that, only you're pretending you're not. And it's perfectly OK to pretend you're not, to be perfectly convinced, because this is the whole notion of drama.

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The Nature of Consciousness; also published as What Is Reality?
4 months 2 weeks ago

If you want to do evil, science provides the most powerful weapons to do evil; but equally, if you want to do good, science puts into your hands the most powerful tools to do so. The trick is to want the right things, then science will provide you with the most effective methods of achieving them.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience.

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Book II, Ch. 1, sec. 19
5 months 3 weeks ago

Custom reconciles us to every thing.

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Part IV Section XVIII
6 months 3 days ago

Declining from the public ways, walk in unfrequented paths.

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Symbol 5
5 months 2 weeks ago

Fate and temperament are the names of a concept.

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As quoted in Demian (1972) by Hermann Hesse, trans. W.J. Strachan
5 months 3 weeks ago

The determination to print them (his lectures), and to communicate them to the General Public, must also speak for itself; and should it not do so, any other recommendation of them would be thrown away. Thus, with respect to the appearance of this work, I have nothing further to say to the Public, than that I have nothing to say.

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Preface
5 months 2 weeks ago

Government was intended to suppress injustice, but its effect has been to embody and perpetuate it.

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"Summary of Principles" 2.7
5 months 2 weeks ago

People will become faint out of fear and expectation of the things coming upon the inhabited earth, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. And then they will see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.

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21:26-27, NWT
3 months 1 week ago

One is not worthy to have what one, through weakness, lets be taken from him; one is not worthy of it because one is not capable of it.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

In reality, the labourer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital.

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Vol. I, Ch. 23, pg. 633.
6 months 4 weeks ago

Those that will combat use and custom by the strict rules of grammar do but jest.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

African audiences cannot accept our passive consumer role in the presence of film.

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(p. 44)
4 months 2 weeks ago

With so many mind-bytes to be downloaded, so many mental codons to be replicated, it is no wonder that child brains are gullible, open to almost any suggestion, vulnerable to subversion, easy prey to Moonies, Scientologists and nuns. Like immune-deficient patients, children are wide open to mental infections that adults might brush off without effort.

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3 months 1 week ago

Be not the slave of Words.

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Bk. I, ch. 8.
5 months 2 weeks ago

To ignore the true God is in fact only half an evil; atheism is worth more than the piety bestowed on mythical gods.

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A Religion for Adults
6 months 3 weeks ago

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

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Ch. 1, p. 9 [2012 reprint]. Also in "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" in Adonis and the Alphabet (1956); later in Collected Essays (1959), p. 293
6 months 2 weeks ago

The small are always dependent on the great; they are "small" precisely because they think they are independent. The great thinker is one who can hear what is greatest in the work of other "greats" and who can transform it in an original manner.

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p. 35
6 months 3 weeks ago

The poor, short lone fact dies at birth. Memory catches it up into her heaven and bathes it in immortal waters.

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"Memory", p. 66
5 months 2 weeks ago

History proves nothing because it contains everything.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

To understand this for sense it is not required that a man should be a geometrician or a logician, but that he should be mad. On the proposition that the volume generated by revolving the region under 1/x from 1 to infinity has finite volume.

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Quoted in Mathematical Maxims and Minims by N. Rose
5 months 1 week ago

I write to thee on this subject, friend, because I am angry at a book which I have just left, which is so large, that it seems to contain universal science, but it hath almost split my head, without teaching me anything.

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No. 66.
5 months 1 week ago

Gregorian chant, Romanesque architecture, the Iliad, the invention of geometry were not, for the people through whom they were brought into being and made available to us, occasions for the manifestation of personality.

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p. 55
6 months 2 weeks ago

Deconstruction never had meaning or interest, at least in my eyes, than as a radicalization, that is to say, also within the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism.

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Specters of Marx. Routledge, 1994. p. 115
2 months 2 weeks ago

Would not all we mean by "communication between mind and mind" be provided for if we suppose that common knowledge comes about, not from our explaining things to one another, but from things explaining themselves in the same terms to us all? Accepting the object as its own interpreter, as its own "medium of communication," do we not begin to understand what is utterly dark on any other view, how it comes to pass that the resulting knowledge is a common possession?

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Don't you feel the same way? When I cannot see myself, even though I touch myself, I wonder if I really exist.

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Estelle, discovering that there are no mirrors in Hell, Act 1, sc. 5
7 months 2 weeks ago

When a war breaks out, people say: "It's too stupid; it can't last long." But though the war may well be "too stupid," that doesn't prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.

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