Skip to main content
4 months 3 weeks ago

If beings are grasped as will to power, the "should" which is supposed to hang suspended over them, against which they might be measured, becomes superfluous. If life itself is will to power, it is itself the ground, principium, of valuation. Then a "should" does not determine being. Being determines a "should." "When we talk of values we are speaking under the inspiration or optics of life: life itself compels us to set up values; life itself values through us whenever we posit values."

0
0
Source
source
(VIII, 89) p. 32
4 months 3 weeks ago

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.

0
0
Source
source
The Human Condition (1958), part 3, chapter 16
2 months 6 days ago

The wise man should restrain his senses like the crane and accomplish his purpose with due knowledge of his place, time and ability.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

As a way of maintaining relative intellectual independence, having the attitude of an amateur instead of a professional is a better course.

0
0
Source
source
p. 87
3 months 3 weeks ago

The most important subject, and the first problem of philosophy, is the restoration in man of the lost image of God; so far as this relates to science.Should this restoration in the internal consciousness be fully understood, and really brought about, the object of pure philosophy is attained.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

So far as it has gone, it probably is the most pure and defecated publick good which ever has been conferred on mankind.

0
0
Source
source
p. 463 On the Polish Constitution of May 3, 1791
1 month 2 weeks ago

While the positivists were proclaiming the end "once and for all" of unverifiable metaphysical systems and speculative philosophy in general, new doctrines in flagrant contradiction to those ideals have sprung up one after the other. Positivists see no more in this development than evidence of human stupidity, not any reflection on themselves.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter Eight, Logical Empiricism, p. 198
1 month 2 weeks ago

With what scientific stoicism he walks through the land of wonders, unwondering.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

If the love of money is the root of all evil, the need of money is most certainly the root of all despair.

0
0
4 months 1 day ago

Persecution is a bad and indirect way to plant Religion.

0
0
Source
source
Section 25
4 months 4 weeks ago

Fools admire everything in an author of reputation.

0
0
4 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.

0
0
5 months ago

In the state of nature, wrong-doing is impossible ; or, if anyone does wrong, it is to himself, not to another. For no one by the law of nature is bound to please another, unless he chooses, nor to hold anything to be good or evil, but what he himself, according to his own temperament, pronounces to be so ; and, to speak generally, nothing is forbidden by the law of nature, except what is beyond everyone's power.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 2, Of Natural Right
1 month 2 weeks ago

The seeing eye! It is this that discloses the inner harmony of things; what Nature meant, what musical idea Nature has wrapped up in these often rough embodiments. Something she did mean. To the seeing eye that something were discernible. Are they base, miserable things? You can laugh over them, you can weep over them; you can in some way or other genially relate yourself to them; - you can, at lowest, hold your peace about them, turn away your own and others' face from them, till the hour come for practically exterminating and extinguishing them!

0
0
4 months 1 day ago

Be charitable before Wealth makes thee covetous.

0
0
5 months ago

In manufactures, a very small advantage will enable foreigners to undersell our own workmen, even in the home market. It will require a very great one to enable them to do so in the rude produce of the soil. If the free importation of foreign manufactures were permitted, several of the home manufactures would probably suffer, and some of them, perhaps, go to ruin altogether, and a considerable part of the stock and industry at present employed in them, would be forced to find out some other employment. But the freest importation of the rude produce of the soil could have no such effect upon the agriculture of the country.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter II
3 weeks 2 days ago

You don't love yourself enough. Or you'd love your nature too, and what it demands of you. People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash or eat. Do you have less respect for your own nature than the engraver does for engraving, the dancer for the dance, the miser for money or the social climber for status? When they're really possessed by what they do, they'd rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practicing their arts. Is helping others less valuable to you? Not worth your effort?

0
0
Source
source
(Hays translation) V, 1
2 weeks 2 days ago

The really good music, whether of the East or of the West, cannot be analyzed.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

Men are what their mothers made them.

0
0
Source
source
Fate
5 months 3 weeks ago

First, there must be an end to war and national rivalry and only then could one turn to the internal miseries that, after all, had external conflict as their chief cause.

0
0

Virtue by premeditation isn't worth much.

0
0
Source
source
H 13
4 months 3 weeks ago

That what we seek we shall find; what we flee from flees from us.

0
0
Source
source
Fate
4 months ago

There is no good father who would want to resemble our Heavenly Father.

0
0
Source
source
No. 51
3 months 1 week ago

Power tends to reduce openness... Power tries to solidify and stabilize its position by eradicating spaces open to play, or incalculable spaces.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

What man calls Absolute Being, his God, is his own being. The power of the object over him is therefore the power of his own being. Thus, the power of the object of feeling is the power of feeling itself; the power of the object of reason is the power of reason itself; and the power of the object of will is the power of will itself.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction, Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), p. 102
4 months 3 weeks ago

Epicurus, the great teacher of happiness, has correctly and finely divided human needs into three classes. First there are the natural and necessary needs which, if they are not satisfied, cause pain. Consequently, they are only victus et amictus [food and clothing] and are easy to satisfy. Then we have those that are natural yet not necessary, that is, the needs for sexual satisfaction. ... These needs are more difficult to satisfy. Finally, there are those that are neither natural nor necessary, the needs for luxury, extravagance, pomp, and splendour, which are without end and very difficult to satisfy.

0
0
Source
source
E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 346
1 month 2 weeks ago

[on Epicurus] His starting point is a conviction that apathy is impossible, and that pleasure - though not necessarily sensual pleasure - is the only conceivable, and quite legitimate, end of life and action. "Nature leads every organism to prefer its own good to every other good" - even the stoic finds a subtle pleasure in renunciation. "We must not avoid pleasures, but we must select them". Epicurus, then, is no epicurean, he exalts the joys of intellect rather than those of sense; he warns against pleasures that excite and disturb the soul which they should rather quite and appease. In the end he proposes to seek not pleasure in its usual sense, but ataraxia - tranquility, equaninimity, repose of mind; all of which trembles on the verge of Zeno's "Apathy"

0
0
5 months 4 days ago

Covetousness is both the beginning and the end of the devil's alphabet- the first vice in corrupt nature that moves, and the last which dies.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

0
0
Source
source
Book IV, Chapter 10, "The New Men"
4 months 3 weeks ago

You can choose whatever name you like for the two types of government. I personally call the type of government which can be removed without violence "democracy", and the other "tyranny".

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Freedom: A New Analysis (1954) by Maurice William Cranston, p. 112
1 month 2 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 weeks 2 days ago

Does anything genuinely beautiful need supplementing? No more than justice does-or truth, or kindness, or humility. Are any of those improved by being praised? Or damaged by contempt? Is an emerald suddenly flawed if no one admires it? Or gold, or ivory, or purple? Lyres? Knives? Flowers? Bushes?

0
0
Source
source
(Hays translation) IV, 20
3 months 3 weeks ago

Situation seems to be the mould in which men's characters are formed.

0
0
Source
source
Letter 23
4 months 3 weeks ago

The state is primarily an organization for killing foreigners.

0
0
Source
source
Bertrand Russell Speaks His Mind (1960), p. 83
2 weeks 2 days ago

The state of mind which enables a man to do work of this kind is akin to that of the religious worshiper or the lover; the daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart.

0
0
3 weeks 6 days ago

It is not you talking, but innumerable ancestors talking with your mouth. It is not you who desire, but innumerable generations of descendants longing with your heart. Your dead do not lie in the ground. They have become birds, trees, air. You sit under their shade, you are nourished by their flesh, you inhale their breathing. They have become ideas and passions, they determine your will and your actions. Future generations do not move far from you in an uncertain time. They live, desire, and act in your loins and your heart. In this lightning moment when you walk the earth, your first duty, by enlarging your ego, is to live through the endless march, both visible and invisible, of your own being.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

Go into the village over against you, and straightway ye shall find an ass tied, and a colt with her: loose them, and bring them unto me. And if any man say ought unto you, ye shall say, The Lord hath need of them; and straightway he will send them. All this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying, Tell ye the daughter of Sion, Behold, thy King cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass.

0
0
Source
source
21:2-5 (KJV)
3 months 1 week ago

Indeed much of the literature written about black folks in the post-civil rights era emphasized the need for jobs. Material advancement was deemed the pressing agenda. Mental health concerns were not a high priority.

0
0
3 weeks 5 days ago

The " Five Words," 'genus', 'species', 'difference', 'property', 'accident', were used by the Aristotelians, in order to express the subordination of kinds, and to describe the nature of definitions and propositions. In modern times, these technical expressions have been more referred to by Natural Historians than by Metaphysicians.

0
0

The beginning of religion, more precisely its content, is the concept of religion itself, that God is the absolute truth, the truth of all things, and subjectively that religion alone is the absolutely true knowledge.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

How every line is of such strong, determined, and consistent meaning! And on every page we encounter deep, original, lofty thoughts, while the whole world is suffused with a high and holy seriousness.

0
0
Source
source
About Indian sacred scriptures. quoted in Londhe, S. (2008).
5 months 3 weeks ago

This was her finest role and the hardest one to play. Choosing between heaven and a ridiculous fidelity, preferring oneself to eternity or losing oneself in God is the age-old tragedy in which each must play his part.

0
0
5 months 5 days ago

Let great authors have their due, as time, which is the author of authors, be not deprived of his due, which is, further and further to discover truth.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, iv, 10
3 weeks 3 days ago

Wait for the appointed hour.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in The Lives of the Sophists by Eunapius (online exerpt)
4 months 4 weeks ago

The more one presupposes that his own power will suffice him to realize what he desires the more practical is that desire. When I treat a man contemptuously, I can inspire him with no practical desire to appreciate my grounds of truth. When I treat any one as worthless, I can inspire him with no desire to do right.

0
0
Source
source
Part III : Selection on Education from Kant's other Writings, Ch. I Pedagogical Fragments, # 15
1 month 1 week ago

I do not mean to be disrespectful, but the attempt of the Lords to stop the progress of reform reminds me very forcibly of the great storm at Sidmouth, and of the conduct of the excellent Mrs Partington on that occasion. In the winter of 1824 there set in a great flood upon that town - the tide rose to an incredible height - the waves rushed in upon the houses, and everything was threatened with destruction. In the midst of this sublime and terrible storm, Dame Partington, who lived upon the beach, was seen at the door of her house with mop and pattens, trundling her mop, squeezing out the sea-water, and vigorously pushing away the Atlantic Ocean. The Atlantic was roused; Mrs. Partington's spirit was up. But I need not tell you that the contest was unequal.

0
0
Source
source
The Atlantic Ocean beat Mrs. Partington. Speech at Taunton
4 months 3 weeks ago

It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of every question that distinguishes the philosopher. He must be like Sophocles' Oedipus, who, seeking enlightenment concerning his terrible fate, pursues his indefatigable inquiry even though he divines that appalling horror awaits him in the answer. But most of us carry with us the Jocasta in our hearts, who begs Oedipus, for God's sake, not to inquire further.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (November 1815)

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia