Skip to main content
5 months 6 days ago

Free in this world as the birds in the air, disengaged from every kind of chains, those who have practiced the Yoga gather in Brahmin the certain fruit of their works. Depend upon it; rude and careless as I am, I would fain practice the yoga faithfully. This Yogi, absorbed in contemplation, contributes in his degree to creation; he breathes a divine perfume, he heard wonderful things. Divine forms traverse him without tearing him and he goes, he acts as animating original matter. To some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a Yogi.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to H. G. O. Blake, November 20, 1849

Friendship ... receives its real sustenance from an equality that, to proceed without a limp, must have its two limbs equal.

0
0
Source
source
Part 3
3 months 2 weeks ago

I've always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider. If I was offered anything like the Nobel Prize for Literature, I'd find it an extremely difficult conflict because I'd be basically disinclined to accept.

0
0
Source
source
Interview with Paul Newman in Abraxas Unbound #7
1 month 2 days ago

That which makes the man no worse than he was makes his life no worse: it has no power to harm, without or within.

0
0
Source
source
IV, 8
3 months 1 week ago

Descartes may have made a lot of mistakes, but he was right about this: you cannot doubt the existence of your own consciousness. That's the first feature of consciousness, it's real and irreducible. You cannot get rid of it by showing that it's an illusion in a way that you can with other standard illusions.

0
0
4 months 1 day ago

At different degrees, everything is pathology, except for indifference.

0
0
3 months 4 weeks ago

This organization of functional discourse is of vital importance; it serves as a vehicle of coordination and subordination. The unified, functional language is an irreconcilably anti-critical and anti-dialectical language. In it, operational and behavioral rationality absorbs the transcendent, negative, oppositional elements of Reason.

0
0
Source
source
p. 97
1 month 3 weeks ago

Before a man can do things there must be things he will not do.

0
0
Source
source
Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction (IVP, 1980), Ch 2
4 months 1 week ago

Mathematical Analysis is... the true rational basis of the whole system of our positive knowledge.

0
0
Source
source
Bk. 1, chap. 1; as cited in: Robert Edouard Moritz. Memorabilia mathematica; or, The philomath's quotation-book, (1914), p. 224
3 months 2 weeks ago

The sadistic person is as dependent on the submissive person as the latter is on the former; neither can live without the other. The difference is only that the sadistic person commands, exploits, hurts, humiliates, and that the masochistic person is commanded, exploited, hurt, humiliated. This is a considerable difference in a realistic sense; in a deeper emotional sense, the difference is not so great as that which they both have in common: fusion without integrity.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 2

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 5 days ago

The statue of Freedom has not been cast yet, the furnace is hot, we can all still burn our fingers.

0
0
Source
source
Act I.
5 months 1 week ago

The love of God consists in an ardent desire to procure the general welfare, and reason teaches me that there is nothing which contributes more to the general welfare of mankind than the perfection of reason.

0
0
Source
source
Closing sentence of the Preface to the general science (1677) (in P. Wiener (ed.), Leibniz Selections, Macmilland Press Ltd, 1951).
5 months 3 weeks ago

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

There are, in every country, some magnificent charities established by individuals. It is, however, but little that any individual can do, when the whole extent of the misery to be relieved is considered. He may satisfy his conscience, but not his heart. He may give all that he has, and that all will relieve but little. It is only by organizing civilization upon such principles as to act like a system of pulleys, that the whole weight of misery can be removed.

0
0
Source
source
Means by Which the Fund Is to Be Created
4 months 1 day ago

Incredible that the prospect of having a biographer has made no one renounce having a life.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

Not all women, in fact, very few, have had the good fortune to live and work among women and men actively involved in the feminist movement. Many of us live in circumstances and environments where we must engage in feminist struggle alone, with only occasional support and affirmation.

0
0
Source
source
Acknowledgments.
5 months 1 week ago

Thus our duties to animals are indirectly duties to humanity.

0
0
Source
source
Part II, p. 213
6 months 6 days ago

A Roman emperor sitting at the table surrounded by his bodyguard is a magnificent sight, but when the reason is fear, the magnificence pales. So also when the individual does not dare stand taciturnly by his word, does not stand freely and confidently on the pedestal of a conscious act, but is surrounded by a host of deliberations before and after that render him incapable of getting his eye on the action.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

I want to block some common misunderstandings about "understanding": In many of these discussions one finds a lot of fancy footwork about the word "understanding."

0
0
4 months 3 days ago

How can a rational being be ennobled by anything that is not obtained by its own exertions?

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 3
2 weeks 1 day ago

You can hear his skepticism here..but...yeah, there's nothing physically precluding us from a flourishing future. SOME of us have to choose it, rather than just flourishing for themselves.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

My whole heart and soul are stirred and incensed against the Turks and Mohammed, when I see this intolerable raging of the Devil. Therefore I shall pray and cry to God, nor rest until I know that my cry is heard in heaven.

0
0
Source
source
Statement while being confined to residence at Coburg, as quoted in History of the Christian Church, (1910) by Philip Schaff, Vol. VII
1 month 2 weeks ago

Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. That is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil.

0
0
1 month 6 days ago

Thus did the Holy Harlots unhinge the brains of man,and when they met and clashed with the pure Mountain Maidens,they raised their white arms high, their armpits smelled of musk,and, as the rites decreed, both fought their verbal war:"God swoops from mountain peeks to eat and play on earth;we are his food and drink and even his sacred toys -and learn, O sterile maids, we are his soft, sweet mates.Let her now leave who fears to merge with her dread God!"The scornful savage mouth of Krino flashed reply:"We will not leave! We guard the innocent soul of man!God is a spirit with pure white wings, a soul that sails,light, disembodied, deep in our thoughts, without embrace.It's we who keep the world in bloom with virgin souls!"

0
0
Source
source
From the Bull Ritual, Book VI, line 197
6 months 1 week ago
The Philology of Christianity. How little Christianity cultivates the sense of honesty can be inferred from the character of the writings of its learned men. They set out their conjectures as audaciously as if they were dogmas, and are but seldom at a disadvantage in regard to the interpretation of Scripture. Their continual cry is: am right, for it is written and then follows an explanation so shameless and capricious that a philologist, when he hears it, must stand stock-still between anger and laughter, asking himself again and again: Is it possible? Is it honest? Is it even decent?It is only those who never or always attend church that underestimate the dishonesty with which this subject is still dealt in Protestant pulpits; in what a clumsy fashion the preacher takes advantage of his security from interruption; how the Bible is pinched and squeezed; and how the people are made acquainted with every form of the art of false reading.
0
0
1 month 3 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
4 months 1 day ago

It is no longer a question anywhere of inventing interconnections from out of our brains, but of discovering them in the facts.

0
0
Source
source
Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy
5 months 5 days ago

Be gentle with them, Timothy. They want to be free, but they don't know how. Teach them. Reassure them.

0
0
Source
source
Reported to be Huxley's last words to Timothy Leary, which Huxley whispered from his deathbed. Quoted in Leary, Timothy (1990) . "Life on a Grounded Space Colony".
3 months 3 weeks ago

If the result of a war is to change nothing, but only to destroy, with the mere result that a group of human beings who do not differ notably from the conquered acquires preponderant advantages for the future, there is lacking the affective strength of an existence that has inspired faith, of an existence whose destiny would have been decided by the war.

0
0
1 month 4 weeks ago

Roemer used eclipses of the satellites of Jupiter, and sought how much the event fell behind its prediction. But... this prediction is made... by... astronomic laws; for instance Newton's... The velocity of light... is adopted, such that the astronomic laws compatible with this value may be as simple as possible.

0
0
5 months 4 days ago

Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.

0
0
Source
source
Laws of Motion, I
5 months 4 days ago

The world is sacred because it gives an inkling of a meaning that escapes us.

0
0
Source
source
p. 280
4 months 5 days ago

If insistence on them tends to unsettle established systems ... self-evident truths are by most people silently passed over; or else there is a tacit refusal to draw from them the most obvious inferences.

0
0
Source
source
Ethics (New York:1915), § 14, pp. 38-39
4 months 5 days ago

The conception of Rights involves that when men are to live in a community, each must so restrict his freedom as to permit the coexistence of the freedom of all others. But it does not involve that this particular person, A, is to restrict his freedom by the freedom of those particular persons, B, C, and D. That it has happened so that I, A, must conform myself particularly to the freedom of these, B, C, and D, of all other men, is purely the result of my living together with them; and I so live with them, simply by my free-will, not because there is an obligation for me to do so.

0
0
Source
source
P. 23-24
5 months 4 days ago

Blood doubly unites us, for we share the same blood and we have spilled blood.

0
0
Source
source
Orestes to Electra, Act 2
1 month 5 days ago

We took the liberty to make some enquiries concerning the ground of their pretentions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our friends who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation.

0
0
3 months 1 day ago

You see, if you say something positive like the whole of life - all living things - is descended from a single common ancestor which lived about 4,000 million years ago and that we are all cousins, well that is an exceedingly important and true thing to say and that is what I want to say. Somebody who is religious sees that as threatening and so I am represented as attacking religion, and I am forced into responding to their reaction. But you do not have to see my main purpose as attacking religion. Certainly I see the scientific view of the world as incompatible with religion, but that is not what is interesting about it. It is also incompatible with magic, but that also is not worth stressing. What is interesting about the scientific world view is that it is true, inspiring, remarkable and that it unites a whole lot of phenomena under a single heading. And that is what is so exciting for me.

0
0
Source
source
Kam Patel (28 April 1995) . "Going the whole hog". Times Higher Education.
3 months 4 weeks ago

Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate, for all things are plain in the sight of Heaven. For nothing hidden will not become manifest, and nothing covered will remain without being uncovered.

0
0
1 month 3 days ago

We are all attached to the throne of the Supreme Being by a supple chain that restrains us without enslaving us. Nothing is more admirable in the universal order of things than the action of free beings under the divine hand. Freely slaves, they act voluntarily and necessarily at the same time; they really do what they will, but without being able to disturb the general plans. Each of these beings occupies the centre of a sphere of activity whose diameter varies according to the will of the Eternal Geometer, who can extend, restrict, check, or direct the will without altering its nature.

0
0
1 month 5 days ago

One cannot reduce terror by holding over the world the threat of what it most fears.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

Muhammad brought down from heaven and put into the Koran not religious doctrines only, but political maxims, criminal and civil laws, and scientific theories. The Gospels, on the other hand, deal only with the general relations between man and God and between man and man. Beyond that, they teach nothing and do not oblige people to believe anything. That alone, among a thousand reasons, is enough to show that Islam will not be able to hold its power long in ages of enlightenment and democracy, while Christianity is destined to reign in such ages, as in all others.

0
0
Source
source
Book One, Chapter V.
5 months 4 days 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
3 months 3 weeks ago

The essential characteristic of the first half of the twentieth century is the growing weakness, and almost the disappearance, of the idea of value.

0
0
Source
source
"The responsibility of writers," p. 167
4 months 3 weeks ago

If I had to lay bets, my bet would be that everything is going to go to hell, but, you know, what else have we got except hope?

0
0
Source
source
"Richard Rorty Interviewed by Gideon Lewis-Kraus." The Believer, June 2003.

Therefore tolerance of diversity, of people that don't believe the same thing that you do, has always been at the core of this pragmatic project to enable diverse populations to live with one another.

0
0
Source
source
9:00
5 months 5 days ago

Freedom is only necessity understood.

0
0
Source
source
The Dilemma of Determinism, 1884
1 month 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

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia