Skip to main content
5 months 3 weeks ago

It is impossible for someone to dispel his fears about the most important matters if he doesn't know the nature of the universe but still gives some credence to myths. So without the study of nature there is no enjoyment of pure pleasure.

0
0
2 months 4 weeks ago

By surpassing writing, we have regained our wholeness, not on a national or cultural but cosmic plane.

0
0
5 months 4 days ago

Criticism alone can sever the root of materialism, fatalism, atheism, free-thinking, fanaticism, and superstition, which can be injurious universally; as well as of idealism and skepticism, which are dangerous chiefly to the Schools, and hardly allow of being handed on to the public.

0
0
Source
source
B xxxiv
1 month 3 weeks ago

In the past you rivalled the Achaians and the Macedonians, peoples of your own race, and Philip, their commander, for the hegemony and glory, but now that the freedom of the Hellenes is at stake at a war against an alien people (Romans), ...And does it worth to ally with the barbarians, to take the field with them against the Epeirotans, the Achaians, the Akarnanians, the Boiotians, the Thessalians, in fact with almost all the Hellenes with the exception of the Aitolians who are a wicked nation... ...So Lakedaimonians it is good to remember your ancestors,... be afraid of the Romans... and do ally yourselves with the Achaians and Macedonians. But if some the most powerful citizens are opposed to this policy at least stay neutral and do not side with the unjust.

0
0
Source
source
Histories, IX, 37:7-39:7 (Loeb)
3 months 4 weeks ago

Surely this voice meant our Teacher; for it is he that can collect the indications which lie scattered on all sides. A singular light kindles in his looks, when at length the high Rune lies before us, and he watches in our eyes whether the star has yet risen upon us, which is to make the Figure visible and intelligible.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

In the empire of signs, the soul, psychology, is erased. There is no soul to infect the holy seriousness of ritual play.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

And killing time is perhaps the essence of comedy, just as the essence of tragedy is killing eternity.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

All states in the world, large or small, are cities of Heaven, and all people, young or old, honourable or humble, are its subjects; for they all graze oxen and sheep, feed dogs and pigs, and prepare clean wine and cakes to sacrifice to Heaven. Does this not mean that Heaven claims all and accepts offerings from all? Since Heaven does claim all and accepts offerings from all, what then can make us say that it does not desire men to love and benefit one another? Hence those who love and benefit others Heaven will bless. Those who hate and harm others Heaven will curse, for it is said that he who murders the innocent will be visited by misfortune. How else can we explain the fact that men, murdering each other, will be cursed by Heaven? Thus we are certain that Heaven desires to have men love and benefit one another and abominates to have them hate and harm one another.

0
0
Source
source
Book 1; On the necessity of standards
5 months 2 days ago

I am writing to you to tell you of my decision to return to your Government the Carl von Ossietzsky medal for peace. I do so reluctantly and after two years of private approaches on behalf of Heinz Brandt, whose continued imprisonment is a barrier to coexistence, relaxation of tension and understanding between East and West... I regret not to have heard from you on this subject. I hope that you will yet find it possible to release Brandt through an amnesty which would be a boon to the cause of peace and to your country.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Walter Ulbricht, January 7, 1964.
3 months 4 weeks ago

To think we could have spared ourselves from living all that we have lived!

0
0
5 months 2 days ago

The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 9: On the Notion of Cause
2 months 4 weeks ago

The pre-atomist multisensory void was an animate, pulsating, and moving vibrant interval, neither container nor contained, acoustic space penetrated by tactility.

0
0
Source
source
p. 34
5 months 2 weeks ago

Does anyone bathe in a mighty little time? Don't say that he does it ill, but in a mighty little time. Does anyone drink a great quantity of wine? Don't say that he does ill, but that he drinks a great quantity. For, unless you perfectly understand the principle from which anyone acts, how should you know if he acts ill? Thus you will not run the hazard of assenting to any appearances but such as you fully comprehend.

0
0
Source
source
(45).
3 months 3 weeks ago

Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.

0
0
Source
source
The Book and the Brotherhood (1987) p. 248.
4 months 6 days ago

The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other; and with them this conviction does not spring from that barren traditionary faith which seems to vegetate in the soul rather than to live.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter XVII.
3 months 2 weeks ago

Religion is better described than defined and better felt than described. But if there is any one definition that latterly has obtained acceptance, it is that of Schleiermacher, to the effect that religion consists in the simple feeling of a relationship of dependence upon something above us and a desire to establish relations with this mysterious power.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

These philosophers of the world place contrarieties in the same subject; for the one attributed greatness to nature and the other weakness to this same nature, which could not subsist; whilst faith teaches us to place them in different subjects: all that is infirm belonging to nature, all that is powerful belonging to grace. Such is the marvelous and novel union which God alone could teach, and which he alone could make, and which is only a type and an effect of the ineffable union of two natures in the single person of a Man-God.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

With a drunken man do not walk on the road.

0
0

Not to display anger or other emotions. To be free of passion and yet full of love.

0
0
Source
source
(Hays translation) I, 9
2 months 2 weeks ago

There are no signposts in the sky to show a man has passed that way before. There are no channels marked. The flier breaks each second into new uncharted seas.

0
0
Source
source
North to the Orient (1935) Ch. 1

The nature of the All moved to make the universe.

0
0
Source
source
VII, 75
4 months 1 week ago

Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares with memory, a great part even of our living beings; we slightly remember our felicities, and the smartest strokes of affliction leave but short smart upon us. Sense endureth no extremities, and sorrows destroy us or themselves. To weep into stones are fables.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter V
4 months 2 days ago

So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find some one to worship.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

I have often admired the mystical way of Pythagoras, and the secret Magic of numbers.

0
0
Source
source
Section 12
5 months 2 days ago

[M]y father's rejection of all that is called religious belief, was not, as many might suppose, primarily a matter of logic and evidence: the grounds of it were moral, still more than intellectual. He found it impossible to believe that a world so full of evil was the work of an Author combining infinite power with perfect goodness and righteousness.

0
0
Source
source
(pp. 39-40)
3 months 2 weeks ago

With the sense of sight, the idea communicates the emotion, whereas, with sound, the emotion communicates the idea, which is more direct and therefore more powerful.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 29, June 10, 1943.
4 months 2 days ago

Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

The culture of a civilization is the art and literature through which it rises to consciousness of itself and defines its vision of the world.

0
0
Source
source
"What is Culture?" (p. 2)
2 months 3 weeks ago

Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.

0
0
Source
source
Prince Otto, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
1 month ago

How can a man be said to have a country where he has no right to a square inch of soil...

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 2 : Political Dangers
5 months 2 days ago

Even the best things are not equal to their fame.

0
0
Source
source
Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 87
5 months 2 days ago

Let a man take time enough for the most trivial deed, though it be but the paring of his nails. The buds swell imperceptibly, without hurry or confusion; as if the short spring days were an eternity.

0
0
Source
source
Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 175
5 months 2 days ago

We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count.

0
0
Source
source
Old Age
5 months 2 days ago

He would have left a Greek accent slanting the wrong way, and righted up a falling man.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

To the man who is truly ethical all life is sacred, including that which from the human point of view seems lower in the scale. He makes distinctions only as each case comes before him, and under the pressure of necessity, as, for example, when it falls to him to decide which of two lives he must sacrifice in order to preserve the other. But all through this series of decisions he is conscious of acting on subjective grounds and arbitrarily, and knows that he bears the responsibility for the life which is sacrificed.

0
0
Source
source
p. 269
5 months 2 days ago

We must have kings, and we must have nobles. Nature provides such in every society, - only let us have the real instead of the titular. Let us have our leading and our inspiration from the best. In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise. Let the powers be well directed, directed by love, and they would everywhere be greeted with joy and honor.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

Saturninus said, "Comrades, you have lost a good captain to make him an ill general."

0
0
Source
source
Book III, Ch. 9. Of Vanity
3 months 2 weeks ago

The more Lil' Kim distorted her natural beauty to become a cartoonlike caricature of whiteness, the larger her success.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

There are and can be only two ways of searching into and discovering truth. The one flies from the senses and particulars to the most general axioms, and from these principles, the truth of which it takes for settled and immovable, proceeds to judgment and to the discovery of middle axioms. And this way is now in fashion. The other derives axioms from the senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it arrives at the most general axioms last of all. This is the true way, but as yet untried.

0
0
Source
source
Aphorism 19
5 months 2 days ago

The State is a collection of officials, different for difference purposes, drawing comfortable incomes so long as the status quo is preserved. The only alteration they are likely to desire in the status quo is an increase of bureaucracy and the power of bureaucrats.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 12: Free Thought and Official Propaganda
1 month 1 day ago

In a modern war, fought with modern weapons and on the modern scale, neither side can limit to "the enemy" the damage that it does. These wars damage the world. We know enough by now to know that you cannot damage a part of the world without damaging all of it. Modern war has not only made it impossible to kill "combatants" without killing "noncombatants," it has made it impossible to damage your enemy without damaging yourself.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

A multitude is irreducible multiplicity; the singular social differences that constitute the multitude must always be expressed and can never be flattened into sameness, unity, identity, or indifference. ... the compact identities of factory workers in the dominant countries have been undermined with the rise of short-term contracts and forced mobility of new forms of work; how migration has challenged traditional notions of national identity; how family identity has changed and so forth.

0
0
Source
source
105
1 month 3 weeks ago

The so-called communism of capital, that is, its drive toward an ever more extensive socialization of labor, points ambiguously toward the communism of the multitude.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

All who say the same things do not possess them in the same manner; and hence the incomparable author of the Art of Conversation pauses with so much care to make it understood that we must not judge of the capacity of a man by the excellence of a happy remark that we heard him make. ...let us penetrate, says he, the mind from which it proceeds... it will oftenest be seen that he will be made to disavow it on the spot, and will be drawn very far from this better thought in which he does not believe, to plunge himself into another, quite base and ridiculous.

0
0
Source
source
Montaigne, Essais, liv. III, chap. viii.-Faugère
2 months 4 weeks ago

It is a bad plan that admits of no modification.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 469
5 months 4 weeks ago

What is a rebel? A man who says no. 

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 1
3 months 3 weeks ago

By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.

0
0
Source
source
The Communist Manifesto, footnote
5 months 1 week ago

We have now completed both the spiritual and the temporal government, that is, the divine and the paternal authority and obedience. But here now we go forth from our house among our neighbors to learn how we should live with one another, every one himself toward his neighbor. Therefore God and government are not included in this commandment nor is the power to kill, which they have taken away. For God has delegated His authority to punish evil-doers to the government instead of parents, who aforetime (as we read in Moses) were required to bring their own children to judgment and sentence them to death. Therefore, what is here forbidden is forbidden to the individual in his relation to any one else, and not to the government.

0
0
Source
source
[The Large Catechism] by Martin Luther, Translated by F. Bente and W.H.T. Dau Published in: Triglot Concordia: The Symbolical Books of the Ev. Lutheran Church (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1921) pp. 565-773,
3 months 2 weeks ago

In the end, I am moved by causes and ideas that I can actually choose to support because they conform to values and principles that I believe in.

0
0
Source
source
p. 88
5 months 2 days ago

What chance has Vulcan against Roberts & Co., Jupiter against the lightning-rod and Hermes against the Credit Mobilier? All mythology overcomes and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in the imagination and by the imagination; it therefore vanishes with the advent of real mastery over them.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction, p. 30.

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia