Skip to main content
1 month 2 weeks ago

We do not struggle for ourselves, nor for our race, not even for humanity. We do not struggle for Earth, nor for ideas. All these are the precious yet provisional stairs of our ascending God, and they crumble away as soon as he steps upon them in his ascent. In the smallest lightning flash of our lives, we feel all of God treading upon us, and suddenly we understand: if we all desire it intensely, if we organize all the visible and invisible powers of earth and fling them upward, if we all battle together like fellow combatants eternally vigilant - then the Universe might possibly be saved. It is not God who will save us - it is we who will save God, by battling, by creating, and by transmuting matter into spirit.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

There is a connected set of events (light-waves) travelling outward from a centre... there are some respects in which all events are alike, and others in which they differ... We must not think of a light-wave as a 'thing', but as a connected group of rhythmical events. The mathematical characteristics of such a group can be inferred by physics, but the intrinsic character of the component events cannot be inferred.

0
0
Source
source
An Outline of Philosophy Ch.15 The Nature of our Knowledge of Physics, 1927
5 months 2 weeks ago

I am responsible for everything ... except for my very responsibility, for I am not the foundation of my being. Therefore everything takes place as if I were compelled to be responsible. I am abandoned in the world ... in the sense that I find myself suddenly alone and without help, engaged in a world for which I bear the whole responsibility without being able, whatever I do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for an instant.

0
0
Source
source
Part 4, Chapter 1, III
4 months 3 weeks ago

Since therefore, as well those degrees of heat that are not painful, as those that are, can exist in a thinking substance; may we not conclude that external bodies are absolutely incapable of any degree of heat whatsoever?

0
0
Source
source
Philonous to Hylas. Hylas replies with, "So it seems".
3 months 1 day ago

I have repeatedly stressed that the rape of the Earth and rape of women are intimately linked - both metaphorically, in shaping world-views, and materially, in shaping women's everyday lives. The deepening economic vulnerability of women makes them more vulnerable to all forms of violence, including sexual assault, as we found out during a series of public hearings on the impact of economic reforms on women organized by the National Commission on Women and the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology.

0
0
Source
source
Ecofeminism, by Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, 1993, (full text pdf)
4 months 3 weeks ago

The Americans never use the word peasant, because they have no idea of the class which that term denotes; the ignorance of more remote ages, the simplicity of rural life, and the rusticity of the villager have not been preserved among them; and they are alike unacquainted with the virtues, the vices, the coarse habits, and the simple graces of an early stage of civilization.

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

Men and boys are learning all kinds of trades but how to make men of themselves. They learn to make houses; but they are not so well housed, they are not so contented in their houses, as the woodchucks in their holes. What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on? - If you cannot tolerate the planet that it is on? Grade the ground first. If a man believes and expects great things of himself, it makes no odds where you put him, or what you show him ... he will be surrounded by grandeur. He is in the condition of a healthy and hungry man, who says to himself, - How sweet this crust is!

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Harrison Blake (20 May 1860); published in Familiar Letters, 1865
4 months 1 week ago

The methods of logical procedure are very different in ancient and modem logic, but behind all difference is the construction of a universally valid order of thought, neutral with respect to material content. Long before technological man and technological nature emerged as the objects of rational control and calculation, the mind was made susceptible to abstract generalization. Terms which could be organized into a coherent logical system, free from contradiction or with manageable contradiction, were separated from those which could not. Distinction was made between the universal, calculable, "objective" and the particular, incalculable, subjective dimension of thought.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 137-138
5 months 2 weeks ago

A man who is so exceedingly civil that for the sake of quietude and a peaceable name will silently see the community imposed upon, or their rights invaded, may, in his principles, be a good man, but cannot be stiled a useful one, neither does he come up to the full mark of his duty; for silence becomes a kind of crime when it operates as a cover or an encouragement to the guilty. 

0
0
Source
source
"To the People of America", Pennsylvania Packet, January 23, 1779
5 months 2 weeks ago

If you punish him for what he sees you practise yourself, he... will be apt to interpret it the peevishness and arbitrary imperiousness of a father, who, without any ground for it, would deny his son the liberty and pleasure he takes himself.

0
0
Source
source
Sec. 71
5 months 2 weeks ago

A man of intellect is like an artist who gives a concert without any help from anyone else, playing on a single instrument - a piano, say, which is a little orchestra in itself. Such a man is a little world in himself; and the effect produced by various instruments together, he produces single-handed, in the unity of his own consciousness. Like the piano, he has no place in a symphony; he is a soloist and performs by himself - in solitude, it may be; or if in the company with other instruments, only as principal; or for setting the tone, as in singing.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

Admit it, it is your youth that you regret, more even than your crime; it is my youth you hate, even more than my innocence.

0
0
Source
source
Electra to her mother Clytemnestra, Act 1
4 months 2 days ago

A general definition of civilization: a civilized society is exhibiting the five qualities of truth, beauty, adventure, art, peace.

0
0
Source
source
p. 353.
5 months 2 weeks ago

Another thing wherein they shew their love of dominion, is, their desire to have things to be theirs: They would have propriety and possession, pleasing themselves with the power which that seems to give, and the right that they thereby have, to dispose of them as they please. He that has not observ's these two humours working very betimes in children, has taken little notice of their actions: And he who thinks that these two roots of almost all the injustice and contention that so disturb human life, are not early to be weeded out, and contrary habits introduc'd, neglects the proper season to lay the foundations of a good and worthy man.

0
0
Source
source
Sec. 105
3 months 1 week ago

Writers, poets, painters, musicians, philosophers, political thinkers, to name only a few of the categories affected, must woo their readers, viewers, listeners, from distraction. To this we must add, for simple realism demands it, that these same writers, painters, etc., are themselves the children of distraction. As such, they are peculiarly qualified to approach the distracted multitudes. They will have experienced the seductions as well as the destructiveness of the forces we have been considering here. This is the destructive element in which we do not need to be summoned to immerse ourselves, for we were born to it.

0
0
Source
source
The Distracted Public (1990), p. 167
4 months 2 weeks ago

In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

Every father is given the opportunity to corrupt his daughter's nature, and the educator, husband, or psychiatrist then has to face the music. For what has been spoiled by the father can only be made good by a father, just as what has been spoiled by the mother can only be repaired by a mother. The disastrous repetition of the family pattern could be described as the psychological original sin, or as the curse of the Atrides running through the generations.

0
0
Source
source
Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955) CW 14: P. 232
6 months 2 weeks ago

In order to cease being a doubtful case, one has to cease being, that's all.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

The fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself.

0
0
Source
source
Estranged Labour, p. 30.
4 months 2 weeks ago

In a word, we reject all legislation, all authority, and all privileged, licensed, official, and legal influence, even though arising from universal suffrage, convinced that it can turn only to the advantage of a dominant minority of exploiters against the interest of the immense majority in subjection to them. This is the sense in which we are really Anarchists.

0
0
6 months ago

The mind must not be forced; artificial and constrained manners fill it with foolish presumption, through unnatural elevation and vain and ridiculous inflation, instead of solid and vigorous nutriment.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

Every one who has a heart and eyes sees that you, working men, are obliged to pass your lives in want and in hard labor, which is useless to you, while other men, who do not work, enjoy the fruits of your labor-that you are the slaves of these men, and that this ought not to exist.

0
0
Source
source
To the Working People, Complete Works, trans. Leo Wiener, Vol 24, p. 129
5 months 2 weeks ago

Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in In Passing: Condolences and Complaints on Death, Dying, and Related Disappointments (2005) by Jon Winokur, p. 144
6 months 2 weeks ago

Human justice is very prolix, and yet at times quite mediocre; divine justice is more concise and needs no information from the prosecution, no legal papers, no interrogation of witnesses, but makes the guilty one his own informer and helps him with eternity's memory.

0
0
3 months 3 days ago

The student of development finds, not only that the chick commences its existence as an egg, primarily identical, in all essential respects, with that of the Dog, but that the yelk of this egg undergoes division-that the primitive groove arises, and that the contiguous parts of the germ are fashioned, by precisely similar methods into a young chick, which, at one stage of its existence, is so like the nascent Dog, that ordinary inspection would hardly distinguish the two.

0
0
Source
source
The history of the development of any other vertebrate animal, Lizard, Snake, Frog, or Fish, tells the same story. Ch.2, p. 79
4 months ago

The sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology. The result is that the average individual does not experience the separateness and isolation the fully schizophrenic person feels. He feels at ease among those who suffer from the same deformation; in fact, it is the fully sane person who feels isolated in the insane society - and he may suffer so much from the incapacity to communicate that it is he who may become psychotic. In the context of this study the crucial question is whether the hypothesis of a quasi-autistic or of low-grade schizophrenic disturbance would help us to explain some of the violence spreading today.

0
0
Source
source
p. 395
1 month 2 weeks ago

In order to be transmuted into knowledge, every perception is and must be ordered and organized into categories. The extent, however, to which we can organize and express our experience in such conceptual forms is, in turn, dependent upon the frames of reference which happen to be available at a given historical moment. The concepts which we have and the universe of discourse in which we move, together with the directions in which they tend to elaborate themselves, are dependent largely upon the historical-social situation of the intellectually active and responsible members of the group.

0
0
1 month 4 weeks ago

To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.

0
0
Source
source
The Essence of Alan Watts
5 months 1 week ago

I'm very proud that some people think that I'm a danger for the intellectual health of students. When people start thinking of health in intellectual activities, I think there is something wrong. In their opinion I am a dangerous man, since I am a crypto-Marxist, an irrationalist, a nihilist.

0
0
Source
source
Truth, Power, Self : An Interview with Michel Foucault
5 months 2 weeks ago

Be quiet! Anyone can spit in my face, and call me a criminal and a prostitute. But no one has the right to judge my remorse.

0
0
Source
source
Act 1
4 months 3 weeks ago

A constellation of the most pedantic, obstinate ignorance and presumption, mixed with a kind of rustic incivility, which would try the patience of Job.

0
0
Source
source
Declaration about the scholars of England, particularly those of Oxford
2 months 1 week ago

Henry of Essex's religion was the Inner Light or Moral Conscience of his own soul; such as is vouchsafed still to all souls of men;-which Inner Light shone here 'through such intellectual and other media' as there were; producing 'Phantasms,' Kircherean Visual-Spectra, according to circumstances! It is so with all men. The clearer my Inner Light may shine, through the less turbid media; the fewer Phantasms it may produce,-the gladder surely shall I be, and not the sorrier! Hast thou reflected, O serious reader, Advanced- Liberal or other, that the one end, essence, use of all religion past, present and to come, was this only: To keep that same Moral Conscience or Inner Light of ours alive and shining.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

A whole from necessary substances is impossible. The whole, therefore, of substances is a whole of contingent things, and the world consists essentially of only contingent things.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

0
0
Source
source
On History.
5 months 2 weeks ago

I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.

0
0
Source
source
Lecture III, Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered
6 months 1 week ago

The Master said, "Hard is it to deal with him, who will stuff himself with food the whole day, without applying his mind to anything good! Are there not gamesters and chess players? To be one of these would still be better than doing nothing at all.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

Let all the 'free-will' in the world do all it can with all its strength; it will never give rise to a single instance of ability to avoid being hardened if God does not give the Spirit, or of meriting mercy if it is left to its own strength.

0
0
Source
source
p. 202
4 months 1 week ago

The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the "self-satisfied man."

0
0
Source
source
Chapter XI: The Self-Satisfied Age
3 months 1 week ago

Nationality is not the only kind of social membership, nor is it an exclusive tie. However, it is the only form of membership that has so far shown itself able to sustain a democratic process and a liberal rule of law.

0
0
6 months 2 days ago

Practice yourself, for heaven's sake, in little things; and thence proceed to greater.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, ch. 18, 18.
2 months 1 week ago

One comfort is, that Great Men, taken up in any way, are profitable company. We cannot look, however imperfectly, upon a great man, without gaining something by him. He is the living light-fountain, which it is good and pleasant to be near. The light which enlightens, which has enlightened the darkness of the world; and this not as a kindled lamp only, but rather as a natural luminary shining by the gift of Heaven; a flowing light-fountain, as I say, of native original insight, of manhood and heroic nobleness;-in whose radiance all souls feel that it is well with them.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

By 1204, the only place where the entire body of Greek learning existed, still intact, was Constantinople. As a result of the crusaders' conquest, however, Constantinople was ruthlessly pillaged and destroyed and almost all the great treasures of ancient Greek learning were lost forever. It is because of that sack, for instance, that we have only seven plays left out of the better than one hundred written by Sophocles. The tragedy of 1204 can never be undone and for all of time, only bits and pieces of the marvelous Greek world can be known to us.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

Thought is all light, and publishes itself to the universe. It will speak, though you were dumb, by its own miraculous organ. It will flow out of your actions, your manners, and your face. It will bring you friendships. It will impledge you to truth by the love and expectation of generous minds. By virtue of the laws of that Nature, which is one and perfect, it shall yield every sincere good that is in the soul, to the scholar beloved of earth and heaven.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

Scientists believe there is a hierarchy of facts and that among them may be made a judicious choice. They are right, since otherwise there would be no science... One need only open the eyes to see that the conquests of industry which have enriched so many practical men would never have seen the light, if these practical men alone had existed and if they had not been preceded by unselfish devotees who died poor, who never thought of utility, and yet had a guide far other than caprice.As Mach says, these devotees have spared their successors the trouble of thinking.

0
0
Source
source
Henri Poincaré, The Value of Science (1907) Author's Essay Prefatory to the Translation: "The Choice of Facts," p.4, Tr. George Bruce Halsted
4 months 2 weeks ago

To fear is to die every minute.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

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

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

Who holds a sword is tempted, who has youth must play,he who does not fear death on earth does not fear God.

0
0
Source
source
Odysseus, Book VIII, line 560
5 months 1 week ago

He was seized and dragged off to King Philip, and being asked who he was, replied, "A spy upon your insatiable greed."

0
0
Source
source
Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 43. Cf. Plutarch, Moralia, 70CD.
1 month 2 weeks ago

When alterations in technical terms become necessary, it is desirable that the new term should contain in its form some memorial of the old one.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

Men are most apt to believe what they least understand.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, Ch. 11. Of Cripples

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia