Skip to main content
3 months 2 weeks ago

The wind is blowing, adore the wind.

0
0
Source
source
Symbol 8
4 months 2 days ago

Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in "Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard on the ethico-religious" by Roe Fremstedal in Ideas in History Vol. 1
2 months 3 weeks ago

History is full of religious wars; but, we must take care to observe, it was not the multiplicity of religions that produced these wars, it was the intolerating spirit which animated that one which thought she had the power of governing.

0
0
Source
source
No. 65. (Usbek writing to his wives)
2 months 2 weeks ago

What nationalist educators often fail to recognize is that merely being taught by teachers who are black has not and will not solve the problem if the teachers have been socialized to internalize racist thinking.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

This is how one puts an end to totality. If all information can be found in each of its parts, the whole loses its meaning. It is also the end of the body, of this singularity called body, whose secret is precisely that it cannot be segmented into additional cells, that it is an indivisible configuration, to which its sexuation is witness (paradox: cloning will fabricate sexed beings in perpetuity, since they are similar to their model, whereas thereby sex becomes useless-but precisely sex is not a function, it is what makes a body a body, it is what exceeds all the parts, all the diverse functions of this body). Sex (or death: in this sense it is the same thing) is what exceeds all information that can be collected on a body. Well, where is all this information collected? In the genetic formula. This is why it must necessarily want to forge a path of autonomous reproduction, independent of sexuality and of death.

0
0
Source
source
"Clone Story," p. 97
3 weeks 6 days ago

I knew Robert Burns, and I knew my father. Yet were you to ask me which had the greater natural faculty, I might perhaps actually pause before replying. Burns had an infinitely wider education, my father a far wholesomer. Besides, the one was a man of musical utterance; the other wholly a man of action, with speech subservient thereto. Never, of all the men I have seen, has one come personally in my way in whom the endowment from nature and the arena from fortune were so utterly out of all proportion. I have said this often, and partly know it. As a man of speculation - had culture ever unfolded him - he must have gone wild and desperate as Burns; hut he was a man of conduct, and work keeps all right. What strange shapable creatures we are!

0
0
2 months 4 days ago

There is but a step between a proud man's glory and his disgrace.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 138
4 months 3 weeks ago
0
0
Source
source
Variant translation: To sing is characteristic of the lover. 336
3 months 1 week ago

We are taught to believe that a desire of domineering over our countrymen is love to our country; and those who hate civil war abet rebellion, and that the amiable and conciliatory virtues of lenity, moderation, and tenderness to the privileges of those who depend on this kingdom are a sort of treason to the state. It is impossible that we should remain long in a situation, which breeds such notions and dispositions, without some great alteration in the national character.

0
0
2 weeks 3 days ago

Wouldn't it be as farfetched to call birth the cause of death as to call the cat's head the cause of the tail? Lifting the neck of a bottle implies lifting the bottom as well, for the "two parts" come up at the same time. If I pick up an accordion by one end, the other will follow a little later, but the principle is the same. Total situations are, therefore, patterns in time as much as patterns in space.

0
0
Source
source
p. 72

Attractions take place between bodies, affinities between the particles of a body. The former may be compared to the alliances of states, the latter to the ties of family.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

The example of the Jews, in many things, may not be imitated by us; they had not only orders to cut off several nations altogether, but if they were obliged to war with others, and conquered them, to cut off every male; they were suffered to use polygamy and divorces, and other things utterly unlawful to us under clearer light.

0
0
4 months 2 days ago

One can mistrust one's own senses, but not one's own belief. If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.

0
0
Source
source
Pt II, p. 162
3 months 2 days ago

Good health is the best weapon against religion. Healthy bodies and healthy minds have never been shaken by religious fears.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

Peace is more important than all justice; and peace was not made for the sake of justice, but justice for the sake of peace.

0
0
Source
source
On Marriage
2 months 2 weeks ago

In reading Jung's account of his cases, it is impossible not to be aware that his success was due partly to an element of ruthlessness; he was dominated by curiosity rather than compassion.

0
0
Source
source
p. 36
2 months 6 days ago

The assertion that art may be good art and at the same time incomprehensible to a great number of people is extremely unjust, and its consequences are ruinous to art itself...it is the same as saying some kind of food is good but most people can't eat it.

0
0
4 months 6 days ago

Always put the best interpretation on a tenet. Why not on Christianity, wholesome, sweet, and poetic? It is the record of a pure and holy soul, humble, absolutely disinterested, a trutn-speaker, and bent on serving, teaching, and uplifting men. Christianity taught the capacity, the element, to Jove the All-perfect without a stingy bargain for personal happiness. It taught that to love him was happiness,-to love him in other's virtues.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

Who does not in some sort live to others, does not live much to himself.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, Ch. 10
4 months 2 days ago

Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

0
0
4 months 6 days ago

His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.

0
0
Source
source
Greatness
2 months 3 weeks ago

But it has been necessary, for the benefit of the social order, to convert religion into a kind of police system, and hence hell. Oriental or Greek Christianity is predominantly eschatological, Protestantism predominantly ethical, and Catholicism is a compromise between the two, although with the eschatological element predominating.

0
0
5 days ago

On bourgeois ground ... change is impossible anyway even if it were desired. In fact, bourgeois interest would like to draw every other interest opposed to it into its own failure; so, in order to drain the new life, it makes its own agony apparently fundamental, apparently ontological. The futility of bourgeois existence is extended to be that of the human situation in general, of existence per se.

0
0
Source
source
The Principle of Hope (1959), N. Plaice, trans. (1986), p. 4
2 months 3 days ago

As a liberal I would hesitate to propose a blanket ban on any style of dress because of the implications for individual liberty and freedom of choice.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Richard Dawkins causes outcry after likening the burka to a bin liner (10 August 2010), The Telegraph.
3 months 3 days ago

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

0
0
Source
source
P. 97
4 months 3 weeks ago

We ought neither to fasten our ship to one small anchor nor our life to a single hope.

0
0
Source
source
Fragment 30 (Oldfather translation)
4 months 2 weeks ago

No wind serves him who addresses his voyage to no certain port.

0
0
Source
source
Book II, Ch. 1
2 months 4 days ago

If your parent is just, revere him; if not, bear with him.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 27

Or... they observe an astronomic phenomenon... an eclipse of the moon, and... suppose... this... is perceived simultaneously from all points of the earth. That is not altogether true, since the propagation of light is not instantaneous; if absolute exactitude were desired, there would be a correction... according to a complicated rule.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

If you look at the graph of the growth of G.M.O.s, the growth of application of glyphosate and autism, it's literally a one-to-one correspondence. And you could make that graph for kidney failure, you could make that graph for diabetes, you could make that graph even for Alzheimer's.

0
0
Source
source
On the correlation of autism, kidney failure, diabetes and Alzheimer's with GMOs and glyphosate, as quoted in "Seeds of Doubt" by Michael Specter, The New Yorker
4 months 3 weeks ago

If we admit the existence of the prophetic mission, by putting the idea of possibility, which is in fact ignorance, in place of certainty, and make miracles a proof of the truth of man who claims to be a prophet it becomes necessary that they should not be used by a person, who says that they can be performed by others than prophets, as the Mutakallimun do.

0
0
4 months 5 days ago

The live dead-man is dead as a producer and alive insofar as he consumes.

0
0
Source
source
p. 139
4 months 3 weeks ago

All things must needs be borne on through the calm void moving at equal rate with unequal weights.

0
0
Source
source
Book II, lines 238-239 (tr. Bailey)
4 months 6 days ago

We are always getting ready to live, but never living.

0
0
Source
source
April 12, 1834
4 months 2 weeks ago

If the public thought elevates you above the generality of men, let the other humble you, and hold you in a perfect equality with all mankind, for this is your natural condition.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

The salvation of reality is its obstinate, irreducible, matter-of-fact entities, which are limited to be no other than themselves. Neither science, nor art, nor creative action can tear itself away from obstinate, irreducible, limited facts.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 5: "The Romantic Reaction", p. 132
3 months 2 days ago

I have no ideas, only obsessions. Anybody can have ideas. Ideas have never caused anybody's downfall.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

Two very different ideas are usually confounded under the name democracy. The pure idea of democracy, according to its definition, is the government of the whole people by the whole people, equally represented. Democracy, as commonly conceived and hitherto practiced, is the government of the whole people by a mere majority of the people exclusively represented. The former is synonymous with the equality of all citizens; the latter, strangely confounded with it, is a government of privilege in favor of the numerical majority, who alone possess practically any voice in the state. This is the inevitable consequence of the manner in which the votes are now taken, to the complete disfranchisement of minorities.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. VII: Of True and False Democracy; Representation of All, and Representation of the Majority only (p. 247)
4 months 1 week ago

The Austrians are a highly civilised race, half-surrounded by Slavs in a relatively backward state of culture. ... Servia, a country so barbaric that a man can secure the throne by instigating the assassination of his predecessor, is engaged constantly in fermenting the racial discontent of men of the same race who are Austrian subjects.

0
0
Source
source
War: The Offspring of Fear (1914), quoted in Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude, 1872-1921 (1996), p. 373
2 months 4 weeks ago

The tangible source of exploitation disappears behind the façade of objective rationality.

0
0
Source
source
p. 32
4 months 3 weeks ago

Who are those people by whom you wish to be admired? Are they not these about whom you are in the habit of saying that they are mad? What then? Do you wish to be admired by the mad?

0
0
Source
source
Book I, ch. 21, 4.

From the nature of things, every society must at all times possess within itself the sovereign powers of legislation. The feelings of human nature revolt against the supposition of a state so situated as that it may not in any emergency provide against dangers which perhaps threaten immediate ruin. While those bodies are in existence to whom the people have delegated the powers of legislation, they alone possess and may exercise those powers; but when they are dissolved by the lopping off one or more of their branches, the power reverts to the people, who may exercise it to unlimited extent, either assembling together in person, sending deputies, or in any other way they may think proper.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

0
0
Source
source
Talking, in A Lover's Discourse
3 months 2 days ago

One would have to be as unenlightened as an angel or an idiot to imagine that the human escapade could turn out well.

0
0

Acquire the contemplative way of seeing how all things change into one another, and constantly attend to it, and exercise thyself about this part [of philosophy]. For nothing is so much adapted to produce magnanimity. ...But as to what any man shall say or think about him, or do against him, he never even thinks of it, being himself contented with these two things: with acting justly in what he now does, and being satisfied with what is now assigned to him; and he lays aside all distracting and busy pursuits, and desires nothing else than to accomplish the straight course through the law, and by accomplishing the straight course to follow God.

0
0
Source
source
X, 11
3 months 1 week ago

Think of something finite molded into the infinite, and you think of man.

0
0
Source
source
"Selected Ideas (1799-1800)", Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, trans. (1968) #98
2 weeks 2 days ago

It is my opinion that the present subject interests all: "Whatever breathes, and moves upon the earth," all that are endowed with existence, with a rational soul, and with a mind: but that above all others it interests myself, inasmuch as I am a votary of the Sun.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

Our bodies are perishable, wealth is not at all permanent and death is always nearby. Therefore we must immediately engage in acts of merit.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia