Skip to main content
5 months 3 weeks ago

I believe government, organized authority, or the State is necessary only to maintain or protect property and monopoly. It has proven efficient in that function only. As a promoter of individual liberty, human well-being and social harmony, which alone constitute real order, government stands condemned by all the great men of the world...I believe - indeed, I know - that whatever is fine and beautiful in the human expresses and asserts itself in spite of government, and not because of it.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

Once we have tasted the sweetness of what is spiritual, the pleasures of the world will have no attraction for us. If we disregard the shadows of things, then we will penetrate their inner substance.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

Precisely by inculcating a critical attitude, the "canon" served to demythologize the conventional pieties of the American bourgeoisie and provided the student with a perspective from which to critically analyze American culture and institutions. Ironically, the same tradition is now regarded as oppressive. The texts once served an unmasking function; now we are told that it is the texts which must be unmasked.

0
0
Source
source
"The Storm Over the University", The New York Review of Books, December 6, 1990
6 months 1 week ago

To try curing someone of a "vice," of what is the deepest thing he has, is to attack his very being, and this is indeed how he himself understands it, since he will never forgive you for wanting him to destroy himself in your way and not his.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

The secret is that only that which can destroy itself is truly alive.

0
0
Source
source
Psychology and Alchemy
6 months 1 week ago

We exhort the compromisers to open their hearts to truth, to free themselves of their wretched and blind circumspection, of their intellectual arrogance, and of the servile fear which dries up their souls and paralyzes their movements. Let us therefore trust the eternal Spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternal source of all life. The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!

0
0
Source
source
"The Reaction in Germany" (1842) Often paraphrased as, "The urge to destroy is also a creative urge"
5 months 3 weeks ago

Could it be that sexual perversion and romanticism sprang from the same longing for distant horizons?

0
0
Source
source
p. 17
7 months 2 weeks ago

All happiness or unhappiness solely depends upon the quality of the object to which we are attached by love.

0
0
Source
source
I, 9; translation by W. Hale White (Revised by Amelia Hutchison Stirling)
8 months 3 days ago

The man of virtue makes the difficulty to be overcome his first business, and success only a subsequent consideration: this may be called perfect virtue.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

I find I am shedding hypocrisy in human relationships. What a rest that will be! The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere. That is why so much of social life is exhausting; one is wearing a mask. I have shed my mask.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 2; part of this statement has often been paraphrased: "The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere."
5 months 1 week ago

It really comes down to parsimony, economy of explanation. It is possible that your car engine is driven by psychokinetic energy, but if it looks like a petrol engine, smells like a petrol engine and performs exactly as well as a petrol engine, the sensible working hypothesis is that it is a petrol engine.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

Those distinct substances, which concretes generally either afford, or are made up of, may, without very much inconvenience, be called the elements or principles of them.

0
0
Source
source
Proposition IV
6 months 2 weeks ago

The man who makes his religion a means to the gaining of this world, will lose both worlds alike; whereas the man who gives up this world for the sake of religion, will get both worlds alike.

0
0
Source
source
The Faith and Practice of Al-Ghazali, Allen & Unwin (1963), p. 152.
7 months 1 week ago

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

0
0
Source
source
November 11, 1842
5 months 1 week ago

Sight-seeing is the art of disappointment.

0
0
Source
source
Pt. I, ch. II.
5 months 2 weeks ago

Take provocation, for instance, which is the opposite and the caricature of seduction. It says: "I know that you want to be seduced, and I will seduce you." Nothing could be worse than betraying this secret rule. Nothing could be less seductive than a provocative smile or inciteful behaviour, since both presuppose that one cannot be seduced naturally and that one needs to be blackmailed into it, or through a declaration of intent: "Let me seduce you"

0
0
Source
source
(p. 67)

It appears to me to be indisputable that he who I am to-day derives, by a continuous series of states of consciousness, from him who was in my body twenty years ago. Memory is the basis of individual personality, just as tradition is the basis of the collective personality of a people. We live in memory, and our spiritual life is at bottom simply the effort of our memory to persist, to transform itself into hope, the effort of our past to transform itself into our future.

0
0
8 months 2 weeks ago

Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs to dizziness. Further than this, psychology cannot and will not go. In that very moment everything is changed, and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty. Between these two moments lies the leap, which no science has explained and which no science can explain. He who becomes guilty in anxiety becomes as ambiguously guilty as it is possible to become.

0
0
5 months 6 days ago

We are all such accidents. We do not make up history and culture. We simply appear, not by our own choice. We make what we can of our condition with the means available. We must accept the mixture as we find it - the impurity of it, the tragedy of it, the hope of it.

0
0
Source
source
Great Jewish Short Stories, introduction to the Dell paperback edition
1 month 2 weeks ago

Balance isn't good for everything. A balance that agrees to destroy SOME life is not a good balance...

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

As for others whose lives are not so ordered, he reminds himself constantly of the characters they exhibit daily and nightly at home and abroad, and of the sort of society they frequent; and the approval of such men, who do not even stand well in their own eyes has no value for him.

0
0
Source
source
III. 4, trans. Maxwell Staniforth
7 months 2 weeks ago

The concept of space, therefore, is a pure intuition, being a singular concept, not made up by sensations, but itself the fundamental form of all external sensation.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

The STATE IDEA, the authoritarian principle, has been proven bankrupt by the experience of the Russian Revolution. If I were to sum up my whole argument in one sentence I should say: The inherent tendency of the State is to concentrate, to narrow, and monopolize all social activities; the nature of revolution is, on the contrary, to grow, to broaden, and disseminate itself in ever-wider circles. In other words, the State is institutional and static; revolution is fluent, dynamic. These two tendencies are incompatible and mutually destructive. The State idea killed the Russian Revolution and it must have the same result in all other revolutions, unless the libertarian idea prevail.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

1. Find a subject you care about.2. Do not ramble, though.3. Keep it simple.4. Have the guts to cut.5. Sound like yourself.6. Say what you mean to say.7. Pity the readers.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Science Fictionisms (1995), compiled by William Rotsler
6 months 6 days ago

Time, and Industry, produce everyday new knowledge.

0
0
Source
source
The Second Part, Chapter 30, p. 176
7 months 3 days ago

Verily we know nothing. Truth is buried deep.

0
0
Source
source
(Another translation: "Of truth we know nothing, for truth is in a well." Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers R.D. Hicks, Ed.)
6 months 4 days ago

Hardness and softness, roughness and smoothness, moonlight and sunlight present themselves in our recollection not preeminently as sensory contents but as certain kinds of symbioses, certain ways outside has of invading us and certain ways we have of meets this invasion...

0
0
Source
source
p. 317
6 months 2 weeks ago

When the end comes, you will be esteemed by the world and rewarded by God, not because you have won the love and respect of the princes of the earth, however powerful, but rather for having loved, defended and cherished one such as I ... what you receive from others is a testimony to their virtue; but all that you do for others is the sign and clear indication of your own.

0
0
Source
source
Dedication
5 months 3 weeks ago

Crowley wanted to be a magician because he wanted power -- power over other people.

0
0
Source
source
p. 157
7 months 3 days ago

Antisthenes ... was asked on one occasion what learning was the most necessary, and he replied, "To unlearn one's bad habits."

0
0
Source
source
§ 4
5 months 2 weeks ago

We often attribute "understanding" and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

I have been overcome by the beauty and richness of our life together, those early mornings setting out, those evenings gleaming with rivers and lakes below us, still holding the last light. ... Those fields of daisies we landed on, and dusty fields and desert stretches. Memories of many skies and earths beneath us - many days, many nights of stars.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

The poor, by thinking unceasingly of money, reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession, thereby sinking as low as the rich.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

We know enough of our own history by now to be aware that people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love. To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

The formula 'two plus two equals five' is not without its attractions.

0
0
Source
source
Part 1, Chapter 9 (tr. ?)
7 months 1 week 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
4 months 6 days ago

But the philosophy that killed off truth proclaims unlimited tolerance for the "language games" (i.e., opinions, beliefs and doctrines) that people find useful. The outcome is expressed in the words of Karl Kraus: "Alles ist wahr und auch das Gegenteil." "Everything is true, and also its opposite."

0
0
Source
source
"Our Merry Apocalypse" (1997), as quoted in Is God Happy? Selected Essays (Basic Books, 2013), p. 318
7 months 2 weeks ago

Thus there is nothing waste, nothing dead in the universe; no chaos, no confusions, save in appearence. We might compare this to the appearence of a pond in the distance, where we can see the confused movement and swarming of the fish, without distinguishing the fish themselves.Thus we are that each living body has a dominante entelechy, which in case of an animal is the soul, but the members of this living body are full of other living things, plants and animals, of which each has in turn ita dominant entelechy or soul.

0
0
Source
source
Monadology (69-70).
7 months 2 weeks ago

If you are describing any occurrence... make two or more distinct reports at different times... We discriminate at first only a few features, and we need to reconsider our experience from many points of view and in various moods in order to perceive the whole.

0
0
Source
source
March 24, 1857
1 month 3 weeks ago

I love Emil, but I can't get behind this relativism. Disapproval of somebody's haircut or clothing is not a reason to kill them. Severity is everything....

0
0
3 months 4 weeks ago

So near at hand is freedom, and is anyone still a slave?

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

Whenever a system of communication evolves, there is always the danger that some will exploit the system for their own ends.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 4. The Gene machine
7 months 4 weeks ago

I too have sworn heedlessly and all the time, I have had this most repulsive and death-dealing habit. I'm telling your graces; from the moment I began to serve God, and saw what evil there is in forswearing oneself, I grew very afraid indeed, and out of fear I applied the brakes to this old, old, habit.

0
0
Source
source
180:10:1
8 months 3 days ago

War is the father and king of all: some he has made gods, and some men; some slaves and some free.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

Attempt nothing above thy strength!

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia