Skip to main content
8 months 1 week ago

A sensible human once said, "If people knew how much ill-feeling unselfishness occasions, it would not be so often recommended from the pulpit"; and again, "She's the sort of woman who lives for others-you can always tell the others by their hunted expression."

0
0
Source
source
Letter XXVI
6 months 6 days ago

Every technology contrived and "outered" by man has the power to numb human awareness during the period of its first interiorization.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 174)
8 months 2 weeks ago

A person must take care to exercise moderate discipline over the body and subject it to the Spirit by means of fasting, vigils, and labor. The goal is to have the body obey and conform - and not hinder - the inner person and faith. Unless it is held in check, we know it is the nature of the body to undermine faith and the inner person.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 71-72
6 months 4 weeks ago

If by enlightenment and intellectual progress we mean the freeing of man from superstitious belief in evil forces, in demons and fairies, in blind fate-in short, emancipation of fear-then denunciation of what is currently called reason is the greatest service reason can render.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

Whether we take these characters then, or such minor ones as those which are derivable from the proportional length of the spines in the cervical vertebrae, and the like, there is no doubt whatsoever as to the marked difference between Man and the Gorilla; but there is as little, that equally marked differences, of the very same order, obtain between the Gorilla and the lower apes.

0
0
Source
source
Ch.2, p. 92
8 months 2 weeks ago

Nothing prints more lively in our minds than something we wish to forget.

0
0
Source
source
Book II, Ch. 12
7 months 1 week ago

Throughout all organic nature there is at work a modifying influence of the kind... as the cause, these specific differences: an influence which, though slow in its action, does, in time, if the circumstances demand it, produce marked changes-an influence, which to all appearance, would produce in the millions of years, and under the great varieties of condition which geological records imply, any amount of change.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

Only that position can impart dignity in which we do not appear as servile tools but rather create independently within our circle.

0
0
Source
source
Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, L. Easton, trans. (1967), p. 38
3 months 4 weeks ago

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.

0
0
Source
source
Quoted in The Ultimate Quotable Einstein by Alice Calaprice (2010), p. 230
4 months 2 weeks ago

A very weighty argument is this - namely, that neither does the light which descends from thence, chiefly upon the world, mix itself with anything, nor admit of dirtiness or pollution, but remains entirely, and in all things that are, free from defilement, admixture, and suffering. Besides, we must pay attention to the other kinds of phenomena, both to the Intelligible, and yet more to the Sensible - whatever are connected with matter, or will manifest themselves in relation to our subject.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

It was by the sober sense of our citizens that we were safely and steadily conducted from monarchy to republicanism, and it is by the same agency alone we can be kept from falling back.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Arthur Campbell
6 months 2 weeks ago

Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.

0
0
Source
source
C 33
4 months 1 week ago

The monopoly of a single bank is certainly an evil. The multiplication of them was intended to cure it; but it multiplied an influence of the same character with the first, and completed the supplanting the precious metals by a paper circulation. Between such parties the less we meddle the better.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Albert Gallatin, 1802. ME 10:323
4 months 2 weeks ago

The whole history of religion is a history of the failure of preaching. Preaching is moral violence.

0
0
5 months 3 days ago

The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.

0
0
Source
source
Loose paraphrase of Salviati on Day 3
6 months 5 days ago

I can't be sure God does not exist... On a scale of seven, where one means I know he exists, and seven I know he doesn't, I call myself a six... That doesn't mean I'm absolutely confident, that I absolutely know, because I don't.

0
0
Source
source
Dawkins on The Telegraph, 2012-02-24.
7 months 1 week ago

General ideas are no proof of the strength, but rather of the insufficiency of the human intellect.

0
0
Source
source
Book One, Chapter III.
6 months 2 weeks ago

What concerns me alone I only think, what concerns my friends I tell them, what can be of interest to only a limited public I write, and what the world ought to know is printed...

0
0
Source
source
B 52
1 month 3 weeks ago

Eh...you can know....becoming less and less of a fan of his. Some of these writers create existential problems where resolution is possible.

0
0
9 months 5 days ago

There lay certitude; there, in the daily round. All the rest hung on mere threads and trivial contingencies; you couldn't waste your time on it. The thing was to do your job as it should be done.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

You can't worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it's hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you've got to die to every other moment.

0
0
Source
source
John Rivers in The Genius and the Goddess, 1955
4 months 4 days ago

Shamed, dishonored, wading in blood and dripping with filth, thus capitalist society stands. Not as we usually see it, playing the roles of peace and righteousness, of order, of philosophy, of ethics - as a roaring beast, as an orgy of anarchy, as a pestilential breath, devastating culture and humanity - so it appears in all its hideous nakedness.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks (1970), trns: Mary-Alice Waters
7 months 5 days ago

I seem to myself, among civilised men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers.

0
0
9 months 1 week ago
One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear.
0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

When I was a child, the institution of war, which, by then, had been in existence for perhaps about five thousand years, was still being taken for granted by most people in the World as a normal and acceptable fact of life. One small religious community, the Society of Friends, was at that time singular in condemning war as immoral and in consequently refusing to have any part or lot in war-making.

0
0
Source
source
Experiences (New York: Oxford UP, 1969) pt. 2, sect. 4
8 months 2 weeks ago

There is nothing so easy, so sweet, and so favourable, as the divine law: it calls and invites us to her, guilty and abominable as we are; extends her arms and receives us into her bosom, foul and polluted as we at present are, and are for the future to be. But then, in return, we are to look upon her with a respectful eye; we are to receive this pardon with all gratitude and submission, and for that instant at least, wherein we address ourselves to her, to have the soul sensible of the ills we have committed, and at enmity with those passions that seduced us to offend her.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 56, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Carew Hazlitt, 1877
6 months 6 days ago

Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly.

0
0
Source
source
p.73 of the 1966 Signet paperback edition
6 months 3 weeks ago

If all men, by the act of being born, are destined to suffer violence, that is a truth to which the empire of circumstances closes their minds.

0
0
Source
source
in The Simone Weil Reader, p. 163
8 months 1 week ago

The phenomenon of the will in Epictetus, a different mental ability whose chief characteristic is that it speaks an imperative even when it commands nothing but our ability to think. The goal is to annihilate reality insofar it concerns me.

0
0
Source
source
Hannah Arendt Lecture on Thinking
7 months 1 day ago

Liberal philosophy, at this point, ceases to be empirical and British in order to become German and transcendental. Moral life, it now believes, is not the pursuit of liberty and happiness of all sorts by all sorts of different creatures; it is the development of a single spirit in all life through a series of necessary phases, each higher than the preceding one. No man, accordingly, can really or ultimately desire anything but what the best people desire. This is the principle of the higher snobbery; and in fact, all earnest liberals are higher snobs.

0
0
Source
source
"The Irony of Liberalism"
8 months 3 weeks ago

The source of the errors of these two sects, is in not having known that the state of man at the present time differs from that of his creation; so that the one, remarking some traces of his first greatness and being ignorant of his corruption, has treated nature as sound and without need of redemption, which leads him to the height of pride; whilst the other, feeling the present wretchedness and being ignorant of the original dignity, treats nature as necessarily infirm and irreparable, which precipitates it into despair of arriving at real good, and thence into extreme laxity.

0
0
4 months 5 days ago

Search men's governing principles, and consider the wise, what they shun and what they cleave to.

0
0
Source
source
IV, 38
8 months 1 week ago

If you are tired of the real landscape, look at it in a mirror. By putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves. This book applies the treatment not only to bread or apple but to good and evil, to our endless perils, our anguish, and our joys. By dipping them in myth we see them more clearly.

0
0
4 months 4 days ago

If democracy has become superfluous or annoying to the bourgeoisie, it is on the contrary necessary and indispensable to the working class. It is necessary to the working class because it creates the political forms (autonomous administration, electoral rights, etc.) which will serve the proletariat as fulcrums in its task of transforming bourgeois society. Democracy is indispensable to the working class because only through the exercise of its democratic rights, in the struggle for democracy, can the proletariat become aware of its class interests and its historic task.

0
0
Source
source
Ch.8
9 months 5 days ago

Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter.

0
0
4 months 5 days ago

Why dost thou not pray... to give thee the faculty of not fearing any of the things which thou fearest, or of not desiring any of the things which thou desirest, or not being pained at anything, rather than pray that any of these things should not happen or happen?

0
0
Source
source
IX, 40
6 months 6 days ago

I heard what you were saying. You - you know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.

0
0
Source
source
Cameo appearance as himself in Woody Allen's 1977 film Annie Hall
8 months 1 week ago

I believe Buddhism to be a simplification of Hinduism and Islam to be a simplification of Xianity.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Sheldon Vanauken (14 December 1950), quoted in Sleuthing C. S. Lewis (2001) by Kathryn Ann Lindskoog, p. 393
8 months 3 weeks ago

Violence and injury enclose in their net all that do such things, and generally return upon him who began.

0
0
Source
source
Book V, lines 1152-1153 (tr. Rouse)
6 months 2 weeks ago

We distinguish diagrammatic from sentential paper-and-pencil representations of information by developing alternative models of information-processing systems that are informationally equivalent and that can be characterized as sentential or diagrammatic. Sentential representations are sequential, like the propositions in a text. Diagrammatic representations are indexed by location in a plane. Diagrammatic representations also typically display information that is only implicit in sentential representations and that therefore has to be computed, sometimes at great cost, to make it explicit for use. We then contrast the computational efficiency of these representations for solving several.illustrative problems in mathematics and physics.

0
0
Source
source
p. 65
7 months 2 weeks ago

Times before you, when even the living men were Antiquities; when the living might exceed the dead, and to depart this world, could not be properly said, to go unto the greater number. Dedication

0
0
7 months 6 days ago

Morality must be the heart of our existence, if it is to be what it wants to be for us. ... The highest form of philosophy is ethics. Thus all philosophy begins with "I am." The highest statement of cognition must be an expression of that fact which is the means and ground for all cognition, namely, the goal of the I.

0
0
Source
source
Fichte Studies § 556
4 months 3 weeks ago

A large part of mankind is angry not with the sins, but with the sinners.

0
0
Source
source
De Ira (On Anger): Book 2, cap. 28, line 8
6 months 3 weeks ago

Barbusse has shown us that the Outsider is a man who cannot live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeois, accepting what he sees and touches as reality.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter one, The Country of the Blind
4 months 1 week ago

Where the preamble declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed by inserting "Jesus Christ," so that it would read "A departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion;" the insertion was rejected by the great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohammedan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination.

0
0
Source
source
Referring to the Virginia Act for Religious Freedom, in his Autobiography, 1821
6 months 1 week ago

Saying that what we call our "selves" consist only of our bodies and that reason, soul, and love arise only from the body, is like saying that what we call our body is equivalent to the food that feeds the body. It is true that my body is only made up of digested food and that my body would not exist without food, but my body is not the same as food. Food is what the body needs for life, but it is not the body itself. The same thing is true of my soul. It is true that without my body there would not be that which I call my soul, but my soul is not my body. The soul may need the body, but the body is not the soul.

0
0
Source
source
p. 12

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia