Skip to main content
2 weeks 4 days ago

If an event really happened which was not a part of the uniformity of nature, it would have two properties: no evidence could give the right to believe it to any except those whose actual experience it was; and no inference worthy of belief could be founded upon it at all. Are we then bound to believe that nature is absolutely and universally uniform? Certainly not; we have no right to believe anything of this kind. The rule only tells us that in forming beliefs which go beyond our experience, we may make the assumption that nature is practically uniform so far as we are concerned. Within the range of human action and verification, we may form, by help of this assumption, actual beliefs; beyond it, only those hypotheses which serve for the more accurate asking of questions.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

Economy is a distributive virtue, and consists not in saving but selection. Parsimony requires no providence, no sagacity, no powers of combination, no comparison, no judgment.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

Animal Liberation is Human Liberation too.

0
0
Source
source
Preface
3 months 2 weeks ago

You have dreamed of setting the world ablaze, and you have not even managed to communicate your fire to words, to light up a single one!

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

If one thing goes without saying, almost anything can.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

Make your educational laws strict and your criminal ones can be gentle; but if you leave youth its liberty you will have to dig dungeons for ages.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

Plato and his objectivistic successors ... preserved the awareness of differences that pragmatism has been invented to deny-the difference between thinking in the laboratory and in philosophy, and consequently the difference between the destination of mankind and its present course.

0
0
Source
source
p. 53.
4 months 2 weeks ago

Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's belief that they "own" their bodies - those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another!

0
0
Source
source
Letter XXI
5 months 1 week ago

Hence, as Narcissus, by catching at the shadow, plunged himself in the stream and disappeared, so he who is captivated by beautiful bodies, and does not depart from their embrace, is precipitated, not with his body, but with his soul, into a darkness profound and repugnant to intellect (the higher soul), through which, remaining blind both here and in Hades, he associates with shadows.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

Heroism feels and never reasons and therefore is always right.

0
0
Source
source
Heroism
4 months 1 week ago

Philosophy is the childhood of the intellect, and a culture that tries to skip it will never grow up.

0
0
Source
source
p. 12.
2 months 2 weeks ago

No feats of heroism are needed to achieve the greatest and most important changes in the existence of humanity; neither the armament of millions of soldiers, nor the construction of new roads and machines, nor the arrangement of exhibitions, nor the organization of workmen's unions, nor revolutions, nor barricades, nor explosions, nor the perfection of aerial navigation; but a change in public opinion. And to accomplish this change no exertions of the mind are needed, nor the refutation of anything in existence, nor the invention of any extraordinary novelty; it is only needful that we should not succumb to the erroneous, already defunct, public opinion of the past, which governments have induced artificially; it is only needful that each individual should say what he really feels or thinks, or at least that he should not say what he does not think.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 17
5 months 2 weeks ago

It is true that in the confessional it is the pastor who preaches; but the true preacher is still the secret-sharer in your inner being. The pastor can preach only in vague generalities; the preacher in your inner being is just the opposite; he speaks simply and solely about you, to you, and within you.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

We are speaking on this occasion, not as members of this or that nation, continent, or creed, but as human beings, members of the species Man, whose continued existence is in doubt.

0
0
1 month 3 days ago

A great pilot can sail even when his canvas is rent.

0
0
Source
source
Line 3.
3 months 2 weeks ago

Knowledge is the plague of life, and consciousness, an open wound in its heart.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

There is one mistake we got to avoid, and that is the mistake of supposing that if you simulate it, you duplicate it. This is a deep mistake embedded in our popular culture - that simulation is equivalent to duplication, but of course it isn't. A perfect simulation of the brain - say, on a computer - would no longer thereby be conscious than a perfect simulation of a rainstorm on a weather-predicting computer will leave us all wet.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

Man is a Sun; his Senses are the Planets.

0
0
1 week 1 day ago

The really good music, whether of the East or of the West, cannot be analyzed.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

God may not play dice but he enjoys a good round of Trivial Pursuit every now and again.

0
0
Source
source
"God"
5 months 2 weeks ago

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

What has philosophy got to do with measuring anything? It's the mathematicians you have to trust, and they measure the skies like we measure a field.

0
0
Source
source
Matteo in Concerning the New Star
2 months 1 day ago

As human beings, we are endowed with this freedom of choice, and we cannot shuffle off our responsibility upon the shoulders of God or nature. We must shoulder it ourselves. It is up to us.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 3: Does History Repeat Itself?
2 months 2 weeks ago

Confession of our faults is the next thing to innocence.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 1060
1 month 2 weeks ago

Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. IV: "The Line of Least Resistance", p. 51
3 months 1 week ago

Dialectical thought understands the critical tension between "is" and "ought" first as an ontological condition, pertaining to the structure of Being itself. However, the recognition of this state of Being - its theory - intends from the beginning a concrete practice. Seen in the light of a truth which appears in them falsified or denied, the given facts themselves appear false and negative.

0
0
Source
source
p. 133
4 months 3 weeks ago

We were halves throughout, and to that degree that, methinks, by outliving him I defraud him of his part.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 27. Of Friendship, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Hazlitt, 1842
2 months 3 weeks ago

I will argue that in the literal sense the programmed computer understands what the car and the adding machine understand, namely, exactly nothing.

0
0
1 week 1 day ago

I have only two rules which I regard as principles of conduct. The first is: Have no rules. The second is: Be independent of the opinion of others.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

A life of action, if it is to be useful, must be a life of compromise. But speculation admits of no compromise. A public-man is often under the necessity of consenting to measures which he dislikes, lest he should endanger the success of measures which he thinks of vital importance.

0
0
Source
source
War of the Succession in Spain', The Edinburgh Review (January 1833), quoted in T. B. Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to The Edinburgh Review, Vol. II (1843), p. 91
3 months 1 day ago

Faculty X is simply that latent power in human beings possess to reach beyond the present. After all, we know perfectly well that the past is as real as the present, and that New York and Singapore and Lhasa and Stepney Green are all as real as the place I happen to be in at the moment. Yet my senses do not agree. They assure me that this place, here and now, is far more real than any other place or any other time. Only in certain moments of great inner intensity do I know this to be a lie. Faculty X is a sense of reality, the reality of other places and other times, and it is the possession of it - fragmentary and uncertain though it is - that distinguishes man from all other animals.

0
0
Source
source
p. 59
3 weeks 5 days ago

Danger reawakens the spirit.

0
0
Source
source
p. 66
3 months 2 weeks ago

There never comes a point where a theory can be said to be true. The most that one can claim for any theory is that it has shared the successes of all its rivals and that it has passed at least one test which they have failed.

0
0
Source
source
Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (1982) p. 133.
4 months 1 week ago

The chief function of the disciplinary power is to 'train', rather than to select and to levy; or, no doubt, to train in order to levy and select all the more. It does not link forces together in order to reduce them; it seeks to bind them together in such a way as to multiply and use them.

0
0
Source
source
Part Three, The Means of Correct Training
4 months 2 weeks ago

The great writers to whom the world owes what religious liberty it possesses, have mostly asserted freedom of conscience as an indefeasible right, and denied absolutely that a human being is accountable to others for his religious belief.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1: Introductory
5 months 1 week ago

The superior man is satisfied and composed; the mean man is always full of distress. The virtuous is frank and open; the non-virtuous is secretive and worrying.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 3, P. 57
2 months 2 weeks ago

I had wished to visit a slaughter-house, in order to see with my own eyes the reality of the question raised when vegetarianism is discussed. But at first I felt ashamed to do so, as one is always ashamed of going to look at suffering which one knows is about to take place, but which one cannot avert; and so I kept putting off my visit. But a little while ago I met on the road a butcher ... He is not yet an experienced butcher, and his duty is to stab with a knife. I asked him whether he did not feel sorry for the animals that he killed. He gave me the usual answer: 'Why should I feel sorry? It is necessary.' But when I told him that eating flesh is not necessary, but is only a luxury, he agreed; and then he admitted that he was sorry for the animals.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. IX
2 months 2 weeks ago

By doing nothing men learn to do ill.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 318 Compare Ecclesiasticus 33:27 (KJV): "idleness teacheth much evil".
4 months ago

No evil is honorable; but death is honorable; therefore death is not evil.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Epistles No. 82, by Seneca the Younger
4 months 2 weeks ago

Luxury is the opposite of the naturally necessary.

0
0
Source
source
Notebook V, The Chapter on Capital, p. 448.
5 months 2 days ago

Cease therefore to be dismayed by the mere novelty and so to reject reason from your mind with loathing: weigh the questions rather with keen judgment and if they seem to you to be true, surrender, or if the thing is false, gird yourself to the encounter.

0
0
Source
source
Book II, lines 1040-1043 (tr. Munro)
3 months 2 weeks ago

Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.

0
0
Source
source
The Transcendent Function ("Die Transzendente Funktion") (1916) Volume 8: Structure & Dynamics of the Psyche, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung
4 months 1 week ago

To have a great man for an intimate friend seems pleasant to those who have never tried it; those who have, fear it.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, epistle xviii, line 86
4 months 2 weeks ago

It is arrogance in us to call frankness, fairness and chivalry "masculine" when we see them in a woman; it is arrogance in them, to describe a man's sensitiveness or tact or tenderness as "feminine".

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

Long before physics or psychology were born, pain disintegrated matter, and affliction the soul.

0
0

Perhaps, if prematurely we dismiss ourselves from this world, all may even have to be suffered through again - the premature birth may not contribute to the production of another being, which must be begun again from the beginning.

0
0
2 weeks 4 days 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

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia