Skip to main content
4 months 1 week ago

Whenever I have read any part of the Vedas, I have felt that some unearthly and unknown light illuminated me. In the great teaching of the Vedas, there is no touch of sectarianism. It is of all ages, climes and nationalities and is the royal road for the attainment of the Great Knowledge. When I am at it, I feel that I am under the spangled heavens of a summer night.

0
0
Source
source
Quoted in Bansi Pandit, The Hindu Mind (B & V Enterprises, 1996) p. 307
2 months 5 days ago

Gravity is not a version of the truth. It is the truth. Anybody who doubts it is invited to jump out of a tenth-floor window.

0
0
Source
source
The Genius of Charles Darwin
2 months 3 weeks ago

I have said that, in a sense, the parasites were a 'shadow' of man's cowardice and passivity. Their strength could increase in an atmosphere of defeat and panic, for it fed on human fear. In that case, the best way to combat them was to change the atmosphere to one of strength and purpose.

0
0
Source
source
p. 188
4 months ago

He who abhors and shuns the light of the Sun, He who refuses to behold with respect the living creation of God, He who leads the good to wickedness, He who makes the meadows waterless and the pastures desolate, He who lets fly his weapon against the innocent, An enemy of my faith, a destroyer of Thy principles is he, O Lord!

0
0
Source
source
Ahunuvaiti Gatha; Yasna 32, 10.
2 weeks 4 days ago

The visible world has, as I have said, subsisted around him from all eternity: and the Light also which surrounds the world has also its place from all eternity, not intermittently, nor in different degrees at different times, but constantly and in an equable manner. But whosoever will attempt to estimate, as far as thought goes, this external Nature, by the measure of Time, he will very easily discover respecting the Sun, Sovereign of all things, of how many blessings he is, from all eternity, the author to the world.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs; and lucky it is if the passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way.

0
0
1 month 5 days ago

We admire people to the extent that we cannot explain what they do, and the word "admire" then means "marvel at."

0
0
Source
source
Beyond Freedom and Dignity
3 months 5 days ago

Sadness makes you God's prisoner.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

In order to seek truth, it is necessary once in the course of our life, to doubt, as far as possible, of all things.

0
0
Source
source
Descartes, René (1644). Principles of Philosophy.
4 months 1 week ago

Man is free at the instant he wants to be.

0
0
Source
source
Source Brutus, act II, scene I, 1730
4 months 1 week ago

The virtues of society are the vices of the saints.

0
0
Source
source
Circles
3 weeks 4 days ago

The state is God, deifies arms and prisons. The worship of the state is the worship of force. There is no more dangerous menace to civilization than a government of incompetent, corrupt, or vile men. The worst evils which mankind ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments. The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter III: Etatism
2 months 5 days ago

Unfortunately, instead of working out that they have probably misunderstood evolution, creationists conclude, instead, that evolution must be false.

0
0
Source
source
Heat the Hornet, a review of Jerry Coyne's book Why Evolution is True

You want praise from people who kick themselves every fifteen minutes, the approval of people who despise themselves. (Is it a sign of self-respect to regret nearly everything you do?)

0
0
Source
source
(Hays translation) VIII, 53
2 months 3 weeks ago

Thinking is an expedition into quietness.

0
0

Riemann has shewn that as there are different kinds of lines and surfaces, so there are different kinds of space of three dimensions; and that we can only find out by experience to which of these kinds the space in which we live belongs. In particular, the axioms of plane geometry are true within the limits of experiment on the surface of a sheet of paper, and yet we know that the sheet is really covered with a number of small ridges and furrows, upon which (the total curvature not being zero) these axioms are not true. Similarly, he says although the axioms of solid geometry are true within the limits of experiment for finite portions of our space, yet we have no reason to conclude that they are true for very small portions; and if any help can be got thereby for the explanation of physical phenomena, we may have reason to conclude that they are not true for very small portions of space.

0
0
Source
source
Abstract
4 months 3 weeks ago

Those who deny the first principle should be flogged or burned until they admit that it is not the same thing to be burned and not burned, or whipped and not whipped.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

To those who inquire as to the purpose of mathematics, the usual answer will be that it facilitates the making of machines, the travelling from place to place, and the victory over foreign nations, whether in war or commerce. ... The reasoning faculty itself is generally conceived, by those who urge its cultivation, as merely a means for the avoidance of pitfalls and a help in the discovery of rules for the guidance of practical life.

0
0

Adorn thyself with simplicity and with indifference towards the things which lie between virtue and vice. Love mankind. Follow God. The poet says that Law rules all. And it is enough to remember that law rules all.

0
0
Source
source
VII, 31
3 months 1 week ago

It is reconciled in policy; and politics ought to be adjusted, not to human reasonings, but to human nature; of which the reason is but a part; and by no means the greatest part.

0
0
Source
source
Observations on a Late Publication on the Present State of the Nation (1769), page 78
2 months 1 week ago

His own character is the arbiter of every one's fortune.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 283
4 months 1 week ago

Our moral virtues benefit mainly other people; intellectual virtues, on the other hand, benefit primarily ourselves; therefore the former make us universally popular, the latter unpopular.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

Myth is depoliticized speech.

0
0
Source
source
p. 145
4 months 1 week ago

Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 5 (p. 42)
3 months 4 weeks ago

And what he fears he cannot make attractive with his touch he abandons.

0
0
Source
source
Line 149 (tr. H. R. Fairclough)

Poetry is the universal art of the spirit which has become free in itself and which is not tied down for its realization to external sensuous material; instead, it launches out exclusively in the inner space and the inner time of ideas and feelings.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in the Introduction to Aesthetics (1842), translated by T. M. Knox, (1979), p. 89
5 months 1 week ago

Everything that depends on the action of nature is by nature as good as it can be, and similarly everything that depends on art or any rational cause, and especially if it depends on the best of all causes. To entrust to chance what is greatest and most noble would be a very defective arrangement.

0
0
2 months 5 days ago

A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted. We need not care whether they could prove the forty-seventh proposition; they do a better thing than that, they practically demonstrate the great Theorem of the Liveableness of Life.

0
0
Source
source
An Apology for Idlers.
3 months 2 weeks ago

This is a work that cannot be completed except by a society of men of letters and skilled workmen, each working separately on his own part, but all bound together solely by their zeal for the best interests of the human race and a feeling of mutual good will.

0
0
Source
source
Article on Encyclopedia, as translated in The Many Faces of Philosophy : Reflections from Plato to Arendt (2001), "Diderot", p. 237
3 weeks 3 days ago

It is indeed foolish to be unhappy now because you may be unhappy at some future time.

0
0
2 months 3 days ago

Women will be no longer made the slaves of, or dependent upon men ... They will be equal in education, rights, privileges and personal liberty.

0
0
Source
source
Sixth Part
4 months ago

I believe that there is a necessary connection in both directions between the physical and the mental, but that it cannot be discovered a priori. Opinion is strongly divided on the credibility of some kind of functionalist reductionism, and I won't go through my reasons for being on the antireductionist side of that debate. Despite significant attempts by a number of philosophers to describe the functional manifestations of conscious mental states, I continue to believe that no purely functionalist characterization of a system entails - simply in virtue of our mental concepts - that the system is conscious.

0
0
Source
source
"Conceiving the Impossible and the Mind-Body Problem," Royal Institute of Philosophy annual lecture, given in London on February 18, 1998, published in Philosophy vol. 73 no. 285, July 1998, pp 337-352, Cambridge University Press, p. 337.
1 week 2 days ago

No one has a natural right to the trade of a money lender, but he who has the money to lend. Let those then among us who have a moneyed capital and who prefer employing it in loans rather than otherwise, set up banks and give cash or national bills for the notes they discount. Perhaps, to encourage them, a larger interest than is legal in the other cases might be allowed them, on the condition of their lending for short periods only.

0
0
Source
source
ME 13:277
4 months 3 weeks ago

We are all sprung from a heavenly seed.

0
0
Source
source
Book II, line 991 (tr. Munro)
2 months 5 days ago

Contrary to earlier prejudices, there is nothing inherently progressive about evolution.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 7 "Constructive Evolution" (p. 178)
4 months 4 days ago

As medium for reaching understanding, speech acts serve: a) to establish and renew interpersonal relations, whereby the speaker takes up a relation to something in the world of legitimate social orders; b) to represent states and events, whereby the speaker takes up a relation to something in the world of existing states of affairs; c) to manifest experiences that is, to represent oneself- whereby the speaker takes up a relation to something in the subjective world to which he has privileged access.

0
0
Source
source
p. 308
2 months 2 days ago

No realistic, sane person goes around Chicago without protection.

0
0
Source
source
Humboldt's Gift (1975), p. 452
4 months 1 week ago

Some men are born committed to action: they do not have a choice, they have been thrown on a path, at the end of that path, an act awaits them, their act.

0
0
Source
source
Act 1
4 months 1 week ago

For man holds his ground only by surpassing himself, in the same sense in which it is said that one ceases to love if one does not love increasingly everyday.

0
0
Source
source
p. 238
4 months 2 weeks ago

It is an unsufferable blasphemy to reject the public ministry or to say that people can become holy without sermons and Church. This involves a destruction of the Church and rebellion against ecclesiastical order; such upheavals must be warded off and punished like all other revolts.

0
0
Source
source
In Luther, Hartmann Grisar, 1915, London, Kegan Paul, Trench, vol. 4, p. 126,
1 month 4 days ago

In morals, truth is but little prized when it is a mere sentiment, and only attains its full value when realized in the world as fact.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 5.
4 months 1 week ago

Money is the password, and all doors, which are closed to the man of lesser means, fly open to those whom Plutus favors. The invention of money, which has no other usefulness (or at least it should not have any) except for the commercial exchange of the products of man's industry, now serves all that is physically good among men. Especially after money was represented by metal, it has produced avarice which, finally, without indulgence, but by its mere possession, and even with the resolution (of the stingy) not to spend it, still contains a power which people believe can sufficiently compensate for the lack of any other power.

0
0
Source
source
Kant, Immanuel (1996), pages 181-182
3 months 2 weeks ago

I can cure the gout or stone in some, sooner than Divinity, Pride, or Avarice in others.

0
0
Source
source
Section 9
2 weeks 6 days ago

It must be obvious... that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

It is impossible to imagine a more dramatic and horrifying combination of scientific triumph with political and moral failure than has been shown to the world in the destruction of Hiroshima. From the scientific point of view, the atomic bomb embodies the results of a combination of genius and patience as remarkable as any in the history of mankind.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

Do not wonder, if the common people speak more truly than those of high rank; for they speak with more safety.

0
0
Source
source
Exempla Antithetorum, IX. Laus, Existimatio (Pro.)

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia