Skip to main content
7 months 3 weeks ago

Nor is there any embarrassment in the fact that we're ridiculous, isn't it true? For it's actually so, we are ridiculous, light-minded, with bad habits, we're bored, we don't know how to look, how to understand, we're all like that, all, you, and I, and they! Now, you're not offended when I tell you to your face that you're ridiculous? And if so, aren't you material? You know, in my opinion it's sometimes even good to be ridiculous, if not better: we can the sooner forgive each other, the sooner humble ourselves; we can't understand everything at once, we can't start right out with perfection! To achieve perfection, one must first begin by not understanding many things! And if we understand too quickly, we may not understand well. This I tell you, you, who have already been able to understand. .. and not understand ... so much. I'm not afraid for you now.

0
0
Source
source
Part 4, Chapter ?
8 months 3 weeks ago

It is an odd circumstance that neither the old nor the new, by itself, is interesting; the absolutely old is insipid; the absolutely new makes no appeal at all. The old in the new is what claims the attention,-the old with a slightly new turn.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter XI: Attention
9 months 3 weeks ago

Take a book, the poorest one written, but read it with the passion that it is the only book you will read-ultimately you will read everything out of it, that is, as much as there was in yourself, and you could never get more out of reading, even if you read the best of books.

0
0
5 months 6 days ago

Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers - such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a façade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.

0
0
Source
source
Open letter to the Fourth Soviet Writers' Congress (16 May 1967) "The Struggle Intensifies," Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record, ed. Leopold Labedz
8 months 1 week ago

Those alone are dear to Divinity who are hostile to injustice.

0
0
Source
source
Pythagorean Ethical Sentences From Stobæus
5 months 2 weeks ago

All work, even cotton spinning, is noble; work is alone noble ... A life of ease is not for any man, nor for any god.

0
0
Source
source
Bk. III, ch. 4.
7 months 3 weeks ago

I have never in my life met a man like him for noble simplicity, and boundless truthfulness. I understood from the way he talked that anyone who chose could deceive him, and that he would forgive anyone afterwards who had deceived him, and that was why I grew to love him.

0
0
Source
source
Part 4, Chapter 8
6 months 3 weeks ago

We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb, because it is through us - through our brains, our symbolic culture and our technology - that the explosion may proceed to the next stage and reverberate through deep space.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 5: The Replication Bomb
6 months 2 weeks 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
7 months 1 week ago

What objection is there in reason to there being no other purpose in the sum of things save only to exist and happen as it does exist and happen? For him who places himself outside of himself, none; but for him who lives and suffers and desires within himself - for him it is a question of life or death.

0
0
9 months 1 week ago

There are some men who expose themselves to damnation so foolishly by avarice, by brutality, by debauches, by violence, by excesses, by blasphemies! ...it is always a great folly for a man to expose himself to damnation... He must despise desire and its kingdom, and aspire to that kingdom of love in which all the subjects breathe nothing but love, and desire nothing but the benefits of love.

0
0
7 months 2 weeks ago

England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humors.

0
0
Source
source
"The British Character"
7 months 2 weeks ago

The Interpretation of the Laws of Nature in a Common-wealth, dependeth not on the books of Moral Philosophy. The Authority of writers, without the Authority of the Commonwealth, maketh not their opinions Law, be they never so true.

0
0
Source
source
The Second Part, Chapter 26, p. 143
4 months 3 weeks ago

I have stated that the constitutions of our several States vary more or less in some particulars. But there are certain principles in which all agree, and which all cherish as vitally essential to the protection of the life, liberty, property, and safety of the citizen:

0
0
8 months 3 weeks ago

Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

To my complete surprise, that exposure to out-of-date scientific theory and practice radically undermined some of my basic conceptions about the nature of science and the reasons for its special success.Those conceptions were ones I had previously drawn partly from scientific training itself and partly from a long-standing avocational interest in the philosophy of science. Somehow, whatever their pedagogic utility and their abstract plausibility, those notions did not at all fit the enterprise that historical study displayed. Yet they were and are fundamental to many discussions of science, and their failures of verisimilitude therefore seemed thoroughly worth pursuing. The result was a drastic shift in my career plans, a shift from physics to history of science and then, gradually, from relatively straightforward historical problems back to the more philosophical concerns that had initially led me to history.

0
0
7 months 2 weeks ago

In the human reality, all existence that spends itself in procuring the prerequisites of existence is thus an "untrue" and unfree existence. Obviously this reflects the not at all ontological condition of a society based on the proposition that freedom is incompatible with the activity of procuring the necessities of life, that this activity is the "natural" function of a specific class, and that cognition of the truth and true existence imply freedom from the entire dimension of such activity. ... Society still is organized in such a way that procuring the necessities of life constitutes the full-time and life-long occupation of specific social classes, which are therefore unfree and prevented from a human existence. In this sense, the classical proposition according to which truth is incompatible with enslavement by socially necessary labor is still valid.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 127-128
4 months 3 weeks ago

The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Éleuthère Irénée du Pont de Nemours
6 months 4 weeks ago

The "hard law of value," the "law set in stone"-when it abandons us, what sadness, what panic! This is why there are still good days left to fascist and authoritarian methods, because they revive something of the violence necessary to life-whether suffered or inflicted. The violence of ritual, the violence of work, the violence of knowledge, the violence of blood, the violence of power and of the political is good! It is clear, luminous, the relations of force, contradictions, exploitation, repression! This is lacking today, and the need for it makes itself felt.

0
0
Source
source
"Value's Last Tango," p. 156
6 months 3 weeks ago

But if you can breed cattle for milk yield, horses for running speed, and dogs for herding skill, why on Earth should it be impossible to breed humans for mathematical, musical or athletic ability? Objections such as "these are not one-dimensional abilities" apply equally to cows, horses and dogs and never stopped anybody in practice. I wonder whether, some 60 years after Hitler's death, we might at least venture to ask what the moral difference is between breeding for musical ability and forcing a child to take music lessons. Or why it is acceptable to train fast runners and high jumpers but not to breed them. I can think of some answers, and they are good ones, which would probably end up persuading me. But hasn't the time come when we should stop being frightened even to put the question? 

0
0
Source
source
From the Afterword, The Herald, Glasgow, Scotland, 20 November 2006
8 months 3 weeks ago

And we feel that the hero has lived all the details of this night like annunciations, promises, or even that he lived only those that were promises, blind and deaf to all that did not herald adventure. We forget that the future was not yet there; the man was walking in the night without forethought, a night which offered him a choice of dull rich prizes, and he did not make his choice.

0
0
Source
source
Diary entry of Saturday noon (10 February?)
5 months 1 week ago

All this talk: the state should do this or that, ultimately means: the police should force consumers to behave otherwise than they would behave spontaneously.

0
0
8 months 4 weeks ago

The means employed by Nature to bring about the development of all the capacities of men is their antagonism in society, so far as this is, in the end, the cause of a lawful order among men.

0
0
Source
source
Fourth Thesis
4 months 3 weeks ago

Politics, like religion, hold up the torches of martyrdom to the reformers of error.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to James Ogilvie
8 months 3 weeks ago

The harm that is done by a religion is of two sorts, the one depending on the kind of belief which it is thought ought to be given to it, and the other upon the particular tenets believed. As regards the kind of belief: it is thought virtuous to have faith-that is to say, to have a conviction which cannot be shaken by contrary evidence. Or, if contrary evidence might induce doubt, it is held that contrary evidence must be suppressed.

0
0
Source
source
preface xxiii
5 months 5 days ago

Einstein's theory of relativity has advanced our ideas of the structure of the cosmos a step further. It is as if a wall which separated us from Truth has collapsed. Wider expanses and greater depths are now exposed to the searching eye of knowledge, regions of which we had not even a presentiment. It has brought us much nearer to grasping the plan that underlies all physical happening.

0
0
Source
source
From the Author's Preface to First Edition
8 months 4 weeks ago

I have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself.

0
0
Source
source
B 158
9 months 1 week ago

Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Spirituality and Liberation: Overcoming the Great Fallacy (1988) by Robert McAfee Brown, p. 136
7 months 3 weeks ago

Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection.

0
0
8 months 3 weeks ago

Nature paints the best part of a picture, carves the best parts of the statue, builds the best part of the house, and speaks the best part of the oration.

0
0
Source
source
Art
2 months ago

When robots can do the work, the people who insist others have to suffer and they themselves are special...they're whole way of life is just going to disappear. What will they do then to make others suffer needlessly?

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

Her reverence for the divine, her generosity, her inability not only to do wrong but even to conceive of doing it. And the simple way she lived-not in the least like the rich.

0
0
Source
source
(Hays translation) I, 3

To him who looks upon the world rationally, the world in its turn presents a rational aspect. The relation is mutual.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

Treasury notes of small as well as high denomination, bottomed on a tax which would redeem them in ten years, would place at our disposal the whole circulating medium of the United States... The public... ought never more to permit its being filched from them by private speculators and disorganizers of the circulation.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to William H. Crawford, 1815. ME 14:242
6 months 3 weeks ago

Older cliches are retrieved both as inherent principles that inform the new ground and new awareness, and as archetypal nostalgia figures with transformed meaning in relation to the new ground.

0
0
Source
source
p. 105
7 months 1 week ago

How are we to adjudicate among rival ontologies? Certainly the answer is not provided by the semantical formula "To be is to be the value of a variable"; this formula serves rather, conversely, in testing the conformity of a given remark or doctrine to a prior ontological standard.

0
0
Source
source
"On What There Is"
9 months 1 week ago

There are hardly any truths upon which we always remain agreed, and still fewer objects of pleasure which we do not change every hour, I do not know whether there is a means of giving fixed rules for adapting discourse to the inconstancy of our caprices.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. VI: "Some Necessary Iconoclasm", p. 168.
8 months 2 weeks ago

In the Greek conception of parrhesia... truth-having is guaranteed by the possession of... moral qualities... required... to know... and... convey such truth...

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

Speak straight and clear! I only hear that manly prayerwhich like a huge fist breaks my head against the stones.

0
0
Source
source
Odysseus, Book VIII, line 530
9 months 3 days ago

Tis the sharpness of our mind that gives the edge to our pains and pleasures.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, Ch. 14
6 months 3 weeks ago

I am a pattern watcher.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 311)
8 months 2 weeks ago

With an ignorant man thou shouldst not become a confederate and associate.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

Words that everyone once used are now obsolete, and so are the men whose names were once on everyone's lips: Camillus, Caeso, Volesus, Dentatus, and to a lesser degree Scipio and Cato, and yes, even Augustus, Hadrian, and Antoninus are less spoken of now than they were in their own days. For all things fade away, become the stuff of legend, and are soon buried in oblivion. Mind you, this is true only for those who blazed once like bright stars in the firmament, but for the rest, as soon as a few clods of earth cover their corpses, they are 'out of sight, out of mind.' In the end, what would you gain from everlasting remembrance? Absolutely nothing. So what is left worth living for? This alone: justice in thought, goodness in action, speech that cannot deceive, and a disposition glad of whatever comes, welcoming it as necessary, as familiar, as flowing from the same source and fountain as yourself.

0
0
Source
source
IV. 33, trans. Scot and David Hicks
5 months 2 weeks ago

Find in any country the Ablest Man that exists there; raise him to the supreme place, and loyally reverence him: you have a perfect government for that country; no ballot-box, parliamentary eloquence, voting, constitution-building, or other machinery whatsoever can improve it a whit.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their life a meaning.

0
0
9 months 4 days ago

The natural philosophy of Democritus and some others, who did not suppose a mind or reason in the frame of things, but attributed the form thereof able to maintain itself to infinite essays or proofs of nature, which they term fortune, seemeth to me... in particularities of physical causes more real and better inquired than that of Aristotle and Plato; whereof both intermingled final causes, the one as a part of theology, and the other as a part of logic, which were the favourite studies respectively of both those persons. Not because those final causes are not true, and worthy to be inquired, being kept within their own province; but because their excursions into the limits of physical causes hath bred a vastness and solitude in that tract.

0
0
Source
source
Book VII, 7
7 months 3 weeks ago

The supervision of the state extends to the lock upon the door, and there begins mine own. The lock is the boundary line between the power of the government and my own private power. It is the intention of locks to make possible self-protection. In my own house my person is sacred and inviolable even to the government. In civil cases government has no right to attack me in my house, but must wait till I am upon public ground.

0
0
Source
source
P. 324

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia