Skip to main content
3 months 3 weeks ago

The abolition of the evil is not impossible; it ought never therefore to be despaired of. Every plan should be adopted, every experiment tried, which may do something towards the ultimate object.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

I'm not changing anything for somebody that isn't an ACTUAL good person....who is arguing from correspondence truth and a context of observable reality at a minimum.....

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

Again and again our foe, religion, has given birth to deeds sinful and unholy.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, lines 82-83 (tr. C. Bailey)
3 months 2 weeks ago

Look to the essence of a thing, whether it be a point of doctrine, of practice, or of interpretation.

0
0
Source
source
VIII, 22
4 months 3 days ago

It is especially important for Westerners to understand that high lamas, Zen masters, and Hindu gurus in the discipline of yoga are human beings, not supermen. We must not put them, as we have put Jesus Christ, on pedestals of reverence so high that we automatically exclude ourselves from their states of consciousness.

0
0
Source
source
Foreward to The Secret Oral Teachings in the Tibetan Buddhist Sects (1964)], by Alexandra David Neel
6 months 4 days ago

The family uses people, not for what they are, nor for what they are intended to be, but for what it wants them for - its own uses. It thinks of them not as what God has made them, but as the something which it has arranged that they shall be.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

The idea does not belong to the soul; it is the soul that belongs to the idea.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. I, par. 216
6 months 2 weeks ago

The mind that puts everything in question, reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?

0
0
8 months 3 weeks ago

Spontaneous love can reach the point of despair, shows that it is in despair, that even when it is happy it loves with the power of despair.

0
0
8 months 2 weeks ago

All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly. It is ready to pay up. In other words, there may be responsible persons, but there are no guilty ones, in its opinion. At very most, such a mind will consent to use past experience as a basis for its future actions.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

Astronomers... define duration in the following way: time... so defined that Newton's law and that of vis viva [or of the conservation of energy] may be verified. Newton's law is an experimental truth... only approximate... We still have only a definition by approximation.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

The fundamental political question is why do people obey a government. The answer is that they tend to enslave themselves, to let themselves be governed by tyrants. Freedom from servitude comes not from violent action, but from the refusal to serve. Tyrants fall when the people withdraw their support.

0
0
Source
source
This quote is a paraphrase of the contents of the first chapter of Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. The quote appears in an edition titled Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude edited by Murray Rothbard and Harry Kurz (1975), p. 39
8 months ago

All seed except Mary was vitiated [by original sin].

0
0
Source
source
Weimar edition of Martin Luther's Works, English translation edited by J. Pelikan [Concordia: St. Louis], Vol. 11, WA, 39, II:107
7 months 3 weeks ago

To be ignorant of the past is to remain a child.

0
0
Source
source
Cicero
5 months 2 weeks ago

My life was not useless; I gave important truths to the world, and it was only for want of understanding that they were disregarded. I have been ahead of my time.

0
0
Source
source
Deathbed statement (November 1858), in response to a church minister who asked if he regretted wasting his life on fruitless projects; as quoted in Harold Hill : A People's History
3 months 2 weeks ago

The Christian Scholastics... might have shown that God Himself said that He had "imprinted an active principle in the elements of matter (Gen. i; Is. lxvi).

0
0
Source
source
Ch. V Concerning the Moving Force of Matter
4 months 1 week ago

We give voice to our trivial cares, but suffer enormities in silence.

0
0
Source
source
line 607; (Phaedra)
7 months 3 weeks ago

Friendship, I have said, is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself..."

0
0
5 months 5 days ago

The human race's prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenceless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenceless against ourselves.

0
0
Source
source
"Man and Hunger: The Perspectives of History", Speech to the World Food Congress (4 June 1963)
7 months 3 weeks ago

Of course I base my characters partly on the people I know-one can't escape it-but fictional characters are oversimplified; they're much less complex than the people one knows.

0
0
Source
source
Interview, The Paris Review, 1960
6 months 3 weeks ago

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 3, Ch. IX, State-Tamperings with Money and Banks
6 months 6 days ago

There continue to be complex debates about what Nietzsche understood truth to be. Quite certainly, he did not think, in pragmatist spirit, that beliefs are true if they serve our interests or welfare: we have just seen some of his repeated denials of this idea. The more recently fashionable view is that he was the first of the deniers, thinking that there is no such thing as truth, or that truth is what anyone thinks it is, or that it is a boring category that we can do without. This is also wrong, and more deeply so. Nietzsche did not think that the ideal of truthfulness went into retirement when its metaphysical origins were discovered, and he did not suppose, either, that truthfulness could be detached from a concern for the truth. Truthfulness as an ideal retains its power, and so far from his seeing truth as dispensable or malleable, his main question is how it can be made bearable.

0
0
Source
source
p. 16
4 months 1 week ago

It is no longer the moral, religious, spiritual condition of the people that is our concern, but their physical, practical, economical condition, as regulated by public laws.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

Self-reliance, the height and perfection of man, is reliance on God.

0
0
Source
source
The Fugitive Slave Law, a lecture in NYC, March 7, 1854
8 months 1 week ago

It would be better if they [rulers] compelled the Jews to work for their living, as they do in parts of Italy, than that, living without occupation, they can grow rich only by usury .

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

The moment is ripe: leave the heart and the mind behind you, go forward, take the third step. Free yourself from the simple complacency of the mind that thinks to put all things in order and hopes to subdue phenomena. Free yourself from the terror of the heart that seeks and hopes to find the essence of things. Conquer the last, the greatest temptation of all: Hope. This is the third duty.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

To discover the various use of things is the work of history.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. I, Ch. 1, Section 1, pg. 42.
4 months 3 days ago

I am now even more persuaded of the urgent need to study why Socrates was accused. The dislike of philosophy is perennial, and the seeds of the condemnation of Socrates are present at all times, not in the bosoms of pleasure-seekers, who don't give a damn, but in those of high-minded and idealistic persons who do not want to submit their aspirations to examination.

0
0
Source
source
Western Civ, p. 19.
5 months 2 weeks ago

The most human thing about us is our technology.

0
0
Source
source
Man and the future of organizations, Volume 5, School of Business Administration, Georgia State University, 1974, p. 19
4 months 2 weeks ago

News and truth are not the same thing and must be clearly distinguished. The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them into relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act. Only at those points, where social conditions take recognizable and measurable shape, do the body of truth and the body of news coincide.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. XXIV: "News, Truth, and a Conclusion", p. 358 The clause in bold is sometimes quoted on its own in the form, "The news and the truth are not the same thing."
7 months 3 weeks ago

Diversity makes critical argument fruitful. ...[P]artners in an argument must share ...the wish to know, and the readiness to learn from the other ...by severely criticizing his views... and hearing... [the] reply. ...the so-called method of science consists in this kind of criticism.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

If someone incessantly drops the word "life," you know he's a sick man.

0
0
8 months 3 weeks ago

Knowledge can in part be set aside, and one can then go further in order to collect new; the natural scientist can set aside insects and flowers and then go further, but if the existing person sets aside the decision in existence, it is eo ipso lost, and he is changed.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

Karsky: I met your father last week. Are you still interested in hearing how he is doing?

Hugo: No. 

Karsky: It is very probable that you will be responsible for his death.

Hugo: It is virtually certain that he is responsible for my life. We are even.

0
0
Source
source
Act 4, sc. 4
4 months 1 week ago

Every love to which there clings but the smallest speck of obligation is an unselfish love, and, so far as this speck reaches, a possessedness. He who believes that he owes the object of his love anything loves romantically or religiously.

0
0
Source
source
Cambridge 1995, p. 260
7 months 3 weeks ago

We are in hell and I will have my turn!

0
0
Source
source
Inès warns Garcin and Estelle not to make love in her presence, Act 1, sc. 5
7 months 3 weeks ago

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 2: 'Useless' Knowledge
5 months 1 week ago

So far from the posterior lobe, the posterior cornu, and the hippocampus minor, being structures peculiar to and characteristic of man, as they have been over and over again asserted to be, even after the publication of the clearest demonstration of the reverse, it is precisely these structures which are the most marked cerebral characters common to man with the apes. They are among the most distinctly Simian peculiarities which the human organism exhibits.

0
0
Source
source
Ch.2, p. 119
4 months 1 week ago

Everything of this sort is not anger, but the semblance of anger, like that of boys who want to beat the ground when they have fallen upon it, and who often do not even know why they are angry, but are merely angry without any reason or having received any injury, yet not without some semblance of injury received, or without some wish to exact a penalty for it.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. This famous statement has produced many paraphrases and variants: Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not remember their past are condemned to repeat their mistakes. Those who do not read history are doomed to repeat it. Those who fail to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors are destined to repeat them. Those who do not know history's mistakes are doomed to repeat them.

0
0
Source
source
There is a similar quote by Edmund Burke (in Revolution in France) that often leads to misattribution: "People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors."
8 months 2 weeks ago

Parmenides: I was pleased with you, Socrates, because you would not discuss the doubtful question in terms of visible objects or in relation to them, but only with reference to what we conceive most entirely by the intellect and may call ideas… But if you wish to get better training, you must do something more than that; you must consider not only what happens if a particular hypothesis is true, but also what happens if it is not true.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

First of all, no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status; nor does he know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence and strength, and the like. Nor, again, does anyone know his conception of the good, the particulars of his rational plan of life, or even the special features of psychology such as his aversion to risk or liability to optimism or pessimism. More than this, I assume that the parties do not know the particular circumstances of their own society. That is, they do not know its particular economic or political situation, or the level of civilization and culture it has been able to achieve. The persons in the original position have no information as to which generation they belong.

0
0
Source
source
p. 117
7 months 1 week ago

Perdiccas threatened to put him to death unless he came to him, "That's nothing wonderful," Diogenes said, "for a beetle or a tarantula would do the same."

0
0
Source
source
Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 44
7 months 3 weeks ago

The adjective is the enemy of the substantive.

0
0
Source
source
Variants: The adjective is the enemy of the noun. Quote attributed in Arthur Schopenhauer (translated by Mrs Rudolf Dircks), Essays of Schopenhauer (2004), Kessinger Publishing, p. 31
5 months 2 weeks ago

Atheists have the intellectual courage to accept reality for what it is: wonderfully and shockingly explicable. As an atheist, you have the moral courage to live to the full the only life you're ever going to get: to fully inhabit reality, rejoice in it, and do your best finally to leave it better than you found it.

0
0
Source
source
The Intellectual and Moral Courage of Atheism
4 months 1 week ago

But no wall can be erected against Fortune which she cannot take by storm; let us strengthen our inner defences. If the inner part be safe, man can be attacked, but never captured.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

He who is not satisfied with a little, is satisfied with nothing.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

Paradox of choice, but I think we would all prefer MORE options. At least then it's on us.....

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia