Skip to main content
1 month 2 weeks ago

Navigation brought man face to face with the uncertainty of destiny, where each is left to himself and every departure might always be the last. The madman on his crazy boat sets sail for the other world, and it is from the other world that he comes when he disembarks. This enforced navigation is both rigorous division and absolute Passage, serving to underline in real and imaginary terms the liminal situation of the mad in medieval society. It was a highly symbolic role, made clear by the mental geography involved, where the madman was confined at the gates of the cities. His exclusion was his confinement, and if he had no prison other than the threshold itself he was still detained at this place of passage. In a highly symbolic position he is placed on the inside of the outside, or vice versa. A posture that is still his today, if we admit that what was once the visible fortress of social order is now the castle of our own consciousness.

0
0
Source
source
Part One: 1. Stultifera Navis
1 month 3 weeks ago

Where is the prince sufficiently educated to know that for seventeen hundred years the Christian sect has done nothing but harm?

0
0
Source
source
Letters of Voltaire and Frederick the Great (New York: Brentano's, 1927), transl. Richard Aldington, letter 160 from Voltaire to Frederick II of Prussia, 6 April 1767
1 month 3 weeks ago

The public use of a man's reason must be free at all times, and this alone can bring enlightenment among men...

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

I do not overlook the fact that there are irrationalists who love mankind, and that not all forms of irrationalism engender criminality. But I hold that he who teaches that not reason but love should rule opens up the way for those who rule by hate. (Socrates, I believe, saw something of this when he suggested that mistrust or hatred of argument is related to mistrust or hatred of man).

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 2, Ch. 24 "Oracular Philosophy and the Revolt against Reason"
1 month 2 weeks ago

What is commonly called friendship even is only a little more honor among rogues.

0
0
Source
source
Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 95
1 month 2 weeks ago

"Everything is both a trap and a display; the secret reality of the object is what the Other makes of it."

0
0
2 weeks 5 days ago

Spirit: Do not be deceived by sophists and half philosophers; things do not appear to thee by means of any representatives. Of the thing that exists, and that can exist, thou art conscious immediately ; thou, thyself, art that of which thou art conscious. By a fundamental law of thy being thou art thus presented to thyself, and thrown out of thyself.

0
0
Source
source
Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p. 53
1 month 2 weeks ago

The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the social worker-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behavior, his aptitudes, his achievements.

0
0
1 week 4 days ago

This they do in the service of an imaginary science; and, like the astrologers and soothsayers whom they have succeeded, cast up their eyes to the clouds, and speak in immense, unsubstantiated images and similes, in deeply misleading metaphors and allegories, and make use of hypnotic formulae with little regard for experience, or rational argument, or tests of proven reliability. Thereby they throw dust in their own eyes as well as in ours, obstruct our vision of the real world, and further confuse an already sufficiently bewildered public about the relations of morality to politics, and about the nature and methods of the natural sciences and historical studies alike.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

"Young men," said Cæsar, "hear an old man to whom old men hearkened when he was young."

0
0
Source
source
Cæsar Augustus
1 month 2 weeks ago

We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He has disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ's death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and, if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself.

0
0
Source
source
Book II, Chapter 4, "The Perfect Penitent"
2 weeks 5 days ago

There is nothing whatever in Existence but immediate and living Thought:-Thought, I say, but by no means a thinking substance, a dead body in which thought inheres,-with which no-thought indeed a no-thinker is full surely at hand:-Thought, I say, and also the real Life of this Thought, which at bot tom is the Divine Life; both of which-Thought and , this its real Life-are molten together into one inward organic Unity; like as, outwardly, they are one simple, identical, eternal, and unchangeable Unity.

0
0
Source
source
P. 56
1 month 2 weeks ago

Try now to answer my third riddle. By what rule to you tell a copy from an original?'

0
0
Source
source
Pilgrim's Regress 52

To be sure, exchange-value exerts its power in a special way in the realm of cultural goods. For in the world of commodities this realm appears to be exempted from the power of exchange, to be in an immediate relationship with the goods, and it is this appearance in turn which alone gives cultural goods their exchange-value. But they nevertheless simultaneously fall completely into the world of commodities, are produced for the market, and are aimed at the market.

0
0
Source
source
p. 279
2 months 2 days ago

In order to enter into a real knowledge of your condition, consider it in this image: A man was cast by a tempest upon an unknown island, the inhabitants of which were in trouble to find their king, who was lost; and having a strong resemblance both in form and face to this king, he was taken for him, and acknowledged in this capacity by all the people.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.

0
0
Source
source
Author's prefaces to the First Edition.

On the stage on which we are observing it, - Universal History - Spirit displays itself in its most concrete reality.

0
0
3 days ago

Sexual activity is driven by the same aims and motives as reading poetry or listening to music: to escape the limitations imposed by the need for particularity in the consciousness.

0
0
Source
source
p. 75
1 month 1 week ago

As Athenodorus was taking his leave of Cæsar, "Remember," said he, "Cæsar, whenever you are angry, to say or do nothing before you have repeated the four-and-twenty letters to yourself."

0
0
Source
source
Cæsar Augustus
1 month 2 weeks ago

Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.

0
0
Source
source
Education
2 months 2 weeks ago

Necessity makes a joke of civilization.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

In a word, human life is more governed by fortune than by reason; is to be regarded more as a dull pastime than as a serious occupation; and is more influenced by particular humour, than by general principles. Shall we engage ourselves in it with passion and anxiety? It is not worthy of so much concern. Shall we be indifferent about what happens? We lose all the pleasure of the game by our phlegm and carelessness. While we are reasoning concerning life, life is gone; and death, though perhaps they receive him differently, yet treats alike the fool and the philosopher.

0
0
Source
source
Part I, Essay 18: The Sceptic
2 months 2 weeks ago

He is a dreamer of ancient times, or rather, of the myths of what ancient times used to be. Such men are harmless in themselves, but their queer lack of realism makes them fools for others.

1
1
1 month 2 weeks ago

The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion twenty years later.

0
0
Source
source
Culture
2 months 5 days ago

For if a thing is not diminished by being shared with others, it is not rightly owned if it is only owned and not shared.

0
0
Source
source
1:1:1 English Latin Latin: Omnis enim res quae dando non deficit, dum habetur et non datur, nondum habetur quomodo habenda est.
1 month 1 week ago

Almost as soon as I began to study philosophy, I was impressed by the way in which philosophical problems appeared, disappeared, or changed shape, as a result of new assumptions or vocabularies.

0
0
Source
source
Preface
2 months 2 weeks ago

Then we may begin by assuming that there are three classes of men—lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, lovers of gain?

0
0
1 month 1 day ago

Wisdom thoroughly learned, will never be forgotten. Science is got by diligence; but Discretion and Wisdom cometh of GOD.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition.

0
0
Source
source
Déclaration de Voltaire, note to his secretary, Jean-Louis Wagnière, 28 February 1778
1 month 2 weeks ago

The poet is, etymologically, the maker. Like all makers, he requires a stock of raw materials - in his case, experience. Now experience is not a matter of having actually swum the Hellespont, or danced with the dervishes, or slept in a doss-house. It is a matter of sensibility and intuition, of seeing and hearing the significant things, of paying attention at the right moments, of understanding and co-ordinating. Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. It is a gift for dealing with the accidents of existence, not the accidents themselves. By a happy dispensation of nature, the poet generally possesses the gift of experience in conjunction with that of expression. What he says so well is therefore intrinsically of value.

0
0
Source
source
p. 5
1 month 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
2 months 4 days ago

Every habit and faculty is confirmed and strengthened by the corresponding actions, that of walking by walking, that of running by running.

0
0
Source
source
Book II, ch. 18, 1
1 week 3 days ago

Instead of defining the word, let us briefly characterize or describe the phenomenon. Ressentiment is a self-poisoning of the mind which has quite definite causes and consequences. It is a lasting mental attitude, caused by the systematic repression of certain emotions and affects which, as such, are normal components of human nature. Their repression leads to the constant tendency to indulge in certain kinds of value delusions and corresponding value judgments. The emotions and affects primarily concerned are revenge, hatred, malice, envy, the impulse to detract, and spite.

0
0
1 week 3 days ago

Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.

0
0
Source
source
p. 94.
1 month 3 weeks ago

Suicide evokes revulsion with horror, because everything in nature seeks to preserve itself: a damaged tree, a living body, an animal; and in man, then, is freedom, which is the highest degree of life, and constitutes the worth of it, to become now a principium for self-destruction? This is the most horrifying thing imaginable. For anyone who has already got so far as to be master, at any time, over his own life, is also master over the life of anyone else; for him, the door stands open to every crime, and before he can be seized he is ready to spirit himself away out of the world. So suicide evokes horror, in that a man thereby puts himself below the beasts. We regard a suicide as a carcase, whereas we feel pity for one who meets his end through fate.

0
0
Source
source
Part II, p. 146
2 months 2 weeks ago

Those who assert that the mathematical sciences say nothing of the beautiful or the good are in error. For these sciences say and prove a great deal about them; if they do not expressly mention them, but prove attributes which are their results or definitions, it is not true that they tell us nothing about them. The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree.

0
0
2 weeks 6 days ago

Well is it known that ambition can creep as well as soar.

0
0
Source
source
No. 3
1 week 5 days ago

Non-operational ideas are non-behavioral and subversive. The movement of thought is stopped at barriers which appear as the limits of Reason itself.

0
0
Source
source
p. 14
1 month 2 weeks ago

Discourses are tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force relations; there can exist different and even contradictory discourses within the same strategy; they can, on the contrary, circulate without changing their form from one strategy to another, opposing strategy.

0
0
Source
source
Vol I, pp. 101-102
1 month 1 week ago

He used to reason as follows: 'Everything belongs to the gods; the wise are friends of the gods; friends hold all things in common; ergo, everything belongs to the wise.'

0
0
Source
source
Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 37, as reported in Diogenes the Cynic: Sayings and Anecdotes as translated by Robin Hard (Oxford: 2012), p. 13
1 month 3 weeks ago

T is one and the same Nature that rolls on her course, and whoever has sufficiently considered the present state of things might certainly conclude as to both the future and the past.

0
0
Source
source
Book II, Ch. 12. Apology for Raimond Sebond
2 weeks 2 days ago

Consciousness must essentially cover an interval of time; for if it did not, we could gain no knowledge of time, and not merely no veracious cognition of it, but no conception whatever. We are therefore, forced to say that we are immediately conscious through an infinitesimal interval of time.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 2, Ch. 1, § 1
1 month 2 weeks ago

I am ashamed of belonging to the species Homo Sapiens...You & I may be thankful to have lived in happier times - you more than I, because you have no children.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Lucy Donnelly, 6/23/1946
1 month 2 weeks ago

Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.

0
0
Source
source
Act 11, sc. 2
1 month 2 weeks ago

It is obvious that "obscenity" is not a term capable of exact legal definition; in the practice of the Courts, it means "anything that shocks the magistrate."

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 10: Recrudescence of Puritanism
2 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
2 weeks 2 days ago

Understand me well. My appeal is to observation - observation that each of you must make for himself.

0
0
Source
source
Lecture II : The Universal Categories, § 2 : Struggle, CP 5.53
1 month 3 weeks ago

Stop Traveller! Near this place lieth John Locke. If you ask what kind of a man he was, he answers that he lived content with his own small fortune. Bred a scholar he made his learning subservient only to the cause of truth. This thou will learn from his writings, which will show thee everything else concerning him, with greater truth, than the suspect praises of an epitaph. His virtues, indeed, if he had any, were too little for him to propose as matter of praise to himself, or as an example to thee. Let his vices be buried together. As to an example of manners, if you seek that, you have it in the Gospels; of vices, to wish you have one nowhere; if mortality, certainly, (and may it profit thee), thou hast one here and everywhere.

0
0
Source
source
Epitaph, as translated from the Latin.
2 months 1 week ago

It is impossible for someone to dispel his fears about the most important matters if he doesn't know the nature of the universe but still gives some credence to myths. So without the study of nature there is no enjoyment of pure pleasure.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia