Skip to main content
3 days ago

Reason is immortal, all else mortal.

0
0
1 month 6 days ago

Nothing is ever gotten out of nothing by divine power.

0
0
3 weeks 1 day ago

I shall, without further discussion of the other theories, attempt to contribute something towards the understanding and appreciation of the Utilitarian or Happiness theory, and towards such proof as it is susceptible of. It is evident that this cannot be proof in the ordinary and popular meaning of the term. Questions of ultimate ends are not amenable to direct proof. Whatever can be proved to be good, must be so by being shown to be a means to something admitted to be good without proof.

0
0
3 weeks 1 day ago

Unlimited exploitation of cheap labour-power is the sole foundation of their power to compete.

0
0
2 weeks 3 days ago

The world is the totality of facts, not things.

0
0
3 weeks 1 day ago

We invite this Congress, and through it the scientists of the world and the general public, to subscribe to the following resolution: "In view of the fact that in any future world war nuclear weapons will certainly be employed, and that such weapons threaten the continued existence of mankind, we urge the governments of the world to realize, and to acknowledge publicly, that their purpose cannot be furthered by a world war, and we urge them, consequently, to find peaceful means for the settlement of all matters of dispute between them".

0
0
3 days ago

In this theater of man's life it is reserved only for God and angels to be lookers on.

0
0
3 weeks 2 days ago

Europeans are awakening more and more to a sense that beasts have rights, in proportion as the strange notion is being gradually overcome and outgrown, that the animal kingdom came into existence solely for the benefit and pleasure of man. This view, with the corollary that non-human living creatures are to be regarded merely as things, is at the root of the rough and altogether reckless treatment of them, which obtains in the West.

0
0
1 month 1 day ago

I need not repeat, that the most savage of the savage tribes in the forest, live among each other in amity. Lions show no fierceness to the lion race. The boar does not brandish his deadly tooth against his brother boar. The lynx lives in peace with the lynx. The serpent shews no venom in his intercourse with his fellow serpent; and the loving kindness of wolf to wolf is proverbial.

0
0
3 days ago

He is worst of all, that is malicious against his friends.

0
0
3 weeks 4 days ago

By this means all knowledge degenerates into probability; and this probability is greater or less, according to our experience of the veracity or deceitfulness of our understanding, and according to the simplicity or intricacy of the question.

0
0
1 month 1 day ago

There is a great difference between the Idols of the human mind and the Ideas of the divine. That is to say, between certain empty dogmas, and the true signatures and marks set upon the works of creation as they are found in nature.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

There were many special laws affecting the several kings inscribed about the temples, but the most important was the following: They were not to take up arms against one another, and they were all to come to the rescue if any one in any of their cities attempted to overthrow the royal house; like their ancestors, they were to deliberate in common about war and other matters, giving the supremacy to the descendants of Atlas. And the king was not to have the power of life and death over any of his kinsmen unless he had the assent of the majority of the ten.

0
0
1 month 1 day ago

I feel that the entire spiritual life consists in this: That we gradually turn from those things whose appearance is deceptive to those things that are real.

0
0
3 weeks 1 day ago

If I had been by nature extremely quick of apprehension, or had possessed a very accurate and retentive memory or were of a remarkably active and energetic character, the trial would not be conclusive; but in all these natural gifts I am rather below than above par; what I could do, could assuredly be done by any boy or girl of average capacity and healthy physical constitution: and if I have accomplished anything, I owe it, among other fortunate circumstances, to the fact that through the early training bestowed on me by my father, I started, I may fairly say, with an advantage of a quarter of a century over my contemporaries.

0
0
2 weeks 6 days ago

What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world-and defines himself afterwards. If man as the existentialist see him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing - as he wills to be after that leap towards existence. Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

Law could never, by determining exactly what is noblest and must just for one and all, enjoin upon them that which is best; for the differences of men and of actions and the fact that nothing, I may say, in human life is ever at rest, forbid any science whatsoever to promulgate any simple rule for everything and for all time. So, that which is persistently simple is inapplicable to things which are never simple.

0
0
3 weeks 3 days ago

It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living. Variant translation: It is too difficult to think nobly when one only thinks to get a living.

0
0
3 weeks ago

After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

0
0
1 week 4 days ago

Nothing of the All is either empty or superfluous.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto could not endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire. He dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror.

0
0
3 weeks 1 day ago

For I now saw, or thought I saw, what I had always before received with incredulity-that the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings: as indeed it has, when no other mental habit is cultivated, and the analysing spirit remains without its natural complements and correctives.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of. For the Son of man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them. (KJV) 9:55-56 Rebuking James and John for asking if he would command fire to come down from heaven, to consume a village of Samaritans for not receiving them, because they seemed to be headed for Jerusalem.

0
0
4 weeks 1 day ago

It is the mind that maketh good or ill, That maketh wretch or happy, rich or poor.

0
0
2 weeks 3 days ago

The world is all that is the case.

0
0
1 week 5 days ago

In speaking of the fear of religion, I don't mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something much deeper-namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.

0
0
3 weeks 3 days ago

What good would it be to possess the whole universe if one were its only survivor?

0
0
3 weeks 1 day ago

Moreover, if the character is formed, and the mind made up, on the few cardinal points of human opinion, agreement of conviction and feeling on these, has been felt in all times to be an essential requisite of anything worthy the name of friendship, in a really earnest mind. All these circumstances united, made the number very small of those whose society, and still more whose intimacy, I now voluntarily sought.

0
0
3 weeks 4 days ago

It appears, accordingly, from the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, that the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves.

0
0
3 days ago

Attempt nothing above thy strength!

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

So many men are deprived of grace. How can one live without grace? One has to try it and do what Christianity never did: be concerned with the damned.

0
0
3 weeks ago

The indispensible is not necessarily the desirable.

0
0
4 weeks 1 day ago

Our preaching does not stop with the law. That would lead to wounding without binding up, striking down and not healing, killing and not making alive, driving down to hell and not bringing back up, humbling and not exalting. Therefore, we must also preach grace and the promise of forgiveness - this is the means by which faith is awakened and properly taught. Without this word of grace, the law, contrition, penitence, and everything else are done and taught in vain.

0
0
1 week 5 days ago

I think of the course of human history as a long, swelling, increasingly polyphonic poem - a poem that leads up to nothing save itself. When the species is extinct, "human nature's total message" will not be a set of propositions, but a set of vocabularies - the more, and the more various, the better.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

Since those who rule in the city do so because they own a lot, I suppose they're unwilling to enact laws to prevent young people who've had no discipline from spending and wasting their wealth, so that by making loans to them, secured by the young people's property, and then calling those loans in, they themselves become even richer and more honored.

0
0
1 month 1 day ago

The human understanding is moved by those things most which strike and enter the mind simultaneously and suddenly, and so fill the imagination; and then it feigns and supposes all other things to be somehow, though it cannot see how, similar to those few things by which it is surrounded.

0
0
4 weeks 1 day ago

Through faith we are restored to paradise and created anew.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

Now the mass of mankind are plainly... choosing a life like that of brute animals...

0
0
1 week 4 days ago

Nay, men, if any of you had heeded what I was ever foretelling and advising, ye would now neither be fearing a single man nor putting your hopes in a single man.

0
0
3 weeks 1 day ago

The criticism of religion ends with the doctrine that man is the supreme being for man, hence the categorical imperative to overthrow all those conditions in which man is degraded, enslaved, neglected, contemptible being-conditions which can hardly be better described than in the exclamation of a Frenchman on the occasion of a proposed tax upon dogs: 'Wretched dogs! They want to treat you like men!'

0
0
3 weeks 1 day ago

I don't care for the applause one gets by saying what others are thinking; I want actually to change people's thoughts. Power over people's minds is the main personal desire of my life; and this sort of power is not acquired by saying popular things.

0
0
1 week 5 days ago

I will begin to speak when I am not going to say what were better left unsaid.

0
0
1 month 1 day ago

The sun, which passeth through pollutions and itself remains as pure as before.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

It is impossible for a man who secretly violates the terms of the agreement not to harm or be harmed to feel confident that he will remain undiscovered, even if he has already escaped ten thousand times; for until his death he is never sure that he will not be detected.

0
0
1 month 1 day ago

Cleanness of body was ever deemed to proceed from a due reverence to God.

0
0
3 weeks ago

To be taken without consent from my home and friends; to lose my liberty; to undergo all those assaults on my personality which modern psychotherapy knows how to deliver; to be re-made after some pattern of "normality" hatched in a Viennese laboratory to which I never professed allegiance; to know that this process will never end until either my captors have succeeded or I have grown wise enough to cheat them with apparent success-who cares whether this is called Punishment or not? "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment"

0
0
3 weeks 1 day ago

Character is higher than intellect...A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think.

0
0
3 weeks 1 day ago

But if the labourers could live on air they could not be bought at any price.

0
0
3 weeks 1 day ago

Gradually the village murmur subsided, and we seemed to be embarked on the placid current of our dreams, floating from past to future as silently as one awakes to fresh morning or evening thoughts.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

War is the father and king of all, and has produced some as gods and some as men, and has made some slaves and some free.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia