Skip to main content
3 months 1 week ago

And therefore I think you have done very wisely to make it your business to consider the Phœnomena relating to the present question, which have been afforded by experiments, especially since it might seem injurious to our senses, by whose mediation we acquire so much of the knowledge we have of things corporal, to have recourse to far-fetched and abstracted Ratiocination, to know what are the sensible ingredients of those sensible things that we daily see and handle, and are supposed to have the liberty to untwist (if I may so speak) into the primitive bodies they consist of.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

Doth perfect beauty stand in need of praise at all? Nay; no more than law, no more than truth, no more than loving kindness, nor than modesty.

0
0
Source
source
IV, 20
5 months 1 week ago

Age may have one side, but assuredly Youth has the other. There is nothing more certain than that both are right, except perhaps that both are wrong. Let them agree to differ; for who knows but what agreeing to differ may not be a form of agreement rather than a form of difference?

0
0
Source
source
Crabbed Age and Youth.
5 months 2 weeks ago

I was taught in the sixth grade that we had a standing army of just over a hundred thousand men and that the generals had nothing to say about what was done in Washington. I was taught to be proud of that and to pity Europe for having more than a million men under arms and spending all their money on airplanes and tanks. I simply never unlearned junior civics. I still believe in it. I got a very good grade.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted by James Lundquist in Kurt Vonnegut
6 months 6 days ago

It is the most advanced industrial society which feels most directly threatened by the rebellion, because it is here that the social necessity of repression and alienation, of servitude and heteronomy is most transparently unnecessary, and unproductive in terms of human progress. Therefore the cruelty and violence mobilized in the struggle against the threat, therefore the monotonous regularity with which the people are made familiar with, and accustomed to inhuman attitudes and behavior-to wholesale killing as patriotic act.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

I have observed that even the barbarians across the Rhine sing savage songs composed in language not unlike the croaking of harsh-voiced birds, and that they delight in such songs. For I think it is always the case that inferior musicians, though they annoy their audiences, give very great pleasure to themselves.

0
0
Source
source
On the songs of the early Germans, in his Mispogon, 337-338
4 months 1 week ago

Ours is a problem in which deception has become organized and strong; where truth is poisoned at its source; one in which the skill of the shrewdest brains is devoted to misleading a bewildered people.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. IV: "The Golden Rule and After", p. 105.
3 months 1 week ago

The monopoly of a single bank is certainly an evil. The multiplication of them was intended to cure it; but it multiplied an influence of the same character with the first, and completed the supplanting the precious metals by a paper circulation. Between such parties the less we meddle the better.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Albert Gallatin, 1802. ME 10:323
3 months 2 weeks ago

I strive to discover how to signal my companions before I die, how to give them a hand, how to spell out for them in time one complete word at least, to tell them what I think this procession is, and toward what we go. And how necessary it is for all of us together to put our steps and hearts in harmony. To say in time a simple word to my companions, a password, like conspirators. Yes, the purpose of Earth is not life, it is not man. Earth has existed without these, and it will live on without them. They are but the ephemeral sparks of its violent whirling. Let us unite, let us hold each other tightly, let us merge our hearts, let us create - so long as the warmth of this earth endures, so long as no earthquakes, cataclysms, icebergs or comets come to destroy us - let us create for Earth a brain and a heart, let us give a human meaning to the superhuman struggle. This anguish is our second duty.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

0
0
Source
source
"Is Theology Poetry?", 1945
6 months 2 weeks ago

Talking nonsense is man's only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

Is that to say we are against Free Trade? No, we are for Free Trade, because by Free Trade all economical laws, with their most astounding contradictions, will act upon a larger scale, upon the territory of the whole earth; and because from the uniting of all these contradictions in a single group, where they will stand face to face, will result the struggle which will itself eventuate in the emancipation of the proletariat.

0
0
Source
source
Writing in the Chartist newspaper (1847), in Marx Engels Collected Works Vol 6, pg 290.
6 months 2 weeks ago

In the deep discovery of the Subterranean world, a shallow part would satisfy some enquirers.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter I
5 months 4 weeks ago

When I read the catechism of the Council of Trent, it seems as though I had nothing in common with the religion there set forth.

0
0
7 months 2 weeks ago

Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow. Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. III: Of Individuality, As One of the Elements of Well-Being
7 months 1 week ago

I trust a good deal to common fame, as we all must. If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.

0
0
Source
source
February 1855
7 months 1 week ago

Someone who knows too much finds it hard not to lie.

0
0
Source
source
p. 64e
6 months 2 weeks ago

It has been said that love robs those who have it of their wit, and gives it to those who have none.

0
0
Source
source
Paradoxe sur le Comédien
4 months 1 week ago

If we study the history of science we see happen two inverse phenomena... Sometimes simplicity hides under complex appearances; sometimes it is the simplicity which is apparent, and which disguises extremely complicated realities....No doubt, if our means of investigation should become more and more penetrating, we should discover the simple under the complex, then the complex under the simple, then again the simple under the complex, and so on, without our being able to foresee what will be the last term. We must stop somewhere, and that science may be possible, we must stop when we have found simplicity. This is the only ground on which we can rear the edifice of our generalizations.

0
0
3 months 3 days ago

I see a clock, but I cannot envision the clockmaker. The human mind is unable to conceive of the four dimensions, so how can it conceive of a God, before whom a thousand years and a thousand dimensions are as one?

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

Lord, give me the capacity of never praying, spare me the insanity of all worship, let this temptation of love pass from me which would deliver me forever unto You. Let the void spread between my heart and heaven! I have no desire to people my deserts by Your presence, to tyrannize my nights by Your light, to dissolve my Siberias beneath Your sun.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

Autumn is a second Spring when every leaf is a flower.

0
0
6 months 6 days ago

When two, or more men, know of one and the same fact, they are said to be CONSCIOUS of it one to another; which is as much as to know it together.

0
0
Source
source
The First Part, Chapter 7, p. 31
8 months 3 days ago

All things are nourished together without their injuring one another. The courses of the seasons, and of the sun and moon, are pursued without any collision among them. The smaller energies are like river currents; the greater energies are seen in mighty transformations. It is this which makes heaven and earth so great.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

We should be offended when children are denied a proper education. We should be offended when children are told they will spend eternity in hell. We should be offended when medical science, for example stem-cell research, is compromised by the bigoted opinions of powerful and above all well-financed ignoramuses. We should be offended when voodoo, of all kinds, is given equal weight to science. We should be offended by hymen reconstruction surgery. We should be offended by 'female circumcision', euphemism for genital mutilation. We should be offended by stoning.

0
0
Source
source
I Am Offended!, August 3, 2008
4 months 1 week ago

What postulate do we implicitly admit? It is that the duration of two identical phenomena is the same; or... that the same causes take the same time to produce the same effects. ...Is it impossible that experiment may some day contradict our postulate?

0
0
7 months 2 weeks ago

The sentiments of men often differ with regard to beauty and deformity of all kinds, even while their general discourse is the same ... In all matters of opinion and science, the case is opposite: The difference among men is there oftener found to lie in generals than in particulars; and to be less in reality than in appearance.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

Sociology is the science which has the most methods and the least results.

0
0
Source
source
Part I. Ch. 1 : The Selection of Facts, p. 19
7 months 1 week ago

Harvard now, I think, suffers from a kind of self-idolatry, that it needs to be critical of itself in order to grow. And again, if you can be in contact with the best of its past, then it's got a chance. But if it just remains well adjusted to the status quo, generating careerist and opportunist students rather than critically oriented students who have a heart and soul, concerned about suffering here and around the world - then Harvard has a chance. I'm not giving up on Harvard, but I am making my way to New York.

0
0
Source
source
Speaking in Too Radical for Harvard? Cornel West on Failed Fight for Tenure, Biden's First 50 Days & More, Democracy Now!
3 months 2 weeks ago

God huddles in a knot in every cell of flesh. When I break a fruit open, this is how every seed is revealed to me. When I speak to men, this what I discern in their thick and muddy brains. God struggles in every thing, his hands flung upward toward the light. What light? Beyond and above every thing!

0
0
6 months 5 days ago

The other conclusion is that art is the complement of science. Science as I have said is concerned wholly with relations, not with individuals. Art, on the other hand, is not only the disclosure of the individuality of the artist but also a manifestation of individuality as creative of the future, in an unprecedented response to conditions as they were in the past. Some artists in their vision of what might be, but is not, have been conscious rebels. But conscious protest and revolt is not the form which the labor of the artist in creation of the future must necessarily take. Discontent with things as they are is normally the expression of the vision of what may be and is not, art in being the manifestation of individuality is this prophetic vision.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

There is little in common between the organised parading of madness in the eighteenth century and the freedom with which madness came to the fore during the Renaissance. The earlier age had found it everywhere, an integral element of each experience, both in images and in real life dangers. During the classical period, it was also on public view, but behind bars. When it manifested itself it was at a carefully controlled distance, under the watchful eye of a reason that denied all kinship with it, and felt quite unthreatened by any hint of resemblance. Madness had become a thing to be observed, no longer the monster within, but an animal moved by strange mechanisms, more beast than man, where all humanity had long since disappeared.

0
0
Source
source
Part One: 5. The Insane
3 months 1 week ago

Does the light of a lamp shine and keep its glow until its fuel is spent? Why shouldn't your truth, justice, and self-control shine until you are extinguished?

0
0
Source
source
XII. 15:294
3 months 3 weeks ago

As a human being it is just my nature to enjoy and share philosophy. I do this in the same way that some birds are eagles and some doves, some flowers lilies and some roses.

0
0
Source
source
p. 22
7 months 1 week ago

I have nothing but contempt for you idiotic chosen ones who have the heart to rejoice when there are the damned in Hell and the poor on earth; as for me, I am on the side of men and I will not leave it.

0
0
Source
source
Act 6, sc. 6
3 months 2 weeks ago

I said to the almond tree: "Speak to me of God."and the almond tree blossomed.

0
0
Source
source
The Fratricides
7 months 2 weeks ago

In vain I sought relief from my favourite books; those memorials of past nobleness and greatness from which I had always hitherto drawn strength and animation. I read them now without feeling, or with the accustomed feeling minus all its charm; and I became persuaded, that my love of mankind, and of excellence for its own sake, had worn itself out. I sought no comfort by speaking to others of what I felt. If I had loved any one sufficiently to make confiding my griefs a necessity, I should not have been in the condition.

0
0
Source
source
(pp. 134-135)
3 months 1 week ago

Think not disdainfully of death, but look on it with favor; for even death is one of the things that Nature wills.

0
0
Source
source
IX, 3
7 months 3 weeks ago

This adoration, too, was not the same as the worship of God. In my opinion they did not yet recognize him as God, but they acted in keeping with the custom mentioned in Scripture, according to which Kings and important people were worshiped; this did not mean more than falling down before them at their feet and honoring them.

0
0
Source
source
Sermon on The Gospel for the Festival of the Epiphany, 1522. Luther's Works, American Ed., Hans J. Hillerbrand, Helmut T. Lehmann eds., Philadelphia, Concordia Publishing House/Fortress Press, 1974, ISBN 0800603524 (Sermons II), vol. 52:198
8 months 2 days ago

Pleasure and distress, fear and courage, desire and aversion, where have these affections and experiences their seat? Clearly, either in the Soul alone, or in the Soul as employing the body, or in some third entity deriving from both. And for this third entity, again, there are two possible modes: it might be either a blend or a distinct form due to the blending.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.

0
0
Source
source
p. 285
6 months 3 weeks ago

No one entrusts a secret to a drunken man; but one will entrust a secret to a good man; therefore, the good man will not get drunk.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Epistulae morales ad Lucilium by Seneca, Epistle LXXXIII (trans. R. M. Gummere)
7 months ago

"These Macedonians," said he, "are a rude and clownish people, that call a spade a spade."

0
0
Source
source
39 Philip
7 months 2 weeks ago

The conception of the necessary unit of all that is resolves itself into the poverty of the imagination, and a freer logic emancipates us from the straitwaistcoated benevolent institution which idealism palms off as the totality of being.

0
0
Source
source
p. 9
5 months 1 week ago

All the measures now proposed are only a compromise with the errors of the present systems; but as these errors now almost universally exist, and must be overcome solely by the force of reason; and as reason, to effect the most beneficial purposes, makes her advance by slow degrees, and progressively substantiates one truth of high import after another, it will be evident, to minds of comprehensive and accurate thought, that by these and similar compromises alone can success be rationally expected in practice. For such compromises bring truth and error before the public; and whenever they are fairly exhibited together, truth must ultimately prevail.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

The civilized pagan recognizes life not in himself alone, but in societies of men-in the tribe, the clan, the family, the kingdom -and sacrifices his personal good for these societies. The motive power of his life is glory. His religion consists in the exaltation of the glory of those who are allied to him-the founders of his family, his ancestors, his rulers-and in worshiping gods who are exclusively protectors of his clan, his family, his nation, his government.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter IV, Christianity Misunderstood by Men of Science
7 months 1 week ago

Deep in the man sits fast his fate To mould his fortunes, mean or great.

0
0
Source
source
Fate

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia