Skip to main content

No man can have a peaceful life who thinks too much about lengthening it.

0
0
Source
source
Line 4.
4 months 2 weeks ago

Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.

0
0
Source
source
p. 167
4 months 2 weeks ago

A man, an adult, is precisely what [Aeneas] is: Achilles had been little more than a passionate boy.

0
0
Source
source
A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942), Chapter 6: "Virgil and the Subject of Secondary Epic"
1 month 1 week ago

As for civilization, from which at last we are about to escape, so far from being the social destiny of man, it is only a transient stage - a state of temporary evil with which globes are afflicted during the first ages of their career; it is for the human race a disease of infancy, like teething; but it is a disease which has been prolonged in our globe at least twenty centuries beyond its natural term, owing to the neglect on the part of the ancient philosophy to study association and passional attraction.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

In order to abolish the idea of private property, the idea of communism is completely sufficient. It takes actual communist action to abolish actual private property. History will com to it; and this movement, which in theory we already know to be a self-transcending movement, will constitute in actual fact a very severe and protracted process. But we must regard it as a real advance to have gained beforehand a consciousness of the limited character a well as of the goal of this historical movement - and a consciousness which reaches out beyond it.

0
0
Source
source
p. 99, The Marx-Engels Reader
4 months 2 weeks ago

The best is the enemy of the good.

0
0
1 week 5 days ago

Does anything genuinely beautiful need supplementing? No more than justice does-or truth, or kindness, or humility. Are any of those improved by being praised? Or damaged by contempt? Is an emerald suddenly flawed if no one admires it? Or gold, or ivory, or purple? Lyres? Knives? Flowers? Bushes?

0
0
Source
source
(Hays translation) IV, 20
1 week 5 days ago

It is satisfaction to a man to do the proper works of a man.

0
0
Source
source
VIII, 26
4 months 2 weeks ago

With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches, which in their eye is never so complete as when they appear to possess those decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselves.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter XI, Part II, p. 202 (See also Thorstein Veblen).
5 months 1 week ago

When you write a short story ... you had better know the ending first. The end of a story is only the end to the reader. To the writer, it's the beginning. If you don't know exactly where you're going every minute you're writing, you'll never get there or anywhere.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

War is never anything less than accelerated technological change.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 102)
5 months 2 weeks ago

My dear reader, read aloud, if possible! If you do so, allow me to thank you for it: if you not only do it yourself, if you also influence others to do it, allow me to thank each one of them, and you again and again!

0
0
4 months 3 days ago

Cato requested old men not to add the disgrace of wickedness to old age, which was accompanied with many other evils.

0
0
Source
source
Cato the Elder
4 months 2 weeks ago

The For-itself, in fact, is nothing but the pure nihilation of the In-itself; it is like a hole of being at the heart of Being.

0
0
2 weeks 1 day ago

They have retired into the Judiciary as a stronghold. There the remains of federalism are to be preserved and fed from the Treasury; and from that battery all the works of republicanism are to be beaten down and erased.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to J. Dickinson
4 months 2 weeks ago

Nature is too thin a screen; the glory of the One breaks in everywhere.

0
0
Source
source
p. 182
3 months 2 weeks ago

Resolved to die in the last dike of prevarication.

0
0
Source
source
Speech on the sixth article of charge in the impeachment of Warren Hastings (7 May 1789), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Volume the Tenth (1899), p. 406
4 months 2 weeks ago

We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of the workman. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter VIII, p. 80.
1 week 5 days ago

It is crazy to want what is impossible. And impossible for the wicked not to do so. (Hays translation) To seek what is impossible is madness: and it is impossible that the bad should not do something of this kind.

0
0
Source
source
V, 17
2 months 3 weeks ago

These papers are all written from what is called a realist perspective. The statements of science are in my view either true or false (although it is often the case that we don't know which) and their truth or falsity does not consist in their being highly derived ways of describing regularities in human experience. Reality is not a part of the human mind; rather the human mind is a part - and a small part at that - of reality.

0
0
Source
source
"Introduction: Science as approximation to truth"
2 months 2 weeks ago

The ethical and political practice of nonviolence can rely neither exclusively on the dyadic encounter, nor on the bolstering of a prohibition; it requires a political opposition to the biopolitical forms of racism and war logics that rely on phantasmagoric inversions that occlude the binding and interdependent character of the social bond. It requires, as well, an account of why, and under what conditions, the frameworks for understanding violence and nonviolence, or violence and self-defense, seem to invert into one another, causing confusion about how best to pin down those terms.

0
0
Source
source
p. 62
2 months 4 weeks ago

Station, power, wealth-how inadequate they have proved! How useless and insecure!

0
0
2 months 4 weeks ago

Those who devote themselves to rituals must ignore themselves. Rituals produce a distance from the self, a self-transcendence.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

Mercantile jealousy is excited, and both inflames, and is itself inflamed, by the violence of national animosity.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter III, Part II, p. 534.
4 months 2 weeks ago

Wherever one finds oneself inclined to bitterness, it is a sign of emotional failure: a larger heart, and a greater self-restraint, would put a calm autumnal sadness in the place of the instinctive outcry of pain.

0
0
Source
source
The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell: Contemplation and Action, 1902-1914, ed. Richard A. Rempel, Andrew Brink and Margaret Moran (Routledge, 1993
1 month 1 week ago

All repressed passion produces its counter-passion which is as malevolent as the natural passion would be beneficial.

0
0
Source
source
Le nouveau monde amoureux
4 months 2 weeks ago

The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture for wild beasts to fight in.

0
0
Source
source
Letter addressed to "un premier commis" [name unknown] (20 June 1733), from Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire: Correspondance [Garnier frères, Paris, 1880], vol. I, letter # 343 (p. 354)
4 months 2 weeks ago

Let's go dance under the elms:

Step lively, young lassies.

Let's go dance under the elms:

Gallants, take up your pipes.

0
0
Source
source
Le devin du village, 1752
5 months 3 days ago

A hymn is the praise of God with song; a song is the exultation of the mind dwelling on eternal things, bursting forth in the voice.

0
0
Source
source
Commentary on the Psalms (c. 1273), Introduction
3 months 1 week ago

Suppose a surface to be part red and part blue; so that every point on it is either red or blue, and of course, no part can be both red and blue. What then, is the color of the surface in the immediate neighborhood of the point. ...it follows that the boundary is half red and half blue. In like manner, we find it necessary to hold that consciousness essentially occupies time... Thus, the present is half past and half time to come. ...Take another case: the velocity of a particle at any instant of time is its mean velocity during an infinitesimal instant in which that time is consumed. Just so, my immediate feeling is my feeling through an infinitesimal duration containing the present instant.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

People don't stop things they enjoy doing just because they reach a certain age. They don't stop playing tennis just because they turn 40, they don't stop with sex just because they turn 40; they keep it up as long as they can if they enjoy it, and learning will be the same thing.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

Accordingly, time logically supposes a continuous range of intensity of feeling. It follows then, from the definition of continuity, that when any particular kind of feeling is present, an infinitesimal continuum of all feelings differing infinitesimally from that, is present.

0
0
4 months 6 days ago

Contemporary intellectuals have given up the Enlightenment assumption that religion, myth, and tradition can be opposed to something ahistorical, something common to all human beings qua human.

0
0
3 weeks 5 days ago

Profound love demands a deep conception and out of this develops reverence for the mystery of life. It brings us close to all beings, to the poorest and smallest as well as all others.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.

0
0
Source
source
Lecture at the Harvard Divinity School (13 March 1884); published in the The Unitarian Review and Religious Magazine as The Dilemma of Determinism
3 months 1 week ago

It is the peculiarity of privilege and of every privileged position to kill the intellect and heart of man. The privileged man, whether he be privileged politically or economically, is a man depraved in intellect and heart.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in "Socialism" article of Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th edition (1887), edited by Thomas Spencer Baynes with assistance of William Robertson Smith, Vol. 22, p. 216, Charles Scribner's Sons
2 months 2 weeks ago

When the Indians complain that the English have enslaved them it is as if drunkards complained that the spirit-dealers who have settled among them have enslaved them. You tell them that they might give up drinking, but they reply that they are so accustomed to it that they cannot abstain, and that they must have alcohol to keep up their energy. Is it not the same thing with the millions of people who submit to thousands or even to hundreds, of others - of their own or other nations? If the people of India are enslaved by violence it is only because they themselves live and have lived by violence, and do not recognize the eternal law of love inherent in humanity.

0
0
Source
source
V
4 months 2 weeks ago

Everyone has a goal which appears to be great, at least to himself, and is great when deepest conviction, the innermost voice of the heart, pronounces it great. ... This voice, however, is easily drowned out, and what we thought to be inspiration may have been created by the fleeting moment and again perhaps destroyed by it. ... We must seriously ask ourselves, therefore, whether we are really inspired about a vocation, whether an inner voice approves of it, or whether the inspiration was a deception, whether that which we took as the Deity's calling to us was self-deceit. But how else could we recognize this except by searching for the source of our inspiration?

0
0
Source
source
Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, L. Easton, trans. (1967), p. 36
5 months 1 week ago

Query: How to contrive not to waste one's time? Answer: By being fully aware of it all the while. Ways in which this can be done: By spending one's days on an uneasy chair in a dentist's waiting room; by remaining on one's balcony all a Sunday afternoon; by travelling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by queueing at the box-office of theatres and then not booking a seat.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

Suso has even left a diagrammatic picture of the relations subsisting between Godhead, triune God and creatures. In this very curious and interesting drawing a chain of manifestation connects the mysterious symbol of the Divine Ground with the three Persons of the Trinity, and the Trinity in turn is connected in a descending scale with angels and human beings. These last, as the drawing vividly shows, may make one of two choices. They can either live the life of the outer man, the life of the separative selfhood; in which case they are lost (for, in the words of the Theologia Germanica, "nothing burns in hell but the self"). Or else they can identify themselves with the inner man, in which case it becomes possible for them, as Suso shows, to ascend again, through unitive knowledge, to the Trinity and even, beyond the Trinity, to the ultimate Unity of the Divine Ground.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

To affirm equality is to affirm a cohabitation defined in part by an interdependency that takes the edge off the individual boundaries of the body, or that works that edge for its social and political potential.

0
0
Source
source
p. 148
3 months 2 weeks ago

Virtue is reason which has become energy.

0
0
Source
source
"Selected Ideas (1799-1800)", Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, trans. (Pennsylvania University Press:1968) #23
1 week 5 days ago

You want praise from people who kick themselves every fifteen minutes, the approval of people who despise themselves. (Is it a sign of self-respect to regret nearly everything you do?)

0
0
Source
source
(Hays translation) VIII, 53
2 months 4 weeks ago

Haikus allow the whole world to appear within things.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

Modesty is an unnatural attitude, and one which is only with difficulty taught to children.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

He who is bent on doing evil can never want occasion.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 459
4 months 2 weeks ago

I deny that anyone knows, or can know, the nature of the two sexes, as long as they have only been seen in their present relation to one another. If men had ever been found in society without women, or women without men, or if there had been a society of men and women in which the women were not under the control of the men, something might have been positively known about the mental and moral differences which may be inherent in the nature of each. What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing - the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1
4 months 1 week ago

If our intention now is to reveal classical unreason on its own terms, outside of its ties with dreams and error, it must be understood not as a form of reason that is somehow diseased, lost or mad, but quite simply as reason dazzled.

0
0
Source
source
Part Two: 2. The Transcendence of Delirium

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia