Skip to main content
7 months 3 days ago

The unconsciousness of man is the consciousness of God.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

One simple method is to take a pen or pencil and hold it up against a blank wall or ceiling. Now concentrate on the pen as if it is the most important thing in the world. Then allow your sense to relax, so you see the pen against the background of the wall. Concentrate again. Relax again. Keep on doing this until you become aware of the ability to focus attention at will. You will find that this unaccustomed activity of the will is tiring; it produces a sense of strain behind the eyes. My own perception is that if you persist, in spite of the strain, the result is acute discomfort, followed by a sudden immense relief - the 'peak experience'.

0
0
Source
source
p. 33
5 months 3 weeks ago

The quality of the human that precludes identifying the individual with the class is 'metaphysical' and has no place in empiricist epistemology. The pigeon hole into which a man is shoved circumscribes his fate.

0
0
Source
source
p. 23.
7 months 2 days ago

The law of gravity thus asserts itself when a house falls about our ears.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. I, Ch. 1, Section 4, pg. 86.
6 months 2 days ago

My immediate consciousness, my absolute perception, cannot go beyond myself, - I have immediate knowledge only of myself, whatever I know further I know only by reasoning, in the same manner in which I have come to those conclusions concerning the original powers of Nature, which certainly do not lie within the circle of my perceptions. I, however, - that which I call myself, - am not the man-forming power of Nature, but only one of its manifestations ; and only of this manifestation am I conscious, not of that power, whose existence I have only discovered from the necessity of explaining my own.

0
0
Source
source
Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p. 13
6 months 3 weeks ago

Form no covetous desire, so that the demon of greediness may not deceive thee, and the treasure of the world may not be tasteless to thee.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

The fact that no one has come up with a really convincing reason for giving greater moral weight to members of our own species, simply because they are members of our species, strongly suggests that there is no such reason. Like racism and sexism, speciesism is wrong.

0
0
Source
source
p. 343
5 months 4 weeks ago

The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

Discipline 'makes' individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise. It is not a triumphant power...it is a modest, suspicious power, which functions as a calculated, but permanent economy.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

AI: An immemorial man is a concept referring to a human being considered outside of or prior to history, culture, and institutional memory — a figure defined not by what has been recorded or remembered, but by what precedes record-keeping itself. 

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt.

0
0
Source
source
15:28 (KJV)
2 months 4 weeks ago

The modern proletarian class doesn't carry out its struggle according to a plan set out in some book or theory; the modern workers' struggle is a part of history, a part of social progress, and in the middle of history, in the middle of progress, in the middle of the fight, we learn how we must fight... That's exactly what is laudable about it, that's exactly why this colossal piece of culture, within the modern workers' movement, is epoch-defining: that the great masses of the working people first forge from their own consciousness, from their own belief, and even from their own understanding the weapons of their own liberation.

0
0
Source
source
The Politics of Mass Strikes and Unions; Collected Works 2
6 months 3 days ago

That chastity of honour which felt a stain like a wound.

0
0
Source
source
Volume iii, p. 332
2 months 4 weeks ago

One is immediately struck with the obstinacy and rigid consistency with which Lenin and his comrades stuck to this slogan, a slogan which is in sharp contradiction to their otherwise outspoken centralism in politics as well as to the attitude they have assumed towards other democratic principles. Wile they showed a quite cool contempt for the Constituent Assembly, universal suffrage, freedom of press and assemblage, in short for the whole apparatus of basic democratic liberties of the people which, taken all together, constituted the "right of self-determination" inside Russia, they treated the right of self-determination of peoples as a jewel of democratic policy for the sake of which all practical considerations of real criticism had to be stilled.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter Three, "Nationalities Question"
7 months 3 weeks ago

It is only he who is possessed of the most complete sincerity that can exist under heaven, who can give its full development to his nature. Able to give its full development to his own nature, he can do the same to the nature of other men. Able to give its full development to the nature of other men, he can give their full development to the natures of animals and things. Able to give their full development to the natures of creatures and things, he can assist the transforming and nourishing powers of Heaven and Earth. Able to assist the transforming and nourishing powers of Heaven and Earth, he may with Heaven and Earth form a ternion.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

I think that democratic communities have a natural taste for freedom: left to themselves, they will seek it, cherish it, and view any privation of it with regret. But for equality, their passion is ardent, insatiable, incessant, invincible: they call for equality in freedom; and if they cannot obtain that, they still call for equality in slavery.

0
0
Source
source
Book Two, Chapter I.

While Poe and the Symbolists were exploring the irrational in literature, Freud had begun to explore the resonant figure/ground double-plot of the conscious and unconscious.

0
0
Source
source
p. 52
5 months 3 weeks ago

To disappear into deep water or to disappear toward a far horizon, to become part of depth of infinity, such is the destiny of man that finds its image in the destiny of water.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction
5 months 4 weeks ago

This world was created from God's fear of solitude. In other words, us, the creatures, have no other meaning but to distract the Creator. Poor clowns of the absolute, we forget that we live dramas for the boredom of a spectator, whose claps have never reached the ears of a mortal.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

Knowledge is employed in the service of the necessity of life and primarily in the service of the instinct of personal preservation. The necessity and this instinct have created in man the organs of knowledge and given them such capacity as they possess. Man sees, hears, touches, tastes and smells that which it is necessary for him to see, hear, touch, taste and smell in order to preserve his life. The decay or loss of any of these senses increases the risks with which his life is environed, and if it increases them less in the state of society in which we are actually living, the reason is that some see, hear, touch, taste and smell for others. A blind man, by himself and without a guide, could not live long. Society is an additional sense; it is the true common sense.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

Technically speaking, since our complex societies are highly susceptible to interferences and accidents,they certainly offer ideal opportunities for a prompt disruption of normal activities. These disruptions can, with minimum expense, have considerably destructive consequences. Global terrorism is extreme both in its lack of realistic goals and in its cynical exploitation of the vulnerability of complex systems.

0
0
Source
source
Habermas (2004) in: Giovanna Borradori (2004) Philosophy in a Time of Terror: : Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. p. 34
7 months 3 days ago

The reason that I call my doctrine logical atomism is because the atoms that I wish to arrive at as the sort of last residue in analysis are logical atoms and not physical atoms. Some of them will be what I call "particulars" - such things as little patches of color or sounds, momentary things - and some of them will be predicates or relations and so on.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

Names and attributes must be accommodated to the essence of things, and not the essence to the names, since things come first and names afterwards.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (1957) by Stillman Drake, p. 92
6 months 3 days ago

The future use and the whole effect, if not the very existence, of the process of an impeachment of high crimes and misdemeanors before the peers of this kingdom upon the charge of the Commons will very much be decided by your judgment in this cause... For we must not deceive ourselves: whatever does not stand with credit cannot stand long. And if the Constitution should be deprived, I do not mean in form, but virtually, of this resource, it is virtually deprived of everything else that is valuable in it. For this process is the cement which binds the whole together; this is the individuating principle that makes England what England is.

0
0
Source
source
Speech in opening the impeachment of Warren Hastings (15 February 1788), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Volume the Ninth (1899), p. 332
7 months 1 day ago

The safest road to Hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

0
0
Source
source
Letter XII
7 months 6 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
Source
source
Part 4, Section 1
3 months 2 weeks ago

As the liberal sees it, the task of the state consists solely and exclusively in guaranteeing the protection of life, health, liberty, and private property against violent attacks. Everything that goes beyond this is an evil. A government that, instead of fulfilling its task, sought to go so far as actually to infringe on personal security of life and health, freedom, and property would, of course, be altogether bad.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1 : The Foundations of Liberal Policy § 11. The Limits of Governmental Activity
5 months 4 weeks ago

In the torments of the intellect, there is a certain bearing which is to be sought in vain among those of the heart. Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep. 

0
0
Source
source
John Bercow, 2016.To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account (1976), p. 127 Compare: It's a point so blindingly obvious that only an extraordinarily clever and sophisticated person could fail to grasp it.
5 months 2 weeks ago

The Outsider may be an artist, but the artist is not necessarily an Outsider.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter one, The Country of the Blind
7 months 5 days ago

The second is the partiality for unity proper to the philosophical mind, whence this wide-spread canon has flown forth: principles are not to be multiplied beyond supreme necessity, to which we give in our adhesion, not because we have insight into causal unity in the world either by reason or experience, but as seeking it by an impulse of the intellect which seems to itself to have by thus much advanced in the explication of phenomena, by as much as it is granted to it to descend from the same principle to a greater number of consequences,

0
0
7 months 2 days ago

Thus heaven I've forfeited, I know it full well. My soul, once true to God, is chosen for hell.

0
0
Source
source
"The Pale Maiden" (1837) ballad
6 months 3 weeks ago

In forming a store of good works thou shouldst be diligent, so that it may come to thy assistance among the spirits.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

Conservatism is a philosophy of inheritance and stewardship; it does not squander resources but strives to enhance them and pass them on.

0
0
Source
source
Stand up for the real meaning of freedom, The Spectator
4 months 3 weeks ago

My friends, I tell you that hitherto you have been prevented from even knowing what happiness really is, solely in consequence of the errors - gross errors - that have been combined with the fundamental notions of every religion that has hitherto been taught to men. And, in consequence, they have made man the most inconsistent, and the most miserable being in existence. By the errors of these systems he has been made a weak, imbecile animal; a furious bigot and fanatic or a miserable hypocrite; and should these qualities be carried, not only into the projected villages, but into Paradise itself, a Paradise would no longer be found!

0
0
Source
source
Statement (21 August 1817), as quoted by Jim Herrick, in "Bradlaugh and Secularism: 'The Province of the Real'"
3 months 3 weeks ago

Love one another. My final lesson of history is the same as that of Jesus. You may think that's a lot of lollipop but just try it. Love is the most practical thing in the world. If you take an attitude of love toward everybody you meet, you'll eventually get along. When asked, at the age of 92, if he could summarize the lessons of history into a single sentence.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in "Durants on History from the Ages, with Love," by Pam Proctor, Parade (6 August 1978) p. 12.

The electronic age is a world in which causes and effects become almost interchangeable, as in music structures.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 99)
6 months 2 weeks ago

He said they that were serious in ridiculous matters would be ridiculous in serious affairs.

0
0
Source
source
Cato the Elder
6 months ago

The art of writing books is not yet invented. But it is at the point of being invented. Fragments of this nature are literary seeds. There may be many an infertile grain among them: nevertheless, if only some come up!

0
0
Source
source
Fragment No. 114
7 months 2 days ago

The best effect of fine persons is felt after we have left their presence.

0
0
Source
source
1839
6 months 2 weeks ago

Friends share all things.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, "Pythagoras", Sect. 10
8 months 5 days ago
We have seen how it is originally language which works on the construction of concepts, a labor taken over in later ages by science. Just as the bee simultaneously constructs cells and fills them with honey, so science works unceasingly on this great columbarium of concepts, the graveyard of perceptions.
0
0
8 months 3 days ago

The world is rejuvenated, but as Heine so wittily remarked, it was rejuvenated by romanticism to such a degree that it became a baby again.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

The stupendous Fourth Estate, whose wide world-embracing influences what eye can take in?

0
0
2 months 4 weeks ago

The universe is flux, life is opinion. The universe is (constant) change, life is (mere) presumption.

0
0
Source
source
(Analogous translation) The universe is transformation: life is opinion. (Translation by George Long)
3 months 3 weeks ago

In morals, truth is but little prized when it is a mere sentiment, and only attains its full value when realized in the world as fact.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 5.
5 months 4 weeks ago

The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.

0
0
Source
source
Quoted in Essays in Zoosemiotics (1990) by Thomas A. Sebeok
5 months 1 week ago

Individual expression of undefined universality leads to the murder of innocents through misdirected personal responsibility. Life is true value and consequence true guidance.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

The way of the superior man may be compared to what takes place in traveling, when to go to a distance we must first traverse the space that is near, and in ascending a height, when we must begin from the lower ground.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

Entertainment and learning are not opposites; entertainment may be the most effective mode of learning.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 66-67

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia