Skip to main content
5 months 3 weeks ago

I found there, on the central square (Václavské náměstí), a café that miraculously worked through this emergency. I remember they had wonderful strawberry cakes, and I was sitting there eating strawberry cakes and watching Russian tanks against demonstrators. It was perfect.

0
0
1 week ago

Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When her branch is yet tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is near: So ye in like manner, when ye shall see these things come to pass, know that it is nigh, even at the doors. Verily I say unto you, that this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done. Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass away. But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father. Take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is. For the Son of Man is as a man taking a far journey, who left his house, and gave authority to his servants, and to every man his work, and commanded the porter to watch. Watch ye therefore: for ye know not when the master of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cockcrowing, or in the morning: Lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping. And what I say unto you I say unto all, Watch.

0
0
Source
source
13:28-37 (KJV)
1 month 2 weeks ago

A thing forgotten on one day will be remembered on the next. Something we have made the most strenuous efforts to recall, but all in vain, will, soon after... saunter into the mind... [T]he sphere of possible recollection may be wider than we think, and... apparent oblivion is no proof against possible recall under other conditions.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 16
1 week 4 days ago

As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

That the human mind has a certain order of possible progress, in which some things must precede others, an order which governments and public instructors can modify to some, but not to an unlimited extent: that all questions of political institutions are relative, not absolute, and that different stages of human progress not only will have, but ought to have, different institutions: That government is always either in the hands, or passing into the hands, of whatever is the strongest power in society, and that what this power is, does not depend on institutions, but institutions on it: That any general theory or philosophy of politics supposes a previous theory of human progress, and that this is the same thing with a philosophy of history.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 162)
1 month 2 weeks ago

In a head-on clash between violence and power, the outcome is hardly in doubt. Nowhere is the self-defeating factor in the victory of violence over power more evident than in the use of terror to maintain domination, about whose weird successes and eventual failures we know perhaps more than any generation before us. Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.

0
0
Source
source
On Violence
1 month 2 weeks ago

Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.

0
0
Source
source
May 1849
2 months 1 week ago

It is no one's privilege to despise another. It is only a hard-won right after long experience.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

Frantic administration of panaceas to the world is certainly discouraged by the reflection that "this present" might be "the world's last night"; sober work for the future, within the limits of ordinary morality and prudence, is not.

0
0
1 month 5 days ago

If you are well-to-do and can maintain your household, love your wife in your home according to good custom...Make her happy while you are alive, for she is land profitable to her lord.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim no. 21.
1 month 2 weeks ago

It goes without saying that the normal durability of fixed capital is calculated on the supposition that all the conditions under which it can perform its functions normally during that time are fulfilled, just as we assume, in placing a mans life at 30 years on the average,that he will wash himself.

0
0
Source
source
Volume II, Ch. VIII, p. 176-177.
2 months 2 weeks ago
Forgetting our intentions is the most frequent of all acts of stupidity.
0
0
3 weeks 5 days ago

Concern should drive us into action and not into a depression.

0
0
Source
source
The Collected Works of Karen Horney‎ (1957) by Karen Horney, p. 154: "We may feel genuinely concerned about world conditions, though such a concern should drive us into action and not into a depression."
1 month 2 weeks ago

The days .... come and go like muffled and veiled figures, sent from a distant friendly party; but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.

0
0
Source
source
Works and Days
2 months 2 weeks ago

My doubt goes like this: How could the Loving One have the heart to let human beings become so guilty that they got his murder on their consciences?

0
0

Philosophy is in history, and is never independent of historical discourse. But for the tacit symbolism of life it substitutes, in principle, a conscious symbolism; for a latent meaning, one that is manifest. It is never content to accept its historical situation. It changes this situation by revealing it to itself.

0
0
Source
source
p. 57
3 weeks 1 day ago

Pray, O pray to God, dear friends, if you are not already asses - that he will cause you to become asses... There is none who praiseth not the golden age when men were asses: they knew not how to work the land. One knew not how to dominate another, one understood no more than another; caves and caverns were their refuge; they were not so well covered nor so jealous nor were they confections of lust and of greed. Everything was held in common.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.

0
0
Source
source
January 5, 1856
1 month 1 week ago

The task of universal pragmatics is to identify and reconstruct universal conditions of possible mutual understanding.

0
0
Source
source
p. 21
1 month 2 weeks ago

There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination.

0
0
Source
source
Attributed to Voltaire in Likharev, K.K. (2021). On Government and Politics. In: Likharev, K.K. (eds) Essential Quotes for Scientists and Engineers.
1 month 1 week ago

Every questioning is a seeking. Every seeking takes its direction beforehand from what is sought. Questioning is a knowing search for beings in their thatness and whatness.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction: The Exposition of the Question of the Meaning of Being (Stambaugh translation)
1 month 2 weeks ago

The wise and virtuous man is at all times willing that his own private interests should be sacrificed to the public interest of his own particular society--that the interests of this order of society be sacrificed to the greater interest of the state. He should therefore he equally willing that all those inferior interests should be sacrificed to the greater society of all sensible and intelligent beings.

0
0
Source
source
Section II, Chap. III; cited by Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1941, 24-25.
1 week 4 days ago

Vague a l'ame - melancholy yearning for the end of the world.

0
0
6 days ago

In the ice of solitude man becomes most inexorably a question to himself, and just because the question pitilessly summons and draws into play his most secret life he becomes an experience to himself.

0
0
Source
source
p. 150
1 month 2 weeks ago

Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the labourer.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. I, Ch. 15 (last sentence), pg. 556.
1 week 4 days ago

Now, to say that a lot of objects is finite, is the same as to say that if we pass through the class from one to another we shall necessarily come round to one of those individuals already passed; that is, if every one of the lot is in any one-to-one relation to one of the lot, then to every one of the lot some one is in this same relation.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

Anything could be found in figures if the search were long enough and hard enough and if the proper pieces of information were ignored or overlooked.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

... happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination, resting on merely empirical grounds…

0
0
Source
source
4:418-19, p.29
1 month 2 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
6 days ago

The revolution in scientific ideas just mentioned is primarily logical. It is due to recognition that the very method of physical science, with its primary standard units of mass, space, and time, is concerned with measurements of relations of change, not with individuals as such.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

Nothing contributes more to nourish elevation of sentiments in a people, than the large and free character of their habitations.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 55)
1 week 4 days ago

Not content with real sufferings, the anxious man imposes imaginary ones on himself; he is a being for whom unreality exists, must exist; otherwise where would he obtain the ration of torment his nature demands?

0
0

By faithfulness we are collected and wound up into unity within ourselves, whereas we had been scattered abroad in multiplicity.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Footprints in Time : Fulfilling God's Destiny for Your Life (2007) by Jeff O'Leary, p. 223
1 week 4 days ago

Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

No human being, even the most passionately loved and passionately loving, is ever in our possession.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

Suicide may also be regarded as an experiment - a question which man puts to Nature, trying to force her to answer. The question is this: What change will death produce in a man's existence and in his insight into the nature of things? It is a clumsy experiment to make; for it involves the destruction of the very consciousness which puts the question and awaits the answer.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 2, Ch. 13, § 160
1 month 1 week ago

The way you use the word "God" does not show whom you mean - but, rather, what you mean.

0
0
Source
source
p. 50e
2 months 5 days ago

The superior man, while there is anything he has not studied, or while in what he has studied there is anything he cannot understand, Will not intermit his labor. While there is anything he has not inquired about, or anything in what he has inquired about which he does not know, he will not intermit his labor. While there is anything which he has not reflected on, or anything in what he has reflected on which he does not apprehend, he will not intermit his labor. While there is anything which he has not discriminated or his discrimination is not clear, he will not intermit his labor. If there be anything which he has not practiced, or his practice fails in earnestness, he will not intermit his labor. If another man succeed by one effort, he will use a hundred efforts. If another man succeed by ten efforts, he will use a thousand. Let a man proceed in this way, and, though dull, he will surely become intelligent; though weak, he will surely become strong.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

Formerly, it was held by philosophers and mathematicians alike that the proofs in Geometry depended on the figure; nowadays, this is known to be false. In the best books there are no figures at all. The reasoning proceeds by the strict rules of formal logic from a set of axioms laid down to begin with.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 5: Mathematics and the Metaphysicians
1 month 2 days ago

Valour, however unfortunate, commands great respect even from enemies: but the Romans despise cowardice, even though it be prosperous.

0
0
Source
source
Aemilius Paulus 26 (Tr. Stewart and Long)

Inasmuch as love grows in you, in so much beauty grows; for love is itself the beauty of the soul.

0
0
Source
source
as translated by H. Browne and J. H. Meyers, The Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers (1995)
1 month 2 weeks ago

The love of God consists in an ardent desire to procure the general welfare, and reason teaches me that there is nothing which contributes more to the general welfare of mankind than the perfection of reason.

0
0
Source
source
Closing sentence of the Preface to the general science (1677) (in P. Wiener (ed.), Leibniz Selections, Macmilland Press Ltd, 1951).
1 month 2 weeks ago

Then he tried to recall the lessons of Mr. Wisdom. "it is I myself, eternal Spirit, who drives this Me, the slave, along that ledge. I ought not to care whether he falls and breaks his neck or not. It is not he that is real, it is I - I - I.

0
0
Source
source
Pilgrim's Regress 137
2 months 1 week ago

Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, and over parts of the continent and, furthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjected the parts of Libya within the columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia. This vast power, gathered into one, endeavored to subdue at a blow our country and yours and the whole of the region within the straits, and then, Solon, your country shone forth, in the excellence of her virtue and strength, among all mankind.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

The authority of science ... promotes and encourages the activity of observing, comparing, measuring and ordering the physical characteristics of human bodies.... Cartesian epistemology and classical ideals produced forms of rationality, scientificity and objectivity that, though efficacious in the quest for truth and knowledge, prohibited the intelligibility and legitimacy of black equality.... In fact, to "think" such an idea was to be deemed irrational, barbaric or mad.

0
0
Source
source
Prophesy Deliverance!
1 month 5 days ago

Ethics seems a morass which we have to cross, but get hopelessly bogged in when we make the attempt.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 6, A New Understanding Of Ethics, p. 167
1 month 2 weeks ago

We may suppose that everyone has in himself the whole form of a moral conception.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter I, Section 9, pg. 50
1 month 2 weeks ago

In the Hindoo scripture the idea of man is quite illimitable and sublime. There is nowhere a loftier conception of his destiny. He is at length lost in Brahma himself 'the divine male.' ... there is no grandeur conception of creation anywhere .... The very indistinctness of its theogeny implies a sublime truth.

0
0
Source
source
A Tribute to Hinduism, 2008
1 month 2 weeks ago

All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in substituting diabolical abstractions for human beings. Similarly, those who defend war have invented a pleasant sounding vocabulary of abstractions in which to describe the process of mass murder.

0
0
Source
source
"Pacifism and Philosophy", 1936

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia