Skip to main content
4 months 3 weeks ago

It is precisely in knowing its limits that philosophy consists.

0
0
Source
source
A 727, B 755
2 weeks 6 days ago

The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest, and was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood? My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam & an Eve left in every country, & left free, it would be better than as it now is.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to William Short (January 3, 1793), quoted in Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism (1995), pp. 316-317
4 months 2 days ago

It is not proper either to have a blunt sword or to use freedom of speech ineffectually. Neither is the sun to be taken from the world, nor freedom of speech from erudition.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in the translation of Thomas Taylor
3 months 2 weeks ago

What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

The soul, too, has her virginity and must bleed a little before bearing fruit.

0
0
Source
source
"Normal Madness," Ch. 3, P. 56
4 months 2 weeks ago

We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds...A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.

0
0
Source
source
par. 43
3 months 1 week ago

To be old is a glorious thing when one has not unlearned what it means to begin, this old man had perhaps first learned it thoroughly in old age.

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

On the other hand one must not entertain any fantastic illusions on the productive power of the credit system, so far as it supplies or sets in motion money-capital.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. II, Ch. XVII, p. 351.
4 months 4 weeks ago

The world thought well of my schoolmaster guardian, because he was neither a liar, nor a scamp, nor a gambler; but he was coarse, avaricious, and ignorant; he knew nothing beyond the confused lessons which he taught to his classes. He imagined that in forcing a youth to become a monk he would be offering a sacrifice acceptable to God. He used to boast of the many victims which he devoted annually to Dominic and Francis and Benedict.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Life and Letters of Erasmus: Lectures Delivered at Oxford 1893-4 (1899) by James Anthony Froude
4 months 2 weeks ago

Most of the texts... preserved from this period come from writers... either... affiliated with the aristocratic party, or... distrustful of democratic or radically democratic institutions.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

The whole business of the kingly weaving is comprised in this and this alone: in never allowing the self-restrained characters to be separated from the courageous, but in weaving them together by common beliefs and honors and dishonors and opinions and interchanges of pledges, thus making of them a smooth and, as we say, well-woven fabric, and then entrusting to them in common forever the offices of the state.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

And the conversion of the other Don Quixote - he who was converted only to die - was possible because he was mad, and it was his madness, and not his death or his conversion that immortalized him, earning him forgiveness for this crime of having been born. Felix culpa! And neither was his madness cured, but only transformed. His death was his last knightly adventure; in dying he stormed heaven, which suffereth violence.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

When the individual finds in her conscience beliefs that are relevant to public policy but incapable of the defense on the basis of beliefs common to her fellow citizens, she must sacrifice her conscience on the altar of public expediency.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

We are not yet speaking about equality if we have not yet spoken about equal grievability, or the equal attribution of grievability. Grievability is a defining feature of equality. Those whose grievability is not assumed are those who suffer inequality-unequal value.

0
0
Source
source
p. 108
4 weeks ago

Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (1991) by Alan L. Mackay, p. 35
3 months 3 days ago

Jung believed that alchemy is about the transmutation of the mind and the discovery of the self. Inevitably, he saw the male and female elements of the prima materia -- the king and queen of alchemy -- as the animus and anima; this seemed to indicate the (sic) alchemy is about psychological processes.

0
0
Source
source
p. 103
4 months 2 weeks ago

I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

Until now a culture has been a mechanical fate for societies, the automatic interiorization of their own technologies.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 86)
5 months 3 weeks ago
I will make an attempt to attain freedom, the youthful soul says to itself; and is it to be hindered in this by the fact that two nations happen to hate and fight one another, or that two continents are separated by an ocean, or that all around it a religion is taught with did not yet exist a couple of thousand years ago. All that is not you, it says to itself.
0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

Time is the father of truth, its mother is our mind.

0
0
Source
source
Quote as translated in The Encyclopedia of Religion Vol. 11 (1987), by Mircea Eliade, p. 459
2 months 2 weeks ago

Unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitutes a total and near-instanteous transformation of culture, values and attitudes.

0
0
2 months 4 weeks ago

Before a science can develop principles, it must possess concepts. Before a law of gravitation could be formulated, it was necessary to have the notions of "acceleration" and "weight."

0
0
Source
source
p. 43.
4 months 2 weeks ago

One right-thinking man thinks like all other right-thinking men of his time-that is to say, in most cases, like some wrong-thinking man of another time.

0
0
Source
source
"One and Many," p. 12
4 months 3 weeks ago

In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying.

0
0
Source
source
"The Argument for the Remedying of Injustice"
2 months 3 days ago

The punctuation of anniversaries is terrible, like the closing of doors, one after another between you and what you want to hold on to.

0
0
Source
source
Diary entry on the first anniversary of the kidnapping and death of her son Charles Augustus Lindbergh III (1 March 1932)
4 months 3 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.
1 month 1 day ago

We accepted a definition of ourselves which confined the self to the source and to the limitations of conscious attention. This definition is miserably insufficient, for in fact we know how to grow brains and eyes, ears and fingers, hearts and bones, in just the same way that we know how to walk and breathe, talk and think-only we can't put it into words. Words are too slow and too clumsy for describing such things, and conscious attention is too narrow for keeping track of all their details.

0
0
Source
source
p. 112
3 months 3 weeks ago

Neither the few nor the many have a right to act merely by their will, in any matter connected with duty, trust, engagement, or obligation.

0
0
Source
source
p. 440
3 months 6 days ago

Rome is the Great Beast of atheism and materialism, adoring nothing but itself. Israel is the Great Beast of religion. Neither one nor the other is likable. The Great Beast is always repulsive.

0
0
Source
source
p. 123
2 weeks 6 days ago

No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free no one ever will.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to George Washington (9 September 1792) The word "censor" in this context means one who censures or an adverse critic not an official who decides what can be published.
3 months 1 week ago

When at the beginning of the so-called modern age, at the Renaissance, the pagan sense of religion came to life again, it took the concrete form in the knightly ideal with its codes of conduct of love and honor. But it was a paganism Christianized, baptized. "Woman - la donna - was the divinity enshrined within those savage breasts. Whosoever will investigate the memorials of primitive times will find this ideal of woman in its full force and purity; the Universe is woman.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

We tend to believe the premises because we can see that their consequences are true, instead of believing the consequences because we know the premises to be true. But the inferring of premises from consequences is the essence of induction; thus the method in investigating the principles of mathematics is really an inductive method, and is substantially the same as the method of discovering general laws in any other science.

0
0
Source
source
"The Regressive Method of Discovering the Premises of Mathematics" (1907), in Essays in Analysis (1973), pp. 273-274
4 months 2 weeks ago

And every man, in love or pride, Of his fate is ever wide.

0
0
Source
source
Nemesis
2 weeks 6 days ago

Our people... will give you all the necessaries of war they produce, if, instead of the bankrupt trash they now are obliged to receive for want of any other, you will give them a paper promise funded on a specific pledge, and of a size for common circulation.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to James Monroe, 1815. ME 14:228
4 months 3 weeks ago

Thank you for your letter and for the enclosure which I return herewith. I have been wondering whether there is any means of preventing the confusion between you and me, and I half-thought that we might write a joint letter to The Times in the following terms: Sir, To prevent the continuation of confusions which frequently occur, we beg to state that neither of us is the other. Do you think this would be a good plan?

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Lord Russell of Liverpool, February 18, 1959
3 months 1 week ago

Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, 'Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?' And then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!'

0
0
Source
source
Matthew 7:21-23 (NKJV) (Also Luke 6:24; 13:26, 27)
3 months 2 weeks ago

Three conceptions are perpetually turning up at every point in every theory of logic, and in the most rounded systems they occur in connection with one another. They are conceptions so very broad and consequently indefinite that they are hard to seize and may be easily overlooked. I call them the conceptions of First, Second, Third. First is the conception of being or existing independent of anything else. Second is the conception of being relative to, the conception of reaction with, something else. Third is the conception of mediation, whereby a first and second are brought into relation.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

These principles it is necessary strictly to attend to, because they will serve much to explain the whole course both of government and real property, wherever the German nations obtained a settlement; the whole of their government depending for the most part upon two principles in our nature,-ambition, that makes one man desirous, at any hazard or expense, of taking the lead amongst others; and admiration, which makes others equally desirous of following him from the mere pleasure of admiration, and a sort of secondary ambition, one of the most universal passions among men. These two principles, strong both of them in our nature, create a voluntary inequality and dependence.

0
0
Source
source
An Essay towards an Abridgment of English History (1757-c. 1763), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI (1856), p. 282
3 months 1 week ago

Once the philosophical foundation of democracy has collapsed, the statement that dictatorship is bad is rationally valid only for those who are not its beneficiaries, and there is no theoretical obstacle to the transformation of this statement into its opposite.

0
0
Source
source
p. 29.
1 month 2 weeks ago

Democracy is a meaningless word unless it signifies that differences of opinion have been expressed, represented, and even satisfied in the decision.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. IV: "The Line of Least Resistance", pp. 47-48
3 months 3 weeks ago

The most obvious division of society is into rich and poor; and it is no less obvious, that the number of the former bear a great disproportion to those of the latter. The whole business of the poor is to administer to the idleness, folly, and luxury of the rich; and that of the rich, in return, is to find the best methods of confirming the slavery and increasing the burdens of the poor. In a state of nature, it is an invariable law, that a man's acquisitions are in proportion to his labours. In a state of artificial society, it is a law as constant and as invariable, that those who labour most enjoy the fewest things; and that those who labour not at all have the greatest number of enjoyments. A constitution of things this, strange and ridiculous beyond expression! We scarce believe a thing when we are told it, which we actually see before our eyes every day without being in the least surprised.

0
0
2 weeks 6 days ago

A lively and lasting sense of filial duty is more effectually impressed on the mind of a son or daughter by reading King Lear, than by all the dry volumes of ethics, and divinity, that ever were written.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Robert Skipwith (3 August 1771) ; also in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (19 Vols., 1905) edited by Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, Vol. 4, p. 239
3 months 1 week ago

There is no tyranny in the world more hateful than that of ideas. Ideas bring ideophobia, and the consequence is that people begin to persecute their neighbors in the name of ideas. I loathe and detest all labels, and the only label that I could now tolerate would be that of ideoclast or idea breaker.

0
0
Source
source
Recalled by Walter Starkie from a conversation he had with Unamuno, as related in the Epilogue of Unamuno.
1 month 1 week ago

Civil government does by its nature include much that is mechanical, and must be treated accordingly. We term it indeed, in ordinary language, the Machine of Society, and talk of it as the grand working wheel from which all private machines must derive, or to which they must adapt, their movements.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

The Superior Man is all-embracing and not partial. The inferior man is partial and not all-embracing.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

At this very moment, I am suffering - as we say in French, j'ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

Boldness formerly was not the character of Atheists as such. ... But of late they are grown active, designing, turbulent, and seditious.

0
0
Source
source
"Thoughts on French Affairs" (December 1791), in Three Memorials on French Affairs (1797), p. 53

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia