Skip to main content
4 months 4 weeks ago

It is hardly to be believed how spiritual reflections when mixed with a little physics can hold people's attention and give them a livelier idea of God than do the often ill-applied examples of his wrath.

0
0
Source
source
A 11
6 months 2 weeks ago

If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution-then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise.

0
0
Source
source
Wanted, A New Pleasure
6 months 2 weeks ago

From the fundamental nature of the Philistine, it follows that, in regard to others, as he has no intellectual but only physical needs, he will seek those who are capable of satisfying the latter not the former. And so of all the demands he makes of others the very smallest will be that of any outstanding intellectual abilities. On the contrary, when he comes across these they will excite his antipathy and even hatred. For here he has a hateful feeling of inferiority and also a dull secret envy which he most carefully attempts to conceal even from himself; but in this way it grows sometimes into a feeling of secret rage and rancour. Therefore it will never occur to him to assess his own esteem and respect in accordance with such qualities, but they will remain exclusively reserved for rank and wealth, power and influence, as being in his eyes the only real advantages to excel in which is also his desire.

0
0
Source
source
E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, pp. 344-345

This is what captured religious people (in modern times) would have you believe. Throughout history life has been a battle, but if that were to change....

0
0
4 months 5 days ago

That mysterious independent variable of political calculation, Public Opinion.

0
0
Source
source
Universities, Actual and Ideal
6 months 1 week ago

One who is serious all day will never have a good time, while one who is frivolous all day will never establish a household.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim no. 25.
6 months 2 weeks ago

Every explanation is after all an hypothesis.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 123
5 months 3 weeks ago

Gaiety - a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine.

0
0
Source
source
"Diseases"
7 months 5 days ago

Who is this that cries from the ends of the earth? Who is this one man who reaches to the extremities of the universe? He is one, but that one is unity. He is one, not one in a single place, but the cry of this one man comes from the remotest ends of the earth. But how can this one man cry out from the ends of the earth, unless he be one in all?

0
0
Source
source
p.423
6 months 1 day ago

You will know that wretched men are the cause of their own suffering, who neither see nor hear the good that is near them, and few are the ones who know how to secure release from their troubles. Such is the fate that harms their minds; like pebbles they are tossed about from one thing to another with cares unceasing. For the dread companion Strife harms them unawares, whom one must not walk behind, but withdraw from and flee.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Divine Harmony: The Life and Teachings of Pythagoras by John Strohmeier and Peter Westbrook
6 months 1 day ago

Sobriety is the strength of the soul, for it preserves its reason unclouded by passion.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in The History of Philosophy: From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Present Century (1819) by William Enfield Sobriety is the strength of the mind
3 months 1 week ago

This worthy man, whose nephew is still minister of Eskdalemuir (and author of a book on the Jews), proved the greatest blessing to that household. My father would, in any case, have saved himself. Of the other brothers, it may be doubted whether William Brown was not the primary preserver. They all learned to he masons from him, or from one another; instead of miscellaneous laborers and hunters, became regular tradesmen, the best in all their district, the skilfullest and faithfullest, and the best-rewarded every way. Except my father, none of them attained a decisive religiousness. But they all had prudence and earnestness, love of truth, industry, and the blessings it brings.

0
0
7 months 2 weeks ago

Junz found revulsion growing strong within him. A planet full of people meant nothing against the dictates of economic necessity!

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

God, the supreme being, is neither circumscribed by space, nor touched by time; he cannot be found in a particular direction, and his essence cannot change. The secret conversation is thus entirely spiritual; it is a direct encounter between God and the soul, abstracted from all material constraints.

0
0
4 months 4 weeks ago

One has to do something new in order to see something new.

0
0
Source
source
J 1770
3 months 5 days ago

Atheists keep up their scoffing at the higher being, which was also honoured under the name of the 'highest' or être suprême, and trample in the dust one 'proof of his existence' after another, without noticing that they themselves, out of need for a higher being, only annihilate the old to make room for a new.

0
0
Source
source
Cambridge 1995, p. 38-39
5 months 2 days ago

The basic paradox about sex is that it always seems to be offering more than it can deliver. A glimpse of a girl undressing through a lighted bedroom window induces a vision of ecstatic delight, but in the actual process of persuading the girl into bed, the vision somehow evaporates.

0
0
Source
source
p. 16
4 months 2 weeks ago

Wealth is a great sin in the eyes of God. Poverty is a great sin in the eyes of man.

0
0
Source
source
p. 86
6 months 4 weeks ago

Since my logic aims to teach and instruct the understanding, not that it may with the slender tendrils of the mind snatch at and lay hold of abstract notions (as the common logic does), but that it may in very truth dissect nature, and discover the virtues and actions of bodies, with their laws as determined in matter; so that this science flows not merely from the nature of the mind, but also from the nature of things.

0
0
Source
source
Aphorism 52
6 months 2 weeks ago

Thee might observe incidentally that if the state paid for child-bearing it might and ought to require a medical certificate that the parents were such as to give a reasonable result of a healthy child - this would afford a very good inducement to some sort of care for the race, and gradually as public opinion became educated by the law, it might react on the law and make that more stringent, until one got to some state of things in which there would be a little genuine care for the race, instead of the present haphazard higgledy-piggledy ways.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Alys Pearsall Smith (1894); published in The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, Volume 1: The Private Years (1884-1914)
6 months 2 weeks ago

Exchange value forms the substance of money, and exchange value is wealth.

0
0
Source
source
Notebook II, The Chapter on Money, p. 141.
6 months 2 weeks ago

The individual produces an object and, by consuming it, returns to himself, but returns as a productive and self reproducing individual. Consumption thus appears as a moment of production.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction, p. 14.
4 months 2 weeks ago

Try not to have Emily exposed to hours and hours of TV. It is a vile drug which permeates the nervous system, especially in the young.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to son Eric McLuhan, regarding one of Eric's daughters, 1976
5 months 2 weeks ago

The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor - hence, on the changing state of business, on the vagaries of unbridled competition.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

I am further of opinion that it would be better for us to have [no laws] at all than to have them in so prodigious numbers as we have.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, Ch. 13. Of Experience
5 months 2 weeks ago

It was evident that he revived by fits and starts. He would suddenly come to himself from actual delirium for a few minutes; he would remember and talk with complete consciousness, chiefly in disconnected phrases which he had perhaps thought out and learnt by heart in the long weary hours of his illness, in his bed, in sleepless solitude.

0
0
Source
source
Part 2, Chapter 10
5 months 5 days ago

There is absolute truth in anarchism and it is to be seen in its attitude to the sovereignty of the state and to every form of state absolutism. ... The religious truth of anarchism consists in this, that power over man is bound up with sin and evil, that a state of perfection is a state where there is no power of man over man, that is to say, anarchy. The Kingdom of God is freedom and the absence of such power... the Kingdom of God is anarchy.

0
0
Source
source
Slavery and Freedom (1939), p. 147
4 months 2 weeks ago

'BUT science and art! You are denying science and art: that is you are denying that by which humanity lives.' People constantly make this rejoinder to me, and they employ: this method in order to reject my arguments without examination. 'He rejects science and art, he wishes man to revert to a state of savagery - why listen to him or discuss with him?' But this is unjust. Not only do I not repudiate science, that is, the reasonable activity of humanity, and art - the expression of that reasonable activity - but it is just on behalf of that reasonable activity and its expression that I speak, only that It may be possible for mankind to escape from the savage state into which it is rapidly lapsing thanks to the false teaching of our time. It is only on that account that I speak as I do.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

Death is too exact; it has all the reasons on its side. Mysterious for our instincts, it takes shape, to our reflection, limpid, without glamor, and without the false lures of the unknown. By dint of accumulating non-mysteries and monopolizing non-meanings, life inspires more dread than death: it is life which is the Great Unknown.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

As the Swiss inscription says: Sprechen ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden- "Speech is silvern, Silence is golden"; or, as I might rather express it: speech is of time, silence is of eternity.

0
0
Source
source
Bk. III, ch. 3.
2 months 2 weeks ago

Historically, the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

There is no one whose death I have not longed for, at one moment or another.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

What chance has Vulcan against Roberts & Co., Jupiter against the lightning-rod and Hermes against the Credit Mobilier? All mythology overcomes and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in the imagination and by the imagination; it therefore vanishes with the advent of real mastery over them.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction, p. 30.
5 months 6 days ago

A terrible thing is intelligence. It tends to death as memory tends to stability. The living, the absolutely unstable, the absolutely individual, is strictly unintelligible. Logic tends to reduce everything to identities and genera, to each representation having no more than one self-same content in whatever place, time or relation it may occur to us. And there is nothing that remains for two successive moments of its existence. My idea of God is different each time that I conceive it. Identity, which is death, is the goal of the intellect. The mind seeks what is dead, for what is living escapes it; it seeks to congeal the flowing stream in blocks of ice; it seeks to arrest it. In order to analyze a body it is necessary to extenuate or destroy it. In order to understand anything it is necessary to kill it, to lay it out rigid in the mind.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

He was as great as a man can be without morality.

0
0
Source
source
Said of Napoleon (1842)
2 months 2 weeks ago

Only now, as we feel the onslaught behind us, do we begin dimly to apprehend why the animals fought, begot, and died; and behind them the plants; and behind these the huge reserve of inorganic forces. We are moved by pity, gratitude, and esteem for our old comrades-in-arms. They toiled, loved, and died to open a road for our coming. We also toil with the same delight, agony, and exaltation for the sake of Someone Else who with every courageous deed of ours proceeds one step farther. All our struggle once more will have a purpose much greater than we, wherein our toils, our miseries, and our crimes will have become useful and holy.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

It is the love of the people; it is their attachment to their government, from the sense of the deep stake they have in such a glorious institution, which gives you both your army and your navy, and infuses into both that liberal obedience, without which your army would be a base rabble, and your navy nothing but rotten timber.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

Language is a sense, like touch.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 271)
5 months 5 days ago

The dressing up and puffing up of the individual erases the lineaments of protest.

0
0
Source
source
p. 283
5 months 2 days ago

Eros, erotic desire, conquers depression. It delivers us from the inferno of the same to the utopia, indeed utopia, of the wholly other.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

Never has there been one possessed of complete sincerity who did not move others. Never has there been one who had not sincerity who was able to move others.

0
0
Source
source
Discipline and Character, no. 55
3 months 2 weeks ago

All wars today tend to be netwars.

0
0
Source
source
55
5 months 6 days ago

In fact, for a voluntarist like Schopenhauer, a theory so sanely and cautiously empirical and rational as that of Darwin, left out of account the inward force, the essential motive, of evolution. For what is, in effect, the hidden force, the ultimate agent, which impels organisms to perpetuate themselves and to fight for their persistence and propagation? Selection, adaptation, heredity, these are only external conditions. This inner, essential force has been called will on the supposition that there exists also in other beings that which we feel in ourselves as a feeling of will, the impulse to be everything, to be others as well as ourselves yet without ceasing to be what we are.

0
0
3 months ago

The psychotherapist ... tries to help the individual to be himself and to go it alone without giving unnecessary offense to his community, to be in the world (of social convention) but not of the world.

0
0
Source
source
p. 7
5 months 2 weeks ago

To be a good mother - a woman must have sense, and that independence of mind which few women possess who are taught to depend entirely on their husbands. Meek wives are, in general, foolish mothers; wanting their children to love them best, and take their part, in secret, against the father, who is held up as a scarecrow.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 10
5 months 2 days ago

Often what is absent has more power than what is present.

0
0
5 months 3 days ago

Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling. ... identification of rhythm as the causal counterpart of life; wherever there is some life, only perceptible to us when the analogies are sufficiently close ... The rhythm is then the life, in the sense in which it can be said to be included within nature.

0
0
Source
source
p. 197
5 months 2 weeks ago

Irons and the unbreathable air of this world strip us of everything, except the freedom to kill ourselves; and this freedom grants us a strength and pride to triumph over the loads which overwhelm us.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia