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3 months 3 weeks ago

In its most general form, confinement was explained, or at least justified, by a will to avoid scandal. It thereby signalled an important change in the consciousness of evil. The Renaissance had let unreason in all its forms come out into the light of day, as public exposure gave evil the chance to redeem itself and to serve as an exemplum.

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Part One: 5. The Insane
4 months 1 week ago

C'est une maladie naturelle à l'homme de croire qu'il possède la vérité directement... It is a natural illness of man to think that he possesses the truth directly... Section I Variant translation: It is man's natural sickness to believe that he possesses the Truth.

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4 months ago

If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.

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"Is Life Worth Living?"
3 months 2 weeks ago

Virtue cannot dwell with wealth either in a city or in a house.

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Stobaeus, iv. 31c. 88
2 months 2 weeks ago

In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world.

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Ch. 5: "The Romantic Reaction", p. 128
2 months 3 weeks ago

Whoever abhors the name and fancies that he is godless - when he addresses with his whole devoted being the Thou of his life that cannot be restricted by any other, he addresses God.

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4 months 2 days ago

The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 1, § 1
2 months 3 weeks ago

The animating purpose of James was, on the other hand, primarily moral and artistic. It is expressed in his phrase, "block universe," employed as a term of adverse criticism. Mechanism and idealism were abhorrent to him because they both hold to a closed universe in which there is no room for novelty and adventure. Both sacrifice individuality and all the values, moral and aesthetic, which hang upon individuality; for according to absolute idealism, as to mechanistic materialism, the individual is simply a part determined by the whole of which he is a part. Only a philosophy of pluralism, of genuine indetermination, and of change which is real and intrinsic gives significance to individuality. It alone justifies struggle in creative activity and gives opportunity for the emergence of the genuinely new.

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4 months 1 day ago

So long as the product is sold, everything is taking its regular course from the standpoint of the capitalist producer.

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Vol. II, Ch. II, p. 78.
4 months 4 weeks ago

There is more to a science fiction story than the science it contains.

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2 months ago

The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.

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Ch. 5, translated by David Patterson, 1983
2 months 1 week ago

The period of the actual revolution, the so-called transitory stage, must be the introduction, the prelude to the new social conditions. It is the threshold to the NEW LIFE, the new HOUSE OF MAN AND HUMANITY. As such it must be of the spirit of the new life, harmonious with the construction of the new edifice.

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2 weeks 1 day ago

Besides, he who is feared, fears also; no one has been able to arouse terror and live in peace of mind.

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The barrenest of all mortals is the sentimentalist.

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Characteristics.
1 month 3 weeks ago

But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

The superior man, when resting in safety, does not forget that danger may come. When in a state of security he does not forget the possibility of ruin. When all is orderly, he does not forget that disorder may come. Thus his person is not endangered, and his States and all their clans are preserved.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

No human being escapes the necessity of conceiving some good outside himself towards which his thought turns in a movement of desire, supplication, and hope. consequently, the only choice is between worshipping the true God or an idol. Every atheist is an idolater - unless he is worshipping the true God in his impersonal aspect. The majority of the pious are idolaters.

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Last Notebook (1942) p. 308
5 months 3 days ago
The man who does not wish to belong to the mass needs only to cease taking himself easily; let him follow his conscience, which calls to him: Be your self! All you are now doing, thinking, desiring, is not you yourself.
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1 month 4 weeks ago

The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture.

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(p. 168)
5 months 1 day ago

Nature flies from the infinite, for the infinite is unending or imperfect, and Nature ever seeks an end.

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5 months 1 day ago

The natural way of doing this [seeking scientific knowledge or explanation of fact] is to start from the things which are more knowable and obvious to us and proceed towards those which are clearer and more knowable by nature; for the same things are not 'knowable relatively to us' and 'knowable' without qualification. So in the present inquiry we must follow this method and advance from what is more obscure by nature, but clearer to us, towards what is more clear and more knowable by nature. Now what is to us plain and obvious at first is rather confused masses, the elements and principles of which became known to us by later analysis...

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.

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4 months 1 week ago

Omnipotence and foreknowledge of God, I repeat, utterly destroy the doctrine of 'free-will' ... doubtless it gives the greatest possible offense to common sense or natural reason, that God, Who is proclaimed as being full of mercy and goodness, and so on, should of His own mere will abandon, harden and damn men, as though He delighted in the sins and great eternal torments of such poor wretches. It seems an iniquitous, cruel, intolerable thought to think of God; and it is this that has been such a stumbling block to so many great men down through the ages. And who would not stumble at it? I have stumbled at it myself more than once, down to the deepest pit of despair, so that I wished I had never been made a man.

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(That was before I knew how health-giving that despair was, and how close to grace p. 217)
1 month 3 weeks ago

I was forced, through seeing the error of their foundation, to abandon all belief in every religion which had been taught to man. But my religious feelings were immediately replaced by the spirit of universal charity - not for a sect, or a party, or for a country or a colour - but for the human race, and with a real and ardent desire to do good.

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Life of Robert Owen (1857) his autobiography, as quoted by Jim Herrick, in "Bradlaugh and Secularism: 'The Province of the Real'"
4 months 1 week ago

Labour not after riches first, and think thou afterwards wilt enjoy them. He who neglecteth the present moment, throweth away all that he hath. As the arrow passeth through the heart, while the warrior knew not that it was coming; so shall his life be taken away before he knoweth that he hath it.

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Good wine is a necessity of life for me.

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As quoted in The Man from Monticello : An Intimate Life of Thomas Jefferson (1969) by Thomas J. Fleming, p. 250
2 months 3 weeks ago

...the relatively unconscious man driven by his natural impulses because, imprisoned in his familiar world, he clings to the commonplace, the obvious, the probable, the collectively valid, using for his motto: 'Thinking is difficult. Therefore, let the herd pronounce judgement.'

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Frequently misquoted as "Thinking is difficult, that's why most people judge" and close variants. Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky. (1959), C.G. Jung, R.F.C. Hull (translator) (Princeton Press, 1979, ISBN 9780691018225

A man is a god in ruins.

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Prospects
2 months 3 weeks ago

It must be emphasized that the warrior spirit is one thing and the military spirit quite another. Militarism was unknown in the Middle Ages. The soldier signifies the degeneration of the warrior, corrupted by the industrialist. The soldier is an armed industrialist, a bourgeois who has invented gunpowder. He was organized by the state to make war on the castles. With his coming, long-distance warfare appeared, the abstract war waged by cannon and machine gun.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

The mind that puts everything in question, reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?

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1 month 3 weeks ago

The real reason people are conservatives is that they are attached to the things that they love, and want to preserve them from abuse and decay. They are attached to their family, their friends, their religion, and their immediate environment. They have made a lifelong distinction between the things that nourish and the things that threaten their security and peace of mind.

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Conservatism and the Conservatory,, National Review
3 months ago

The blindness of those who think it absurd to suppose that complex organic forms may have arisen by successive modifications out of simple ones becomes astonishing when we remember that complex organic forms are daily being thus produced. A tree differs from a seed immeasurably in every respect... Yet is the one changed in the course of a few years into the other: changed so gradually, that at no moment can it be said - Now the seed ceases to be, and the tree exists.

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3 months 6 days ago

I thanke God for my happy Dreams|dreames, as I doe for my good rest, for there is a satisfaction in them unto reasonable desires, and such as can be content with a fit of happinesse; and surely it is not a melancholy conceite to thinke we are all asleepe in this world, and that the conceits of this life are as meare dreames to those of the next, as the Phantasmes of the night, to the conceit of the day. There is an equall delusion in both, and the one doth but seeme to bee the embleme or picture of the other;

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Section 12

The government of the United States have no idea of paying their debt in a depreciated medium, and... in the final liquidation of the payments which shall have been made, due regard will be had to an equitable allowance for the circumstance of depreciation.

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Letter to Jean Baptiste de Ternant, 1791. ME 8:247

Dispersed as the Jews are, they still form one nation, foreign to the land they live in.

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As quoted in The Americans by Daniel Boorstin. See Truth from the "Zog Bog" by Gyeorgos Ceres Hatonn, 1993, 224 p.
4 months 1 day ago

We are obviously heading for revolution-something I have never once doubted since 1850. The first act will include a by no means gratifying rehash of the stupidities of '48-'49. However, that's how world history runs its course, and one has to take it as one finds it.

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Letter to Ludwig Kugelmann (28 December 1862), quoted in The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Volume 41. Letters 1860-64 (2010), p. 437
2 weeks 1 day ago

Mucius might have accomplished something more successful in that camp, but never anything more brave.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

In contrast to "Blessed are they who do not see and still believe," he speaks of "seeing and still not believing."

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p. 30
1 month 4 weeks ago

Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the electronic world.

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(p. 30)
4 months 1 day ago

Those things which now most engage the attention of men, as politics and the daily routine, are, it is true, vital functions of human society, but should be unconsciously performed, like the corresponding functions of the physical body. They are infra-human, a kind of vegetation. I sometimes awake to a half-consciousness of them going on about me, as a man may become conscious of some of the processes of digestion in a morbid state, and so have the dyspepsia, as it is called.

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p. 495
1 week 1 day ago

There are two kinds of animals on earth. One kind minds his own business, the other minds other people's business. The former are vegetarians, like cows, sheep and thinking men. The latter are carnivorous, like hawks, tigers and men of action.

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As quoted by Tai-yi Lin (Lin Yutang's daughter) in her Foreword (26 March 1950) to The Importance of Living, p. x
3 months 4 weeks ago

He chooses the most feared, most hated man in order to worship him as a god, feeling sure that he is alone in perceiving the god's secret virtues.

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p. 165
2 months 3 weeks ago

What an incitation to hilarity, hearing the word goal while following a funeral procession!

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4 months 1 week ago

Rules necessary for demonstrations. To prove all propositions, and to employ nothing for their proof but axioms fully evident of themselves, or propositions already demonstrated or admitted; Never to take advantage of the ambiguity of terms by failing mentally to substitute definitions that restrict or explain them.

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3 months 5 days ago

The power of the periodical press is second only to that of the people.

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Chapter XI.
3 months 4 weeks ago

I have no need for good souls: an accomplice is what I wanted.

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Electra to her brother Orestes, Act 2
2 months 3 weeks ago

Every change in the social order, every revolution in property relations, is the necessary consequence of the creation of new forces of production which no longer fit into the old property relations. Private property has not always existed. When, towards the end of the Middle Ages, there arose a new mode of production which could not be carried on under the then existing feudal and guild forms of property, this manufacture, which had outgrown the old property relations, created a new property form, private property. And for manufacture and the earliest stage of development of big industry, private property was the only possible property form; the social order based on it was the only possible social order.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

Gutenberg made all history available as classified data: the transportable book brought the world of the dead into the space of the gentlemen's library; the telegraph brought the entire world of the living to the workman's breakfast table.

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(p. 15)

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