Skip to main content
6 months 3 weeks ago

Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. III: Of Individuality, As One of the Elements of Well-Being
6 months 2 weeks ago

What can be said can and should always be said more and more simply and clearly.

0
0
6 months 4 weeks ago

When speaking of the spiritual nature or the soul, we are referring to that which is "inner" or "new." When speaking of the bodily nature, or that which is flesh and blood, we are referring to that which is called "sensual," "outward," or "old." Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 4:16: "Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day."

0
0
Source
source
p. 51
3 months 1 week ago

Flimsy, desultory readers, who fly from foolish book to foolish book, and get good of none, and mischief of all-are not these as foolish, unhealthy eaters, who mistake their superficial false desire after spiceries and confectioneries for their real appetite, of which even they are not destitute, though it lies far deeper, far quieter, after solid nutritive food?

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

But to return to the Jewish question. Other groups and nations cultivate their individual traditions. There is no reason why we should sacrifice ours. Standardization robs life of its spice. To deprive every ethnic group of its special traditions is to convert the world into a huge Ford plant. I believe in standardizing automobiles. I do not believe in standardizing human beings. Standardization is a great peril which threatens American culture.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

Self-sufficiency is the greatest of all wealth.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

One of the greatest delusions of the average man is to forget that life is death's prisoner.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

Appealing to his [Einstein's] way of expressing himself in theological terms, I said: If God had wanted to put everything into the universe from the beginning, He would have created a universe without change, without organisms and evolution, and without man and man's experience of change. But he seems to have thought that a live universe with events unexpected even by Himself would be more interesting than a dead one.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes by Charles Hartshorne
4 months 2 weeks ago

One of the things that happens at the speed of light is that people lose their goals in life. So what takes the place of goals and objectives? Well, role-playing is coming in very fast.

0
0
Source
source
Interview between Californian Governor Jerry Brown and Marshall McLuhan, 1977
5 months 3 days ago

Witness the tragic condition of Russia. The methods of State centralization have paralysed individual initiative and effort; the tyranny of the dictatorship has cowed the people into slavish submission and all but extinguished the fires of liberty; organized terrorism has depraved and brutalized the masses and stifled every idealistic aspiration; institutionalized murder has cheapened human life, and all sense of the dignity of man and the value of life has been eliminated; coercion at every step has made effort bitter, labour a punishment, has turned the whole of existence into a scheme of mutual deceit, and has revived the lowest and most brutal instincts of man. A sorry heritage to begin a new life of freedom and brotherhood.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

If the colleges were better, if they ... had the power of imparting valuable thought, creative principles, truths which become powers, thoughts which become talents, - if they could cause that a mind not profound should become profound, - we should all rush to their gates: instead of contriving inducements to draw students, you would need to set policy at the gates to keep order in the in-rushing multitude.

0
0
Source
source
The Celebration of Intellect, 1861
1 month 3 weeks ago

After years of study, consolidation, destruction, rebuilding, shifting, redefining….it eventually stops, I promise. It doesn’t go on forever, for all intents and purposes. Functionally we don’t have to know everything to know enough. We can know what is good, simply by knowing enough.

Studying objective reality, watching the consequences of subjectively driven beings setting certain principles but failing to evaluate the consequences of their insistence drove me to investigate to understand.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

Man, if he is to remain man, must advance by way of consciousness. There is no road leading backward. ... We can no longer veil reality from ourselves by renouncing self-consciousness without simultaneously excluding ourselves from the historical course of human existence.

0
0
6 months 4 weeks ago

Above all, every relation must be considered as suspicious, which depends in any degree upon religion, as the prodigies of Livy: And no less so, everything that is to be found in the writers of natural magic or alchemy, or such authors, who seem, all of them, to have an unconquerable appetite for falsehood and fable.

0
0
Source
source
Aphorism 29
5 months 3 days ago

It is characteristic of theistic "tolerance" that no one really cares what the people believe in, just so they believe or pretend to believe.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

Mark what 'tis his mind aims at in the question, and not what words he expresses it in: and when you have informed and satisfied him in that, you shall see how his thoughts will enlarge themselves, and how by fit answers he may be led on farther than perhaps you could have imagine. For knowledge is grateful to the understanding, as light to the eyes.

0
0
Source
source
Sec. 118
4 months 6 days ago

Whatever part of the animal fabric-whatever series of muscles, whatever viscera might be selected for comparison-the result would be the same-the lower Apes and the Gorilla would differ more than the Gorilla and the Man.

0
0
Source
source
Ch.2, p. 101
6 months 2 weeks ago

The Enlightenment worldview held by Du Bois is ultimately inadequate, and, in many ways, antiquated, for our time. The tragic plight and absurd predicament of Africans here and abroad requires a more profound interpretation of the human condition - one that goes beyond the false dichotomies of expert knowledge vs. mass ignorance, individual autonomy vs. dogmatic authority, and self-mastery vs. intolerant tradition.

0
0
Source
source
The Future of the Race (1997) by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Cornel West, p. 64
5 months 2 weeks ago

"Can any good come out of Nazareth?" This is always the question of the wiseacres and the knowing ones. But the good, the new, comes from exactly that quarter whence it is not looked for, and is always something different from what is expected. Everything new is received with contempt, for it begins in obscurity. It becomes a power unobserved.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in "Voices of the New Time" as translated by C. C. Shackford in The Radical Vol. 7 (1870), p. 329
6 months 4 weeks ago

My appetite comes to me while eating.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, Ch. 9. Of Vanity
5 months 3 days ago

Anarchism, more than any other social theory, values human life above things.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

...for stones, plants, and animals there is no God, but only for man.

0
0

Yeah...whatever misery you are enduring....it could be worse....

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

Computers can do better than ever what needn't be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 109)
6 months 3 weeks ago

When we have weighed everything, and when our relations in life permit us to choose any given position, we may take that one which guarantees us the greatest dignity, which is based on ideas of whose truth we are completely convinced, which offers the largest field to work for mankind and approach the universal goal for which every position is only a means: perfection.

0
0
Source
source
Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, L. Easton, trans. (1967), p. 38
4 months 4 weeks ago

Computers were within my sphere of attention, but only computers used as number crunchers. In spite of the "giant brain" metaphor, there is little suggestion in this 1950 talk that the most important application of computers might lie in imitating intelligence symbolically, not numerically.

0
0
Source
source
p. 199.
2 months 2 weeks ago

Depart then satisfied, for he also who releases thee is satisfied.

0
0
Source
source
XII, 36
3 months 5 days ago

It is to this law that our souls must adjust themselves, this they should follow, this they should obey. Whatever happens, assume that it was bound to happen, and do not be willing to rail at Nature. That which you cannot reform, it is best to endure, and to attend uncomplainingly upon the God under whose guidance everything progresses; for it is a bad soldier who grumbles when following his commander.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

The claims of existing social arrangements and of self interest have been duly allowed for. We cannot at the end count them a second time because we do not like the result.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter III, Section 23, pg. 135
7 months 3 days ago

What is it, in your opinion, to be a great nobleman? It is to be master of several objects that men covet, and thus to be able to satisfy the wants and the desires of many. It is these wants and these desires that attract them towards you, and that make them submit to you: were it not for these, they would not even look at you; but they hope, by these services... to obtain from you some part of the good which they desire, and of which they see that you have the disposal.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

If one has no vanity in this life of ours, there is no sufficient reason for living.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 23. This is not, as it is often quoted, a stand-alone Tolstoy epigram, but part of the narration by the novella's jealousy-ridden protagonist Pozdnyshev.
2 months 2 weeks ago

Look at everything that exists, and observe that it is already in dissolution and change, and as it were putrefaction or dispersion, or that everything is so constituted in nature as to die.

0
0
Source
source
X, 18
3 months 1 week ago

What the Universities have mainly done-what I have found the University did for me, was that it taught me to read in various languages and various sciences, so that I could go into the books that treated of these things, and try anything I wanted to make myself master of gradually, as I found it suit me. Whatever you may think of all that, the clearest and most imperative duty lies on every one of you to be assiduous in your reading; and learn to be good readers, which is, perhaps, a more difficult thing than you imagine. Learn to be discriminative in your reading-to read all kinds of things that you have an interest in, and that you find to be really fit for what you are engaged in.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

Do you think that God will punish them for not practicing a religion which he did not reveal to them?

0
0
Source
source
No. 35. (Usbek writing to Gemchid)
5 months 3 weeks ago

In the United States, except for slaves, servants and the destitute fed by townships, everyone has the vote and this is an indirect contributor to law-making. Anyone wishing to attack the law is thus reduced to adopting one of two obvious courses: they must either change the nation's opinion or trample its wishes under foot.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter XIV.
2 months 2 weeks ago

Everything predicted by the enemies of banks, in the beginning, is now coming to pass. We are to be ruined now by the deluge of bank paper. It is cruel that such revolutions in private fortunes should be at the mercy of avaricious adventurers, who, instead of employing their capital, if any they have, in manufactures, commerce, and other useful pursuits, make it an instrument to burden all the interchanges of property with their swindling profits, profits which are the price of no useful industry of theirs.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Thomas Cooper, 1814. ME 14:61
5 months 2 weeks ago

In the first place, the German is a branch of the Teutonic race. Of the latter it is sufficient to say here that its mission was to combine the social order established in ancient Europe with the true religion preserved in ancient Asia, and in this way to develop in and by itself a new and different age after the ancient world had perished.

0
0
Source
source
The Chief Difference Between The Germans And The Other Peoples Of Teutonic Descent.
6 months 2 weeks ago

Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.

0
0
Source
source
Montaigne; or, The Skeptic
6 months 3 weeks ago

If there were only one religion in England there would be danger of despotism, if there were two they would cut each other's throats, but there are thirty, and they live in peace and happiness.

0
0
Source
source
Letters on England, letter 6, "On the Presbyterians" Trans. Leonard Tancock (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1980): p. 41, published first in English in 1733.
5 months 2 weeks ago

A pair of statements may be taken conjunctively or disjunctively; for example, "It lightens and it thunders," is conjunctive, "It lightens or it thunders" is disjunctive. Each such individual act of connecting a pair of statements is a new monad for the mathematician.

0
0
Source
source
p. 268
6 months 1 week ago

We know nothing accurately in reality, but only as it changes according to the bodily condition, and the constitution of those things that flow upon the body and impinge upon it.

0
0
Source
source
Freeman (1948), p. 142
2 months 2 weeks ago

In your actions, don't procrastinate. In your conversations, don't confuse. In your thoughts, don't wander. In your soul, don't be passive or aggressive. In your life, don't be all about business.

0
0
Source
source
VIII. 51:209
6 months 3 weeks ago

It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Harrison Blake, November 16, 1857

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia