Skip to main content
4 months 1 week ago

I never read a book before reviewing it: it prejudices a man so.

0
0
Source
source
Reported in Bon-Mots of Sydney Smith and R. Brinsley Sheridan, edited by Walter Jerrold with grotesques by Aubrey Beardsley (London: J. M. Dent and Company, 1893), p. 24
7 months 3 weeks ago

If you are not already dead, forgive. Rancor is heavy, it is worldly; leave it on earth: die light.

0
0
Source
source
Act 1
3 months 3 weeks ago

...undefiled by pleasures, invulnerable to any pain, untouched by arrogance, unaffected by meanness, an athlete in the greatest of all contests-the struggle not to be overwhelmed by anything that happens.

0
0
Source
source
(Hays translation) III, 4
4 months 3 weeks ago

The straightening board was created because of warped wood, and the plumb line came into being because of things that are not straight. Rulers are established and ritual and rightness are illuminated because the nature is evil.

0
0
Source
source
Sources of Chinese Tradition (1999), vol. 1, p. 182
6 months 3 weeks ago

The pessimist has to invent new reasons to exist every day: he is a victim of the "meaning" of life.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

Myths are not descriptions of things, but expressions of a determination to act... A myth cannot be refuted since it is, at bottom, identical with the convictions of a group, being the expression of these convictions in the language of movement.

0
0
Source
source
p. 28-29 (Letter to Daniel Halevy)
6 months 3 weeks ago

Originally, ethics has no existence apart from religion, which holds it in solution.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1, The Confusion of Ethical Thought
7 months 3 days ago

We vainly accuse the fury of guns, and the new inventions of death; it is in the power of every hand to destroy us, and we are beholden unto every one we meet he doth not kill us.

0
0
Source
source
Section 44
7 months 2 weeks ago

Science does not stand still, and neither does philosophy, although the latter has a tendency to walk in circles.

0
0
Source
source
Afterword To The 2011 Edition, p. 187
4 months 5 days ago

Whoever criticizes others must have something to replace them. Criticism without suggestion is like trying to stop flood with flood and put out fire with fire. It will surely be without worth.

0
0
Source
source
Book 4; Universal Love III
6 months 2 weeks ago

Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.

0
0
Source
source
19:14 (KJV)
7 months 3 weeks ago

It seems to me that the current political task in a society like ours is to criticize the working of institutions that are apparently the most neutral and independent, to criticize these institutions and attack them in such a way that the political violence that exercises itself obscurely through them becomes manifest, so that one can fight against them.

0
0
Source
source
Debate with Noam Chomsky, École Supérieure de Technologie à Eindhoven, November 1971
5 months 4 weeks ago

I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

0
0
Source
source
Knowing What's Nice, an essay from In These Times
8 months 3 weeks ago

A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images. And in a good novel, the whole of the philosophy has passed into the images. But if once the philosophy overflows the characters and action, and therefore looks like a label stuck on the work, the plot loses its authenticity and the novel its life. Nevertheless, a work that is to last cannot dispense with profound ideas. And this secret fusion between experiences and ideas, between life and reflection on the meaning of life, is what makes the great novelist.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

I have always taken as the standard of the mode of teaching and writing, not the abstract, particular, professional philosopher, but universal man, that I have regarded man as the criterion of truth, and not this or that founder of a system, and have from the first placed the highest excellence of the philosopher in this, that he abstains, both as a man and as an author, from the ostentation of philosophy, i.e., that he is a philosopher only in reality, not formally, that he is a quiet philosopher, not a loud and still less a brawling one.

0
0
Source
source
Preface to Second Edition
6 months 3 weeks ago

If women be educated for dependence; that is, to act according to the will of another fallible being, and submit, right or wrong, to power, where are we to stop?

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 3
4 months 3 weeks ago

After World War II, liberal rights were not something that were only deserved by white Europeans. ...There was a recognition that the black and brown peoples being held in colonial bondage could not consistently be held in that bondage, because liberalism was a universal doctrine. ...That's the other respect in which we can defend liberalism, a moral one.

0
0
Source
source
10:30
4 months 1 week ago

At about the age of eleven, I was reading the thrillers of Sax Rohmer and Edgar Wallace concerning Dr. Fu Manchu and other sophisticated Chinese villains, nurturing a secret admiration for these gentlemen because of their opposition to the suet-pudding heroism of our own culture, and because of their refined and mysterious style of life. While other boys dreamed of becoming generals, cowboys, mountain climbers, explorers, and engineers, I wanted to be a Chinese villain. I wanted servants carrying knives in their sleeves, appearing or vanishing without the slightest sound. I wanted a house with secret doors and passages, with Coromandel screens, with ancient scrolls, with ivory and lacquer boxes of exotic poisons, with exquisite brands of tea, with delicate blue porcelain, with jade idols and joss-sticks, and with sonorous gongs.

0
0
Source
source
p. 63-64
3 months 2 weeks ago

I do not carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books. ...The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

To eat is to appropriate by destruction.

0
0
Source
source
Part 3: Being-For-Others
7 months 2 weeks ago

Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one's arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one's mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one's feet in an attic. Insofar as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task.

0
0
Source
source
p. 169.
6 months 2 weeks ago

To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. III: Industry, Government, the peasants
3 months 3 weeks ago

Whatever is in any way beautiful hath its source of beauty in itself, and is complete in itself; praise forms no part of it. So it is none the worse nor the better for being praised. Variant: That which is really beautiful has no need of anything.

0
0
Source
source
(trans. George Long) IV, 20
3 months 3 weeks ago

The concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

Science is international but its success is based on institutions, which are owned by nations. If therefore, we wish to promote culture we have to combine and to organize institutions with our own power and means.

0
0
Source
source
When asked the question, "Why a 'Jewish' University?" when Einstein was assisting Chaim Weizmann in fundraising for The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. | As quoted in [Albert Einstein, Letter "Einstein in Singapore." Manchester Guardian, October 12, 1929]
2 months 3 weeks ago

I used to support Jesus because he's a universalist...sometimes. But I revisited the writings attributed to him and I realized he does a lot of demanding obedience and threatening the other. So, now I give no ground to Christians on it. Jesus, as written was 50% a good example, and 50% totalitarian dictator. THAT is not what humanity needs.

0
0
8 months ago

The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space.

0
0
Source
source
B 8
6 months 1 week ago

Open, honest, truth-telling individuals value privacy. We all need spaces where we can be alone with thoughts and feelings - where we can experience healthy psychological autonomy and can choose to share when we want to.

0
0
Source
source
All About Love: New Visions
7 months 2 weeks ago

There are two sentences inscribed upon the Delphic oracle, hugely accommodated to the usages of man's life: "Know thyself," and "Nothing too much;" and upon these all other precepts depend.

0
0
8 months 5 days ago

This return of Republics back to their principles also results from the simple virtue of one man, without depending on any law that excites him to any execution: none the less, they are of such influence and example that good men desire to imitate him, and the wicked are ashamed to lead a life contrary to those examples.

0
0
Source
source
Book 3, Ch. 1
3 months 3 weeks ago

For Lenin, the difference between the Social Democracy and Blanquism is reduced to the observation that in place of a handful of conspirators we have a class-conscious proletariat. He forgets that this difference implies a complete revision of our ideas on organization and, therefore, an entirely different conception of centralism and the relations existing between the party and the struggle itself.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

There are two types of poor people, those who are poor together and those who are poor alone. The first are the true poor, the others are rich people out of luck.

0
0
Source
source
Act 4, sc. 5
6 months 2 weeks ago

The 'public' is a phantom, the phantom of an opinion supposed to exist in a vast number of persons who have no effective interrelation and though the opinion is not effectively present in the units. Such an opinion is spoken of as 'public opinion,' a fiction which is appealed to by individuals and by groups as supporting their special views. It is impalpable, illusory, transient; "'tis here, 'tis there, 'tis gone"; a nullity which can nevertheless for a moment endow the multitude with power to uplift or destroy.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

An army and navy represents the people's toys.

0
0
8 months ago

Young man! Deny yourself satisfaction (of amusement, of debauchery, of love, etc.), not with the Stoical intention of complete abstinence, but with the refined Epicurean intention of having in view an ever-growing pleasure. This stinginess with the cash of your vital urge makes you definitely richer through the postponement of pleasure, even if you should, for the most part, renounce the indulgence of it until the end of your life. The awareness of having pleasure under your control is, like everything idealistic, more fruitful and more abundant than everything that satisfies the sense through indulgence because it is thereby simultaneously consumed and consequently lost from the aggregate of totality.

0
0
Source
source
Kant, Immanuel (1996), page 54.
3 months 3 weeks ago

The Pennsylvania legislature, who, on a proposition to make the belief in God a necessary qualification for office, rejected it by a great majority, although assuredly there was not a single atheist in their body. And you remember to have heard, that when the act for religious freedom was before the Virginia Assembly, a motion to insert the name of Jesus Christ before the phrase, "the author of our holy religion," which stood in the bill, was rejected, although that was the creed of a great majority of them.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Albert Gallatin (16 June 1817). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 12, p. 73
3 months 3 weeks ago

Everything that happens is either endurable or not. If it's endurable, then endure it. Stop complaining. If it's unendurable . . . then stop complaining. Your destruction will mean its end as well.

0
0
Source
source
(Hays translation) X, 3
8 months 6 days ago

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

0
0
Source
source
Of Studies
7 months 3 weeks ago

Mathematics is as little a natural science as philosophy is one of the humanities. Philosophy in its essence belongs as little in the philosophical faculty as mathematics belongs to natural science. To house philosophy and mathematics in this way today seems to be a blemish or a mistake in the catalog of the universities. Plato put over the entrance to his Academy the words: "Let no one who has not grasped the mathematical enter here!"

0
0
Source
source
p. 69,75
3 months 4 weeks ago

Amidst our greatest happiness someone within us cries out: "I am in pain! I want to escape your happiness! I am stifling!" Amidst our deepest despair someone within us cries out: "I do not despair! I fight on! I grasp at your head, I unsheathe myself from your body, I detach myself from the earth, I cannot be contained in brains, in names, in deeds!"

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

It is the peculiarity of privilege and of every privileged position to kill the intellect and heart of man. The privileged man, whether he be privileged politically or economically, is a man depraved in intellect and heart.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in "Socialism" article of Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th edition (1887), edited by Thomas Spencer Baynes with assistance of William Robertson Smith, Vol. 22, p. 216, Charles Scribner's Sons
1 month 1 week ago

Truths can be verified and potential truths falsified, but, we should remember that I can make a statement that is true in the moment I make it, but can't be verified or falsified, but is still true but not known. That doesn't justify everything, and truths under this condition are subject to the Hitch slap: That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

0
0
6 months 6 days ago

Since my world picture approximates reality only crudely, I cannot aspire to optimize anything; at most, I can aim at satisficing. Searching for the best can only dissipate scarce cognitive resources; the best is the enemy of the good.

0
0
Source
source
(p.361) p. 361; As cited in Ronald J. Baker (2010) Implementing Value Pricing: A Revolutionary Business Model for Professional Firms. p. 122.
7 months 4 weeks ago

Children must be under authority, and are themselves aware that they must be, although they like to play a game of rebellion at times. The case of children is unique in the fact that those who have authority over them are sometimes fond of them. Where this is the case, the children do not resent the authority in general, even when they resist it on particular occasions. Education authorities, as opposed to teachers, have not this merit, and do in fact sacrifice the children to what they consider the good of the State by teaching them "patriotism," i.e., a willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 13: Freedom in Society
6 months 3 weeks ago

Consciousness is nature's nightmare.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia