Skip to main content
8 months 2 days ago

That Man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

0
0
7 months 1 day ago

Brothers, love is a teacher; but one must know how to acquire it, for it is hard to acquire, it is dearly bought, it is won slowly by long labour. For we must love not only occasionally, for a moment, but for ever. Everyone can love occasionally, even the wicked can.

0
0
Source
source
Book VI, Chapter 3: Conversations and Exhortations of Father Zossima
7 months 1 day ago

A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.

0
0
9 months 2 days ago

This is approximately the way Christendom relates to the essentially Christian, the unconditioned. After seventeen, eighteen detours and running all around someone finally has his finite existence assured, and then we receive a sermon about Seek first the kingdom of God. Is this sobriety or is this intoxication?

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind and within the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realized; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 12: "Religion and Science", pp. 267-268
8 months 3 days ago

If a man makes the press utter atrocious things he becomes as answerable for them as if he had uttered them by word of mouth. Mr. Jefferson has said in his inaugural speech, that "error of opinion might be tolerated, when reason was left free to combat it." This is sound philosophy in cases of error. But there is a difference between error and licentiousness.

0
0
Source
source
Liberty of the Press, 1806
8 months 1 week ago

It is the part of cowardice, not of courage, to go and crouch in a hole under a massive tomb, to avoid the blows of fortune.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 3. A Usage of the Island of Cea, tr. George B. Ives, 1925
4 months 2 weeks ago

Credit expansion can bring about a temporary boom. But such a fictitious prosperity must end in a general depression of trade, a slump.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

It is better wither to be silent, or to say things of more value than silence. Sooner throw a pearl at hazard than an idle or useless word; and do not say a little in many words, but a great deal in a few.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in A Dictionary of Thoughts: Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Best Authors of the World, both Ancient and Modern (1908) by Tyron Edwards, p. 525
5 months 3 weeks ago

It is generally characteristic of arms races, including human ones, that although all would be better off if none of them escalated, so long as one of them escalates none can afford not to.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 7 "Constructive Evolution" (p. 184)
8 months 1 day ago

How can great minds be produced in a country where the test of a great mind is agreeing in the opinions of small minds?

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Egoists: A Book of Supermen (1909) by James Huneker, p. 367
7 months 1 day ago

The administrators of the executive power may be either elective or not; and in the former case all or only some of them may be elective. They are elective in a proper democracy, that is to say, in a democracy which recognizes representation. If all the public officials are directly elected by the whole people, the democracy is a pure democracy; if only some, it is a mixed democracy. The public officials may also fill vacancies themselves; this is the case in a pure aristocracy. But if only some of the magistrates are thus replaced by the public officers, and if the others are again directly elected by the people, then the form of government is that of a democratic aristocracy. A permanent president (monarch) may also be elected to exercise the executive power during his lifetime. In all these cases, either all citizens of the commonwealth, or only some of them, are eligible to office. Eligibility may, therefore, be limited or unlimited.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

There is in our souls some native seed of reason, which, if nourished by good counsel and training, flowers into virtue, but which, on the other hand, if unable to resist the vices surrounding it, is stifled and blighted.

0
0
Source
source
Part 2
7 months 3 weeks ago

Contemporary intellectuals have given up the Enlightenment assumption that religion, myth, and tradition can be opposed to something ahistorical, something common to all human beings qua human.

0
0
8 months 2 days ago

Philosophy seems to me on the whole a rather hopeless business.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Gilbert Murray, December 28, 1902
8 months 4 weeks ago

Often, writers on historical events tend to consider ... a loss of willingness to fight as a sign of "decadence," as though there were something despicable about not being a bully and not being willing to engage in mass murder. Perhaps we ought to feel instead that to cease to be warlike means to begin to be civilized and decent.

0
0
4 months ago

What we do need to worry about is the possibility that we will be reduced, in the face of the enormities of our time, to silence or to mere protest.

0
0
Source
source
A Poem of Difficult Hope
8 months 1 day ago

The community has no bribe that will tempt a wise man. You may raise money enough to tunnel a mountain, but you cannot raise money enough to hire a man who is minding his own business. An efficient and valuable man does what he can, whether the community pay him for it or not. The inefficient offer their inefficiency to the highest bidder, and are forever expecting to be put into office. One would suppose that they were rarely disappointed.

0
0
Source
source
p. 486
8 months 2 weeks ago

In this one man, the whole Church has been assumed by the Word.

0
0
Source
source
p.434
8 months ago

Why did it occur to anyone to believe in only one God? And conversely why did it ever occur to anyone to believe in many gods? To both these questions we must return the same answer: Because that is how the human mind happens to work. For the human mind is both diverse and simple, simultaneously many and one. We have an immediate perception of our own diversity and of that of the outside world. And at the same time we have immediate perceptions of our own oneness.

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

We are not arrogant, not hubristic, to celebrate the sheer bulk and detail of what we know through science. We are simply telling the honest and irrefutable truth. Also honest is the frank admission of how much we don't yet know - how much more work remains to be done. That is the very antithesis of hubristic arrogance. Science combines a massive contribution, in volume and detail, of what we do know with humility in proclaiming what we don't. Religion, by embarrassing contrast, has contributed literally zero to what we know, combined with huge hubristic confidence in the alleged facts it has simply made up.

0
0
Source
source
The Intellectual and Moral Courage of Atheism
7 months 3 weeks ago

I would really like to slow down the speed of reading with continual punctuation marks. For I would like to be read slowly. (As I myself read.)

0
0
Source
source
p. 77e
8 months 1 week ago

You worry whether the drought will end. It is far better that you pray that God may water your mind lest virtue wither away in it. You are greatly concerned with money that is lost or being wasted, or you worry about the advance of old age. I think it much to be desired that you provide first of all for the needs of your soul.

0
0
8 months 2 days ago

The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body.

0
0
7 months 1 day ago

The original thinking force of the universe progresses and develops itself in all possible determinations of which it is capable, just as the other original natural forces progress and assume all possible configurations. I am a particular determination of the formative force, like the plant; a particular determination of the peculiar motive force, like the animal; and in addition to this a determination of the thinking force: and the union of these three basic forces into one force, into one harmonious development, is the distinguishing characteristic of my species.

0
0
Source
source
P. Preuss, trans. (1987), p. 12
4 months 2 weeks ago

It is the safest to be moderately base - to be flexible in shame, and to be always ready for what is generous, good, and just, when anything is to be gained by virtue.

0
0
Source
source
"Catholics", published in The Edinburgh Review (1827). See The Works of the Rev. Sydney Smith. 2. 1859. p. 134.
6 months 2 weeks ago

It must be recognized that man in his limited and relative earthly life is capable of bringing about the beautiful and the valuable only when he believes in another life, unlimited, absolute, eternal. That is a law of his being. A contact with this mortal life exclusive of any other ends in the wearing-away of effective energy and a self-satisfaction that makes one useless and superficial. Only the spiritual man, striking his roots deep in infinite and eternal life, can be a true creator. But Humanism denied the spiritual man, handed over the eternal to the temporal, and took its stand by the natural man within the limited confines of the earth.

0
0
Source
source
p. 34
6 months 2 weeks ago

School children and students who love God should never say: "For my part I like mathematics"; "I like French"; "I like Greek." They should learn to like all these subjects, because all of them develop that faculty of attention which, directed toward God, is the very substance of prayer.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.

0
0
Source
source
Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1878).
7 months 1 week ago

A good Soul hath neither too great joy, nor too great sorrow: for it rejoiceth in goodness; and it sorroweth in wickedness. By the means whereof, when it beholdeth all things, and seeth the good and bad so mingled together, it can neither rejoice greatly; nor be grieved with over much sorrow.

0
0
8 months ago

The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie - a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days - but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.

0
0
Source
source
p. 70
6 months 2 weeks ago

Meditation on the chance which led to the meeting of my mother and father is even more salutary than meditation on death.

0
0
Source
source
p. 277
7 months 1 day ago

Is there in the whole world a being who would have the right to forgive and could forgive? I don't want harmony. From love for humanity I don't want it. I would rather be left with the unavenged suffering. I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong. Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it's beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It's not God that I don't accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.

0
0
Source
source
Book II, Chapter 4: Rebellion (trans. Constance Garnett)
6 months 3 weeks ago

The great decisions of human life have as a rule far more to do with the instincts and other mysterious unconscious factors than with conscious will and well-meaning reasonableness. The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. Each of us carries his own life-form-an indeterminable form which cannot be superseded by any other.

0
0
Source
source
p. 69
4 months 1 day ago

Death gestured with his hands and bade the king thrice welcome.

0
0
Source
source
Book VIII, line 168
4 months 3 weeks ago

"By what method or methods can the able men from every rank of life be gathered, as diamond-grains from the general mass of sand: the able men, not the sham-able;-and set to do the work of governing, contriving, administering and guiding for us!" It is the question of questions. All that Democracy ever meant lies there: the attainment of a truer and truer Aristocracy, or Government again by the Best.

0
0
9 months 1 day ago

The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

There was a time when time did not yet exist. ... The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

The first discipline modernity's originators imposed upon themselves was that of self-restraint, learning to live with vulgarity. Their high expectations for effectiveness were made possible by low expectations of what was to be.

0
0
Source
source
Commerce and Culture, p. 285.
5 months 4 weeks ago

We desire nothing so much as what we ought not to have.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 559 [Mimi et aliorum sententiae 677]
7 months 3 weeks ago

It is ugly to be punishable, but there is no glory in punishing. Hence the double system of protection that justice has set up between itself and the punishment it imposes.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 10
6 months 3 weeks ago

If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.

0
0
Source
source
19:21 (KJV)
8 months 3 days ago

Don't think money does everything or you are going to end up doing everything for money.

0
0

Jupiter: I committed the first crime by creating men as mortals. After that, what more could you do, you the murderers?

Aegisteus: Come on; they already had death in them: at most you simply hastened things a little.

0
0
Source
source
Act 2
7 months 1 day ago

A dream! What is a dream? And is not our life a dream? I will say more. Suppose that this paradise will never come to pass (that I understand), yet I shall go on preaching it. And yet how simple it is: in one day, in one hour everything could be arranged at once! The chief thing is to love others like yourself, that's the chief thing, and that's everything; nothing else is wanted - you will find out at once how to arrange it all. And yet it's an old truth which has been told and retold a billion times - but it has not formed part of our lives! The consciousness of life is higher than life, the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness - that is what one must contend against. And I shall. If only everyone wants it, it can be arranged at once.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

I have seen no more evident monstrosity and miracle in the world than myself.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 11
6 months 3 weeks ago

To live in a saint's heart? I'm afraid of setting the sky ablaze.

0
0
7 months 1 day ago

Whenever our neighbour's house is on fire, it cannot be amiss for the engines to play a little on our own.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia