Skip to main content
3 months 1 week ago

Secrets in manufactures are capable of being longer kept than secrets in trade.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter VII, p. 72.
2 months 2 days ago

If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1
3 months 1 week ago

The national debt has given rise to joint stock companies, to dealings in negotiable effects of all kinds, and to agiotage, in a word to stock-exchange gambling and the modern bankocracy.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. I, Ch. 31, pg. 827.
1 month 3 weeks ago

And he arrives at the cogito ergo sum, which St. Augustine had already anticipated... "I think therefore I am," can only mean "I think, therefore I am a thinker"; this being of "I am," which is deduced from "I think," is merely a knowing; this being is a knowledge, but not life. And the primary reality is not that I think, but that I live, for those also live who do not think. Although this living may not be a real living. God! what contradictions when we seek to join in wedlock life and reason!

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

Good music is very close to primitive language.

0
0
Source
source
"Correspondence of Ideas with the Motion of Organs"

It strikes everyone in beginning to form an acquaintance with the treasures of Indian literature, that a land so rich in intellectual products and those of the profoundest order of thought..."

0
0
Source
source
quoted in De Riencourt, Amaury The Soul of India Harper & Brothers Publishers New York 1960 p. 301
1 month 3 weeks ago

As a black woman interested in feminist movement, I am often asked whether being black is more important than being a woman; whether feminist struggle to end sexist oppression is more important than the struggle to racism or vice versa. All such questions are rooted in competitive either/or thinking, the belief that the self is formed in opposition to an other. ... Most people are socialized to think in terms of opposition rather than compatibility. Rather than seeing anti-racist work as totally compatible with working to end sexist oppression, they often see them as two movements competing for first place.

0
0
2 months 5 days ago

What am I, other than a chance in the infinite probabilities of not having been!

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

We distinguish diagrammatic from sentential paper-and-pencil representations of information by developing alternative models of information-processing systems that are informationally equivalent and that can be characterized as sentential or diagrammatic. Sentential representations are sequential, like the propositions in a text. Diagrammatic representations are indexed by location in a plane. Diagrammatic representations also typically display information that is only implicit in sentential representations and that therefore has to be computed, sometimes at great cost, to make it explicit for use. We then contrast the computational efficiency of these representations for solving several.illustrative problems in mathematics and physics.

0
0
Source
source
p. 65

An empire derives no advantage from the caresses of two turtledoves who spend a year cooing to each other in public meetings.

0
0
Source
source
Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World, J. Beecher (1986), p. 315
3 months 1 week ago

That which has no existence cannot be destroyed - that which cannot be destroyed cannot require anything to preserve it from destruction. Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense - nonsense upon stilts. But this rhetorical nonsense ends in the old strain of mischievous nonsense for immediately a list of these pretended natural rights is given, and those are so expressed as to present to view legal rights. And of these rights, whatever they are, there is not, it seems, any one of which any government can, upon any occasion whatever, abrogate the smallest particle. The often-quoted phrase 'nonsense upon stilts' is often modernised to 'nonsense on stilts'.

0
0
3 months ago

He who upholds Truth with all the might of his power, He who upholds Truth the utmost in his word and deed,He, indeed, is Thy most valued helper, O Mazda Ahura!

0
0
Source
source
Ahunuvaiti Gatha; Yasna 31, 22.
3 months 1 week ago

Most people, at a crisis, feel more loyalty to their nation than to their class.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 8: Economic Power
2 months 2 weeks ago

Social positivism only accepts duties, for all and towards all. Its constant social viewpoint cannot include any notion of rights, for such notion always rests on individuality. We are born under a load of obligations of every kind, to our predecessors, to our successors, to our contemporaries. These obligations then increase or accumulate, for it is some time before we can return any service. ... Any human right is therefore as absurd as immoral. Since there are no divine rights anymore, this concept must therefore disappear completely as related only to the preliminary regime and totally inconsistent with the final state where there are only duties based on functions.

0
0
Source
source
Le Catéchisme positiviste
3 months 1 week ago

Monotheistic religions alone furnish the spectacle of religious wars, religious persecutions, heretical tribunals, that breaking of idols and destruction of images of the gods, that razing of Indian temples and Egyptian colossi, which had looked on the sun 3,000 years: just because a jealous god had said, 'Thou shalt make no graven image.'

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

To disrespect the masses is moral; to honor them, lawful.

0
0
Source
source
Lucinde and the Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991), "Athenaeum Fragments" § 211
2 months 1 week ago

By striving to do the impossible, man has always achieved what is possible. Those who have cautiously done no more than they believed possible have never taken a single step forward.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in The Explorers (1996) by Paolo Novaresio ISBN 1-55670-495-X
2 months 1 week ago

People crushed by law, have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws; and those who have much to hope and nothing to lose, will always be dangerous.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Charles James Fox
2 months ago

I do not accept any absolute formulas for living. No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in a man's life. As we live, we grow and our beliefs change. They must change. So I think we should live with this constant discovery. We should be open to this adventure in heightened awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Martin Buber : An Intimate Portrait (1971), p. 56
1 month 2 weeks ago

To conclude: there are two well-known minor ways in which language has mattered to philosophy. On the one hand there is a belief that if only we produce good definitions, often marking out different senses of words that are confused in common speech, we will avoid the conceptual traps that ensnared our forefathers. On the other hand is a belief that if only we attend sufficiently closely to our mother tongue and make explicit the distinctions there implicit, we shall avoid the conceptual traps. One or the other of these curiously contrary beliefs may nowadays be most often thought of as an answer to the question Why does language matter to philosophy? Neither seems to me enough.

0
0
Source
source
Ian Hacking (1975), Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy?, p. 7.
2 months 5 days ago

The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don't know where that elsewhere is.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

Ministers and favorites are a sort of people who have a state prisoner in their custody, the whole management of whose understanding and actions they can easily engross.

0
0
Source
source
Book V, Ch. 5
3 months 4 weeks ago

He who is not satisfied with a little, is satisfied with nothing.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

It is often better for a person to recognize a sin than to do a good deed. Recognizing a sin makes a person humble. Doing a good deed often can feed a person's pride.

0
0
Source
source
p. 108
2 months 1 day ago

There is another significant involution of time and movement in space. It is constituted not only by directional tendencies-up and down for example-but by mutual approaches and retreatings. Near and far, close and distant, are qualities of pregnant, often tragic, import-that is, as they are experienced, not just stated by measurement of science. They signify loosening and tightening, expanding and contracting, separating and compacting, soaring and drooping, rising and falling; the dispersive, scattering, and the hovering and brooding, unsubstantial lightness and massive blow. Such actions and reaction are the very stuff out if which the objects and events we experience are made.

0
0
Source
source
p. 215
1 month 3 weeks ago

At the deepest level, the desire for complete union with God exhibits a narcissistic structure.

0
0
3 months 4 weeks ago

We must consider both the ultimate end and all clear sensory evidence, to which we refer our opinions; for otherwise everything will be full of uncertainty and confusion.

0
0
2 months 2 days ago

German idealism rescued philosophy from the attack of British empiricism, and the struggle between the two became not merely a clash of different philosophical school, but a struggle for philosophy as such.

0
0
Source
source
P. 16
3 months 4 weeks ago

Perfect is the virtue which is according to the Mean! Rare have they long been among the people, who could practice it!

0
0
2 months 5 days ago

Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

We must leave on one side the beliefs which fill up voids and sweeten what is bitter. The belief in immortality. The belief in the utility of sin: etiam peccata. The belief in the providential ordering of events - in short the "consolations" which are ordinarily sought in religion.

0
0
Source
source
p. 258
3 months 3 weeks ago

But there is nothing sweeter than to dwell in towers that rise On high, serene and fortified with teachings of the wise, From which you may peer down upon the others as they stray This way and that, seeking the path of life, losing their way: The skirmishing of wits, the scramble for renown, the fight, Each striving harder than the next, and struggling day and night, To climb atop a heap of riches and lay claim to might.

0
0
Source
source
Book II, lines 7-13 (tr. Stallings)
2 months 5 days ago

We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

I have at last come to the end of the Faerie Queene: and though I say "at last", I almost wish he had lived to write six books more as he had hoped to do - so much have I enjoyed it.

0
0
Source
source
On Edmund Spenser's long poem in a letter to Arthur Greeves (7 March 1916), published in The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis
3 months 4 weeks ago

I do not open up the truth to one who is not eager to get knowledge, nor help out any one who is not anxious to explain himself. When I have presented one corner of a subject to any one, and he cannot from it learn the other three, I do not repeat my lesson.

0
0
2 months 1 day ago

If, as I believe, the ends of men are many, and not all of them are in principle compatible with each other, then the possibility of conflict - and of tragedy - can never wholly be eliminated from human life, either personal or social. The necessity of choosing between absolute claims is then an inescapable characteristic of the human condition. This gives its value to freedom as Acton conceived of it - as an end in itself, and not as a temporary need, arising out of our confused notions and irrational and disordered lives, a predicament which a panacea could one day put right.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, Chapter 8, "The Great Sin"
3 months 1 week ago

Pride is an established conviction of one's own paramount worth in some particular respect, while vanity is the desire of rousing such a conviction in others, and it is generally accompanied by the secret hope of ultimately coming to the same conviction oneself. Pride works from within; it is the direct appreciation of oneself. Vanity is the desire to arrive at this appreciation indirectly, from without.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 1, Ch. 4, § 2
3 months 4 days ago

The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.

0
0
3 months 5 days ago

The logical picture of the facts is the thought.

0
0
Source
source
(3) Original German: Das logische Bild der Tatsachen ist der Gedanke.
3 months 1 week ago

Nor is it the irrationality of the form which is taken as characteristic. On the contrary, one overlooks the irrational.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. II, Ch. I, p. 30.

Can there be a more horrible object in existence than an eloquent man not speaking the truth?

0
0
Source
source
Address as Lord Rector of Edinburgh University, (1866), reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

The true University of these days is a Collection of Books.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

Perseus wore a magic cap that the monsters he hunted down might not see him.We draw the magic cap down over eyes and ears as a make-believe that there are no monsters.

0
0
Source
source
Author's prefaces to the First Edition.
1 month 3 weeks ago

The capacity to give one's attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it. Warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity are not enough.

0
0

From of old, a thousand thoughts, in his pilgrimings and wanderings, had been in this man: What am I? What is this unfathomable Thing I live in, which men name Universe? What is Life; what is Death? What am I to believe? What am I to do? The grim rocks of Mount Hara, of Mount Sinai, the stern sandy solitudes answered not. The great Heaven rolling silent overhead, with its blue-glancing stars, answered not. There was no answer. The man's own soul, and what of God's inspiration dwelt there, had to answer!

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

As touching the gods, I do not know whether they exist or not, nor how they are featured; for there is much to prevent our knowing: the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life.

0
0
Source
source
Opening lines of Concerning the Gods (DK 80 B4).
2 months 1 day ago

Even the eye that is artificially trained to see color as color, apart from things that colors qualify, cannot shut out the resonances and transfers of value.

0
0
Source
source
p. 126

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia