Skip to main content
1 week 2 days ago

All urgent calls he shall hear at once, but never put off; for when postponed, they will prove too hard or impossible to accomplish.

0
0
Source
source
Book I : "Concerning Discipline" Chapter 19
3 months 1 week ago

I care not so much what I am to others as what I am to myself. I will be rich by myself, and not by borrowing.

0
0
Source
source
Book II, Ch. 16
1 month 4 weeks ago

The stars are scattered all over the sky like shimmering tears, there must be great pain in the eye from which they trickled.

0
0
Source
source
Act IV.

Stupidity is much the same all the world over. A stupid person's notions and feelings may confidently be inferred from those which prevail in the circle by which the person is surrounded. Not so with those whose opinions and feelings are an emanation from their own nature and faculties.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1
1 month 2 weeks ago

Consciousness (conscientia) is participated knowledge, is co-feeling, and co-feeling is com-passion. Love personalizes all that it loves. Only by personalizing it can we fall in love with an idea. And when love is so great and so vital, so strong and so overflowing, that it loves everything, then it personalizes everything and discovers that the total All, that the Universe, is also a person possessing a Consciousness, a Consciousness which in its turn suffers, pities, and loves, and therefore is consciousness. And this Consciousness of the Universe, which a love, personalizing all that it loves, discovers, is what we call God.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

The condemned man found himself transformed into a hero by the sheer extend of his widely advertised crimes, and sometimes the affirmation of his belated repentance. Against the law, against the rich, the powerful, the magistrates, the constabulary or the watch, against taxes and their collectors, he appeared to have waged a struggle with which one all too easily identified. The proclamation of these crimes blew up to epic proportions the tiny struggle that passed unperceived in everyday life. If the condemned man was shown to be repentant, accepting the verdict, asking both God and man for forgiveness for his crimes, it was as if he had come through some process of purification: he died, in his own way, like a saint.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter One: The Spectacle of the scaffold, pp. 67
1 month 1 week ago

The first consequence of the principle of bounded rationality is that the intended rationality of an actor requires him to construct a simplified model of the real situation in order to deal with it. He behaves rationally with respect to this model, and such behavior is not even approximately optimal with respect to the real world. To predict his behavior we must understand the way in which this simplified model is constructed, and its construction will certainly be related to his psychological properties as a perceiving, thinking, and learning animal.

0
0
Source
source
p. 198; Cited in P. Slovic (1972, p. 2).
1 month 3 weeks ago

The general co-operation of all members of society for the purpose of planned exploitation of the forces of production, the expansion of production to the point where it will satisfy the needs of all, the abolition of a situation in which the needs of some are satisfied at the expense of the needs of others, the complete liquidation of classes and their conflicts, the rounded development of the capacities of all members of society through the elimination of the present division of labor, through industrial education, through engaging in varying activities, through the participation by all in the enjoyments produced by all, through the combination of city and country - these are the main consequences of the abolition of private property.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness. . . . I resign from movement, and from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole glory. . . . Let "desire" be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

Who is this that cries from the ends of the earth? Who is this one man who reaches to the extremities of the universe? He is one, but that one is unity. He is one, not one in a single place, but the cry of this one man comes from the remotest ends of the earth. But how can this one man cry out from the ends of the earth, unless he be one in all?

0
0
Source
source
p.423
3 months ago

On the other hand one must not entertain any fantastic illusions on the productive power of the credit system, so far as it supplies or sets in motion money-capital.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. II, Ch. XVII, p. 351.
1 month 1 day ago

There is a similarity between writers and SDS [Students for a Democratic Society, a radical left-wing group]: Plenty of paranoia, but no ideas.

0
0
1 week 5 days ago

Societies, not states, are 'the social atoms' with which students of history have to deal.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 1
1 month 3 weeks ago

The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

Stuart was not dismayed by his sexual feelings about the boy.

0
0
Source
source
The Good Apprentice (1985), p. 247.
1 month 3 weeks ago

Few persons care to study logic, because everybody conceives himself to be proficient enough in the art of reasoning already. But I observe that this satisfaction is limited to one's own ratiocination and does not extend to that of other men. We come to the full possession of our power of drawing inferences the last of all our faculties, for it is not so much a natural gift as a long and difficult art.

0
0
Source
source
Illustrations of the Logic of Science First Paper - The Fixation of Belief", in Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 12
2 months ago

Jacobinism is the revolt of the enterprising talents of a country against its property.

0
0
Source
source
No. 1
1 month 3 weeks ago

You know I am not born to tread in the beaten track - the peculiar bent of my nature pushes me on.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Everina Wollstonecraft
2 months 2 weeks ago

When Philip had news brought him of divers and eminent successes in one day, "O Fortune!" said he, "for all these so great kindnesses do me some small mischief."

0
0
Source
source
34 Philip
1 month 4 weeks ago

In Germany, the judicial system has been the whore of the German princes for centuries.

0
0
3 months 1 day ago

The chief objection I have to Pantheism is that it says nothing. To call the world "God" is not to explain it; it is only to enrich our language with a superfluous synonym for the word "world".

0
0
Source
source
On Pantheism as quoted in Faiths of Famous Men in Their Own Words (1900) by John Kenyon Kilbourn; also in Religion: A Dialogue and Other Essays (2007), p. 40
1 month 1 week ago

Newton's law is nothing but the statistics of gravitation, it has no power whatever. Let us get rid of the idea of power from law altogether. Call law tabulation of facts, expression of facts, or what you will; anything rather than suppose that it either explains or compels.

0
0
Source
source
Suggestions for Thought : Selections and Commentaries (1994), edited by Michael D. Calabria and Janet A. MacRae, p. 41
2 months 2 weeks ago

Living a minimally acceptable ethical life involves using a substantial part of our spare resources to make the world a better place. Living a fully ethical life involves doing the most good we can.

0
0
Source
source
Preface (p. vii)

Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs to dizziness. Further than this, psychology cannot and will not go. In that very moment everything is changed, and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty. Between these two moments lies the leap, which no science has explained and which no science can explain. He who becomes guilty in anxiety becomes as ambiguously guilty as it is possible to become.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

Nothing is ever gotten out of nothing by divine power.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, line 150 (tr. Munro)
3 months 3 weeks ago

He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love — first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

0
0
3 months 2 days ago

A plant, an animal, the regular order of nature - probably also the disposition of the whole universe - give manifest evidence that they are possible only by means of and according to ideas; that, indeed, no one creature, under the individual conditions of its existence, perfectly harmonizes with the idea of the most perfect of its kind - just as little as man with the idea of humanity, which nevertheless he bears in his soul as the archetypal standard of his actions; that, notwithstanding, these ideas are in the highest sense individually, unchangeably, and completely determined, and are the original causes of things; and that the totality of connected objects in the universe is alone fully adequate to that idea.

0
0
Source
source
B 374
2 months 3 weeks ago

This legible lesson, this ritual recording, must be repeated as often as possible; the punishments must be a school rather than a festival; an ever-open book rather than a ceremony. The duration that makes the punishment effective for the guilty is also useful for the spectators. They must be able to consult at each moment the permanent lexicon of crime and punishment. A secret punishment is a punishment half wasted. Children should be allowed to come to the places where the penalty is being carried out; there they will attend their classes in civics. And grown men will periodically relearn the laws. Let us conceive of places of punishment as a Garden of the Laws that families would visit on Sundays.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter Three, The Gentle Way in Punishment
1 week 2 days ago

Don't judge the future of a person based on his present conditions, because time has the power to change black coal to shiny diamond.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

There is no objective reality. But there is only an illusion of consciousness, there is only an objectivication of reality, which was created by the spirit. The origin of life is creativity, freedom; and the personality, subject, and spirit are the representatives of that origin, but not the nature, not the object.

0
0
Source
source
As translated at Gallery of Russian Thinkers ... selected by Dmitry Olshansky
3 months 3 weeks ago

"In the light, the earth remains our first and our last love. Our brothers are breathing under the same sky as we; justice is a living thing. Now is born that strange joy which helps one live and die, and which we shall never again postpone to a later time."

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

When you have understood that nothing is, that things do not even deserve the status of appearances, you no longer need to be saved, you are saved, and miserable forever.

0
0
2 months 4 weeks ago

Shallow men believe in luck.

0
0
Source
source
Worship
1 month 3 weeks ago

But, braggart demons, we postpone our end: how could we renounce the display of our freedom, the show of our pride?

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

No man, not even a doctor, ever gives any other definition of what a nurse should be than this - "devoted and obedient." This definition would do just as well for a porter. It might even do for a horse. It would not do for a policeman.

0
0
Source
source
Notes on Nursing

The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder's lack of rational conviction.

0
0
Source
source
Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately. Introduction to 1961 edition of Sceptical Essays, 1961
1 month 1 week ago

A book is a small cog in a much more complex, external machinery. Writing is a flow among others; it enjoys no special privilege and enters into relationships of current and counter-current, of back-wash with other flows - the flows of shit, sperm, speech, action, eroticism, money, politics, etc. Like Bloom, writing on the sand with one hand and masturbating with the other - two flows in what relationship?

0
0
Source
source
from I have Nothing to Admit
2 months 3 weeks ago

Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it.

0
0
Source
source
§ 124
2 months 3 weeks ago

You can't be reluctant to give up your lie and still tell the truth.

0
0
Source
source
p. 44e
2 months 3 weeks ago

Of course, the aim of a constitutional democracy is to safeguard the rights of the minority and avoid the tyranny of the majority. Yet the concrete practice of the US legal system from 1883 to 1964 promoted a tyranny of the white majority much more than a safeguarding of the rights of black Americans.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 102-3)
2 months 4 weeks ago

I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.

0
0
Source
source
Lecture III, Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered
1 month 1 week ago

Nietzsche's break with Schopenhauer rests on precisely this point; it is a matter of knowing whether the will is unitary or multiple.

0
0
Source
source
p. 7
2 months 3 weeks ago

For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules - it hasn't been taught us by means of strict rules, either.

0
0
Source
source
p. 25
3 weeks 4 days ago

It is as natural and as right for a young man to be imprudent and exaggerated, to live in swoops and circles, and beat about his cage like any other wild thing newly captured, as it is for old men to turn gray, or mothers to love their offspring, or heroes to die for something worthier than their lives.

0
0
Source
source
Crabbed Age and Youth.
2 months 4 weeks ago

We must plan for freedom, and not only for security, if for no other reason than that only freedom can make security secure.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 2, Ch. 21 "An Evaluation of the Prophecy"
2 months 4 weeks ago

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.

0
0
Source
source
November 8, 1838
1 month 3 weeks ago

When we are young, we take a certain pleasure in our infirmities. They seem so new, so rich! With age, they no longer surprise us, we know them too well. Now, without anything unexpected in them, they do not deserve to be endured.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

Sexual activity is driven by the same aims and motives as reading poetry or listening to music: to escape the limitations imposed by the need for particularity in the consciousness.

0
0
Source
source
p. 75

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia