Skip to main content
4 months 3 weeks ago

I am further of opinion that it would be better for us to have [no laws] at all than to have them in so prodigious numbers as we have.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, Ch. 13. Of Experience
4 months 3 weeks ago

Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

0
0
Source
source
Translated by Lewis White Beck Two things fill the heart with renewed and increasing awe and reverence the more often and the more steadily that they are meditated on: the starry skies above me and the moral law inside me.
3 months 1 week ago

The color is of the object and the object in all its qualities is expressed through color. For it is objects that glows- gems and sunlight; and it is objects that are splendid- crowns, robes, sunlight. Except as they express objects, through being the significant color-quality of materials of ordinary experience, colors effect only transient excitations.

0
0
Source
source
p. 212
4 months 1 week ago

By Thy perfect Intelligence, O MazdaThou didst first create us having bodies and spiritual consciences,And by Thy Thought gave our selves the power of thought, word, and deed.Thus leaving us free to choose our faith at our own will.

0
0
Source
source
Ahunuvaiti Gatha; Yasna 31, 11.
4 months 2 weeks ago

The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops - no, but the kind of man the country turns out.

0
0
Source
source
Civilization
3 months 5 days ago

The very same reason which one man may regard as a motive for taking care to prolong his life may be regarded by another man as a motive for shooting himself.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

Death takes the mean man with the proud; The fatal urn has room for all.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, ode i, line 14 (trans. John Conington)
3 months 2 weeks ago

Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

By and large the literature of a democracy will never exhibit the order, regularity, skill, and art characteristic of aristocratic literature; formal qualities will be neglected or actually despised. The style will often be strange, incorrect, overburdened, and loose, and almost always strong and bold. Writers will be more anxious to work quickly than to perfect details. Short works will be commoner than long books, wit than erudition, imagination than depth. There will be a rude and untutored vigor of thought with great variety and singular fecundity. Authors will strive to astonish more than to please, and to stir passions rather than to charm taste.

0
0
Source
source
Book One, Chapter XIII.
4 months 2 weeks ago

But, suppose, besides, that the making of the new machinery affords employment to a greater number of mechanics, can that be called compensation to the carpet makers, thrown on the streets?

0
0
Source
source
Vol. I, Ch. 15, Section 6, pg. 479.
4 months 1 week ago

Human beings are social animals. We were social before we were human.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 1, The Origins Of Altruism, p. 3
2 months 3 weeks ago

Those who used to sacrifice animals did not take them for beasts. And even the Middle Ages, which condemned and punished them in due form, was in this way much closer to them than we are, we who are filled with horror at this practice. They held them to be guilty: which was a way of honoring them. We take them for nothing, and it is on this basis that we are "human" with them. We no longer sacrifice them, we no longer punish them, and we are proud of it, but it is simply that we have domesticated them, worse: that we have made of them a racially inferior world, no longer even worthy of our justice, but only of our affection and social charity, no longer worthy of punishment and of death, but only of experimentation and extermination like meat from the butchery.

0
0
Source
source
"The Animals: Territory and Metamorphoses," pp. 134-135
4 months ago

Educate the children and it won't be necessary to punish the men.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists‎ (2007) by James Geary
3 weeks 6 days ago

Nature loves to hide her secrets, and she does not suffer the hidden truth about the essential nature of the gods to be flung in naked words to the ears of the profane...

0
0
Source
source
Oration to the Cynic Heracleios
3 months 3 weeks ago

We indeed, who are beings of finite powers, are forced to make use of instruments. And the use of an instrument sheweth the agent to be limited by rules of another's prescription, and that he cannot obtain his end but in such a way, and by such conditions. Whence it seems a clear consequence, that the supreme unlimited agent useth no tool or instrument at all. The will of an Omnipotent Spirit is no sooner exerted than executed, without the application of means; which, if they are employed by inferior agents, it is not upon account of any real efficacy that is in them, or necessary aptitude to produce any effect, but merely in compliance with the laws of nature, or those conditions prescribed to them by the First Cause, who is Himself above all limitation or prescription whatsoever.

0
0
Source
source
Philonous to Hylas. The Second Dialogue
3 months 3 weeks ago

The decisions of law courts should never be printed: in the long run, they form a counterauthority to the law.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

0
0
Source
source
November 11, 1842
2 months 2 weeks ago

Be your money's master, not its slave.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 657
3 weeks 5 days ago

When we try to develop and procure benefits for the world with universal love as our standard, then attentive ears and keen eyes will respond in service to one another, then limbs will be strengthened to work for one another, and those who know the Tao will untiringly instruct others. Thus the old and those who have neither wife nor children will have the support and supply to spend their old age with, and the young and weak and orphans will have the care and admonition to grow up in. When universal love is adopted as the standard, then such are the consequent benefits. It is incomprehensible, then, why people should object to universal love when they hear it.

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

"You really should come to the house - one of these days we might die without having seen each other again." - "Since we have to die in any case, what's the use of seeing each other again?"

0
0
2 weeks ago

That then, that I wish for, as to systems, is this, that men, in the first place, would forbear to establish any theory, till they have consulted with (though not a fully competent number of experiments, such as may afford them all the phænomena to be explicated by that theory, yet) a considerable number of experiments, in proportion to the comprehensiveness of the theory to be erected on them. And, in the next place, I would have such kind of supestructures looked upon only as temporary ones; which though they may be preferred before any others, as being the least imperfect, or, if you please, the best in their kind that we yet have, yet are they not entirely to be acquiesced in, as absolutely perfect, or uncapable of improving alterations.

0
0
3 months 2 days ago

Popular escapist fiction enchants adult readers without challenging them to be educated for critical consciousness.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

Let us give Nature a chance; she knows her business better than we do.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 13
5 months 2 weeks ago

A robot, the man had said, is logical but not reasonable.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

Were a stranger to drop on a sudden into this world, I would show him, as a specimen of its ills, a hospital full of diseases, a prison crowded with malefactors and debtors, a field of battle strewed with carcasses, a fleet foundering in the ocean, a nation languishing under tyranny, famine, or pestilence. To turn the gay side of life to him, and give him a notion of its pleasures; whither should I conduct him? to a ball, to an opera, to court? He might justly think, that I was only showing him a diversity of distress and sorrow.

0
0
Source
source
Demea to Philo, Part X
3 months 2 weeks ago

The whole nature of man presupposes woman, both physically and spiritually. His system is tuned into woman from the start, just as it is prepared for a quite definite world where there is water, light, air, salt, carbohydrates etc.

0
0
Source
source
"Two Essays in Analytical Psychology" In CW 7: P. 188
2 weeks 4 days ago

The dead? But the dead have no rights. They are nothing; and nothing cannot own something. Where there is no substance, there can be no accident. This corporeal globe, and everything upon it, belong to its present corporeal inhabitants, during their generation. They alone have a right to direct what is the concern of themselves alone, and to declare the law of that direction; and this declaration can only be made by their majority. That majority, then, has a right to depute representatives to a convention, and to make the constitution what they think will be the best for themselves.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

[O]ne might naively suppose that a negative utilitarian would welcome human extinction. But only (trans)humans - or our potential superintelligent successors - are technically capable of phasing out the cruelties of the rest of the living world on Earth. And only (trans)humans - or rather our potential superintelligent successors - are technically capable of assuming stewardship of our entire Hubble volume.

0
0
Source
source
"Unsorted Postings", Facebook, pre-2014
4 months 3 weeks ago

Truth will sooner come out from error than from confusion.

0
0
Source
source
Aphorism 20
4 months 2 weeks ago

The real nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, all that was not present did not exist.

0
0
1 month 3 days ago

Men who prefer any load of infamy, however great, to any pressure of taxation, however light.

0
0
Source
source
The Humble Petition of the Rev. Sydney Smith to the House of Congress at Washington (May 18, 1843), in Letters on American Debts (London: Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans, 1843), p. 9
4 months 2 weeks ago
0
0
Source
source
To the Humble Bee, st. 1
2 months 1 day ago

The difference between a Humanist and a lunatic is in fact one of degree.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 9
2 weeks 4 days ago

The solution is, that we do not see the image on the retina at all, we only see by means of it.

0
0
2 weeks 1 day ago

Relativism is a product of the modern historical-sociological procedure which is based on the recognition that all historical thinking is bound up with the concrete position in life of the thinker [Standortsgebundenheit des Denkers]. But relativism combines this historical-sociological insight with an older theory of knowledge which was as yet unaware of the interplay between conditions of existence and modes of thought, and which modelled its knowledge after static prototypes such as might be exemplified by the proposition 2 x 2 = 4. This older type of thought, which regarded such examples as the model of all thought, was necessarily led to the rejection of all those forms of knowledge which were dependent upon the subjective standpoint and the social situation of the knower, and which were, hence, merely "relative".

0
0
2 weeks 4 days ago

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Edward Carrington, Paris
1 month 2 weeks ago

I did not direct my life. I didn't design it. I never made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That's what life is.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in "Unpacking the Skinner Box : Revisiting B. F. Skinner through a Postformal Lens" by Dana Salter in The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology Vol. 4 (2008) edited by Joe L. Kincheloe and Raymond A. Horn, Ch. 99, p. 872
1 month 3 days ago

Besides, he who is feared, fears also; no one has been able to arouse terror and live in peace of mind.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

Let us maintain inviolably equality in the sacred right of suffrage: public security can never have a basis more solid.

0
0
Source
source
Author's Inscription: French Edition
1 month 1 week ago

To all Christian governments Christianity was not a rule of means but a means of rule; Christ was for the people, Machiavelli was preferred by the kings. The state in some measure had civilized man, but who would civilize the state?

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 6, p. 229
3 months 1 week ago

O ye of little faith, why reason ye among yourselves, because ye have brought no bread? Do ye not yet understand, neither remember the five loaves of the five thousand, and how many baskets ye took up? Neither the seven loaves of the four thousand, and how many baskets ye took up? How is it that ye do not understand that I spake it not to you concerning bread, that ye should beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees?

0
0
Source
source
16:8-11 (KJV)
4 months 3 weeks ago

He who seeks equality between unequals seeks an absurdity.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 9, Of Aristocracy, Continuation
3 months 2 weeks ago

They defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance.

0
0
5 months 1 day ago

I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.

0
0
Source
source
Provincial Letters: Letter XVI (4 December 1656)
3 months 1 week ago

It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.

0
0
Source
source
4:7 (KJV) Said to Satan. The reference is to Deuteronomy 6:16, "Ye shall not tempt the Lord your God, as ye tempted him in Massah." (KJV)
4 months 2 weeks ago

The foundations on which several duties are built, and the foundations of right and wrong from which they spring, are not perhaps easily to be let into the minds of grown men, not us'd to abstract their thoughts from common received opinions. Much less are children capable of reasonings from remote principles. They cannot conceive the force of long deductions. The reasons that move them must be obvious, and level to their thoughts, and such as may be felt and touched. But yet, if their age, temper, and inclination be consider'd, they will never want such motives as may be sufficient to convince them.

0
0
Source
source
Sec. 81
4 months 2 weeks ago

I greatly doubt whether the men who become pirate chiefs are those who are filled with retrospective terror of their fathers, or whether Napoleon, at Austerlitz, really felt that he was getting even with Madame Mère. I know nothing of the mother of Attila, but I rather suspect that she spoilt the little darling, who subsequently found the world irritating because it sometimes resisted his whims.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 2: Leaders and Followers

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia