Skip to main content
2 months 1 week ago

Not only was Thebes built by the music of an Orpheus; but without the music of some inspired Orpheus was no city ever built, no work that man glories-in ever done.

0
0
Source
source
Bk. III, ch. 8.
6 months 2 weeks ago

The contradiction is this: man rejects the world as it is, without accepting the necessity of escaping it. In fact, men cling to the world and by far the majority do not want to abandon it.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

The telling of jokes is an art of its own, and it always rises from some emotional threat. The best jokes are dangerous, and dangerous because they are in some way truthful.

0
0
Source
source
Interviewed by J. Rentilly, "The Best Jokes Are Dangerous", McSweeny's
4 months 3 weeks ago

Americans combine to give fêtes, found seminaries, build churches, distribute books, and send missionaries to the antipodes. Hospitals, prisons, and schools take shape in that way. Finally, if they want to proclaim a truth or propagate some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form an association. In every case, at the head of any new undertaking, where in France you would find the government or in England some territorial magnate, in the United States you are sure to find an association. I have come across several types of association in America of which, I confess, I had not previously the slightest conception, and I have often admired the extreme skill they show in proposing a common object for the exertions of very many and in inducing them voluntarily to pursue it.

0
0
Source
source
Book Two, Chapter V.
4 months 2 weeks ago

Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

Our present-day neurochemical cocktail, we are asked to believe, is the medium through which alien realms of consciousness can be grasped and neutrally appraised from a third-person perspective. Empirical research suggests this optimism is at best naïve.

0
0
Source
source
Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, BLTC Research
5 months 3 weeks ago

Amongst so many borrowed things, I am glad if I can steal one, disguising and altering it for some new service.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, Ch. 12. Of Physiognomy
3 months 3 weeks 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 2 weeks ago

Some people, when they do someone a favor, are always looking for a chance to call it in. And some aren't, but they're still aware of it--still regard it as a debt. But others don't even do that. They're like a vine that produces grapes without looking for anything in return. (Hays translation) A man makes no noise over a good deed, but passes on to another as a vine to bear grapes again in season.

0
0
Source
source
V, 6
4 months 2 weeks ago

I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide . . .

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

That there should one Man die ignorant who had capacity for Knowledge, this I call a tragedy.

0
0
Source
source
Bk. III, ch. 4.
4 months 3 weeks ago

For no one's authority ought to rank so high as to set a value on his words and terms even though nothing clear and determinate lies behind them.

0
0
Source
source
Paragraph 1
2 months 1 week ago

That, on the whole, if you have got the intrinsic qualities, you have got everything, and the preliminaries will prove attainable; but that if you have got only the preliminaries, you have yet got nothing. A man of real dignity will not find it impossible to bear himself in a dignified manner; a man of real understanding and insight will get to know, as the fruit of his very first study, what the laws of his situation are, and will conform to these.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

Things are not so painful and difficult of themselves, but our weakness or cowardice makes them so.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 14, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Carew Hazlitt, 1877
5 months 6 days ago

Once when Phocion had delivered an opinion which pleased the people,... he turned to his friend and said, "Have I not unawares spoken some mischievous thing or other?"

0
0
Source
source
55 Phocion
3 months 4 weeks ago

What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment.

0
0
Source
source
L 49
6 months 2 weeks ago

The infinite is in capacity. That, however, which is infinite in capacity is not to be assumed as that which is infinite in energy. ...It has its being in capacity, and in division and diminution. ...It is always possible to assume something beyond it. It does not, however, on this account surpass every definite magnitude; as in division it surpasses every definite magnitude, and will be less.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

There must then be something that is better, and that must be God. When you see a stately and stupendous edifice, though you do not know who is the owner of it, you would yet conclude it was not built for rats. And this divine structure, that we behold of the celestial palace, have we not reason to believe that it is the residence of some possessor, who is much greater than we?

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 12, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Carew Hazlitt, 1877
4 months 1 day ago

Following Foucault, we may define the art of life as a practice of suicide, of giving oneself to death, of depsychologizing oneself, of playing.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

The whole historic existence of mankind is nothing else than the gradual transition from the personal, animal conception of life to the social conception of life, and from the social conception of life to the divine conception of life.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter IV, Christianity Misunderstood by Men of Science
5 months 2 weeks ago

Means at our disposal should be regarded as a bulwark against the many evils and misfortunes that can occur. We should not regard such wealth as a permission or even an obligation to procure for ourselves the pleasures of the world.

0
0
Source
source
E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 348
5 months 2 weeks ago

In philosophy the race is to the one who can run slowest-the one who crosses the finish line last.

0
0
Source
source
p. 40e
1 month 2 weeks ago

The system becomes more coherent as it is further extended. The elements which we require for explaining a new class of facts are already contained in our system. Different members of the theory run together, and we have thus a constant convergence to unity. In false theories, the contrary is the case.

0
0
Source
source
Part II Of Knowledge, Book XI Of the Construction of Science, Chap. 5 Of Certain Characteristics of Scientific Induction
5 months 2 weeks ago

In the Catholic Church, especially, they go into chancery, make a clean confession, give up all, and think to start again. Thus men will lie on their backs, talking about the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up.

0
0
Source
source
p. 487
3 months 2 weeks ago

Until now a culture has been a mechanical fate for societies, the automatic interiorization of their own technologies.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 86)
6 months 1 week ago

All people respect and love their own parents and children, as well as the parents and children of others.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

The universal and lasting establishment of peace constitutes not merely a part, but the whole final purpose and end of the science of right as viewed within the limits of reason.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

The concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion, and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism.

0
0
4 months 5 days ago

Isolation is the worst possible counselor.

0
0
Source
source
Civilization is Civilism
2 months 1 week ago

In the 1980s and 90s there was an extension of the autonomy of individual property owners in... a movement towards neoliberalism represented by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and... by the Chicago school of economics that denigrated... the role of the state in the economy, that said the private markets would be able to solve most social distribution problems and the like. This was true in many ways. The world did become much richer in this period, but it also became much more unequal... Without adequate regulation and... effort to protect people against the excesses of market capitalism, you had people... left behind, even as their societies as a whole, grew. ...This ...became one of the triggers for the kind of populism we've seen arise in many rich countries.

0
0
Source
source
14:13
3 months 4 weeks ago

One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.

0
0
Source
source
A 10
5 months 2 weeks ago

The individual, so far as he suffers from his wrongness and criticizes it, is to that extent consciously beyond it, and in at least possible touch with something higher, if anything higher exist. Along with the wrong part there is thus a better part of him, even though it may be but a most helpless germ. With which part he should identify his real being is by no means obvious at this stage; but when stage 2 (the stage of solution or salvation) arrives, the man identifies his real being with the germinal higher part of himself; and does so in the following way. He becomes conscious that this higher part is coterminous and continuous with a more of the same quality, which is operative in the universe outside of him, and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck.

0
0
Source
source
Lecture XX, "Conclusions"
1 month 4 weeks ago

May the men who hold the destiny of peoples in their hands, studiously avoid anything that might cause the present situation to deteriorate and become even more dangerous. May they take to heart the words of the Apostle Paul: "If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men." These words are valid not only for individuals, but for nations as well. May these nations, in their efforts to maintain peace, do their utmost to give the spirit time to grow and to act.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

Applaud us when we run, console us when we fall, cheer us when we recover.

0
0
Source
source
Speech at Bristol Previous to the Election (6 September 1780), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II (1855), p. 129
5 months 2 weeks ago

Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.

0
0
Source
source
p. 245
5 months 2 weeks ago

Deep in the man sits fast his fate To mould his fortunes, mean or great.

0
0
Source
source
Fate
3 months 1 day ago

I mean to lead a simple life, to choose a simple shell I can carry easily - like a hermit crab. But I do not. I find that my frame of life does not foster simplicity. My husband and five children must make their way in the world. The life I have chosen as a wife and mother entrains a whole caravan of complications.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

I cannot recall those years without horror, loathing, and heart-rending pain. I killed people in war, challenged men to duels with the purpose of killing them, and lost at cards; I squandered the fruits of the peasants' toil and then had them executed; I was a fornicator and a cheat. Lying, stealing, promiscuity of every kind, drunkenness, violence, murder - there was not a crime I did not commit... Thus I lived for ten years.

0
0
Source
source
Pt. I, ch. 2
5 months 2 weeks ago

When I was a child the atmosphere in the house was one of puritan piety and austerity. There were family prayers at eight o'clock every morning. Although there were eight servants, food was always of Spartan simplicity, and even what there was, if it was at all nice, was considered too good for children. For instance, if there was apple tart and rice pudding, I was only allowed the rice pudding. Cold baths all the year round were insisted upon, and I had to practice the piano from seven-thirty to eight every morning although the fires were not yet lit. My grandmother never allowed herself to sit in an armchair until the evening. Alcohol and tobacco were viewed with disfavor although stern convention compelled them to serve a little wine to guests. Only virtue was prized, virtue at the expense of intellect, health, happiness, and every mundane good.

0
0
Source
source
p. 9
4 months 2 weeks ago

Always to have lived with the nostalgia to coincide with something, but not really knowing with what - it is easy to shift from unbelief to belief, or conversely. But what is there to convert to, and what is there to abjure, in a state of chronic lucidity?

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

The self-discipline of the Social Democracy is not merely the replacement of the authority of bourgeois rulers with the authority of a socialist central committee. The working class will acquire the sense of the new discipline, the freely assumed self-discipline of the Social Democracy, not as a result of the discipline imposed on it by the capitalist state, but by extirpating, to the last root, its old habits of obedience and servility.

0
0
Source
source
Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy
4 months 3 weeks ago

Our philosophy... reduceth to a single origin and relateth to a single end, and maketh contraries to coincide so that there is one primal foundation both of origin and of end. From this coincidence of contraries, we deduce that ultimately it is divinely true that contraries are within contraries; wherefore it is not difficult to compass the knowledge that each thing is within every other.

0
0
Source
source
As translated by Dorothea Waley Singer
6 months 3 days ago

What is food to one, is to others bitter poison.

0
0
Source
source
Book IV, line 637 (reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations) Compare: "What's one man's poison, signor, / Is another's meat or drink", Beaumont and Fletcher, Love's Cure (1647), Act III, scene 2
4 months 1 week ago

Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God: but if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.

0
0
Source
source
19:17 (KJV)
4 months 1 week ago

All the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and in time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death.

0
0
Source
source
Creative Evolution (1907), Chapter III. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911, p. 271
4 months 3 weeks ago

If you want me to believe in God, you must make me touch him.

0
0
Source
source
as quoted in Diderot and the Encyclopædists (1897) by John Morley, p. 92.
5 months 3 weeks ago

My Lord St. Albans said that Nature did never put her precious jewels into a garret four stories high, and therefore that exceeding tall men had ever very empty heads.

0
0
Source
source
No. 17
4 months 2 weeks ago

My Lords, to obtain empire is common; to govern it well has been rare indeed. To chastise the guilt of those who have been instruments of imperial sway over other nations by the high superintending justice of the sovereign state has not many striking examples among any people.

0
0
Source
source
Speech in opening the impeachment of Warren Hastings (16 February 1788), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Volume the Ninth (1899), p. 398

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia