Skip to main content
1 week 5 days ago

The reasons for persisting in Being seem less and less well founded, and our successors will find it easier than we to be rid of such obstinacy.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

To expect, indeed, that the freedom of trade should ever be entirely restored in Great Britain, is as absurd as to expect that an Oceana or Utopia should never be established in it.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter II, p. 505.
1 month 3 weeks ago

Further, it will not be amiss to distinguish the three kinds and, as it were, grades of ambition in mankind. The first is of those who desire to extend their own power in their native country, a vulgar and degenerate kind. The second is of those who labor to extend the power and dominion of their country among men. This certainly has more dignity, though not less covetousness. But if a man endeavor to establish and extend the power and dominion of the human race itself over the universe, his ambition (if ambition it can be called) is without doubt both a more wholesome and a more noble thing than the other two. Now the empire of man over things depends wholly on the arts and sciences. For we cannot command nature except by obeying her.

0
0
Source
source
Aphorism 129
2 months 4 days ago

The world is divided into men who have wit and no religion and men who have religion and no wit.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue.

0
0
2 weeks 2 days ago

Every presentation of philosophy, whether oral or written, is to be taken and can only be taken in the sense of a means. Every system is only an expression or image of reason, and hence only an object of reason, an object which reason-a living power that procreates itself in new thinking beings-distinguishes from itself and posits as an object of criticism. Every system that is not recognized and appropriated as just a means, limits and warps the mind for it sets up the indirect and formal thought in the place of the direct, original and material thought.

0
0
Source
source
Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), p. 67
1 month 1 week ago

This investigation aims to analyze the type "bourgeois public sphere". Its particular approach is required, to begin with, by the difficulties specific to an object whose complexity precludes exclusive reliance on the specialized methods of a single discipline. Rather, the category. "public sphere" must be investigated within the broad field formerly reflected in the perspective of the traditional science of "politics."' When particular social-scientific discipline, this object disintegrates. The problems that result from fusing aspects of sociology and economics, of constitutional law and political science, and of social and intellectual history are obvious: given the present state of differentiation and specialization in the social sciences, scarcely anyone will be able to master several, let alone all, of these disciplines.

0
0
Source
source
p.xvii

The philosophical thought of Kant, the supreme flower of the Germanic people, has its roots in the religious feeling of Luther, and it is not possible for Kantism, especially the practical part of it, to take root and bring forth flower and fruit in peoples who have not undergone the experience of the Reformation and who perhaps were incapable of experiencing it. Kantism is Protestant, and we Spaniards are fundamentally Catholic. And if Krause struck some roots here - more numerous and more permanent than is commonly supposed - it is because Krause has roots in pietism, and pietism, as Ritschl has demonstrated in his Geschichte des Pietismus, has specifically Catholic roots and may be described as the irruption, or rather the persistence of Catholic mysticism in the heart of Protestant rationalism. And this explains why not a few Catholic thinkers in Spain became followers of Krause.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push it.

0
0
Source
source
p. 42e
1 week 6 days ago

The evil of marriage, as is it practiced in the European countries, extends further than we have yet described. The method is for a thoughtless and romantic youth of each sex, to come together, to see each other, for a few times, and under circumstances full of delusion and then to vow eternal attachment. What is the consequence of this? In almost every instance they find themselves deceived. They are reduced to make the best of an irretrievable mistake. They are led to conceive it their wiser policy, to shut their eyes upon realities, happy, if by any perversion of intellect, they can persuade themselves that they were right in their first crude opinion of each other. Thus the institution of marriage is made a system of fraud; and men who carefully mislead their judgement in the daily affair of their life, must be expected to have a crippled judgement in every other concern.

0
0
1 week 5 days ago

One of the biggest paradoxes of our world: memories vanish when we want to remember, but fix themselves permanently in the mind when we want to forget.

0
0
2 weeks 2 days ago

In the interval between his campaigns Agricola was employed in the great labours of peace. He knew that the general must be perfected by the legislator; and that the conquest is neither permanent nor honourable, which is only an introduction to tyranny... In short, he subdued the Britons by civilizing them; and made them exchange a savage liberty for a polite and easy subjection. His conduct is the most perfect model for those employed in the unhappy, but sometimes necessary, task of subduing a rude and free people.

0
0
Source
source
An Essay towards an Abridgment of English History (1757-c. 1763)

Few new truths have ever won their way against the resistance of established ideas save by being overstated. 

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Communications and History : Theories of Knowledge, Media and Civilization (1988) by Paul Heyer, p. 125
1 month 2 weeks ago

It was his peculiar doctrine that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave. I agree with him. They who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but no others.

0
0
2 months ago

You are a little soul carrying a corpse around, as Epictetus used to say.

0
0
Source
source
Fragment 26 (Oldfather translation). This fragment originates from Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, IV. 41.
1 month 2 weeks ago

The deadliest enemies of nations are not their foreign foes; they always dwell within their borders. And from these internal enemies civilization is always in need of being saved. The nation blest above all nations is she in whom the civic genius of the people does the saving day by day, by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans or empty quacks.

0
0
Source
source
Robert Gould Shaw: Oration upon the Unveiling of the Shaw Monument
1 week ago

The cry of equality pulls everyone down.

0
0
Source
source
Quoted in The Observer September 13, 1987.
2 weeks 2 days ago

Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

Absurd, irreducible; nothing - not even a profound and secret delirium of nature - could explain it. Obviously I did not know everything, I had not seen the seeds sprout, or the tree grow. But faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explained by the rotation of a straight segment around one of its extremities. But neither does a circle exist. This root, on the other hand, existed in such a way that I could not explain it. Reflections on a chestnut tree root.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

In a logically perfect language, there will be one word and no more for every simple object, and everything that is not simple will be expressed by a combination of words, by a combination derived, of course, from the words for the simple things that enter in, one word for each simple component.

0
0
1 week 6 days ago

Virtue can only flourish amongst equals.

0
0
Source
source
A Vindication of the Rights of Men
2 weeks 2 days ago

Whether directly or indirectly all nations are originally nothing but Indian colonies... the oriental antiquity could, if we consented to deepen it, bring us back more safely towards the divine....

0
0
Source
source
Friedrich Schlegel, Essay on the Language and Wisdom of the Indians, quoted by Roger-Pol Droit in L'Oubli de I'Inde, Paris Presses Universitaires de France, 1989, p. 129.
1 month 2 weeks ago

Where men are the most sure and arrogant, they are commonly the most mistaken, and have there given reins to passion, without that proper deliberation and suspense, which can alone secure them from the grossest absurdities.

0
0
Source
source
§ 9.13 : Conclusion, Pt. 1
1 week 5 days ago

No one has the audacity to exclaim: "I don't want to do anything!" - we are more indulgent with a murderer than with a mind emancipated from actions.

0
0
2 months 1 day ago

The verdict of the world is conclusive.

0
0
Source
source
III, 24
2 months 4 days ago

Pleasure and distress, fear and courage, desire and aversion, where have these affections and experiences their seat? Clearly, either in the Soul alone, or in the Soul as employing the body, or in some third entity deriving from both. And for this third entity, again, there are two possible modes: it might be either a blend or a distinct form due to the blending.

0
0
2 weeks 2 days ago

Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle.

0
0
Source
source
Volume iii, p. 334
1 month 3 weeks ago

I find that the best goodness I have has some tincture of vice.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 20
1 month 2 weeks ago

Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

0
0
Source
source
"On Three Ways of Writing for Children" (1952) - in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (1967), p. 25
1 month 4 weeks ago

When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the small space which I fill, or even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified, and wonder that I am here rather than there, for there is no reason why here rather than there, or now rather than then. Who has set me here? By whose order and design have this place and time been destined for me? It is not well to be too much at liberty. It is not well to have all we want.How many kingdoms know nothing of us! The eternal silence of these infinite spaces alarms me.

0
0
Source
source
"The Misery of Man Without God": "Man's Disproportion," The Thoughts of Blaise Pascal translated from the Text of M. Auguste Molinier Tr. C. Kegan Paul, 1885
1 week 1 day ago

Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven. Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein.

0
0
Source
source
18:16-17 (KJV) Variant translation: Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.
1 month 1 week ago

Exercise is the technique by which one imposes on the body tasks that are both repetitive and different, but always graduated. By bending behavior towards a terminal state, exercise makes possible a perpetual characterization of the individual...It thus assures, in the form of continuity and constraint, a growth, an observation, a qualification.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

God can make good use of all that happens, but the loss is real.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

Character means that the person derives his rules of conduct from himself and from the dignity of humanity. Character is the common ruling principle in man in the use of his talents and attributes. Thus it is the nature of his will, and is good or bad. A man who acts without settled principles, with no uniformity, has no character. A man may have a good heart and yet no character, because he is dependent upon impulses and does not act according to maxims. Firmness and unity of principle are essential to character.

0
0
Source
source
Part III : Selection on Education from Kant's other Writings, Ch. I Pedagogical Fragments, # 14
1 month 2 weeks ago

It is not for its own sake that men desire money, but for the sake of what they can purchase with it.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter I, p. 471.
1 month 2 weeks ago

I now saw, that a science is either deductive or experimental, according as, in the province it deals with, the effects of causes when conjoined, are or are not the sums of the effects which the same causes produce when separate. It followed that politics must be a deductive science. It thus appeared, that both Macaulay and my father were wrong; the one in assimilating the method of philosophising in politics to the purely experimental method of chemistry; while the other, though right in adopting a deductive method, had made a wrong selection of one, having taken as the type of deduction, not the appropriate process, that of the deductive branches of natural philosophy, but the inappropriate one of pure geometry, which, not being a science of causation at all, does not require or admit of any summing-up of effects.

0
0
Source
source
(pp. 160-161)
2 weeks 6 days ago

And now I have explained the series of social and intellectual conditions by which the discovery of sociological laws, and consequently the foundation of Positivism, was fixed for the precise date at which I began my philosophical career: that is to say, one generation after the progressive dictatorship of the Convention, and almost immediately after the fall of the retrograde tyranny of Bonaparte.

0
0
Source
source
p. 71
1 month 2 weeks ago

There are infinitely many variations of the initial situation and therefore no doubt indefinitely many theorems of moral geometry.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter III, Section 21, pg. 126
1 month 1 week ago

My aim is not to provide excuses for black behavior or to absolve blacks of personal responsibility. But when the new black conservatives accent black behavior and responsibility in such a way that the cultural realities of black people are ignored, they are playing a deceptive and dangerous intellectual game with the lives and fortunes of disadvantaged people. We indeed must criticize and condemn immoral acts of black people, but we must do so cognizant of the circumstances into which people are born and under which they live. By overlooking these circumstances, the new black conservatives fall into the trap of blaming black poor people for their predicament. It is imperative to steer a course between the Scylla of environmental determinism and the Charybdis of a blaming-the-victims perspective.

0
0
Source
source
(p56)
1 month 2 weeks ago

The best life is the one in which the creative impulses play the largest part and the possessive impulses the smallest.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

The faith that stands on authority is not faith.

0
0
Source
source
The Over-soul
1 month 2 weeks ago

The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilized men.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1: Mysticism and Logic
4 weeks 1 day ago

For this, to draw a right line from every point, to every point, follows the definition, which says, that a line is the flux of a point, and a right line an indeclinable and inflexible flow.

0
0
Source
source
Book III. Concerning Petitions and Axioms.
2 weeks 2 days ago

That the uneducated and the ill-educated should think the hypothesis that all races of beings, man inclusive, may in process of time have been evolved from the simplest monad, a ludicrous one, is not to be wondered at. But for the physiologist, who knows that every individual being is so evolved-who knows, further, that in their earliest condition the germs of all plants and animals whatever are so similar, "that there is no appreciable distinction amongst them, which would enable it to be determined whether a particular molecule is the germ of a Conferva or of an Oak, of a Zoophyte or of a Man";-for him to make a difficulty of the matter is inexcusable.

0
0
Source
source
Spencer here references William Benjamin Carpenter, Principles of Comparative Physiology see p. 473
1 month 3 weeks ago

Seek first the virtues of the mind; and other things either will come, or will not be wanted.

0
0
Source
source
Book II, xxxi
2 months 1 day ago

Bad times, hard times, this is what people keep saying; but let us live well, and times shall be good. We are the times: Such as we are, such are the times.

0
0
Source
source
80:8
1 month 2 weeks ago

I am particularly grateful to Nozick for his unfailing help and encouragement during the last stages.

0
0
Source
source
Preface, pg. xii
1 week 6 days ago

Nothing can be of more importance than to separate prejudice and mistake on the one hand from reason and demonstration on the other.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, Ch.1
1 month 1 week ago

I shall develop the thesis that anyone acting communicatively must, in performing any speech act, raise universal validity claims and suppose that they can be vindicated.

0
0
Source
source
p. 22
3 weeks 6 days ago

Write in the sand the flaws of your friend.

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

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia