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6 months 4 weeks ago

We should never take pleasure in causing pain to others, even to those who have wronged us, but rather strive to do good to all.

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6 months 1 week ago

Americans need rest, but do not know it. I believe this to be a large part of the explanation of the crime wave in the United States.

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Ch. 13: Freedom in Society.

And now the sagacious reader, who is capable of reading into these lines what does not stand written in them, but is nevertheless implied, will be able to form some conception of the serious feelings with which I then set foot in Emmendingen.

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Autobiography: Truth and Poetry Book xviii. London 1884 p. 115 books.google.de
6 months 1 week ago

When I come to my own beliefs, I find myself quite unable to discern any purpose in the universe, and still more unable to wish to discern one.

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"Is There a God?", 1952
3 months 2 days ago

We may, to be more precise, have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth.

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p. 170
2 months 3 weeks ago

Arms observe no bounds; nor can the wrath of the sword, once drawn, be easily checked or stayed; war delights in blood.

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lines 403-405; (Lycus).
6 months 2 weeks ago

For truth itself has not the privilege to be spoken at all times and in all sorts.

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

The great reformers of the world turn into the great misanthropists, if circumstances or organisation do not permit them to act. Christ, if He had been a woman, might have been nothing but a great complainer. Peace be with the misanthropists! They have made a step in progress; the next will make them great philanthropists; they are divided but by a line. The next Christ will perhaps be a female Christ. But do we see one woman who looks like a female Christ? or even like "the messenger before" her "face", to go before her and prepare the hearts and minds for her? To this will be answered that half the inmates of Bedlam begin in this way, by fancying that they are "the Christ." People talk about imitating Christ, and imitate Him in the little trifling formal things, such as washing the feet, saying His prayer, and so on; but if anyone attempts the real imitation of Him, there are no bounds to the outcry with which the presumption of that person is condemned.

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6 months 1 week ago

Philosophy will not be able to bring about a direct change of the present state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all merely human meditations and endeavors. Only a god can still save us. I think the only possibility of salvation left to us is to prepare readiness, through thinking and poetry, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god during the decline; so that we do not, simply put, die meaningless deaths, but that when we decline, we decline in the face of the absent god.

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6 months 1 week ago

Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

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4 months 1 week ago

Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes. But I warn you, if you don't tell me that this means war, if you still try to defend the infamies and horrors perpetrated by that Antichrist-I really believe he is Antichrist-I will have nothing more to do with you and you are no longer my friend, no longer my 'faithful slave,' as you call yourself! But how do you do? I see I have frightened you-sit down and tell me all the news.

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Bk. I, Ch. I
4 months 1 week ago

Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly.

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p.73 of the 1966 Signet paperback edition
6 months 6 days ago

In its most general form, confinement was explained, or at least justified, by a will to avoid scandal. It thereby signalled an important change in the consciousness of evil. The Renaissance had let unreason in all its forms come out into the light of day, as public exposure gave evil the chance to redeem itself and to serve as an exemplum.

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Part One: 5. The Insane
6 months 1 week ago

Creatures extremely low in the intellectual scale may have conception. All that is required is that they should recognize the same experience again. A polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of 'Hello! thingumbob again!' ever flitted through its mind.

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Ch. 12
2 months 1 week ago

Either all things proceed from one intelligent source and come together as in one body, and the part ought not to find fault with what is done for the benefit of the whole; or there are only atoms, and nothing else than a mixture and dispersion. Why, then, art thou disturbed? Say to this ruling faculty, Art thou dead, art thou corrupted, art thou playing the hypocrite, art thou become a beast, dost thou herd and feed with the rest?

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IX, 39
4 months 2 weeks ago

Broadly stated, the task is to replace the global rationality of economic man with a kind of rational behavior that is compatible with the access to information and the computational capacities that are actually possessed by organisms, including man, in the kinds of environments in which such organisms exist.

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Simon (1955) "A behavioral model of rational choice", The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 69 (1); As cited in: Gustavo Barros (2010, p. 462).
5 months 1 week ago

Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

The real and effectual discipline which is exercised over a workman is that of his customers. It is the fear of losing their employment which restrains his frauds and corrects his negligence.

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Chapter X, Part II.
5 months 2 weeks ago

We vainly accuse the fury of guns, and the new inventions of death; it is in the power of every hand to destroy us, and we are beholden unto every one we meet he doth not kill us.

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Section 44
6 months 6 days ago

The political triumph of Donald Trump is a symbol and symptom-not cause or origin-of our imperial meltdown. Trump is neither alien nor extraneous to American culture and history. In fact, he is as American as apple pie. Yet he is a sign of our spiritual bankruptcy-all spectacle and no substance, all narcissism and no empathy, all appetite and greed and no wisdom and maturity. Yet his triumph flows from the implosion of a Republican Party establishment beholden to big money, big military, and big scapegoating of vulnerable peoples of color, LGBTQ peoples, immigrants, Muslims, and women; from a Democratic Party establishment beholden to big money, big military, and the clever deployment of peoples of color, LGBTQ peoples, immigrants, Muslims, and women to hide and conceal the lies and crimes of neoliberal policies here and abroad; and from a corporate media establishment that aided and abetted Trump owing to high profits and revenues.

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2017 introduction
2 months 1 week ago

Once we recognize that all historical knowledge is relational knowledge, and can only be formulated with reference to the position of the observer, we are faced, once more, with the task of discriminating between what is true and what is false in such knowledge.

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2 months 1 week ago

In our contemporary social and intellectual plight, it is nothing less than shocking to discover that those persons who claim to have discovered an absolute are usually the same people who also pretend to be superior to the rest. To find people in our day attempting to pass off to the world and recommending to others some nostrum of the absolute which they claim to have discovered is merely a sign of the loss of and the need for intellectual and moral certainty, felt by broad sections of the population who are unable to look life in the face.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

Alcibiades had a very handsome dog, that cost him seven thousand drachmas; and he cut off his tail, "that," said he, "the Athenians may have this story to tell of me, and may concern themselves no further with me."

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50 Alcibiades
4 months 3 weeks ago

Implication is thus the very texture of our web of belief, and logic is the theory that traces it.

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S. 41
7 months 1 week ago

Great novelists are philosopher novelists, that is, the contrary of thesis-writers.

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6 months 1 week ago

My friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, "What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and most hostile to, the idea of escape?" and gave the obvious answer: jailers.

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"On Science Fiction". Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2002). p. 67.
3 months 3 weeks ago

The way out of this violent cycle is to deepen democracy-to bring decisions that directly affect people's lives as close as possible to where people are and to where they can take responsibility.

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6 months 1 week ago

Most of what happens actually is forgotten.

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Ch. 16
2 months 2 weeks ago

The Americans' "open-mindedness", which is sometimes cited in their favor, is the other side of their interior formlessness. The same goes for their "individualism". Individualism and personality are not the same: the one belongs to the formless world of quantity, the other to the world of quality and hierarchy. The Americans are the living refutation of the Cartesian axiom, "I think, therefore I am": Americans do not think, yet they are. The American "mind", puerile and primitive, lacks characteristic form and is therefore open to every kind of standardization.

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American "Civilization" (1945) · Excerpts
2 months 3 weeks ago

The young are of age when they twitter like the old; they are driven through school to learn the old song, and, when they have this by heart, they are declared of age.

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Cambridge 1995, pp. 61-62
2 weeks 2 days ago

Paradox of choice, but I think we would all prefer MORE options. At least then it's on us.....

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5 months 1 week ago

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

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Volume iii, p. 334
7 months 1 week ago

It seems to be almost an invariable rule that as real power declines, the symbols of power multiply and intensify in compensation.

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2 months 1 week ago

...that to expect a bad person not to harm others is like expecting fig trees not to secrete juice, babies not to cry, horses not to neigh-the inevitable not to happen.

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(Hays translation) XII, 16
6 months 1 week ago

United States! the ages plead, - Present and Past in under-song, - Go put your creed into your deed, Nor speak with double tongue.

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Ode, st. 5
5 months 3 weeks ago

Abstain from animals.

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Symbol 39
6 months 1 week ago

To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe.

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5 months 1 week 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.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

In fact, for a voluntarist like Schopenhauer, a theory so sanely and cautiously empirical and rational as that of Darwin, left out of account the inward force, the essential motive, of evolution. For what is, in effect, the hidden force, the ultimate agent, which impels organisms to perpetuate themselves and to fight for their persistence and propagation? Selection, adaptation, heredity, these are only external conditions. This inner, essential force has been called will on the supposition that there exists also in other beings that which we feel in ourselves as a feeling of will, the impulse to be everything, to be others as well as ourselves yet without ceasing to be what we are.

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7 months ago

I am not my soul.

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Super I ad Corinthios, 15.2
6 months 1 week ago

There are those who blame the Press, but in this I think they are mistaken. The Press is such as the public demands, and the public demands bad newspapers because it has been badly educated.

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p. 133
4 months 3 weeks ago

Truth is sought not because it is truth but because it is good.

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p. 213
3 months 3 weeks ago

We should always speak what would please the man of whom we expect a favour, like the hunter who sings sweetly when he desires to shoot a deer.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Station, power, wealth-how inadequate they have proved! How useless and insecure!

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5 months 1 week ago

Obviously God was a solution, and obviously none so satisfactory that will ever be found again.

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5 months 4 days ago

The Kingdom is like a wise fisherman who cast his net into the sea and drew it up from the sea full of small fish. Among them the wise fisherman found a fine large fish. He threw all the small fish back into the sea and chose the large fish without difficulty. Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

The key to understanding Crowley is the same as the key to understanding the Marquis de Sade. Both wasted an immense amount of energy screaming defiance at the authority they resented so much, and lacked the insight to see that they were shaking their fists at an abstraction.

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p. 29
2 months 1 week ago

Only an atheist can be a good Christian.

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Atheismus im Christentum 1968, english translation: Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom 1972
6 months 1 week ago

The Calculus required continuity, and continuity was supposed to require the infinitely little; but nobody could discover what the infinitely little might be.

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Ch. 5: Mathematics and the Metaphysicians

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