Skip to main content
3 months 2 weeks ago

Though thou be destined to live three thousand years and as many myriads besides, yet remember that no man loseth other life than that which he liveth, nor liveth other than that which he loseth.

0
0
Source
source
II, 14
6 months 3 weeks ago

They call, in fact, for the forfeiture, to a greater or less degree, of human liberty, to the point where, were I to attempt to sum up what socialism is, I would say that it was simply a new system of serfdom.

0
0
Source
source
Notes for a Speech on Socialism (1848). http://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/tocqueville-s-critique-of-socialism-1848
8 months 4 days ago

Morality is the beauty of Philosophy.

0
0
Source
source
Trattato Terzo, Ch. 15.
3 months 1 week ago

The really good music, whether of the East or of the West, cannot be analyzed.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

When we come to inanimate elements, the prevailing view has been that time and sequential change are entirely foreign to their nature. According to this view they do not have careers; they simply change their relations is space. We have only to think of the classic conception of atoms. The Newtonian atom, for example, moved and was moved, thus changing its position in space, but it was unchangeable in its own being. ... In itself it was like a God, the same yesterday, today, and forever.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

May they not forget to keep pure the great heritage that puts them ahead of the West: the artistic configuration of life, the simplicity and modesty of personal needs, and the purity and serenity of the Japanese soul.

0
0
Source
source
Comment made after a six-week trip to Japan in November-December 1922, published in Kaizo 5, no. 1 (January 1923), 339. Einstein Archive 36-477.1. Appears in The New Quotable Einstein by Alice Calaprice (2005), p. 269
7 months 3 weeks ago

To talk about religion except in terms of human psychology is an irrelevance.

0
0
Source
source
"One and Many," p. 3
6 months 2 weeks ago

Lucidity is not necessarily compatible with life, actually not at all.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

Good roads, canals, and navigable rivers, by diminishing the expence of carriage, put the remote parts of the country more nearly upon a level with those of the neighbourhood of the town. They are upon that the greatest of all improvements.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter XI, Part I, p. 174.
4 months 3 days ago

Let me give you a definition of ethics: It is good to maintain and further life - it is bad to damage and destroy life. And this ethic, profound and universal, has the significance of a religion. It is religion.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Albert Schweitzer : The Man and His Mind (1947) by George Seaver, p. 366
4 months 2 days ago

The social game has a deeper double meaning-that it is played not only in a society as its outward bearer but that with its help people actually "play" "society."

0
0
Source
source
Sociability (1910) in On Individuality and Social Forms (1971), p. 134
8 months 3 weeks ago

If, then, in the sphere of action there is some one end which we desire for its own sake, and for the sake of which we desire every thing else; and if we do not choose every thing for the sake of something else, for this would go on without limit, and our desire would be idle and futile, it is clear that this must be the supreme good, and the best thing of all.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

0
0
Source
source
From an April 13, 1942 letter to poet Joë Bousquet, published in their collected correspondence
6 months 2 weeks ago

Virtue can only flourish amongst equals.

0
0
Source
source
A Vindication of the Rights of Men
4 months 1 week ago

Few people who are not actually practitioners of a mature science realize how much mop-up work of this sort a paradigm leaves to be done or quite how fascinating such work can prove in the execution.

0
0
Source
source
p. 24
7 months 2 weeks ago

Tell them I've had a wonderful life.

0
0
Source
source
Last words, to his doctor's wife (28 April 1951)-as quoted in Ludwig Wittgenstein : A Memoir (1966) by Norman Malcolm, p. 100
3 months 3 weeks ago

Trade has ever been the extinguisher of war, the eradicator of prejudice, the diffuser of knowledge.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 6
7 months 3 weeks ago

Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill? Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill.

0
0
Source
source
Fragment
8 months 1 week ago

In this one man, the whole Church has been assumed by the Word.

0
0
Source
source
p.434
5 months 2 weeks ago

At the very high speed of living, everybody needs a new career and a new job and a totally new personality every ten years.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

To rule the imperial population, behold our vocation.

0
0
Source
source
94
6 months 3 weeks ago

The history of philosophical system is the picture gallery of reason.

0
0
Source
source
Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), p. 68
5 months 1 day ago

A created thing is never invented and it is never true: it is always and ever itself.

0
0
Source
source
Creation
5 months 3 weeks ago

The only thing that we know is that we know nothing - and that is the highest flight of human wisdom.

0
0
Source
source
Book V, Ch. I
1 month 1 week ago

"In each of us there dwells a mystery, and that mystery is the human personality."
- Jacques Maritain

See biography for Jacques Maritain:
https://civilsimian.com/Jacques-Maritain

Read Jacques Maritain's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/323/content

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

There is the same difference between political theory and constitutional laws as there is between poetics and poetry. The illustrious Montesquieu is to Lycurgus, in the intellectual hierarchy, what Batteux is to Homer or Racine. Moreover, these two talents positively exclude each other, as can be seen by the example of Locke, who fumbled badly when he presumed to give laws to the Americans.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter VI, p. 52
5 months 2 weeks ago

If you have a faith, it is statistically overwhelmingly likely that it is the same faith as your parents and grandparents had. No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth. The convictions that you so passionately believe would have been a completely different, and largely contradictory, set of convictions, if only you had happened to be born in a different place. Epidemiology, not evidence.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

There will be a time when those trying to turn the world into a Colosseum for their own amusement will be raw meat thrown to the wolves themselves, and the rest of us will watch, as justice is served, with a clean conscience.

0
0
6 months 4 days ago

I believe government, organized authority, or the State is necessary only to maintain or protect property and monopoly. It has proven efficient in that function only. As a promoter of individual liberty, human well-being and social harmony, which alone constitute real order, government stands condemned by all the great men of the world...I believe - indeed, I know - that whatever is fine and beautiful in the human expresses and asserts itself in spite of government, and not because of it.

0
0
8 months 3 weeks ago
Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him!
0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

What chiefly diverts the men of democracies from lofty ambition is not the scantiness of their fortunes, but the vehemence of the exertions they daily make to improve them.

0
0
Source
source
Book Three, Chapter XIX.
6 months 3 weeks ago

I: My consciousness of the object is only a yet unrecognised consciousness of my production of the representation of an object. Of this production I know no more than that it is I who produce, and thus is all consciousness no more than a consciousness of myself, and so far perfectly comprehensible. Am I in the right? Spirit. Perfectly so ; but whence then is derived the necessity and universality thou hast ascribed to these propositions, to that of causality for instance?

0
0
Source
source
Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p. 47
6 months 1 week ago

In most cases, to be reasonable means not to be obstinate, which in turn points to conformity with reality as it is. The principle of adjustment is taken for granted. When the idea of reason was conceived, it was intended to achieve more than the mere regulation of the relation between means and ends: it was regarded as the instrument for understanding the ends, for determining them.

0
0
Source
source
p. 10.
7 months 3 weeks ago

The Spirit of the Age wishes to allow argument and not to allow argument. ... If anyone argues with them they say that he is rationalizing his own desires, and therefore need not be answered. But if anyone listens to them they will then argue themselves to show that their own doctrines are true. ... You must ask them whether any reasoning is valid or not. If they say no, then their own doctrines, being reached by reasoning, fall to the ground. If they say yes, then they will have to examine your arguments and refute them on their merits: for if some reasoning is valid, for all they know, your bit of reasoning may be one of the valid bits.'

0
0
Source
source
Pilgrim's Regress 63
6 months 1 week ago

In order to obey God, one must receive his commands. How did it happen that I received them in adolescence, while I was professing atheism? To believe that the desire for good is always fulfilled - that is faith, and whoever has it is not an atheist.

0
0
Source
source
Last Notebook (1942) p. 137
6 months 1 week ago

To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

The past is the luxury of proprietors.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

Communism differs from all previous movements in that it overturns the basis of all earlier relations of production and intercourse, and for the first time consciously treats all natural premises as the creatures of hitherto existing men, strips them of their natural character and subjugates them to the power of the united individuals. Its organisation is, therefore, essentially economic, the material production of the conditions of this unity; it turns existing conditions into conditions of unity. The reality, which communism is creating, is precisely the true basis for rendering it impossible that anything should exist independently of individuals, insofar as reality is only a product of the preceding intercourse of individuals themselves.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. I, Part 4.
6 months 2 weeks ago

The intellectual is called on the carpet. ... Don't you conceal something? You talk a language which is suspect. You don't talk like the rest of us, like the man in the street, but rather like a foreigner who does not belong here. We have to cut you down to size, expose your tricks, purge you.

0
0
Source
source
p. 192
3 months 3 weeks ago

Experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind; for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Colonel Edward Carrington

The techniques of the practitioner are usually called 'synthetic'. He designs by organizing known principles and devices into larger systems.

0
0
Source
source
Simon (1945, p. 353); As cited in: Philosophy of Technology and Engineering Sciences (2009) p. 425.
6 months 2 weeks ago

Everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.

0
0
Source
source
19:29
1 month 3 weeks ago

Also, the quickest path to neglect duty....

0
0
4 months 4 weeks ago

Their minds befogged by fashionable nonsense about globalisation, western leaders believe liberal democracy is spreading unstoppably. The reality is continuing political diversity. Republics, empires, liberal and illiberal democracies, and a wide variety of authoritarian regimes will be with us for the foreseeable future. Globalisation is nothing more than the industrialisation of the planet, and increasing resource nationalism is an integral part of the process. (So is accelerating climate change, but that's another story.) As industrialisation spreads, countries that control natural resources use these resources to advance their strategic objectives.

0
0
Source
source
Folly of the progressive fairytale, The Observer
5 months 2 weeks ago

Interface, of the resonant interval as 'where the action is', whether chemical, psychic or social, involves touch.

0
0
Source
source
p. 102
6 months 1 week ago

No human being escapes the necessity of conceiving some good outside himself towards which his thought turns in a movement of desire, supplication, and hope. consequently, the only choice is between worshipping the true God or an idol. Every atheist is an idolater - unless he is worshipping the true God in his impersonal aspect. The majority of the pious are idolaters.

0
0
Source
source
Last Notebook (1942) p. 308

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia