Skip to main content
2 months 2 days ago

No natural boundary seems to be set to the efforts of man; and what is not yet done is only what he has not yet attempted to do. Variant: What is not yet done is only what we have not yet attempted to do.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter XVIII.
1 month 2 weeks ago

Well both original seizure and subsequent critical discrimination have equal claims, each to its own complete development and must not be forgotten that direct and unreasoned impression comes first. There is such occasions something of the quality of the wind that bloweth where it listeth. Sometimes it comes and sometimes it does not, even in the presence of the same object. It cannot be forced and when it does not arrive it is not wise to seek to recover by direct action the first fine rapture.

0
0
Source
source
p. 151
3 weeks 6 days ago

A commercial company enslaved a nation comprising two hundred millions. Tell this to a man free from superstition and he will fail to grasp what these words mean. What does it mean that thirty thousand men, not athletes but rather weak and ordinary people, have subdued two hundred million vigorous, clever, capable, and freedom-loving people? Do not the figures make it clear that it is not the English who have enslaved the Indians, but the Indians who have enslaved themselves?

0
0
Source
source
V
2 months 2 weeks ago

On James's view, "true" resembles "good" or "rational" in being a normative notion, a compliment paid to sentences that seem to be paying their way and that fit with other sentences which are doing so.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism
1 month 2 weeks ago

When all these things are lacking there is no culture; there is in the strictest sense of the word, barbarism. And let us not deceive ourselves, this is what is beginning to appear in Europe under the progressive rebellion of the masses. The traveller who arrives in a barbarous country knows that in that territory there are no ruling principles to which it is possible to appeal. Properly speaking, there are no barbarian standards. Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.

0
0
Source
source
Chap. VIII: The Masses Intervene In Everything, And Why Their Intervention Is Solely By Violence
1 month 3 weeks ago

While all these are disturbed and divided by the multifarious objects to which their thoughts must be applied, the Philosopher pursues, in solitary silence and in unbroken concentration of mind, his single and undeviating course towards the Good, the Beautiful, and the True; and that is his daily labour, to which others can only resort at times for rest and refreshment after toil.

0
0
Source
source
P. 17
1 month 3 weeks ago

Love of the absolute engenders a predilection for self-destruction. Hence the passion for monasteries and brothels. Cells and women, in both cases. Weariness with life fares well in the shadow of whores and saintly women.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

Tools arm the man. One can well say that man is capable of bringing forth a world; he lacks only the necessary apparatus, the corresponding armature of his sensory tools. The beginning is there. Thus the principle of a warship lies in the idea of the shipbuilder, who is able to incorporate this thought by making himself into a gigantic machine, as it were, through a mass of men and appropriate tools and materials. Thus the idea of a moment often required monstrous organs, monstrous masses of materials, and man is therefore a potential, if not an actual creator.

0
0
Source
source
Fragment No. 88
3 weeks 4 days ago

The message of radio is one of violent, unified implosion and resonance.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 263)
1 month 2 weeks ago

Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last, and the living one, and I became dead, but look! I am living forever and ever, and I have the keys of death and of the Grave.

0
0
Source
source
Revelation 1:17-18, NWT
1 month 3 weeks ago

Since the only things we remember are humiliations and defeats, what is the use of all the rest?

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

Second, by this and other means we are driven to perceive, what is quite evident in itself, that instantaneous feelings flow together in a continuum of feeling, which has in a modified degree the peculiar vivacity of feeling and has gained generality. And in reference to such general ideas, or continua of feeling, the difficulties about resemblance and suggestion and reference to the external, cease to have any force.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

If one thing goes without saying, almost anything can.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

Concern should drive us into action and not into a depression.

0
0
Source
source
The Collected Works of Karen Horney‎ (1957) by Karen Horney, p. 154: "We may feel genuinely concerned about world conditions, though such a concern should drive us into action and not into a depression."
2 months 3 weeks ago

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

0
0
Source
source
"Note on Dogma"
1 month 3 weeks ago

Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 6, The Formula of Justice

Virtue by premeditation isn't worth much.

0
0
Source
source
H 13
2 months 4 weeks ago

The word of man is the most durable of all material.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 2, Ch. 25, sect. 298
3 months 3 weeks ago

What is a rebel? A man who says no. 

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 1
2 months 4 weeks ago

Men use thought only to justify their wrongdoings, and speech only to conceal their thoughts.

0
0
Source
source
Dialogue 14, Le Chapon et la Poularde (1766); reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed., 1919
1 month 2 weeks ago

The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.

0
0
Source
source
8:20 (KJV)
3 months 3 weeks ago

Parmenides: Whatever the subject of your hypothesis, if you suppose that it is or is not, or that it experiences any other affection, you must consider what happens to it and to any other particular things you may choose, and to a greater number and to all in the same way; and you must consider other things in relation to themselves and to anything else you may choose in any instance, whether you suppose that the subject of your hypothesis exists or does not exist, if you are to train yourself completely to see the truth perfectly.

0
0
2 months 4 weeks ago

Society should treat all equally well who have deserved equally well of it, that is, who have deserved equally well absolutely. This is the highest abstract standard of social and distributive justice; towards which all institutions, and the efforts of all virtuous citizens, should be made in the utmost degree to converge.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 5
1 month 2 weeks ago

See ye not all these things? verily I say unto you, There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.

0
0
Source
source
24:2 (KJV)
2 months 2 weeks ago

Complaints about the social irresponsibility of the intellectual typically concern the intellectual's tendency to marginalize herself, to move out from one community by interior identification of herself with some other community-for example, another country or historical period. ... It is not clear that those who thus marginalize themselves can be criticized for social irresponsibility. One cannot be irresponsible toward a community of which one does not think of oneself as a member. Otherwise runaway slaves and tunnelers under the Berlin Wall would be irresponsible.

0
0
Source
source
"Postmodernist bourgeois liberalism," Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (Cambridge: 1991), p. 197
2 months 3 weeks ago

We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, Chapter 5, "We Have Cause to Be Uneasy"
3 months 5 days ago

So blind is the curiosity by which mortals are possessed, that they often conduct their minds along unexplored routes, having no reason to hope for success, but merely being willing to risk the experiment of finding whether the truth they seek lies there.

0
0
Source
source
Rules for the Direction of the Mind: IV
1 week 4 days ago

As Gandhi taught, freedom can be reclaimed only by refusing to cooperate with unjust, immoral laws. The fight for truth-employing the principles of civil disobedience, nonviolence, and noncooperation-is not just our right as free citizens of free societies. It is our duty as citizens of the earth.

0
0
Source
source
(p184)
3 weeks 4 days ago

Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture.

0
0
3 months 5 days ago

The ceaseless labour of your life is to build the house of death.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, Ch. 20
3 weeks 6 days ago

The Anarchists are right in everything; in the negation of the existing order, and in the assertion that, without authority, there could not be worse violence than that of authority under existing conditions. They are mistaken only in thinking that Anarchy can be instituted by a revolution. "To establish Anarchy." "Anarchy will be instituted." But it will be instituted only by there being more and more people who do not require protection from governmental power, and by there being more and more people who will be ashamed of applying this power.

0
0
Source
source
"On Anarchy", in Pamphlets : Translated from the Russian (1900) as translated by Aylmer Maude, p. 22
2 months 3 weeks ago

Genet is a man-failure: he wills the impossible in order to derive from the tragic grandeur of this defeat the assurance that there is something other than the possible.

0
0
Source
source
p. 213
3 weeks 6 days ago

Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious Idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, [play or] a game in which one releases surplus energy, ...not the production of pleasing objects, and is above all, not pleasure itself, but it is the means of union among mankind, joining them in the same feelings, and necessary for the life and progress toward the good of the individual and of humanity.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

Erect I make a resolution; prone I revoke it.

0
0
2 weeks 6 days ago

National loyalty is founded in the love of place, of the customs and traditions that have been inscribed in the landscape and of the desire to protect these good things through a common law and a common loyalty.

0
0
2 months 4 weeks ago

None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear.

0
0
Source
source
Attributed to Russell in M. Kumar Dictionary of Quotations, p. 76, but actually said by Marshal Lannes, according to The London Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences (1824), p. 664
1 month 2 weeks ago

In its relation to the reality of daily life, the high culture of the past was many things-opposition and adornment, outcry and resignation. But it was also the appearance of the realm of freedom: the refusal to behave.

0
0
Source
source
p. 71
2 months 4 weeks ago

Faith consists in believing what reason cannot.

0
0
Source
source
"The Flood", 1764
3 months 1 day ago

In vain, therefore, should we pretend to determine any single event, or infer any cause or effect, without the assistance of observation and experience.

0
0
Source
source
§ 4.11
1 month 3 weeks ago

Wherever big industries displaced manufacture, the bourgeoisie developed in wealth and power to the utmost and made itself the first class of the country. The result was that wherever this happened, the bourgeoisie took political power into its own hands and displaced the hitherto ruling classes, the aristocracy, the guildmasters, and their representative, the absolute monarchy. The bourgeoisie annihilated the power of the aristocracy, the nobility, by abolishing the entailment of estates - in other words, by making landed property subject to purchase and sale, and by doing away with the special privileges of the nobility. It destroyed the power of the guildmasters by abolishing guilds and handicraft privileges. In their place, it put competition - that is, a state of society in which everyone has the right to enter into any branch of industry, the only obstacle being a lack of the necessary capital.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

The inexperienced in wisdom and virtue, ever occupied with feasting and such, are carried downward, and there, as is fitting, they wander their whole life long, neither ever looking upward to the truth above them nor rising toward it, nor tasting pure and lasting pleasures. Like cattle, always looking downward with their heads bent toward the ground and the banquet tables, they feed, fatten, and fornicate. In order to increase their possessions they kick and butt with horns and hoofs of steel and kill each other, insatiable as they are.

0
0
6 days ago

Philosophy is an everlasting fire, sometimes damped down by setting itself limits, then flaring into new life as it consumes them. Every field of inquiry is limited, but philosophy has an essential relation to the question of limits, to its own limits.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction, p. xiii
1 month 1 week ago

Today's fashion magazines may carry an article about the dangers of anorexia while bombarding its readers with images of emaciated young bodies representing the height of beauty and desirability.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (2014), p.34
3 weeks 3 days ago

Natural selection is like artificial selection, but without the human chooser. Instead of a human deciding which offspring shall die in which shall reproduce, nature 'decides'. The quotation marks are vital because nature doesn't consciously decide. This might seem too obvious to emphasize, but you'd be surprised by the number of people who think natural selection implies some kind of personal choice. They couldn't be more wrong. It just is the case that some offspring are more likely to die while others have what it takes to survive and reproduce. Therefore, as the generations go by, the average, typical creature in the population becomes ever better at the arts of surviving and reproducing. Ever better, I should specify, when, when measured against some absolute standard.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 1, "Facing Mount Rushmore" (p. 34)
3 months 1 week ago

Cleanness of body was ever deemed to proceed from a due reverence to God.

0
0
Source
source
Book II
1 month 3 weeks ago

Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.

0
0
2 months 2 days ago

Americans of all ages, all stations of life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations... In democratic countries knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other forms of knowledge; on its progress depends that of all the others.

0
0
Source
source
Book Two, Chapter V.
1 month 2 weeks ago

I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.

0
0
Source
source
Revelation 22:13

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia