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8 months 2 weeks ago

The moral things I wish to say to future generations is very simple. I should say love is wise hatred is foolish. In this world which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other. We have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don't like. We can only live together in that way, and if we are to live together and not die together we must learn the kind of charity and kind of tolerance which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.

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6 months 1 week ago

The business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but a direct participation in an experience. The whole tendency of modern communication...is towards participation in a process, rather than apprehension of concepts.

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Letter to Harold Adam Innis (14 March 1951), published in Essential McLuhan (1995), edited by Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, p. 73
8 months 2 weeks ago

The way for a person to develop a [writing] style is (a) to know exactly what he wants to say, and (b) to be sure he is saying exactly that. The reader, we must remember, does not start by knowing what we mean. If our words are ambiguous, our meaning will escape him. I sometimes think that writing is like driving sheep down a road. If there is any gate open to the left or the right the readers will most certainly go into it.

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As quoted in part 2 of Sherwood Eliot Wirt in "The Final Interview of C. S. Lewis", 1963
5 months 5 days ago

This, evidently was not a minor civilization, produced by inferior people. It ranks with the highest civilizations of history, and some, like Keyserling, would place it at the head and summit of all. The British conquest of India was the invasion and destruction of a high civilization by a trading company utterly without scruple or principle, careless of art, greedy of gain, overrunning with fire and sword a country temporarily disordered and helpless, bribing and murdering, annexing and stealing, and beginning that career of illegal and "legal" plunder which has now gone on ruthlessly for one hundred and seventy-three years, and goes on at this moment while in our secure comfort we write and read. Those who have seen the unspeakable poverty and physiological weakness of the Hindus today will hardly believe that it was the wealth of eighteenth century India which attracted the commercial pirates of England and France.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

In some lyceums they tell me that they have voted to exclude the subject of religion. But how do I know what their religion is, and when I am near to or far from it? I have walked into such an arena and done my best to make a clean breast of what religion I have experienced, and the audience never suspected what I was about.

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p. 490
8 months 2 weeks ago

I disbelieve in specialization and... experts. ...[P]aying too much respect to the specialist ...[is] destroying the commonwealth of learning, the rationalist tradition, and science ...

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1 month 3 weeks ago

I have an embroidered patch on my work laptop bag that says, "Do nothing forever." Radical capitalists hate this one trick....

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4 months 3 weeks ago

True philosophy must start from the most immediate and comprehensive fact of consciousness: "I am life that wants to live, in the midst of life that wants to live."

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Chapter 26 "The Civilizing Power of the Ethics of Reverence for Life"
4 months 3 weeks ago

I was convinced - and I am so still - that the fundamental principles of Christianity have to be proved true by reasoning, and by no other method. Reason, I said to myself, is given us that we may bring everything within the range of its action, even the most exalted ideas of religion. And this certainty filled me with joy.

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7 months 1 week ago

Third, these general ideas are not mere words, nor do they consist in this, that certain concrete facts will every time happen under certain descriptions of conditions; but they are just as much, or rather far more, living realities than the feelings themselves out of which they are concreted. And to say that mental phenomenon are governed by law does not mean merely that they are describable by a general formula; but that there is a living idea, a conscious continuum of feeling which pervades them, and to which they are docile.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

That which parents should take care of... is to distinguish between the wants of fancy, and those of nature.

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Sec. 107
6 months 2 weeks ago

Our design, not respecting arts, but philosophy, and our subject, not manual, but natural powers, we consider chiefly those things which relate to gravity, levity, elastic force, the resistance of fluids, and the like forces, whether attractive or impulsive; and therefore we offer this work as mathematical principles of philosophy; for all the difficulty of philosophy seems to consist in this - from the phenomena of motions to investigate the forces of nature, and then from these forces to demonstrate the other phenomena...

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Preface
6 months 1 week ago

The late philosopher Morris R. Cohen of CCNY was asked by a student in the metaphysics course, "Professor Cohen, how do I know that I exist?" The keen old prof replied, "And who is asking?"

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Humboldt's Gift (1996), p. 163
7 months 1 week ago

To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!

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4 months 1 week ago

To be like the rock that the waves keep crashing over. It stands unmoved and the raging of the sea falls still around it.

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IV, 49
9 months 2 weeks ago

There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys; they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked out the sum for themselves.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

There are only Epicureans, either crude or refined; Christ was the most refined.

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Act I.
6 months 3 weeks ago

One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.

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ABC TV
6 months 1 week ago

Psychic communal integration, made possible at last by the electronic media, could create the universality of consciousness foreseen by Dante when he predicted that men would continue as no more than broken fragments until they were unified into an inclusive consciousness...This is a new interpretation of the mystical body of Christ; and Christ, after all, is the ultimate extension of man.

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6 months 1 day ago

Is Man so different from any of these Apes that he must form an order by himself? Or does he differ less from them than they differ from one another, and hence must take his place in the same order with them?

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Ch.2, p. 86
7 months 1 week ago

If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.

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Ch. 1
9 months 4 days ago

Men are at variance with the one thing with which they are in the most unbroken communion, the reason that administers the whole universe.

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9 months 3 days ago

The perfection of the effect demonstrates the perfection of the cause, for a greater power brings about a more perfect effect. But God is the most perfect agent. Therefore, things created by Him obtain perfection from Him. So, to detract from the perfection of creatures is to detract from the perfection of divine power.

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III, 69, 15
8 months 2 weeks ago

The art of music is good, for the reason, among others, that it produces pleasure; but what proof is it possible to give that pleasure is good? If, then, it is asserted that there is a comprehensive formula, including all things which are in themselves good, and that whatever else is good, is not so as an end, but as a mean, the formula may be accepted or rejected, but is not a subject of what is commonly understood by proof.

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Ch. 1
7 months 2 days ago

Reason, that which we call reason, reflex and reflective knowledge, the distinguishing mark of man, is a social product.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

A mellow understanding of life and of human nature is, and always has been, the Chinese ideal of character, and from that understanding other qualities are derived, such as pacifism, contentment, calm and strength of endurance which distinguish the Chinese character.

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p. 43
9 months 2 weeks ago
He who is punished is never he who performed the deed. He is always the scapegoat.
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7 months 1 week ago

The transition from Hegel to Marx is, in all respects, a transition to an essentially different order of truth, no to be interpreted in terms of philosophy. We shall see that all the philosophical concepts of Marxian theory are social and economic categories, whereas Hegel's social and economic categories are all philosophical concepts.

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P. 258
8 months 2 weeks ago

Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.

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The German Ideology, International Publishers, ed. Chris Arthur, p. 103.
6 months 4 weeks ago

But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.

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All About Love: New Visions, 1999
8 months 2 weeks ago

When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of 'No answer.' It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, 'Peace, child; you don't understand.'

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Those alone are dear to Divinity who are hostile to injustice.

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Pythagorean Ethical Sentences From Stobæus
8 months 2 weeks ago

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.

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Ch. 2: 'Useless' Knowledge
9 months 4 days ago

War is the father and king of all: some he has made gods, and some men; some slaves and some free.

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4 months 1 week ago

The Utopianism of the standpoint which expects an era of peace and retrenchment of militarism in the present social order is plainly revealed in the fact that it is having recourse to project making. For it is typical of Utopian strivings that, in order to demonstrate their practicability, they hatch "practical" recipes with the greatest possible details. To this also belongs the project of the "United States of Europe" as a basis for the limitation of international militarism.

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7 months 1 week ago

Every interpretation is hypothetical, for it is a mere attempt to read an unfamiliar text. An obscure dream, taken by itself, can rarely be interpreted with any certainty, so that I attach little importance to the interpretation of single dreams. With a series of dreams we can have more confidence in our interpretations, for the later dreams correct the mistakes we have made m handling those that went before. We are also better able, in a dream series, to recognize the important contents and basic themes.

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p. 14
8 months 2 weeks ago

A gun gives you the body, not the bird.

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Quoted by Ralph Waldo Emerson, in C. J. Woodbury (ed.) Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1890
8 months 3 weeks ago

The world's a bubble, and the life of man Less than a span.

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5 months 1 week ago

The mob has always behaved in this way-eagerly open to bribes that cannot be honorably accepted, and dissolutely callous to degradation and insult that cannot be honorably endured.

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Part 2
6 months 2 weeks ago

This realistic image, however, does not catch at all what really is, but what should not be - death and misery - what should not exist, from our moral and humanistic point of view. And at the same time making an aesthetic and commercial, perfectly immoral use and abuse of this misery. Images that actually testify, behind their pretended "objectivity", of a deep denial of the real, and of an equal denial of the image - assigned to present what does not even want to be represented, assigned to the rape of the real by burglary.

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4 months 1 week ago

Religious beauty is superior to ideal beauty, since it is the ideal of the ideal.

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p. 287
9 months 2 weeks ago

Father in heaven, when the thought of thee awakens in our soul, let it not waken as an agitated bird which flutters confusedly about, but as a child waking from sleep with a celestial smile.

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6 months 1 week ago

The second requirement of a virus-friendly environment - that it should obey a program of coded instructions - is again only quantitatively less true for brains than for cells or computers. We sometimes obey orders from one another, but also we sometimes don't. Nevertheless, it is a telling fact that, the world over, the vast majority of children follow the religion of their parents rather than any of the other available religions. Instructions to genuflect, to bow towards Mecca, to nod one's head rhythmically towards the wall, to shake like a maniac, to "speak in tongues" - the list of such arbitrary and pointless motor patterns offered by religion alone is extensive - are obeyed, if not slavishly, at least with some reasonably high statistical probability.

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8 months 1 week ago

Athuroglossos is characterized by..: (1) When you have "a mouth like a running spring," you cannot distinguish those occasions when you should speak from those when you should remain silent; or that which must be said from that which must remain unsaid; or the circumstances and situations where speech is required from those where one ought to remain silent. (2) As Plutarch notes... you have no regard for the value of logos, for rational discourse as a means of gaining access to truth.

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5 months 1 week ago

Ethical control may survive in small groups, but the control of the population as a whole must be delegated to specialists-to police, priests, owners, teachers, therapists, and so on, with their specialized reinforcers and their codified contingencies.

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Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), p. 155

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