Skip to main content
5 months 3 weeks ago

Should it seem to me that truth has been put to silence, and virtue trampled under foot, and that folly and vice will certainly triumph; should it happen, when all hearts were filled with hope for the human race, that the horizon should suddenly darken around them as it had never done before; should the work, well and happily begun, on which all eyes were fixed with joyous expectation, suddenly and unexpectedly be turned into a deed of shame, - yet will I not be dismayed; nor if the good cause should appear to grow and flourish, the lights of freedom and civilization be diffused, and peace and good-will amongst men be extended, shall yet my efforts be relaxed.

0
0
Source
source
Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p.123
2 months 3 weeks ago

In the history of bourgeois society, legislative reform served to strengthen progressively the rising class till the latter was sufficiently strong to seize political power, to suppress the existing juridical system and to construct itself a new one.

0
0
Source
source
Ch.8
6 months 2 weeks ago

One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own ugly way.

0
0
Source
source
p. 98e
7 months 2 days ago

What can only be taught by the rod and with blows will not lead to much good; they will not remain pious any longer than the rod is behind them.

0
0
Source
source
The Great Catechism. Second Command
3 months 2 weeks ago

Let us pardon him his hope of a vain apocalypse, and of a second coming in great triumph upon the clouds of heaven. Perhaps these were the errors of others rather than his own; and if it be true that he himself shared the general illusion, what matters it, since his dream rendered him strong against death, and sustained him in a struggle to which he might otherwise have been unequal?

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 17.
5 months 3 days ago

Most of the propositions that make up the body of administrative theory today share, unfortunately, this defect of proverbs. For almost every principle one can find an equally plausible and acceptable contradictory principle.

0
0
Source
source
Simon, Herbert A. "The proverbs of administration." Public Administration Review 6.1 (1946): 53-67.
6 months 3 weeks ago

There cannot be a greater rudeness, than to interrupt another in the current of his discourse... To which, if there be added, as is usual, a correcting of any mistake, or a contradiction of what has been said, it is a mark of yet greater pride and self-conceitedness, when we thus intrude our selves for teachers, and take upon us either to set another right in his story, or shew the mistakes of his judgement.

0
0
Source
source
Sec. 145
6 months 2 weeks ago

It is said that "being" is the most universal and the emptiest concept. As such it resists every attempt at definition. Nor does this most universal and thus indefinable concept need any definition. Everybody uses it constantly and also already understands what is meant by it.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction: The Exposition of the Question of the Meaning of Being (Stambaugh translation)
6 months 3 weeks ago

The gods sell anything to everybody at a fair price.

0
0
Source
source
Quotation and Originality
2 months 3 weeks ago

It needs to realize that what happens to everyone-bad and good alike-is neither good nor bad.

0
0
Source
source
(Hays translation) IV, 39
6 months 3 weeks ago

All that time is lost which might be better employed.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in A Dictionary of Quotations in Most Frequent Use: Taken Chiefly from the Latin and French, but comprising many from the Greek, Spanish, and Italian Languages, translated into English (1809) by David Evans Macdonnel
6 months 2 weeks ago

The desire to philosophize from the standpoint of standpointlessness, as a purportedly genuine and superior objectivity, is either childish, or, as is usually the case, disingenuous.

0
0
Source
source
The Essence of Truth, 1931-32
6 months 3 weeks ago

I was a solitary, shy, priggish youth. I had no experience of the social pleasures of boyhood and did not miss them. But I liked mathematics, and mathematics was suspect because it has no ethical content. I came also to disagree with the theological opinions of my family, and as I grew up I became increasingly interested in philosophy, of which they profoundly disapproved. Every time the subject came up they repeated with unfailing regularity, 'What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.' After some fifty or sixty repetitions, this remark ceased to amuse me.

0
0
Source
source
p. 9
6 months 3 weeks ago

Prejudice is an opinion without judgement.

0
0
Source
source
"Prejudices", 1764
2 months 3 weeks ago

The times when the centre of gravity of political development and the crystallising agent of capitalist contradictions lay on the European continent, are long gone by. To-day Europe is only a link in the tangled chain of international connections and contradictions.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

If one awakens in men the idea of freedom then the free men will incessantly go on to free themselves; if on the contrary, one only educates them, then they will at all times accommodate themselves to circumstance in the most highly educated and elegant manner and degenerate into subservient cringing souls.

0
0
Source
source
p. 23
2 months 3 weeks ago

Not that I at all disallow the use of reasoning upon experiments, or the endeavouring to discern as early as we can the confederations, and differences, and tendencies of things: for such an absolute suspension of the exercise of reasoning were exceeding troublesome, if not impossible. And, as in that rule of arithmetic, which is commonly called regula falsi by proceeding upon a conjecturally-supposed number, as if it were that, which we inquire after, we are wont to come to the knowledge of the true number sought for; so in physiology it is sometimes conducive to the discovery of truth, to permit the understanding to make an hypothesis, in order to the explication of this or that difficulty, that by examining how far the phænomena are, or are not, capable of being solved by that hypothesis, the understanding may, even by its own errors, be instructed.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.

0
0
Source
source
Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1752) Fontenelle Note: The most frequently attributed variant of this quote is: It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
7 months 1 week ago

The inclination to seek the truth is safer than the presumption which regards unknown things as known.

0
0
Source
source
(Cambridge: 2002), Book 9, Chapter 1, p. 24
6 months 3 weeks ago

If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.

0
0
Source
source
Marx quoted and translated by Engels (in an 1882 letter to Eduard Bernstein) about the peculiar Marxism which arose in France 1882.
7 months 1 week ago

Remember that it is not he who gives abuse or blows who affronts, but the view we take of these things as insulting. When, therefore, any one provokes you, be assured that it is your own opinion which provokes you.

0
0
Source
source
(20).
6 months 4 weeks ago

This miracle of analysis, this marvel of the world of ideas, an almost amphibian object between Being and Non-being that we call the imaginary number.

0
0
Source
source
Quoted in Singularités : individus et relations dans le système de Leibniz (2003) by Christiane Frémont
7 months 3 weeks ago

I can understand myself in believing, although in addition I can in a relative misunderstanding comprehend the human aspect of this life: but comprehend faith or comprehend Christ, I cannot.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

An arrow has one motion and the mind another. Even when pausing, even when weighing conclusions, the mind is moving forward, toward its goal. (Hays translation) VIII, 60

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

The heart unites whatever the mind separates, pushes on beyond the arena of necessity and transmutes the struggle into love.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

The more we devote ourselves to observing animals and their behaviour, the more we love them, on seeing how gready they care for their young; in such a context, we cannot even contemplate cruelty to a wolf. Leibnitz put the grub he had been observing back on the tree with its leaf, lest he should be guilty of doing any harm to it. It upsets a man to destroy such a creature for no reason, and this tenderness is subsequently transferred to man.

0
0
Source
source
Part II, pp. 212-213
7 months 2 days ago

Fear of evil is greater than the evil itself.

0
0
Source
source
Act III, scene xi
3 months 5 days ago

It is the nature of a real thing to be inexhaustible in content; we can get an ever deeper insight into this content by the continual addition of new experiences, partly in apparent contradiction, by bringing them into harmony with one another. In this interpretation, things of the real world are approximate ideas. From this arises the empirical character of all our knowledge of reality.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction
5 months 3 weeks ago

All law relations are determined by this principle: each one must restrict his freedom by the possibility of the freedom of the other. ... My freedom is limited by the freedom of the other only on condition that he limits his freedom by the conception of mine. Otherwise he is lawless. Hence, if a law-relation is to result from my cognition of the other, the cognition and the consequent limitation of freedom must have been mutual. All law-relation between persons is, therefore, conditioned by their mutual cognition of each other, and is, at the same time, completely determined thereby.

0
0
Source
source
P. 173-175
2 months 3 weeks ago

And you can also commit injustice by doing nothing.

0
0
Source
source
(Hays translation) IX, 5
6 months 2 weeks ago

This Europe, which in its ruinous blindness is forever on the point of cutting its own throat, lies today in a great pincers, squeezed between Russia on one side and America on the other. From a metaphysical point of view, Russia and America are the same: the same dreary technological frenzy, the same unrestricted organization of the average man...

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

Human beings have a physical need to tell themselves when at work: "Let's have done with it now," and it's having constantly to go on thinking in the face of this need when philosophizing that makes this work so strenuous.

0
0
Source
source
p. 86e
2 months 3 weeks ago

No one has a natural right to the trade of a money lender, but he who has the money to lend. Let those then among us who have a moneyed capital and who prefer employing it in loans rather than otherwise, set up banks and give cash or national bills for the notes they discount. Perhaps, to encourage them, a larger interest than is legal in the other cases might be allowed them, on the condition of their lending for short periods only.

0
0
Source
source
ME 13:277
5 months 3 weeks ago

There are questions which, once approached, either isolate you or kill you outright.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

The RIGHT OF NATURE, which Writers commonly call Jus Naturale, is the Liberty each man hath, to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own Nature; that is to say, of his own Life; and consequently, of doing any thing, which in his own Judgement, and Reason, he shall conceive to be the aptest means thereunto.

0
0
Source
source
The First Part, Chapter 14, p. 64
6 months 2 weeks ago

What should we gain by a definition, as it can only lead us to other undefined terms?

0
0
Source
source
p. 26
6 months 3 weeks ago

One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.

0
0
Source
source
Act 5, sc. 2
2 months 3 weeks ago

Epicurus... supposes not only all mixt bodies, but all others to be produced by the various and casual occursions of atoms, moving themselves to and fro by an internal principle in the immense or rather infinite vacuum.

0
0
Source
source
Carneades speaking
7 months 2 days ago

He who does not give himself leisure to be thirsty cannot take pleasure in drinking.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 42
6 months 3 weeks ago

In looking over the catalogue of human actions (says a partizan of this principle) in order to determine which of them are to be marked with the seal of disapprobation, you need but to take counsel of your own feelings: whatever you find in yourself a propensity to condemn, is wrong for that very reason. For the same reason it is also meet for punishment: in what proportion it is adverse to utility, or whether it be adverse to utility at all, is a matter that makes no difference. In that same proportion also is it meet for punishment: if you hate much, punish much: if you hate little, punish little: punish as you hate. If you hate not at all, punish not at all: the fine feelings of the soul are not to be overborne and tyrannized by the harsh and rugged dictates of political utility.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 2: Of Principles Adverse to That of Utility
5 months 1 week ago

Don Quixote made himself ridiculous; but did he know the most tragic ridicule of all, the inward ridicule, the ridiculousness of a man's self to himself, in the eyes of his own soul? Imagine Don Quixote's battlefield to be his own soul; imagine him to be fighting in his soul to save the Middle Ages from the Renaissance, to preserve the treasure of his infancy; imagine him an inward Don Quixote, with a Sancho at his side, inward and heroic too - and tell me if you find anything comic in the tragedy.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted without citation in Discovering Evolutionary Ecology: Bringing Together Ecology And Evolution (2006) by Peter J. Mayhew, p. 24
7 months 3 weeks ago

To the contemporary, Christ can only say: I will offer myself as a sacrifice for the sins of the world and for yours also. Is this easier to believe now than when he has done it, has offered himself? Or is the comfort greater because of his saying that he will do it than it is because of his having done it? There is no greater love than this, that someone lays down his life for another, but when is it easier to believe, and when is the comfort greater: when the loving one says he will do it, or when he has done it?

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

Architecture is a way for power to achieve eloquence through form.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

And why be scandalized by the infallibility of a man, of the Pope? What difference does it make whether it be a book that is infallible - the Bible, or a society of men - the Church, or a single man? Does it make any essential change in the rational difficulty? And since the infallibility of a book or of a society of men is not more rational than that of a single man, this supreme offense to the eyes of reason has to be postulated.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

Four snakes gliding up and down a hollow for no purpose that I could see - not to eat, not for love, but only gliding.

0
0
Source
source
April 11, 1834

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia