Skip to main content
5 months 1 day ago

The best life is the one in which the creative impulses play the largest part and the possessive impulses the smallest.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

There are no arguments. Can anyone who has reached the limit bother with arguments, causes, effects, moral considerations, and so forth? Of course not. For such a person there are only unmotivated motives for living. On the heights of despair, the passion for the absurd is the only thing that can still throw a demonic light on chaos. When all the current reasons - moral, esthetic, religious, social, and so on - no longer guide one's life, how can one sustain life without succumbing to nothingness? Only by a connection with the absurd, by love of absolute uselessness, loving something which does not have substance but which simulates an illusion of life. I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

So long as you are a slave to the opinions of the many you have not yet approached freedom or tasted its nectar...But I do not mean by this that we ought to be shameless before all men and to do what we ought not; but all that we refrain from and all that we do, let us not do or refrain from merely because it seems to the multitude somehow honorable or base, but because it is forbidden by reason and the god within us.

0
0
Source
source
Oration to the Uneducated Cynics
5 months 1 day ago

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. But do not care to convince him. Men will believe what they see.

0
0
Source
source
Let them see. Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 222
4 months 1 day ago

All those countless battles-those endless, and... for the greater part, useless wars, of which... fills up for so many thousand years... are but little atoms compared with the great whole of human destiny.

0
0
5 months 2 days ago

While loving glory so much how can you persist in a plan which will cause you to lose it?

0
0
Source
source
Letters of Voltaire and Frederick the Great (New York: Brentano's, 1927), transl. Richard Aldington, letter 130 from Voltaire to Frederick II of Prussia, October 1757.
4 weeks 1 day ago

Evil does not approach us as pride any more, but on the contrary as slumber, lassitude, concealment of the "I." ... It may make us so quickly contented, that any definitive fire will die down. The venomous, breathtaking frigid mist seems able ... to harden hearts and fill them with envy, obduracy and resentment, with bloody scorn for the divine image and light, with all the causes of the only true original sin, which is not wanting to be like God.

0
0
Source
source
p. 62
5 months 2 weeks ago

Now, justification in this life is given to us according to these three things: first by the laver of regeneration by which all sins are forgiven; then, by a struggle with the faults from whose guilt we have been absolved; the third, when our prayer is heard, in which we say: Forgive us our debts, because however bravely we fight against our faults, we are men; but the grace of God so aids as we fight in this corruptible body that there is reason for His hearing us as we ask forgiveness.

0
0
Source
source
Against Julian, Book II, ch. 8, 22. In The Fathers of the Church, Matthew A. Schumacher, tr., 1957, ISBN 0813214009 ISBN 9780813214009 pp. 83-84.
6 months 1 day ago

For well-being and health, again, the homestead should be airy in summer, and sunny in winter. A homestead possessing these qualities would be longer than it is deep; and its main front would face the south.

0
0
1 month 1 day ago

I put my body through its paces like a war horse; I keep it lean, sturdy, prepared. I harden it and I pity it. I have no other steed. I keep my brain wide awake, lucid, unmerciful. I unleash it to battle relentlessly so that, all light, it may devour the darkness of the flesh. I have no other workshop where I may transform darkness into light. I keep my heart flaming, courageous, restless. I feel in my heart all commotions and all contradictions, the joys and sorrows of life. But I struggle to subdue them to a rhythm superior to that of the mind, harsher than that of my heart - to the ascending rhythm of the Universe.

0
0

If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger.

0
0
Source
source
C 54 Variant translation: If all mankind were suddenly to practice honesty, many thousands of people would be sure to starve.
4 months 1 day ago

If the State, modeled after the universe, is split into two spheres or classes of beings - wherein the free represent the ideas and the unfree the concrete and sensate things - then the ultimate and uppermost order remains unrealized by both. By using sensate things as tools or organs, the ideas obtain a direct relationship to the apparitions and enter into them as souls. God, however, as identity of the highest order, remains above all reality and eternally has merely an indirect relationship. If then in the higher moral order the State represents a second nature, then the divine can never have anything other than an indirect relationship to it, never can it bear any real relationship to it, and religion, if it seeks to preserve itself in unscathed pure ideality, can therefore never exist - even in the most perfect State - other than esoterically in the form of mystery cults.

0
0
Source
source
P. 51
3 months 2 weeks ago

Like monarchy, monotheism had a martial origin. "It is only on the march and it time of war," says Robertson Smith in The Prophets of Israel, "that a nomad people feels any urgent need of a central authority, and so it came about that in the first beginnings of national organization, centering in the sanctuary of the ark, Israel was thought of mainly as a host of Jehovah. the very name of Israel is martial, and means 'God (El) fighteth,' and Jehovah in the Old Testament is Iahwé Cebāôth - the Jehovah of the armies of Israel. It was on the battlefield that Jehovah's presence was most clearly realized; but in primitive nations the leader in time of war is also the natural judge in time of peace."

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

I know God only as he became human, so shall I have him in no other way.

0
0
Source
source
Das Marburger religionsgesprach 1529: Versuch einer Rekonstruction (Leipzig, 1929), p. 27; also LW 38, 3-90
4 months 1 week ago

No evil is honorable; but death is honorable; therefore death is not evil.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Epistles No. 82, by Seneca the Younger
4 months 2 weeks ago

Cato instigated the magistrates to punish all offenders, saying that they that did not prevent crimes when they might, encouraged them. Of young men, he liked them that blushed better than those who looked pale.

0
0
Source
source
Cato the Elder
5 months 2 days ago

A man who is so exceedingly civil that for the sake of quietude and a peaceable name will silently see the community imposed upon, or their rights invaded, may, in his principles, be a good man, but cannot be stiled a useful one, neither does he come up to the full mark of his duty; for silence becomes a kind of crime when it operates as a cover or an encouragement to the guilty. 

0
0
Source
source
"To the People of America", Pennsylvania Packet, January 23, 1779
1 month 3 weeks ago

The suffering man ought really 'to consume his own smoke'; there is no good in emitting smoke till you have made it into fire, - which, in the metaphorical sense too, all smoke is capable of becoming!

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

Oblivious of Democritus, the unwilling materialists of our day have generally been awkwardly intellectual and quite incapable of laughter. If they have felt anything, they have felt melancholy. Their allegiance and affection were still fixed on those mythical sentimental worlds which they saw to be illusory. The mechanical world they believed in could not please them, in spite of its extent and fertility. Giving rhetorical vent to their spleen and prejudice, they exaggerated nature's meagreness and mathematical dryness. When their imagination was chilled they spoke of nature, most unwarrantably, as dead, and when their judgment was heated they took the next step and called it unreal.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 3 "Mechanism"
2 months 4 weeks ago

Only puny secrets need protection. Big secrets are protected by public incredulity. You can actually dissipate a situation by giving it maximal coverage. As to alarming people, that's done by rumours, not by coverage.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 92)
1 month 3 weeks ago

The polarization has a number of different roots. The economic... fact that many working class voters have been left behind by the prosperity of globalization. ...The more important division is a cultural one ...the feeling on the part of many populist voters, that they are not being respected by the elites that are running the country... [H]ere, all of the identity issues... play themselves out.

0
0
Source
source
22:57
2 months 1 week ago

A city that outdistances Man's walking powers is a trap for Man. It threatens to become a prison from which he cannot escape unless he has mechanical means of transport, the thoroughfares for carrying these, and the purchasing power for commanding the use of artificial means of communication.

0
0
Source
source
"Has Man's Metropolitan Environment Any Precedents?", Ekistics, vol. 22, no. 133 (December 1966) pp. 385-7

Man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, he believes he has free will.

0
0
Source
source
J 249
3 months 4 weeks ago

Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue; and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath.

0
0
Source
source
Dedication
4 months 1 day ago

An event has happened, upon which it is difficult to speak, and impossible to be silent.

0
0
Source
source
Speech on the sixth article of charge in the impeachment of Warren Hastings (5 May 1789), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Volume the Tenth (1899), p. 306
2 months 4 weeks ago

When Fortune is on our side, popular favor bears her company.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 275
5 months 4 days ago

Nature may certainly produce whatever can arise from habit: Nay, habit is nothing but one of the principles of nature, and derives all its force from that origin.

0
0
Source
source
Part 3, Section 16
4 months 4 weeks ago

Catherine: Why commit Evil? Goetz: Because Good has already been done. Catherine: Who has done it? Goetz: God the Father. I, on the other hand, am improvising.

0
0
Source
source
Act 3, sc. 4
5 months 1 week ago

Women . . . have . . . small and narrow chests, and broad hips, to the end they should remain at home, sit still, keep house, and bear and bring up children. . . . A woman is, or at least should be, a friendly, courteous, and a merry companion in life . . . the honor and ornament of the house, and inclined to tenderness, for thereunto are they chiefly created, to bear children, and to be the pleasure, joy and solace of their husbands.

0
0
Source
source
-- Table Talk, quoted in Luther On "Woman"
5 months 3 weeks ago

This was her finest role and the hardest one to play. Choosing between heaven and a ridiculous fidelity, preferring oneself to eternity or losing oneself in God is the age-old tragedy in which each must play his part.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

A great soul, any sincere soul, knows not what he is,-alternates between the highest height and the lowest depth; can, of all things, the least measure-Himself! What others take him for, and what he guesses that he may be; these two items strangely act on one another, help to determine one another. With all men reverently admiring him; with his own wild soul full of noble ardors and affections, of whirlwind chaotic darkness and glorious new light; a divine Universe bursting all into godlike beauty round him, and no man to whom the like ever had befallen, what could he think himself to be?

0
0
1 month ago

Our Constitution, by its separation of powers and its system of checks and balances, acts as a restraint upon efficiency by denying exclusive power to any branch of government. The logic of governmental efficiency, unchecked, runs straight on, not only to dictatorship, but also to torture, assassination, and other abominations.

0
0
5 months 4 days ago

The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off our ignorance a little longer: as perhaps the most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind serves only to discover larger portions of it. Thus the observation of human blindness and weakness is the result of all philosophy, and meets us at every turn, in spite of our endeavours to elude or avoid it.

0
0
Source
source
Section 4 : Sceptical Doubts Concerning The Operations of The Understanding
3 months 3 weeks ago

The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, prophane, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame, or blame...

0
0
Source
source
The First Part, Chapter 8, p. 34
3 months 3 weeks ago

One disgust, then another - to the point of losing the use of speech and even of the mind...The greatest exploit of my life is to be still alive.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

The essence of the belief that bats have experience is that there is something that it is like to be a bat. Now we know that most bats (the microchiroptera, to be precise) perceive the external world primarily by sonar, or echolocation. ... But bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine. This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat.

0
0
Source
source
p. 168.
1 month 3 weeks ago

Where this will end? In the Abyss, one may prophecy; whither all Delusions are, at all moments, travelling; where this Delusion has now arrived. For if there be a Faith, from of old, it is this, as we often repeat, that no Lie can live for ever. The very Truth has to change its vesture, from time to time; and be born again. But all Lies have sentence of death written down against them, and Heaven's Chancery itself; and, slowly or fast, advance incessantly towards their hour.

0
0
Source
source
Pt. I, Bk. VI, ch. 3.
5 months 1 day ago

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

0
0
Source
source
August 19, 1851
5 months 1 day ago

This bird sees the white man come and the Indian withdraw, but it withdraws not. Its untamed voice is still heard above the tinkling of the forge... It remains to remind us of aboriginal nature.

0
0
Source
source
March 23, 1856; of the crow
1 month 2 weeks ago

Most men ebb and flow in wretchedness between the fear of death and the hardships of life; they are unwilling to live, and yet they do not know how to die.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

No criticism can be brought against a branch of technical science from outside; no thought fitted out with the knowledge of a period and setting its course by definite historical aims could have anything to say to the specialist. Such thought and the critical, dialectical element it communicates to the process of cognition, thereby maintaining conscious connection between that process and historical life, do not exist for empiricism; nor do the associated categories, such as the distinction between essence and appearance, identity in change, and rationality of ends, indeed, the concept of man, of personality, even of society and class taken in the sense that presupposes specific viewpoints and directions of interest.

0
0
Source
source
p. 145.

To enrich God, man must become poor; that God may be all, man must be nothing.

0
0
5 months 4 weeks ago

Moreover, there is a victory and defeat, the first and best of victories, the lowest and worst of defeat, which each man gains or sustains at the hands, not of another, but of himself; this shows that there is a war against ourselves going on within every one of us. Book I Sometimes paraphrased as "The first and best victory is to conquer self".

0
0
3 months 3 weeks 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
4 months 1 day ago

Because half-a-dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that of course they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.

0
0
Source
source
Volume iii, p. 344

Only through blind Instinct, in which the only possible guidance of the Imperative is awanting, does the Power in Intuition remain undetermined; where it is schematised as absolute it becomes infinite; and where it is presented in a determinate form, as a principle, it becomes at least manifold. By the above-mentioned act of Intelligising, the Power liberates itself from Instinct, to direct itself towards Unity.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia