Skip to main content
5 months 1 week ago

The disappearance of public executions marks therefore the decline of the spectacle; but it also marks a slackening of the hold on the body.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter One, The Spectacle of the Scaffold
5 months 4 weeks ago

For human beings, the measure of every action is the impression of the senses.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, ch. 28, 10
6 months 1 week ago

If the love of money is the root of all evil, the need of money is most certainly the root of all despair.

0
0
2 months 5 days ago

I esteem the modern error, That all goes by self-interest and the checking and balancing of greedy knaveries, and that in short, there is nothing divine whatever in the association of men, a still more despicable error, natural as it is to an unbelieving century, than that of a "divine right" in people called Kings. I say, Find me the true Konning, King, or Able-man, and he has a divine right over me.

0
0
5 months 4 days ago

With deep roots Ether plunged into earth.

0
0
Source
source
fr. 54
2 months 1 week ago

Now the argument that I make in my book is that part of the current disaffection with liberalism is not from any of its basic principles, but... is the result of certain deformations of liberal principles that were carried to extremes that led... to bad outcomes... There's a move in this direction on the right and... on the left.

0
0
Source
source
12:25 Ref: Francis Fukuyama, Liberalism and Its Discontents
5 months 3 weeks ago

There is no man so good that if he placed all his actions and thoughts under the scrutiny of the laws, he would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 9
3 months 1 week ago

The criminal, like the artist, is a social explorer.

0
0
Source
source
quoted in "Marshall McLuhan, Author, Dies; Declared 'Medium Is the Message'" by Alden Whitman, The New York Times, January 1, 1981
5 months 2 weeks ago

Love truth, but pardon error.

0
0
Source
source
1738
3 months 2 weeks ago

Honest work is much better than a mansion.

0
0
Source
source
p. 82
1 month 1 week ago

They call it "friendship" and "peace," and further "harmony" and "unanimity": for these are all cohesive and unificatory of opposites and dissimilars. Hence they also call it "marriage." And there are also three ages in life.

0
0
Source
source
On the Triad
5 months 2 weeks ago

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 60-61
4 months 2 weeks ago

The Doctrine of Knowledge, apart from all special and definite knowing, proceeds immediately upon Knowledge itself, in the essential unity in which it recognises Knowledge as existing; and it raises this question in the first place - How this Knowledge can come into being, and what it is in its inward and essential Nature? The following must be apparent: - There is but One who is absolutely by and through himself, - namely, God; and God is not the mere dead conception to which we have thus given utterance, but he is in himself pure Life. He can neither change nor determine himself in aught within himself, nor become any other Being; for his Being contains within it all his Being and all possible Being, and neither within him nor out of him can any new Being arise.

0
0
9 months 2 weeks ago

I think that the task of philosophy is not to provide answers, but to show how the way we perceive a problem can be itself part of a problem.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

The criticism of the reformers was directed not so much at the weakness or cruelty of those in authority, as at a bad economy of power.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter Two, pp.. 79
2 months 1 week ago

The advance of science is not comparable to the changes of a city, where old edifices are pitilessly torn down to give place to new, but to the continuous evolution of zoologic types which develop ceaselessly and end by becoming unrecognizable to the common sight, but where an expert eye finds always traces of the prior work of the centuries past. One must not think then that the old-fashioned theories have been sterile or vain.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

To change your mind and to follow him who sets you right is to be nonetheless the free agent that you were before. Remember that to change thy opinion and to follow him who corrects thy error is as consistent with freedom as it is to persist in thy error.

0
0
Source
source
(Long translation) VIII, 16
4 months 1 week ago

Government in reality, as has abundantly appeared, is a question of force, and not of consent. It is desirable that a government should be made as agreeable as possible to the ideas and inclinations of its subjects and that they should be consulted, as extensively as may be, respecting its construction and regulations. But, at last, the best constituted government that can be formed particularly for a large community, will contain many provisions that, far from having obtained the consent of all its members, encounter even in their outset a strenuous, thought ineffectual opposition.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, "Of Obedience"
6 months 1 week ago

Earth governments in moments of stress are not famous for being reasonable.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

Marriage is a union between two persons - one man and one woman. A woman who has given herself up to one, can not give herself up to a second, for her whole dignity requires that she should belong only to this one.

0
0
Source
source
p. 406
4 months 1 day ago

The Catholic solution of our problem, of our unique vital problem, the problem of the immortality and eternal salvation of the soul, satisfies the will, and therefore satisfies life; but the attempt to rationalize it by means of a dogmatic theology fails to satisfy the reason. And reason has its exigencies as imperious as those of life. It is no use seeking to force ourselves to consider as super-rational what clearly appears to us to be contra-rational... Infallibility, a notion of Hellenic origin, is in its essence a rationalistic category.

0
0
4 months 6 days ago

What has been shown by Machiavelli, who is often (like Nietzsche) congratulated for tearing off hypocritical masks, brutally revealing the truth, and so on, is not that men profess one thing and do another (although no doubt he shows this too) but that when they assume that the two ideals are compatible, or perhaps are even one and the same ideal, and do not allow this assumption to be questioned, they are guilty of bad faith (as the existentialists call it, or of "false consciousness," to use a Marxist formula) which their actual behavior exhibits. Machiavelli calls the bluff not just of official morality-the hypocrisies of ordinary life-but of one of the foundations of the central Western philosophical tradition, the belief in the ultimate compatibility of all genuine values. His own withers are unwrung. He has made his choice. He seems wholly unworried by, indeed scarcely aware of, parting company with traditional Western morality.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

Things are impressed better by active than by passive repetition. ...It pays better to wait and recollect by an effort from within, than to look at the book again.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 16
5 months 4 days ago

Now drown care in wine.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, ode vii, line 32
1 month 3 weeks ago

Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems.

0
0
Source
source
"Atomic Physics and the Description of Nature"
5 months 3 weeks 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
1 month 2 weeks ago

To begin an affair of that kind now, and carry it on so long a time in form, is by no means a proper plan ... whatever assurances I may give her in private of my esteem for her, or whatever assurances I may ask in return from her, depend on it - they must be kept in private. Necessity will oblige me to proceed in a method which is not generally thought fair; that of treating with a ward before obtaining the approbation of her guardian. I say necessity will oblige me to it, because I never can bear to remain in suspense so long a time. If I am to succeed, the sooner I know it, the less uneasiness I shall have to go through. If I am to meet with a disappointment, the sooner I know it, the more of life I shall have to wear it off: and if I do meet with one, I hope in God, and verily believe; it will be the last.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to John Page (15 July 1763); published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson
5 months 2 weeks ago

It is precisely in knowing its limits that philosophy consists.

0
0
Source
source
A 727, B 755
3 months 1 week ago

I am not a "culture critic" because I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities. That is why I have no interest in the academic world.

0
0
Source
source
Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p. 413
4 months 1 week ago

There exists, I grant you, a clinical depression, upon which certain remedies occasionally have effect; but there exists another kind, a melancholy underlying our very outbursts of gaiety and accompanying us everywhere, without leaving us alone for a single moment. And there is nothing that can rid us of this lethal omnipresence: the self forever confronting itself.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

One of the most difficult of the philosopher's tasks is to find out where the shoe pinches.

0
0
Source
source
p. 61
5 months 2 weeks ago

What strikes one here above all is the crudely empirical conception of profit derived from the outlook of the ordinary capitalist, which wholly contradicts the better esoteric understanding of Adam Smith.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. II, Ch. X, p. 202.
5 months 2 weeks ago

It is the principle of antipathy which leads us to speak of offences as deserving punishment. It is the corresponding principle of sympathy which leads us to speak of certain actions as meriting reward. This word merit can only lead to passion and error. It is effects good or bad which we ought alone to consider.

0
0
Source
source
MSS 29, 32, University College Collection
6 months 1 week ago

Ideas are cheap. It's only what you do with them that counts.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

I'm at a point where my grand projects are out of the design phase and into the general administration phase, so I have some time to do some writing.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-193722840

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

No matter how abstract our theories may sound or how consistent our arguments may appear, there are incidents and stories behind them which, at least for ourselves, contain as in a nutshell the full meaning of whatever we have to say.

0
0
Source
source
Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953-1975
4 months 2 weeks ago

Each new ontological theory, propounded in lieu of previous ones shown to be untenable, has been followed by a new criticism leading to a new scepticism. All possible conceptions have been one by one tried and found wanting; and so the entire field of speculation has been gradually exhausted without positive result: the only result reached being the negative one above stated, that the reality existing behind all appearances is, and must ever be, unknown.

0
0
Source
source
Pt. I, The Unknowable; Ch. IV, The Relativity of All Knowledge
6 months 1 week ago

The absurd ... is an experience to be lived through, a point of departure, the equivalent, in existence of Descartes' methodical doubt. Absurdism, like methodical doubt, has wiped the slate clean. It leaves us in a blind alley. But, like methodical doubt, it can, by returning upon itself, open up a new field of investigation, and in the process of reasoning then pursues the same course. I proclaim that I believe in nothing and that everything is absurd, but I cannot doubt the validity of my proclamation and I must at least believe in my protest. The first and only evidence that is supplied me, within the terms of the absurdist experience, is rebellion ... Rebellion is born of the spectacle of irrationality, confronted with an unjust and incomprehensible condition.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

To write well is to think well; there is no art of style distinct from the culture of the mind. The good writer is a complete mind, gifted with judgment, passion, imagination, and at the same time well trained. The inner qualities of rectitude, of brilliant geniality, are not given; instruction, wealth of information, fulness of knowledge, are acquired. Thus good training of the mind is the only school of good style. Wanting that, you have merely rhetoric and bad taste.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in The Art of Authorship (1890) by George Bainton
1 month 2 weeks ago

The name philosopher, which meant originally 'lover of wisdom,' has come in some strange way to mean a man who thinks it is his business to explain everything in a certain number of large books. It will be found, I think, that in proportion to his colossal ignorance is the perfection and symmetry of the system which he sets up; because it is so much easier to put an empty room tidy than a full one.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted by A. D'Abro, The Evolution of Scientific Thought from Newton to Einstein
5 months 3 weeks ago

Confidence in another man's virtue is no light evidence of a man's own, and God willingly favors such a confidence.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, Ch. 14
4 months 2 weeks ago

But the Quincunx of Heaven runs low, and 'tis time to close the five ports of knowledge. We are unwilling to spin out our awaking thoughts into the phantasmes of sleep, which often continueth præcogitations; making Cables of Cobwebbes and Wildernesses of handsome Groves. Beside Hippocrates hath spoke so little and the Oneirocriticall Masters, have left such frigid Interpretations from plants, that there is little encouragement to dream of Paradise it self. Nor will the sweetest delight of Gardens afford much comfort in sleep; wherein the dulnesse of that sense shakes hands with delectable odours; and though in the Bed of Cleopatra, can hardly with any delight raise up the ghost of a Rose.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 5
5 months 3 weeks ago

Nature, which alone is good, is wholly familiar and common.

0
0
4 months 6 days ago

Take heed lest any man deceive you: For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many. And when ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars, be ye not troubled: for such things must needs be; but the end shall not be yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be earthquakes in divers places, and there shall be famines and troubles: these are the beginnings of sorrows. But take heed to yourselves: for they shall deliver you up to councils; and in the synagogues ye shall be beaten: and ye shall be brought before rulers and kings for my sake, for a testimony against them. And the gospel must first be published among all nations. But when they shall lead you, and deliver you up, take no thought beforehand what ye shall speak, neither do ye premeditate: but whatsoever shall be given you in that hour, that speak ye: for it is not ye that speak, but the Holy Ghost.

0
0
Source
source
13:5b-11 (KJV)
5 months 1 week ago

I want to have her back as an ingredient in the restoration of my past. Could I have wished her anything worse? Having got once through death, to come back and then, at some later date, have all her dying to do all over again? They call Stephen the first martyr. Hadn't Lazarus the rawer deal?

0
0
2 months 6 days ago

It seems to us that the past is our property. Well, on the contrary - we are its property, because we are not able to make changes in it, while it fills the whole of our existence.

0
0
Source
source
Original: "Otóż przeciwnie - to my jesteśmy jej własnością, ponieważ nie jesteśmy w stanie dokonać w niej zmian, ona natomiast wypełnia całość naszego istnienia." Klucz niebieski albo opowieści biblijne zebrane ku pouczeniu i przestrodze

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia