Skip to main content
1 month 2 weeks ago

Not official revolutionary commissars in any sort of sashes, but rather revolutionary propagandists are to be dispatched into all the provinces and communes and particularly among the peasants who cannot be revolutionised by principles, nor by the decrees of any dictatorship, but only by the act of revolution itself, that is to say, by the consequences that will inevitably ensure in every commune from complete cessation of the legal and official existence of the state.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

If you are describing any occurrence... make two or more distinct reports at different times... We discriminate at first only a few features, and we need to reconsider our experience from many points of view and in various moods in order to perceive the whole.

0
0
Source
source
March 24, 1857
2 months 2 weeks ago

We have ...as M. Ribot says, not memory so much as memories. The visual... tactile... muscular... auditory memory may all vary independently... and different individuals may have them developed in different degrees. As a rule, a man's memory is good in the departments in which his interest is strong; but those departments are apt to be those in which his discriminative sensibility is high. ...[D]ifferences in men's imagining power... the machinery of memory must be largely determined thereby.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 16
2 months 2 weeks ago

"A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hmān, as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing. The séroni could say it better than I say it now. Not better than I could say it in a poem. What you call remembering is the last part of the pleasure, as the crah is the last part of a poem. When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it. But still we know very little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then-that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it."

0
0
Source
source
Hyoi, p. 73
2 months 2 weeks ago

The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title. To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food.

0
0
Source
source
Nature
2 months 3 weeks ago

II. The tax which each individual is bound to pay ought to be certain, and not arbitrary.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter II, Part II, p. 892.
2 months 1 week ago

Education is an ornament for the prosperous, a refuge for the unfortunate.

0
0
Source
source
Freeman (1948), p. 161
1 month 3 weeks ago

A man may be in as just possession of Truth as of a City, and yet be forced to surrender.

0
0
Source
source
Section 6
2 months 2 weeks ago

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

0
0
Source
source
Section 1, paragraph 19
2 months 5 days ago

After he routed Pharnaces Ponticus at the first assault, he wrote thus to his friends: "I came, I saw, I conquered."

0
0
Source
source
Cæsar
2 months 2 weeks ago

I feel like that intellectual but plain-looking lady who was warmly complimented on her beauty. In accepting his Nobel Prize, in December 1950; Russell denied that he had contributed anything in particular to literature.

0
0
Source
source
Quoted in LIFE, Editorials: "A great mind is still annoying and adorning our age", 26 May 1952
3 months 2 weeks ago

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

Those who have been inspired to action by the doctrine of the class war will have acquired the habit of hatred, and will instinctively seek new enemies when the old ones have been vanquished. But in actual fact the psychology of the working man in any of the Western democracies is totally unlike that which is assumed in the Communist Manifesto. He does not by any means feel that he has nothing to lose but his chains, nor indeed is this true. The chains which bind Asia and Africa in subjection to Europe are partly riveted by him. He is himself part of a great system of tyranny and exploitation. Universal freedom would remove, not only his own chains, which are comparatively light, but the far heavier chains which he has helped to fasten upon the subject races of the world.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. VI: International Relations
2 months 2 weeks ago

I was looking at my furniture, not as the utilitarian who has to sit on chairs, to write at desks and tables, and not as the cameraman or scientific recorder, but as the pure aesthete whose concern is only with forms and their relationships within the field of vision or the picture space. But as I looked, this purely aesthetic, Cubist's-eye view gave place to what I can only describe as the sacramental vision of reality. I was back where I had been when I was looking at the flowers-back in a world where everything shone with the Inner Light, and was infinite in its significance.

0
0
Source
source
describing his experiment with mescaline, p. 22
3 months 3 weeks ago
It is not enough to prove something, one has also to seduce or elevate people to it. That is why the man of knowledge should learn how to speak his wisdom: and often in such a way that it sounds like folly!
0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

The pursuit of individual happiness within those limits prescribed by social conditions, is the first requisite to the attainment of the greatest general happiness.

0
0
Source
source
Ethics (New York:1915), § 70, pp. 190-191
1 month 1 week ago

Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.

0
0
Source
source
Mark 13:31, KJV
2 months 2 weeks ago

There is no need to worry about mere size. We do not necessarily respect a fat man more than a thin man. Sir Isaac Newton was very much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account value him less.

0
0
Source
source
"The Expanding Mental Universe", Saturday Evening Post, 7/1/1959
3 months 2 weeks ago

The science which has to do with nature clearly concerns itself for the most part with bodies and magnitudes and their properties and movements, but also with the principles of this sort of substance, as many as they may be.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

Few men think; yet all have opinions.

0
0
Source
source
Philonous to Hylas. The Second Dialogue. This appears in a passage first added in the third edition
1 month 2 weeks ago

Existing is plagiarism.

0
0
3 months 1 day ago

One of the principal reasons that diverts those who are entering upon this knowledge so much from the true path which they should follow, is the fancy that they take at the outset that good things are inaccessible, giving them the name great, lofty, elevated, sublime. This destroys everything. I would call them low, common, familiar: these names suit it better; I hate such inflated expressions.

0
0
2 weeks 2 days ago

Let your life be pleasing to the multitude, and it can not be so to yourself.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 1075
2 months 1 week ago

Men have fashioned an image of Chance as an excuse for their own stupidity. For Chance rarely conflicts with intelligence, and most things in life can be set in order by an intelligent sharpsightedness.

0
0
Source
source
Freeman (1948), p. 155
2 months 2 weeks ago

The facts of science, as they appeared to him [Heraclitus], fed the flame in his soul, and in its light, he saw into the depths of the world.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1: Mysticism and Logic
1 month 2 weeks ago

There is an innate anxiety which supplants in us both knowledge and intuition.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

An American cannot converse, but he can discuss, and his talk falls into a dissertation. He speaks to you as if he was addressing a meeting; and if he should chance to become warm in the discussion, he will say "Gentlemen" to the person with whom he is conversing.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter XIV.
2 weeks 2 days ago

Privacy invasion is now one of biggest knowledge industries.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 24)
2 months 2 weeks ago

A testimony is sufficient when it rests on: 1st. A great number of very sensible witnesses who agree in having seen well. 2d. Who are sane, bodily and mentally. 3d. Who are impartial and disinterested. 4th. Who unanimously agree. 5th. Who solemnly certify to the fact.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted by H. P. Blavatsky in Isis Unveiled, Vol. I, p. 108, 1877
3 months 2 weeks ago

It seemed to him [Euphemius] it would be a brilliant notion to call in an outside force to fight on his behalf. This same brilliant notion has occurred to participants in civil wars uncounted times in history and it has ended in catastrophe just about every time, since those called in invariably take over for themselves. Of all history's lessons, this seems to be the plainest, and the most frequently ignored.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

I am not bothered by the fact that I am not understood. I am bothered when I do not know others.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

That virtue we appreciate is as much ours as another's. We see so much only as we possess.

0
0
Source
source
June 22, 1839
2 months 3 weeks ago

Lucid intervals and happy pauses.

0
0
Source
source
History of King Henry VII, III
2 months 2 weeks ago

Technology is in its essence something that human beings cannot master of their own accord.

0
0
1 month ago

The application of psychoanalysis to sociology must definitely guard against the mistake of wanting to give psychoanalytic answers where economic, technical, or political facts provide the real and sufficient explanation of sociological questions. On the other hand, the psychoanalyst must emphasize that the subject of sociology, society, in reality consists of individuals, and that it is these human beings, rather than abstract society as such, whose actions, thoughts, and feelings are the object of sociological research.

0
0
Source
source
"Psychoanalyse und Soziologie" (1929); published as "Psychoanalysis and Sociology" as translated by Mark Ritter, in Critical Theory and Society : A Reader (1989) edited by S. E. Bronner and D. M. Kellner
2 months 2 weeks ago

Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken.

0
0
Source
source
A Fresh Look at Empiricism: 1927-42 (1996), p. 281
2 months 2 weeks ago

Mathematics is as little a natural science as philosophy is one of the humanities. Philosophy in its essence belongs as little in the philosophical faculty as mathematics belongs to natural science. To house philosophy and mathematics in this way today seems to be a blemish or a mistake in the catalog of the universities. Plato put over the entrance to his Academy the words: "Let no one who has not grasped the mathematical enter here!"

0
0
Source
source
p. 69,75
2 months 3 weeks ago

In every country it always is and must be the interest of the great body of the people to buy whatever they want of those who sell it cheapest. The proposition is so very manifest that it seems ridiculous to take any pains to prove it; nor could it ever have been called in question had not the interested sophistry of merchants and manufacturers confounded the common sense of mankind. Their interest is, in this respect, directly opposite to that of the great body of the people.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter III, Part II, p. 531.
2 months 1 week ago

The guillotine takes life almost without touching the body, just as prison deprives of liberty or a fine reduces wealth. It is intended to apply the law not so to a real body capable of feeling pain as to a juridical subject, the possessor, among other rights, of the right to exist it had to have the abstraction of the law itself.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 13, Chapter One The Body of the Condemned
2 months ago

The best and greatest winning is a true friend; and the greatest loss is the loss of time.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

If things are ever to move upward, some one must take the first step, and assume the risk of it. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try non-resistance as the saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods will or will not succeed.

0
0
Source
source
Lectures XIV and XV, "The Value of Saintliness"
1 month 3 weeks ago

There are two things which a democratic people will always find very difficult-to begin a war and to end it.

0
0
Source
source
Book Three, Chapter XXII.
2 months 5 days ago

"These Macedonians," said he, "are a rude and clownish people, that call a spade a spade."

0
0
Source
source
39 Philip
2 weeks 4 days ago

The Churches as Churches-as institutions affirming their own infallibility-are anti-Christian institutions. Between the Churches as such and Christianity, not only is there nothing in common except the name, but they are two quite opposite and opposing principles. The one represents pride, violence, self-assertion, immobility and death: the other humility, penitence, meekness, progress, and life.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter III, Christianity Misunderstood by Believers
1 month 1 week ago

The precepts "Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, bless them that curse you" ... are born from the Gospel's profound spirit of individualism, which refuses to let one's own actions and conduct depend in any way on somebody else's acts. The Christian refuses to let his acts be mere reactions-such conduct would lower him to the level of his enemy. The act is to grow organically from the person, "as the fruit from the tree." ... What the Gospel demands is not a reaction which is the reverse of the natural reaction, as if it said: "Because he strikes you on the cheek, tend the other"-but a rejection of all reactive activity, of any participation in common and average ways of acting and standards of judgment.

0
0
Source
source
L. Coser, trans. (1961), pp. 99-100
2 months 2 weeks ago

Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.

0
0
Source
source
The New York Herald-Tribune Magazine, 3/6/1938
2 months 2 weeks ago

When the husk gets separated from the kernel, almost all men run after the husk and pay their respects to that. It is only the husk of Christianity that is so bruited and wide spread in this world; the kernel is still the very least and rarest of all things. There is not a single church founded on it.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

Government must be a transparent garment which tightly clings to the people's body.

0
0
Source
source
Act I.
2 weeks 2 days ago

Prosperity makes friends, adversity tries them.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 872
2 months 2 weeks ago

For want of the apparatus of propositional functions, many logicians have been driven to the conclusion that there are unreal objects. It is argued, e.g., by Meinong, that we can speak about "the golden mountain," "the round square," and so on; we can make true propositions of which these are the subjects; hence they must have some kind of logical being, since otherwise the propositions in which they occur would be meaningless. In such theories, it seems to me, there is a failure of that feeling for reality which ought to be preserved even in the most abstract studies. Logic, I should maintain, must no more admit a unicorn than zoology can; for logic is concerned with the real world just as truly as zoology, though with its more abstract and general features.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 16: Descriptions

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia