Skip to main content
5 months 2 weeks ago

I suppose you imagined I was so insanely in love with you that I could commit any folly. When will you women understand that one isn't insanely in love? All one asks for is a quiet life, which you won't allow one to have. I don't know what the devil ever induced me to marry you. It was all a damned stupid, practical joke. And now you go about saying I'm a murderer. I won't stand it.

0
0
Source
source
The Gioconda smile, in Mortal Coils, 1921
5 months 5 days ago

I never believed in a God. There may have been times when I wondered if there might be a God, but it always seemed to me wildly implausible that a God worth worshipping could allow the Holocaust to occur.

0
0
Source
source
From an interview, as cited by Dan Goldberg "Peter Singer: is he really the most dangerous man in the world?", The Jewish Chronicle
4 months 1 week ago

The pint would call the quart a dualist, if you tried to pour the quart into him.

0
0
Source
source
p. 60
2 months 6 days ago

Let us honor all honest human power of contrivance in its degree. The beaver intellect, so long as it steadfastly refuses to be vulpine, and answers the tempter pointing out short routes to it with an honest "No, no," is truly respectable to me; and many a highflying speaker and singer whom I have known, has appeared to me much less of a developed man than certain of my mill-owning, agricultural, commercial, mechanical, or otherwise industrial friends, who have held their peace all their days and gone on in the silent state. If a man can keep his intellect silent, and make it even into honest beaverism, several very manful moralities, in danger of wreck on other courses, may comport well with that, and give it a genuine and partly human character; and I will tell him, in these days he may do far worse with himself and his intellect than change it into beaverism, and make honest money with it.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

Essentially, this war...is a great race-conflict, a conflict of Teuton and Slav, in which certain other nations, England, France and Belgium, have been led into cooperation with the Slav. ... The conflict of Germany and Russia has been produced not by this or that diplomatic incident, but by primitive passions expressing themselves in the temper of the two races.

0
0
Source
source
War: The Offspring of Fear (1914), quoted in Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude, 1872-1921 (1996), p. 373
4 months 3 weeks ago

Above and before all things, worship GOD!

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in The Sayings of the Wise: Or, Food for Thought: A Book of Moral Wisdom, Gathered from the Ancient Philosophers (1555) by William Baldwin [1908 edition]
5 months 2 weeks ago

Political ideals must be based upon ideals for the individual life. The aim of politics should be to make the lives of individuals as good as possible.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1
2 months 4 days ago

Wisdom, if it were young, would cherish love, nursing it with devotion, deepening it with sacrifice, vitalizing with parentage, making all things subordinate to it till the end. Even though it consumes us in its service and overwhelms us with tragedy, even though it breaks us down with separations, let it be first. How can it matter what price we pay for love?

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 2 : On Youth
4 months 5 days ago

The sensate body possesses an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis The Visible and the Invisible, trans.

0
0
Source
source
A. Lingis (Evanston: 1968), p. 135
4 months 1 week ago

Sex-appeal is the keynote of our whole civilization.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter IV
2 months ago

The habit of the religious way of thinking has biased our mind so grievously that we are - terrified at ourselves in our nakedness and naturalness; it has degraded us so that we deem ourselves depraved by nature, born devils.

0
0
Source
source
Dover 2005, p. 162
5 months 2 weeks ago

Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter VIII, p. 719.
3 months 4 weeks ago

Rituals are processes of embodiment and bodily performances. In them, the valid order and values of a community are physically experienced and solidified.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

The happy consciousness is shaky enough-a thin surface over fear, frustration, and disgust.

0
0
Source
source
p. 76
6 months 1 week ago

With the exception of professional rationalists, today people despair of true knowledge. If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be history of its successive regrets and impotences.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

Through the emancipation of private property from the community, the State has become a separate entity, beside and outside civil society; but is it nothing more than the form of organization which the bourgeois necessarily adopt both for internal and external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of their property and interests.

0
0
Source
source
Part One The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 187
5 months 2 weeks ago

The days .... come and go like muffled and veiled figures, sent from a distant friendly party; but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.

0
0
Source
source
Works and Days
5 months 5 days ago

Truth is best (of all that is) good. As desired, what is being desired is truth for him who (represents) the best truth.

0
0
Source
source
Ahunuvaiti Gatha; Yasna 27, 14.
5 months 3 weeks ago

We are born to inquire after truth; it belongs to a greater power to possess it. It is not, as Democritus said, hid in the bottom of the deeps, but rather elevated to an infinite height in the divine knowledge.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, Ch. 8. Of the Art of Conversation
5 months 2 weeks ago

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 2, Ch. 23, § 296a
4 months ago

Words of the jargon sound as if they said something higher than what they mean.

0
0
Source
source
p. 9
5 months 5 days ago

Strength of body is nobility in beasts of burden, strength of character is nobility in men.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stood.

0
0
Source
source
§ 118
1 month 2 weeks ago

The Cry within me is a call to arms. It shouts: "I, the Cry, am the Lord your God! I am not an asylum. I am not hope and a home. I am not the Father nor the Son nor the Holy Ghost. I am your General! "You are not my slave, nor a plaything in my hands. You are not my friend, you are not my child. You are my comrade-in-arms! "Hold courageously the passes which I entrusted to you; do not betray them. You are in duty bound, and you may act heroically by remaining at your own battle station. "Love danger. What is most difficult? That is what I want! Which road should you take? The most craggy ascent! It is the one I also take: follow me!

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

The vices respectively fall short of or exceed what is right in both passions and actions, while virtue both finds and chooses that which is intermediate.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

The ideal being? An angel ravaged by humor.

0
0
2 months 6 days ago

No Dilettantism in this Mahomet; it is a business of Reprobation and Salvation with him, of Time and Eternity: he is in deadly earnest about it! Dilettantism, hypothesis, speculation, a kind of amateur-search for Truth, toying and coquetting with Truth: this is the sorest sin. The root of all other imaginable sins. It consists in the heart and soul of the man never having been open to Truth; - "living in a vain show." Such a man not only utters and produces falsehoods, but is himself a falsehood. The rational moral principle, spark of the Divinity, is sunk deep in him, in quiet paralysis of life-death.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

We can see nothing whatever of the soul unless it is visible in the expression of the countenance; one might call the faces at a large assembly of people a history of the human soul written in a kind of Chinese ideograms.

0
0
Source
source
B 11
1 month 1 week ago

Observe always that everything is the result of a change, and get used to thinking that there is nothing Nature loves so well as to change existing forms and to make new ones like them.

0
0
Source
source
IV, 36
4 months 1 week 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
5 months 1 week ago

There is an almost universal tendency, perhaps an inborn tendency, to suspect the good faith of a man who holds opinions that differ from our own opinions. ... It obviously endangers the freedom and the objectivity of our discussion if we attack a person instead of attacking an opinion or, more precisely, a theory.

0
0
Source
source
"The Importance of Critical Discussion" in On the Barricades: Religion and Free Inquiry in Conflict (1989) by Robert Basil
3 months 3 weeks ago

The average mind is slow in grasping a truth, but when the most thoroughly organized, centralized institution, maintained at an excessive national expense, has proven a complete social failure, the dullest must begin to question its right to exist. The time is past when we can be content with our social fabric merely because it is "ordained by divine right," or by the majesty of the law.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

I do feel visceral revulsion at the burka because for me it is a symbol of the oppression of women.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Richard Dawkins causes outcry after likening the burka to a bin liner (10 August 2010), The Telegraph.
4 months 3 weeks ago

How can even the lowest mind, if he reflects at all the marvels of this earth and sky, the brilliant fashioning of plants and animals, remain blind to the fact that this wonderful world with its settled order must have a maker to design, determine and direct it?

0
0
Source
source
Tibawi, A.L. (ed. and tr.). (1965) Al-Risala al-Qudsiyya (The Jerusalem Epistle) "Al-Ghazali's Tract on Dogmatic Theology". In: The Islamic Quarterly, 9:3-4 (1965), 3-4.
5 months 2 weeks ago

The cheapest sort of pride is national pride; for if a man is proud of his own nation, it argues that he has no qualities of his own of which he can be proud; otherwise he would not have recourse to those which he shares with so many millions of his fellowmen. The man who is endowed with important personal qualities will be only too ready to see clearly in what respects his own nation falls short, since their failings will be constantly before his eyes. But every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud adopts, as a last resource, pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and glad to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 1, Ch. 3, Section 2: Pride
5 months 2 weeks ago

The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 6 (p. 47)
5 months 2 weeks ago

There is something in human history like retribution; and it is a rule of historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended, but by the offender himself. The first blow dealt to the French monarchy proceeded from the nobility, not from the peasants. The Indian revolt does not commence with the ryots, tortured, dishonoured and stripped naked by the British, but with the sepoys, clad, fed and petted, fatted and pampered by them.

0
0
Source
source
In an article written for the New York Daily Tribune, September 16, 1857
5 months 2 weeks ago

In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly.

0
0
Source
source
"Is Life Worth Living?"
6 months 3 days ago

Philosophers do not claim that God does not know particulars; they rather claim that He does not know them the way humans do. God knows particulars as their Creator whereas humans know them as a privileged creations of God might know them.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

Communism differs from all previous movements in that it overturns the basis of all earlier relations of production and intercourse, and for the first time consciously treats all natural premises as the creatures of hitherto existing men, strips them of their natural character and subjugates them to the power of the united individuals. Its organisation is, therefore, essentially economic, the material production of the conditions of this unity; it turns existing conditions into conditions of unity. The reality, which communism is creating, is precisely the true basis for rendering it impossible that anything should exist independently of individuals, insofar as reality is only a product of the preceding intercourse of individuals themselves.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. I, Part 4.
6 months 4 days ago

It is only he, possessed of all sagely qualities that can exist under heaven, who shows himself quick in apprehension, clear in discernment, of far-reaching intelligence, and all-embracing knowledge, fitted to exercise rule; magnanimous, generous, benign, and mild, fitted to exercise forbearance; impulsive, energetic, firm, and enduring, fitted to maintain a firm hold; self-adjusted, grave, never swerving from the Mean, and correct, fitted to command reverence; accomplished, distinctive, concentrative, and searching, fitted to exercise discrimination. All-embracing is he and vast, deep and active as a fountain, sending forth in their due season his virtues. All-embracing and vast, he is like Heaven. Deep and active as a fountain, he is like the abyss. He is seen, and the people all reverence him; he speaks, and the people all believe him; he acts, and the people all are pleased with him.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

There is a sort of enthusiasm in all projectors, absolutely necessary for their affairs, which makes them proof against the most fatiguing delays, the most mortifying disappointments, the most shocking insults; and what is severer than all, the presumptuous judgments of the ignorant upon their designs.

0
0
Source
source
Volume I, p. 7
2 weeks 6 days ago

Let people write in arguments without the ridiculous gatekeeping...

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia