Skip to main content
6 months 4 days ago

The recognition by one person of another's personality takes place by means to some extent identical to the means by which he is conscious of his own personality. The idea of the second personality, which is as much as to say that second personality itself, enters within the direct consciousness of the first person, and is immediately perceived as his ego, though less strongly. At the same time, the opposition between the two persons is perceived, so that the externality of the second is perceived.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

The dressing up and puffing up of the individual erases the lineaments of protest.

0
0
Source
source
p. 283
5 months 3 weeks ago

Systems, scientific and philosophic, come and go. Each method of limited understanding is at length exhausted. In its prime each system is a triumphant success: in its decay it is an obstructive nuisance.

0
0
Source
source
p. 203.
3 months 1 week ago

With clarity and quiet, I look upon the world and say: All that I see, hear, taste, smell, and touch are the creations of my mind. The sun comes up and the sun goes down in my skull. Out of one of my temples the sun rises, and into the other the sun sets. The stars shine in my brain; ideas, men, animals browse in my temporal head; songs and weeping fill the twisted shells of my ears and storm the air for a moment.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

Although life is a matter of indifference, the use which you make of it is not a matter of indifference.

0
0
Source
source
Book II, ch. 6, 1.
7 months 4 days ago

I am my world.

0
0
Source
source
(The microcosm.) (5.63) Original German: Ich bin meine welt (Der Mikrokosmos.)
8 months 6 days ago

There is no belief, however foolish, that will not gather its faithful adherents who will defend it to the death.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

In England women are still occasionally used instead of horses for hauling canal boats, because the labour required to produce horses and machines is an accurately known quantity, while that required to maintain the women of the surplus population is below all calculation.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. I, Ch. 15, Section 2, pg. 430.
8 months 6 days ago

Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

Whatever concept one may hold, from a metaphysical point of view, concerning the freedom of the will, certainly its appearances, which are human actions, like every other natural event are determined by universal laws. However obscure their causes, history, which is concerned with narrating these appearances, permits us to hope that if we attend to the play of freedom of the human will in the large, we may be able to discern a regular movement in it, and that what seems complex and chaotic in the single individual may be seen from the standpoint of the human race as a whole to be a steady and progressive though slow evolution of its original endowment.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction
7 months 3 weeks ago

Thus the sum of things is ever being renewed, and mortal creatures live dependent one upon another. Some species increase, others diminish, and in a short space the generations of living creatures are changed and, like runners, pass on the torch of life.

0
0
Source
source
Book II, line 75 (tr. Rouse)
6 months 1 week ago

What is the use of all knowledge, if one does not act in accordance with it? This remark implies that knowledge is regarded as a means to action, and the latter as the real end. One could put the question the other way round and ask: How can we possibly act well without knowing what the Good is? This way of expressing it would regard knowledge as conditioning action. But both expressions are one-sided, and the truth is that both, knowledge as well as action, are in the same way inseparable elements of rational life.

0
0
Source
source
Consequences of the Difference p. 75
7 months 4 days ago

But more correctly: The fact that I use the word "hand" and all the other words in my sentence without a second thought, indeed that I should stand before the abyss if I wanted so much as to try doubting their meanings - shows that absence of doubt belongs to the essence of the language-game, that the question "How do I know..." drags out the language-game, or else does away with it.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

I was aggressively nonpolitical. I believed that people who make a fuss about politics do so because their heads are too empty to think about more important things. So I felt nothing but impatient contempt for Osborne's Jimmy Porter and the rest of the heroes of social protest.

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

The rights and duties of man thus simplified, it seems almost impertinent to attempt to illustrate truths that appear so incontrovertible: yet such deeply rooted prejudices have clouded reason, and such spurious qualities have assumed the name of virtues, that it is necessary to pursue the course of reason as it has been perplexed and involved in error, by various adventitious circumstances, comparing the simple axiom with casual deviations.Men, in general, seem to employ their reason to justify prejudices, which they have imbibed, they cannot trace how, rather than to root them out. The mind must be strong that resolutely forms its own principles; for a kind of intellectual cowardice prevails which makes many men shrink from the task, or only do it by halves. Yet the imperfect conclusions thus drawn, are frequently very plausible, because they are built on partial experience, on just, though narrow, views.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1
5 months 3 weeks ago

I can assure you that no kingdom has ever had as many civil wars as the kingdom of Christ.

0
0
Source
source
No. 29. (Rica writing to Ibben)
7 months 1 week ago

The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible.

0
0
Source
source
The Comic
3 months 1 week ago

This is the Supreme Duty of the man who struggles - to set out for the lofty peak which Christ, the first-born sone of salvation, attained. How can we begin? If we are to follow him we must have a profound knowledge of his conflict, we must relive his anguish: his victory over the blossoming snares of the earth, his sacrifice of the great and small joys of men and his ascent from sacrifice to sacrifice, exploit to exploit, to martyrdom's summit, the Cross.

0
0
7 months 2 weeks ago

Truth will sooner come out from error than from confusion.

0
0
Source
source
Aphorism 20
7 months 1 week ago

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

0
0
Source
source
Worship
7 months 1 week ago

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

0
0
Source
source
God in the Dock: Essays on Theology (Making of Modern Theology)
6 months 3 weeks ago

Being about to pitch his camp in a likely place, and hearing there was no hay to be had for the cattle, "What a life," said he, "is ours, since we must live according to the convenience of asses!"

0
0
Source
source
37 Philip
5 months 3 weeks ago

The bourgeoisie is defined as the social class which does not want to be named.

0
0
Source
source
p. 138
7 months 4 weeks ago

All human laws are nourished by one divine law.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

Very little of the great cruelty shown by men can really be attributed to cruel instinct. Most of it comes from thoughtlessness or inherited habit. The roots of cruelty, therefore, are not so much strong as widespread. But the time must come when inhumanity protected by custom and thoughtlessness will succumb before humanity championed by thought. Let us work that this time may come.

0
0
3 months 5 days ago

The world is nothing but change. Our life is only perception.

0
0
Source
source
(Hays translation) IV, 4
3 months 5 days ago

Men exist for the sake of one another. Teach them then or bear with them.

0
0
Source
source
(Long translation) All men are made one for another: either then teach them better, or bear with them. (trans. Meric Casaubon). VIII, 59
7 months 2 weeks ago

He who would teach men to die would teach them to live.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 20. Of the Force of Imagination (tr. Donald M. Frame)
3 months 3 weeks ago

At any rate, if you wish to sift doubtful meanings of this kind, teach us that the happy man is not he whom the crowd deems happy, namely, he into whose coffers mighty sums have flowed, but he whose possessions are all in his soul, who is upright and exalted, who spurns inconstancy, who sees no man with whom he wishes to change places, who rates men only at their value as men, who takes Nature for his teacher, conforming to her laws and living as she commands, whom no violence can deprive of his possessions, who turns evil into good, is unerring in judgment, unshaken, unafraid, who may be moved by force but never moved to distraction, whom Fortune when she hurls at him with all her might the deadliest missile in her armoury, may graze, though rarely, but never wound.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

What then? Shall I not follow in the footsteps of my predecessors? I shall indeed use the old road, but if I find one that makes a shorter cut and is smoother to travel, I shall open the new road. Men who have made these discoveries before us are not our masters, but our guides. Truth lies open for all; it has not yet been monopolized. And there is plenty of it left even for posterity to discover.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others.

0
0
Source
source
Part I, Essay 23: Of The Standard of Taste
7 months 4 days ago

"What is a thing?" is historical, because every report of the past, that is of the preliminaries to the question about the thing, is concerned with something static. This kind of historical reporting is an explicit shutting down of history, whereas it is, after all, a happening. We question historically if we ask what is still happening even if it seems to be past. We ask what is still happening and whether we remain equal to this happening so that it can really develop.

0
0
Source
source
p. 43
3 months 3 weeks ago

And we cannot change this order of things; but what we can do is to acquire stout hearts, worthy of good men, thereby courageously enduring chance and placing ourselves in harmony with Nature.

0
0
7 months 2 weeks ago

Is it not a noble farce, wherein kings, republics, and emperors have for so many ages played their parts, and to which the whole vast universe serves for a theatre?

0
0
Source
source
Book II, Ch. 36. Of the most Excellent Men
6 months 4 days ago

We replace God as best we can; for every god is good, provided he perpetuates in eternity our desire for a crucial solitude. . . .

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

The most authentic Catholic ethic, monastic asceticism, is an ethic of eschatology, directed to the salvation of the individual soul rather than to the maintenance of society. And in the cult of virginity may there not perhaps be a certain obscure idea that to perpetuate ourselves in others hinders our own personal perpetuation?

0
0
5 months 4 weeks ago

Nationalism is always an effort in a direction opposite to that of the principle which creates nations. The former is exclusive in tendency, the latter inclusive. In periods of consolidation, nationalism has a positive value, and is a lofty standard. But in Europe everything is more than consolidated, and nationalism is nothing but a mania, a pretext to escape from the necessity of inventing something new, some great enterprise.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter XIV: Who Rules The World?
5 months 1 week ago

Forgetting extermination is part of extermination, because it is also the extermination of memory, of history, of the social, etc. This forgetting is as essential as the event in any case unlocatable by us, inaccessible to us in its truth. This forgetting is still too dangerous, it must be effaced by an artificial memory (today, everywhere, it is artificial memories that effect the memory of man, that efface man in his own memory). This artificial memory will be the restaging of extermination-but late, much too late for it to be able to make real waves and profoundly disturb something, and especially, especially through medium that is itself cold, radiating forgetfulness, deterrence, and extermination in a still more systematic way, if that is possible, than the camps themselves.

0
0
Source
source
"Holocaust," p. 49
6 months 6 days ago

The peoples' revolution .... will arrange its revolutionary organisation from the bottom up and from the periphery to the centre, in keeping with the principle of liberty.

0
0
6 months 6 days ago

Freedom is the absolute right of every human being to seek no other sanction for his actions but his own conscience, to determine these actions solely by his own will, and consequently to owe his first responsibility to himself alone.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, Daniel Guérin, New York: NY, Monthly Review Press (1970) p. 31
3 months 2 weeks ago

All the future of socialism resides in the autonomous development of workers' syndicates.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Essays in Political Philosophy, Vidya Dhar Mahajan, Doaba House, Lahore, 1943 p. 41
7 months 1 week ago

We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.

0
0
Source
source
Letters of C. S. Lewis (29 April 1959), para. 1, p. 285 - as reported in The Quotable Lewis (1989), p. 469
7 months 3 weeks ago

Who dismisses his adulterous wife and marries another woman, whereas his first wife still lives, remains perpetually in the state of adultery. Such a man does not any efficacious penance while he refuses to abandon the new wife. If he is a catechumen, he cannot be admitted to baptism, because his will remains rooted in the evil. If he is a (baptized) penitent, he cannot receive the (ecclesiastical) reconciliation as long as he does not break with his bad attitude.

0
0
Source
source
De adulterinis coniugiis, 2, 16, in Bishop Athanasius Schneider, Reaction to Synod Door to communion for divorced & remarried officially kicked open, November 2nd, 2015
2 months 4 weeks ago

Besides agreeing with the aims of vegetarianism for aesthetic and moral reasons, it is my view that a vegetarian manner of living by its purely physical effect on the human temperament would most beneficially influence a lot of mankind.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

To take Macaulay out of literature and society and put him in the House of Commons, is like taking the chief physician out of London during a pestilence.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. I, ch. 9, p. 315

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia