Skip to main content
4 months 1 day ago

The rapid development of science... has, as it were, burst its old shell, now become too narrow.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction
7 months 2 weeks ago

...man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world - and defines himself afterwards.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

In fact, contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.

0
0
Source
source
p. 198
5 months 6 days ago

So far from a gradual progress towards perfection forming any necessary part of the Darwinian creed, it appears to us that it is perfectly consistent with indefinite persistence in one state, or with a gradual retrogression.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

Mencius went to see King Huei of Liang. The king said, "Venerable sir, since you have not counted it far to come here, a distance of a thousand li, may I presume that you are provided with counsels to profit my kingdom?" Mencius replied, "Why must your Majesty use that word "profit"? What I am provided with, are counsels to benevolence and righteousness, and these are my only topics.

0
0
Source
source
Book 1, part 1, as translated by James Legge in The Life and Works of Mencius (1875), p. 124
7 months 2 weeks ago

The activity of to-day and the assurance of to-morrow.

0
0
Source
source
p. 215
6 months 1 week ago

Understanding being nothing else, but conception caused by Speech.

0
0
Source
source
The First Part, Chapter 4, p. 17
7 months 3 weeks ago

That of beaver skins, of beaver wool, and of gum Senega, has been subjected to higher duties; Great Britain, by the conquest of Canada and Senegal, having got almost the monopoly of those commodities.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter II, Part II, Article IV, p. 954-955.
6 months 2 weeks ago

The meaning and design of a problem seem not to lie in its solution, but in our working at it incessantly.

0
0
Source
source
p. 103
5 months 2 weeks ago

Every person I met believes if there is any disagreement between the Koran and science, then the Koran wins. It's just utterly deplorable. These are now British children who are having their minds stuffed with alien rubbish. Occasionally, my colleagues lecturing in universities lament having undergraduate students walk out of their classes when they talk about evolution. This is almost entirely Muslims.

0
0
Source
source
Dawkins attacks 'alien rubbish' taught in Muslim faith schools, Daily Mail
3 months 2 weeks ago

The intelligence required for the solving of social problems is not a thing of the mere intellect. It must be animated with the religious sentiment and warm with sympathy for human suffering. It must stretch out beyond self-interest, whether it be the self-interest of the few or of the many. It must seek justice. For at the bottom of every social problem we will find a social wrong.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1 : The Increasing Importance of Social Questions
4 months 5 days 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
4 months 2 weeks ago

To conceive the good, in fact, is not sufficient; it must be made to succeed among men. To accomplish this less pure paths must be followed.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 5.
4 months 1 week ago

Love is ever the beginning of Knowledge as fire is of light.

0
0
Source
source
Essays, Death of Goethe.
7 months 2 weeks ago

Earth proudly wears the Parthenon As the best gem upon her zone.

0
0
Source
source
The Problem, st. 3
6 months 1 week ago

All names of God remain hallowed because they have been used not only to speak of God but also to speak to him.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks 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
8 months 3 weeks ago
It is mere illusion and pretty sentiment to expect much from mankind if he forgets how to make war. And yet no means are known which call so much into action as a great war, that rough energy born of the camp, that deep impersonality born of hatred, that conscience born of murder and cold-bloodedness, that fervor born of effort of the annihilation of the enemy, that proud indifference to loss, to one's own existence, to that of one's fellows, to that earthquake-like soul-shaking that a people needs when it is losing its vitality.
0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

TV is not good at covering single events. It needs a ritual, a rhythm, and a pattern...TV tends to fosters patterns rather than events.

0
0
4 months 4 weeks ago

The young watch television twenty-four hours a day, they don't read and they rarely listen. This incessant bombardment of images has developed a hypertrophied eye condition that's turning them into a race of mutants. They should pass a law for a total reeducation of the young, making children visit the Galleria Borghese on a daily basis.

0
0
Source
source
"Younger Generation"
7 months 3 weeks ago

Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.

0
0
Source
source
Attributed to Bentham in The Dictionary of Humorous Quotations‎ (1949) by Evan Esar, p. 29; no earlier sources for this have been located.
4 months 2 weeks ago

The so-called communism of capital, that is, its drive toward an ever more extensive socialization of labor, points ambiguously toward the communism of the multitude.

0
0
7 months 4 weeks ago

For I find that even those that have sought knowledge for itself and not for benefit, or ostentation, or any practical enablement in the course of their life, have nevertheless propounded to themselves a wrong mark, namely, satisfaction, which men call truth, and not operation. For as in the courts and services of princes and states, it is a much easier matter to give satisfaction than to do the business; so in the inquiring of causes and reasons it is much easier to find out such causes as will satisfy the mind of man, and quiet objections, than such causes as will direct him and give him light to new experiences and inventions.

0
0
Source
source
Valerius Terminus: Of the Interpretation of Nature (ca. 1603), in Works, Vol. 1; The Works of Francis Bacon (1857), Vol. 3, p. 232
7 months 2 weeks ago

But if you say: "How am I to know what he means, when I see nothing but the signs he gives?" then I say: "How is he to know what he means, when he has nothing but the signs either?"

0
0
Source
source
§ 504
5 months 2 weeks ago

Blast Sputnik for closing terrestrial nature in a man-made environment that transfers the evolutionary process from biology to technology.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 85)
8 months 2 weeks ago

When you write a short story ... you had better know the ending first. The end of a story is only the end to the reader. To the writer, it's the beginning. If you don't know exactly where you're going every minute you're writing, you'll never get there or anywhere.

0
0
6 months 3 days ago

Those who will not worship at the shrine of money, need not hope for recognition. On the other hand, they will also not have to think other people's thoughts or wear other people's political clothes. They will not have to proclaim as true that which is false, nor praise that as humanitarian which is brutal.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

The Bible is literature, not dogma.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

"The Precession of Simulacra,"

0
0
Source
source
p. 6
7 months 2 weeks ago

We are always getting ready to live, but never living.

0
0
Source
source
April 12, 1834
7 months 2 weeks ago

Analytical philosophy was very interesting. It always struck me as being very interesting and full of tremendous intellectual curiosities. It is wonderful to see the mind at work in such an intense manner, but, for me, it was still too far removed from my own issues.

0
0
Source
source
Interview in African-American Philosophers: 17 Conversations (1998) edited by George Yancy, p. 35
6 months 3 weeks ago

Manners are of more importance than laws. The law can touch us here and there, now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation like that of the air we breathe in.

0
0
Source
source
No. 1, p. 172 in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke: A New Edition, v. VIII. London: F. C. and J. Rivington, 1815
5 months 1 week ago

As free constitutions are the strongest supports of governments, social order is the best safeguard of freedom. Liberty has no enemies so pernicious as those misguided friends whose ardour in her cause leads them to outrage the moral sense of mankind, and to arm against her the interests and feelings which are her natural allies. Even the prejudices of nations should be respected.

0
0
Source
source
'Essay on the Life and Character of King William III' (1822), written for the Greaves Historical Prize at Cambridge, quoted in The Times Literary Supplement (1 May 1969), p. 469
8 months 5 days ago

Pleasant it is, when over a great sea the winds trouble the waters, to gaze from shore upon another's great tribulation: not because any man's troubles are a delectable joy, but because to perceive from what ills you are free yourself is pleasant.

0
0
Source
source
Book II, lines 1-4 (tr. Rouse)
5 months 2 weeks ago

But the more he is alone with nature, the greater man and his doings bulk in the consideration of his fellow-men.

0
0
Source
source
Toils And Pleasures.
6 months 1 week ago

Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life.... Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable immobile world.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction, sect. 6
7 months 3 weeks ago

Thus, because Christian morals leave animals out of consideration ... therefore in philosophical morals they are of course at once outlawed; they are merely "things," simply means to ends of any sort; and so they are good for vivisection, for deer-stalking, bull-fights, horse-races, etc., and they may be whipped to death as they struggle along with heavy quarry carts. Shame on such a morality ... which fails to recognize the Eternal Reality immanent in everything that has life, and shining forth with inscrutable significance from all eyes that see the sun!

0
0
Source
source
Part II, Ch. VI, pp. 94-95
7 months 2 weeks ago

There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.

0
0
Source
source
Preface
6 months 6 days ago

How are we to adjudicate among rival ontologies? Certainly the answer is not provided by the semantical formula "To be is to be the value of a variable"; this formula serves rather, conversely, in testing the conformity of a given remark or doctrine to a prior ontological standard.

0
0
Source
source
"On What There Is"
2 months 3 weeks ago

When thinking about Utilitarianism, the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people, I always caveat by saying “with mitigation”. We already know the common attack on Utilitarianism is the majority crushes those not in the majority. This is a problem that comes from any group that’s larger than any other group. Unless we want absolute atomization, in an absolute sense, this will always be an issue that has to be addressed. It’s not particular to Utilitarianism.

0
0
7 months 4 weeks ago

The ceaseless labour of your life is to build the house of death.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, Ch. 20
3 months 2 weeks ago

The exclusive right of legislation and taxation in the representatives of the people.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the Enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.

0
0
Source
source
John Cumming trans., p. 7.
6 months 2 days ago

The martyr sacrifices herself (himself in a few instances) entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for she (or he) makes the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Forever Yours (1990) by Martha Vicinus and Bea Nergaard , p. 275. Letter, c. 1867, to the scholar Benjamin Jowett.
6 months 5 days ago

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment in recognition of the pattern.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 29, June 10, 1943.
7 months 2 days ago

Disbelieve nothing wonderful concerning the gods, nor concerning divine dogmas.

0
0
Source
source
Symbol 4

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia