Skip to main content
1 month 1 week ago

The idea of an all-powerful divine Being is present everywhere, unconsciously if not consciously, because it is an archetype. There is in the psyche some superior power, and if it is not consciously a god, it is the "belly" at least, in St. Paul's words. I therefore consider it wiser to acknowledge the idea of God consciously, for, if we do not, something else is made God, usually something quite inappropiate and stupid such as only an "enlightened" intellect could hatch forth.

0
0
Source
source
C. G. Jung. 2014. Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 7: Two Essays in Analytical Psychology. Princeton University Press. p. 71
1 week 6 days ago

Wealth is a great sin in the eyes of God. Poverty is a great sin in the eyes of man.

0
0
Source
source
p. 86
1 week 4 days ago

Electric technology is directly related to our central nervous systems, so it is ridiculous to talk of "what the public wants" played over its own nerves.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 68)
4 weeks 1 day ago

The aim is to replace economic oligarchies by the State, which has a will-to-power of its own and is quite as little concerned with the public good; and a will-to-power, moreover, which is not economic but military and therefore much more dangerous to any good folk who have a taste for staying alive. And on the bourgeois side what on earth is the sense of objecting to State control in economic affairs if one accepts private monopolies which have all the economic and technical disadvantages of State monopolies and possibly some others as well?

0
0
Source
source
p. 230
1 month 2 weeks ago

Since I have spread my wings to purpose high, The more beneath my feet the clouds I see, The more I give the winds my pinions free, Spurning the earth and soaring to the sky.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in "Giordano Bruno" by Thomas Davidson, in The Index Vol. VI. No. 36 (4 March 1886), p. 429
2 months 3 weeks ago

Women . . . have . . . small and narrow chests, and broad hips, to the end they should remain at home, sit still, keep house, and bear and bring up children. . . . A woman is, or at least should be, a friendly, courteous, and a merry companion in life . . . the honor and ornament of the house, and inclined to tenderness, for thereunto are they chiefly created, to bear children, and to be the pleasure, joy and solace of their husbands.

0
0
Source
source
-- Table Talk, quoted in Luther On "Woman"

A philosophy without heart and a faith without intellect are abstractions from the true life of knowledge and faith. The man whom philosophy leaves cold, and the man whom real faith does not illuminate, may be assured that the fault lies in them, not in knowledge and faith. The former is still an alien to philosophy, the latter an alien to faith.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

0
0
1 week 4 days ago

The telegraph press mosaic is acoustic space as much as an electric circus.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

Demonstrating is therefore only the means through which I strip my thought of the form of "mine-ness" so that the other person may recognize it as his own.

0
0
Source
source
Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), p. 66
1 month 1 week ago

Thus poetry, regarded as a vehicle of thought, is especially impressive partly because it obeys all the laws of effective speech, and partly because in so doing it imitates the natural utterances of excitement.

0
0
Source
source
Pt. I, sec. 6, "The Effect of Poetry Explained"
1 month 6 days ago

The range of socially permissible and desirable satisfaction is greatly enlarged, but through this satisfaction, the Pleasure Principle is reduced-deprived of the claims which are irreconcilable with the established society. Pleasure, thus adjusted, generates submission.

0
0
Source
source
p. 75
2 months 2 weeks ago

My body and my will are one.

0
0
Source
source
Book 1
1 month 1 week ago

With this as its basic constitution, civilization achieved things of which gentile society was not even remotely capable. But it achieved them by setting in motion the lowest instincts and passions in man and developing them at the expense of all his other abilities. From its first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization; wealth and again wealth and once more wealth, wealth, not of society, but of the single scurvy individual-here was its one and final aim. If at the same time the progressive development of science and a repeated flowering of supreme art dropped into its lap, it was only because without them modern wealth could not have completely realized its achievements.

0
0
Source
source
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) as translated by Ernest Untermann (1902)
2 months 4 weeks ago

Be not swept off your feet by the vividness of the impression, but say, "Impression, wait for me a little. Let me see what you are and what you represent. Let me try you."

0
0
Source
source
Book II, ch. 18, § 24, Reported in Bartlett's Quotations (1919) as "Be not hurried away by excitement, but say, "Semblance, wait for me a little".
2 months 1 week ago

The virtues of society are the vices of the saints.

0
0
Source
source
Circles
1 month ago

I'm exclusive of those that exclude...

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

We refuse to have our conscience bound by any work or law, so that by doing this or that we should be righteous, or leaving this or that undone we should be damned.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 2
6 days ago

Take our politicians: they're a bunch of yo-yos. The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in The Portable Curmudgeon (1987) by Jon Winokur, p. 219
1 month 2 weeks ago

The last thing abandoned by a party is its phraseology, because among political parties, as elsewhere, the vulgar make the language, and the vulgar abandon more easily the ideas that have been instilled into it than the words that it has learnt. France Before The Consulate, Chapter I: "How the Republic was ready to accept a master", in Memoir, Letters, and Remains, Vol I (1862), p. 266 Variant translation: The last thing a political party gives up is its vocabulary. This is because, in party politics as in other matters, it is the crowd who dictates the language, and the crowd relinquishes the ideas it has been given more readily than the words it has learned.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in The Viking book of Aphorisms : A Personal Selection (1962) by W. H. Auden, and Louis Kronenberger, p. 306. Variant translation: The last thing that a party abandons is its language.
1 month 1 week ago

The recognition of the light of reality within the darkness of abstraction is a contradiction - both the affirmation and the negation of the real at one and the same time. The new philosophy, which thinks the concrete not in an abstract but a concrete way, which acknowledges the real in its reality - that is, in a way corresponding to the being of the real as true, which elevates it into the principle and object of philosophy - is consequently the truth of the Hegelian philosophy, indeed of modern philosophy as a whole.

0
0
Source
source
Part III, Section 31
2 months 2 weeks ago

Habit... makes the endurance of evil easy (which, under the name of patience, is falsely honored as a virtue), because sensations of the same type, when continued without alteration for a long time, draw our attention away from the senses so that we are scarcely conscious of them at all. On the other hand, habit also makes the consciousness and the remembrance of good that has been received more difficult, which then gradually leads to ingratitude (a real vice). [...] Acquired habit deprives good actions of their moral value because it undermines mental freedom and, moreover, it leads to thoughtless repetitions of the same acts (monotony), and thus becomes ridiculous.

0
0
Source
source
Kant, Immanuel (1996), pages 34-35
1 week 4 days ago

Necessity gives the law without itself acknowledging one.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 444
2 months 1 week ago

In justice as fairness society is interpreted as a cooperative venture for mutual advantage.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter II, Section 14, pg. 84
3 months 3 days ago

The way of the superior man may be compared to what takes place in traveling, when to go to a distance we must first traverse the space that is near, and in ascending a height, when we must begin from the lower ground.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

The plea of anger or of drunkenness - as having placed the criminal for the moment beyond the control of his reason - relieves him from the charge of premeditated and malicious intent; but a rational legislation will rather provide more severe than milder punishment for such cases, particularly if such a state of mind is habitual with the accused; for a single unlawful act may well constitute an exception from an otherwise blameless life. But a person who pleads, "I habitually get so angry or so drunk as not to be any longer master of my senses!" confesses thereby that he changes himself into a beast on a fixed principle, and that he is, therefore, not fit to live among rational beings.

0
0
Source
source
P. 351
3 weeks 5 days ago

In its mad passion for power, the Communist State even sought to strengthen and deepen the very ideas and conceptions which the Revolution had come to destroy. It supported and encouraged all the worst antisocial qualities and systematically destroyed the already awakened conception of the new revolutionary values.The sense of justice and equality, the love of liberty and of human brotherhood - these fundamentals of the real regeneration of society - the Communist State suppressed to the point of extermination. Man's instinctive sense of equity was branded as weak sentimentality; human dignity and liberty became a bourgeois superstition; the sanctity of life, which is the very essence of social reconstruction, was condemned as unrevolutionary, almost counter-revolutionary. This fearful perversion of fundamental values bore within itself the seed of destruction.

0
0
3 months 3 days ago

Gentleness, as opposed to an irascible temper, greatly contributes to the tranquility and happiness of life, by preserving the mind from perturbation, and arming it against the assaults of calumny and malice.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

It is the love of the people; it is their attachment to their government, from the sense of the deep stake they have in such a glorious institution, which gives you both your army and your navy, and infuses into both that liberal obedience, without which your army would be a base rabble, and your navy nothing but rotten timber.

0
0
1 week 4 days ago

The present is always invisible because it's environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.

0
0
Source
source
Mademoiselle: the magazine for the smart young woman, Volume 64, 1966, p. 114
2 months 1 week ago

The French bourgeois doesn't dislike shit, provided it is served up to him at the right time.

0
0
Source
source
Book 2, "To Succeed in Being All, Strive to be Nothing in Anything"
2 months 2 weeks ago

There are three juridical attributes that inseparably belong to the citizen by right. These are: Constitutional freedom, as the right of every citizen to have to obey no other law than that to which he has given his consent or approval; Civil equality, as the right of the citizen to recognize no one as a superior among the people in relation to himself...; and Political independence, as the right to owe his existence and continuance in society not to the arbitrary will of another, but to his own rights and powers as a member of the commonwealth.

0
0
Source
source
Science of Right, 1797
3 months 1 day ago

Now, as the Word of God is the Son of God, so the love of God is the Holy Spirit.

0
0
Source
source
Art. 8
1 month 2 weeks ago

To be acutely conscious is a disease, a real, honest-to-goodness disease.

0
0
Source
source
Part 1, Chapter 2 (tr. David Magarshack, 1950) To think too much is a disease, a real, actual disease.
1 month 1 week ago

There have always been poor and working classes; and the working class have mostly been poor. But there have not always been workers and poor people living under conditions as they are today.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

As geological time goes, it is but a moment since the human race began and only the twinkling of an eye since the arts of civilization were first invented. In spite of some alarmists, it is hardly likely that our species will completely exterminate itself. And so long as man continues to exist, we may be pretty sure that, whatever he may suffer for a time, and whatever brightness may be eclipsed, he will emerge sooner or later, perhaps strengthened and reinvigorated by a period of mental sleep. The universe is vast and men are but tiny specks on an insignificant planet. But the more we realize our minuteness and our impotence in the face of cosmic forces, the more astonishing becomes what human beings have achieved.

0
0
Source
source
"If We are to Survive this Dark Time", The New York Times Magazine, 9/3/1950
1 month 3 weeks ago

As touching the gods, I do not know whether they exist or not, nor how they are featured; for there is much to prevent our knowing: the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life.

0
0
Source
source
Opening lines of Concerning the Gods (DK 80 B4).
3 weeks 5 days ago

Pettiness separates; breadth unites. Let us be broad and big. Let us not overlook vital things because of the bulk of trifles confronting us. A true conception of the relation of the sexes will not admit of conqueror and conquered; it knows of but one great thing: to give of one's self boundlessly, in order to find one's self richer, deeper, better. That alone can fill the emptiness, and transform the tragedy of woman's emancipation into joy, limitless joy.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand at all, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language, with this 'relation,' precisely, which is yours.

0
0
Source
source
Derrida Jacques, Elisabeth Weber (1995), Points...: Interviews, 1974-1994. p. 115
2 months 4 days ago

Human beings are social animals. We were social before we were human.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 1, The Origins Of Altruism, p. 3
1 week 6 days ago

By words one transmits thoughts to another, by means of art, one transmits feelings.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

It may indeed be doubted, whether butcher's meat is any where a necessary of life. Grain and other vegetables, with the help of milk, cheese, and butter, or oil, where butter is not to be had, it is known from experience, can, without any butcher's meat, afford the most plentiful, the most wholesome, the most nourishing, and the most invigorating diet.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter II, Part II, Appendix to Articles I and II.
2 months 2 weeks ago

Only in thought is man a God; in action and desire we are the slaves of circumstance.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Lucy Donnely, November 25, 1902
2 months 2 weeks ago

The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free.

0
0
Source
source
"Slavery in Massachusetts", 1854
2 months 3 weeks ago

Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.

0
0
Source
source
No. 36

The chief error in philosophy is overstatement.

0
0
Source
source
Pt. I, ch. 1, sec. 1.
1 month 2 weeks ago

If man's love for himself be necessary, then his love for Him through whom, first his coming-to-be, and second, his continuance in his essential being with all his inward and outward traits, his substance and his accidents, occur must also be necessary. Whoever is so besotted by his fleshy appetites as to lack this love neglects his Lord and Creator. He possesses no authentic knowledge of Him; his gaze is limited to his cravings and to things of sense. 

0
0
Source
source
Al-Ghazali on Love, Longing, Intimacy & Contentment, Translated with an introduction and notes by Eric Ormsby. Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society (2011), p. 25.
2 months 2 weeks ago

Titles of property, for instance railway shares, may change hands every day, and their owner may make a profit by their sale even in foreign countries, so that titles to property are exportable, although the railway itself is not.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. II, Ch. X, p. 215.

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia