Skip to main content
5 months 2 weeks ago

In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be a gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy.

0
0
Source
source
Old Mortality (1884).
8 months 6 days ago

We should never take pleasure in causing pain to others, even to those who have wronged us, but rather strive to do good to all.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

A fool with a heart and no sense is just as unhappy as a fool with sense and no heart.

0
0
Source
source
Part 1, Chapter 7
6 months 2 weeks ago

I forsook the company and the dinner-parties, the port-wine and champagne of the middle-classes, and devoted my leisure-hours almost exclusively to the intercourse with plain working men; I am both glad and proud of having done so. Glad, because thus I was induced to spend many a happy hour in obtaining a knowledge of the realities of life-many an hour, which else would have been wasted in fashionable talk and tiresome etiquette; proud, because thus I got an opportunity of doing justice to an oppressed and calumniated class of men who with all their faults and under all the disadvantages of their situation, yet command the respect of every one but an English money-monger.

0
0
Source
source
p. 27
6 months 2 weeks ago

The Leaders have ever since gone...to propagate the principles of French Levelling and confusion, by which no house is safe from its Servants, and no Officer from his Soldiers, and no State or constitution from conspiracy and insurrection. I will not enter into the baseness and depravity of the System they adopt; but one thing I will remark, that its great Object is not, (as they pretend to delude worthy people to their Ruin) the destruction of all absolute Monarchies, but totally to root out that thing called an Aristocrate or Noblemen and Gentleman.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Lord Fitzwilliam (21 November 1791), quoted in Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith (eds.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Volume VI: July 1789-December 1791 (1967), p. 451
7 months 3 weeks ago

Christ ought to be preached with this goal in mind - that we might be moved to faith in him so that he is not just a distant historical figure but actually Christ for you and me.

0
0
Source
source
p. 69
6 months 2 weeks ago

To win the guilty kiss of a saint, I'd welcome the plague as a blessing

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

Days of absence,

sad and dreary, 

Clothed in sorrow's dark array,

Days of absence, I am weary: She I love is far away.

0
0
Source
source
Day of Absence, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
4 months 1 week ago

Marxism has been the greatest fantasy of our century. It was a dream offering the prospect of a society of perfect unity, in which all human aspirations would be fulfilled and all values reconciled.

0
0
Source
source
Epilogue, p. 1206
7 months 3 weeks ago

This endeavour to do a thing or leave it undone, solely in order to please men, we call ambition, especially when we so eagerly endeavour to please the vulgar, that we do or omit certain things to our own or another's hurt : in other cases it is generally called kindliness.

0
0
Source
source
Part III, Prop. XXIX
6 months 3 weeks ago

I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all.

0
0
Source
source
Book Three, Chapter XXI.
8 months 1 day ago

This art, which I call the art of persuading, and which, properly speaking, is simply the process of perfect methodical proofs, consists of three essential parts: of defining the terms of which we should avail ourselves by clear definitions, of proposing principles of evident axioms to prove the thing in question; and of always mentally substituting in the demonstrations the definition in the place of the thing defined.

0
0
3 months 4 weeks ago

Archeologists have not discovered stages of human existence so early that they were without art. Right back in the early morning twilights of mankind we received it from Hands which we were too slow to discern. And we were too slow to ask: FOR WHAT PURPOSE have we been given this gift? What are we to do with it? And they were mistaken, and will always be mistaken, who prophesy that art will disintegrate, that it will outlive its forms and die. It is we who shall die - art will remain. And shall we comprehend, even on the day of our destruction, all its facets and all its possibilities?

0
0
7 months 2 weeks ago

I would say to the readers of the Scriptures, if they wish for a good book, read the Bhagavad-Gita...translated by Charles Wilkins. It deserves to be read with reverence even by yankees...Besides the Bhagvat-Geeta, our Shakespeare seems sometimes youthfully green...Ex oriente lux may still be the motto of scholars, for the Western world has not yet derived from the East all the light it is destined to derive thence.

0
0
Source
source
Quoted in Sushama Londhe, A Tribute to Hinduism (New Delhi: Pragun Publication, 2008) p. 26
6 months 2 weeks ago

...a monarchy is a thing perfectly susceptible of reform; perfectly susceptible of a balance of power; and that, when reformed and balanced, for a great country, it is the best of all governments. The example of our country might have led France, as it has led him, to perceive that monarchy is not only reconcilable to liberty, but that it may be rendered a great and stable security to its perpetual enjoyment.

0
0
Source
source
p. 400
3 months 2 weeks ago

Even the most humble insect and the most insignificant idea are the military encampments of God. Within them, all of God is arranged in fighting position for a critical battle. Even in the most meaningless particle of earth and sky I hear God crying out: "Help me!" Everything is an egg in which God's sperm labors without rest, ceaselessly. Innumerable forces within and without it range themselves to defend it. With the light of the brain, with the flame of the heart, I besiege every cell where God is jailed, seeking, trying, hammering to open a gate in the fortress of matter, to create a gap through which God may issue in heroic attack.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

Character is destiny.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

Fame and tranquility can never be bedfellows.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, Ch. 39
8 months 2 weeks ago

I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away - yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit ----------- and wanted to shoot myself.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

Children till 10. years old to serve as nurses. from 10. to 16. the boys make nails, the girls spin. at 16. go into the ground or learn trades.

0
0
Source
source
Jefferson's Farm Book as quoted in The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson, by Henry Wiencek, Smithsonian Magazine,
5 months 2 days ago

Properties perceived in nature will depend on how one looks and how one looks depends on the economic interest one has in the resources of nature. The value of profit maximization is thus linked to reductionist systems, while the value of life and the maintenance of life is linked to holistic and ecological systems.

0
0
Source
source
Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development
7 months 3 weeks ago

The origin of our passions, the root and spring of all the rest, the only one which is born with man, which never leaves him as long as he lives, is self-love; this passion is primitive, instinctive, it precedes all the rest, which are in a sense only modifications of it. In this sense, if you like, they are all natural. But most of these modifications are the result of external influences, without which they would never occur, and such modifications, far from being advantageous to us, are harmful. They change the original purpose and work against its end; then it is that man finds himself outside nature and at strife with himself.

0
0
7 months 2 weeks ago

That the human mind has a certain order of possible progress, in which some things must precede others, an order which governments and public instructors can modify to some, but not to an unlimited extent: that all questions of political institutions are relative, not absolute, and that different stages of human progress not only will have, but ought to have, different institutions: That government is always either in the hands, or passing into the hands, of whatever is the strongest power in society, and that what this power is, does not depend on institutions, but institutions on it: That any general theory or philosophy of politics supposes a previous theory of human progress, and that this is the same thing with a philosophy of history.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 162)
8 months 2 weeks ago

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. IV: The Aristocratic Ideal
4 months 1 week ago

Probably some ninety-nine out of every hundred of our gifted souls, who have to seek a career for themselves, go this beaver road. Whereby the first half-result, national wealth namely, is plentifully realized; and only the second half, or wisdom to guide it, is dreadfully behindhand.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

Among Latin writers, the acceptations of the word nature are so many, that I remember, one author reckons up no less than fourteen or fifteen. Hence we see how easy 'tis for the generality of men, without excepting those who write of natural things, to impose upon others and themselves, in the use of a word so apt to be mis-employ'd. ..the very great ambiguity of this term, and the promiscuous use made of it, without sufficiently attending to its different significations, render many of the expressions wherein 'tis employ'd either unintelligible, improper, or false.

0
0
Source
source
Sect. 1
6 months 2 weeks ago

The Africans had that claim on our humanity which could not be resisted, whatever might have been advanced by an hon. gentleman in defence of the property of the planters.

0
0
Source
source
Speech in the House of Commons (12 May 1789), quoted in The Parliamentary History of England, From the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, Vol. XXVIII (1816), column 98
7 months 3 weeks ago

Pyrrhus, when his friends congratulated to him his victory over the Romans under Fabricius, but with great slaughter of his own side, said to them, "Yes; but if we have such another victory, we are undone".

0
0
Source
source
No. 193
6 months 1 week ago

Whit Meynell was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.

0
0
Source
source
The Philosopher's Pupil (1983) p. 165.
6 months 2 weeks ago

The consciousness of a general idea has a certain "unity of the ego" in it, which is identical when it passes from one mind to another. It is, therefore, quite analogous to a person, and indeed, a person is only a particular kind of general idea.

0
0
Source
source
Man's Glassy Essence in The Monist, Vol. III, No. 1
7 months 2 weeks ago

I find the Englishman to be him of all men who stands firmest in his shoes. They have in themselves what they value in their horses, - mettle and bottom.

0
0
Source
source
Manners
5 months 2 weeks ago

There was a brief moment after 9/11 when Colin Powell said "we should not rush to satisfy the desire for revenge." It was a great moment, an extraordinary moment, because what he was actually asking people to do was to stay with a sense of grief, mournfulness, and vulnerability.

0
0
Source
source
Interview with Judith Butler. in: The Believer. May 2003

Getting along with women, Knocking around with men, Having more credit than money, Thus one goes through the world.

0
0
Source
source
Claudine von Villa Bella
4 months 1 week ago

Friendship ... receives its real sustenance from an equality that, to proceed without a limp, must have its two limbs equal.

0
0
Source
source
Part 3
7 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
3 months 2 weeks ago

"Fire is the first and final mask of my God. We dance and weep between two enormous pyres." Our thoughts and our bodies flash and glitter with reflected light. Between the two pyres I stand serenely, my brain unshaken amid the vertigo, and I say: "Time is most short and space most narrow between these two pyres, the rhythm of this life is most sluggish, and I have no time, nor a place to dance in. I cannot wait." Then all at once the rhythm of the earth becomes a vertigo, time disappears, the moment whirls, becomes eternity, and every point in space - insect or star or idea - turns into dance.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

Pleasure, or pain, is not only good, or evil, in itself, but the measure of what is good or evil, in every object of desire or aversion; for the ultimate reason why we pursue one thing, and avoid another, is because we expect pleasure from the former, and apprehend pain from the latter. If we sometimes decline a present pleasure, it is not because we are averse to pleasure itself, but because we conceive, that in the present instance, it will be necessarily connected with a greater pain. In like manner, if we sometimes voluntarily submit to a present pain, it is because we judge that it is necessarily connected with a greater pleasure.

0
0
8 months 2 weeks ago

Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold. What does the scientist have to offer in exchange? Uncertainty! Insecurity!

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

The virtuous who are prosperous must be exalted, and the virtuous who are not prosperous must be exalted too.

0
0
Source
source
Book 2; Exaltation of the Virtuous I
7 months 3 weeks ago

A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, Ch. 5
4 months 3 days ago

Just as we suffer from excess in all things, so we suffer from excess in literature; thus we learn our lessons, not for life, but for the lecture room.

0
0
Source
source
Line 12 Alternate translation: Not for life, but for school do we learn. (translator unknown) Alternate translation: We are taught for the schoolroom, not for life. (translator unknown).
4 months 2 weeks ago

Fleeing from a life of constant insecurity and forced mobility is good preparation for dealing with and resisting the typical forms of exploitation of immaterial labor.

0
0
Source
source
133
3 months 2 weeks ago

All pain is a punishment, and every punishment is inflicted for love as much as for justice.

0
0
Source
source
"Fifth Dialogue," p. 149
7 months 2 weeks ago

The safest road to Hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

0
0
Source
source
Letter XII

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia