Skip to main content
3 months 2 weeks ago

Now to get back to our given Church: it lives almost entirely for modesty and moneyed piety. It zealously inveighs against the harm done to Joseph and the sheep, but it has made its arrangements with the upper classes and serves as their spiritual defender. It bristles at see-through blouses, but not at slums in which half-naked children starve, and not, above all, at the conditions that keep three quarters of mankind in misery. It condemns desperate girls who abort a foetus, but it consecrates war, which aborts millions. It has nationalized its God, nationalized him into ecclesiastic organization, and has inherited the Roman empire under the mask of the Crucified. It preserves misery and injustice, having first tolerated and then approved the class power that causes them; it prevents any seriousness about deliverance by postponing it to St. Never-Ever's Day or shifting it to the beyond.

0
0
Source
source
p. 144
6 months 1 day ago

It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense.

0
0
Source
source
ch. 15.
8 months 6 days ago

Temperance is that discreet regulation of the desires and passions, by which we are enabled to enjoy pleasures without suffering any consequent inconvenience. They who maintain such a constant self-command, as never to be enticed by the prospect of present indulgence, to do that which will be productive of evil, obtain the truest pleasure by declining pleasure.

0
0
8 months 2 weeks ago
I now myself live, in every detail, striving for wisdom, while I formerly merely worshipped and idolized the wise.
0
0
2 weeks 5 days ago

It leads to an extinction of universal values, but a detached consensual value system floating in an overall state of war could literally kill others to maintain itself while agents in the in group are good to each other.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

What I give is the morphology of the use of an expression. I show that it has kinds of uses of which you had not dreamed. In philosophy one feels forced to look at a concept in a certain way. What I do is suggest, or even invent, other ways of looking at it. I suggest possibilities of which you had not previously thought. You thought that there was one possibility, or only two at most. But I made you think of others. Furthermore, I made you see that it was absurd to expect the concept to conform to those narrow possibilities. Thus your mental cramp is relieved, and you are free to look around the field of use of the expression and to describe the different kinds of uses of it.

0
0
Source
source
Lectures of 1946 - 1947, as quoted in Ludwig Wittgenstein : A Memoir (1966) by Norman Malcolm, p. 43
7 months 2 weeks ago

"The cardinal difficulty," said MacPhee, "in collaboration between the sexes is that women speak a language without nouns. If two men are doing a bit of work, one will say to the other, 'Put this bowl inside the bigger bowl which you'll find on the top shelf of the green cupboard.' The female for this is, 'Put that in the other one in there.' And then if you ask them, 'in where?' they say, 'in there, of course.' There is consequently a phatic hiatus."

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 8 : Moonlight at Belbury, section 2
7 months 2 weeks ago

All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience.

0
0
Source
source
"The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" in address to the Yale Philosophical Club, published in the International Journal of Ethics, April 1891
7 months 3 weeks ago

Were a stranger to drop on a sudden into this world, I would show him, as a specimen of its ills, a hospital full of diseases, a prison crowded with malefactors and debtors, a field of battle strewed with carcasses, a fleet foundering in the ocean, a nation languishing under tyranny, famine, or pestilence. To turn the gay side of life to him, and give him a notion of its pleasures; whither should I conduct him? to a ball, to an opera, to court? He might justly think, that I was only showing him a diversity of distress and sorrow.

0
0
Source
source
Demea to Philo, Part X
7 months 2 weeks ago

He the devil always sends errors into the world in pairs-pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse. You see why, of course? He relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one. But do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through between both errors. We have no other concern than that with either of them.

0
0
Source
source
Book IV, chapter 6, "Two Notes"
5 months 2 weeks ago

Until writing was invented, we lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, the dark of the mind, the world of emotion, primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 13)
8 months 2 weeks ago

It is all too easy to forget that there are emotional motivations in history, as well as economic ones.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, cloath and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter VIII, p. 94.
5 months 2 weeks ago

The student should have enough knowledge of his or her cultural tradition to know how it got to be the way it is. This involves both political and social history, on the one hand, as well as the mastery of some of the great philosophical and literary texts of the culture on the other. It involves reading not only texts that are of great value, like those of Plato, but many less valuable that have been influential, such as the works of Marx. For the United States, the dominant tradition is, and for the foreseeable future, will remain the European tradition. The United States is, after all, a product of the European Enlightenment. However, you do not understand your own tradition if you do not see it in relation to others. Works from other cultural traditions need to be studied as well.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

In plain truth, lying is an accursed vice. We are not men, nor have any other tie upon another, but by our word.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, Ch. 9
5 months 6 days 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
7 months 2 weeks ago

As for the commercial business, I can no longer make head or tail of it. At one moment crisis seems imminent and the City prostrated, the next everything is set fair. I know that none of this will have any impact on the catastrophe.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Friedrich Engels (4 February 1852), quoted in The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Volume 39. Letters 1852-55 (2010), p. 32
3 months 2 weeks ago

We may say with truth and meaning that governments are more or less republican, as they have more or less of the element of popular election and control in their composition; and believing, as I do, that the mass of the citizens is the safest depository of their own rights, and especially, that the evils flowing from the duperies of the people are less injurious than those from the egoism of their agents, I am a friend to that composition of government which has in it the most of this ingredient. And I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to John Taylor (28 May 1816) ME 15:23
3 months 1 week 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 1 week ago

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

0
0
7 months 1 day ago

Incorporeal hypostases, in descending, are distributed into parts, and multiplied about individuals with a diminution of power; but when they ascend by their energies beyond bodies, they become united, and proceed into a simultaneous subsistence, through exuberance of power.

0
0
7 months 2 weeks ago

Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone-quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

0
0
Source
source
Quotation and Originality
7 months 2 weeks ago

The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the false appearance things present and which mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 2, Ch. 1, § 17
3 months 2 weeks ago

In ourselves alone the absolute light keeps shining, a sigillum falsi et sui, mortis et vitae aeternae [false signal and signal of eternal life and death itself], and the fantastic move to it begins: to the external interpretation of the daydream, the cosmic manipulation of a concept that is utopian in principle. Finding this concept, finding the right for whose sake it behoves us to live, to be organized, to have time-this is where we are headed, why we are clearing the metaphysically constitutive trails afresh, calling for what is not, building into the blue that lines all edges of the world; this is why we build ourselves into the blue and search for truth and reality where mere factuality vanishes.

0
0
Source
source
p. 43
7 months 2 weeks ago

The human imagination has seldom had before it an object so sublimely ordered as the medieval cosmos. If it has an aesthetic fault, it is perhaps, for us who have known romanticism, a shade too ordered. For all its vast spaces it might in the end afflict us with a kind of claustrophobia. Is there nowhere any vagueness? No undiscovered by-ways? No twilight? Can we never really get out of doors?

0
0
Source
source
The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, 1964
4 months 1 week ago

Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy. 

0
0
Source
source
p. 330
3 months 4 weeks ago

The only originality I claim is that for me this truth goes hand in hand with the intellectual certainty that the human spirit is capable of creating in our time a new mentality, an ethical mentality. Inspired by this certainty, I too proclaim this truth in the hope that my testimony may help to prevent its rejection as an admirable sentiment but a practical impossibility. Many a truth has lain unnoticed for a long time, ignored simply because no one perceived its potential for becoming reality.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

Note that Unitarianism rejects concepts such as Hell, the Trinity, Original Sin, the infallability of the Bible, as well as claims that any one religion has a monopoly on theological truth and the Holy Spirit. At the same time, it accepts the notion that reason, rational thought, science, and philosophy can coexist with faith in God.

0
0
Source
source
Thomas Jefferson, letter to Benjamin Waterhouse (26 June 1822), published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 12, pp. 241-243.
5 months 2 weeks ago

The compassionate are not rich; therefore, the rich are not compassionate.

0
0
Source
source
p. 89
8 months 6 days ago

The end of living, or the ultimate good, which is to be sought for its own sake, according to the universal opinion of mankind, is happiness; yet men, for the most part, fail in the pursuit of this end, either because they do not form a right idea of the nature of happiness, or because they do not make use of proper means to attain it.

0
0
7 months 2 weeks ago

I mistrust illuminations: what we take for a discovery is very often only a familiar thought that we have not recognized.

0
0
Source
source
p. 439
6 months 1 week ago

The reasons for persisting in Being seem less and less well founded, and our successors will find it easier than we to be rid of such obstinacy.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

Some decent regulated pre-eminence, some preference (not exclusive appropriation) given to birth, is neither unnatural, nor unjust, nor impolitic.

0
0
5 months 3 days ago

Education is the instruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature, under which name I include not merely things and their forces, but men and their ways; and the fashioning of the affections and of the will into an earnest and loving desire to move in harmony with those laws. For me, education means neither more nor less than this. Anything which professes to call itself education must be tried by this standard, and if it fails to stand the test, I will not call it education, whatever may be the force of authority, or of numbers, upon the other side.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

The Sensations are the 'Objective', the Ideas the 'Subjective' part of every act of perception or knowledge.

0
0
8 months 2 days ago

For if a thing is not diminished by being shared with others, it is not rightly owned if it is only owned and not shared.

0
0
Source
source
1:1:1 English Latin Latin: Omnis enim res quae dando non deficit, dum habetur et non datur, nondum habetur quomodo habenda est.
4 months 2 days ago

Our luxuries have condemned us to weakness; we have ceased to be able to do that which we have long declined to do.

0
0
5 months 3 days ago

Within the last fifty years, the extraordinary growth of every department of physical science has spread among us mental food of so nutritious and stimulating a character that a new ecdysis seems imminent.

0
0
Source
source
Ch.2, p. 73
7 months 3 weeks ago

Nothing but the most exemplary morals can give dignity to a man of small fortune.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter I, Part III, Article III, p. 874.
4 months 1 week ago

Well, since paradoxes are at hand, let us see how it might be demonstrated that in a finite continuous extension it is not impossible for infinitely many voids to be found.

0
0
Source
source
Salviati, First Day, Stillman Drake translation
3 months 3 weeks ago

If the early Chinese people had any chivalry, it was manifested not toward women and children, but toward old people. That feeling of chivalry found clear expression in Mencius in some such saying as, "The people with gray hair should not be seen carrying burdens on the street," which was expressed as the final goal of good government.

0
0
Source
source
p. 193
8 months 2 weeks ago

There has never been any custom, however useless it may become with changing conditions, that isn't clung to desperately simply because it is something old and familiar.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

The acts of France were acts of hostility to this country; her whole system, every speech, every decree, every act, bespoke an intention preclusive of accommodation. No man, he would venture to say, had a more lively sense of the importance of the question before the House, or of the evils of war, than himself. A war with France, under such circumstances as now governed her conduct, must be terrible, but peace much more so. A nation that had abandoned all its valuable distinctions, arts, sciences, religion, law order, every thing but the sword, was most formidable and dreadful to all nations composed of citizens who only used soldiers as a defence; as such, France should be resisted with spirit and temper, without fear or scruple.

0
0
Source
source
Speech in the House of Commons upon the outbreak of war with France (12 February 1793)
7 months 3 weeks ago

Man, being the servant and interpreter of Nature, can do and understand so much and so much only as he has observed in fact or in thought of the course of nature. Beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything.

0
0
Source
source
Aphorism 1
6 months 1 week ago

Human life, by its very nature, has to be dedicated to something, an enterprise glorious or humble, a destiny illustrious or trivial. We are faced with a condition, strange but inexorable, involved in our very existence.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter XIV: Who Rules The World?

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia