Skip to main content
4 months 2 weeks ago

That by any series of changes a protozoon should ever become a mammal, seems to those who are not familiar with zoology, and who have not seen how clear becomes the relationship between the simplest and the most complex forms when intermediate forms are examined, a very grotesque notion. Habitually, looking at things rather in their statical aspect than in their dynamical aspect, they never realize the fact that, by small increments of modification, any amount of modification may in time be generated.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

Man is the creature of circumstances.

0
0
Source
source
"The Philanthropist"
4 months ago

In erotic love, two people who were separate become one. In motherly love, two people who were one become separate. The mother must not only tolerate, she must wish and support the child's separation.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 2
6 months 3 weeks ago
The reasons and purposes for habits are always lies that are added only after some people begin to attack these habits and to ask for reasons and purposes. At this point the conservatives of all ages are thoroughly dishonest: they add lies.
0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

0
0
3 months 1 day ago

The human race's prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenceless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenceless against ourselves.

0
0
Source
source
"Man and Hunger: The Perspectives of History", Speech to the World Food Congress (4 June 1963)
5 months 3 weeks ago

Not because Socrates said so,... I look upon all men as my compatriots.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, Ch. 9. Of Vanity
5 months 2 weeks ago

The human being is not the lord of beings, but the shepherd of Being.

0
0
Source
source
Letter on Humanism
2 months 4 days ago

A word of honour, an oath, is one only for him whom I entitle to receive it; he who forces me to it obtains only a forced, a hostile word, the word of a foe, whom one has no right to trust; for the foe does not give us the right.

0
0
Source
source
Cambridge 1995, p. 269
5 months 2 weeks ago

Arithmetic must be discovered in just the same sense in which Columbus discovered the West Indies, and we no more create numbers than he created the Indians.

0
0
Source
source
Principles of Mathematics (1903), p. 451
2 months 3 days ago

Great men hallow a whole people and lift up all who live in their time.

0
0
Source
source
Ireland, published in The Edinburgh Review
5 months 2 weeks ago

Communism... is the genuine resolution of the antagonism between man and nature and between man and man; it is the true resolution of the conflict between existence and essence, objectification and self-affirmation, freedom and necessity, individual and species. It is the riddle of history solved and knows itself as the solution.

0
0
Source
source
Private Property and Communism, p. 43.
3 months 2 weeks ago

Even pacifist agitation or the nation-wide fever of big sports competitions acts as a spur to war fever in circumstances like ours. Any kind of excitement or emotion contributes to the possibility of dangerous explosions when the feelings of huge populations are kept inflamed even in peacetime for the sake of the advancement of commerce. Headlines mean street sales. It takes emotion to move merchandise. And wars and rumors of wars are the merchandise and also the emotion of the popular press.

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

The nuclear bomb will turn warfare into the juggling of images.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 360)
1 month 2 weeks ago

Every legal constitution is the product of a revolution. In the history of classes, revolution is the act of political creation, while legislation is the political expression of the life of a society that has already come into being. Work for reform does not contain its own force independent from revolution. During every historic period, work for reforms is carried on only in the direction given to it by the impetus of the last revolution and continues as long as the impulsion from the last revolution continues to make itself felt. Or, to put it more concretely, in each historic period work for reforms is carried on only in the framework of the social form created by the last revolution. Here is the kernel of the problem.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 8
4 months 2 weeks ago

Unless man have a natural bent in accordance with nature's, he has no chance of understanding nature at all.

0
0
Source
source
IV
5 months 1 week ago

Everyday we act in ways that reflect our ethical judgements.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 3, From Evolution To Ethics?, p. 69
2 months 1 week ago

Much has been said of Mahomet's propagating his Religion by the sword. It is no doubt far nobler what we have to boast of the Christian Religion, that it propagated itself peaceably in the way of preaching and conviction. Yet withal, if we take this for an argument of the truth or falsehood of a religion, there is a radical mistake in it. The sword indeed: but where will you get your sword! Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one. In one man's head alone, there it dwells as yet. One man alone of the whole world believes it; there is one man against all men. That he take a sword, and try to propagate with that, will do little for him. You must first get your sword! On the whole, a thing will propagate itself as it can. We do not find, of the Christian Religion either, that it always disdained the sword, when once it had got one.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a St. Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

If the world should break and fall on him, it would strike him fearless.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, ode iii, line 7
1 month 2 weeks ago

Death hangs over thee: whilst yet thou livest, whilst thou mayest, be good.

0
0
Source
source
IV, 14 (trans. Meric Casaubon) Variant: Death hangs over thee. While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good.
2 months 2 weeks ago

Beginning in the 1970s, however, the techniques and organizational form of industrial production shifted toward smaller and more mobile labor units and more flexible structures of production, a shift often labeled as a move from Fordist to post-Fordist production.

0
0
Source
source
82
6 months 2 weeks ago

Metaphysical rebellion is a claim, motivated by the concept of a complete unity, against the suffering of life and death and a protest against the human condition both for its incompleteness, thanks to death, and its wastefulness, thanks to evil.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

Now, let there be an indefinite succession of these inferential acts of comparative perception; and it is plain that the last moment will contain objectively the whole series. Let there be, not merely an indefinite succession, but a continuous flow of inference through a finite time; and the result will be a mediate objective consciousness of the whole time in the last moment. In this last moment, the whole series will be recognized, or known as known before.

0
0
3 months 4 days ago

M. Comte's philosophy, in practice, might be compendiously described as Catholicism minus Christianity.

0
0
Source
source
On the Physical Basis of Life
5 months 1 week ago

Fools -- for their thoughts are not well-considered who suppose that not-being exists or that anything dies and is wholly annihilated.

0
0
Source
source
fr. 11
6 months 2 weeks ago

According to one mode... nature is thus denominated, viz. the first subject matter to every thing which contains in itself the principle of motion and mutation. But after another mode it is denominated form, which subsists according to definition: for as art is called that which subsists according to art, and that which is artificial; so likewise nature is both called that which is according to nature, and that which is natural. ...that which is composed from these is not nature, but consists from nature; as, for instance, man. And this is nature in a greater degree than matter: for every thing is then said to be, when it is form in energy... entelecheia, rather than when it is incapacity.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

We face eternity now. We have no universe left, no outside phenomena, no emotions, no passions. Nothing but ourselves and thought. We face an eternity of introspection, when all through history we have never known what to do with ourselves on a rainy Sunday.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

What has philosophy got to do with measuring anything? It's the mathematicians you have to trust, and they measure the skies like we measure a field.

0
0
Source
source
Matteo in Concerning the New Star
4 months 2 days ago

Once again, I experienced that overwhelming joy in the universe that I had felt in London outside the V and A. But this time, my consciousness of the world seemed larger, more complex. It was the mystic's sensation of oneness, of everything blending into everything else. Everything I looked at reminded me of something else, which also became present to my consciousness, as if I were simultaneously seeing a million worlds and smelling a million scents and hearing a million sounds-- not mixed up, but each separate and clear. I was overwhelmed with a sense of my smallness in the face of this vast, beautiful, objective universe, this universe whose chief miracle is that it exists, as well as myself. It is no dream, but a great garden in which life is trying to obtain a foothold. I experienced a desire to burst into tears of gratitude; then I controlled it, and the feeling subsided into a calm sense of immense, infinite beauty.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 237-238
6 months 2 weeks ago

Death cannot explain itself. The earnestness consists precisely in this, that the observer must explain it to himself.

0
0
5 months 6 days ago

He preferred an honest man that wooed his daughter, before a rich man. "I would rather," said Themistocles, "have a man that wants money than money that wants a man."

0
0
Source
source
49 Themistocles
5 months 2 weeks ago

The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. I, Ch. 32, p. 837.
6 months 1 week ago

When I walk along with two others, they may serve me as my teachers. I will select their good qualities and follow them, their bad qualities and avoid them.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

What is the purpose of this struggle? This is what the wretched self-seeking mind of man is always asking, forgetting that the Great Spirit does not toil within the bounds of human time, place, or casualty. The Great Spirit is superior to these human questionings. It teems with many rich and wandering drives which to our shallow minds seem contradictory; but in the essence of divinity they fraternize and struggle together, faithful comrades-in-arms. The primordial Spirit branches out, overflows, struggles, fails, succeeds, trains itself. It is the Rose of the Winds.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century.

0
0
Source
source
quoted in Advertising Age, Sep. 3, 1976
4 months 3 weeks ago

How can even the lowest mind, if he reflects at all the marvels of this earth and sky, the brilliant fashioning of plants and animals, remain blind to the fact that this wonderful world with its settled order must have a maker to design, determine and direct it?

0
0
Source
source
Tibawi, A.L. (ed. and tr.). (1965) Al-Risala al-Qudsiyya (The Jerusalem Epistle) "Al-Ghazali's Tract on Dogmatic Theology". In: The Islamic Quarterly, 9:3-4 (1965), 3-4.
5 months 2 weeks ago

I hardly know an intellectual man, even, who is so broad and truly liberal that you can think aloud in his society. Most with whom you endeavor to talk soon come to a stand against some institution in which they appear to hold stock, - that is, some particular, not universal, way of viewing things.

0
0
Source
source
p. 490
4 months 1 week ago

I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.

0
0
Source
source
The Message to the Planet (1989) p. 322.
6 months 2 weeks ago

People who want to do so can lose weight most safely and permanently if they realize that above all they must be patient. ... It is better to eat a little less at each meal than impulse would suggest and to do that constantly. Add to this a little more exercise or activity than impulse suggests and keep that up constantly too. A few less calories taken in each day and a few more used up will decrease weight, slowly, to be sure, but without undue misery. And with better long-range results too.

0
0
6 months 1 day ago

All the excesses, all the violence, and all the vanity of great men, come from the fact that they know not what they are: it being difficult for those who regard themselves at heart as equal with all men... For this it is necessary for one to forget himself, and to believe that he has some real excellence above them, in which consists this illusion that I am endeavoring to discover to you.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago
If you have hitherto believed that life was one of the highest value and now see yourselves disappointed, do you at once have to reduce it to the lowest possible price?
0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops - no, but the kind of man the country turns out.

0
0
Source
source
Civilization
5 months 2 weeks ago

The humans live in time but our Enemy (God) destines them for eternity.

0
0
Source
source
Letter XV
1 month 2 weeks ago

Then what should we work for? Only this: proper understanding; unselfish action; truthful speech. A resolve to accept whatever happens as necessary and familiar, flowing like water from that same source and spring.

0
0
Source
source
(Hays translation) IV, 33
4 months 2 weeks ago

A living language can stand on a higher level of culture in comparison with another, but it can never in itself attain that perfection of development which a dead language quite easily attains. In the latter the connotation of words is fixed, and the possibilities of suitable combinations will also gradually become exhausted. Hence, he who wishes to speak this language must speak it just as it is; but, after he has once learnt to do this, the language speaks itself in his mouth and thinks and imagines for him.

0
0
Source
source
Consequences of the Difference p. 85
2 months 1 week ago

If the gist of the controversy were to be expressed in a single sentence, one might say that the mechanists represented the opposition of the natural sciences to philosophic interference, while the dialecticians stood for the supremacy of philosophy over the sciences and thus reflected the characteristic tendency of Soviet ideological development. The mechanists' outlook might be called negative, while the dialecticians ascribed immense importance to philosophy and regarded themselves as specialists. The mechanists, however, had a much better idea of what science was about. The dialecticians were ignoramuses in this sphere and confined themselves to general formulas about the philosophical need to "generalize" and unify the sciences; on the other hand, they knew more than the mechanists about the history of philosophy. (Eventually the party condemned both camps, and created a dialectical synthesis of both forms of ignorance.)

0
0
Source
source
(pg. 64)

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia