Skip to main content
5 months 2 weeks ago

Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

Capital is money, capital is commodities. ... By virtue of it being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. I, Ch. 4, pp. 171-172
2 months 3 weeks ago

Deem not life a thing of consequence. For look at the yawning void of the future, and at that other limitless space, the past.

0
0
Source
source
IV, 50
6 months 2 weeks ago

The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don't know where that elsewhere is.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

We must have kings, and we must have nobles. Nature provides such in every society, - only let us have the real instead of the titular. Let us have our leading and our inspiration from the best. In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise. Let the powers be well directed, directed by love, and they would everywhere be greeted with joy and honor.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

Germany is now a field of cadavers, soon she will be a paradise.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

Why so many laws? Because there is no legislator. What have these so-called legislators done in six years? Nothing, for to destroy is not to make.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

If we are not stupid or insincere when we say that the good or ill of man lies within his own will, and that all beside is nothing to us, why are we still troubled?

0
0
Source
source
Book I, ch. 25, § 1.
6 months 3 weeks ago

Alike in the highest regions of speculation and in the smaller practical concerns of daily life, her mind was the same perfect instrument, piercing to the very heart and marrow of the matter; always seizing the essential idea or principle. The same exactness and rapidity of operation, pervading as it did her sensitive as well as her mental faculties, would, with her gifts of feeling and imagination, have fitted her to be a consummate artist, as her fiery and tender soul and her vigorous eloquence would certainly have made her a great orator, and her profound knowledge of human nature and discernment and sagacity in practical life, would, in the times when such a carrière was open to women, have made her eminent among the rulers of mankind. Her intellectual gifts did but minister to a moral character at once the noblest and the best balanced which I have ever met with in life.

0
0
Source
source
(pp. 186-187)
3 months 2 weeks ago
0
0
Source
source
Conversation with Friedrich Wilhem Riemer
7 months 3 days ago

For a man to love again where he is loved, it is the charity of publicans contracted by mutual profit and good offices; but to love a man's enemies is one of the cunningest points of the law of Christ, and an imitation of the divine nature.

0
0
Source
source
Of The Exaltation of Charity
4 months 1 week ago

We shall have to share out the fruits of technology among the whole of mankind. The notion that the direct and immediate producers of the fruits of technology have a proprietary right to these fruits will have to be forgotten. After all, who is the producer? Man is a social animal, and the immediate producer has been helped to produce by the whole structure of society, beginning with his own education.

0
0
Source
source
Surviving the Future (1971; Oxford UP, 1972) p. 95
2 months 3 weeks ago

They might need a preparatory discourse on the text of 'prove all things, hold fast that which is good,' in order to unlearn the lesson that reason is an unlawful guide in religion. They might startle on being first awaked from the dreams of the night, but they would rub their eyes at once, and look the spectres boldly in the face.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Benjamin Waterhouse (19 July 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, p. 244
3 months 1 week ago

We have Divine Wisdom in the mortal body.Whatever does harm to the body, ruins the House of the Eternal.

0
0

Affectation is a very good word when someone does not wish to confess to what he would none the less like to believe of himself.

0
0
Source
source
F 149
5 months 1 week ago

Power is not opposed to freedom. It is precisely freedom that distinguishes power from violence or coercion.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

We live to improve, or we live in vain.

0
0
Source
source
Address and Declaration at a Select Meeting of the Friends of Universal Peace and Liberty (August 20, 1791) p. 5
6 months 3 weeks ago

I trust that some may be as near and dear to Buddha, or Christ, or Swedenborg, who are without the pale of their churches. It is necessary not to be Christian to appreciate the beauty and significance of the life of Christ. I know that some will have hard thoughts of me, when they hear their Christ named beside my Buddha, yet I am sure that I am willing they should love their Christ more than my Buddha, for the love is the main thing, and I like him too.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

Historically, the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

There is a left wing version of this longing for community... because in a liberal society we never move as quickly as we should towards full equality, and therefore there are many marginalized groups who feel that the liberal society is... hypocritical, that it's promising an equality of recognition, and of rights, but it is not delivering... and therefore the very concept of liberal universalism is challenged in favor of a definition of rights that is tied to the specific groups.

0
0
Source
source
18:44
6 months 3 weeks ago

Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle. Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for the others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish for ever.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1: In Praise of Idleness
4 months 3 weeks ago

I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

0
0
Source
source
Knowing What's Nice, an essay from In These Times
6 months 3 weeks ago

I believe that the abolition of private ownership of land and capital is a necessary step toward any world in which the nations are to live at peace with one another.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. VI: International relations, p. 99
4 months 2 weeks ago

National loyalty is founded in the love of place, of the customs and traditions that have been inscribed in the landscape and of the desire to protect these good things through a common law and a common loyalty.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

This mutual dependencies no longer the dialectical relationship between master and servant, which has been broken in the struggle for mutual recognition, but rather a vicious circle which encloses both the master and the servant. Do the technicians rule, or is their rule that of the others, who rely on the technicians as their planners and executors?

0
0
Source
source
p. 33
2 months 3 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
6 months 3 weeks ago

I was a solitary, shy, priggish youth. I had no experience of the social pleasures of boyhood and did not miss them. But I liked mathematics, and mathematics was suspect because it has no ethical content. I came also to disagree with the theological opinions of my family, and as I grew up I became increasingly interested in philosophy, of which they profoundly disapproved. Every time the subject came up they repeated with unfailing regularity, 'What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.' After some fifty or sixty repetitions, this remark ceased to amuse me.

0
0
Source
source
p. 9
5 months 1 week ago

If a young girl is being forced into a brothel she will not talk about her rights. In such a situation the word would sound ludicrously inadequate.

0
0
Source
source
p. 63
6 months 3 weeks ago

The plan we are advocating amounts essentially to this: that a certain small income, sufficient for necessaries, should be secured to all, whether they work or not, and that a larger income, as much larger as might be warranted by the total amount of commodities produced, should be given to those who are willing to engage in some work which the community recognizes as useful.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. IV: Work and Pay, discussing Universal Basic Income (UBI)
3 months 2 weeks ago

May not this religious reticence, in these devout good souls, be perhaps a merit, and sign of health in them? Jocelin, Eadmer, and such religious men, have as yet nothing of 'Methodism;' no Doubt or even root of Doubt. Religion is not a diseased self-introspection, an agonising inquiry: their duties are clear to them, the way of supreme good plain, indisputable, and they are traveling on it. Religion lies over them like an all-embracing heavenly canopy, like an atmosphere and life-element, which is not spoken of, which in all things is presupposed without speech. Is not serene or complete Religion the highest aspect of human nature.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.

0
0
Source
source
Behavior
6 months 3 weeks ago

The next good quality belonging to a gentleman, is good breeding [manners]. There are two sorts of ill-breeding: the one a sheepish bashfulness, and the other a mis-becoming negligence and disrespect in our carriage; both of which are avoided by duly observing this one rule, not to think meanly of ourselves, and not to think meanly of others.

0
0
Source
source
Sec. 141
5 months 2 weeks ago

Without some affinity in human ideas art would certainly be impossible; but it can never be exactly determined how far the intentions of the poet are realized.

0
0
Source
source
Gottlob Frege (1892). On Sense and Reference.
6 months 3 weeks ago

Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 3 (pp. 19-20)
6 months 3 weeks ago

There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

On the more conservative side... Liberalism has been associated with... the right to own private property... one of the most fundamental individual rights that is protected in true liberal societies, and that right is... what made possible the modern economic world. As any economist would tell you, without secure property rights and contract enforcement, you don't get investment and therefore economic growth.

0
0
Source
source
13:44
5 months 2 weeks ago

I know of nothing more terrible than the poor creatures who have learned too much. Instead of the sound powerful judgement which would probably have grown up if they had learned nothing, their thoughts creep timidly and hypnotically after words, principles and formulae, constantly by the same paths. What they have acquired is a spider's web of thoughts too weak to furnish sure supports, but complicated enough to provide confusion.

0
0
Source
source
On the Relative Educational Value of the Classics and the Mathematico-Physical Sciences in Colleges and High Schools, an address in (16 April 1886)
3 months 2 weeks ago

And now the sagacious reader, who is capable of reading into these lines what does not stand written in them, but is nevertheless implied, will be able to form some conception of the serious feelings with which I then set foot in Emmendingen.

0
0
Source
source
Autobiography: Truth and Poetry Book xviii. London 1884 p. 115 books.google.de
4 months 3 weeks ago

To love life is to love God. Harder and more blessed than all else is to love this life in one's sufferings, in undeserved sufferings.

0
0
Source
source
Bk. XIV, ch. 15
6 months 3 weeks ago

Do not most of us resemble that old general of ninety who, having come upon some young officers debauching some girls, said to them angrily: "Gentlemen, is that the example I give you?" "Character"

0
0
Source
source
1764
3 months 2 weeks ago

With what scientific stoicism he walks through the land of wonders, unwondering.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

Observe always that everything is the result of a change, and get used to thinking that there is nothing Nature loves so well as to change existing forms and to make new ones like them.

0
0
Source
source
IV, 36
6 months 2 weeks ago

Often must you turn your pencil to erase, if you hope to write something worth a second reading.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, satire i, lines 72-3,
6 months 4 weeks ago

When anyone tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous, than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.

0
0
Source
source
Section 10 : Of Miracles Pt. 1
2 months 3 weeks ago

Rememberest the gods, and that they wish not to be flattered, but wish all reasonable beings to be made like themselves; and... rememberest that what does the work of a fig-tree is a fig-tree, and that what does the work of a dog is a dog, and that what does the work of a bee is a bee, and that what does the work of a man is a man.

0
0
Source
source
X, 8

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia