Skip to main content
4 months 1 day ago

Very little is needed to make a happy life.

0
0
Source
source
VII, 67
8 months 1 week ago

The heroes in paganism correspond exactly to the saints in popery, and holy dervises in MAHOMETANISM. The place of, HERCULES, THESEUS, HECTOR, ROMULUS, is now supplied by DOMINIC, FRANCIS, ANTHONY, and BENEDICT. Instead of the destruction of monsters, the subduing of tyrants, the defence of our native country; whippings and fastings, cowardice and humility, abject submission and slavish obedience, are become the means of obtaining celestial honours among mankind.

0
0
Source
source
Part X - With regard to courage or abasement
8 months 3 days ago

There are many difficulties impeding the rapid spread of reasonableness. One of the main difficulties is that it always takes two to make a discussion reasonable. Each of the parties must be ready to learn from the other. You cannot have a rational discussion with a man who prefers shooting you to being convinced by you.

0
0
7 months 2 days ago

Here then is what we understand by these words: "the equalization of the classes." It would perhaps have been better to say suppression of the classes, the unification of society by the abolition of economic and social inequality. But we have also demanded the equalization of the individuals, and it is there especially that we attract all the thunderbolts of outraged eloquence from our adversaries. One has made use of that part of our proposition to prove in a conclusive manner that we are nothing but communists.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

If you know that "I", in the sense of the person, the front, the ego, it really doesn't exist. Then...it won't go to your head too badly, if you wake up and discover that you're God.

0
0
4 months 1 day ago

Just that you do the right thing. The rest doesn't matter. Cold or warm. Tired or well-rested. Despised or honored. Dying . . . or busy with other assignments.

0
0
Source
source
(Hays translation) VI, 2
8 months 5 days ago

Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business.

0
0
Source
source
The Civil War in France : "The Third Address", May 1871
8 months 5 days ago

The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.

0
0
Source
source
Experience
8 months 3 weeks ago

What Heaven has conferred is called The Nature; an accordance with this nature is called The Path of duty; the regulation of this path is called Instruction. The path may not be left for an instant. If it could be left, it would not be the path. On this account, the superior man does not wait till he sees things, to be cautious, nor till he hears things, to be apprehensive.

0
0

Among the Romans in Christian times Mithras-worship as very widely spread, and so late as the Middle Ages we meet with a secret Mithras-worship ostensibly connected with the order of the Knights-Templars. Mithras thrusting the knife into the neck of the ox is a figurative representation belonging essentially to the cult of Mithras, of which examples have been frequently found in Europe. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Lectures on the philosophy of religion, together with a work on the proofs of the existence of God.

0
0
Source
source
Vol 2 Translated from the 2d German ed. 1895 Ebenezer Brown Speirs 1854-1900, and J Burdon Sanderson p. 81-82
7 months 5 days ago

Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found.

0
0
7 months 4 weeks ago

Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?

0
0
Source
source
Discipline and Punish (1977) as translated by Alan Sheridan, p. 228
7 months 2 days ago

A common mortal periodically selected by his fellow-citizens to watch over their own interests, can never be supposed to possess this stupendous virtue.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, Chapter 9
7 months 1 day ago

The wrinkles of a nation are as visible as those of an individual.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

The most beautiful fate of a physical theory is to point the way to the establishment of a more inclusive theory, in which it lives on as a limiting case.

0
0
7 months 2 days ago

Nothing, I am sure, calls forth the faculties so much as the being obliged to struggle with the world; and this is not a woman's province in a married state. Her sphere of action is not large, and if she is not taught to look into her own heart, how trivial are her occupations and pursuits! What little arts engross and narrow her mind!

0
0
Source
source
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), "Matrimony", p. 100
7 months 1 day ago

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

0
0
Source
source
p. 326

The more I think about it, the more obvious it becomes to me that the Poles are une nation foutue [a finished nation] who can only continue to serve a purpose until such time as Russia herself becomes caught up into the agrarian revolution. From that moment Poland will have absolutely no raison d'étre any more. The Poles' sole contribution to history has been to indulge in foolish pranks at once valiant and provocative. Nor can a single moment be cited when Poland, even if only by comparison with Russia, has successfully represented progress or done anything of historical significance.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Karl Marx
8 months 4 days ago

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.

0
0
Source
source
"A Case of Voluntary Ignorance" in Collected Essays, 1959
8 months 1 week ago

The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case.

0
0
8 months 6 days 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
7 months 4 days ago

Reason does not exist for the sake of life, but life for the sake of reason. An existence which does not of itself satisfy reason and solve all her doubts, cannot be the true one.

0
0
Source
source
Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p.94
2 months 5 days ago

That's just like your opinion, man....

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

I find that the best goodness I have has some tincture of vice.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 20
6 months 2 weeks ago

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

0
0
Source
source
Pt. II, ch. 1, sec. 1.

You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded.

0
0
Source
source
Conversation of 1947 or 1948
5 months 3 weeks ago

Psychoanalysis pretends to investigate the Unconscious. The Unconscious by definition is what you are not conscious of. But the Analysts already know what's in it. They should, because they put it all in beforehand. It's like an Easter Egg hunt.

0
0
Source
source
The Dean's December (1982), ch. 18, p. 298
8 months 3 days ago

One always dies too soon - or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

0
0
Source
source
Inès, Act 1, sc. 5
8 months 5 days ago

But if the labourers could live on air they could not be bought at any price.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. I, Ch. 24, Section 4, pg. 657.
8 months 3 days ago

You know how much I admire Che Guevara. In fact, I believe that the man was not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age: as a fighter and as a man, as a theoretician who was able to further the cause of revolution by drawing his theories from his personal experience in battle.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Marianne Alexandre (ed.), !Viva Che!: Contributions in Tribute to Ernesto 'Che' Guevara, 1968
7 months 3 weeks ago

Wise people are in want of nothing, and yet need many things. On the other hand, nothing is needed by fools, for they do not understand how to use anything, but are in want of everything.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Moral Epistles by Seneca, iii. 10.
4 months 2 weeks ago

Imagine that nature is saying to us: "Those things of which you complain are the same for all. I cannot give anything easier to any man, but whoever wishes will make things easier for himself." In what way? By equanimity. You must suffer pain, and thirst, and hunger, and old age too, if a longer stay among men shall be granted you; you must be sick, and you must suffer loss and death.

0
0
9 months 5 days ago

And surely to know what this good is, is of great importance for the conduct of life, for in that case we shall be like archers shooting at a definite mark, and shall be more likely to do what is right. But, if this is the case, we must try to comprehend, in outline at least, what it is and to which of the sciences it belongs.

0
0
7 months 5 days ago

I think I can hardly overrate the malignity of the principles of Protestant ascendancy, as they affect Ireland; or of Indianism, as they affect these countries, and as they affect Asia; or of Jacobinism, as they affect all Europe, and the state of human society itself. The last is the greatest evil.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe (26 May 1795), quoted in R. B. McDowell (ed.)
9 months 2 days ago

Moreover, there is a victory and defeat, the first and best of victories, the lowest and worst of defeat, which each man gains or sustains at the hands, not of another, but of himself; this shows that there is a war against ourselves going on within every one of us. Book I Sometimes paraphrased as "The first and best victory is to conquer self".

0
0
7 months 5 days ago

Men must be governed by those laws which they love. Where thirty millions are to be governed by a few thousand men, the government must be established by consent, and must be congenial to the feelings and to the habits of the people. That which creates tyranny is the imposition of a form of government contrary to the will of the governed: and even a free and equal plan of government, would be considered as despotic by those who desired to have their old laws and their ancient system.

0
0
Source
source
Speech in the House of Commons on India (27 June 1781), quoted in The Parliamentary Register: Or, History of the Proceedings and Debates of the House of Commons, Volume III (1782), pp. 666-667
8 months 4 days ago

Nothing is yet in its true form.

0
0
8 months 5 days ago

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.

0
0
Source
source
Plato; or, The Philosopher
6 months 2 weeks ago

I've always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider. If I was offered anything like the Nobel Prize for Literature, I'd find it an extremely difficult conflict because I'd be basically disinclined to accept.

0
0
Source
source
Interview with Paul Newman in Abraxas Unbound #7
4 months 3 weeks ago

Grave talk and grave humor with the doers of the craft. Building, walling, is an operation that beyond most other manual ones requires incessant consideration - even new invention. I have heard good judges say that he excelled in it all persons they had seen.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

In this consists the difference between the character of a miser and that of a person of exact economy and assiduity. The one is anxious about small matters for their own sake; the other attends to them only in consequence of the scheme of life which he has laid down to himself.

0
0
Source
source
Chap. VI.
6 months 2 weeks ago

Whether or no it be for the general good, life is robbery. It is at this point that with life morals become acute. The robber requires justification.

0
0
8 months 3 days ago

It is too early to love. We will buy the right to do so by shedding blood.

0
0
Source
source
Act 1
6 months 3 weeks ago

For such Truth as opposeth no man's profit nor pleasure is to all men welcome.

0
0
Source
source
Review and Conclusion, p. 396, (Last text line)
7 months 1 day ago

We are all secularised anarchists today.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia