Skip to main content
6 months 4 days ago

For the Lawes of Nature (as Justice, Equity, Modesty, Mercy, and (in summe)doing to others, as wee would be done to,) of themselves, without the terrour of some Power, to cause them to be observed, are contrary to our naturall Passions, that carry us to Partiality, Pride, Revenge, and the like. And Covenants, without the Sword, are but Words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.

0
0
Source
source
The Second Part, Chapter 17, p. 85
3 months 3 weeks ago

It would be foolish to assert that there is no power above mine. Only the attitude that I take toward it will be quite another than that of the religious age: I shall be the enemy of every higher power, while religion teaches us to make it our friend and be humble toward it.

0
0
Source
source
Dover 2005, p. 184
6 months 1 week ago

Everyone must destroy their life. According to the way they do it, they're either triumphants or failures.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

What I liked was Thatcherism's Bolshevik aspect, which was to shake up the whole of Britain quite fundamentally, and if you read what I wrote in those years I think you might agree that in taking the view that I did then - that this was necessary and desirable - I never subscribed to the main delusion of the Thatcherites, which was that you could change everything and everything would remain the same. If what you wanted was a very anarchic, globalised, polyglot, mixed-up society in which most of the structures which had somehow been renewed from the Edwardian period to the Sixties were destroyed, then Thatcherism was what would do the job.

0
0
Source
source
Quoted in Will Self, "John Gray: Forget everything you know," The Independent
6 months 1 week ago

The seat of faith, however, is not consciousness but spontaneous religious experience, which brings the individual's faith into immediate relation with God. Here we must ask: Have I any religious experience and immediate relation to God, and hence that certainty which will keep me, as an individual, from dissolving in the crowd?

0
0
Source
source
p 85
5 months 3 weeks ago

The jingoes and war speculators are filling the air with the sentimental slogan of hypocritical nationalism, "America for Americans," "America first, last, and all the time."

0
0
1 month ago

If you talk a lot about being humble, you are likely not humble. If you talk a lot about high IQ.....*cough*....

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

The strangest mores of the most of-the-way societies will, in spite of everything, be relatively comprehensible to the person who has a flesh-and-blood knowledge of man's needs, anxieties, and hopes. If, on the other hand, this experience is lacking, he will not even be able to understand the customs of those about him.

0
0
Source
source
p. 139
5 months 3 weeks ago

I must confess that my estimate of Lovecraft would not have pleased his most ardent admirers. The view I expressed in that book was that, while Lovecraft was distinctly a creative genius in his own way, his pessimism should not be taken too seriously; that it was the pessimism of a sick recluse, and had about it an element of rassentiment, a kind of desire to take revenge on the world that rejected him. In short, Lovecraft was a 19th century romantic, born in the wrong time. Most men of genius dislike their own age, but the really great ones impose their own vision on the age. The weak ones turn away into a world of gloomy fantasy.

0
0
Source
source
p. 2
7 months 1 week ago

The three great things that govern mankind are reason, passion and superstition. The first governs a few, the two last share the bulk of mankind and possess them in their turns. But superstition most powerfully produces the greatest mischief.

0
0
Source
source
Journal entry (16 May 1681), quoted in Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (1957; 1985), p. 200
5 months 2 weeks ago

Definition of design = Everyone designs who devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. The intellectual activity that produces material artifacts is no different fundamentally from the one that prescribes remedies for a sick patient or the one that devises a new sales plan for a company or a social welfare policy for a state.

0
0
Source
source
p. 130.
8 months 1 week ago

If it were so, as conceited sagacity, proud of not being deceived, thinks, that we should believe nothing that we cannot see with our physical eyes, then we first and foremost ought to give up believing in love. ... We can be deceived by believing what is untrue, but we certainly are also deceived by not believing what is true. ... Which deception is more dangerous?

0
0
7 months 2 days ago

As long as we try to project from the relative and conditioned to the absolute and unconditioned, we shall keep the pendulum swinging between dogmatism and skepticism. The only way to stop this increasingly tiresome pendulum swing is to change our conception of what philosophy is good for. But that is not something which will be accomplished by a few neat arguments. It will be accomplished, if it ever is, by a long, slow process of cultural change - that is to say, of change in common sense, changes in the intuitions available for being pumped up by philosophical arguments.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction to Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (1998).
7 months 1 week ago

Try now to answer my third riddle. By what rule to you tell a copy from an original?'

0
0
Source
source
Pilgrim's Regress 52
3 months 3 weeks ago

The characteristic feature of militarism is not the fact that a nation has a powerful army or navy. It is the paramount role assigned to the army within the political structure. Even in peacetime the army is supreme; it is the predominant factor in political life. The subjects must obey the government as soldiers must obey their superiors. Within a militarist community there is no freedom; there are only obedience and discipline.

0
0
Source
source
Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War
4 months 2 days ago

Our "Theories of Taste," as they are called, wherein the deep, infinite, unspeakable Love of Wisdom and Beauty, which dwells in all men, is "explained," made mechanically visible, from "Association" and the like, ...

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

It is a question whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel, we do not fall into the error a child makes when it hits the chair it has bumped into.

0
0
Source
source
J 146
3 months 3 weeks ago

Of all things nothing exists that is not by its substance the offspring of ocean. But why will you have me tell this to the vulgar? Although better to have been shrouded in silence, it nevertheless has been spoken; at all events I declare it, although all men will not readily receive the same.

0
0
7 months 2 days ago

Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.

0
0
Source
source
p. 165.
6 months 1 week ago

Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

Every one knows that there are no real forests in England. The deer in the parks of the great are demurely domestic cattle, fat as London alderman.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. I, Ch. 27, pg. 803.
7 months 1 week ago

Men use thought only to justify their wrongdoings, and speech only to conceal their thoughts.

0
0
Source
source
Dialogue 14, Le Chapon et la Poularde (1766); reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed., 1919
6 months 1 week ago

I think that I have succeeded in making it clear that this doctrine gives room for explanations of many facts which without it are absolutely and hopelessly inexplicable; and further that it carries along with it the following doctrines: first, a logical realism of the most pronounced type; second, objective idealism; third, tychism, with its consequent thoroughgoing evolutionism. We also notice that the doctrine presents no hindrences to spiritual influences, such as some philosophies are felt to do.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

The infinite... happens to subsist in a way contrary to what is asserted by others: for the infinite is not that beyond which there is nothing, but it is that of which there is always something beyond. ...But that pertaining to which there is nothing beyond is perfect and whole. ...that of which nothing is absent pertaining to the parts ...the whole is that pertaining to which there is nothing beyond. But that pertaining to which something external is absent, that is not all ...But nothing is perfect which has not an end; and the end is a bound. On this account... Parmenides spoke better than Melissus: for the latter says that the infinite is a whole; but the former, that the whole is finite, and equally balanced from the middle: for to conjoin the infinite with the universe and the whole, is not to connect line with line.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

That fear which gives birth to thoughts, and the fear of thoughts...

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

No thing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, ch. 15, 7.
4 months 3 weeks ago

Missionaries, whether of philosophy or of religion, rarely make rapid way, unless their preachings fall in with the prepossessions of the multitude of shallow thinkers, or can be made to serve as a stalking-horse for the promotion of the practical aims of the still larger multitude, who do not profess to think much, but are quite certain they want a great deal.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

The world is not dialectical -- it is sworn to extremes, not to equilibrium, sworn to radical antagonism, not to reconciliation or synthesis. This is also the principle of evil.

0
0
Source
source
Jean Baudrillard in: Eldon Taylor What Does That Mean?: Exploring Mind, Meaning, and Mysteries, Hay House, Inc, 15 January 2010, p. 171
6 months 1 week ago

Custom reconciles us to every thing.

0
0
Source
source
Part IV Section XVIII
8 months 1 week ago

The papers were always talking about the debt owed to society. According to them, it had to be paid. But that doesn't speak to the imagination. What really counted was the possibility of escape, a leap to freedom, out of the implacable ritual, a wild run for it that would give whatever chance for hope there was. Of course, hope meant being cut down on some street corner, as you ran like mad, by a random bullet. But when I really thought it through, nothing was going to allow me such a luxury. Everything was against it; I would just be caught up in the machinery again.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto could not endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire. He dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

Go where he will, the wise man is at home, His hearth the earth, his hall the azure dome.

0
0
Source
source
Wood-notes, st. 3
6 months 2 weeks ago

An American cannot converse, but he can discuss, and his talk falls into a dissertation. He speaks to you as if he was addressing a meeting; and if he should chance to become warm in the discussion, he will say "Gentlemen" to the person with whom he is conversing.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter XIV.
5 months 1 week ago

Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful.

0
0
Source
source
The less identity, the more violence. "Violence in the media." Canadian Forum. Volume 56, 1976, p. 9
6 months 1 week ago

There is but One Principle that proceeds from God; and thus, in consequence of the unity of the Power, it is possible for each Individual to schematise his World of Sense in accordance with the law of that original harmony; - and every Individual, under the condition of being found on the way towards the recognition of the Imperative, must so schematise it. I might say: - Every Individual can and must, under the given condition, construct the True World of Sense, - for this indeed has beyond the universal and formal laws above deduced, no other Truth and Reality than this universal harmony.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

Naturally, every age thinks that all ages before it were prejudiced, and today we think this more than ever and are just as wrong as all previous ages that thought so. How often have we not seen the truth condemned! It is sad but unfortunately true that man learns nothing from history.

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

The King that followeth Truth, and ruleth according to Justice, shall reign quietly: but he that doth the contrary, seeketh another to reign for him.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

I do feel that evolution is being controlled by some sort of divine engineer. I can't help thinking that. And this engineer knows exactly what he or she is doing and why, and where evolution is headed. That's why we've got giraffes and hippopotami and the clap.

0
0
Source
source
On evolution vs. "intelligent design", interviewed by Jon Stewart, The Daily Show
7 months 1 week ago

The violence of love is as much to be dreaded as that of hate. When it is durable, it is serene and equable. Even its famous pains begin only with the ebb of love, for few are indeed lovers, though all would fain be.

0
0
Source
source
Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 158
6 months 1 week 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
7 months 1 week ago

I think modern educational theorists are inclined to attach too much importance to the negative virtue of not interfering with children, and too little to the positive merit of enjoying their company.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 12: Education and Discipline
5 months 3 weeks ago

When I was in my teens, I invented a term to describe them. I call it 'holiday consciousness' . . . because I often experienced this sense of optimism and wide-awakeness when setting out on a journey or a holiday. It was always the feeling that the world is self-evidently complex and beautiful, and that life is so obviously good that man's boredom and defeat is an absurdity . . . And then I used to ask: Why do men forget this so easily? And the answer seemed obvious: because the human will is so flabby and weak. Instead of being self-controlled, self-driven creatures, most men are little more than leaves on a stream, they drift along hoping for the best. I once wrote that men are like grandfather clocks driven by watchsprings.

0
0
Source
source
p. 75
7 months 1 week ago

Philosophy seems to me on the whole a rather hopeless business.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Gilbert Murray, December 28, 1902
3 months 1 week ago

What we do need to worry about is the possibility that we will be reduced, in the face of the enormities of our time, to silence or to mere protest.

0
0
Source
source
A Poem of Difficult Hope
3 months 3 weeks ago

Now I'm sure that most of you know the old story about the astronaut, who went far out into space, and was asked on his return whether he'd been to heaven and seen God. And he said: "Yes". And so they said to him: "Well, what about God?" And he said: "She's Black".

0
0
Source
source
The Nature of God

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia