Skip to main content
6 months 1 week ago

They made me take cod liver oil: that is the height of luxury: a medicine to make you hungry while the others, in the street, would have sold themselves for a beefsteak. I saw them passing my window with their signs: "Give me bread".

0
0
Source
source
Act 3, sc. 3
6 months 1 week ago

The notion that truths external to the mind may be known by intuition or consciousness, independently of observation and experience, is, I am persuaded, in these times, the great intellectual support of false doctrines and bad institutions. By the aid of this theory, every inveterate belief and every intense feeling, of which the origin is not remembered, is enabled to dispense with the obligation of justifying itself by reason, and is erected into its own all-sufficient voucher and justification. There never was such an instrument devised for consecrating all deep-seated prejudices.

0
0
Source
source
(pp. 225-226)
2 months 1 week ago

The Palætiological Sciences depend upon the Idea of Cause; but the leading conception which they involve is that of 'historical cause', not mechanical cause.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

Food probably has a very great influence on the condition of men. Wine exercises a more visible influence, food does it more slowly but perhaps just as surely. Who knows if a well-prepared soup was not responsible for the pneumatic pump or a poor one for a war?

0
0
Source
source
A 14
6 months 1 week ago

Inferiority is always with us, and merciless scorn of it is the keynote of the military temper.

0
0
5 months 6 days ago

Born in a prison, with burdens on our shoulders and our thoughts, we could not reach the end of a single day if the possibilities of ending it all did not incite us to begin the next day all over again.

0
0

He was seized and dragged off to King Philip, and being asked who he was, replied, "A spy upon your insatiable greed."

0
0
Source
source
Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 43. Cf. Plutarch, Moralia, 70CD.
4 months 3 weeks ago

Nobody is bound to have an optimistic outlook on the future: that is not a precept of the Christian religion. ... It is a matter of immense importance that illusions should be dispelled and man come face to face with positive realities.

0
0
Source
source
p. 131
6 months 1 week ago

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

0
0
Source
source
"Variations on a Philosopher" in Themes and Variations, 1950
4 months 1 week ago

The mask, like the side-show freak, is mainly participatory rather than pictorial in its sensory appeal.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 352)
6 months 5 days ago

The Sabbath is not simply a time to rest, to recuperate. We should look at our work from the outside, not just from within.

0
0
Source
source
p. 91e
6 months 1 week ago

Of corruption, the principal and direct use is, to engage the representatives of the people to betray their trust, and sell themselves and the people to the universal corrupter-the monarch, in his capacity of corrupter-general.

0
0
Source
source
Constitutional Code (written between 1820 and 1832), quoted in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. XVII (1841), p. 76
4 months 3 weeks ago

Use harms and even destroys beauty. The noblest function of an object is to be contemplated.

0
0
Source
source
Niebla [Mist]
7 months 1 week ago

In the Church which was founded at Corinth, St. Paul had special difficulties of the kind I have mentioned. In that flourishing commercial city, which through its shipping and situation, maintained a vital connexion between East and West, numerous crowds of people flocked together from all quarters, different in speech and in culture. As they mingled with the inhabitants, they produced, by contacts and contrasts, new and ever new differences. Even in the Church this differentiation endeavoured to make itself felt in sects and parties; and a kind of pagan wisdom made a special attempt to force itself forward as a teacher of truth. In his first letter to this church, from which the text I read is taken, St. Paul strongly combats this tendency.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

I am convinced that those societies (as the Indians) which live without government enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live under the European governments.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Colonel Edward Carrington, Paris,
4 months 3 weeks ago

It was the normal working of the antisuccess mechanism. In our overcrowded modern world a hit record, a best-selling book, a successful film, can reach more people in a week than Shakespeare or Beethoven reached in a whole lifetime. And so fame has become the most romantic, the most desirable of all commodities, the dream for which a modern Faust might sell his soul to the Devil. Once attained, fame is never as easy to hold on to as some people believe. The people who achieve fame by some accident of fashion are usually forgotten within a week; the ones who remain on top have to work to stay there. But few people understand this. The result is that anyone who achieves sudden notoriety arouses envy and hostility. The greater the success, the greater the reaction.

0
0
Source
source
p. 28
6 months 3 weeks ago

Behold a God more powerful than I who comes to rule over me.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter I (tr. Barbara Reynolds); of love.
2 months 3 weeks ago

No one is able to rule unless he is also able to be ruled.

0
0
Source
source
De Ira (On Anger): Book 2, cap. 15, line 4
5 months 2 weeks ago

Art is the perfection of nature.

0
0
Source
source
Section 16
6 months 1 week ago

So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 10
3 months 3 weeks ago

I kept looking at the flowers in a vase near me: lavender sweet peas, fragile winged and yet so still, so perfectly poised, apart, and complete. They are self-sufficient, a world in themselves, a whole - perfect. Is that then, perfection? Is what those sweet peas had what I have, occasionally in moments like that? But flowers always have it - poise, completion, fulfillment, perfection; I only occasionally, like that moment. For that moment I and the sweet peas had an understanding.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

Self-reliance, the height and perfection of man, is reliance on God.

0
0
Source
source
The Fugitive Slave Law, a lecture in NYC, March 7, 1854
6 months 2 weeks ago

We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of the workman. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter VIII, p. 80.
6 months 1 week ago

Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 2: Dreams and Facts
4 months 3 weeks ago

It cannot be sufficiently emphasized that revolution is in vain unless inspired by its ultimate ideal. Revolutionary methods must be in tune with revolutionary aims. The means used to further the revolution must harmonize with its purposes. In short, the ethical values which the revolution is to establish in the new society must be initiated with the revolutionary activities of the so-called transitional period. The latter can serve as a real and dependable bridge to the better life only if built of the same material as the life to be achieved.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

Like other human freedoms, the freedoms embodied in market institutions are justified inasmuch as they meet human needs. Insofar as they fail to do this they can reasonably be altered. This is true not only of the rights that are involved in market institutions. It is true of all human rights.

0
0
Source
source
'Modus Vivendi' (p.36)
3 months 4 days ago

Mathematicians do not study objects, but the relations between objects; to them it is a matter of indifference if these objects are replaced by others, provided that the relations do not change. Matter does not engage their attention, they are interested in form alone.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. II: Dover abridged edition (1952), p. 20
2 months 2 weeks ago

Speaking as of today, I do not consider it intellectually respectable to be a partisan in matters of religion. I see religion as I see such other basic fascinations as art and science, in which there is room for many different approaches, styles, techniques, and opinions. Thus I am not formally a committed member of any creed or sect and hold no particular religious view or doctrine as absolute. I deplore missionary zeal, and consider excessive dedication to and advocacy of any particular religion, as either the best or the only true way, an almost irreligious arrogance. Yet my work and my life are fully concerned with religion, and the mystery of being is my supreme fascination, though, as a shameless mystic, I am more interested in religion as feeling and experience than as conception and theory.

0
0
Source
source
p. 61
4 months 1 week ago

A beautiful face is a silent commendation.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 283
5 months 6 days ago

Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

It cannot be doubted, I think, that Mr. Darwin has satisfactorily proved that what he terms selection, or selective modification, must occur, and does occur, in nature; and he has also proved to superfluity that such selection is competent to produce forms as distinct, structurally, as some genera even are. If the animated world presented us with none but structural differences, I should have no hesitation in saying that Mr. Darwin has demonstrated the existence of a true physical cause, amply competent to account for the origin of living species, and of man among the rest.

0
0
Source
source
Ch.2, p. 126
3 months 1 week ago

Is there really someone who, searching for a group of wise and sensitive persons to regulate him for his own good, would choose that group of people that constitute the membership of both houses of Congress?

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 2 : The State of Nature; Protective Associations, p. 14
2 months 2 weeks ago

Symmetry is a vast subject, significant in art and nature. Mathematics lies at its root, and it would be hard to find a better one on which to demonstrate the working of the mathematical intellect.

0
0
Source
source
Symmetry
4 months 3 weeks ago

I believe government, organized authority, or the State is necessary only to maintain or protect property and monopoly. It has proven efficient in that function only. As a promoter of individual liberty, human well-being and social harmony, which alone constitute real order, government stands condemned by all the great men of the world...I believe - indeed, I know - that whatever is fine and beautiful in the human expresses and asserts itself in spite of government, and not because of it.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

Little can be hoped for from a ruler... who has not at some time or other been preoccupied, even if only confusedly, with the first beginning and ultimate end of all things, and above all of man, with the "why" of his origin and the "wherefore" of his destiny.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

Many Catholic mystics have affirmed that, at a certain stage of that contemplative prayer in which, according to the most authoritative theologians, the life of Christian perfection ultimately consists, it is necessary to put aside all thought of the Incarnation as distracting from the higher knowledge of that which has been incarnated. From this fact have arisen misunderstandings in plenty and a number of intellectual difficulties.

0
0
6 months ago

One common strategy on which we should all be able to agree is to take steps to reduce the risk of human extinction when those steps are also highly effective in benefiting existing sentient beings. For example, eliminating or decreasing the consumption of animal products will benefit animals, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and lessen the chances of a pandemic resulting from a virus evolving among the animals crowded into today's factory farms, which are an ideal breeding ground for viruses. That therefore looks like a high-priority strategy.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 15: Preventing Human Extinction (p. 177)
6 months 1 week ago

How every line is of such strong, determined, and consistent meaning! And on every page we encounter deep, original, lofty thoughts, while the whole world is suffused with a high and holy seriousness.

0
0
Source
source
About Indian sacred scriptures. quoted in Londhe, S. (2008).
5 months 2 days ago

Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.

0
0
Source
source
4:10 (KJV) Said to Satan.
4 months 3 weeks ago

To believe in God is to long for His existence and, further, it is to act as if he existed; it is to live by this longing and to make it the inner spring of our action. This longing or hunger for divinity begets hope, hope begets faith, and faith and hope beget charity. Of this divine longing is born our sense of beauty, of finality, of goodness.

0
0
6 months 5 days ago

A hero looks death in the face, real death, not just the image of death. Behaving honourably in a crisis doesn't mean being able to act the part of a hero well, as in the theatre, it means being able to look death itself in the eye. For an actor may play lots of different roles, but at the end of it all he himself, the human being, is the one who has to die.

0
0
Source
source
p. 50e
6 months 1 week ago

Everything which is demanded is by that fact a good.

0
0
Source
source
"The Will to Believe" p. 205
3 months 5 days ago

The final thing... the question of the nation, and the role of the nation in liberalism...There would seem to be a tension between liberalism's belief that all human beings enjoy... the same basic set of human rights, and the fact that we are divided up into nation states, in which the authority to enforce those rights is territorially limited. ...This contradiction can be bridged because... there is a liberal form of national identity which is not only possible, but... necessary if a liberal society is going to succeed.

0
0
Source
source
23:22
4 months 1 week ago

Unfortunately not only were the rulers, who were considered supernatural beings, benefited by having the peoples in subjection, but as a result of the belief in, and during the rule of, these pseudodivine beings, ever larger and larger circles of people grouped and established themselves around them, and under an appearance of governing took advantage of the people. And when the old deception of a supernatural and God-appointed authority had dwindled away these men were only concerned to devise a new one which like its predecessor should make it possible to hold the people in bondage to a limited number of rulers.

0
0
Source
source
III
4 months 2 weeks ago

There's no objective morality, but that's not the real point. It's not the point that morality has to somehow be a stone, or something that can be touched. 

The options that are available to choose are determined to a point, and this is the objective aspect of morality, ethics, goodness, fairness, justice. 

The subjective aspect can still remain subjective, but that doesn't mean goodness is relative.....at all. The measure of a man is a man.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia