Skip to main content
5 days ago

Stars and blossoming fruit-trees: utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity.

0
0
Source
source
p. 277
1 month 3 weeks ago

Nature has pointed out a mixed kind of life as most suitable to the human race, and secretly admonished them to allow none of these biases to draw too much, so as to incapacitate them for other occupations and entertainments. Indulge your passion for science, says she, but let your science be human, and such as may have a direct reference to action and society. Abstruse thought and profound researches I prohibit, and will severely punish, by the pensive melancholy which they introduce, by the endless uncertainty in which they involve you, and by the cold reception which your pretended discoveries shall meet with, when communicated. Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.

0
0
Source
source
Section 1 : Of The Different Species of Philosophy
2 weeks 6 days ago

Rich parents bribed universities to admit unqualified children, revealing what everyone knew: college admission isn't meritocratic. Legacy admissions, donor influence, private tutors, expensive test prep - legal advantages that dwarf the illegal ones. The scandal is that the quiet part was said aloud.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

In writing a history of madness, Foucault has attempted-and this is the greatest merit, but also the very infeasibility of his book-to write a history of madness itself. Itself.

0
0
Source
source
Of madness itself. That is by letting madness speak for itself. Cogito and The History of Madness, p.37 (Routledge classics edition)
2 weeks 1 day ago

To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

He was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché. Eichmann, despite his rather bad memory, repeated word for word the same stock phrases and self-invented clichés (when he did succeed in constructing a sentence of his own, he repeated it until it became a cliché) each time he referred to an incident or event of importance to him. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. III
2 months 2 weeks ago

Forgetting when God does it in relation to sin, is the opposite of creating, since to create is to bring forth from nothing and to forget is to take back into nothing. What is hidden from my eyes, that I have never seen; but what is hidden behind my back, that I have seen. The one who loves forgives in this way; he forgives, he forgets, he blots out the sin, in love he turns toward the one he forgives; but when he turns toward him, he of course, cannot see what is lying behind his back.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

Raphael paints wisdom, Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it.

0
0
Source
source
Art
1 month 2 weeks ago

We can come to look upon the deaths of our enemies with as much regret as we feel for those of our friends, namely, when we miss their existence as witnesses to our success.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 2, Ch. 26, sect. 311a
3 weeks 2 days ago

People praise virtue, but they hate it, they run away from it. It freezes you to death, and in this world you've got to keep your feet warm.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

Mercantile jealousy is excited, and both inflames, and is itself inflamed, by the violence of national animosity.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter III, Part II, p. 534.
3 weeks 2 days ago

On doit exiger de moi que je cherche la vérité, mais non que je la trouve. One may demand of me that I should seek truth, but not that I should find it.

0
0
Source
source
No. 29
3 weeks 2 days ago

The infant runs toward it with its eyes closed, the adult is stationary, the old man approaches it with his back turned.

0
0
Source
source
"Death"

Everything in me that conspires to break the unity and continuity of my life conspires to destroy me and consequently to destroy itself. Every individual in a people who conspires to break the spiritual unity and continuity of that people tends to destroy it and to destroy himself as a part of that people.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

There was once a millionaire who bought an infinite number of pairs of shoes and, whenever he bought a pair of shoes, he also bought a pair of socks. We can make a selection choosing one out of each pair of shoes, because we can choose always the right shoe or always the left shoe. Thus, so far as the shoes are concerned, selections exist. But, as regards the socks, where there is no distinction of right and left, we cannot use this rule of selection.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 93-93
1 month 3 weeks ago

There cannot be a greater rudeness, than to interrupt another in the current of his discourse... To which, if there be added, as is usual, a correcting of any mistake, or a contradiction of what has been said, it is a mark of yet greater pride and self-conceitedness, when we thus intrude our selves for teachers, and take upon us either to set another right in his story, or shew the mistakes of his judgement.

0
0
Source
source
Sec. 145
2 weeks 5 days ago

Laws, like houses, lean on one another.

0
0
Source
source
From the Tracts Relative to the Laws Against Popery in Ireland (c. 1766), not published during Burke's lifetime.

Tactically, conceptualism is no doubt the strongest position of the three; for the tired nominalist can lapse into conceptualism and still allay his puritanic conscience with the reflection that he has not quite taken to eating lotus with the Platonists.

0
0
Source
source
"Logic and the Reification of Universals"
1 month 3 weeks ago

I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition.

0
0
Source
source
Déclaration de Voltaire, note to his secretary, Jean-Louis Wagnière, 28 February 1778
1 month 3 weeks ago

Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it means one always has some battle to wage against oneself.

0
0
Source
source
Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (French), Sixième partie, Lettre VII Réponse (1761) Julie, or The New Heloise (English), Part Six, Letter VII Response, pg 560
2 weeks 2 days ago

All religions are cruel, all founded on blood; for all rest principally on the idea of sacrifice - that is, on the perpetual immolation of humanity to the insatiable vengeance of divinity.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

Men of learning are those who have read the contents of books. Thinkers, geniuses, and those who have enlightened the world and furthered the race of men, are those who have made direct use of the book of the world.

0
0
Source
source
"Thinking for Oneself"
1 month 3 weeks ago

This is that which I think great readers are apt to be mistaken in; those who have read of everything, are thought to understand everything too; but it is not always so. Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections ; unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in "Hand Book : Caution and Counsels" in The Common School Journal Vol. 5, No. 24 (15 December 1843) by Horace Mann, p. 371
1 week 4 days ago

A judgment, for me is not the mere grasping of a thought, but the admission of its truth.

0
0
Source
source
Gottlob Frege (1892). On Sense and Reference, note 7.
1 month 3 weeks ago

He will better comprehend the foundations and measures of decency and justice, and have livelier, and more lasting impressions of what he ought to do, by giving his opinion on cases propos'd, and reasoning with his tutor on fit instances, than by giving a silent, negligent, sleepy audience to his tutor's lectures; and much more than by captious logical disputes, or set declamations of his own, upon any question. The one sets the thoughts upon wit and false colours, and not upon truth; the other teaches fallacy, wrangling, and opiniatry; and they are both of them things that spoil the judgment, and put a man out of the way of right and fair reasoning; and therefore carefully to be avoided by one who would improve himself, and be acceptable to others.

0
0
Source
source
Sec. 98
2 weeks 5 days ago

Am I a free agent, or am I merely the manifestation of a foreign power? Neither appear sufficiently well founded.By the most courageous resolve of my life am I reduced to this! what Power can save me from it, from myself?

0
0
Source
source
Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p. 24
1 month 2 weeks ago

Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 5 (p. 42)
1 month 2 weeks ago

God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself.

0
0
Source
source
Book II, Chapter 3, "The Shocking Alternative"
1 week 3 days ago

If the result of a war is to change nothing, but only to destroy, with the mere result that a group of human beings who do not differ notably from the conquered acquires preponderant advantages for the future, there is lacking the affective strength of an existence that has inspired faith, of an existence whose destiny would have been decided by the war.

0
0

Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 2
1 month 2 weeks ago

Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite skeptical about ethics, but bred to believe that 'a gentleman does not cheat,' than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers. In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

This year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, Chapter 1, "The Law of Human Nature"
1 month 2 weeks ago

When people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid.

0
0
Source
source
Theory of Knowledge, 1913
1 month 3 weeks ago

The husband who decides to surprise his wife is often very much surprised himself.

0
0
Source
source
La Femme Qui a Raison, Act 1, scene 2, 1759
1 month 3 weeks ago

We were halves throughout, and to that degree that, methinks, by outliving him I defraud him of his part.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 27. Of Friendship, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Hazlitt, 1842
1 month 2 weeks ago

Before we as individuals are even conscious of our existence we have been profoundly influenced for a considerable time (since before birth) by our relationship to other individuals who have complicated histories, and are members of a society which has an infinitely more complicated and longer history than they do (and are members of it at a particular time and place in that history); and by the time we are able to make conscious choices we are already making use of categories in a language which has reached a particular degree of development through the lives of countless generations of human beings before us. . . . We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being. The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or unindebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Popper (1973) by Bryan Magee
3 weeks 5 days ago

The lowest degree of education is to distinguish oneself from the ignorant ordinary man. The educated man does not loathe honey even if he finds it in the surgeon's cupping-glass; he realizes that the cupping glass does not essentially alter the honey. The natural aversion from it in such a case rests on popular ignorance, arising from the fact that the cupping-glass is made only for impure blood. Men imagine that the blood is impure because it is in the cupping-glass, and are not aware that the impurity is due to a property.

0
0
Source
source
III. The Classes of Seekers, p. 31.
1 month 2 weeks ago

We are not that we are, nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for that we are capable of being.

0
0
Source
source
Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 37
1 month 2 weeks ago

No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 2, Ch. 24 "Oracular Philosophy and the Revolt against Reason"
2 weeks 5 days ago

The moment a sovereign removes the idea of security and protection from his subjects, and declares that he is everything and they nothing, when he declares that no contract he makes with them can or ought to bind him, he then declares war upon them: he is no longer sovereign; they are no longer subjects.

0
0
Source
source
Speech in opening the impeachment of Warren Hastings (16 February 1788), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Volume the Ninth (1899), p. 459
1 week 4 days ago

The words of the world want to make sentences.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 5, sect. 4
2 months 2 weeks ago

With the exception of professional rationalists, today people despair of true knowledge. If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be history of its successive regrets and impotences.

0
0
1 week 4 days ago

The Kingdom is like a wise fisherman who cast his net into the sea and drew it up from the sea full of small fish. Among them the wise fisherman found a fine large fish. He threw all the small fish back into the sea and chose the large fish without difficulty. Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

There is no art which one government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter II, Part II, Appendix to Articles I and II.

The good is the idea, or unity of the conception of the will with the particular will. Abstract right, well-being, the subjectivity of consciousness, and the contingency of external reality, are in their independent and separate existences superseded in this unity, although in their real essence they are contained in it and preserved. This unity is realized freedom, the absolute final cause of the world. Addition.-Every stage is properly the idea, but the earlier steps contain the idea only in more abstract form. The I, as person, is already the idea, although in its most abstract guise. The good is the idea more completely determined; it is the unity of the conception of will with the particular will. It is not something abstractly right, but has a real content, whose substance constitutes both right and well-being.

0
0
Source
source
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Right translated by SW Dyde Queen's University Canada 1896 p. 123
1 month 2 weeks ago

It is a bad thing to perform menial duties even for the sake of freedom; to fight with pinpricks, instead of with clubs. I have become tired of hypocrisy, stupidity, gross arbitrariness, and of our bowing and scraping, dodging, and hair-splitting over words. Consequently, the government has given me back my freedom.

0
0
Source
source
Letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge (25 January 1843)
1 month 2 weeks ago

The end cannot justify the means for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1, p. 10 [2012 reprint]
2 days ago

Sadism is plainly connected with the need for self-assertion. At the same time it cannot be separated from the idea of defeat. A sadist is a man, who, in some sense, has his back to the wall. Nothing is further from sadism, for example, than the cheerful, optimistic mentality of a Shaw or Wells.

0
0
Source
source
p. 158
2 weeks 1 day ago

Skepticism is an exercise in defascination.

0
0
2 months 3 days ago

Nothing can be produced from nothing.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, lines 156-157 (tr. Munro) Variant translations: Nothing can be created from nothing. Nothing can be created out of nothing.

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia