Skip to main content
6 months 2 weeks ago

O ye of little faith, why reason ye among yourselves, because ye have brought no bread? Do ye not yet understand, neither remember the five loaves of the five thousand, and how many baskets ye took up? Neither the seven loaves of the four thousand, and how many baskets ye took up? How is it that ye do not understand that I spake it not to you concerning bread, that ye should beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees?

0
0
Source
source
16:8-11 (KJV)
8 months 1 week ago

But if one should guide his life by true principles, man's greatest riches is to live on a little with contented mind; for a little is never lacking.

0
0
Source
source
Book V, lines 1117-1119 (tr. Rouse)
8 months 2 weeks ago

Thus, where'er the drift of hazardSeems most unrestrained to flow,Chance herself is reined and bitted,And the curb of law doth know.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

When equality is treated not as a medicine or a safety-gadget, but as an ideal, we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all superiority. That mind is the special disease of democracy, as cruelty and servility are the special diseases of privileged societies. It will kill us all if it grows unchecked. The man who cannot conceive a joyful and loyal obedience on the one hand, nor an unembarrassed and noble acceptance of that obedience on the other - the man who has never even wanted to kneel or to bow - is a prosaic barbarian. But it would be wicked folly to restore these old inequalities on the legal or external plane. Their proper place is elsewhere.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

The savage recognizes life only in himself and his personal desires. His interest in life is concentrated on himself alone. The highest happiness for him is the fullest satisfaction of his desires. The motive power of his life is personal enjoyment. His religion consists in propitiating his deity and in worshiping his gods, whom he imagines as persons living only for their personal aims.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter IV, Christianity Misunderstood by Men of ScienceChapter IV, Christianity Misunderstood by Men of Science
5 months 3 weeks ago

Psychic communal integration, made possible at last by the electronic media, could create the universality of consciousness foreseen by Dante when he predicted that men would continue as no more than broken fragments until they were unified into an inclusive consciousness...This is a new interpretation of the mystical body of Christ; and Christ, after all, is the ultimate extension of man.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

It is certain that nature inclines us toward the amorous orgy, just as much as toward the gastronomic orgy, and that while both are blameworthy in the excess, they would become praiseworthy in an order in which they could be equilibrated.

0
0
Source
source
Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World, J. Beecher (1986), p. 310
8 months 3 weeks ago

It is no one's privilege to despise another. It is only a hard-won right after long experience.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.

0
0
Source
source
'La Fère of Cursed Memory', 15th vignette of An Inland Voyage (1878), in Collected Memoirs, Travel Sketches and Island Literature of Robert Louis Stevenson, Stevenson, e-artnow
6 months 3 weeks ago

Every pleasure raises the tide of life; every pain lowers the tide of life.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 6, The Biological View
3 months 3 weeks ago

In a modern war, fought with modern weapons and on the modern scale, neither side can limit to "the enemy" the damage that it does. These wars damage the world. We know enough by now to know that you cannot damage a part of the world without damaging all of it. Modern war has not only made it impossible to kill "combatants" without killing "noncombatants," it has made it impossible to damage your enemy without damaging yourself.

0
0
6 months ago

There is probably no more abused a term in the history of philosophy than "representation," and my use of this term differs both from its use in traditional philosophy and from its use in contemporary cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence.... The sense of "representation" in question is meant to be entirely exhausted by the analogy with speech acts: the sense of "represent" in which a belief represents its conditions of satisfaction is the same sense in which a statement represents its conditions of satisfaction. To say that a belief is a representation is simply to say that it has a propositional content and a psychological mode.

0
0
Source
source
P. 12.
7 months 3 weeks ago

Scientists try to eliminate their false theories, they try to let them die in their stead. The believer-whether animal or man-perishes with his false beliefs.

0
0
Source
source
Epistemology Without A Knowing Subject
5 months 1 week ago

If you look at the graph of the growth of G.M.O.s, the growth of application of glyphosate and autism, it's literally a one-to-one correspondence. And you could make that graph for kidney failure, you could make that graph for diabetes, you could make that graph even for Alzheimer's.

0
0
Source
source
On the correlation of autism, kidney failure, diabetes and Alzheimer's with GMOs and glyphosate, as quoted in "Seeds of Doubt" by Michael Specter, The New Yorker
8 months 1 day ago

Love in animals, has not for its only object animals of the same species, but extends itself farther, and comprehends almost every sensible and thinking being. A dog naturally loves a man above his own species, and very commonly meets with a return of affection.

0
0
Source
source
Part 2, Section 12
7 months 3 weeks ago

...this Jewish doctrine of the primacy of economic values has found the widest acceptance and been most whole-heartedly acted upon. From America it has begun to infect the rest of the world. We may be pardoned for wishing that the Jews had remained not forty, but four thousand years in their repulsive wilderness.

0
0
Source
source
"One and Many," pp. 18
7 months 4 weeks ago

It is strange that men will talk of miracles, revelations, inspiration, and the like, as things past, while love remains.

0
0
Source
source
Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 163
8 months 5 days ago

It is not titles that make men illustrious, but men who make titles illustrious.

0
0
Source
source
Book 3, Ch. 38
8 months 2 weeks ago

Anything done against faith or conscience is sinful.

0
0
Source
source
Commentary on Romans, cap 14, I 3
8 months 4 weeks ago

Again, it is possible to fail in many ways (for evil belongs to the class of the unlimited ... and good to that of the limited), while to succeed is possible only in one way (for which reason also one is easy and the other difficult—to miss the mark easy, to hit it difficult); for these reasons also, then, excess and defect are characteristic of vice, and the mean of virtue; For men are good in but one way, but bad in many.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

Whether we take these characters then, or such minor ones as those which are derivable from the proportional length of the spines in the cervical vertebrae, and the like, there is no doubt whatsoever as to the marked difference between Man and the Gorilla; but there is as little, that equally marked differences, of the very same order, obtain between the Gorilla and the lower apes.

0
0
Source
source
Ch.2, p. 92
6 months 2 weeks ago

The apparatus defeats its own purpose if its purpose is to create a humane existence on the basis of a humanized nature.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 145-146
6 months 3 weeks ago

As long as I live I shall not allow myself to forget that I shall die; I am waiting for death so that I can forget about it.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

The unhappiness of our life; patch up our false way of life as we will, propping it up by the aid of the sciences and arts - that life becomes feebler, sicklier, and more tormenting every year; every year the number of suicides and the avoidance of motherhood increases; every year the people of that class become feebler; every year we feel the increasing gloom of our lives. Evidently salvation is not to be found by increasing the comforts and pleasures of life, medical treatments, artificial teeth and hair, breathing exercises, massage, and so forth;...It is impossible to remedy this by any amusements, comforts, or powders - it can only be remedied by a change of life.

0
0
8 months 4 weeks ago

Is there anything we cannot contrive to call the demands of the times, and is there anything that does not acquire a certain prestige by being the demand of the times? But for decisive religious categories to become the demand for the times is eo ipso a contradiction. “The times” is too abstract a category to be able as claimant to demand the decisive religious categories that belong specifically to individuality and particularity; loud collective demands en mass for what can be shared only by the single individual in particularity, in solitariness, in silence, cannot be made.

0
0
Source
source
Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age. A Literary Review.
6 months 3 weeks ago

What, then, is the animal? First of all, a system of plant-souls. The unity of those plant-souls, which unity nature itself produces, is the soul of the animal. Its world is therefore partly that of the plants - its nourishment, for instance, it receives partly through synthesis from vegetable, and through analysis from animal nature - and partly that of the animals, whereof we shall speak directly. Each product of nature is an organically in-itself completed totality in space, like the plant. Hence, the unknown x which we are looking for must also be such a whole or totality, and in so far it must also have a principle of organization, a sphere and central point of this organization ; in short, the same which we have called the soul of the plant, which thus remains common to both. ... The animal is a system of plant-souls, and the plant is a separated, isolated part of an animal. Both reciprocally affect each other.

0
0
Source
source
P. 502, 503, 504
7 months 2 days ago

There are at the present time two great nations in the world-allude to the Russians and the Americans- All other nations seem to have nearly reached their national limits, and have only to maintain their power; these alone are proceeding-along a path to which no limit can be perceived.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter XVIII.
7 months 2 days ago

The pit of a theatre is the one place where the tears of virtuous and wicked men alike are mingled.

0
0
7 months 4 days ago

We find that everything that makes up difference and number is pure accident, pure show, pure constitution. Every production, of whatever kind, is an alteration, but the substance remains always the same, because it is only one, one divine immortal being.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

Wonder is not a disease. Wonder, and its expression in poetry and the arts, are among the most important things which seem to distinguish men from other animals, and intelligent and sensitive people from morons.

0
0
Source
source
Inside Information p. 7
6 months 3 weeks ago

Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser.

0
0
8 months 5 days ago

I assert once again as a truth to which history as a whole bears witness that men may second their fortune, but cannot oppose it; that they may weave its warp, but cannot break it. Yet they should never give up, because there is always hope, though they know not the end and more towards it along roads which cross one another and as yet are unexplored; and since there is hope, they should not despair, no matter what fortune brings or in what travail they find themselves.

0
0
Source
source
Book 2, Ch. 29 (as translated by LJ Walker and B Crick)
6 months 1 week ago

Perhaps power is never free from a feeling of lack.

0
0
8 months 4 weeks ago

It's gravity is the cause; and that which is heavy abides in the middle, and the earth is in the middle: in like manner also, the infinite will abide in itself, through some other cause... and will itself support itself. ..The places of the whole and the part are of the same species; as of the whole earth and a clod, the place is downward; and of the whole of fire, and a spark, the place is upward. So that if the place of the infinite is in itself, there will be the same place also of a part of the infinite.

0
0
8 months ago

The principle of utility judges any action to be right by the tendency it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interests are in question... if that party be the community the happiness of the community, if a particular individual, the happiness of that individual.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction, 1789 edition
7 months 2 weeks ago

Rather, we heirs of Enlightenment think of enemies of liberal democracy like Nietzsche or Loyola as, to use Rawls's word, "mad." We do so because there is no way to see them as fellow citizens of our constitutional democracy, people whose life plans might, given ingenuity and good will, be fitted in with those of other citizens. They are crazy because the limits of sanity are set by what we can take seriously. This, in turn, is determined by our upbringing, our historical situation.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

Christian philosophers have found no difficulty in justifying imperialism, war, the capitalist system, the use of torture, the censorship of the press and ecclesiastical tyrannies of every sort, from the tyranny of Rome to the tyrannies of Geneva and New England.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 14, p. 315 [2012 reprint]
6 months 3 weeks ago

God, I have said, is the fulfiller, or the reality, of the human desires for happiness, perfection, and immortality. From this it may be inferred that to deprive man of God is to tear the heart out of his breast. But I contest the premises from which religion and theology deduce the necessity and existence of God, or of immortality, which is the same thing. I maintain that desires which are fulfilled only in the imagination, or from which the existence of an imaginary being is deduced, are imaginary desires, and not the real desires of the human heart; I maintain that the limitations which the religious imagination annuls in the idea of God or immortality, are necessary determinations of the human essence, which cannot be dissociated from it, and therefore no limitations at all, except precisely in man's imagination.

0
0
Source
source
Lecture XXX, Atheism alone a Positive View
7 months 3 weeks ago

I want to have her back as an ingredient in the restoration of my past. Could I have wished her anything worse? Having got once through death, to come back and then, at some later date, have all her dying to do all over again? They call Stephen the first martyr. Hadn't Lazarus the rawer deal?

0
0
8 months 5 days ago

There is no more lovely, friendly and charming relationship, communion or company than a good marriage.

0
0
Source
source
292
5 months 4 days ago

Liberals tend to regard being subjects of the Queen as an insult to their dignity. But at least the archaic structures by which we are ruled do not force us to define ourselves by blood, soil or faith, and we are protected from the poisonous politics of identity.

0
0
Source
source
"Monarchy is the key to our liberty,", The Observer
5 months 3 weeks ago

My method is vertical rather than horizontal so the scenery does not change but the texture does.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to The Listener October 1971, Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p. 318
5 months 4 weeks ago

We do not have to love one another to be obligated to build a world in which all lives are sustainable. The right to persist can only be understood as a social right, as the subjective instance of a social and global obligation we bear toward one another.

0
0
Source
source
p. 64
7 months 4 weeks ago

I do not believe that I am now dreaming, but I cannot prove that I am not. I am, however, quite certain that I am having certain experiences, whether they be those of a dream or those of waking life.

0
0
Source
source
Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948), p. 172
6 months 3 weeks ago

To make our position clearer, we may formulate it in another way. Let us call a proposition which records an actual or possible observation an experiential proposition. Then we may say that it is the mark of a genuine factual proposition, not that it should be equivalent to an experiential proposition, or any finite number of experiential propositions, but simply that some experiential propositions can be deduced from it in conjunction with certain other premises without being deducible from those other premises alone.

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

There is only one thing that can form a bond between men, and that is gratitude...we cannot give someone else greater power over us than we have ourselves.

0
0
Source
source
No. 104. (Usbek writing to Ibben)
7 months 4 weeks ago

The softer you find your child is, the more you are to seek occasions, at fit times, thus to harden him. The great art in this is, to begin with what is but very little painful, and to proceed by insensible degrees, when you are playing, and in good humour with him, and speaking well of him: and when you have once got him to think himself made amends for his suffering by the praise is given him for his courage; when he can take pride in giving such marks of his manliness, and can prefer the reputation of being brave and stout, to the avoiding a little pain, or the shrinking under it; you need nor despair in time and by the assistance of his growing reason, to master his timorousness, and mend the weakness of his constitution.

0
0
Source
source
Sec. 115

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia