Skip to main content
3 months 2 weeks ago

If thy fellows hurt thee in small things, suffer it! and be as bold with them!

0
0
5 months 2 days ago

In Oran, as elsewhere, for want of time and thought, people have to love one another without knowing it.

0
0
4 months 6 days ago

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

0
0
Source
source
December 20, 1822
4 months 1 week ago

God might grant us riches, honours, life, and even health, to our own hurt; for every thing that is pleasing to us is not always good for us. If he sends us death, or an increase of sickness, instead of a cure, Vvrga tua et baculus, tuus ipsa me consolata sunt. "Thy rod and thy staff have comforted me," he does it by the rule of his providence, which better and more certainly discerns what is proper for us than we can do; and we ought to take it in good part, as coming from a wise and most friendly hand.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 12
1 month 1 day ago

To rule the imperial population, behold our vocation.

0
0
Source
source
94
3 months 2 days ago

I am for the most part so convinced that everything is lacking in basis, consequence, justification, that if someone dared to contradict me, even the man I most admire, he would seem to me a charlatan or a fool.

0
0
4 months 1 day ago

Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.

0
0
Source
source
The Question Concerning Technology
4 months 1 week ago

It is amusing to hear the modern Christian telling you how mild and rationalistic Christianity really is and ignoring the fact that all its mildness and rationalism is due to the teaching of men who in their own day were persecuted by all orthodox Christians.

0
0
Source
source
"Sources of Intolerance"
2 months 3 weeks ago

Concern for the symbol has completely disappeared from our science. And yet, if one were to give oneself the trouble, one could easily find, in certain parts at least of contemporary mathematics... symbols as clear, as beautiful, and as full of spiritual meaning as that of the circle and mediation. From modern thought to ancient wisdom the path would be short and direct, if one cared to take it.

0
0
Source
source
The Need for Roots (1949), p. 292
2 months 3 weeks ago

The true antithesis of nature is not art but arbitrary conceit, fantasy, and stereotyped convention.

0
0
Source
source
p. 158
4 months 1 week ago

Even from their infancy we frame them to the sports of love: their instruction, behavior, attire, grace, learning and all their words azimuth only at love, respects only affection. Their nurses and their keepers imprint no other thing in them.

0
0

Though thou be destined to live three thousand years and as many myriads besides, yet remember that no man loseth other life than that which he liveth, nor liveth other than that which he loseth.

0
0
Source
source
II, 14
3 months 3 days ago

No one, of a surety, wanders farther from the mark than he who fancies to himself that he already understands this marvellous Kingdom, and can, in few words, fathom its constitution, and everywhere find the right path. To no one, who has broken off, and made himself an Island, will insight rise of itself, nor even without toilsome effort. Only to children, or childlike men, who know not what they do, can this happen. Long, unwearied intercourse, free and wise Contemplation, attention to faint tokens and indications; an inward poet-life, practised senses, a simple and devout spirit: these are the essential requisites of a true Friend of Nature; without these no one can attain his wish.

0
0
4 months 6 days ago

The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.

0
0
Source
source
p. 26
2 months 3 weeks ago

Answers determined by the social division of labor become truth as such.

0
0
Source
source
p. 50: Describing the pragmatist view
3 months 3 weeks ago

Be cheerful while you are alive.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim no. 34.
2 months 4 weeks ago

England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humors.

0
0
Source
source
"The British Character"
1 month 1 week ago

Talk of secularism is meaningful when it refers to the weakness of traditional religious belief or the lack of power of churches and other religious bodies. That is what is meant when we say Britain is a more secular country than the United States, and in this sense secularism is an achievable condition. But if it means a type of society in which religion is absent, secularism is a kind of contradiction, for it is defined by what it excludes. Post-Christian secular societies are formed by the beliefs they reject, whereas a society that had truly left Christianity behind would lack the concepts that shaped secular thought.

0
0
Source
source
Post-Apocalypse: After Secularism (pp. 267-8)
2 months 2 weeks ago

A precise language awaits a completed metaphysics.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

The life of Berdyaev spans the momentous events of the first half of the twentieth century in Europe. He was no ivory tower philosopher but was intimately affected by these events throughout his life and drew his inspirations from them regarding the nature of the human condition. His writings bear the imprint of the catastrophic situations within which he was destined to live.

0
0
Source
source
Richard Schain, in In Love with Eternity : Philosophical Essays and Fragments (2005), Ch. 7 : Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev - A Champion of the Spirit, p. 43
3 months 3 weeks ago

If the world should break and fall on him, it would strike him fearless.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, ode iii, line 7

You, masters of the earth - princes, kings, emperors, powerful majesties, invincible conquerors - simply try to make the people go on such-and-such a day each year to a given place to dance. I ask little of you, but I dare give you a solemn challenge to succeed, whereas the humblest missionary will succeed and be obeyed two thousand years after his death. Every year the people gather around some rustic temple in the name of St John, St Martin, St Benedict, etc.; they come, animated by a feverish and yet innocent eagerness; religion sanctifies their joy and the joy embellishes religion; they forget their troubles; on leaving they think of the pleasure that they will have on the same day the following year, and the date is set in their minds.

0
0
3 months 3 days ago

Equality, proclaimed in 1793, has been one of the greatest conquests of the French Revolution. Despite all the reactions which have arrived since, that great principle has triumphed in the political economy of Europe. In the most advanced countries, it is called the equality of politic rights; in the other countries, civil equality - equality before the law. No country in Europe would dare to openly proclaim today the principle of political inequality. But the history of the revolution itself and that of the seventy-five years that have passed since, we prove that political equality without economic equality is a lie. You would proclaim in vain the equality of political rights, as long as society remains split by its economic organization into socially different layers - that equality will be nothing but a fiction.

0
0
2 months 4 weeks ago

In solitude it is possible to love mankind; in the world, for one who knows the world, there can be nothing but secret or open war.

0
0
2 months 4 weeks ago

And this Feare of things invisible, is the naturall Seed of that, which every one in himself calleth Religion; and in them that worship, or feare that Power otherwise than they do, Superstition.

0
0
Source
source
The First Part, Chapter 11, p. 51
2 months 3 days ago

When the evolutionary process shifts from biology to software technology the body becomes the old hardware environment. The human body is now a probe, a laboratory for experiments.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 180)
4 months 1 week ago

The world is full of conflicts; and, overshadowing all minor conflicts, the titanic struggle between Communism and anti-Communism. Almost everybody who is politically conscious has strong feelings about one or more of these issues; but we want you, if you can, to set aside such feelings and consider yourselves only as members of a biological species which has had a remarkable history, and whose disappearance none of us can desire. We shall try to say no single word which should appeal to one group rather than to another. All, equally, are in peril, and, if the peril is understood, there is hope that they may collectively avert it.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

He who does not give himself leisure to be thirsty cannot take pleasure in drinking.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 42
3 months 1 week ago

When we consider the being and substance of that universe in which we are immutably set, we shall discover that neither we ourselves nor any substance doth suffer death; for nothing is in fact diminished in its substance, but all things, wandering through infinite space, undergo change of aspect.

0
0
Source
source
Introductory Epistle
4 months 3 weeks ago

The reason, however, why the philosopher may be likened to the poet is this: both are concerned with the marvellous.

0
0
Source
source
Commentary on the Metaphysics (c. 1270-1272), 1, 3; quoted in Josef Pieper, Leisure, the Basis of Culture (New York, 1952), p. 88
4 months 1 week ago

I should like you to consider that these functions (including passion, memory, and imagination) follow from the mere arrangement of the machine's organs every bit as naturally as the movements of a clock or other automaton follow from the arrangement of its counter-weights and wheels.

0
0
Source
source
Descartes, Rene, L'Homme (The Treatise on Man) (1662) p. 108
2 months 4 weeks ago

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.

0
0
4 months ago

If it recedes one day, leaving behind its works and signs on the shores of our civilization, the structuralist invasion might become a question or the historian of ideas, or perhaps even an object. But the historian would be deceived if he came to this pass: by the very act of considering the structuralist invasion as an object he would forget its meaning and would forget that what is at stake, first of all, is an adventure of vision, a conversion of the way of putting questions to any object posed before us, to historical objects-his own- in particular. And, unexpectedly among these, the literary objects.

0
0
Source
source
Force and Signification
5 months 3 days ago

No man of sense can put himself and his soul under the control of names... You must consider courageously and thoroughly and not accept anything carelessly.

0
0
4 months 6 days ago

There are other letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus invented.

0
0
4 months 6 days ago

What do you think of the aspect of the money market? ... This time, by the by, the thing has assumed European dimensions such as have never been seen before, and I don't suppose we'll be able to spend much longer here merely as spectators. The very fact that I've at last got round to setting up house again and sending for my books seems to me to prove that the 'mobilisation' of our persons is AT HAND.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Friedrich Engels (26 September 1856), quoted in The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Volume 40. Letters 1856-59 (2010), pp. 71-72
3 months 1 week ago

Of the eternal corporeal substance (which is not producible ex nihilo, nor reducible ad nihilum, but rarefiable, condensable, formable, arrangeable, and "fashionable") the composition is dissolved, the complexion is changed, the figure is modified, the being is altered, the fortune is varied, only the elements remaining what they are in substance, that same principle persevering which was always the one material principle, which is the true substance of things, eternal, ingenerable and incorruptible.

0
0
Source
source
As translated by Arthur Imerti
2 months 3 days ago

Radio comes to us ostensibly with person to person directness that is private and intimate, while in more urgent fact, it is really a subliminal echo chamber of magic power to touch remote and forgotten chords.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 302).
3 months 2 days ago

It is unjust to call imaginary the diseases which are, on the contrary, only too real, since they proceed from our mind, the only regulator of our equilibrium and our health.

0
0
2 weeks 6 days ago

Fire tries gold, misfortune tries brave men.

0
0
Source
source
De Providentia (On Providence), 5.9, translated by Aubrey Stewart Alternate translation: Fire is the test of gold; adversity, of strong men. (translator unknown).
4 months 3 weeks ago

Now, as the Word of God is the Son of God, so the love of God is the Holy Spirit.

0
0
Source
source
Art. 8
4 months 4 days ago

The consciousness of being betrayed is to the collective consciousness of a sacred group what a certain form of schizophrenia is to the individual...it is a form of madness.

0
0
Source
source
p. 193
5 months 3 days ago

Such was the vast power which the god settled in the lost island of Atlantis; and this he afterwards directed against our land for the following reasons, as tradition tells: For many generations, as long as the divine nature lasted in them, they were obedient to the laws, and well-affectioned towards the god, whose seed they were; for they possessed true and in every way great spirits, uniting gentleness with wisdom in the various chances of life, and in their intercourse with one another.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

I do like clarity and exact thinking and I believe that very important to mankind because when you allow yourself to think inexactly your prejudices, your bias, your self interest comes in in ways you don't notice and you do bad things without knowing that you are doing them: self deception is very easy. So that I do think clear thinking immensely important.

0
0
Source
source
Television interview ("On clarity and exact thinking" - available on youtube)
4 months 1 week ago

Competition for power is of two sorts: between organizations, and between individuals for leadership within an organization.

0
0
Source
source
p. 165

Man, servant and interpreter of Nature, does and understands only as much as he has observed of the order of Nature, either in reality or in mind; he neither knows nor can do more.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

When the world presents as a force field of violence, the task of nonviolence is to find ways of living and acting in that world such that violence is checked or ameliorated, or its direction turned, precisely at moments when it seems to saturate that world and offer no way out.

0
0
Source
source
p. 10

Let those flatter, who fear: it is not an American art.

0
0
Source
source
Summary View of the Rights of British America
3 months 1 week ago

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

Oh! wherefore come ye forth, in triumph from the North,With your hands, and your feet, and your raiment all red? And wherefore doth your rout send forth a joyous shout? And whence be the grapes of the wine-press which ye tread?

0
0
Source
source
The Battle of Naseby (1824), quoted in The Works of Lord Macaulay Complete, Vol. VIII, ed. Lady Trevelyan (1866), p. 551

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia