Skip to main content
1 month 3 weeks ago

Laws are always unstable unless they are founded on the manners of a nation; and manners are the only durable and resisting power in a people.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter XVI.

Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason. From this we can see how useful it is to employ reason in seeking out the laws of taste.

0
0
Source
source
E 69
1 month 1 week ago

In the Platonic dialectic, ... the terms "Being" "Non-being" "Movement," "the One and the Many" "Identity" and "Contradiction" are methodically kept open, ambiguous, not fully defined. They have an open horizon, an entire universe of meaning which is gradually structured in the process of communication itself, but which is never closed. The propositions are submitted, developed, and tested in a dialogue, in which the partner is led to question the normally unquestioned universe of experience and speech, and to enter a new dimension of discourse - otherwise he is free and the discourse is addressed to his freedom. He is supposed to go beyond that which is given to him - as the speaker, in his proposition, goes beyond the initial setting of the terms. These terms have many meanings because the conditions to which they refer have many sides, implications, and effects which cannot be insulated and stabilized.

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

When we make ethical judgments, we must go beyond a personal or sectional point of view and take into account the interests of all those affected, unless we have sound ethical grounds for doing otherwise. (...) The essence of the principle of equal consideration of interests is that we give equal weight in our moral deliberations to the like interests of all those affected by our actions. (...) an interest is an interest, whoever's interest it may be.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 2: Equality and Its Implications
3 months 6 days ago

Charity, by which God and neighbor are loved, is the most perfect friendship.

0
0
Source
source
Disputed Questions: On Charity, c. 1270

We have always thought that Mr. Darwin has unnecessarily hampered himself by adhering so strictly to his favourite "Natura non facit saltum." We greatly suspect that she does make considerable jumps in the way of variation now and then, and that these saltations give rise to some of the gaps which appear to exist in the series of known forms.

0
0
1 month 2 days ago

I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren't.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Church and Home, Vol. 1 (1964) by United Methodist Church, and Evangelical United Brethren Church, p. 21.
1 month 2 weeks ago

A common mortal periodically selected by his fellow-citizens to watch over their own interests, can never be supposed to possess this stupendous virtue.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, Chapter 9
2 months 2 weeks ago

When I was 4 years old ... I dreamt that I'd been eaten by a wolf, and to my great surprise I was in the wolf's stomach and not in heaven.

0
0
Source
source
BBC interview on "Face to Face" (1959); The Listener, Vol. 61 (1959), p. 503
2 months 3 weeks ago

The death of dogma is the birth of morality.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Faith Or Fact (1897) by Henry Moorehouse Taber, p. 86
2 months 1 week ago

He lit a lamp in broad daylight and said, as he went about, "I am looking for a human."

0
0
Source
source
Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 41. This line is frequently translated as "I am looking for an honest man."
2 months 1 week ago

Humility is the fruit of inner security and wise maturity. To be humble is to be so sure of one's self and one's mission that one can forego calling excessive attention to one's self and status. And, even more pointedly, to be humble is to revel in the accomplishments or potentials of others -- especially those with whom one identifies and to whom one is linked organically.

0
0
Source
source
(p38)
2 months ago

Wish not the thing, which thou mayest not obtain!

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

If you reject absolutely any single sensation without stopping to discriminate with respect to that which awaits confirmation between matter of opinion and that which is already present, whether in sensation or in feelings or in any immediate perception of the mind, you will throw into confusion even the rest of your sensations by your groundless belief and so you will be rejecting the standard of truth altogether. If in your ideas based upon opinion you hastily affirm as true all that awaits confirmation as well as that which does not, you will not escape error, as you will be maintaining complete ambiguity whenever it is a case of judging between right and wrong opinion.

0
0

The method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of the necessary mode of working of the human mind.

0
0
Source
source
Our Knowledge of the Causes of the Phenomena of Organic Nature
2 months 2 weeks ago

At the present day, civilized opinion is a curious mental mixture. The military instincts and ideals are as strong as ever, but they are confronted by reflective criticisms which sorely curb their ancient freedom. Innumerable writers are showing up the bestial side of military service. Pure loot and mastery seem no longer morally allowable motives, and pretexts must be found for attributing them solely to the enemy.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

I regard it as the irresistible effect of the Copernican astronomy to have made the theological scheme of redemption absolutely incredible.

0
0
Source
source
Quoted in Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson, the Mind On Fire (Univ. of Calif Press 1995), p. 124
2 months 2 weeks ago

Life is bristling with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one's garden.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Pierre-Joseph Luneau de Boisjermain (21 October 1769), from Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire: Correspondance [Garnier frères, Paris, 1882], vol. XIV, letter # 7692 (p. 478)
2 months 2 weeks ago

God is the solitude of men. There was only me: I alone decided to commit Evil; alone, I invented Good. I am the one who cheated, I am the one who performed miracles, I am the one accusing myself today, I alone can absolve myself; me, the man.

0
0
Source
source
Act 10, sc. 4
1 month 1 week ago

Yea; have ye never read, Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise?

0
0
Source
source
21:16 (KJV)
2 months 1 week ago

A religious symbol does not rest on any opinion. And error belongs only with opinion. One would like to say: This is what took place here; laugh, if you can.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 123
1 month 1 day ago

If things are deprived of memory, they become information or commodities. They are pushed into a time-free, ahistorical place.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others. It is much more nearly certain that we are assembled here tonight than it is that this or that political party is in the right. Certainly there are degrees of certainty, and one should be very careful to emphasize that fact, because otherwise one is landed in an utter skepticism, and complete skepticism would, of course, be totally barren and completely useless.

0
0
Source
source
"Skepticism"
1 month 1 week ago

Liberalism has merely cleared a field in which every soul and every corporate interest may fight with every other for domination. Whoever is victorious in this struggle will make an end of liberalism; and the new order, which will deem itself saved, will have to defend itself in the following age against a new crop of rebels.

0
0
Source
source
"The Irony of Liberalism"
1 month 1 day ago

It must be borne in mind that it is through the channel of the child that the development of the mature man must go, and that the present ideas of the educating or training of the latter in the school and the family - even the family of the liberal or radical - are such as to stifle the natural growth of the child. Every institution of our day, the family, the State, our moral codes, sees in every strong, beautiful, uncompromising personality a deadly enemy; therefore every effort is being made to cramp human emotion and originality of thought in the individual into a straight-jacket from its earliest infancy; or to shape every human being according to one pattern; not into a well-rounded individuality, but into a patient work slave, professional automaton, tax-paying citizen, or righteous moralist.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

Everything exists; nothing exists. Either formula affords a like serenity. The man of anxiety, to his misfortune, remains between them, trembling and perplexed, forever at the mercy of a nuance, incapable of gaining a foothold in the security of being or in the absence of being.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

France has always more or less influenced manners in England; and when your fountain is choked up and polluted, the stream will not run long, or not run clear, with us, or perhaps with any nation. This gives all Europe, in my opinion, but too close and connected a concern in what is done in France. Excuse me, therefore, if I have dwelt too long on the atrocious spectacle of the 6th of October, 1789, or have given too much scope to the reflections which have arisen in my mind on occasion of the most important of all revolutions, which may be dated from that day, I mean a revolution in sentiments, manners, and moral opinions.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

Freedom is only necessity understood.

0
0
Source
source
The Dilemma of Determinism, 1884
2 months 2 weeks ago

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.

0
0
Source
source
Montaigne; or, The Skeptic
2 months 2 weeks ago

Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1: Introductory
1 month 1 week ago

In so far as words are not used obviously to calculate technically relevant probabilities or for other practical purposes, ... they are in danger of being suspect as sales talk of some kind.

0
0
Source
source
p. 22.
1 month 1 week ago

The hypostasis of the particular methods of procedure employed by natural science ... results in the view that all theoretical differences which rest on historically conditioned antagonisms of interest are to be settles by a "crucial experiment" rather than by struggle and counter-struggle. The harmonious relation of individuals to one another becomes a fact, therefore, that has even more general character than a law of nature.

0
0
Source
source
p. 148.
2 months 2 weeks ago

The open society is one in which men have learned to be to some extent critical of taboos, and to base decisions on the authority of their own intelligence.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 1, Endnotes to the Chapters : Notes to the Introduction.
2 months 2 weeks ago

The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

The 'public' is a phantom, the phantom of an opinion supposed to exist in a vast number of persons who have no effective interrelation and though the opinion is not effectively present in the units. Such an opinion is spoken of as 'public opinion,' a fiction which is appealed to by individuals and by groups as supporting their special views. It is impalpable, illusory, transient; "'tis here, 'tis there, 'tis gone"; a nullity which can nevertheless for a moment endow the multitude with power to uplift or destroy.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

With a higher moral nature will come a restriction on the multiplication of the inferior.

0
0
Source
source
The Principles of Biology, Vol. II (1867), Part VI: Laws of Multiplication, ch. 8: Human Population in the Future
2 months 2 weeks ago

The hand that rounded Peter's dome, And groined the aisles of Christian Rome, Wrought in a sad sincerity, Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew, The conscious stone to beauty grew.

0
0
Source
source
The Problem, st. 2
3 months 2 days 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)
3 months 1 week ago

At fifteen my heart was set on learning; at thirty I stood firm; at forty I had no more doubts; at fifty I knew the will of heaven; at sixty my ear was obedient; at seventy I could follow my heart's desire without overstepping the boundaries of what was right.

0
0
2 weeks 2 days ago

For me any of the little gestures I make are all tentative probes. That's why I feel free to make them sound as outrageous or extreme as possible. Until you make it extreme, the probe is not very efficient.

0
0
Source
source
Marshall McLuhan: the man and his message, edited by George Sanderson and Frank MacDonald, Fulcrum, 1989, p. 32
3 months 2 weeks ago

Nothing is harder to understand than a symbolic work. A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

Such arguments ill become us, since the time of reformation came, under Gospel light. All distinctions of nations, and privileges of one above others, are ceased; Christians are taught to account all men their neighbours; and love their neighbours as themselves; and do to all men as they would be done by; to do good to all men; and Man-stealing is ranked with enormous crimes. Is the barbarous enslaving our inoffensive neighbours, and treating them like wild beasts subdued by force, reconcilable with all these Divine precepts? Is this doing to them as we would desire they should do to us? If they could carry off and enslave some thousands of us, would we think it just?-One would almost wish they could for once; it might convince more than Reason, or the Bible.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

The man who makes his religion a means to the gaining of this world, will lose both worlds alike; whereas the man who gives up this world for the sake of religion, will get both worlds alike.

0
0
Source
source
The Faith and Practice of Al-Ghazali, Allen & Unwin (1963), p. 152.
1 month 2 weeks ago

A word, once dissected, no longer signifies anything, is nothing. Like a body that, after an autopsy, is less than a corpse.

0
0

In the last 50 years agrotoxins have spread and are pushing bees to extinction. The choices before humanity are clear, a Poison Free Future to save bees, farmers, our food and humanity. Or continue to use poisons, threatening our common future by walking blindly to extinction through the arrogance that we can substitute bees with artificial intelligence and robots... There is no substitute for the amazing biodiversity and gifts of bees. Let us together as diverse species and diverse cultures and through poison free organic food and farming, rejuvenate the biodiversity of our pollinators and restore their sacredness. We have the creative power to stop the sixth mass extinction and climate catastrophe without the need for these false technocratic solutions.

0
0
Source
source
Poisons Mean Extinction: For Bees and Humanity article for Common Dreams
2 months 2 weeks ago

Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.

0
0
Source
source
1836
2 months 2 weeks ago

And when his hours are numbered, and the world Is all his own, retiring, as he were not, Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work, The frolic architecture of the snow.

0
0
Source
source
The Snow-Storm
1 month 2 weeks ago

Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? Where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

I dream of wanting - and all I want seems to me worthless.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia