Skip to main content
3 months 3 weeks ago

What matters the party to me? I shall find enough anyhow who unite with me without swearing allegiance to my flag.

0
0
Source
source
Dover 2005, p. 236
5 months 3 days ago

God looks at the clean hands, not the full ones.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 715
7 months 1 day ago

A man's thinking goes on within his consciousness in a seclusion in comparison with which any physical seclusion is an exhibition to public view.

0
0
Source
source
Pt II, p. 189
8 months 3 days ago

Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard. It steels itself to attain the absolute and authority; it wants to transfigure the world before having exhausted it, to set it to rights before having understood it. Whatever it may say, our era is deserting this world.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

Let a man take time enough for the most trivial deed, though it be but the paring of his nails. The buds swell imperceptibly, without hurry or confusion; as if the short spring days were an eternity.

0
0
Source
source
Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 175
7 months 1 week ago

I love liberty, and I loathe constraint, dependence, and all their kindred annoyances. As long as my purse contains money it secures my independence, and exempts me from the trouble of seeking other money, a trouble of which I have always had a perfect horror; and the dread of seeing the end of my independence, makes me proportionately unwilling to part with my money. The money that we possess is the instrument of liberty, that which we lack and strive to obtain is the instrument of slavery.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

So far from a gradual progress towards perfection forming any necessary part of the Darwinian creed, it appears to us that it is perfectly consistent with indefinite persistence in one state, or with a gradual retrogression.

0
0
7 months 5 days ago

To choose this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because we can never choose evil. We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for us without being good for all.

0
0
Source
source
Existentialism and Human Emotions

Every philosophy is complete in itself and, like a genuine work of art, contains the totality. Just as the works of Apelles and Sophocles, if Raphael and Shakespeare had known them, should not have appeared to them as mere preliminary exercises for their own work, but rather as a kindred force of the spirit, so, too reason cannot find in its own earlier forms mere useful preliminary exercises for itself.

0
0
Source
source
Difference of the Fichtean and Schellingean System of Philosophy, cited in W. Kaufmann, Hegel (1966), p. 49
5 months 2 weeks ago

In refusing to face evil, Sinclair has gained nothing and lost a great deal; the Buddhist scripture expenses it: those who refuse to discriminate might as well be dead.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter Three, The Romantic Outsider
7 months 6 days ago

Death is the only thing we haven't succeeded in completely vulgarizing.

0
0
Source
source
Eyeless in Gaza, 1936
6 months 6 days ago

While all these are disturbed and divided by the multifarious objects to which their thoughts must be applied, the Philosopher pursues, in solitary silence and in unbroken concentration of mind, his single and undeviating course towards the Good, the Beautiful, and the True; and that is his daily labour, to which others can only resort at times for rest and refreshment after toil.

0
0
Source
source
P. 17
7 months 6 days ago

The fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself.

0
0
Source
source
Estranged Labour, p. 30.
4 months 2 weeks ago

Our present-day neurochemical cocktail, we are asked to believe, is the medium through which alien realms of consciousness can be grasped and neutrally appraised from a third-person perspective. Empirical research suggests this optimism is at best naïve.

0
0
Source
source
Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, BLTC Research
7 months 6 days ago

We have been given free will, in order that we may will our self-will out of existence and so come to live continuously in a 'state of grace.' All our actions must be directed, in the last analysis, to making ourselves passive in relation to the activity and the being of divine reality. We are, as it were, aeolian harps, endowed with the power either to expose themselves to the wind of the Spirit or to shut themselves away from it.

0
0
7 months 6 days ago

The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.

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

It is always a genial laughter. Not at mere weakness, at misery or poverty; never. No man who can laugh, what we call laughing, will laugh at these things. It is some poor character only desiring to laugh, and have the credit of wit, that does so. Laughter means sympathy.

0
0
7 months 2 weeks ago

For truth itself does not have the privilege to be employed at any time and in every way; its use, noble as it is, has its circumscriptions and limits.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 13
3 months 6 days ago

Individualism is going around these days in uniform, handing out the party line on individualism.

0
0
Source
source
Think Little
3 months 1 week ago

Joy! Joy! I did not know that all this world is so much part of me, that we are all one army, that windflowers and stars struggle to right and left of me and do not know me; but I turn to them and hail them. The Universe is warm, beloved, familiar, and it smells like my own body. It is Love and War both, a raging restlessness, persistence and uncertainty. Uncertainty and terror. In a violent flash of lightning I discern on the highest peak of power the final, the most fearful pair embracing: Terror and Silence. And between them, a Flame.

0
0
6 months 2 days ago

That fear which gives birth to thoughts, and the fear of thoughts...

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

The Outsider is always unhappy, but he is an agent that ensures the happiness for millions of 'Insiders'.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter Seven, The Great Synthesis…
4 months 2 days ago

As for civilization, from which at last we are about to escape, so far from being the social destiny of man, it is only a transient stage - a state of temporary evil with which globes are afflicted during the first ages of their career; it is for the human race a disease of infancy, like teething; but it is a disease which has been prolonged in our globe at least twenty centuries beyond its natural term, owing to the neglect on the part of the ancient philosophy to study association and passional attraction.

0
0
3 months 3 days ago

The mind which is free from passions is a citadel, for man has nothing more secure to which he can fly for refuge and for the future be inexpugnable. He then who has not seen this is an ignorant man: but he who has seen it and does not fly to this refuge is unhappy.

0
0
Source
source
VIII, 48
4 months 2 days ago

Man's power appears to have increased out of all proportion to his wisdom. He has never been in a better position to build a healthy, happy, and productive world; yet things have perhaps never seemed so black.

0
0
Source
source
Science and Human Behavior
4 months 1 day ago

To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough to make me ambitious.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to his elder sister Henriette (1841).
6 months 6 days ago

Among other men Reason awakes in another form-as the impulse towards Personal Freedom, which, although it never opposes the mild rule of the inward Instinct which it loves, yet rises in rebellion against the pressure of a stranger Instinct which has usurped its rights; and in this awakening it breaks the chains,-not of Reason as Instinct itself, but of the Instinct of foreign natures clothed in the garb of external power.

0
0
Source
source
p. 8
3 months 6 days ago

We might as well say that the Newtonian system of philosophy is a part of the common law, as that the Christian religion is. The truth is that Christianity and Newtonianism being reason and verity itself, in the opinion of all but infidels and Cartesians, they are protected under the wings of the common law from the dominion of other sects, but not erected into dominion over them.

0
0
Source
source
To Dr. Thomas Cooper Monticello, February 10, 1814
7 months 1 week ago

The process of philosophizing, to my mind, consists mainly in passing from those obvious, vague, ambiguous things, that we feel quite sure of, to something precise, clear, definite, which by reflection and analysis we find is involved in the vague thing that we start from, and is, so to speak, the real truth of which that vague thing is a sort of shadow.

0
0
6 months 2 days ago

Having always lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.

0
0
7 months 6 days ago

Characters and talents are complemental and suppletory. The world stands by balanced antagonisms. The more the peculiarities are pressed the better the result. The air would rot without lightning; and without the violence of direction that men have, without bigots, without men of the fixed idea, no excitement, no efficiency. The novelist should not make any character act absurdly, but only absurdly as seen by others. For it is so in life. Nonsense will not keep its unreason if you come into the humorist's point of view, but unhappily we find it is fast becoming sense, and we must flee again into the distance if we would laugh.

0
0
Source
source
"The Natural History of Intellect", p. 45
5 months 3 weeks ago

All the seemingly positive valuations and judgments of ressentiment are hidden devaluations and negations.

0
0
Source
source
L. Coser, trans. (1973), p. 67
6 months 3 weeks ago

He once begged alms of a statue, and, when asked why he did so, replied, "To get practice in being refused."

0
0
Source
source
Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 49
8 months 3 days ago

The contradiction is this: man rejects the world as it is, without accepting the necessity of escaping it. In fact, men cling to the world and by far the majority do not want to abandon it.

0
0
3 months 5 days ago

The tax upon land values is, therefore, the most just and equal of all taxes. It falls only upon those who receive from society a peculiar and valuable benefit, and upon them in proportion to the benefit they receive. It is the taking by the community, for the use of the community, of that value which is the creation of the community. It is the application of the common property to common uses. When all rent is taken by taxation for the needs of the community, then will the equality ordained by Nature be attained. No citizen will have an advantage over any other citizen save as is given by his industry, skill, and intelligence; and each will obtain what he fairly earns. Then, but not till then, will labor get its full reward, and capital its natural return.

0
0
Source
source
Book VIII, Ch. 3
7 months 3 weeks ago

Into the same rivers we step and do not step, we are and are not.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

Oh, how empty is praise when it reflects back to its origin!

0
0
Source
source
No. 50. (Rica writing to * * *)
7 months 3 weeks ago

The double meaning has been given to suit people's diverse intelligence. The apparent contradictions are meant to stimulate the learned to deeper study.

0
0
6 months 2 days ago

Mathematical and physiological researches have shown that the space of experience is simply an actual case of many conceivable cases, about whose peculiar properties experience alone can instruct us.

0
0
Source
source
p. 205; On the space of experience.
3 months 3 weeks ago

If you could be alarmed into the semblance of modesty, you would charm everybody; but remember my joke against you about the Moon and the Solar System;-"Damn the solar system! bad light - planets too distant - pestered with comets - feeble contriviance; - could make a better with great ease."

0
0
Source
source
Vol. II, letter to Lord Jeffrey (1806), p. 23 Discussed in David A. Kent, D. R. Ewen, "Romantic Parodies, 1797-1831", The Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 44, No. 175, (1993), pp. 430-432
5 months 2 weeks ago

The Outsider cannot accept life as it is, who cannot consider his own existence or anyone else's necessary. He sees 'too deep and too much'. It is still a question of self-expression.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter Four The Attempt to Gain Control
1 week 1 day ago

But don't forget...rationalizations for owning man as a commodity...well...through his never-ending service, anyway...☠️
 

See biography for Herbert Marcuse:

https://civilsimian.com/Herbert-Marcuse

Read Herbert Marcuse's work:

https://civilsimian.com/user/142/content

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries-not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.

0
0
Source
source
"Two Dogmas of Empiricism"
4 months 3 days ago

In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. XII: "The Political Principles of Liberalism", §6, p. 267
3 months 6 days ago

It is hardly in human nature that a man should quite accurately gauge the limits of his own insight; but it is the duty of those who profit by his work to consider carefully where he may have been carried beyond it. If we must needs embalm his possible errors along with his solid achievements, and use his authority as an excuse for believing what he cannot have known, we make of his goodness an occasion to sin.

0
0
6 months 2 days ago

It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia