Skip to main content
8 months 3 weeks ago

O light! This is the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer. Return to Tipasa (1954) Variant translation: In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

All these present struggles revolve around the question: Who are we? They are a refusal of these abstractions, of economic and ideological state violence, which ignore who we are individually, and also a refusal of a scientific or administrative inquisition which determines who one is.

0
0
Source
source
p. 781
5 months 3 weeks ago

The message of radio is one of violent, unified implosion and resonance.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 263)
4 months 2 weeks ago

Nay, am not I also the humble James Carlyle's work? I owe him much more than existence, I owe him a noble inspiring example (now that I can read it in that rustic character). It was he exclusively that determined on educating me; that from his small hard-earned funds sent me to school and college, and made me whatever I am or may become. Let me not mourn for my father, let me do worthily of him. So shall he still live even here in me, and his worth plant itself honorably forth into new generations.

0
0
8 months 1 day ago

For wherever violence is used, and injury done, though by hands appointed to administer Justice, it is still violence and injury, however colour'd with the Name, Pretences, or Forms of Law, the end whereof being to protect and redress the innocent, by an unbiassed application of it, to all who are under it; wherever that is not bona fide done, War is made upon the Sufferers, who having no appeal on Earth to right them, they are left to the only remedy in such Cases, an appeal to Heaven.

0
0
Source
source
Two Treatises of Government. The Second Treatise. Chapter 3: The State of War, §20 p. 281 books.google
7 months 4 weeks ago

Alexander's career was piracy pure and simple, nothing but an orgy of power and plunder, made romantic by the character of the hero. There was no rational purpose in it, and the moment he died his generals and governors attacked one another.

0
0
7 months 4 weeks ago

So that is what hell is. I would never have believed it. You remember: the fire and brimstone, the torture. Ah! the farce. There is no need for torture: Hell is other people.

0
0
Source
source
Garcin, Act 1, sc. 5
7 months 4 weeks ago

He begins to think for himself and meets Nineteenth-century Rationalism Which can explain away religion by any number of methods.

0
0
Source
source
Pilgrim's Regress 19-20
5 months 3 weeks ago

He dies twice who perishes by his own hand.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 97
6 months 2 weeks ago

And if the immortality of the soul had been unable to find vindication in rational empiricism, neither is it satisfied with pantheism. To say that everything is God, and that when we die, we return to God, or more accurately, continue in Him, avails our longing nothing; for if this indeed be so, then we were in God before we were born, and if we die we return to where we were before being born, then the human soul, the individual consciousness, is perishable. And since we know very well that God, the personal and conscious God of Christian monotheism, is simply the provider, and above all the guarantor, of our immortality, pantheism is said, and rightly said to be merely atheism disguised; and in my opinion, undisguised.

0
0

A man who for a long time has gone around hiding a secret becomes mentally deranged. At this point one would imagine that his secret would have to come out, but despite his derangement his soul still sticks to its hideout, and those around him become even more convinced that the false story he told to deceive them is the truth. He is healed of his insanity, knows everything that has gone on, and thereby perceives that nothing has been betrayed. Was this gratifying to him or not; he might wish to have disposed of his secret in his madness; it seems as if there were a fate which forced him to remain in his secret and would not let him go away from it. Or was it for the best, was there a guardian spirit who helped him keep his secret.

0
0
5 months 4 weeks ago

The Churches as Churches-as institutions affirming their own infallibility-are anti-Christian institutions. Between the Churches as such and Christianity, not only is there nothing in common except the name, but they are two quite opposite and opposing principles. The one represents pride, violence, self-assertion, immobility and death: the other humility, penitence, meekness, progress, and life.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter III, Christianity Misunderstood by Believers
7 months 4 weeks ago

The stronghold of the determinist argument is the antipathy to the idea of chance...This notion of alternative possibility, this admission that any one of several things may come to pass is, after all, only a roundabout name for chance.

0
0
Source
source
The Dilemma of Determinism (1884) p.153
4 months 1 week ago

Immortality is the privilege of the few, and, according to the Aryan conception, specifically the privilege of heroes. Continuing to live - not as a shadow, but as a demigod - is reserved to those which a special spiritual action has elevated from the one nature to the other.

0
0
Source
source
p. 102
6 months 1 week ago

A general definition of civilization: a civilized society is exhibiting the five qualities of truth, beauty, adventure, art, peace.

0
0
Source
source
p. 353.
5 months 3 weeks ago

We are swiftly moving at present from an era where business was our culture into an era when culture will be our business. Between these poles stand the huge and ambiguous entertainment industries.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 384)
3 months 3 weeks ago

Before making a decision the first thing to do - don't get worked up. For everything happens according to the nature of all things, and in a short time you'll be nobody and nowhere even as the great emperors Hadrian and Augustus are now. The next thing to do - consider carefully the task at hand for what it is, while remembering that your purpose is to be a good human being. Get straight to doing what nature requires of you, and speak as you see most just and fitting - with kindness, modesty, and sincerity.

0
0
Source
source
VIII. 5:162
6 months 3 weeks ago

The slave is outside competition; the proletarian is in it and experiences all its vagaries.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

Let thy mind rule thy tongue!

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

Those who keep the masses of men in subjection by exercising force and cruelty deprive them at once of two vital foods, liberty and obedience; for it is no longer within the power of such masses to accord their inner consent to the authority to which they are subjected. Those who encourage a state of things in which the hope of gain is the principal motive take away from men their obedience, for consent which is its essence is not something which can be sold.

0
0
Source
source
p. 97
7 months 1 week ago

You, Socrates, began by saying that virtue can't be taught, and now you are insisting on the opposite, trying to show that all things are knowledge, justice, soundness of mind, even courage, from which it would follow that virtue most certainly can be taught.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Protagoras by Plato
7 months 4 weeks ago

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied - as had been said at Nuremberg over and over again by the defendants and their counsels - that this new type of criminal, who is in actual fact hostis generis humani, commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong.

0
0
Source
source
Epilogue
6 months 2 weeks ago

The concept of God was for a long time the place where the idea was kept alive that there are other norms besides those to which nature and society give expression in their operation.

0
0
Source
source
"Thoughts on Religion," Critical Theory: Selected Essays (1995), p. 129.

In youth it is the outward aspect of things that most engages us; while in age, thought or reflection is the predominating quality of the mind. Hence, youth is the time for poetry, and age is more inclined to philosophy. In practical affairs it is the same: a man shapes his resolutions in youth more by the impression that the outward world makes upon him; whereas, when he is old, it is thought that determines his actions.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

The feeling of being ten thousand years behind, or ahead, of the others, of belonging to the beginnings or to the end of humanity...

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

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

But though empires, like all the other works of men, have all hitherto proved mortal, yet every empire aims at immortality.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter II, Part II, p. 896.
7 months ago

Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour, and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.

0
0
7 months 2 weeks ago

Cicero said loud-bawling orators were driven by their weakness to noise, as lame men to take horse.

0
0
Source
source
Cicero

If the State, modeled after the universe, is split into two spheres or classes of beings - wherein the free represent the ideas and the unfree the concrete and sensate things - then the ultimate and uppermost order remains unrealized by both. By using sensate things as tools or organs, the ideas obtain a direct relationship to the apparitions and enter into them as souls. God, however, as identity of the highest order, remains above all reality and eternally has merely an indirect relationship. If then in the higher moral order the State represents a second nature, then the divine can never have anything other than an indirect relationship to it, never can it bear any real relationship to it, and religion, if it seeks to preserve itself in unscathed pure ideality, can therefore never exist - even in the most perfect State - other than esoterically in the form of mystery cults.

0
0
Source
source
P. 51
4 months 3 weeks ago

The virtues are not poured into us, they are natural. Seek, and you will find them: neglect, and you will lose them.

0
0
Source
source
Uses and Sanctions, no. 22
3 months 2 weeks ago

No man can visualize four dimensions, except mathematically ... I think in four dimensions, but only abstractly. The human mind can picture these dimensions no more than it can envisage electricity. Nevertheless, they are no less real than electro-magnetism, the force which controls our universe, within, and by which we have our being.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.

0
0
Source
source
The First Part, Chapter 13, p. 62

Every parting gives a foretaste of death; every coming together again a foretaste of the resurrection.

0
0
Source
source
"Psychological Observations"
6 months 3 weeks ago

I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

0
0
Source
source
14:06
7 months 3 days ago

Jacques said that his master said that everything good or evil we encounter here below was written on high.

0
0
Source
source
Prologue
6 months 3 weeks ago

Situation seems to be the mould in which men's characters are formed.

0
0
Source
source
Letter 23
7 months 4 weeks ago

Most kings and priests have been despotic, and all religions have been riddled with superstition.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 6 (pp. 52-53)
6 months 1 week ago

In one sense, I do believe I am "like a man," as Parthe [the writer's sister] says. But how? In having sympathy. ... Women crave for being loved, not for loving. They scream out at you for sympathy all day long, they are incapable of giving any in return, for they cannot remember your affairs long enough to do so. ... They cannot state a fact accurately to another, nor can that other attend to it accurately enough for it to become information. Now is not all this the result of want of sympathy?

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Madame Mohl
6 months 1 week ago

The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime. The wholesale mechanisation of modern life has increased uniformity a thousandfold. It is everywhere present, in habits, tastes, dress, thoughts and ideas. Its most concentrated dullness is "public opinion." Few have the courage to stand out against it. He who refuses to submit is at once labelled "queer," "different," and decried as a disturbing element in the comfortable stagnancy of modern life.

0
0
7 months 4 weeks ago

I find men victims of illusion in all parts of life. Children, youths, adults, and old men, all are led by one bawble or another. Yoganidra, the goddess of illusion, Proteus, or Momus, or Gylfi's Mocking, - for the Power has many names, - is stronger than the Titans, stronger than Apollo.

0
0
Source
source
Illusions
5 months 2 weeks ago

My convictions, positive and negative, on all the matters of which you speak, are of long and slow growth and are firmly rooted. But the great blow which fell on me seemed to stir them to their foundation, and had I lived a couple of centuries earlier I could have fancied a devil scoffing at me and them - and asking me what profit it was to have stripped myself of the hopes and consolations of the mass of mankind? To which my only reply was and is - Oh devil! Truth is better than much profit. I have searched over the grounds of my belief, and if wife and child and name and fame were all to be lost to me one after the other as the penalty, still I will not lie.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

There is a left wing version of this longing for community... because in a liberal society we never move as quickly as we should towards full equality, and therefore there are many marginalized groups who feel that the liberal society is... hypocritical, that it's promising an equality of recognition, and of rights, but it is not delivering... and therefore the very concept of liberal universalism is challenged in favor of a definition of rights that is tied to the specific groups.

0
0
Source
source
18:44
5 months 1 week ago

Getting rid of predation isn't a matter of moralising. A python who kills a small human child isn't morally blameworthy. Nor is a lion who hunts and kills a terrified zebra. In both cases, the victim suffers horribly. But the predator lacks the empathetic and mind-reading skills needed to understand the implications of what s/he is doing. Some humans still display a similar deficit. From the perspective of the victim, the moral status or (lack of) guilty intent of a human or nonhuman predator is irrelevant. Either way, to stand by and watch the snake asphyxiate a child would be almost as morally abhorrent as to kill the child yourself. So why turn this principle on its head with beings of comparable sentience to human infants and toddlers? With power comes complicity.

0
0
Source
source
"The Radical Plan to Phase out Earth's Predatory Species", io9, 30 Jul. 2014
5 months 3 weeks ago

There is simply too much to think about. It is hopeless - too many kinds of special preparation are required. In electronics, in economics, in social analysis, in history, in psychology, in international politics, most of us are, given the oceanic proliferating complexity of things, paralyzed by the very suggestion that we assume responsibility for so much. This is what makes packaged opinion so attractive.

0
0
Source
source
There Is Simply Too Much to Think About (1992), pp. 173-174
5 months 2 weeks ago

So far from the posterior lobe, the posterior cornu, and the hippocampus minor, being structures peculiar to and characteristic of man, as they have been over and over again asserted to be, even after the publication of the clearest demonstration of the reverse, it is precisely these structures which are the most marked cerebral characters common to man with the apes. They are among the most distinctly Simian peculiarities which the human organism exhibits.

0
0
Source
source
Ch.2, p. 119

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia