Skip to main content
2 months 4 weeks ago

He has begun by supposing that light has a constant velocity... the same in all directions. This... could never be verified directly by experiment... The postulate... resembling the principle of sufficient reason... furnishes us with a new rule for the investigation of simultaneity.

0
0
5 months 1 day ago

He detested objective truths, the burden of argument, sustained reasoning. He disliked demonstrating, he wanted to convince no one. Others are a dialectician's invention.

0
0
2 months 4 weeks ago

Copernicus never discusses matters of religion or faith, nor does he use argument that depend in any way upon the authority of sacred writings which he might have interpreted erroneously. ... He did not ignore the Bible, but he knew very well that if his doctrine were proved, then it could not contradict the Scriptures when they were rightly understood.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

In order to seek truth, it is necessary once in the course of our life, to doubt, as far as possible, of all things.

0
0
Source
source
Descartes, René (1644). Principles of Philosophy.
2 months 3 weeks ago

A witty statesman said, you might prove anything by figures.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 2, Statistics.
5 months 3 weeks ago

The goal of maximizing the welfare of all may be better achieved by an ethic that accepts our inclinations and harnesses them so that, taken as a whole, the system works to everyone's advantage.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 6, A New Understanding Of Ethics, p. 157
4 months 5 days ago

To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed through words, so to convey this so that others may experience the same feeling - this is the activity of art.

0
0
6 months 6 days ago

If this labourer were in possession of his own means of production, and was satisfied to live as a labourer, he need not work beyond beyond the time necessary for the reproduction of his means of subsistence, say 8 hours a day.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. I, Ch. 11, pg. 336.
5 months 1 day ago

I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide . . .

0
0
5 months 3 days ago

Nothing, in fact, is as universal or as ancient as the iniquitous and absurd; truth and justice, on the contrary, are the least universal, the youngest features in the development of human society.

0
0
2 months 5 days ago

Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly.

0
0
6 months 5 days ago

A third illusion haunts us, that a long duration, as a year, a decade, a century, is valuable. But an old French sentence says, "God works in moments," - "En peu d'heure Dieu labeure." We ask for long life, but 't is deep life, or grand moments, that signify. Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical. Life is unnecessarily long. Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance, - what ample borrowers of eternity they are! Life culminates and concentrates; and Homer said, "The Gods ever give to mortals their appointed share of reason only on one day."

0
0
Source
source
Works and Days
5 months 6 days ago

Whilst shame keeps its watch, virtue is not wholly extinguished in the heart; nor will moderation be utterly exiled from the minds of tyrants.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

The most successful tempters and thus the most dangerous are the deluded deluders.

0
0
Source
source
F 120
4 months 1 week ago

There are clear cases in which "understanding" literally applies and clear cases in which it does not apply; and these two sorts of cases are all I need for this argument.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

He who upholds Truth with all the might of his power, He who upholds Truth the utmost in his word and deed,He, indeed, is Thy most valued helper, O Mazda Ahura!

0
0
Source
source
Ahunuvaiti Gatha; Yasna 31, 22.
6 months 1 day ago

"Fare well!" "A whole world of pain is contained in these words." How can it be contained in them? - It is bound up in them. The words are like an acorn from which an oak tree can grow.

0
0
Source
source
p. 52e
6 months 1 week ago

The natural price, therefore, is, as it were, the central price, to which the prices of all commodities are continually gravitating.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter VII, p. 69.
5 months 2 weeks ago

Work at these things, practice them, these are the things you ought to desire; they are what will put you on the path of divine virtue - yes, by the one who entrusted our soul with the tetraktys, source of ever-flowing nature. Pray to the gods for success and get to work.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Divine Harmony: The Life and Teachings of Pythagoras by John Strohmeier and Peter Westbrook.
7 months 1 week ago
We still do not yet know where the drive for truth comes from. For so far we have heard only of the duty which society imposes in order to exist: to be truthful means to employ the usual metaphors. Thus, to express it morally, this is the duty to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie with the herd and in a manner binding upon everyone. Now man of course forgets that this is the way things stand for him. Thus he lies in the manner indicated, unconsciously and in accordance with habits which are centuries' old; and precisely by means of this unconsciousness and forgetfulness he arrives at his sense of truth.
0
0
4 months 4 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
3 months 3 weeks ago

The only good that I can see in the demonstration of the truth of "Spiritualism" is to furnish an additional argument against suicide. Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a "medium" hired at a guinea a séance.

0
0
Source
source
Review in the Daily News (17 October 1871), quoted in Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley F.R.S (1900) edited by Leonard Huxley, Vol. 1, p. 452
6 months ago

The constitution of madness as mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, bears witness to a rupture in a dialogue, gives the separation as already enacted, and expels from the memory all those imperfect words, of no fixed syntax, spoken falteringly, in which the exchange between madness and reason was carried out. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence.

0
0
Source
source
Preface to 1961 edition
3 months 2 weeks ago

Instead of water belonging to millions of local communities, water too is to be controlled by five or six global water giants. These are recipes that use economic systems to appropriate for the few the base of survival of the majority.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1
7 months 3 days ago

The dullness of fact is the mother of fiction.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

In the United States, the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own.

0
0
Source
source
Book One, Chapter II.
5 months 1 week ago

So many of my thoughts and feelings are shared by the English that England has turned into a second native land of the mind for me.

0
0
Source
source
Journeys to England and Ireland, 1835.
2 months 2 weeks ago

For no man is free who is a slave to his body.

0
0
2 months 6 days ago

"Fire is the first and final mask of my God. We dance and weep between two enormous pyres." Our thoughts and our bodies flash and glitter with reflected light. Between the two pyres I stand serenely, my brain unshaken amid the vertigo, and I say: "Time is most short and space most narrow between these two pyres, the rhythm of this life is most sluggish, and I have no time, nor a place to dance in. I cannot wait." Then all at once the rhythm of the earth becomes a vertigo, time disappears, the moment whirls, becomes eternity, and every point in space - insect or star or idea - turns into dance.

0
0
6 months 6 days ago

From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.

0
0
Source
source
The Criticism of the Gotha Program (1875) Variant translation: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
4 months 4 weeks ago

When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for the sky is red. And in the morning, It will be foul weather to day: for the sky is red and lowring. O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times? A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given unto it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas.

0
0
Source
source
16:2-4 (KJV)
2 months 2 weeks ago

A comfortable house is a great source of happiness. It ranks immediately after health and a good conscience.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. II, letter to Lord Murray (29 September 1843), p. 501
6 months ago

In its most general form, confinement was explained, or at least justified, by a will to avoid scandal. It thereby signalled an important change in the consciousness of evil. The Renaissance had let unreason in all its forms come out into the light of day, as public exposure gave evil the chance to redeem itself and to serve as an exemplum.

0
0
Source
source
Part One: 5. The Insane
6 months 1 week ago

It may indeed be doubted, whether butcher's meat is any where a necessary of life. Grain and other vegetables, with the help of milk, cheese, and butter, or oil, where butter is not to be had, it is known from experience, can, without any butcher's meat, afford the most plentiful, the most wholesome, the most nourishing, and the most invigorating diet.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter II, Part II, Appendix to Articles I and II.
4 months 5 days ago

The man is making preparations for a year, and does not know that he will die before evening. And I remembered God's second saying, "Learn what is not given to man." 'What dwells in man" I already knew. Now I learnt what is not given him. It is not given to man to know his own needs.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. XI
4 months 1 week ago

The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.

0
0
Source
source
Preface (p. xi)
4 months 3 weeks ago

Everyone knows what made Berkeley notorious. He said that there were no material objects. He said the external world was in some sense immaterial, that nothing existed save ideas - ideas and their authors. His contemporaries thought him very ingenious and a little mad.

0
0
6 months 6 days ago

That I, a funny little gesticulating animal on two legs, should stand beneath the stars and declaim in a passion about my rights - it seems so laughable, so out of all proportion. Much better, like Archimedes, to be killed because of absorption in eternal things... There is a possibility in human minds of something mysterious as the night-wind, deep as the sea, calm as the stars, and strong as Death, a mystic contemplation, the "intellectual love of God." Those who have known it cannot believe in wars any longer, or in any kind of hot struggle. If I could give to others what has come to me in this way, I could make them too feel the futility of fighting. But I do not know how to communicate it: when I speak, they stare, applaud, or smile, but do not understand.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Miss Rinder, July 30, 1918
2 months 3 weeks ago

An intellectual dapperling of these times boasts chiefly of his irresistible perspicacity, his "dwelling in the daylight of truth," and so forth; which, on examination, turns out to be a dwelling in the rush-light of "closet logic," and a deep unconsciousness that there is any other light to dwell in or any other objects to survey with it.

0
0
4 months 1 day ago

I speak as a biologist. There aren't many absolutely clear distinctions in biology. Mostly what we have is a spectrum. But the male-female divide is exceptional in biology. It really is a true binary.

0
0
Source
source
Interviewed by Judith Woods, as cited in "Richard Dawkins interview: 'I shall continue to use every one of the prohibited words'", The Telegraph
6 months 6 days ago

It must not be supposed that the subjective elements are any less 'real' than the objective elements; they are only less important... because they do not point to anything beyond ourselves...

0
0
Source
source
An Outline of Philosophy Ch.15 The Nature of our Knowledge of Physics, 1927
5 months 1 week ago

Given that annihilation of nature in its entirety is impossible, and that death and dissolution are not appropriate to the whole mass of this entire globe or star, from time to time, according to an established order, it is renewed, altered, changed, and transformed in all its parts.

0
0
Source
source
Fifth Dialogue
6 months 5 days ago

Each the herald is who wrote His rank, and quartered his own coat. There is no king nor sovereign state That can fix a hero's rate.

0
0
Source
source
Astræa
4 months 3 weeks ago

The Text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural. The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination.

0
0
Source
source
Proposition 4
3 months 3 weeks ago

The great tragedy of Science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

0
0
Source
source
Presidential Address at the British Association, "Biogenesis and abiogenesis" (1870); later published in Collected Essays, Vol. 8, p. 229
6 months 5 days ago

A good symbol is the best argument and is a missionary to persuade thousands.

0
0
Source
source
Poetry and Imagination

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia