Skip to main content
5 months ago

Emptiness is not a denial of the proper but an affirmation of it.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

It is easy to see that, even in the freedom of early youth, an American girl never quite loses control of herself; she enjoys all permitted pleasures without losing her head about any of them, and her reason never lets the reins go, though it may often seem to let them flap.

0
0
Source
source
Book Three, Chapter IX.
5 months 1 week ago

The mind advances only when it has the patience to go in circles, in other words, to deepen.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God's eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

When reason rules, money is a blessing.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 50
6 months 2 weeks ago

Blessed are those who have no talent!

0
0
Source
source
February 1850
2 months 2 weeks ago

It may possibly be true that, to continue to live on and to act in a world like ours, it is vitally necessary to seek a way out of this uncertainty of multiple alternatives; and accordingly people may be led to embrace some immediate goal as if it were absolute, by which they hope to make their problems appear concrete and real. But it is not primarily the man of action who seeks the absolute and immutable, but rather it is he who wishes to induce others to hold on to the status quo because he feels comfortable and smug under conditions as they are.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

I can never join Calvin in addressing his god. He was indeed an Atheist, which I can never be; or rather his religion was Daemonism. If ever man worshipped a false god, he did. The being described in his 5 points is not the God whom you and I acknowledge and adore, the Creator and benevolent governor of the world; but a daemon of malignant spirit. It would be more pardonable to believe in no god at all, than to blaspheme him by the atrocious attributes of Calvin. Indeed I think that every Christian sect gives a great handle to Atheism by their general dogma that, without a revelation, there would not be sufficient proof of the being of a god.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to John Adams (11 April 1823) (Scan at The Library of Congress)
4 months 2 weeks ago

Avarice is as destitute of what it has, as what it has not.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 927
5 months 4 days ago

And this God, the living God, your God, our God, is in me, is in you, lives in us, and we live and move and have our being in Him. And he is in us by virtue of the hunger, the longing, which we have for Him, He is Himself creating the longing for Himself.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1: The Impulse to Power
2 months 2 weeks ago

Let us not limit the resources of nature; they are infinite, especially when reinforced by great art.

0
0
7 months 2 weeks ago

Just you think first, and don't bother to speak afterward, either.

0
0
4 months 6 days ago

It is odd that the last twenty-five years which have witnessed the greatest progress ever made in physical science-the greatest victories ever achieved by mind over matter-should have produced hardly a volume that will be remembered in 1900.

0
0
Source
source
Journal entry (9 March 1850), quoted in Thomas Macaulay, The Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay: Volume 5, January 1849-December 1855, ed. Thomas Pinney (1981), p. 99
6 months 2 weeks ago

My education, which was wholly his work, had been conducted without any regard to the possibility of its ending in this result; and I saw no use in giving him the pain of thinking that his plans had failed, when the failure was probably irremediable, and, at all events, beyond the power of his remedies. Of other friends, I had at that time none to whom I had any hope of making my condition intelligible. It was however abundantly intelligible to myself; and the more I dwelt upon it, the more hopeless it appeared.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 135)
2 weeks ago

You'd think things would change in a connected world.....at least for the moment....nothing has changed...

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

The problem of establishing a perfect civic constitution is dependent upon the problem of a lawful external relation among states and cannot be solved without a solution of the latter problem.

0
0
Source
source
Seventh Thesis
2 months 2 weeks ago

The, diverse states of the soul are always correlative with those of the body.

0
0
5 months 1 day ago

Lying takes the form of mass media creating the myth that feminist movement has completely transformed society, so much so that the politics of patriarchal power have been inverted and that men, particularly white men, just like emasculated black men, have become the victims of dominating women. So, it goes, all men (especially black men) must pull together (as in the Clarence Thomas hearings) to support and reaffirm patriarchal domination. Add to this the widely held assumptions that blacks, other minorities, and white women are taking jobs from white men, and that people are poor and unemployed because they want to be, and it becomes most evident that part of our contemporary crisis is created by a lack of meaningful access to truth.

0
0
Source
source
Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom
4 months 2 weeks ago

"The Precession of Simulacra,"

0
0
Source
source
p. 6
7 months ago

Of the truths within our reach... the mind and the heart are as doors by which they are received into the soul, but... few enter by the mind, whilst they are brought in crowds by the rash caprices of the will, without the council of reason.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

There is thus a certain plausibility to Nietzsche's doctrine, though it is dynamite. He maintains in effect that the gulf separating Plato from the average man is greater than the cleft between the average man and a chimpanzee.

0
0
Source
source
p. 151
5 months 3 weeks ago

I have no hesitation in saying that although the American woman never leaves her domestic sphere and is in some respects very dependent within it, nowhere does she enjoy a higher station. And if anyone asks me what I think the chief cause of the extraordinary prosperity and growing power of this nation, I should answer that it is due to the superiority of their women.

0
0
Source
source
Book Three, Chapter XII.
6 months 2 weeks ago

Where we find a difficulty we may always expect that a discovery awaits us. Where there is cover we hope for game.

0
0
Source
source
Reflections on the Psalms (1958), ch. III: Cursings
4 months 1 week ago

It is a very helpful insight to say we are vehicles for our DNA, we are hosts for DNA parasites which are our genes. Those are insights which help us to understand an aspect of life. But it's emotive to say, that's all there is to it, we might as well give up going to Shakespeare plays and give up listening to music and things, because that's got nothing to do with it. That's an entirely different subject.

0
0
7 months 2 weeks ago
The pride connected with knowing and sensing lies like a blinding fog over the eyes and senses of men, thus deceiving them concerning the value of existence. For this pride contains within itself the most flattering estimation of the value of knowing. Deception is the most general effect of such pride, but even its most particular effects contain within themselves something of the same deceitful character.
0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

Instead of funding issues of paper on the hypothecation of specific redeeming taxes (the only method of anticipating, in a time of war, the resources of times of peace, tested by the experience of nations), we are trusting to tricks of jugglers on the cards, to the illusions of banking schemes for the resources of the war, and for the cure of colic to inflations of more wind.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to José Correia da Serra (1814) ME 14:224
5 months 3 weeks ago

I have often admired the mystical way of Pythagoras, and the secret Magic of numbers.

0
0
Source
source
Section 12
1 week 5 days ago

Sometimes I just want to show that these guys are normal people. These quotes might seem boring, but they serve a contextual purpose. Bringing these guys down to eye level creates a practical, attainable context for philosophy. Maybe Elbert here is already at eye level...😁

See biography for Elbert Hubbard:
https://civilsimian.com/Elbert-Hubbard

Read Elbert Hubbard's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/295/content

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

We are but dust and shadow.

0
0
Source
source
Book IV, ode vii, line 16
6 months 2 weeks ago

There is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world. But this, I hold, is an offence against every decent conception of mankind. It is hardly better than to treat the history of embezzlement or of robbery or of poisoning as the history of mankind. For the history of power politics is nothing but the history of international crime and mass murder (including it is true, some of the attempts to suppress them). This history is taught in schools, and some of the greatest criminals are extolled as heroes. 

0
0
Source
source
Vol 2, Ch. 25 "Has History any Meaning?" Variant: There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world.
5 months 4 days ago

From whatever side the matter is regarded, it is always found that reason confronts our longing for personal immortality and contradicts it. And the truth is, in all strictness, that reason is the enemy of life.

0
0
5 months 1 week 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
5 months 1 week ago

Philosophers are as jealous as women. Each wants a monopoly of praise.

0
0
Source
source
P. 30
6 months 3 weeks ago

They [theologians] will explain to you how Christ was formed in the Virgin's womb; how accident subsists in synaxis without domicile in place. The most ordinary of them can do this. Those more fully initiated explain further whether there is an instans in Divine generation; whether in Christ there is more than a single filiation; whether 'the Father hates the Son' is a possible proposition; whether God can become the substance of a woman, of an ass, of a pumpkin, or of the devil, and whether, if so, a pumpkin could preach a sermon, or work miracles, or be crucified. And they can discover a thousand other things to you besides these. They will make you understand notions, and instants, formalities, and quiddities, things which no eyes ever saw, unless they were eyes which could see in the dark what had no existence.

0
0
Source
source
as quoted by Froude ibid.,
5 months 1 week ago

That Marxism should triumph in Russia, where there is no industry, would be the greatest contradiction that Marxism could undergo. But there is no such contradiction, for there is no such triumph. Russia is Marxist more or less as the Germans of the Holy Roman Empire were Romans.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter XIV: Who Rules The World?
3 months 1 week ago

There is no witness so dreadful, no accuser so terrible as the conscience that dwells in the heart of every man.

0
0
Source
source
Histories, XVIII, 43 (Bartlett's Familiar Quotations)
4 months 2 weeks ago

The Marxist critique is only a critique of capital, a critique coming from the heart of the middle and petit bourgeois classes, for which Marxism has served for a century as a latent ideology.... The Marxist seeks a good use of economy. Marxism is therefore only a limited petit bourgeois critique, one more step in the banalization of life toward the "good use" of the social!

0
0
Source
source
Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 15 (1987) "When Bataille Attacked the Metaphysical Principle of Economy"
3 months 1 week ago

To reconcile Despotism with Freedom:-well, is that such a mystery? Do you not already know the way? It is to make your Despotism just. Rigorous as Destiny; but just too, as Destiny and its Laws. The Laws of God: all men obey these, and have no 'Freedom' at all but in obeying them. The way is already known, part of the way;-and courage and some qualities are needed for walking on it!

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

The whole life of the upper classes is a constant inconsistency. The more delicate a man's conscience is, the more painful this contradiction is to him.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter V, Contradiction Between our Life and our Christian Conscience
6 months 2 weeks ago

The typical Westerner wishes to be the cause of as many changes as possible in his environment; the typical Chinaman wishes to enjoy as much and as delicately as possible.

0
0
Source
source
The Problem of China (1922), Ch. XII: The Chinese Character
2 months 3 weeks ago

Such religion as there can be in modern life, every individual will have to salvage from the churches for himself.

0
0
Source
source
p. 397
4 months 4 weeks ago

Care and responsibility are constituent elements of love, but without respect for and knowledge of the beloved person, love deteriorates into domination and possessiveness. Respect is not fear and awe; it denotes, in accordance with the root of the word (respicere = to look at), the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his individuality and uniqueness. To respect a person is not possible without knowing him; care and responsibility would be blind if they were not guided by the knowledge of the person's individuality.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 3; in Ch. 2 of his later work The Art of Loving (1956) a similar statement is made :
3 months 2 days ago

Two elements must therefore be rooted out once for all-the fear of future suffering, and the recollection of past suffering; since the latter no longer concerns me, and the former concerns me not yet.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia