Skip to main content
3 months 3 weeks ago

I dare affirm in knowledge of nature, that a little natural philosophy, and the first entrance into it, doth dispose the opinion to atheism; but on the other side, much natural philosophy and wading deep into it, will bring about men's minds to religion; wherefore atheism every way seems to be combined with folly and ignorance, seeing nothing can can be more justly allotted to be the saying of fools than this, "There is no God" Of Atheism.

0
0
3 months 5 days ago

Being nimble and light-footed, his father encouraged him to run in the Olympic race. "Yes," said he, "if there were any kings there to run with me."

0
0
Source
source
41 Alexander
2 months 2 weeks ago

The problem of induction is, roughly speaking, the problem of finding a way to prove that certain empirical generalizations which are derived from past experience will hold good also in the future. There are only two ways of approaching this problem on the assumption that it is a genuine problem, and it is easy to see that neither of them can lead to its solution.

0
0
Source
source
p. 49.
3 months 3 weeks ago

What I have given in the second book on the nature and properties of curved lines, and the method of examining them, is, it seems to me, as far beyond the treatment in the ordinary geometry, as the rhetoric of Cicero is beyond the a, b, c of children.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Marin Mersenne (1637) as quoted by D. E. Smith & M. L. Latham Tr. The Geometry of René Descartes
1 week 1 day ago

The infinite, absolute character of Virtue has passed into a finite, conditional one; it is no longer a worship of the Beautiful and Good; but a calculation of the Profitable.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

Thought is as much a lie as love or faith.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks 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
3 months 2 weeks ago

He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is himself a prophet; no statute book, for he hath the Lawgiver; no money, for he is value itself; no road, for he is at home where he is.

0
0
Source
source
December 26, 1839
1 week 5 days ago

A right exists in theory... All human beings have the same set of rights, but rights need to be enforced by the state. It needs to rely on the coercive power of the state... its army, its police force, to actually make those rights something real that citizens can enjoy, and the enforcement power is not universal. ...We wouldn't want to live in a world in which every liberal state wanted to enforce liberal rights in every other state in the world.

0
0
Source
source
24:09
3 months 2 weeks ago

Most of what happens actually is forgotten.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 16
2 months ago

There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another, This conception is a potent menace to social regeneration. All human experience teaches that methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim. The means employed become, through individual habit and social practice, part and parcel of the final purpose; they influence it, modify it, and presently the aims and means become identical.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

This tendency towards a Christian-European Universal Monarchy has shown itself successively in the several States which could make pretensions to such a dominion, and, since the fall of the Papacy, it has become the sole animating principle of our History. We by no means seek to determine whether this notion of Universal Monarchy has ever been distinctly entertained as a definite plan .... Thus each State either strives to attain this Universal Christian Monarchy, or at least to acquire the power of striving after it;-to maintain the Balance of Power when it is in danger of being disturbed by another; and, in secret, for power, that it may eventually disturb it itself.

0
0
Source
source
P. 213-214
2 months 3 weeks ago

Few men think; yet all have opinions.

0
0
Source
source
Philonous to Hylas. The Second Dialogue. This appears in a passage first added in the third edition
3 months 2 weeks ago

We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, Chapter 5, "We Have Cause to Be Uneasy"
1 week 4 days ago

Astronomers... define duration in the following way: time... so defined that Newton's law and that of vis viva [or of the conservation of energy] may be verified. Newton's law is an experimental truth... only approximate... We still have only a definition by approximation.

0
0

To have been a Sovereign, yet the champion of liberty,-a revolutionary leader, yet the supporter of social order, is the peculiar glory of William. Till his accession the British Constitution was in its Chaos. It had contained, from a very remote period, the simple elements of an harmonious government. But they were in a state not of amalgamation, but of conflict,-not of equilibrium but of alternate elevation and depression. The tyranny of Charles the first produced civil war and anarchy. Tyranny had now again produced resistance and revolution. And, but for the wisdom of the new King, it seems probable that the same cycle of misery would have been again described.

0
0
Source
source
'Essay on the Life and Character of King William III' (1822), written for the Greaves Historical Prize at Cambridge, quoted in The Times Literary Supplement (1 May 1969), p. 469
3 months 3 weeks ago

My whole heart and soul are stirred and incensed against the Turks and Mohammed, when I see this intolerable raging of the Devil. Therefore I shall pray and cry to God, nor rest until I know that my cry is heard in heaven.

0
0
Source
source
Statement while being confined to residence at Coburg, as quoted in History of the Christian Church, (1910) by Philip Schaff, Vol. VII
3 months 1 week ago

A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.

0
0
Source
source
Conversation of 1930
4 months 2 weeks ago
Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.
0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 2, Ch. 22, § 261
1 month 2 weeks ago

There is a similarity between writers and SDS [Students for a Democratic Society, a radical left-wing group]: Plenty of paranoia, but no ideas.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

When national debts have once been accumulated to a certain degree, there is scarce, I believe, a single instance of their having been fairly and completely paid. The liberation of the public revenue, if it has ever been brought about at all, has always been brought about by bankruptcy; sometimes by an avowed one, but always by a real one, though frequently by a pretend payment.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter III, Part V, p. 1012.
2 months 1 week ago

Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

The thirst after happiness is never extinguished in the heart of man.

0
0
Source
source
IX
4 months 2 weeks ago

I shall have to test the theory of my father Parmenides, and contend forcibly that after a fashion not-being is and on the other hand in a sense being is not. For unless these statements are either disproved or accepted, no one who speaks about false words, or false opinion whether images or likenesses or imitations or appearances about the arts which have to do with them, can ever help being forced to contradict himself and make himself ridiculous.

0
0

The capitalist system of production is an economic democracy in which every penny gives a right to vote. The consumers are the sovereign people. The capitalists, the entrepreneurs, and the farmers are the people's mandatories. If they do not obey, if they fail to produce, at the lowest possible cost, what the consumers are asking for, they lose their office. Their task is service to the consumer. Profit and loss are the instruments by means of which the consumers keep a tight rein on all business activities.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter I: Profit Management, § 1: The Operation of The Market Mechanism
4 months 1 week ago

A wise man, who puts himself under the government of reason, will be able to receive an injury with calmness, and to treat the person who committed it with lenity; for he will rank injuries among the casual events of life, and will prudently reflect that he can no more stop the natural current of human passions, than he can curb the stormy winds.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

No man's error becomes his own Law; nor obliges him to persist in it.

0
0
Source
source
The Second Part, Chapter 26, p. 144
3 months 2 weeks ago

I shall need only myself to be happy.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in The prophetic voice, 1758-1778 by Lester G. Crocke, p. 148.
2 months 4 days ago

There is only one thing that can form a bond between men, and that is gratitude...we cannot give someone else greater power over us than we have ourselves.

0
0
Source
source
No. 104. (Usbek writing to Ibben)
3 months 3 weeks ago

The entire lower world was created in the likeness of the higher world. All that exists in the higher world appears like an image in this lower world; yet all this is but One.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

Is this not an advantage? Is it not a sign of immense progress that the masses should have "ideas," that is to say, should be cultured? By no means. The "ideas" of the average man are not genuine ideas, nor is their possession culture. An idea is a putting truth in checkmate. Whoever wishes to have ideas must first prepare himself to desire truth and to accept the rules of the game imposed by it. It is no use speaking of ideas when there is no acceptance of a higher authority to regulate them, a series of standards to which it is possible to appeal in a discussion. These standards are the principles on which culture rests.

0
0
Source
source
Chap. VIII: The Masses Intervene In Everything, And Why Their Intervention Is Solely By Violence
2 months ago

There is no getting around authority and power, and no getting around the intellectual's relationship to them. How does the intellectual address authority: as a professional supplicant or as its unrewarded, amateurish conscience?

0
0
Source
source
p. 83
1 month 2 weeks ago

Today's terrorism is not the product of a traditional history of anarchism, nihilism, or fanaticism. It is instead the contemporary partner of globalization.

0
0
Source
source
The Spirit of Terrorism (2003) "The Violence of the Global"
3 weeks ago

When I was 15 years old, or 16, I carried around on the streets of Brooklyn a paperback copy of Plato's Republic, front cover facing outward. I had read only some of it and understood less, but I was excited by it and knew it was something wonderful.

0
0
Source
source
The Examined Life
2 months 2 weeks ago

Marriage is a union between two persons - one man and one woman. A woman who has given herself up to one, can not give herself up to a second, for her whole dignity requires that she should belong only to this one.

0
0
Source
source
p. 406
4 months 2 weeks ago

There were many special laws affecting the several kings inscribed about the temples, but the most important was the following: They were not to take up arms against one another, and they were all to come to the rescue if any one in any of their cities attempted to overthrow the royal house; like their ancestors, they were to deliberate in common about war and other matters, giving the supremacy to the descendants of Atlas. And the king was not to have the power of life and death over any of his kinsmen unless he had the assent of the majority of the ten.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

There lay certitude; there, in the daily round. All the rest hung on mere threads and trivial contingencies; you couldn't waste your time on it. The thing was to do your job as it should be done.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.

0
0
Source
source
"The Art of Controversy" as translated by T. Bailey Saunders

Rollers on the beach, wind in the pines, the slow flapping of herons across sand dunes, drown out the hectic rhythms of city and suburb, time tables and schedules. One falls under their spell, relaxes, stretches out prone. One becomes, in fact, like the element on which one lies, flattened by the sea; bare, open, empty as the beach, erased by today's tides of all yesterday's scribblings.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

Writing turned a spotlight on the high, dim Sierras of speech; writing was the visualization of acoustic space. It lit up the dark.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 14)
3 months 2 weeks ago

Always remember that it is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood: there will always be some who misunderstand you.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

Sleep is a death; oh, make me try By sleeping what it is to die, And as gently lay my head On my grave as now my bed.

0
0
Source
source
Section 12
2 months 2 weeks ago

We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything.

0
0

A city that outdistances Man's walking powers is a trap for Man. It threatens to become a prison from which he cannot escape unless he has mechanical means of transport, the thoroughfares for carrying these, and the purchasing power for commanding the use of artificial means of communication.

0
0
Source
source
"Has Man's Metropolitan Environment Any Precedents?", Ekistics, vol. 22, no. 133 (December 1966) pp. 385-7
3 months 2 weeks ago

In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

0
0
Source
source
Quotation and Originality
3 months 2 weeks ago

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 60-61
3 months 2 weeks ago

All poetry is misrepresentation.

0
0
Source
source
An Aphorism attributed to him according to John Stuart Mill (see Mill's essay On Bentham and Coleridge in Utilitarianism edt. by Mary Warnock p. 123).
2 months 1 week ago

Men looke not at the greatnesse of the evill past, but the greatnesse of the good to follow.

0
0
Source
source
The First Part, Chapter 15, p. 76 (Italics as per text)
4 months 2 weeks ago
The man who does not wish to belong to the mass needs only to cease taking himself easily; let him follow his conscience, which calls to him: Be your self! All you are now doing, thinking, desiring, is not you yourself.
0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia