Skip to main content
1 month 1 week ago

We will freedom for freedom's sake, in and through particular circumstances. And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely upon the freedom of others and that the freedom of others depends upon our own. Obviously, freedom as the definition of a man does not depend upon others, but as soon as there is a commitment, I am obliged to will the liberty of others at the same time as my own. I cannot make liberty my aim unless I make that of others equally my aim.

0
0
Source
source
p. 52
4 weeks 1 day ago

Neither our distance from a preventable evil nor the number of other people who, in respect to that evil, are in the same situation as we are, lessens our obligation to mitigate or prevent that evil.

0
0
1 month 4 days ago

Nietzsche understands the aesthetic state of the observer and recipient on the basis of the state of the creator. Thus the effect of the artwork is nothing else than a reawakening of the creator's state in the one who enjoys the artwork. Observation of art follows in the wake of creation. Nietzsche says (SM, 821), "-the effect of artworks is arousal of the art-creating state, rapture."

0
0
Source
source
p. 117
1 month 1 week ago

There seem, however, to be two cases in which it will generally be advantageous to lay some burden upon foreign, for the encouragement of domestic industry. The first is, when some particular sort of industry is necessary for the defence of the country. The defence of Great Britain, for example, depends very much upon the number of its sailors and shipping. The act of navigation, therefore, very properly endeavours to give the sailors and shipping of Great Britain the monopoly of the trade of their own country, in some cases, by absolute prohibitions, and in others by heavy burdens upon the shipping of foreign countries.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter II
4 days ago

This morning I thought, hence lost my bearings, for a good quarter of an hour.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

Unlike the masses, intellectuals have a taste for rationality and an interest in facts.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 5 (p. 43)
1 month 2 weeks ago

Libraries are as the shrine where all the relics of the ancient saints, full of true virtue, and that without delusion or imposture, are preserved and reposed.

0
0
4 days ago

At different degrees, everything is pathology, except for indifference.

0
0
2 weeks 6 days ago

True and perfect Friendship is, to make one heart and mind of many hearts and bodies.

0
0
4 days ago

Everyone is mistaken, everyone lives in illusion. At best, we can admit a scale of fictions, a hierarchy of unrealities, giving preference to one rather than to another; but to choose, no, definitely not that...

0
0
4 days ago

The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.

0
0

The consciousness of a general idea has a certain "unity of the ego" in it, which is identical when it passes from one mind to another. It is, therefore, quite analogous to a person, and indeed, a person is only a particular kind of general idea.

0
0
Source
source
Man's Glassy Essence in The Monist, Vol. III, No. 1
1 month 2 weeks ago

States as great engines move slowly.

0
0
Source
source
Book II
1 month 1 week ago

There cannot any one moral Rule be propos'd, whereof a Man may not justly demand a Reason.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, Ch. 3, sec. 4

A scientist can hardly meet with anything more undesirable than to have the foundations give way just as the work is finished. I was put in this position by a letter from Mr. Bertrand Russell when the work was nearly through the press.

0
0
Source
source
Note in the appendix of Grundlagen der Arithmetik (Vol. 2) after Frege had received a letter of Bertrand Russell in which Russell had explained his discovery of, what is now known as, Russell's paradox.

All metaphysical theories are inconclusively vulnerable to positivist attack.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 9, p. 127

It is a matter of perfect indifference where a thing originated; the only question is: "Is it true in and for itself?" Many think that by pronouncing a doctrine to be Neo-Platonic, they have ipso facto banished it from Christianity. Whether a Christian doctrine stands exactly thus or thus in the Bible, the point to which the exegetical scholars of modern times devote all their attention is not the only question. The Letter kills, the Spirit makes alive: this they say themselves, yet pervert the sentiment by taking the Understanding for the Spirit.

0
0
Source
source
Pt. III, sec. 3, ch. 2 Lectures on the History of History Vol 1 p. 344 John Sibree translation (1857), 1914
1 month 1 week ago

In our monogamous part of the world, to marry means to halve one's rights and double one's duties.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 2, Ch. 27, § 370 Variant translation: To marry is to halve your rights and double your duties.
1 month 2 weeks ago

Once we have tasted the sweetness of what is spiritual, the pleasures of the world will have no attraction for us. If we disregard the shadows of things, then we will penetrate their inner substance.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

Only a male intellect clouded by the sexual drive could call the stunted, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped and short-legged sex the fair sex.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 2, Ch. 27, § 369
1 month 1 week ago

The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,-a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.

0
0
Source
source
par. 5
1 month 1 week ago

Good bye, proud world! I'm going home; Thou art not my friend; I am not thine.

0
0
Source
source
Good-bye, st. 1
4 days ago

Self-knowledge - the bitterest knowledge of all and also the kind we cultivate least: what is the use of catching ourselves out, morning to night, in the act of illusion, pitilessly tracing each act back to its root, and losing case after case before our own tribunal?

0
0

While they denounce as subversive anarchy signs of independent thought, of thinking for themselves on the part of others lest such thought disturb the conditions by which they profit, they think quite literally for themselves, that is of themselves.

0
0
Source
source
Human Nature and Conduct (1921) Part 1 Section IV.
1 month 4 days ago

It is not by recognizing the want of courage in someone else that you acquire courage yourself.

0
0
Source
source
p. 44e
1 month 1 week ago

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

0
0
Source
source
Worship
4 days ago

What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.

0
0
1 month 3 days ago

The most defenseless tenderness and the bloodiest of powers have a similar need of confession. Western man has become a confessing animal.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. I, p. 59
1 month 1 week ago

But petitional prayer is only one department of prayer; and if we take the word in the wider sense as meaning every kind of inward communion or conversation with the power recognized as divine, we can easily see that scientific criticism leaves it untouched. Prayer in this wide sense is the very soul and essence of religion.

0
0
Source
source
Lecture XIX, "Other Characteristics"
1 month 1 week ago

Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 6: Machines and the Emotions
1 month 2 weeks ago

A Christian has no need of any law in order to be saved, since through faith we are free from every law. Thus all the acts of a Christian are done spontaneously, out of a sense of pure liberty. As Christians we do not seek our own advantage or salvation because we are already fully satisfied and saved by God's grace through faith. Now our only motive is to do that which is pleasing to God.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 75-76
1 month 1 week ago

The commonest and cheapest sounds, as the barking of a dog, produce the same effect on fresh and healthy ears that the rarest music does. It depends on your appetite for sound. Just as a crust is sweeter to a healthy appetite than confectionery to a pampered or diseased one.

0
0
Source
source
December 27, 1857
4 weeks 1 day ago

For a thinking man is where Wisdom is at home.

0
0
Source
source
Ahunuvaiti Gatha; Yasna 30, 9.

True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction
1 month 1 week ago

So monstrous is the making and keeping them slaves at all, abstracted from the barbarous usage they suffer, and the many evils attending the practice; as selling husbands away from wives, children from parents, and from each other, in violation of sacred and natural ties; and opening the way for adulteries, incests, and many shocking consequences, for all of which the guilty Masters must answer to the final Judge.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

Wherever you are it is your own friends who make your world.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in The Thought and Character of William James (1935) by Ralph Barton Perry, Vol. II, ch. 91
1 month 1 week ago

I have been writing & speaking what were once called novelties, for twenty five or thirty years, & have not now one disciple. Why? Not that what I said was not true; not that it has not found intelligent receivers but because it did not go from any wish in me to bring men to me, but to themselves. I delight in driving them from me. What could I do, if they came to me? - they would interrupt and encumber me. This is my boast that I have no school & no follower. I should account it a measure of the impurity of insight, if it did not create independence.

0
0
Source
source
April 1859
1 month 1 week ago

The deadliest enemies of nations are not their foreign foes; they always dwell within their borders. And from these internal enemies civilization is always in need of being saved. The nation blest above all nations is she in whom the civic genius of the people does the saving day by day, by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans or empty quacks.

0
0
Source
source
Robert Gould Shaw: Oration upon the Unveiling of the Shaw Monument
1 month 1 week ago

Go where we will on the surface of things, men have been there before us.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

0
0
Source
source
Section 1, paragraph 14.
1 month 4 weeks ago

Much learning does not teach understanding.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

Nothing is yet in its true form.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

Correct and accurate conclusions may be arrived at if we carefully observe the relation of the spheres of concepts, and only conclude that one sphere is contained in a third sphere, when we have clearly seen that this first sphere is contained in a second, which in its turn is contained in the third. On the other hand, the art of sophistry lies in casting only a superficial glance at the relations of the spheres of the concepts, and then manipulating these relations to suit our purposes, generally in the following way: - When the sphere of an observed concept lies partly within that of another concept, and partly within a third altogether different sphere, we treat it as if it lay entirely within the one or the other, as may suit our purpose.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. I, Ch. 10, as translated by R. B. Haldane
1 month 1 week ago

The love of power is a part of human nature, but power-philosophies are, in a certain precise sense, insane. The existence of the external world, both that of matter and of other human beings, is a datum, which may be humiliating to a certain kind of pride, but can only be denied by a madman. Men who allow their love of power to give them a distorted view of the world are to be found in every asylum: one man will think he is Governor of the Bank of England, another will think he is the King, and yet another will think he is God. Highly similar delusions, if expressed by educated men in obscure language, lead to professorships in philosophy; and if expressed by emotional men in eloquent language, lead to dictatorships. Certified lunatics are shut up because of the proneness to violence when their pretensions are questioned; the uncertified variety are given control of powerful armies, and can inflict death and disaster upon all sane men within their reach.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 16: Power philosophies
1 week 6 days ago

For the first time in sixty years, the priests, the old aristocracy and the people met in a common sentiment-a feeling of revenge, it is true, and not of affection; but even that is a great thing in politics, where a community of hatred is almost always the foundation of friendships.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

Extreme pride or dejection indicates extreme ignorance of self.

0
0
Source
source
Part IV, Prop. LV
1 month 1 week ago

Since it is always the same person whose mind thinks, wills, and judges, the autonomous nature of these activities has created great difficulties. Reason's inability to move the will, plus the fact that thinking can only "understand" what is past what neither remove it nor "rejuvenate it" ... have led to the various doctrines asserting the mind's impotence and the force of the irrational, in brief to Hume's famous dictum that "Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions," that is, to a rather simple-minded reversal of the Platonic notion of reason's uncontested rulership in the household of the soul. What is so remarkable in all these theories and doctrines is their implicit monism, the claim that behind the obvious multiplicity of the world's appearances and, even more pertinently to our context, behind the obvious plurality of man's faculties and abilities, there must exist a oneness - the old hen pan, "the all is one" - either a single source or a single ruler.

0
0
1 week 3 days ago

Nonprofit boards require wealth and connections, ensuring rich people control organizations serving poor communities. Decision-making power concentrates among those least affected by problems. Boards become gentry philanthropy, maintaining class hierarchy while claiming service. The helped have no voice in helping.

0
0
1 month 3 days ago

All affected can accept the consequences and the side effects that [the norm's] general observance can be anticipated to have for the satisfaction of everyone's interests, and the consequences are preferred to those of known alternative possibilities for regulation.

0
0
Source
source
p. 65

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia