Skip to main content
2 weeks 2 days ago

If you want to influence him at all, you must do more than merely talk to him ; you must fashion him, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than you wish him to will.

0
0
Source
source
Addresses to the German Nation (1807), Second Address : "The General Nature of the New Education". Chicago and London, The Open Court Publishing Company, 1922, p. 21
1 month 2 weeks ago

If a given science accidentally reached its goal, this would by no means stop the workers in the field, who would be driven past their goal by the sheer momentum of the illusion of unlimited progress.

0
0
Source
source
p. 55
1 week 5 days ago

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

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

Bad times have a scientific value. [...] We learn geology the morning after the earthquake, on ghastly diagrams of cloven mountains, upheaved plains, and the dry bed of the sea.

0
0
Source
source
Considerations by the Way
1 week 5 days ago

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

0
0
1 week ago

The Thou encounters me by grace - it cannot be found by seeking. But that I speak the basic word to it is a deed of my whole being, is my essential deed.

0
0
1 week 2 days ago

Jesus said to His disciples, "Compare me to someone and tell Me whom I am like." Simon Peter said to Him, "You are like a righteous angel." Matthew said to Him, "You are like a wise philosopher." Thomas said to Him, "Master, my mouth is wholly incapable of saying whom You are like." Jesus said, "I am not your master. Because you have drunk, you have become intoxicated by the bubbling spring which I have measured out." And He took him and withdrew and told him three things. When Thomas returned to his companions, they asked him, "What did Jesus say to you?" Thomas said to them, "If I tell you one of the things which he told me, you will pick up stones and throw them at me; a fire will come out of the stones and burn you up."

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

These effects of mescalin are the sort of effects you could expect to follow the administration of a drug having the power to impair the efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve. When the brain runs out of sugar, the undernourished ego grows weak, can't be bothered to undertake the necessary chores, and loses all interest in those spatial and temporal relationships which mean so much to an organism bent on getting on in the world. As Mind at Large seeps past the no longer watertight valve, all kinds of biologically useless things start to happen. ... Other persons discover a world of visionary beauty. To others again is revealed the glory, the infinite value and meaningfulness of naked existence, of the given, unconceptualized event.

0
0
Source
source
describing his experiment with mescaline, p. 26
1 month 2 weeks ago

The church is a sort of hospital for men's souls, and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies. Those who are taken into it live like pensioners in their Retreat or Sailors' Snug Harbor, where you may see a row of religious cripples sitting outside in sunny weather.

0
0
Source
source
Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 43
3 weeks 2 days ago

To a body of infinite size there can be ascribed neither centre nor boundary... Thus the Earth no more than any other world is at the centre.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

One can forget everything, everything, only not oneself, one's own being.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

Resting on your laurels is as dangerous as resting when you are walking in the snow. You doze off and die in your sleep.

0
0
Source
source
p. 35e
1 week 5 days ago

I don't understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday.

0
0
1 week 5 days ago

I'd rather offer my life as a sacrifice than be necessary to anything.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

"Milton was right," said my Teacher. "The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words 'Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.' There is always something they insist on keeping even at the price of misery."

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 9
1 month 2 weeks ago

Many conservative writers have contended that the tendency to equality in modern social movements is the expression of envy. In this way they seek to discredit this trend, attributing it to collectively harmful impulses.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter IX, Section 82, p. 538
1 week 5 days ago

It has never been in my power to study anything, - mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as a study of semeiotic.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Victoria
1 month 1 week ago

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language.

0
0
Source
source
§ 109
1 month 2 weeks ago

Ironclads and Maxim guns must be the ultimate arbiters of metaphysical truth.

0
0
Source
source
Quoted in The Edinburgh Review: Or Critical Journal, Vol. 209 (1909), p. 387
1 month 2 weeks ago

The standard of permanent Christianity must be kept clear in our minds and it is against that standard that we must test all contemporary thought. In fact, we must at all costs not move with the times.

0
0
Source
source
"Christian Apologetics" (1945), p. 92
1 month 2 weeks ago

Nature does nothing in vain, and in the use of means to her goals she is not prodigal. Her giving to man reason and the freedom of the will which depends upon it is clear indication of her purpose. Man accordingly was not to be guided by instinct, not nurtured and instructed with ready-made knowledge; rather, he should bring forth everything out of his own resources.

0
0
Source
source
Third Thesis
1 month 2 weeks ago

A metaphysics of morals is therefore indispensably necessary, not merely because of a motive to speculation - for investigating the source of the practical basic principles that lie a priori in our reason - but also because morals themselves remain subject to all sorts of corruption as long as we are without that clue and supreme norm by which to appraise them correctly...

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.

0
0
Source
source
(6.44) Variant translation: The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is. Original German: Nicht wie die Welt ist, ist das Mystische, sondern dass sie ist.
1 week 1 day ago

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

Each pursues his private interest and only his private interest; and thereby serves the private interests of all, the general interest, without willing it or knowing it. The real point is not that each individual's pursuit of his private interest promotes the totality of private interests, the general interest. One could just as well deduce from this abstract phrase that each individual reciprocally blocks the assertion of the others' interests, so that, instead of a general affirmation, this war of all against all produces a general negation.

0
0
Source
source
Notebook I, The Chapter on Money, p. 76.
2 weeks 3 days ago

A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

Every revolutionary ends as an oppressor or a heretic.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction
2 months 6 days ago

The wise find pleasure in water; the virtuous find pleasure in hills. The wise are active; the virtuous are tranquil. The wise are joyful; the virtuous are long-lived.

0
0
2 months 3 days ago

Medicine considers the human body as to the means by which it is cured and by which it is driven away from health.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

If you die, I will lie down beside you and I will stay there until the end, without eating or drinking, you will rot in my arms and I will love you as carcass: for you love nothing if you do not love everything.

0
0
Source
source
Act 10, sc. 2
3 weeks 2 days ago

Indeed, the drunken man while in that condition does not know the definition of drunkenness nor the scientific account of it; he has not the very least scientific knowledge of it. The sober man, on the other hand, knows the definition of drunkenness and its basis, yet he is not drunk in the very least. Again the doctor, when he is himself ill, knows the definition and causes of health and the remedies which restore it, and yet is lacking in health. Similarly there is a difference between knowing the true nature and causes and conditions of the ascetic life and actually leading such a life and forsaking the world.

0
0
Source
source
III. The Classes of Seekers, p. 47.
1 month 2 weeks ago

No regulation of commerce can increase the quantity of industry in any society beyond what its capital can maintain. It can only divert a part of it into a direction into which it might not otherwise have gone; and it is by no means certain that this artificial direction is likely to be more advantageous to the society than that into which it would have gone of its own accord. Every individual is continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment for whatever capital he can command. It is his own advantage, indeed, and not that of the society, which he has in his view. But the study of his own advantage naturally, or rather necessarily leads him to prefer that employment which is most advantageous to the society.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter II, p. 486.
2 weeks 4 days ago

Internet access determines opportunity, yet it's treated as luxury not necessity. Homework requires internet; job applications are online; services move digital. The digital divide isn't technological - it's economic. Excluding poor people from digital life is policy choice.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

The cultural treasures of the past, believed to be dead, are being made to speak, in the course of which it turns out that they propose things altogether different than what had been thought.

0
0
Source
source
"Martin Heidegger at Eighty," in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays (1978) by Michael Murray, p. 294
2 months 2 weeks ago

A fire eater must eat fire even if he has to kindle it himself.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

What cannot be imagined cannot even be talked about.

0
0
Source
source
Journal entry (12 October 1916), p. 84e
1 month 2 weeks ago

The society adopts neither rites nor priesthood, and it will never lose sight of the resolution not to advance any thing as a society inconvenient to any sect or sects, in any time or country, and under any government. It will be seen that it is so much the more easy for the society to keep within this circle, because, that the dogmas of the Theophilanthropists are those upon which all the sects have agreed, that their moral is.that upon which there has never been the least dissent; and that the name they have taken expresses the double end of all the sects, that of leading to the adoration of God and love of man.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction
2 weeks 2 days ago

That the uneducated and the ill-educated should think the hypothesis that all races of beings, man inclusive, may in process of time have been evolved from the simplest monad, a ludicrous one, is not to be wondered at. But for the physiologist, who knows that every individual being is so evolved-who knows, further, that in their earliest condition the germs of all plants and animals whatever are so similar, "that there is no appreciable distinction amongst them, which would enable it to be determined whether a particular molecule is the germ of a Conferva or of an Oak, of a Zoophyte or of a Man";-for him to make a difficulty of the matter is inexcusable.

0
0
Source
source
Spencer here references William Benjamin Carpenter, Principles of Comparative Physiology see p. 473
2 months 2 weeks ago

Man is a synthesis of psyche and body, but he is also a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal. In the former, the two factors are psyche and body, and spirit is the third, yet in such a way that one can speak of a synthesis only when the spirit is posited. The latter synthesis has only two factors, the temporal and the eternal. Where is the third factor? And if there is no third factor, there really is no synthesis, for a synthesis that is a contradiction cannot be completed as a synthesis without a third factor, because the fact that the synthesis is a contradiction asserts that it is not. What, then, is the temporal?

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

Wherever Macdonald sits, there is the head of the table.

0
0
Source
source
par. 37
2 days ago

Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith; and in this sense atheism is a purification. I have to be an atheist with that part of myself which is not made for God. Among those in whom the supernatural part of themselves has not been awakened, the atheists are right and the believers wrong.

0
0
Source
source
"Faiths of Meditation; Contemplation of the divine" as translated in The Simone Weil Reader (1957) edited by George A. Panichas, p. 417

The owl of Minerva first begins her flight with the onset of dusk.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

It was the addition of status that brought the little things: a more comfortable seat here, a better cut of meat there, a shorter wait in line at the other place. To the philosophical mind, these items might seem scarcely worth any great trouble to acquire.Yet no one, however philosophical, could give up those privileges, once acquired, without a pang. That was the point.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

Our concern is solely with the basic structure of society and its major institutions and therefore with the standard cases of social justice.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter II, Section 10, pg. 58
1 week 4 days ago

Once the first radical attack on private property has been launched, the proletariat will find itself forced to go ever further, to concentrate increasingly in the hands of the state all capital, all agriculture, all transport, all trade. All the foregoing measures are directed to this end; and they will become practicable and feasible, capable of producing their centralizing effects to precisely the degree that the proletariat, through its labor, multiplies the country's productive forces.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

The logical picture of the facts is the thought.

0
0
Source
source
(3) Original German: Das logische Bild der Tatsachen ist der Gedanke.
1 week 5 days ago

I define a Sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its Interpretant, that the latter is thereby mediately determined by the former.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Victoria, Lady Welby (1908) SS 80-81

Although the formulations of science now offer the most advanced knowledge of nature, men continue to use obsolete forms of thought long discarded by scientific theory. In so far as these obsolete forms are superfluous for science, the fact that they persist violated the principle of the economy of thought, that characteristic trait of the bourgeois temper.

0
0
Source
source
p. 133.
1 week 5 days ago

Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia