Skip to main content
1 month 4 weeks ago

I possess no weapon but love. With that I have come to do battle. Help me!

0
0
1 month 4 weeks ago

Natural Groups are best described, not by any definition which marks their boundaries, but by a 'Type' which marks their centre. The Type of any natural group is an example which possesses in a marked degree all the leading characters of the class.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

Socrates' way of life is the consequence of his recognition that we can know what it is that we do not know about the most important things and that we are by nature obliged to seek that knowledge.

0
0
Source
source
Western Civ, p. 18.
4 months 1 week ago

Positivism ... implies the double falsehood that no interpretation is needed, and that it is not needed because the story which the positivist writer tells, such as it is, is obvious. The story he or she tells is usually a bad one, and its being obvious only means that it is familiar.

0
0
Source
source
p. 12
5 months 4 weeks ago

I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.

0
0
Source
source
Books
5 months 4 weeks ago

Alike in the highest regions of speculation and in the smaller practical concerns of daily life, her mind was the same perfect instrument, piercing to the very heart and marrow of the matter; always seizing the essential idea or principle. The same exactness and rapidity of operation, pervading as it did her sensitive as well as her mental faculties, would, with her gifts of feeling and imagination, have fitted her to be a consummate artist, as her fiery and tender soul and her vigorous eloquence would certainly have made her a great orator, and her profound knowledge of human nature and discernment and sagacity in practical life, would, in the times when such a carrière was open to women, have made her eminent among the rulers of mankind. Her intellectual gifts did but minister to a moral character at once the noblest and the best balanced which I have ever met with in life.

0
0
Source
source
(pp. 186-187)
1 month 3 weeks ago

Liberalism, with its contradictions and compromises, existed for Donoso Cortés only in that short interim period in which it was possible to answer the question "Christ or Barabbas?" with a proposal to adjourn or appoint a commission of investigation.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

Martyrs create faith, faith does not create martyrs.

0
0
6 months 4 weeks ago

And thus Christianity is played in, Christendom. Artists in dramatic costumes make their appearance in artistic buildings-there really is no danger at all, anything but that: the teacher is a royal functionary, steadily promoted, making a career-and how he dramatically plays Christianity, in short, he plays comedy. He lectures about renunciation, but he himself is being steadily promoted; he teaches all that about despising worldly titles and rank, but he himself is making a career.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better.

0
0
Source
source
Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.
5 months 4 weeks ago

We love those who hate our enemies, and if we had no enemies there would be very few people whom we should love. All this, however, is only true so long as we are concerned solely with attitudes towards other human beings. You might regard the soil as your enemy because it yields reluctantly a niggardly subsistence. You might regard Mother Nature in general as your enemy, and envisage human life as a struggle to get the better of Mother Nature. If men viewed life in this way, cooperation of the whole human race would become easy. And men could easily be brought to view life in this way if schools, newspapers, and politicians devoted themselves to this end. But schools are out to teach patriotism; newspapers are out to stir up excitement; and politicians are out to get re-elected. None of the three, therefore, can do anything towards saving the human race from reciprocal suicide.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

The universe is flux, life is opinion. The universe is (constant) change, life is (mere) presumption.

0
0
Source
source
(Analogous translation) The universe is transformation: life is opinion. (Translation by George Long)
7 months 1 day ago
The objective of all human arrangements is through distracting one's thoughts to cease to be aware of life.
0
0

Why should we divide the sensitive principle which thinks in man? ...For a thing that is divided can no longer without absurdity be regarded as indivisible.

0
0
4 months 4 weeks ago

Nor is there any embarrassment in the fact that we're ridiculous, isn't it true? For it's actually so, we are ridiculous, light-minded, with bad habits, we're bored, we don't know how to look, how to understand, we're all like that, all, you, and I, and they! Now, you're not offended when I tell you to your face that you're ridiculous? And if so, aren't you material? You know, in my opinion it's sometimes even good to be ridiculous, if not better: we can the sooner forgive each other, the sooner humble ourselves; we can't understand everything at once, we can't start right out with perfection! To achieve perfection, one must first begin by not understanding many things! And if we understand too quickly, we may not understand well. This I tell you, you, who have already been able to understand. .. and not understand ... so much. I'm not afraid for you now.

0
0
Source
source
Part 4, Chapter ?
4 months 3 weeks ago

In that very hour he became overjoyed in the holy spirit and said: “I publicly praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have carefully hidden these things from wise and intellectual ones and have revealed them to young children. Yes, O Father, because this is the way you approved.

0
0
Source
source
Luke 10:21, New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures
5 months 3 weeks ago

Is it just I who cannot found a school, or can a philosopher never do so?

0
0
Source
source
p. 69e
2 months 3 weeks ago

One whose intentions and thoughts are cultivated will disregard wealth and nobility. One whose greatest concern is for the Way and righteousness will take lightly kings and dukes. It is simply that when one examines oneself on the inside, external goods carry little weight. A saying goes, "The gentleman makes things his servants. The petty man is servant to things.

0
0
Source
source
Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy (2001), p. 263
5 months 4 weeks ago

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.

0
0
Source
source
Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 177
5 months 2 weeks ago

There were two brothers called Both and Either; perceiving Either was a good, understanding, busy fellow, and Both a silly fellow and good for little, Philip said, "Either is both, and Both is neither."

0
0
Source
source
35 Philip
2 months 6 days ago

How many of us are able to distinguish between the odors of noon and midnight, or of winter and summer, or of a windy spell and a still one? If man is so generally less happy in the cities than in the country, it is because all these variations and nuances of sight and smell and sound are less clearly marked and lost in the general monotony of gray walls and cement pavements.

0
0
Source
source
p. 129
4 months 2 weeks ago

The three qualities of space and time reciprocally affect and qualify one another in experience. Space is inane save as occupied with active volumes. Pauses are holes when they do not accentuate masses and define figures as individuals. Extension sprawls and finally benumbs if it does not interact with place so as to assume intelligible distribution. Mass is nothing fixed. It contracts and expands, asserts and yields, according to its relations to other spatial and enduring things.... these are then the common properties of the matter of arts because there are general conditions without which an experience is not possible. As we saw earlier, the basic condition is felt relationship between doing and undergoing as the organism and environment interact.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 220-21
4 months 3 weeks ago

It is the most advanced industrial society which feels most directly threatened by the rebellion, because it is here that the social necessity of repression and alienation, of servitude and heteronomy is most transparently unnecessary, and unproductive in terms of human progress. Therefore the cruelty and violence mobilized in the struggle against the threat, therefore the monotonous regularity with which the people are made familiar with, and accustomed to inhuman attitudes and behavior-to wholesale killing as patriotic act.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

Human intuitions are systematically biased. Evolutionary psychology explains how our moral intuitions and the rationalisations they spawn have been shaped by millennia of natural selection to maximise the inclusive fitness of our genes, not to track the welfare of other sentient beings impartially conceived. Many human cultures have found nothing intuitively wrong with aggressive warfare, slavery, wife-beating, infanticide or female genital mutilation. Ultimately, folk morality is a doomed enterprise as hopeless as folk physics. A mature posthuman ethics, I'd argue, must be committed to the well-being of all sentient life; and mature posthuman technology offers the means to deliver that commitment.

0
0
Source
source
"Post-Darwinian Ethics?", H+ Magazine, May 2009
2 months 3 weeks ago

Today we have arrived at a point when the three principles [of modern resistance: 1. measure of efficacy, 2. the form of political and military organization correspond to the current forms of economic and social production, 3. democracy and freedom] coincide. The distributed network structure provides the model for an absolutely democratic organization that corresponds to the dominant forms of economic and social production and is also the most powerful weapon against the ruling power structure.

0
0
Source
source
88
5 months 3 weeks ago

There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 11
4 months 2 weeks ago

Egoism you say? There is nothing more universal than the individual, for what is the property of each is the property of all. Each man is worth more than the whole of humanity, nor will it do to sacrifice each to all save in so far as all sacrifice themselves to each. That which we call egoism is the principle of psychic gravity, the necessary postulate. "Love thy neighbor as thyself," we are told, the presupposition being that each man loves himself; and it is not said "Love thyself." And nevertheless, we do not know how to love ourselves.

0
0
5 months 4 weeks ago

Landlords... grow richer, as it were in their sleep, without working, risking, or economizing.

0
0
Source
source
Book V, Chapter 1, Section 5
4 months 2 weeks ago

There are, in fact, people who appear to think only with the brain, or with whatever may be the specific thinking organ; while others think with all the body and all the soul, with the blood, with the marrow of the bones, with the heart, with the lungs, with the belly, with the life. And the people who think only with the brain develop into definition-mongers; they become the professionals of thought.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.

0
0
Source
source
"Civil Disobedience"
4 months 4 weeks ago

There are only Epicureans, either crude or refined; Christ was the most refined.

0
0
Source
source
Act I.
2 months 1 week ago

Why then do you occupy me with the words rather than with the works of wisdom? Make me braver, make me calmer, make me the equal of Fortune, make me her superior.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

The true Church of England, at this moment, lies in the Editors of its Newspapers. These preach to the people daily, weekly; admonishing kings themselves; advising peace or war, with an authority which only the first Reformers, and a long-past class of Popes, were possessed of; inflicting moral censure; imparting moral encouragement, consolation, edification; in all ways diligently "administering the Discipline of the Church."

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

A man perfects himself by work much more than by reading.

0
0
3 months 2 days ago

Whatever arises from a just situation by just steps is itself just.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 7 : Distributive Justice, Section I, The Entitlement Theory, p. 151
2 months 6 days ago

Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Values of the Wise : Humanity's Highest Aspirations (2004) by Jason Merchey, p. 63
4 months 2 weeks ago

The bourgeoisie hides the fact that it is the bourgeoisie and thereby produces myth; revolution announces itself openly as revolution and thereby abolishes myth.

0
0
Source
source
p. 146
4 months 2 weeks ago

No one is guiltless...But no one is beyond the pale of human existence, provided he pays for his guilt.

0
0
6 months 4 weeks ago

Between God and man there is and remains an eternal, essential, qualitative difference. The paradoxical relationship (which, quite rightly, cannot be thought, but only believed) appears when God appoints a particular man to divine authority, in relation, be it carefully noted, to that which has entrusted to him.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

Only when they must choose between competing theories do scientists behave like philosophers.

0
0
Source
source
Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research?, Criticism and the growth of knowledge edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave
1 month 4 weeks ago

It has always been denied by the republican party in this country, that the Constitution had given the power of incorporation to Congress. On the establishment of the Bank of the United States, this was the great ground on which that establishment was combated; and the party prevailing supported it only on the argument of its being an incident to the power given them for raising money.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Dr. Maese, 1809. ME 12:231

We, on the contrary, now send to the Brahmans English clergymen and evangelical linen-weavers, in order out of sympathy to put them right, and to point out to them that they are created out of nothing, and that they ought to be grateful and pleased about it. But it is Just the same as if we fired a bullet at a cliff. " In India, our religions wIll never at any time take root; the ancient wisdom of the human race will not be supplanted by the events in Galilee. On the contrary, Indian Wisdom flows back to Europe, and will produce a fundamental change in our knowledge and thought.

0
0
Source
source
Schopenhauer, Arthur The world as will and representation. Translated from the German by E. F. J. Payne. New York, Dover Publications [c1969 - Volume I, & 63 p. 356-357. quoted in Londhe, S. (2008).
2 months 3 weeks ago

If the gist of the controversy were to be expressed in a single sentence, one might say that the mechanists represented the opposition of the natural sciences to philosophic interference, while the dialecticians stood for the supremacy of philosophy over the sciences and thus reflected the characteristic tendency of Soviet ideological development. The mechanists' outlook might be called negative, while the dialecticians ascribed immense importance to philosophy and regarded themselves as specialists. The mechanists, however, had a much better idea of what science was about. The dialecticians were ignoramuses in this sphere and confined themselves to general formulas about the philosophical need to "generalize" and unify the sciences; on the other hand, they knew more than the mechanists about the history of philosophy. (Eventually the party condemned both camps, and created a dialectical synthesis of both forms of ignorance.)

0
0
Source
source
(pg. 64)
2 months 1 week ago

So the wise man will develop virtue, if he may, in the midst of wealth, or, if not, in poverty; if possible, in his own country-if not, in exile; if possible, as a commander-if not, as a common soldier; if possible, in sound health-if not, enfeebled. Whatever fortune he finds, he will accomplish therefrom something noteworthy.

0
0
4 months 4 weeks ago

The history of philosophical system is the picture gallery of reason.

0
0
Source
source
Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), p. 68
4 months 2 weeks ago

Life is agid. Life is fulgid. Life is a burgeoning, a quickening of the dim primordial urge in the murky wastes of time. Life is what the least of us make most of us feel the least of us make the most of.

0
0
Source
source
Quine's response in 1988 when asked his philosophy of life. (He invented the word "agid".) It makes up the entire Chapter 54 in Quine in Dialogue (2008).
1 month 4 weeks ago

Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Francis Adrian Van der Kemp (30 July 1816), denouncing the doctrine of the Trinity.
3 months 3 weeks ago

The loss which is unknown is no loss at all.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 38

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia