Skip to main content

I could take a pile of words and drop them into a word container. Then I could reach in and grab a clump of words and line them up. Then I capitalize the first letter and put a period at the end.

An observer would read it and say “It’s just a bunch of random words that look like a sentence, but it doesn’t make any sense.”

Then I say: “It only has a message for those who believe.”

Then, if they are a "believer" they will start the process of piecing words together, extracting meaning, coming to conclusions.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

Woe to the book you can read without constantly wondering about the author!

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

Some decent regulated pre-eminence, some preference (not exclusive appropriation) given to birth, is neither unnatural, nor unjust, nor impolitic.

0
0
5 months 1 day ago

The oneness of the universe, and the oneness of each element of the universe, repeat themselves to the crack of doom in the creative advance from creature to creature, each creature including in itself the whole of history and exemplifying the self-identity of things and their mutual diversities.

0
0
Source
source
Pt. III, ch. 1, sec. 7.
6 months 2 weeks ago

"Then those people are right who say that Heaven and Hell are only states of mind?" "Hush," he said sternly. "Do not blaspheme. Hell is a state of mind - ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind - is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly."

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 9
2 months 2 weeks ago

Now the real fruits of human nature - the arts, sciences, great enterprises, lofty conceptions, manly virtues - are due especially to the state of war. In a word, we can say that blood is the manure of the plant we call genius.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter III, p. 29
4 months 4 weeks ago

With the conception that the Revolution was only a means of securing political power, it was inevitable that all revolutionary values should be subordinated to the needs of the Socialist State; indeed, exploited to further the security of the newly acquired governmental power.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them.

0
0
Source
source
Part III: Man and Himself, Ch. 16: Ideas Which Have Become Obsolete, p. 158
6 months 2 weeks ago

My sympathies are, of course, with the Government side, especially the Anarchists; for Anarchism seems to me more likely to lead to desirable social change than highly centralized, dictatorial Communism.

0
0
Source
source
Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War (1937) edited by Nancy Cunard and publisehd by the Left Review
3 months 3 weeks ago

[I]n the wake of the growth of the animal-rights movement, there has recently arisen a hitherto unfelt need to demonise and demean our non-human victims - and those who try to help them - now that our previously well-nigh unquestioned right to kill and exploit them is being challenged. Bloodsports enthusiasts, for instance, currently spend a lot of time cataloguing the alleged depredations of our victims on the environment. Recreational animal-killers go to extraordinarily lengths to avoid admitting that they themselves enjoy hunting and killing other creatures for fun. But then until a few years ago such rationalisations seemed scarcely called for. Selfish DNA had honed our intuitions so that the most agonising bloodshed seemed simply "natural". "The Post-Darwinian Transition", The Animal Rights Library, 1996

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

The religion and philosophy of the Hebrews are those of a wilder and ruder tribe, wanting the civility and intellectual refinements and subtlety of Vedic culture.

0
0
Source
source
A Tribute to Hinduism, 2008
5 months 1 week ago

Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction, sect. 4
4 months 1 week ago

A developed legal system, with elaborate common law rights, and supported by a system of natural justice, was the most precious legacy of our empire. If it were still permissible to defend colonization, I should justify it in terms of this bequest, and at the same time contrast the colonization of Africa with the Soviet "colonization" of eastern Europe, which has advanced not by the generation but by the destruction of law.

0
0
Source
source
A colonial inheritance once again cast off', The Times (6 September 1983), p. 10
5 months 1 week ago

A heart without music is like beauty without melancholy.

0
0
4 months 4 weeks ago

Temperament refers to the mode of reaction and is constitutional and not changeable; character is essentially formed by a person's experiences, especially of those in early life, and changeable, to some extent, by insights and new kinds of experiences. If a person has a choleric temperament, for instance, his mode of reaction is "quick and strong." But what he is quick or strong about depends on his kind of relatedness, his character. If he is a productive, just, loving person he will react quickly and strongly when he loves, when he is enraged by injustice, and when he is impressed by a new idea. If he is a destructive or sadistic character, he will be quick and strong in his destructiveness or in his cruelty. The confusion between temperament and character has had serious consequences for ethical theory. Preferences with regard to differences in temperament are mere matters of subjective taste. But differences in character are ethically of the most fundamental importance.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 3
7 months 1 week ago

Art, at least, teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for his existence in the order of nature.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.

0
0
Source
source
Interview (1960), Quoted in Susan Sontag's introduction to Barthes: Selected Writings, "Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes,"
4 months 4 weeks ago

The chief impression left by a study of Crowley's life and works is that he wasted an immense amount of time and energy trying to shock everyone he came into contact with, and his dislike of orthodoxy turned him into an unconsciously comic figure, like Don Quixote.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 153-154
5 months 3 days ago

The vanity of the passing world and love are the two fundamental and heart-penetrating notes of true poetry. And they are two notes of which neither can be sounded without causing the other to vibrate. The feeling of the vanity of the passing world kindles love in us, the only thing that triumphs over the vain and transitory, the only thing that fills life again and eternalizes it.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten before God? But even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not therefore: ye are of more value than many sparrows.

0
0
Source
source
12:6-7
6 months 2 weeks ago

Whatever is known to us by consciousness, is known beyond possibility of question. What one sees or feels, whether bodily or mentally, one cannot but be sure that one sees or feels. No science is required for the purpose of establishing such truths; no rules of art can render our knowledge of them more certain than it is in itself. There is no logic for this portion of our knowledge.

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

One cannot reduce terror by holding over the world the threat of what it most fears.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

Science is not distinguished from myth by science being literally true and myth only a type of poetic analogy. While their aims are different, both are composed of symbols we use to deal with a slippery world.

0
0
Source
source
Beyond the Last Thought: Freud's cigars and the long way round to Nirvana (p. 96)
6 months 2 weeks ago

All's well that ends well; which is the epitaph I should put on my tombstone if I were the last man left alive.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Lucy Donnely, April 22, 1906
7 months 2 weeks ago

Someone in despair despairs over something. So, for a moment, it seems, but only for a moment. That same instant the true despair shows itself, or despair in its true guise. In despairing over something he was really despairing over himself, and he wants now to be rid of himself.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

It's unfortunate that this has happened. No. It's fortunate that this has happened and I've remained unharmed by it-not shattered by the present or frightened of the future. It could have happened to anyone. But not everyone could have remained unharmed by it.

0
0
Source
source
IV, 49a
7 months 2 weeks ago
The objective of all human arrangements is through distracting one's thoughts to cease to be aware of life.
0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours Vijaya in Island.

0
0
Source
source
1962
5 months 2 weeks ago

What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it heaven.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself without reason.

0
0
2 months 6 days ago

The only progress I can see is progress in the organization. The ordinary human being does not live long enough to draw any substantial benefit from his own experience. And no one, it seems, can benefit by the experiences of others. Being both a father and teacher, I know we can teach our children nothing. We can transmit to them neither our knowledge of life nor of mathematics. Each must learn its lesson anew.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

Religion should be .... successively freed from all statutes based on history, and one purely moral religion rule over all, in order that God might be all in all. The veil must fall. The leading-string of sacred tradition with all its appendices becomes by degrees useless, and at last a fetter ... The humiliating difference between laymen and clergymen must disappear, and equality spring from true liberty. All this, however, must not be expected from an exterior revolution, which acts violently, and depends upon fortune In the principle of pure moral religion, which is a sort of divine revelation constantly taking place in the soul of man, must be sought the ground for a passage to the new order of things, which will be accomplished by slow and successive reforms.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in German Thought, From The Seven Years' War To Goethe's Death : Six Lectures (1880) by Karl Hillebrand, p. 208
6 months 2 weeks ago

The case of the conscience of Eichmann, which is admittedly complicated but is by no means unique, is scarcely comparable to the case of the German generals, one of whom, when asked at Nuremberg, "How was it possible that all of you honorable generals could continue to serve a murderer with such unquestioning loyalty?," replied that it was "not the task of a soldier to act as judge over his supreme commander. Let history do that or God in Heaven."

0
0
Source
source
Ch. VIII
6 months 2 weeks ago

The administration of the great system of the universe, however, the care of the universal happiness of all rational and sensible beings, is the business of God and not of man. To man is allotted a much humbler department, but one much more suitable to the weakness of his powers, and to the narrowness of his comprehension; the care of his own happiness, of that of his family, his friends, his country: that he is occupied in contemplating the more sublime, can never be an excuse for his neglecting the more humble department.

0
0
Source
source
Section II, Chap. III.
3 months 3 weeks ago

Knowledge grows, but human beings remain much the same.Belief in progress is a relic of the Christian view of history as a universal narrative, and an intellectually rigorous atheism would start by questioning it.

0
0
7 months 1 day ago

A thing therefore never returns to nothing.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, line 248 (tr. Munro)
7 months 4 days ago

Those who deny the first principle should be flogged or burned until they admit that it is not the same thing to be burned and not burned, or whipped and not whipped.

0
0
3 months 2 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
5 months 1 week ago

The skepticism which fails to contribute to the ruin of our health is merely an intellectual exercise.

0
0
6 months 4 weeks ago

Do not imagine that it is less an accident by which you find yourself master of the wealth which you possess, than that by which this man found himself king.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

A witty statesman said, you might prove anything by figures.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 2, Statistics.
6 months 2 weeks ago

If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next... It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at Heaven and you will get earth "thrown in": aim at earth and you will get neither.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, Chapter 10, "Hope"
5 months 2 weeks ago

...no legislator, at any period of the world, has willingly placed the seat of active power in the hands of the multitude: Because there it admits of no control, no regulation; no steady direction whatsoever. The people are the natural control on authority; but to exercise and to control together is contradictory and impossible.

0
0
Source
source
p. 441
6 months 2 weeks ago

But why,' (some ask), 'why, if you have a serious comment to make on the real life of men, must you do it by talking about a phantasmagoric never-never land of your own?' Because, I take it, one of the main things the author wants to say is that the real life of men is of that mythical and heroic quality. One can see the principle at work in his characterization. Much that in a realistic work would be done by 'character delineation' is here done simply by making the character an elf, a dwarf, or a hobbit. The imagined beings have their insides on the outside; they are visible souls. And Man as a whole, Man pitted against the universe, have we seen him at all till we see that he is like a hero in a fairy tale?

0
0
Source
source
p. 89
6 months 2 weeks ago

It is obvious that "obscenity" is not a term capable of exact legal definition; in the practice of the Courts, it means "anything that shocks the magistrate."

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 10: Recrudescence of Puritanism

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia