Skip to main content
5 months 1 week ago

When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 12 (tr. Donald M. Frame) , tr. David Wills, 2008
3 months 3 weeks ago

Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it.

0
0
Source
source
Matthew 7:13-14 (NKJV) (Also Luke 13:24)
5 months 3 days ago

A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the written words.

0
0
Source
source
Refusing the Nobel Prize, New York Times
4 months 5 days ago

France had endeavoured under the specious pretext of an enlarged benevolence, to sow the seeds of enmity among nations, and destroy all local attachments, calling them narrow and illiberal-thereby to dissever the people from their governors.

0
0
Source
source
Speech in the House of Commons on the Traitorous Correspondence Bill (9 April 1793)
4 months 5 days ago

Their principles always go to the extreme. They who go with the principles of the ancient Whigs, which are those contained in Mr. Burke's book, never can go too far. ... The opinions maintained in that book never can lead to an extreme, because their foundation is laid in an opposition to extremes.

0
0
Source
source
p. 470
1 month 4 weeks ago

I would say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree [probably Caesar Baronius]: "The intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes.

0
0
Source
source
Variant translation: I would say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree: "That the intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how the heavens go."
4 months 5 days ago

To care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it's good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things.

0
0
Source
source
Part 1, Chapter 9
3 months 1 week ago

One can imagine a computer simulation of the action of peptides in the hypothalamus that is accurate down to the last synapse. But equally one can imagine a computer simulation of the oxidation of hydrocarbons in a car engine or the action of digestive processes in a stomach when it is digesting pizza. And the simulation is no more the real thing in the case of the brain than it is in the case of the car or the stomach. Barring miracles, you could not run your car by doing a computer simulation of the oxidation of gasoline, and you could not digest pizza by running the program that simulates such digestion. It seems obvious that a simulation of cognition will similarly not produce the effects of the neurobiology of cognition.

0
0
Source
source
"Is the Brain's Mind a Computer Program?", Scientific American (January 1990).
5 months 5 days ago

Self-command is the main elegance.

0
0
Source
source
p. 205
1 month 2 weeks ago

An ardent Jehovah's Witness once tried to convince me that if there were a God of love, he would certainly provide mankind with a reliable and infallible textbook for the guidance of conduct. I replied that no considerate God would destroy the human mind by making it so rigid and unadaptable as to depend upon one book, the Bible, for all the answers. For the use of words, and thus of a book, is to point beyond themselves to a world of life and experience that is not mere words or even ideas. Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.

0
0
Source
source
p. 14
3 months 2 days ago

Headlines are icons, not literature.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 5)
5 months 5 days ago

Capitalist production does not exist at all without foreign commerce.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. II, Ch. XX, p. 474 (See also...David Ricardo, The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, Ch. VII, p. 81).
1 month 2 weeks ago

As the State formerly played a most important part in the revolutions that abolished the old economic systems, so it must again be the State that should abolish capitalism.

0
0
Source
source
p. 170
3 months 3 weeks ago

One of those leaders of what they call the social revolution has said that religion is the opiate of the people. Opium...opium...opium, yes. Let us give them opium so that they can sleep and dream.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.

0
0
Source
source
George Santayana, as quoted in Quotations for Our Time (1977) edited by Laurence J. Peter
3 months 2 weeks ago

No man, not even a doctor, ever gives any other definition of what a nurse should be than this - "devoted and obedient." This definition would do just as well for a porter. It might even do for a horse. It would not do for a policeman.

0
0
Source
source
Notes on Nursing
2 months 2 weeks ago

The difference between a Humanist and a lunatic is in fact one of degree.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 9
3 months 2 days ago

The young today cannot follow narrative but they are alert to drama. They cannot bear description but they love landscape and action.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Harold Adam Innis (14 March 1951), published in Essential McLuhan (1995), edited by Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, p. 74
5 months 4 days ago

The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanise them.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Ideas in literature: Ten things Hannah Arendt said that are eerily relevant in today's political times
3 months 3 weeks ago

Jesus answered: "Believe me, Barnabas that I cannot weep as much as I ought. For if men had not called me God, I should have seen God here as he will be seen in paradise, and should have been safe not to fear the day of judgment. But God knows that I am innocent, because never have I harboured thought to be held more than a poor slave. No, I tell you that if I had not been called God I should have been carried into paradise when I shall depart from the world, whereas now I shall not go thither until the judgment. Now you see if I have cause to weep."

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 112
4 months 2 days ago

It is false that kings are entitled to the eminence they obtain. They possess no intrinsic superiority over their subjects. The line of distinction that is drawn is the offspring of pretense, an indirect means employed for effecting certain purposes, and not the language of truth. It tramples upon the genuine nature of things, and depends for its support upon this argument, 'that, were it not for impositions of a similar nature, mankind would be miserable.'

0
0
Source
source
Book V, Ch. 6, "Of Subjects"
4 months 3 weeks ago

He who upholds Truth with all the might of his power, He who upholds Truth the utmost in his word and deed,He, indeed, is Thy most valued helper, O Mazda Ahura!

0
0
Source
source
Ahunuvaiti Gatha; Yasna 31, 22.
6 months 1 day ago

The slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown. He must dominate in his turn.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

The STATE IDEA, the authoritarian principle, has been proven bankrupt by the experience of the Russian Revolution. If I were to sum up my whole argument in one sentence I should say: The inherent tendency of the State is to concentrate, to narrow, and monopolize all social activities; the nature of revolution is, on the contrary, to grow, to broaden, and disseminate itself in ever-wider circles. In other words, the State is institutional and static; revolution is fluent, dynamic. These two tendencies are incompatible and mutually destructive. The State idea killed the Russian Revolution and it must have the same result in all other revolutions, unless the libertarian idea prevail.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

For this also we will honour the poor Manchester Insurrection, and augur well of it. A deep unspoken sense lies in these strong men,- inconsiderable, almost stupid, as all they can articulate of it is. Amid all violent stupidity of speech, a right noble instinct of what is doable and what is not doable never forsakes them: the strong inarticulate men and workers, whom Fact patronises; of whom, in all difficulty and work whatsoever, there is good augury!

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

Teach him what has been said in the past; then he will set a good example to the children of the magistrates, and judgement and all exactitude shall enter into him. Speak to him, for there is none born wise.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction.
5 months 5 days ago

A true account of the actual is the rarest poetry, for common sense always takes a hasty and superficial view.

0
0
5 months 5 days ago

The practical consequence of such a[n individualistic] philosophy is the well-known democratic respect for the sacredness of individuality,-is, at any rate, the outward tolerance of whatever is not itself intolerant. These phrases are so familiar that they sound now rather dead in our ears. Once they had a passionate inner meaning. Such a passionate inner meaning they may easily acquire again if the pretension of our nation to inflict its own inner ideals and institutions vi et armis upon Orientals should meet with a resistance as obdurate as so far it has been gallant and spirited. Religiously and philosophically, our ancient national doctrine of live and let live may prove to have a far deeper meaning than our people now seem to imagine it to possess.

0
0
Source
source
"Preface"
1 month 4 days ago

Poetry can be written only because it has been written.

0
0
Source
source
"The Responsibility of the Poet"
5 months 2 weeks ago

The human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds. And though there be many things in nature which are singular and unmatched, yet it devises for them parallels and conjugates and relatives which do not exist. Hence the fiction that all celestial bodies move in perfect circles, spirals and dragons being (except in name) utterly rejected.

0
0
Source
source
Aphorism 45
4 months 3 weeks ago

Philosophy is the childhood of the intellect, and a culture that tries to skip it will never grow up.

0
0
Source
source
p. 12.
4 months 2 days ago

To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in "Bildung in Early German Romanticism" by Frederick C. Beiser, in Philosophers on Education : Historical Perspectives (1998) by Amélie Rorty, p. 294
5 months 3 weeks ago

The end of living, or the ultimate good, which is to be sought for its own sake, according to the universal opinion of mankind, is happiness; yet men, for the most part, fail in the pursuit of this end, either because they do not form a right idea of the nature of happiness, or because they do not make use of proper means to attain it.

0
0
1 month 1 day ago

Disturbance comes only from within-from our own perceptions.

0
0
Source
source
(Hays translation) IV, 4
4 months 2 days ago

The true philosophical Act is annihilation of self (Selbsttodtung); this is the real beginning of all Philosophy; all requisites for being a Disciple of Philosophy point hither. This Act alone corresponds to all the conditions and characteristics of transcendental conduct.

0
0
5 months 6 days ago

The old often envy the young; when they do, they are apt to treat them cruelly.

0
0
4 months 1 day ago

In relation to any act of life, the mind acts as a killjoy.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

I suggest that scientific knowledge, though logically more articulate and far more complex, is of this sort. The books and teachers from whom it is acquired present concrete examples together with a multitude of theoretical generalizations. Both are essential carriers of knowledge, and it is therefore Pickwickian to seek a methodological criterion that supposes the scientist can specify in advance whether each imaginable instance fits or would falsify his theory.

0
0
Source
source
"Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research?", Criticism and the growth of knowledge edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave
3 months 2 days ago

The more you make people alike, the more competition you have. Competition is based on the principle of conformity.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 135)
5 months 5 days ago

These considerations did not make us overlook the folly of premature attempts to dispense with the inducements of private interest in social affairs, while no substitute for them has been or can be provided: but we regarded all existing institutions and social arrangements as being (in a phrase I once heard from Austin) "merely provisional," and we welcomed with the greatest pleasure and interest all socialistic experiments by select individuals (such as the Co-operative Societies), which, whether they succeeded or failed, could not but operate as a most useful education of those who took part in them, by cultivating their capacity of acting upon motives pointing directly to the general good, or making them aware of the defects which render them and others incapable of doing so.

0
0
Source
source
(pp. 233-234)
5 months 1 week ago

How many valiant men we have seen to survive their own reputation!

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 16
3 months 2 weeks ago

Schizophrenia is like love: there is no specifically schizophrenic phenomenon or entity; schizophrenia is the universe of productive and reproductive desiring machines, universal primary production as "the essential reality of man and nature".

0
0
Source
source
The Desiring Machine
5 months 1 week ago

Man is certainly crazy. He could not make a mite, and he makes gods by the dozen.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 12
6 months 5 days ago

Is there anything we cannot contrive to call the demands of the times, and is there anything that does not acquire a certain prestige by being the demand of the times? But for decisive religious categories to become the demand for the times is eo ipso a contradiction. “The times” is too abstract a category to be able as claimant to demand the decisive religious categories that belong specifically to individuality and particularity; loud collective demands en mass for what can be shared only by the single individual in particularity, in solitariness, in silence, cannot be made.

0
0
Source
source
Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age. A Literary Review.
5 months 3 days ago

I think so badly of philosophy that I don't like to talk about it. ... I do not want to say anything bad about my dear colleagues, but the profession of teacher of philosophy is a ridiculous one. We don't need a thousand of trained, and badly trained, philosophers - it is very silly. Actually most of them have nothing to say.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in "At 90, and Still Dynamic : Revisiting Sir Karl Popper and Attending His Birthday Party" by Eugene Yue-Ching Ho, in Intellectus 23
5 months 5 days ago

Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone-quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

0
0
Source
source
Quotation and Originality
1 month 3 weeks ago

To such a one, already filled with intellectual substance, and possessing what we may call the practical gold-bullion of human culture, it was an obvious improvement that he should be taught to speak it out of him on occasion; that he should carry a spiritual banknote producible on demand for what of "gold-bullion" he had, not so negotiable otherwise, stored in the cellars of his mind. A man, with wisdom, insight and heroic worth already acquired for him, naturally demanded of the schoolmaster this one new faculty, the faculty of uttering in fit words what he had. A valuable superaddition of faculty:-and yet we are to remember it was scarcely a new faculty; it was but the tangible sign of what other faculties the man had in the silent state.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia