Skip to main content
8 months 3 weeks ago

Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. III: Of Individuality, As One of the Elements of Well-Being
9 months 3 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
7 months 3 weeks ago

Strong as it looks at the outset, State-agency perpetually disappoints every one. Puny as are its first stages, private efforts daily achieve results that astound the world.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 3, Ch. VII, Over-Legislation
6 months 2 weeks ago

You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with someone else.

0
0
Source
source
Virginibus Puerisque, Ch. 1. Cornhill Magazine,
4 months 3 weeks ago

Life is a System of Vital Forces ; and the conception of such Forces involves a peculiar Fundamental Idea.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

We know nothing of tomorrow; our business is to be good and happy today.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. I, ch. 12, p. 472
9 months 1 week ago

Nature, which alone is good, is wholly familiar and common.

0
0
8 months 3 weeks ago

Metaphysical fallacies contain the only clues we have to what thinking means to those who engage in it.

0
0
Source
source
p. 12
8 months 3 weeks ago

One unscrupulous distortion of the truth tends to beget other and opposite distortions.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 14, p. 316 [2012 reprint]
7 months 1 week ago

He who bases or thinks he bases his conduct - his inward or his outward conduct, his feeling or his action - upon a dogma or a principle which he deems incontrovertible, runs the risk of becoming a fanatic, and moreover, the moment that this dogma is weakened or shattered, the morality based upon it gives way. If the earth that he thought firm begins to rock, he himself trembles at the earthquake, for we do not all come up to the standard of the ideal Stoic who remains undaunted among the ruins of a world shattered into atoms. Happily the stuff that is underneath a man's ideas will save him. For if a man should tell you that he does not defraud or cuckold his best friend only because he is afraid of hell, you may depend upon it that neither would he do so even if he were to cease to believe in hell, but that he would invent some other excuse instead. And this is all to the honor of the human race.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

According to the technical language of old writers, a thing and its qualities are described as subject and attributes; and thus a man's faculties and acts are attributes of which he is the subject. The mind is the subject in which ideas inhere. Moreover, the man's faculties and acts are employed upon external objects; and from objects all his sensations arise. Hence the part of a man's knowledge which belongs to his own mind, is subjective: that which flows in upon him from the world external to him, is objective.

0
0
Source
source
Part I Of Ideas, Book I Of Ideas in General, Chap. 4 Of the Difference and Opposition of Sensation and Ideas
6 months 1 week ago

The value of the goal lies in the goal itself; and therefore the goal cannot be attained unless it is pursued for its own sake.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 12
6 months 3 weeks ago

What happens to one man may happen to all.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 171
9 months 3 days ago

Animals destitute of reason live with their own kind in a state of social amity. Elephants herd together; sheep and swine feed in flocks; cranes and crows take their flight in troops; storks have their public meetings to consult previously to their emigration, and feed their parents when unable to feed themselves; dolphins defend each other by mutual assistance; and everybody knows, that both ants and bees have respectively established by general agreement, a little friendly community.

0
0
5 months 5 days ago

This dogma had first to be shattered before men could once more go out in quest of the historical Jesus, before they could even grasp the thought of His existence. That the historic Jesus is something different from the Jesus Christ of the doctrine of the Two Natures seems to us now self-evident. We can, at the present day, scarcely imagine the long agony in which the historical view of the life of Jesus came to birth. And even when He was once more recalled to life. He was still, like Lazarus of old, bound hand and foot with grave-clothes - the grave-clothes of the dogma of the Dual Nature.

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

We must frankly confess, then, using our empirical common sense and ordinary practical prejudices, that in the world that actually is, the virtues of sympathy, charity, and non-resistance may be, and often have been, manifested in excess. ... You will agree to this in general, for in spite of the Gospel, in spite of Quakerism, in spite of Tolstoi, you believe in fighting fire with fire, in shooting down usurpers, locking up thieves, and freezing out vagabonds and swindlers.

0
0
Source
source
Lectures XIV and XV, "The Value of Saintliness"
9 months 3 weeks ago

Let us be understood. If the Japanese surrender after the destruction of Hiroshima, having been intimidated, we will rejoice. But we refuse to see anything in such grave news other than the need to argue more energetically in favor of a true international society, in which the great powers will not have superior rights over small and middle-sized nations, where such an ultimate weapon will be controlled by human intelligence rather than by the appetites and doctrines of various states. Before the terrifying prospects now available to humanity, we see even more clearly that peace is the only goal worth struggling for. This is no longer a prayer but a demand to be made by all peoples to their governments a demand to choose definitively between hell and reason.

0
0
8 months 2 weeks ago

Subjects who reciprocally recognize each other as such, must consider each other as identical, insofar as they both take up the position of subject; they must at all times subsume themselves and the other under the same category. At the same time, the relation of reciprocity of recognition demands the non-identity of one and the other, both must also maintain their absolute difference, for to be a subject implies the claim of individuation.

0
0
Source
source
Habermas (1972) "Sprachspiel, intention und Bedeutung. Zu Motiven bei Sellars und Wittgenstein". In R.W. Wiggerhaus (Ed.) Sprachanalyse and Soziologie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp). p. 334 This is called the paradoxical achievement of intersubjectivity
8 months 2 weeks ago

Does man think because he has found that thinking pays? Does he bring his children up because he has found it pays?

0
0
Source
source
§ 467
5 months 2 days ago

What is patriotism but love of the good things we ate in our childhood? I have said elsewhere that the loyalty to Uncle Sam is the loyalty to doughnuts and ham and sweet potatoes and the loyalty to the German Vaterland is the loyalty to Pfannkuchen and Christmas Stollen. As for international understanding, I feel that macaroni has done more for our appreciation of Italy than Mussolini... in food, as in death, we feel the essential brotherhood of mankind.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. IV : On Having A Stomach, p. 46
8 months 3 weeks ago

By a lie a man throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity as a man. A man who himself does not believe what he tells another ... has even less worth than if he were a mere thing. ... makes himself a mere deceptive appearance of man, not man himself.

0
0
Source
source
Doctrine of Virtue as translated by Mary J. Gregor (1964), p. 93
7 months 4 days ago

It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in firs and starts . It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines- real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth a machine coupled to it.

0
0
Source
source
The Desiring Machine
5 months 2 weeks ago

To this end they make a shield of their hypocritical zeal for religion. They go about invoking the Bible, which they would have minister to their deceitful purposes. Contrary to the sense of the Bible and the intention of the holy Fathers, if I am not mistaken, they would extend such authorities until even in purely physical matters - where faith is not involved - they would have us altogether abandon reason and the evidence of our senses in favor of some biblical passage, though under the surface meaning of its words this passage may contain a different sense.

0
0
8 months 3 weeks ago

We may suppose that everyone has in himself the whole form of a moral conception.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter I, Section 9, pg. 50
5 months 1 week ago

Whatever can happen at any time can happen today.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

Marriage is a union between two persons - one man and one woman. A woman who has given herself up to one, can not give herself up to a second, for her whole dignity requires that she should belong only to this one.

0
0
Source
source
p. 406

If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger.

0
0
Source
source
C 54 Variant translation: If all mankind were suddenly to practice honesty, many thousands of people would be sure to starve.
4 months 3 weeks ago

'Intuitive' is opposed to 'discursive' reason. In intuition, we obtain our conclusions by dwelling upon 'one' aspect of the fundamental Idea; in discursive reasoning, we combine several aspects of the Idea

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

Time is taking giant strides with us more than with any other age since the history of the world began. At some point within the three years that have gone by since my interpretation of the present age that epoch has come to an end. At some point self-seeking has destroyed itself, because by its own complete development it has lost its self and the independence of that self; and since it would not voluntarily set itself any other aim but self, an external power has forced upon it another and a foreign purpose.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction p. 1
7 months 1 week ago

Most men have nothing in their heads but their physical needs; put them on a desert island with nothing to occupy their minds and they would go insane. They lack real motive. The curse of civilization is boredom.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter Eight, The Outsider as a Visionary
8 months 4 weeks ago

The tolls for the maintenance of a high road, cannot with any safety be made the property of private persons.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter I, Part III, Article I, p. 786 (See also.. Public-private partnerships).
7 months 2 weeks ago

Interest only becomes one-sided and morbid only when it ceases to be frank, and becomes sly and furtive.

0
0
Source
source
p. 197
9 months 1 week ago

Reason in man is rather like God in the world.

0
0
Source
source
Opuscule II, De Regno On Kingship, c. 1267
5 months 2 weeks ago

That liberal world that emerged after 1945 led to one of the most spectacularly successful periods in human history. There was material progress. There was stability. There was human freedom. There was the flourishing of many human activities that can only take place in a liberal, and therefore free society...

0
0
Source
source
10:06
9 months 3 weeks ago
Because of the way that myth takes it for granted that miracles are always happening, the waking life of a mythically inspired people the ancient Greeks, for instance more closely resembles a dream than it does the waking world of a scientifically disenchanted thinker.
0
0
7 months 1 week ago

Witness the tragic condition of Russia. The methods of State centralization have paralysed individual initiative and effort; the tyranny of the dictatorship has cowed the people into slavish submission and all but extinguished the fires of liberty; organized terrorism has depraved and brutalized the masses and stifled every idealistic aspiration; institutionalized murder has cheapened human life, and all sense of the dignity of man and the value of life has been eliminated; coercion at every step has made effort bitter, labour a punishment, has turned the whole of existence into a scheme of mutual deceit, and has revived the lowest and most brutal instincts of man. A sorry heritage to begin a new life of freedom and brotherhood.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

The same goes for Sartre's waiter...the same goes for Christians, Muslims....it's what you are like, not what you are...

0
0
8 months 3 weeks ago

Man's greatest concern is to know how he shall properly fill his place in the universe and correctly understand what he must be in order to be a man.

0
0
Source
source
Part III : Selection on Education from Kant's other Writings, Ch. I Pedagogical Fragments, # 53
8 months 2 weeks ago

A life without a holiday is like a long journey without an inn to rest at.

0
0
9 months 2 days ago

Those who read and rightly understand my teaching will not start an insurrection; they have not learned that from me.

0
0
Source
source
p. 65
7 months 6 days ago

Women crave for being loved, not for loving. They scream out at you for sympathy all day long, they are incapable of giving any in return, for they cannot remember your affairs long enough to do so... They cannot state a fact accurately to another, nor can that other attend to it accurately enough for it to become information. Now is not all this the result of want of sympathy?... I am sick with indignation at what wives and mothers will do of the most egregious selfishness. And people call it all maternal or conjugal affection, and think it pretty to say so. No, no, let each person tell the truth from their own experience.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Mary Clarke Mohl (13 Dec 1861), published in Florence Nightingale on Women, Medicine, Midwifery and Prostitution: Collected Works of Florence Nightingale (2005), Volume 8, edited by Lynn McDonald, p. 84
7 months 2 weeks ago

Religions are not true or false, but better or worse.

0
0
Source
source
This statement is presented in quotes in The Philosophy of Religion and Advaita Vedanta (2008) by Arvind Sharma, p. 216
6 months 3 weeks ago

The Age of Writing has passed. We must invent a new metaphor, restructure our thoughts and feelings.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 14)
7 months 3 weeks ago

You have the representatives of that [Christian] religion which says that their God is love, that the very vital spirit of their institution is charity,-a religion which so much hates oppression, that, when the God whom we adore appeared in human form, He did not appear in a form of greatness and majesty, but in sympathy with the lowest of the people, and thereby made it a firm and ruling principle that their welfare was the object of all government, since the Person who was the Master of Nature chose to appear Himself in a subordinate situation. These are the considerations which influence them, which animate them, and will animate them, against all oppression,-knowing that He who is called first among them, and first among us all, both of the flock that is fed and of those who feed it, made Himself "the servant of all."

0
0
Source
source
Speech in opening the impeachment of Warren Hastings (19 February 1788), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Volume the Tenth (1899), p. 144

We are obliged to regard many of our original minds as crazy - at least until we have become as clever as they are.

0
0
Source
source
D 97
5 months 2 weeks ago

We have to construct the figure of a new David, the multitude as champion of asymmetrical combat, immaterial workers who became a new kind of combatants, cosmopolitan bricoleurs of resistance and cooperation.

0
0
Source
source
50
4 months 3 weeks ago

To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call into question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it--the life of that man is one long sin against mankind.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia