Skip to main content
6 months 1 week ago

As a rule, begin my lectures on Scientific Method by telling my students that scientific method does not exist. ...having been ...the one and only professor of this non-existent subject within the British Commonwealth.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

III. Every tax ought to be levied at the time, or in the manner, in which it is most likely to be convenient for the contributor to pay it.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter II Part II, p. 893.
5 months 3 weeks ago

Anger begins in folly, and ends in repentance.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Treasury of Thought: Forming an Encyclopædia of Quotations from Ancient and Modern Authors (1894) by Maturin Murray Ballou
5 months 1 week ago

The writers against religion, whilst they oppose every system, are wisely careful never to set up any of their own.

0
0
Source
source
Preface
6 months 1 week ago

The condemned man found himself transformed into a hero by the sheer extend of his widely advertised crimes, and sometimes the affirmation of his belated repentance. Against the law, against the rich, the powerful, the magistrates, the constabulary or the watch, against taxes and their collectors, he appeared to have waged a struggle with which one all too easily identified. The proclamation of these crimes blew up to epic proportions the tiny struggle that passed unperceived in everyday life. If the condemned man was shown to be repentant, accepting the verdict, asking both God and man for forgiveness for his crimes, it was as if he had come through some process of purification: he died, in his own way, like a saint.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter One: The Spectacle of the scaffold, pp. 67
6 months 2 weeks ago

But though there be naturally a wide difference in point of delicacy between one person and another, nothing tends further to encrease and improve this talent, than practice in a particular art, and the frequent survey or contemplation of a particular species of beauty.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

Immediate luminousness, in short, philosophical reasonableness and moral helpfulness are the only available criteria. Saint Teresa might have had the nervous system of the placidest cow, and it would not now save her theology, if the trial of the theology by these other tests should show it to be contemptible. And conversely if her theology can stand these other tests, it will make no difference how hysterical or nervously off balance Saint Teresa may have been when she was with us here below.

0
0
Source
source
Lecture I, "Religion and Neurology"
6 months 2 weeks ago

Thus there is nothing waste, nothing dead in the universe; no chaos, no confusions, save in appearence. We might compare this to the appearence of a pond in the distance, where we can see the confused movement and swarming of the fish, without distinguishing the fish themselves.Thus we are that each living body has a dominante entelechy, which in case of an animal is the soul, but the members of this living body are full of other living things, plants and animals, of which each has in turn ita dominant entelechy or soul.

0
0
Source
source
Monadology (69-70).
5 months 3 weeks ago

For this, to draw a right line from every point, to every point, follows the definition, which says, that a line is the flux of a point, and a right line an indeclinable and inflexible flow.

0
0
Source
source
Book III. Concerning Petitions and Axioms.
7 months 2 weeks ago

For as only one thing is necessary, and as the theme of the talk is the willing of only one thing: hence the consciousness before God of one's eternal responsibility to be an individual is that one thing necessary.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

The truly good and wise man will bear all kinds of fortune in a seemly way, and will always act in the noblest manner that the circumstances allow.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

Money is the password, and all doors, which are closed to the man of lesser means, fly open to those whom Plutus favors. The invention of money, which has no other usefulness (or at least it should not have any) except for the commercial exchange of the products of man's industry, now serves all that is physically good among men. Especially after money was represented by metal, it has produced avarice which, finally, without indulgence, but by its mere possession, and even with the resolution (of the stingy) not to spend it, still contains a power which people believe can sufficiently compensate for the lack of any other power.

0
0
Source
source
Kant, Immanuel (1996), pages 181-182
6 months 1 week ago

The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.

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

The age of philosophy in the sense again that we are confronted more and more often with philosophical problems at an everyday level. It is not that you withdraw from daily life into a world of philosophical contemplation. On the contrary, you cannot find your way around daily life itself without answering certain philosophical questions. It is a unique time when everyone is, in a way, forced to be some kind of philosopher.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

In democratic ages men rarely sacrifice themselves for another, but they show a general compassion for all the human race. One never sees them inflict pointless suffering, and they are glad to relieve the sorrows of others when they can do so without much trouble to themselves. They are not disinterested, but they are gentle.

0
0
Source
source
Book Three, Chapter I.
5 months 4 days ago

The would-be climber must be able to make himself liked ... please his superiors - avoid showing independence except in those matters wherein independence is expected of him by his chiefs... the winners in the race have qualities which disincline them to allow others to be their true selves. Hence the winners snub all those who aim at adequate self-expression, speaking of them as pretentious, eccentric, biased, unpractical, and measuring their achievements by insincere standards.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

I have always done things in my own way, which is at once the way that comes naturally to me, that is honest, sincere, genuine, and unforced; but also perverse, although you must remember that this word means per (through) verse (poetry), out-of-the-way and wayward, which is surely towards the way, and that to be queer-to "follow your own weird"-is wholeheartedly to accept your karma, or fate, or destiny, and thus to be odd in the service of God, "whose service," as the Anglican Book of Common Prayer declares, "is perfect freedom."

0
0
Source
source
p. xiii
6 months 3 days ago

He wins every hand who mingles profit with pleasure, by delighting and instructing the reader at the same time.

0
0
Source
source
Line 343
7 months 2 weeks ago
For those who need consolation no means of consolation is so effective as the assertion that in their case no consolation is possible: it implies so great a degree of distinction that they at once hold up their heads again.
0
0
2 months 4 weeks ago

If you set a high value on liberty, you must set a low value on everything else.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

The repression of liberty that took place in the countries in which Communist regimes were established cannot be adequately explained as a product of backwardness, or of errors in the application of Marxian theory. It was the result of a resolute attempt to realize an Enlightenment utopia - a condition of society in which no serious form of conflict any longer exists.

0
0
Source
source
'Isaiah Berlin: The Value of Decency' (p.99)
4 months 6 days ago

Can we find nothing good to say about TV? Well, yes, it brings scattered solitaries into a sort of communion. TV allows your isolated American to think that he participates in the life of the entire country. It does not actually place him in a community, but his heart is warmed with the suggestion (on the whole false) that there is a community somewhere in the vicinity and that his atomized consciousness will be drawn back toward the whole.

0
0
Source
source
The Distracted Public (1990), p. 159
5 months 5 days ago

If you have money, don't lend it at interest. Rather, give it to someone from whom you won't get it back.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1: "The Origins of Modern Science", p. 6
2 months 1 week ago

Poetry can be written only because it has been written.

0
0
Source
source
"The Responsibility of the Poet"
4 months 3 weeks ago

It seemed perfectly possible that, in spite of my certainty of my own genius, I might die of some illness, or perhaps even in a street accident, before I had ever glimpsed the meaning of life. My moods of happiness and self-confidence convinced me that I had a "destiny" to become a famous writer, and to be remembered as one of the most important thinkers of the century.

0
0
Source
source
p. 67
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
6 months 2 weeks ago

This is that which I think great readers are apt to be mistaken in; those who have read of everything, are thought to understand everything too; but it is not always so. Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections ; unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in "Hand Book : Caution and Counsels" in The Common School Journal Vol. 5, No. 24 (15 December 1843) by Horace Mann, p. 371
6 months 1 week ago

Form displays the relation itself as the state of original comportment toward beings, the festive state in which the being itself in its essence is celebrated and thus for the first time placed in the open.

0
0
Source
source
p. 119
5 months 3 days ago

The characteristic activity of science is not construction, but induction. The more often something has occurred in the past, the more certain that it will in all the future. Knowledge relates solely to what is and to its recurrence. New forms of being, especially those arising from the historical activity of man, lie beyond empiricist theory. Thoughts which are not simply carried over from the prevailing pattern of consciousness, but arise from the aims and resolves of the individual, in short, all historical tendencies that reach beyond what is present and recurrent, do not belong to the domain of science.

0
0
Source
source
p. 144.
2 months 3 weeks ago

The highest instrument of inner awakening of race is combat, and war is its highest expression. That pacifism and humanitarianism are phenomena closely linked to internationalism, democracy, cosmopolitanism and liberalism is perfectly logical - the same anti-racial instinct present in some, is reflected and confirmed in the others. The will towards sub-racial levelling inborn in internationalism finds its ally in pacifist humanitarianism, which has the function of preventing the heroic test from disrupting the game by galvanising the surviving forces of any still not completely deracinated peoples.

0
0
Source
source
p. 67
6 months 3 days ago

It is no more evident that democratic institutions are to be measured by the sort of person they create than that they are to be measured against divine commands. ... Even if the typical character types of liberal democracies are bland, calculating, petty, and unheroic, the prevalence of such people may be a reasonable price to pay for political freedom.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

The mores I return to myself, the more I divest myself, under the traumatic effect of persecution , of my freedom as a constituted, wilful, imperialistic subject, the more I discover myself to be responsible' the more just I am, the more guilty I am. I am 'in myself' through others.

0
0
Source
source
The Levinas reader by Levinas, Emmanuel p. 102
4 months 1 week ago

The media have substituted themselves for the older world.

0
0
Source
source
"Education, Language, and Media". Cycle 7, 1973, p. 232
3 months 3 weeks ago

The system of technological production that we have today has been justified in terms of creating more goods to feed more people and to meet more needs. But it actually destroys more of the resources that we need in order to meet those multiple needs. If we shift to an ecological perception, a diversity perception, we realize that some of the instruments of which we are very proud are actually extremely primitive for dealing with nature. To me that is the great lesson of ecological awareness at the turn of the millennium.

0
0
Source
source
1998
5 months 5 days ago

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.

0
0
Source
source
A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970); 2001, p. 170.
5 months 1 week ago

There ought to be system of manners in every nation which a well-formed mind would be disposed to relish. To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.

0
0
1 week 3 days ago

You'd think things would change in a connected world.....at least for the moment....nothing has changed...

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

What is not good for the swarm is not good for the bee.

0
0
Source
source
VI, 54
7 months 2 weeks ago

Who is to blame but her and the third factor, from whence no one knows, which moved me with its stimulus and transformed me? After all, what I have done is praised in others.-Or is becoming a poet my compensation? I reject all compensation, I demand my rights-that is, my honor. I did not ask to become one, I will not buy it at this price. – Or if I am guilty, then I certainly should be able to repent of my guilt and make it good again. Tell me how. On top of that, must I perhaps repent that the world plays with me as a child plays with a beetle?-Or is it perhaps best to forget the whole thing? Forget-indeed, I shall have ceased to be if I forget it. Or what kind of life would it be if along with my beloved I have lost honor and pride and lost them in such a way that no one knows how it happened, for which reason I can never retrieve them again? Shall I allow myself to be shoved out in this manner? Why, then, was I shoved in?

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

In order to conceive, and to steep ourselves in, unreality, we must have it constantly present to our minds. The day we feel it, see it, everything becomes unreal, except that unreality which alone makes existence tolerable.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

Let your life be pleasing to the multitude, and it can not be so to yourself.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 1075
7 months 1 week ago

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

Bless advertising art for its pictorial vitality and verbal creativity.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 18)

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia