Skip to main content
1 month 1 week ago

Reason does not exist for the sake of life, but life for the sake of reason. An existence which does not of itself satisfy reason and solve all her doubts, cannot be the true one.

0
0
Source
source
Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p.94
3 months 1 week ago

It will be easy for us once we receive the ball of yarn from Ariadne (love) and then go through all the mazes of the labyrinth (life) and kill the monster. But how many are there who plunge into life (the labyrinth) without taking that precaution?

0
0
1 month 4 weeks ago

He preferred an honest man that wooed his daughter, before a rich man. "I would rather," said Themistocles, "have a man that wants money than money that wants a man."

0
0
Source
source
49 Themistocles

Man loves company - even if it is only that of a small burning candle.

0
0
Source
source
K 40
1 month 3 days ago

Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel's, the same shall save it. For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

0
0
Source
source
8:34b-36 (KJV)
3 months 1 week ago

Of course, I had to own that he was right; I didn't feel much regret for what I'd done. Still, to my mind, he overdid it, and I'd have liked to have a chance of explaining to him, in a quite friendly, almost affectionate way, that I have never been able to really regret anything in all my life. I've always been far too much absorbed in the present moment, or the immediate future, to think back.

0
0

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.
2 months 1 week ago

Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, Chapter 4, "Morality and Psychoanalysis"
2 months 1 week ago

I saw a moving sight the other morning before breakfast in a little hotel where I slept in the dusty fields. The young man of the house shot a little wolf called coyote in the early morning. The little heroic animal lay on the ground, with his big furry ears, and his clean white teeth, and his little cheerful body, but his little brave life was gone. It made me think how brave all living things are. Here little coyote was, without any clothes or house or books or anything, with nothing to pay his way with, and risking his life so cheerfully - and losing it - just to see if he could pick up a meal near the hotel. He was doing his coyote-business like a hero, and you must do your boy-business, and I my man-business bravely, too, or else we won't be worth as much as a little coyote.

0
0
Source
source
28-Aug-89

There is only one cure for the evils which newly acquired freedom produces, and that cure is freedom.

0
0
Source
source
p. 41
2 months 1 week ago

I will take it all: tongs, molten lead, prongs, garrotes, all that burns, all that tears, I want to truly suffer. Better one hundred bites, better the whip, vitriol, than this suffering in the head, this ghost of suffering which grazes and caresses and never hurts enough.

0
0
Source
source
Act 1, sc. 5
1 week 6 days ago

If nonviolence is to make sense as an ethical and political position, it cannot simply repress aggression or do away with its reality; rather, nonviolence emerges as a meaningful concept precisely when destruction is most likely or seems most certain.

0
0
Source
source
p. 39
2 months 1 week ago

The "social contract," in the only sense in which it is not completely mythical, is a contract among conquerors, which loses its raison d'être if they are deprived of the benefits of conquest.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 12: Powers and forms of governments
1 month 1 week ago

Say what we will, death is the best thing nature has found to please everyone. With each of us, everything vanishes, everything stops forever. What an advantage, what an abuse! Without the least effort on our part, we own the universe, we drag it into our own disappearance. No doubt about it, dying is immoral...

0
0
1 week 2 days ago

When you move into a new area, a new territory and learn a new language, the language is not a new subject, it is an environment, it is total.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 105)
1 month 2 days ago

Imminent seems the collapse of that which for millennium has constituted man's universe. The new world which has arisen as an apparatus for supply of the necessaries of life compels everything and everyone to serve it. It annihilates whatever it has no place for person seems to be going undergoing absorption into that which is nothing more than a means to an end, into that which is devoid of purpose of significance.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.

0
0
1 month 3 days ago

The real field of knowledge is not the given fact about things as they are, but the critical evaluation of them as a prelude to passing beyond their given form. Knowledge deals with appearances in order to get beyond them. .... The concept of reality has thus turned into the concept of possibility. The real is not yet 'actual,' but is at first only the possibility of an actual.

0
0
Source
source
P. 145

We can see nothing whatever of the soul unless it is visible in the expression of the countenance; one might call the faces at a large assembly of people a history of the human soul written in a kind of Chinese ideograms.

0
0
Source
source
B 11

We often have need of a profound philosophy to restore to our feelings their original state of innocence, to find our way out of the rubble of things alien to us, to begin to feel for ourselves and to speak ourselves, and I might almost say to exist ourselves. Even if my philosophy does not extend to discovering anything new, it does nevertheless possess the courage to regard as questionable what has long been thought true.

0
0
Source
source
B 49
2 months 3 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
2 months 1 day ago

Those who claim to care about the wellbeing of human beings and the preservation of our environment should become vegetarians for that reason alone. They would thereby increase the amount of grain available to feed people elsewhere, reduce pollution, save water and energy, and cease contributing to the clearing of forests; moreover, since a vegetarian diet is cheaper than one based on meat dishes, they would have more money available to devote to famine relief, population control, or whatever social or political cause they thought most urgent. ... when nonvegetarians say that "human problems come first" I cannot help wondering what exactly it is that they are doing for human beings that compels them to continue to support the wasteful, ruthless exploitation of farm animals.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 6: Speciesism Today
2 months 1 week ago

I needed to be made to feel that there was real, permanent happiness in tranquil contemplation. Wordsworth taught me this, not only without turning away from, but with a greatly increased interest in the common feelings and common destiny of human beings.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 148)
2 months 1 week ago

The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination.

0
0
Source
source
Attributed to Voltaire in Likharev, K.K. (2021). On Government and Politics. In: Likharev, K.K. (eds) Essential Quotes for Scientists and Engineers.
1 month 3 days ago

And in these foure things, Opinion of Ghosts, Ignorance of second causes, Devotion towards what men fear, and Taking of things Casuall for Prognostics, consisteth the Natural seed of Religion; which by reason of the different Fancies, Judgements, and Passions of severall men, hath grown up into ceremonies so different, that those which are used by one man, are for the most part ridiculous to another.

0
0
Source
source
The First Part, Chapter 12, p. 54
3 weeks 3 days ago

Without narration, life is purely additive.

0
0

Feeling does not succeed in converting consolation into truth, nor does reason succeed in converting truth into consolation.

0
0

A free society is a community of free beings, bound by the laws of sympathy and by the obligations of family love. It is not a society of people released from all moral constraint-for that is precisely the opposite of a society. Without moral constraint there can be no cooperation, no family commitment, no long-term prospects, no hope of economic, let alone social, order.

0
0
Source
source
"The Limits of Liberty," The American Spectator
3 weeks 6 days ago

It is impossible to feel equal respect for things that are in fact unequal unless the respect is given to something that is identical in all of them. Men are unequal in all their relations with the things of this world, without exception. The only thing that is identical in all men is the presence of a link with the reality outside the world. All human beings are absolutely identical in so far as they can be thought of as consisting of a centre, which is an unquenchable desire for good, surrounded by an accretion of psychical and bodily matter.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

0
0
Source
source
Section 12 : Of the Academical or Sceptical Philosophy Pt. 3
3 months 1 week ago

People don't stop things they enjoy doing just because they reach a certain age. They don't stop playing tennis just because they turn 40, they don't stop with sex just because they turn 40; they keep it up as long as they can if they enjoy it, and learning will be the same thing.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

"How then shall they have the play-games you allow them, if none must be bought for them?" I answer, they should make them themselves, or at least endeavour it, and set themselves about it. ...And if you help them where they are at a stand, it will more endear you to them than any chargeable toys that you shall buy for them.

0
0
Source
source
Sec. 130
2 months 1 week ago

Because people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal cards, and try and win one another's money. Idiots!

0
0
1 month 3 days ago

A scientist can hardly meet with anything more undesirable than to have the foundations give way just as the work is finished. I was put in this position by a letter from Mr. Bertrand Russell when the work was nearly through the press.

0
0
Source
source
Note in the appendix of Grundlagen der Arithmetik (Vol. 2) after Frege had received a letter of Bertrand Russell in which Russell had explained his discovery of, what is now known as, Russell's paradox.
1 month 1 week ago

It is not, what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice, tell me I ought to do.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

Those services which the community will most readily pay for it is most disagreeable to render. You are paid for being something less than a man.

0
0
Source
source
p. 486
1 month 1 week ago

It is a woman's outstanding characteristic that she can do anything for the love of a man. But those women who can achieve something important for the love of a thing are most exceptional, because this does not really agree with their nature. Love for a thing is a man's prerogative. But since masculine and feminine elements are united in our human nature, a man can live in the feminine part of himself, I and a woman in her masculine part. None the less the feminine element in man is only something in the background, as is the masculine element in woman. If one lives out the opposite sex in oneself one is living in one's own background, and one's real individuality suffers. A man should live as a man and a woman as a woman.

0
0
Source
source
P. 243
3 weeks 2 days ago

Chronic boredom - compensated or uncompensated - constitutes one of the major psychopathological phenomena in contemporary technotronic society, although it is only recently that it has found some recognition.

0
0
Source
source
p. 273
2 months 2 weeks ago

But the other conception, namely the infusion of the soul, it is piously and suitably believed, was without any sin, so that while the soul was being infused, she would at the same time be cleansed from original sin and adorned with the gifts of God to receive the holy soul thus infused. And thus, in the very moment in which she began to live, she was without all sin.

0
0
Source
source
Weimar edition of Martin Luther's Works, English translation edited by J. Pelikan [Concordia: St. Louis], Vol. 4, 694
1 month 1 week ago

A regret understood by no one: the regret to be a pessimist. It's not easy to be on the wrong foot with life

0
0
3 weeks 6 days ago

When we are the victims of illusion we do not feel it to be an illusion but a reality. It is the same perhaps with evil. Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty.

0
0
Source
source
p. 64
1 month 2 days ago

Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.

0
0
Source
source
Cited in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations by Subject, ed. Susan Ratcliffe (2010), p. 223
3 months 1 week ago

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.

0
0
1 week 4 days ago

I know that my unity with all people cannot be destroyed by national boundaries and government orders.

0
0
Source
source
My Religion (1884)
2 months 3 weeks ago

What is it, in your opinion, to be a great nobleman? It is to be master of several objects that men covet, and thus to be able to satisfy the wants and the desires of many. It is these wants and these desires that attract them towards you, and that make them submit to you: were it not for these, they would not even look at you; but they hope, by these services... to obtain from you some part of the good which they desire, and of which they see that you have the disposal.

0
0
2 months 6 days ago

Philosophy unravels the knots in our thinking; hence its results must be simple, but its activity is as complicated as the knots that it unravels.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 9 : Philosophy, p. 183
3 weeks 4 days ago

In all philosophic theory there is an ultimate which is actual in virtue of its accidents. It is only then capable of characterization through its accidental embodiments, and apart from these accidents is devoid of actuality. In the philosophy of organism this ultimate is termed creativity; and [[God] is its primordial, non-temporal accident. In monistic philosophies, Spinoza's or absolute idealism, this ultimate is God, who is also equivalently termed The Absolute. In such monistic schemes, the ultimate is illegitimately allowed a final, eminent reality, beyond that ascribed to any of its accidents. In this general position the philosophy of organism seems to approximate more to some strains of Indian, or Chinese, thought, than to western Asiatic, or European, thought. One side makes process ultimate; the other side makes fact ultimate.

0
0
Source
source
Pt. I, ch. 1, sec. 2.
2 months 1 week ago

Being of opinion that the doctrine and history of so extraordinary a sect as the Quakers were very well deserving the curiosity of every thinking man, I resolved to make myself acquainted with them, and for that purpose made a visit to one of the most eminent of that sect in England, who, after having been in trade for thirty years, had the wisdom to prescribe limits to his fortune, and to his desires, and withdrew to a small but pleasant retirement in the country, not many miles from London. Here it was that I made him my visit. His house was small, but neatly built, and with no other ornaments but those of decency and convenience.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

But the best demonstration by far is experience, if it go not beyond the actual experiment.

0
0
Source
source
Aphorism 70
1 month 2 weeks ago

There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Dictionary of Foreign Quotations (1980) by Mary Collison, Robert L. Collison, p. 235

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia