Skip to main content

The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 168)
3 months 2 days ago

The tyranny of Mrs. Grundy is worse than any other tyranny we suffer under.

0
0
Source
source
On Manners and Fashion
2 months 3 weeks ago

The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.

0
0
Source
source
"Dickens"
1 month 3 weeks ago

Where are these rational practices to be taught and acquired? Not within the four walls of a bare building, in which formality predominates... But in the nursery, play-ground, fields, gardens, workshops, manufactures, museums and class-rooms. ...The facts collected from all these sources will be concentrated, explained, discussed, made obvious to all, and shown in their direct application to practice in all the business of life.

0
0
Source
source
3rd Part
3 months 3 weeks ago

He used to reason as follows: 'Everything belongs to the gods; the wise are friends of the gods; friends hold all things in common; ergo, everything belongs to the wise.'

0
0
Source
source
Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 37, as reported in Diogenes the Cynic: Sayings and Anecdotes as translated by Robin Hard (Oxford: 2012), p. 13
4 months 3 days ago

The Austrians are a highly civilised race, half-surrounded by Slavs in a relatively backward state of culture. ... Servia, a country so barbaric that a man can secure the throne by instigating the assassination of his predecessor, is engaged constantly in fermenting the racial discontent of men of the same race who are Austrian subjects.

0
0
Source
source
War: The Offspring of Fear (1914), quoted in Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude, 1872-1921 (1996), p. 373
1 month 4 weeks ago

There's nothing nonsensical about saying that what would evolve if Darwinian selection has its head is something that you don't want to happen. And I could easily imagine trying to go against Darwinism.

0
0
4 months 4 days ago

Faith consists in believing what reason cannot.

0
0
Source
source
"The Flood", 1764
4 months 5 days ago

The great end of all human industry, is the attainment of happiness. For this were arts invented, sciences cultivated, laws ordained, and societies modelled, by the most profound wisdom of patriots and legislators.

0
0
Source
source
Part I, Essay 16: The Stoic
3 months 1 week ago

It is then unnecessary to investigate whether there be beyond the heaven Space, Void or Time. For there is a single general space, a single vast immensity which we may freely call Void; in it are innumerable globes like this one on which we live and grow. This space we declare to be infinite, since neither reason, convenience, possibility, sense-perception nor nature assign to it a limit. In it are an infinity of worlds of the same kind as our own.

0
0

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

0
0
2 weeks 3 days ago

If you wish to be loved, love.

0
0
Source
source
Seneca quotes this in Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium; Epistle IX and attributes it to Hecato
2 months 2 weeks ago

A Pharisee is someone who is virtuous out of obedience to the Great Beast.

0
0
Source
source
p. 125

The Process of Induction may be resolved into three steps ; the 'Selection of the Idea', the 'Construction of the Conception', and the 'Determination of the Magnitudes'. These three steps correspond to the determination of the 'Independent Variable', the 'formula', and the 'coefficients', in mathematical investigations; or to the 'Argument', the 'Law', and the 'Numerical Data', in a Table of an Inequality. The conceptions involved in scientific truths have attained the requisite degree of clearness by means of the Discussions respecting ideas which have taken place among discoverers and their followers. Such discussions are very far from being unprofitable

0
0
4 months 6 days ago

In manufactures, a very small advantage will enable foreigners to undersell our own workmen, even in the home market. It will require a very great one to enable them to do so in the rude produce of the soil. If the free importation of foreign manufactures were permitted, several of the home manufactures would probably suffer, and some of them, perhaps, go to ruin altogether, and a considerable part of the stock and industry at present employed in them, would be forced to find out some other employment. But the freest importation of the rude produce of the soil could have no such effect upon the agriculture of the country.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter II
3 months 2 days ago

It's easier for a Russian to become an atheist than for anyone else in the world.

0
0
Source
source
Part 4, Chapter 7
4 months 1 day ago

The process of being brought up, however well it is done, cannot fail to offend.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

A lot of people recoil from the word "drugs" - which is understandable given today's noxious street drugs and their uninspiring medical counterparts. Yet even academics and intellectuals in our society typically take the prototypical dumb drug, ethyl alcohol. If it's socially acceptable to take a drug that makes you temporarily happy and stupid, then why not rationally design drugs to make people perpetually happier and smarter? Presumably, in order to limit abuse-potential, one would want any ideal pleasure drug to be akin - in one limited but important sense - to nicotine, where the smoker's brain finely calibrates its optimal level: there is no uncontrolled dose-escalation.

0
0
Source
source
"The Abolitionist Project", Talks given at the FHI (Oxford University) and the Charity International Happiness Conference, 2007
3 months 3 weeks ago

The only knowledge that can truly orient action is knowledge that frees itself from mere human interests and is based in Ideas-in other words knowledge that has taken a theoretical attitude.

0
0
Source
source
p. 301
3 weeks 2 days ago

Consider the great elements of human enjoyment, the attainments and possessions that exalt man's life to its present height, and see what part of these he owes to institutions, to Mechanism of any kind; and what to the instinctive, unbounded force, which Nature herself lent him.

0
0
4 months 3 days ago

The teaching of my philosophy... that our whole existence is something which had better not have been, and that to disown and disclaim it is the highest wisdom.

0
0
Source
source
Ch 1
2 months 4 weeks ago

Third, these general ideas are not mere words, nor do they consist in this, that certain concrete facts will every time happen under certain descriptions of conditions; but they are just as much, or rather far more, living realities than the feelings themselves out of which they are concreted. And to say that mental phenomenon are governed by law does not mean merely that they are describable by a general formula; but that there is a living idea, a conscious continuum of feeling which pervades them, and to which they are docile.

0
0
4 months 4 weeks ago

By 1204, the only place where the entire body of Greek learning existed, still intact, was Constantinople. As a result of the crusaders' conquest, however, Constantinople was ruthlessly pillaged and destroyed and almost all the great treasures of ancient Greek learning were lost forever. It is because of that sack, for instance, that we have only seven plays left out of the better than one hundred written by Sophocles. The tragedy of 1204 can never be undone and for all of time, only bits and pieces of the marvelous Greek world can be known to us.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

Rejoice not in another man's misfortune!

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

The way in which the vast mass of the poor are treated by modern society is truly scandalous. They are herded into great cities where they breathe a fouler air than in the countryside which they have left.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

Cunning and deceit will every time serve a man better than force to rise from a base condition to great fortune.

0
0
Source
source
Book 2, Ch. 13
3 months 3 weeks ago

The only justifiable stopping place for the expansion of altruism is the point at which all whose welfare can be affected by our actions are included within the circle of altruism. This means that all beings with the capacity to feel pleasure or pain should be included; we can improve their welfare by increasing their pleasures and diminishing their pains.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 4, Reason, p. 120
4 months 1 day ago

Commoners are weightless. But he was a royal bon vivant who, no matter what, always weighed 125 kilos. I would be very surprised if he didn't have a few pounds left.

0
0
Source
source
A soldier in Argos, speaking of the dead King Agamemnon, Act 2
3 weeks 2 days ago

Mahomet can work no miracles; he often answers impatiently: I can work no miracles. I? "I am a Public Preacher;" appointed to preach this doctrine to all creatures. Yet the world, as we can see, had really from of old been all one great miracle to him. Look over the world, says he; is it not wonderful, the work of Allah; wholly "a sign to you," if your eyes were open!

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

The theme of Cosmology, which is the basis of all religions, is the story of the dynamic effort of the World passing into everlasting unity, and of the static majesty of God's vision, accomplishing its purpose of completion by absorption of the World's multiplicity of effort.

0
0
Source
source
Pt. V, ch. II, sec. V.
4 months 2 days ago

From another side: is Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press, not to mention the printing machine? Do not the song and saga of the muse necessarily come to an end with the printer's bar, hence do not the necessary conditions of epic poetry vanish?

0
0
Source
source
Introduction, p. 31.
4 months 3 weeks ago

The wise find pleasure in water; the virtuous find pleasure in hills. The wise are active; the virtuous are tranquil. The wise are joyful; the virtuous are long-lived.

0
0

This final aim is God's purpose with the world; but God is the absolutely perfect Being, and can, therefore, will nothing but himself.

0
0
4 months 2 days ago

It is also a study peculiarly adapted to an early stage in the education of philosophical students, since it does not presuppose the slow process of acquiring, by experience and reflection, valuable thoughts of their own.

0
0
Source
source
(pp. 19-20)
3 months 2 days ago

The original thinking force of the universe progresses and develops itself in all possible determinations of which it is capable, just as the other original natural forces progress and assume all possible configurations. I am a particular determination of the formative force, like the plant; a particular determination of the peculiar motive force, like the animal; and in addition to this a determination of the thinking force: and the union of these three basic forces into one force, into one harmonious development, is the distinguishing characteristic of my species.

0
0
Source
source
P. Preuss, trans. (1987), p. 12
3 months 2 days ago

If insistence on them tends to unsettle established systems ... self-evident truths are by most people silently passed over; or else there is a tacit refusal to draw from them the most obvious inferences.

0
0
Source
source
Ethics (New York:1915), § 14, pp. 38-39
1 week 3 days ago

He who perceives death perceives a sense of the human comedy, and quickly becomes a poet.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 39-40
4 months 2 days ago

But genius looks forward: the eyes of men are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates.

0
0
Source
source
par. 18
3 months 3 weeks ago

The human being is not the lord of beings, but the shepherd of Being.

0
0
Source
source
Letter on Humanism
1 week 4 days ago

One indeed is the Creator of all things, but many are the creative powers revolving in the heavens; we must, therefore, place the influence of the Sun as intermediate with respect to each single operation affecting the earth. Moreover, the principle productive of Life is vastly superabundant in the Intelligible World; our world, also, is evidently full of generative life. It is therefore clear that the life-producing power of the sovereign Sun is intermediate between these two, since the phenomena of Nature bear testimony to the fact; for some kinds of things the Sun brings to perfection, others of them he brings to pass, others he regulates, others he excites, and there exists nothing that, without the creative influence of the Sun, comes to light and is born.

0
0
4 months 2 days ago

Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction
2 months 3 weeks ago

The Interpretation of the Laws of Nature in a Common-wealth, dependeth not on the books of Moral Philosophy. The Authority of writers, without the Authority of the Commonwealth, maketh not their opinions Law, be they never so true.

0
0
Source
source
The Second Part, Chapter 26, p. 143
3 months 3 days ago

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

0
0
Source
source
Part II Section II

The question Whether one generation of men has a right to bind another, seems never to have been started either on this or our side of the water. Yet it is a question of such consequences as not only to merit decision, but place also, among the fundamental principles of every government. The course of reflection in which we are immersed here on the elementary principles of society has presented this question to my mind; & that no such obligation can be so transmitted I think very capable of proof. I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self-evident, 'that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living': that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it. The portion occupied by any individual ceases to be his when himself ceases to be, & reverts to the society.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to James Madison,
4 months 3 weeks ago

The Yin based its propriety on that of the Xia, and what it added and subtracted is knowable. The Zhou has based its propriety on that of the Shang and what it added and subtracted is knowable. In this way, what continues from the Chou, even if 100 generations hence, is knowable.

0
0

If sovereignty is not anterior to a people, at least these two ideas are collateral, since it takes a sovereign to make a people. It is as impossible to imagine a human society without a sovereign as a hive and a swarm without a queen, for a swarm, in virtue of the eternal laws of nature, exists in this way or it does not exist.

0
0
Source
source
p. 53
1 week 4 days ago

Of all things nothing exists that is not by its substance the offspring of ocean. But why will you have me tell this to the vulgar? Although better to have been shrouded in silence, it nevertheless has been spoken; at all events I declare it, although all men will not readily receive the same.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

I was forced, through seeing the error of their foundation, to abandon all belief in every religion which had been taught to man. But my religious feelings were immediately replaced by the spirit of universal charity - not for a sect, or a party, or for a country or a colour - but for the human race, and with a real and ardent desire to do good.

0
0
Source
source
Life of Robert Owen (1857) his autobiography, as quoted by Jim Herrick, in "Bradlaugh and Secularism: 'The Province of the Real'"
2 months 2 weeks ago

Whenever a man talks he lies, and so far as he talks to himself - that is to say, so far as he thinks, knowing that he thinks - he lies to himself. The only truth in human life is that which is physiological. Speech - this thing that they call a social product - was made for lying.

0
0
Source
source
Niebla [Mist]
4 months 5 days ago

Two conflicting types of educational systems spring from these conflicting aims. One is public and common to many, the other private and domestic. If you wish to know what is meant by public education, read Plato's Republic. Those who merely judge books by their titles take this for a treatise on politics, but it is the finest treatise on education ever written. In popular estimation the Platonic Institute stands for all that is fanciful and unreal. For my own part I should have thought the system of Lycurgus far more impracticable had he merely committed it to writing. Plato only sought to purge man's heart; Lycurgus turned it from its natural course. The public institute does not and cannot exist, for there is neither country nor patriot. The very words should be struck out of our language. The reason does not concern us at present, so that though I know it I refrain from stating it.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia