Skip to main content
7 months 3 weeks ago

It is as useless for a person to want first of all to decide the externals and after that the fundamentals as it is for a cosmic body, thinking to form itself, first of all to decide the nature of its surface, to what bodies it should turn its light, which its dark side, without first letting the harmony of centrifugal and centripetal forces realize its existence and letting the rest come of itself. One must learn to know oneself before knowing anything else (gnothi seauton). Not until a person has inwardly understood himself and then sees the course he is to take does his life gain peace and meaning.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

To the rest of the Galaxy, if they are aware of us at all, Earth is but a pebble in the sky. To us it is home, and all the home we know.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

It is all too easy to forget that there are emotional motivations in history, as well as economic ones.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

To preserve permanent good health, the state of mind must be taken into consideration.

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

To save the world requires faith and courage: faith in reason, and courage to proclaim what reason shows to be true.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

It is so hard to forget what it is worse than useless to remember! If I am to be a thoroughfare, I prefer that it be of the mountain-brooks, the Parnassian streams, and not the town-sewers. There is inspiration, that gossip which comes to the ear of the attentive mind from the courts of heaven. There is the profane and stale revelation of the bar-room and the police court. The same ear is fitted to receive both communications. Only the character of the hearer determines to which it shall be open, and to which closed. I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality.

0
0
Source
source
p. 492
6 months 3 weeks ago

The music that can deepest reach, And cure all ill, is cordial speech.

0
0
Source
source
Merlin's Song, II
6 months 2 weeks ago

I am my world.

0
0
Source
source
(The microcosm.) (5.63) Original German: Ich bin meine welt (Der Mikrokosmos.)
4 months 3 weeks ago

Manuscript culture is conversational if only because the writer and his audience are physically related by the form of publication as performance.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 96)
2 months 3 weeks ago

The problem is that rural America has been a colony, certainly throughout my lifetime. I don't think anybody's paid attention to rural America since about 1945 or '50. Certainly not since 1952, when Eisenhower's Secretary of Agriculture said to the farmers: "Get big or get out." They've just abandoned rural America to corporations and technologies.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

The number 2 thought of by one man cannot be added to the number 2 thought of by another man so as to make up the number 4.

0
0
Source
source
Oppression and Liberty (1958), p. 82
4 months 3 weeks ago

We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

Thus, in this universal catastrophe, the sufferings of Christians have tended to their moral improvement, because they viewed them with eyes of faith.

0
0
Source
source
I, 9
2 months 3 weeks ago

It is irreverent to the Gods to give you this demonstration, but for your sakes it shall be done.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in The Lives of the Sophists by Eunapius
7 months 2 weeks ago

Listen widely to remove your doubts and be careful when speaking about the rest and your mistakes will be few. See much and get rid of what is dangerous and be careful in acting on the rest and your causes for regret will be few. Speaking without fault, acting without causing regret: 'upgrading' consists in this.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

Instead of defining the word, let us briefly characterize or describe the phenomenon. Ressentiment is a self-poisoning of the mind which has quite definite causes and consequences. It is a lasting mental attitude, caused by the systematic repression of certain emotions and affects which, as such, are normal components of human nature. Their repression leads to the constant tendency to indulge in certain kinds of value delusions and corresponding value judgments. The emotions and affects primarily concerned are revenge, hatred, malice, envy, the impulse to detract, and spite.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks 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
3 months 2 weeks ago

Descend where you will into the lower class, in Town or Country, by what avenue you will, by Factory Inquiries, Agricultural Inquiries, by Revenue Returns, by Mining-Labourer Committees, by opening your own eyes and looking, the same sorrowful result discloses itself: you have to admit that the working body of this rich English Nation has sunk or is fast sinking into a state, to which, all sides of it considered, there was literally never any parallel.

0
0
6 months 4 weeks ago

Corn is a necessary, silver is only a superfluity.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter XI, Part III, (First Period) p. 223.
5 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 2 weeks ago

The task of the educator is to make the child's spirit pass again where its forefathers have gone, moving rapidly through certain stages but suppressing none of them. In this regard, the history of science must be our guide.

0
0
Source
source
[Logic and intuition in the science of mathematics and in teaching], L'enseignement mathématique
4 months 2 weeks ago

Train any population rationally, and they will be rational. Furnish honest and useful employments to those so trained, and such employments they will greatly prefer to dishonest or injurious occupations. It is beyond all calculation the interest of every government to provide that training and that employment; and to provide both is easily practicable.

0
0
3 months 3 days ago

I have observed that even the barbarians across the Rhine sing savage songs composed in language not unlike the croaking of harsh-voiced birds, and that they delight in such songs. For I think it is always the case that inferior musicians, though they annoy their audiences, give very great pleasure to themselves.

0
0
Source
source
On the songs of the early Germans, in his Mispogon, 337-338
4 months 2 weeks ago

Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.

0
0
Source
source
An Apology for Idlers.
5 months 2 weeks ago

Except for music, everything is a lie, even solitude, even ecstasy. Music, in fact, is the one and the other, only better.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become.

0
0
Source
source
E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 347
2 months 3 weeks ago

But in life, as we are cognizant of it, mental development can go but a little way. The mind hardly begins to awake ere the bodily powers decline - it but becomes dimly conscious of the vast fields before it, but begins to learn and use its strength, to recognize relations and extend its sympathies, when, with the death of the body, it passes away. Unless there is something more, there seems here a break, a failure. Whether it be a Humboldt or a Herschel, a Moses who looks from Pisgah, a Joshua who leads the host, or one of those sweet and patient souls who in narrow circles live radiant lives, there seems, if mind and character here developed can go no further, a purposelessness inconsistent with what we can see of the linked sequence of the universe.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

Murder begins where self-defense ends.

0
0
Source
source
Act I.
6 months 3 weeks ago

Only the great generalizations survive. The sharp words of the Declaration of Independence, lampooned then and since as 'glittering generalities,' have turned out blazing ubiquities that will burn forever and ever.

0
0
Source
source
From a lecture on Books given in the Fraternity Course in Boston in 1864
6 months 3 weeks ago

Faith consists in believing what reason cannot.

0
0
Source
source
"The Flood", 1764
3 months 2 days ago

If compelled to indicate my religion on an immigration blank, I might be tempted to put down the word "Taoist," to the amazement of the customs officer who probably never heard of it.

0
0
Source
source
The Wisdom of Laotse (1948), Introduction, p. 15
3 months 2 days ago

If the early Chinese people had any chivalry, it was manifested not toward women and children, but toward old people. That feeling of chivalry found clear expression in Mencius in some such saying as, "The people with gray hair should not be seen carrying burdens on the street," which was expressed as the final goal of good government.

0
0
Source
source
p. 193
6 months 3 weeks ago

Can anybody remember when the times were not hard and money not scarce?

0
0
Source
source
Works and Days
6 months 2 weeks ago

In philosophy the race is to the one who can run slowest-the one who crosses the finish line last.

0
0
Source
source
p. 40e
6 months 2 weeks ago

People do not feel in any way ashamed or guilty about spending money on new clothes or a new car instead of giving it to famine relief. (Indeed, the alternative does not occur to them.) This way of looking at the matter cannot be justified. When we buy new clothes not to keep ourselves warm but to look "well-dressed" we are not providing for any important need. We would not be sacrificing anything significant if we were to continue to wear our old clothes, and give the money to famine relief. By doing so, we would be preventing another person from starving. It follows from what I have said earlier that we ought to give money away, rather than spend it on clothes which we do not need to keep us warm. To do so is not charitable, or generous. Nor is it the kind of act which philosophers and theologians have called "supererogatory" - an act which it would be good to do, but not wrong not to do. On the contrary, we ought to give the money away, and it is wrong not to do so.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

When I was 15 years old, or 16, I carried around on the streets of Brooklyn a paperback copy of Plato's Republic, front cover facing outward. I had read only some of it and understood less, but I was excited by it and knew it was something wonderful.

0
0
Source
source
The Examined Life
3 months 2 weeks ago

The crop of spiritual talent that is born to you, of human nobleness and intellect and heroic faculty, this is infinitely more important than your crops of cotton or corn, or wine or herrings or whale-oil, which the Newspapers record with such anxiety every season.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

0
0
Source
source
22:37-40 (KJV)
6 months 3 weeks ago

Mysticism is, in essence, little more than a certain intensity and depth of feeling in regard to what is believed about the universe.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1: Mysticism and Logic
5 months 3 weeks ago

They made and recorded a sort of institute and digest of anarchy, called the rights of man, in such a pedantic abuse of elementary principles as would have disgraced boys at school; but this declaration of rights was worse than trifling and pedantic in them; as by their name and authority they systematically destroyed every hold of authority by opinion, religious or civil, on the minds of the people. By this mad declaration they subverted the state; and brought on such calamities as no country, without a long war, has ever been known to suffer, and which may in the end produce such a war, and perhaps, many such.

0
0
Source
source
Speech in the House of Commons (9 February 1790), quoted in The Parliamentary History of England, From the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, Vol. XXVIII (1816), column 358
7 months 3 days ago

You must acquire the best knowledge first, and without delay; it is the height of madness to learn what you will later have to unlearn.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Christian Northoff (1497), as translated in Collected Works of Erasmus (1974), p. 114
3 months 2 weeks ago

The English are a dumb people. They can do great acts, but not describe them.

0
0
Source
source
Bk. III, ch. 5.
5 months 1 week ago

In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as if it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasoning grasps at straws for premises and floats on gossamer for deductions.

0
0
Source
source
p. 91.
2 months 2 weeks ago

Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed.

0
0
6 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 4 weeks ago

In America, conscription is unknown; men are enlisted for payment. Compulsory recruitment is so alien to the ideas and so foreign to the customs of the people of the United States that I doubt whether they would ever dare to introduce it into their law.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter XIII.
3 months 5 days ago

The deeper we look into nature, the more we recognize that it is full of life, and the more profoundly we know that all life is a secret and that we are united with all life that is in nature. Man can no longer live for himself alone. We realize that all life is valuable, and that we are united to all this life. From this knowledge comes our spiritual relationship to the universe.

0
0
Source
source
p. 248

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia