Skip to main content
8 months 1 day ago

The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off our ignorance a little longer: as perhaps the most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind serves only to discover larger portions of it. Thus the observation of human blindness and weakness is the result of all philosophy, and meets us at every turn, in spite of our endeavours to elude or avoid it.

0
0
Source
source
Section 4 : Sceptical Doubts Concerning The Operations of The Understanding
7 months 3 weeks ago

They [Christians] believe that the living, dynamic activity of love has been going on in God forever and has created everything else. And that, by the way, is perhaps the most important difference between Christianity and all other religions: that in Christianity God is not an impersonal thing nor a static thing-not even just one person-but a dynamic pulsating activity, a life, a kind of drama, almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance ... (The) pattern of this three-personal life is ... the great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very center of reality.

0
0
Source
source
Book IV, Chapter 4, "Good Infection"
4 months 3 weeks ago

The advance of science is not comparable to the changes of a city, where old edifices are pitilessly torn down to give place to new, but to the continuous evolution of zoologic types which develop ceaselessly and end by becoming unrecognizable to the common sight, but where an expert eye finds always traces of the prior work of the centuries past. One must not think then that the old-fashioned theories have been sterile or vain.

0
0
8 months 2 weeks ago

Into the same rivers we step and do not step, we are and are not.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

Sure enough, America is a great, and in many respects a blessed and hopeful phenomenon. Sure enough, these hardy millions of Anglo-Saxon men prove themselves worthy of their genealogy; and, with the axe and plough and hammer, if not yet with any much finer kind of implements, are triumphantly clearing out wide spaces, seedfields for the sustenance and refuge of mankind, arenas for the future history of the world; doing, in their day and generation, a creditable and cheering feat under the sun. But as to a Model Republic, or a model anything, the wise among themselves know too well that there is nothing to be said.

0
0
8 months 3 weeks ago

I do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible. I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

Intolerance is the besetting sin of moral fervour.

0
0
Source
source
p. 63, Ch. 4
6 months 5 days ago

From any vocabulary of ideas we can build other ideas by formal combinations of signs. But not any set of ideas will be instructive. One must have the right ideas.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 15, Inductive Logic, p. 139.
8 months 5 days ago

There can be no doubt that the Virgin Mary is in heaven. How it happened we do not know.

0
0
Source
source
Weimar edition of Martin Luther's Works (Translation by William J. Cole) Vol. 10, p. 268

If we make a couple of discoveries here and there we need not believe things will go on like this for ever.... Just as we hit water when we dig in the earth, so we discover the incomprehensible sooner or later.

0
0
Source
source
F 82
6 months 3 weeks ago

It is a melancholy truth; yet such is the blessed effect of civilization! the most respectable women are the most oppressed; and, unless they have understandings far superiour to the common run of understandings, taking in both sexes, they must, from being treated like contemptible beings, become contemptible.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 9
4 months 2 weeks ago

Oceans of horse-hair, continents of parchment, and learned-sergeant eloquence, were it continued till the learned tongue wore itself small in the indefatigable learned mouth, cannot make unjust just.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

Blood will stream over Europe until the nations become aware of the frightful madness which drives them in circles. And then, struck by celestial music and made gentle, they approach their former altars all together, hear about the works of peace, and hold a great celebration of peace with fervent tears before the smoking altars.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in the Fourth Leaflet of the White Rose
7 months 4 weeks ago

A European who goes to New York and Chicago sees the future... when he goes to Asia he sees the past.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 8: Eastern and Western Ideals of Happiness
6 months 3 weeks ago

Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.

0
0
4 weeks ago

🐂💩...if you believe this, you'll believe just about anything....

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

Nearly all of it is now called in by the banks, who have the regulation of the safety-valves of our fortunes, and who condense and explode them at their will.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to John Adams (1819) ME 15:224
7 months 3 weeks ago

The poet is, etymologically, the maker. Like all makers, he requires a stock of raw materials - in his case, experience. Now experience is not a matter of having actually swum the Hellespont, or danced with the dervishes, or slept in a doss-house. It is a matter of sensibility and intuition, of seeing and hearing the significant things, of paying attention at the right moments, of understanding and co-ordinating. Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. It is a gift for dealing with the accidents of existence, not the accidents themselves. By a happy dispensation of nature, the poet generally possesses the gift of experience in conjunction with that of expression. What he says so well is therefore intrinsically of value.

0
0
Source
source
p. 5
7 months 4 weeks ago

Wisdom and contrivance are shown in overcoming difficulties, so there is no place for them in a Being for whom no difficulties exist.

0
0
Source
source
pages 176-177; Early Modern Texts page 16
7 months 1 week ago

Rest satisfied with doing well, and leave others to talk of you as they please.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in The World's Laconics: Or, The Best Thoughts of the Best Authors (1853) by Everard Berkeley Variant: Rest satisfied with doing well, and leave others to talk of you as they will.
4 months 3 weeks ago

Do not imagine that there is any bird more easily caught by decoy, nor any fish sooner fixed on the hook by wormy bait, than are all these poor fools neatly tricked into servitude by the slightest feather passed, so to speak, before their mouths. Truly it is a marvelous thing that they let themselves be caught so quickly at the slightest tickling of their fancy. Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naïvely, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright picture books.

0
0
Source
source
Part 2
6 months 3 weeks ago

Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.

0
0
7 months 2 weeks ago

If you are well-to-do and can maintain your household, love your wife in your home according to good custom...Make her happy while you are alive, for she is land profitable to her lord.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim no. 21.
7 months 3 weeks ago

Recalling all the erroneous things that doctors have been able to say about sex or madness does us a fat lot of good. I think that what is currently politically important is to determine the regime of verediction established at a given moment ... on the basis of which you can now recognize, for example, that doctors in the nineteenth century said so many stupid things about sex. ... It is not so much the history of the true or the history of the false as the history of verediction which has a political significance.

0
0
Source
source
Lecture 2, January 17, 1979, p. 36
7 months 2 weeks ago

To resist him that is set in authority is evil. .

0
0
Source
source
Maxim no. 31
6 months 1 week ago

As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries-not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.

0
0
Source
source
"Two Dogmas of Empiricism"
7 months 2 weeks ago

Citizens of a Jeffersonian democracy can be as religious or irreligious as they please as long as they are not "fanatical." That is, they must abandon or modify opinion on matters of ultimate importance, the opinions that may hitherto have given sense and point to their lives, if these opinions entail public actions that cannot be justified to most of their fellow citizens.

0
0
8 months 6 days ago

Riches are a good handmaid, but the worst mistress.

0
0
Source
source
De Augmentis Scientiarum, Book II, "Antitheta"
3 months 3 weeks ago

The Idea of Cause is expressed for purposes of science by these three Axioms:-'Every Event must have a Cause':-'Causes are measured by their Effects':-'Reaction is equal and opposite to Action'.

0
0
7 months 4 weeks ago

We live to improve, or we live in vain.

0
0
Source
source
Address and Declaration at a Select Meeting of the Friends of Universal Peace and Liberty (August 20, 1791) p. 5
3 months 3 weeks ago

Discovery depends upon the previous cultivation or natural clearness of the appropriate Idea, and therefore no discovery is the work of accident.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

In which the technical apparatus of production and distribution (with an increasing sector of automation) functions, not as the sum-total of mere instruments which can be isolated from their social and political effects, but rather as a system which determines a priori the product of the apparatus as well as the operations of servicing and extending it. In this society, the productive apparatus tends to become totalitarian to the extent to which it determines not only the socially needed occupations, skills, and attitudes, but also individual needs and aspirations. It thus obliterates the Opposition between the private and public existence, between individual and social needs.

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

Socrates: Dear Pan and all the other Gods of this place, grant that I may be beautiful inside. Let all my external possessions be in friendly harmony with what is within. May I consider the wise man rich. As for gold, let me have as much as a moderate man could bear and carry with him. Do we need anything more, Phaedrus? For me that prayer is enough. Phaedrus: Let me also share in this prayer; for friends have all things in common.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

But it has been necessary, for the benefit of the social order, to convert religion into a kind of police system, and hence hell. Oriental or Greek Christianity is predominantly eschatological, Protestantism predominantly ethical, and Catholicism is a compromise between the two, although with the eschatological element predominating.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

Reason not with him, that will deny the principal truths!

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

I am a determinist. As such, I do not believe in free will. The Jews believe in free will. They believe that man shapes his own life. I reject that doctrine philosophically. In that respect, I am not a Jew.

0
0
Source
source
Quoted in [http://books.google.com/books?id=dJMpQagbz_gC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA387#v=onepage&q&f=false Einstein: His Life and Universe] by Walter Isaacson, p. 387

Dying is nothing. You have to know how to disappear. Dying comes down to a biological chance and that is of no consequence. Disappearing is of a far higher order of necessity. You must not leave it to biology to decide when you will disappear. To disappear is to pass into an enigmatic state which is neither life nor death. Some animals know how to do this, as do savages, who withdraw while still alive, from the sight of their own people.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days, Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, And marching single in an endless file, Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.

0
0
Source
source
Days
5 months 3 weeks ago

I cannot recall those years without horror, loathing, and heart-rending pain. I killed people in war, challenged men to duels with the purpose of killing them, and lost at cards; I squandered the fruits of the peasants' toil and then had them executed; I was a fornicator and a cheat. Lying, stealing, promiscuity of every kind, drunkenness, violence, murder - there was not a crime I did not commit... Thus I lived for ten years.

0
0
Source
source
Pt. I, ch. 2
6 months 2 weeks ago

Persons who feel themselves to be exiles in this world-and what noble mind, from Empedocles down, has not had that feeling?-are mightily inclined to believe themselves citizens of another.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 39-40
4 months 1 week ago

This spirit thrusts itself forward, confident of commendation and esteem. It is superior to all, monarch of all it surveys; hence it should be subservient to nothing, finding no task too heavy, and nothing strong enough to weigh down the shoulders of a man.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

I must plunge into the water of doubt again and again.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 119
7 months 2 weeks ago

The encouragement of light-mindedness about traditional philosophical topics serves the same purposes as does the encouragement of light-mindedness about traditional theological topics. Like the rise of large market economies, the increase in literacy, the proliferation of artistic genres, and the insouciant pluralism of contemporary culture, such philosophical superficiality and light-mindedness helps along the disenchantment of the world. It helps make the world's inhabitants more pragmatic, more tolerant, more liberal, more receptive to the appeal of instrumental rationality.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

For it has been truly observed by a great philosopher, that truth does more easily emerge out of error than confusion.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia