Skip to main content
8 months 1 week ago

There were many special laws affecting the several kings inscribed about the temples, but the most important was the following: They were not to take up arms against one another, and they were all to come to the rescue if any one in any of their cities attempted to overthrow the royal house; like their ancestors, they were to deliberate in common about war and other matters, giving the supremacy to the descendants of Atlas. And the king was not to have the power of life and death over any of his kinsmen unless he had the assent of the majority of the ten.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.

0
0
7 months 2 weeks ago

The deceiver is really the fool.

0
0
Source
source
Kant, Immanuel (1996), page 101
5 months 2 weeks ago

In cloning, the Father and the Mother have disappeared, not in the service of an aleatory liberty of the subject, but in the service of a matrix called code.

0
0
Source
source
"Clone Story," p. 96
6 months 1 week ago

Three in the morning. I realize this second, then this one, then the next: I draw up the balance sheet for each minute. And why all this? Because I was born. It is a special type of sleeplessness that produces the indictment of birth.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it ends in a belief that there is no god, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you. If you find reason to believe there is a God, a consciousness that you are acting under his eye, and that he approves you, will be a vast additional incitement; if that there be a future state, the hope of a happy existence in that increases the appetite to deserve it; if that Jesus was also a god, you will be comforted by a belief of his aid and love.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

Germany is now a field of cadavers, soon she will be a paradise.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

Before Christianity suicide was not in any way troubling. Our lives were our own, and when we tired of them we were at liberty to end them. One might think that as Christianity has declined, this freedom would be reclaimed. Instead secular creeds have sprung up, in which each person's life belongs to everyone else. To hand back the gift of life because it does not please is still condemned as a kind of blasphemy, though the offended deity is now humanity instead of God.

0
0
Source
source
Sweet Morality (p. 231-2)
7 months 1 week ago

A true account of the actual is the rarest poetry, for common sense always takes a hasty and superficial view.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

None but a Craftsman can judge of a craft.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

Universality is the highest principle....

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

A finite interval of time generally contains an innumerable series of feelings; and when these become welded together in association the result is a general idea.

0
0
6 months 4 days ago

The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened.

0
0
Source
source
13:33 (KJV)

Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to H.S. Randall, author of a Life of Thomas Jefferson
3 months 3 weeks ago

The great fault of all ethics hitherto has been that they believed themselves to have to deal only with the relations of man to man. In reality, however, the question is what is his attitude to the world and all life that comes within his reach. A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, and that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help. Only the universal ethic of the feeling of responsibility in an ever-widening sphere for all that lives - only that ethic can be founded in thought. ... The ethic of Reverence for Life, therefore, comprehends within itself everything that can be described as love, devotion, and sympathy whether in suffering, joy, or effort.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 13, p. 188
6 months 2 days ago

The idea that an aim can be reasonable for its own sake-on the basis of virtues that insight reveals it to have in itself-without reference to some kind of subjective gain or advantage, is utterly alien to subjective reason, even where it rises above the consideration of immediate utilitarian values and devotes itself to reflection about the social order as a whole.

0
0
Source
source
p. 4.
6 months 2 days ago

Nationalism is always an effort in a direction opposite to that of the principle which creates nations. The former is exclusive in tendency, the latter inclusive. In periods of consolidation, nationalism has a positive value, and is a lofty standard. But in Europe everything is more than consolidated, and nationalism is nothing but a mania, a pretext to escape from the necessity of inventing something new, some great enterprise.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter XIV: Who Rules The World?
8 months 1 week ago

After these matters we ought perhaps next to discuss pleasure. For it is thought to be most intimately connected with our human nature, which is the reason why in educating the young we steer them by the rudders of pleasure and pain; it is thought, too, that to enjoy the things we ought and to hate the things we ought has the greatest bearing on virtue of character. For these things extend right through life, with a weight and power of their own in respect both to virtue and to the happy life, since men choose what is pleasant and avoid what is painful; and such things, it will be thought, we should least of all omit to discuss, especially since they admit of much dispute.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

Every archetype is capable of endless development and differentiation. It is therefore possible for it to be more developed or less. In an outward form of religion where all the emphasis is on the outward figure (hence where we are dealing with a more or less complete projection) the archetype is identical with externalized ideas but remains unconscious as a psychic factor. When an unconscious content is replaced by a projected image to that extent, it is cut off from all participation in an influence on the conscious mind. Hence it largely forfeits its own life, because prevented from exerting the formative influence on consciousness natural to it; what is more, it remains in its original form - unchanged, for nothing changes in the unconscious.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the government then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence: it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

0
0
Source
source
Book Four, Chapter VI.

Joe Hume talked to me very earnestly about the necessity of an union of Liberals. He said much about Ballot and the Franchise. I told him that I could easily come to some compromise with him and his friends on these matters, but that there were other questions about which I feared that there was an irreconcileable difference, particularly the vital question of national defence. He seemed quite confounded, and had absolutely nothing to say. I am fully determined to make them eat their words on that point, or to have no political connection with them.

0
0
Source
source
Journal entry (November 1852), quoted in George Otto Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, Volume II (1876), p. 368
5 months 1 week ago

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease. [...] In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 131-132
6 months 1 week ago

He who must still exhort himself, and be exhorted, to will the good, has as yet no firm and ever-ready will, but wills a will anew every time he needs it. But he who has such a stable will, wills what he wills for ever, and cannot under any circumstances will otherwise than he always wills. For him freedom of the will is destroyed and swallowed up in necessity.

0
0
Source
source
General Nature of New Eduction p 21
6 months 4 days ago

No man's error becomes his own Law; nor obliges him to persist in it.

0
0
Source
source
The Second Part, Chapter 26, p. 144
3 months 1 week ago

Plausible as the idea of the United States of Europe as a peace arrangement may seem to some at first glance, it has on closer examination not the least thing in common with the method of thought and the standpoint of social democracy . . . At the present stage of development of the world market and of world economy, the conception of Europe as an isolated economic unit is a sterile concoction of the brain. Europe no more forms a special unit within world economy than does Asia or America.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

To aspire to be superhuman is a most discreditable admission that you lack the guts, the wit, the moderating judgment to be successfully and consummately human.

0
0
Source
source
Spinoza's Worm," p. 75
8 months 2 weeks ago
If you have hitherto believed that life was one of the highest value and now see yourselves disappointed, do you at once have to reduce it to the lowest possible price?
0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

The decisions of law courts should never be printed: in the long run, they form a counterauthority to the law.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

Never say, and never take seriously anyone who says, "I cannot believe that so-and-so could have evolved by gradual selection". I have dubbed this kind of fallacy "the Argument from Personal Incredulity". Time and again, it has proven the prelude to an intellectual banana-skin experience.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

There are two classes of poets - the poets by education and practice, these we respect; and poets by nature, these we love.

0
0
Source
source
Parnassus (1874) Preface
7 months 3 weeks ago

Life is one long struggle in the dark.

0
0
Source
source
Book II, line 54 (tr. Rouse)
3 months 3 weeks ago

The rapid development of science... has, as it were, burst its old shell, now become too narrow.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction
7 months 1 week ago

The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings, capable of laws, where there is no law there is no freedom.

0
0
Source
source
Second Treatise of Government, Ch. VI, sec. 57
4 months 4 days ago

But the philosophy that killed off truth proclaims unlimited tolerance for the "language games" (i.e., opinions, beliefs and doctrines) that people find useful. The outcome is expressed in the words of Karl Kraus: "Alles ist wahr und auch das Gegenteil." "Everything is true, and also its opposite."

0
0
Source
source
"Our Merry Apocalypse" (1997), as quoted in Is God Happy? Selected Essays (Basic Books, 2013), p. 318
3 months 1 week ago

The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to William Hunter
8 months 1 week ago

Lord Jesus Christ, our foolish minds are weak; they are more than willing to be drawn-and there is so much that wants to draw us to itself. There is pleasure with its seductive power, the multiplicity with its bewildering distractions, the moment with its infatuating importance and the conceited laboriousness of busyness and the careless time-wasting of light-mindedness and the gloomy brooding of heavy-mindedness-all this will draw us away from ourselves to itself in order to deceive us. But you, who are truth, only you, our Savior and Redeemer, can truly draw a person to yourself, which you have promised to do-that you will draw all to yourself. Then may God grant that by repenting we may come to ourselves, so that you, according to your Word, can draw us to yourself-from on high, but through lowliness and abasement.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

The old land is still the true love, the others are but pleasant infidelities.

0
0
Source
source
Pt. I, ch. IV
5 months 3 weeks ago

Pettiness separates; breadth unites. Let us be broad and big. Let us not overlook vital things because of the bulk of trifles confronting us. A true conception of the relation of the sexes will not admit of conqueror and conquered; it knows of but one great thing: to give of one's self boundlessly, in order to find one's self richer, deeper, better. That alone can fill the emptiness, and transform the tragedy of woman's emancipation into joy, limitless joy.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

Everything harmonizes with me, which is harmonious to thee, O Universe. Nothing for me is too early or too late, which is in due time for thee. There is one light of the sun, though it is interrupted by walls, mountains and infinite other things. There is one common substance, though it is distributed among countless bodies which have their several qualities. There is one soul, though it is distributed among several natures and individual limitations. There is one intelligent soul, though it seems to be divided.

0
0
Source
source
XII, 30
7 months 2 weeks ago

Nothing prints more lively in our minds than something we wish to forget.

0
0
Source
source
Book II, Ch. 12
3 months 3 weeks ago

No easy way leads from the earth to heaven..

0
0
Source
source
line 437; (Megara).
7 months 1 week ago

It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accepts the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints.

0
0
Source
source
Lecture II, "Circumscription of the Topic"
7 months 1 week ago

There was once a millionaire who bought an infinite number of pairs of shoes and, whenever he bought a pair of shoes, he also bought a pair of socks. We can make a selection choosing one out of each pair of shoes, because we can choose always the right shoe or always the left shoe. Thus, so far as the shoes are concerned, selections exist. But, as regards the socks, where there is no distinction of right and left, we cannot use this rule of selection.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 93-93
6 months 1 week ago

Mankind will never be, in an eminent degree, virtuous and happy till each man shall possess that portion of distinction and no more, to which he is entitled by his personal merits. The dissolution of aristocracy is equally the interest of the oppressor and the oppressed. The one will be delivered from the listlessness of tyranny, and the other from the brutalizing operation of servitude.

0
0
Source
source
Book V, Chapter 11, "Moral Effects of Aristocracy"
8 months 1 day ago

The superior man governs men, according to their nature, with what is proper to them, and as soon as they change what is wrong, he stops.

0
0

One never goes so far as when one doesn't know where one is going.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Carl Friedrich Zelter
3 months 2 weeks ago

We cannot ask ourselves whether 'woman' is superior or inferior to 'man' any more than we can ask ourselves whether water is superior or inferior to fire. There can be no doubt that a woman who is perfectly woman is superior to a man who is imperfectly man, just as a farmer who is faithful to his land and performs his work perfectly is superior to a king who cannot do his own work.

0
0
Source
source
Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex
5 months 4 days ago

Take any aspect of the Western inheritance of which our ancestors were proud, and you will find university courses devoted to deconstructing it. Take any positive feature of our political and cultural inheritance, and you will find concerted efforts in both the media and the academy to place it in quotation marks, and make it look like an imposture or a deceit.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 40)

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia