Skip to main content
8 months 2 weeks ago

Figure to yourself the mixture of surprise and delight which has this instant been poured into my mind by the sound of my name, as uttered by you, in the speech just read to me out of the Morning Herald... By one and the same man, not only Parliamentary Reform, but Law Reform advocated. Advocated? and by what man? By one who, in the vulgar sense of profit and loss, has nothing to gain by it... Yes, only from Ireland could such self-sacrifice come; nowhere else: least of all in England, cold, selfish, priest-ridden, lawyer-ridden, lord-ridden, squire-ridden, soldier-ridden England, could any approach to it be found.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Daniel O'Connell (15 July 1828) , quoted in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. X (1843), pp. 594-595
8 months 1 week ago

Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.

0
0
5 months 3 days ago

It depends on what we read, after all manner of Professors have done their best for us.

0
0
7 months 5 days ago

It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.

0
0
Source
source
4:4 (KJV) Said to Satan. The reference is to Deuteronomy 8:3, "... that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man live." (KJV)
8 months 1 week ago

A scheme is unjust when the higher expectations, one or more of them, are excessive. If these expectations were decreased, the situation of the less favored would be improved.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter II, Section 13, pg. 79
8 months 3 weeks ago

Therefore death is nothing to us, it matters not one jot, since the nature of the mind is understood to be mortal.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, lines 830-831 (tr. Rouse)
7 months 1 week ago

There is a boundary to men's passions when they act from feeling; none when they are under the influence of imagination.

0
0
Source
source
p. 460
7 months 1 week ago

There is something beautiful about virtue, Captain. But I am just a poor guy.

0
0
Source
source
Scene VI.
6 months 3 weeks ago

A race preserves its vigour so long as it harbours a real contrast between what has been and what may be, and so long as it is nerved by the vigour to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure, civilization is in full decay.

0
0
Source
source
p. 360.
9 months 1 week ago

The Sophist demonstrates that everything is true and nothing is true.

0
0
6 months 4 weeks ago

Hegel ... destroyed the illusion of the subject's being-in-itself and showed that the subject is itself an aspect of social objectivity. ... However, ... we must ask this question: is this objectivity which we have shown to be a necessary condition and which subsumes abstract subjectivity in fact the higher factor? Does it not rather remain precisely what Hegel reproached it with being in his youth, namely pure externality, the coercive collective? Does not the retreat to this supposedly higher authority signify the regression of the subject, which had earlier won its freedom only with the greatest efforts, with infinite pains?

0
0
Source
source
p. 16
4 months 1 week ago

A magical portal opened inside my mind and conducted me into an astonishing world. ... Before this moment I had divined but had never known with such positiveness that the world is extremely large and that suffering and toil are the companions and fellow warriors not only of Cretan, but of every man. ... that by means of poetry all this suffering and effort could be transformed into dream; no matter how much of the ephemeral existed, poetry could immortalize it by turning it into song.

0
0
Source
source
Naxos, Ch. 11, p. 96
4 months 1 week ago

If an event really happened which was not a part of the uniformity of nature, it would have two properties: no evidence could give the right to believe it to any except those whose actual experience it was; and no inference worthy of belief could be founded upon it at all. Are we then bound to believe that nature is absolutely and universally uniform? Certainly not; we have no right to believe anything of this kind. The rule only tells us that in forming beliefs which go beyond our experience, we may make the assumption that nature is practically uniform so far as we are concerned. Within the range of human action and verification, we may form, by help of this assumption, actual beliefs; beyond it, only those hypotheses which serve for the more accurate asking of questions.

0
0
9 months ago

The greatest states have been overthrown by the young and sustained and restored by the old. ... Rashness is the product of the budding-time of youth, prudence of the harvest-time of age.

0
0
Source
source
section 20
7 months 1 week ago

There is nothing enduring, permanent, either in me or out of me, nothing but everlasting change. I know of no existence, not even of my own. I know nothing and am nothing. Images - pictures - only are, pictures which wander by without anything existing past which they wander, without any corresponding reality which they might represent, without significance and without aim. I myself am one of these images, or rather a confused image of these images. All reality is transformed into a strange dream, without a world of which the dream might be, or a mind that might dream it. Contemplation is a dream; thought, the source of all existence and of all that I fancied reality, of my own existence, my own capacities, is a dream of that dream.

0
0
Source
source
Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p. 60
2 months 1 week ago

Thinking, talking and writing IS action...

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

They say cowardice is infectious; but then argument is, on the other hand, a great emboldener.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 4, The Sea Chest.
8 months 1 week ago

Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world. No hope so bright but is the beginning of its own fulfillment. 

0
0
Source
source
July 18, 1867, Progress of Culture Phi Beta Kappa Address
6 months 3 weeks ago

We set the treatment of bodies so high above the treatment of souls, that the physician occupies a higher place in society than the school-master. The governess is to have every one of God's gifts; she is to do that which the mother herself is incapable of doing; but our son must not degrade himself by marrying the governess, nor our daughter the tutor, though she might marry the medical man.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

Simplicity and nonviolence are the basis of an economy of wellbeing, and such an economy must be localised.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

With this as its basic constitution, civilization achieved things of which gentile society was not even remotely capable. But it achieved them by setting in motion the lowest instincts and passions in man and developing them at the expense of all his other abilities. From its first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization; wealth and again wealth and once more wealth, wealth, not of society, but of the single scurvy individual-here was its one and final aim. If at the same time the progressive development of science and a repeated flowering of supreme art dropped into its lap, it was only because without them modern wealth could not have completely realized its achievements.

0
0
Source
source
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) as translated by Ernest Untermann (1902)
7 months 2 weeks ago

The main business of religions is to purify, control, and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire in times of equality.

0
0
Source
source
Book One, Chapter V.
7 months 1 week ago

We have a priori reasons for believing that in every sentence there is some one order of words more effective than any other; and that this order is the one which presents the elements of the proposition in the succession in which they may be most readily put together.

0
0
Source
source
Pt. I, sec. 3, "The Principle of Economy Applied to Sentences"
6 months 5 days ago

An international socialism is the stated ideal of most socialists; an international liberalism is the unstated tendency of the liberal. To neither system is it thinkable that men live, not by universal aspirations but by local attachments; not by a "solidarity" that stretches across the globe from end to end, but by obligations that are understood in terms which separate men from most of their fellows-in terms such as national history, religion, language, and the customs that provide the basis of legitimacy.

0
0
Source
source
How to be a Non-Liberal, Anti-Socialist Conservative, Intercollegiate Review: A Journal of Scholarship and Opinion
4 months 3 weeks ago

The distinction between private and public undermines the unity of spiritual strength, draining the public of the transcendent energies while trivializing them because the merely private life provides no proper stage for their action.

0
0
Source
source
"Commerce and Culture," p. 280.
8 months 1 week ago

The aim of philosophy is to erect a wall at the point where language stops anyway.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 9 : Philosophy, p. 187
6 months 2 weeks ago

The problem with all this--the problem I discussed in the first lecture--is that if the causes/background conditions distinction is fundamentally subjective, not descriptive of the world in itself, then current philosophical explanations of the metaphysical nature of reference are bankrupt.

0
0
Source
source
Lecture II: Realism and Reasonableness
4 months 1 week ago

As there are many to whom the beauty and harmony of economic laws are hidden, and to whom the inspiring thought of a social order in which there should be work for all, leisure for all, and abundance for all - in which all might be at least as true, as generous and as manful as they wish to be - is shut out by the deference paid to economic authorities who have as it were given bonds not to find that for which they profess to seek, so there are many to-day to whom any belief in the spiritual element, in the existence of God and in a future life, is darkened or destroyed, not so much by difficulties they themselves find, but by what they take to be the teachings of science.

0
0
Source
source
Conclusion : The Moral of this Examination
8 months 1 week ago

You can do everything with bayonets except sit on them. If you want to preserve your power indefinitely you have to get the consent of the ruled. And this they will do partly by drugs as I foresaw in "Brave new World", and partly by these new techniques of propaganda. They will do it by bypassing the sort of rational side of man and appealing to his subconscious, and his deeper emotions, and his physiology, even, and so making him actually love his slavery. I mean I think this is the danger that actually people may be, in some ways, happy under the new regime. But they will be happy in situations when they oughtn't be happy.

0
0
5 months 4 weeks ago

These examples... show that, in whatever proportion of its limbs the Gorilla differs from Man, the other Apes depart still more widely from the Gorilla and that, consequently, such differences of proportion can have no ordinal value.

0
0
Source
source
Ch.2, p. 89
9 months 1 week ago

Those who assert that the mathematical sciences say nothing of the beautiful or the good are in error. For these sciences say and prove a great deal about them; if they do not expressly mention them, but prove attributes which are their results or definitions, it is not true that they tell us nothing about them. The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

In action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces; but in thought, in aspiration, we are free, free from our fellowmen, free from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we live, from the tyranny of death.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

Some things never change...

Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
Emma Goldman believed freedom was meaningless if it did not extend to thought, speech, love, and the body itself.

0
0
5 months 3 days ago

Alas! such is the miseducation of these days, it is only among those that are called the uneducated classes - those educated by experience - that you can look for a Man. Even among these, such a sight is growing daily rarer. My father, in several respects, has not, that I can think of, left his fellow. Perhaps among Scottish peasants what Samuel Johnson was among English authors. I have a sacred pride in my peasant father, and would not exchange him, even now, for any king known to me. Gold and the guinea stamp - the Man and the clothes of the man. Let me thank God for that greatest of blessings, and strive to live worthily of it.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

True science is distinctively the study of useless things. For the useful things will get studied without the aid of scientific men.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.

0
0
Source
source
Education
8 months 1 week ago

The gods sell anything to everybody at a fair price.

0
0
Source
source
Quotation and Originality
6 months 4 weeks ago

I write to thee on this subject, friend, because I am angry at a book which I have just left, which is so large, that it seems to contain universal science, but it hath almost split my head, without teaching me anything.

0
0
Source
source
No. 66.
4 months 1 week ago

That then, that I wish for, as to systems, is this, that men, in the first place, would forbear to establish any theory, till they have consulted with (though not a fully competent number of experiments, such as may afford them all the phænomena to be explicated by that theory, yet) a considerable number of experiments, in proportion to the comprehensiveness of the theory to be erected on them. And, in the next place, I would have such kind of supestructures looked upon only as temporary ones; which though they may be preferred before any others, as being the least imperfect, or, if you please, the best in their kind that we yet have, yet are they not entirely to be acquiesced in, as absolutely perfect, or uncapable of improving alterations.

0
0
8 months 3 days ago

To look for a single general theory of how to decide the right thing to do is like looking for a single theory of how to decide what to believe.

0
0
Source
source
"The Fragmentation of Value" (1977), p. 135.
8 months 4 weeks ago

"For I am holy." When I hear these words I recognize the voice of the Saviour. But shall I take away my own? Certainly when He speaks thus He speaks in inseparable union with His body. But can I say, "I am holy"? If I mean a holiness that I have not received, I should be proud and a liar; but if I mean a holiness that I have received - as it is written: "Be ye holy because I the Lord your God am holy" (Lev. 19:2) - then let the body of Christ say these words. And let this one man, who cries from the ends of the earth, say with his Head and united with his Head: "I am holy." … That is not foolish pride, but an expression of gratitude. If you were to say that you are holy of yourselves, that would be pride; but if, as one of Christ's faithful and as a member of Christ, you say that you are not holy, you are ungrateful.

0
0
Source
source
p.428
4 months 1 week ago

The monopoly of a single bank is certainly an evil. The multiplication of them was intended to cure it; but it multiplied an influence of the same character with the first, and completed the supplanting the precious metals by a paper circulation. Between such parties the less we meddle the better.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Albert Gallatin, 1802. ME 10:323
7 months 3 weeks ago

Dear youths, I warn you cherish peace divine, And in your hearts lay deep these words of mine.

0
0
Source
source
As reported by Heraclides, son of Sarapion, and Diogenes Laërtius, in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, "Pythagoras", Sect. 7, in the translation of C. D. Yonge
9 months 2 days ago

The superior man accords with the course of the Mean. Though he may be all unknown, unregarded by the world, he feels no regret. It is only the sage who is able for this.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

You will have seen that my brother died suddenly in Marseilles. I inherit from him a title, but not a penny of money, as he was bankrupt. A title is a great nuisance to me, and I am at a loss what to do, but at any rate I do not wish it employed in connection with any of my literary work. There is, so far as I know, only one method of getting rid of it, which is to be attainted of high treason, and this would involve my head being cut off on Tower Hill. This method seems to me perhaps somewhat extreme...

0
0
Source
source
Letter to W. W. Norton, 11 March, 1931
5 months 6 days ago

What has philosophy got to do with measuring anything? It's the mathematicians you have to trust, and they measure the skies like we measure a field.

0
0
Source
source
Matteo in Concerning the New Star

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia