Skip to main content
3 months ago

The brutality of a man purely motivated by monetary considerations ... often does not appear to him at all as a moral delinquency, since he is aware only of a rigorously logical behavior, which draws the objective consequences of the situation.

0
0
Source
source
"Domination" (1908), in On Individuality and Social Forms (1971), p. 110
2 months 4 weeks ago

Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Pearls of Wisdom: A Harvest of Quotations From All Ages (1987) by Jerome Agel and Walter D. Glanze, p. 46.
6 months 2 days ago

Do not ask who started it.

0
0
Source
source
Finish it A Dictionary of Thoughts (1908) by Tryon Edwards, p. 234
6 months 4 weeks ago

Wherever you encounter truth, look upon it as Christianity.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Erasmus of Rotterdam‎ (1934) by Stefan Zweig, Eden Paul, and Cedar Paul, p. 91; reprinted in Erasmus - The Right to Heresy (2008) by Stefan Zweig, p. 62
2 months 4 weeks ago

Even the mathematical framework helps nothing, I would first like to understand how Nature avoids the contradictions.

0
0
Source
source
(1927) Quoted in Werner Heisenberg: Die Sprache der Atome (2010) by H. Rechenberg, p. 564.
2 months 2 weeks ago

Doubtless, it shews the wisdom of God, to have so fram'd things at first, that there can seldom or never need any extraordinary interposition of his power; or the employing from, time to time, an intelligent overseer, to regulate, assist, and control the motions of matter.

0
0
Source
source
Sect.1.
2 months 3 weeks ago

Contend with the powers of nature, force them to the yoke of superior purpose. Free that spirit which struggles within them and longs to mingle with that spirit which struggles within you.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

The virtue of frugality lies in a middle between avarice and profusion, of which the one consists in an excess, the other in a defect of the proper attention to the objects of self-interest.

0
0
Source
source
Section II, Chap. I.
6 months 4 weeks ago

Lying and guile need only to be revealed and recognized to be undone. When once lying is recognized as such, it needs no second stroke; it falls of itself and vanishes in shame.

0
0
Source
source
p. 60
2 months 2 weeks ago

Consider all that you've gone through, all that you've survived. And that the story of your life is done, your assignment complete. How many good things have you seen? How much pain and pleasure have you resisted? How many honors have you declined? How many unkind people have you been kind to?

0
0
Source
source
(Hays translation) V, 31
2 months 2 weeks ago

I say, the earth belongs to each of these generations during its course, fully and in its own right. The second generation receives it clear of the debts and incumbrances of the first, the third of the second, and so on. For if the first could charge it with a debt, then the earth would belong to the dead and not to the living generation. Then, no generation can contract debts greater than may be paid during the course of its own existence.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to James Madison (6 September 1789) ME 7:455, Papers 15:393
2 months 3 weeks ago

The heart unites whatever the mind separates, pushes on beyond the arena of necessity and transmutes the struggle into love.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

Some people steal from others, or defraud them, or enslave them, seizing their product and preventing them from living as they choose, or forcibly exclude others from competing in exchanges. None of these are permissible modes of transition from one situation to another.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 7 : Distributive Justice, Section I, The Entitlement Theory, p. 152
2 months 2 weeks ago

The religion-builders have so distorted and deformed the doctrines of Jesus, so muffled them in mysticisms, fancies and falsehoods, have caricatured them into forms so monstrous and inconceivable, as to shock reasonable thinkers, to revolt them against the whole, and drive them rashly to pronounce its founder an impostor.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to w:Timothy Pickering, Esq., 27 February 1821
5 months 3 weeks ago

Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

Do nothing, only keep agitating, debating; and things will destroy themselves.

0
0
Source
source
Pt. I, Bk. VI, ch. 3.
5 months 1 week 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 3 weeks ago

For passionate emotions of all sorts, and for everything which has been said or written in exaltation of them, he professed the greatest contempt. He regarded them as a form of madness. "The intense" was with him a bye-word of scornful disapprobation. He regarded as an aberration of the moral standard of modern times, compared with that of the ancients, the great stress laid upon feeling.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 49)

India has always been an object of yearning, a realm of wonder, a world of magic... India is the land of dreams. India had always dreamt - more of the Bliss that is man's final goal. And this has helped India to be more creative in history than any other nation. Hence the effervescence of myths and legends, religious and philosophies, music, and dances and the different styles of architecture." ...

0
0
Source
source
quoted in Patri, Umesh Hindu scriptures and American transcendentalists 1st ed. quoted from Londhe, S. (2008).
5 months 1 week ago

Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's that "a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." At the same time, when Bacon penned that sage epigram... he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them.

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

A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made. Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 366-67
4 months 1 week ago

The modern world gives proof at every point that it is far easier to destroy institutions than to create them. Nevertheless, few people seem to understand this truth.

0
0
Source
source
Rousseau & the origins of liberalism, The New Criterion
5 months 3 weeks ago

When... in the course of all these thousands of years has man ever acted in accordance with his own interests?

0
0
Source
source
Part 1, Chapter 7
5 months 1 week ago

If one examines the reason why certain works of art offend us, one is likely to find that the cause is that there is no personally felt emotion guiding the selecting the assembling of the materials presented. We derive the impression that the artist, say the author of a novel, is trying to regulate by conscious intent the nature of the emotion aroused. We are irritated by a feeling that he is manipulating materials to secure an effect decided upon in advance. The facets of the work, the variety so indispensable to it, are held together by some external force. The movement of the parts and the conclusion disclose no logical necessity. The author, not the subject matter, is the arbiter.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

Human infirmity in moderating and checking the emotions I name bondage: for, when a man is a prey to his emotions, he is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune: so much so, that he is often compelled, while seeing that which is better for him, to follow that which is worse.

0
0
Source
source
Part IV, Preface; translation by R. H. M. Elwes
3 months 1 day ago

You do not ask what is the value, or what is the use, of this feeling. Of what use is the universe? What is the practical application of a million galaxies? Yet just because it has no use, it has a use-which may sound like a paradox, but is not. What, for instance, is the use of playing music? If you play to make money, to outdo some other artist, to be a person of culture, or to improve your mind, you are not really playing-for your mind is not on the music. You don't swing. When you come to think of it, playing or listening to music is a pure luxury, an addiction, a waste of valuable time and money for nothing more than making elaborate patterns of sound.

0
0
Source
source
p. 92
5 months 2 weeks ago

The skepticism which fails to contribute to the ruin of our health is merely an intellectual exercise.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

At the very high speed of living, everybody needs a new career and a new job and a totally new personality every ten years.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

O reader, to what shifts is poor Society reduced, struggling to give still some account of herself, in epochs when Cash Payment has become the sole nexus of man to men!

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 6, Laissez-Faire.
6 months 2 weeks ago

The Religion that is afraid of science dishonours God and commits suicide. It acknowledges that it is not equal to the whole of truth, that it legislates, tyrannizes over a village of God's empires but is not the immutable universal law. Every influx of atheism, of skepticism is thus made useful as a mercury pill assaulting and removing a diseased religion and making way for truth.

0
0
Source
source
March 4, 1831
5 months 3 weeks ago

...my extreme anxiety about the Object of our common sollicitude and my clear and decided conviction, that there is one part of the War, which instead of being postponed and considered in a secondary light, ought to have priority over every other, and requires our most early and our most careful attention; I mean La Vendée. ... This is a War directly against Jacobinism and its principles. It strikes at the Enemy in his weakest and most vulnerable part. At La Vendée with infinitely less Charge, we may make an impression likely to be decisive. This goes to the heart of the Business.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to the Home Secretary Henry Dundas (8 October 1793), quoted in P. J. Marshall and John A. Woods (eds.)
5 months 2 weeks ago

Humanity may endure the loss of everything: all its possessions may be torn away without infringing its true dignity; - all but the possibility of improvement.

0
0
Source
source
"The Vocation of the Scholar" (1794), as translated by William Smith, in The Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889), Vol. I, Lecture IV, p. 188.
6 months 4 weeks ago

Things are not so painful and difficult of themselves, but our weakness or cowardice makes them so.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 14, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Carew Hazlitt, 1877
3 months 2 weeks ago

News and truth are not the same thing and must be clearly distinguished. The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them into relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act. Only at those points, where social conditions take recognizable and measurable shape, do the body of truth and the body of news coincide.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. XXIV: "News, Truth, and a Conclusion", p. 358 The clause in bold is sometimes quoted on its own in the form, "The news and the truth are not the same thing."
4 months 4 weeks ago

Even though the model referred to satisfies the theory, etc., it is 'unintended'; and we recognize that it is unintended from the description through which it is given (as in the intuitionist case). Models are not lost noumenal waifs looking for someone to name them; they are constructions within our theory itself. and they have names from birth.

0
0
Source
source
Models and Reality
5 months 5 days ago

We cannot think first and act afterwards. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 12: "Religion and Science", p. 261
7 months 2 weeks ago

Art, at least, teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for his existence in the order of nature.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago
Where there have been powerful governments, societies, religions, public opinions, in short wherever there has been tyranny, there the solitary philosopher has been hated; for philosophy offers an asylum to a man into which no tyranny can force it way, the inward cave, the labyrinth of the heart.
0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

Mathematical and physiological researches have shown that the space of experience is simply an actual case of many conceivable cases, about whose peculiar properties experience alone can instruct us.

0
0
Source
source
p. 205; On the space of experience.
5 months 1 week ago

The more the concept of reason becomes emasculated, the more easily it lends itself to ideological manipulation and to propagation of even the most blatant lies. ... Subjective reason conforms to anything.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 24-25.
6 months 4 weeks ago

The believing man hath the Holy Ghost; and where the Holy Ghost dwelleth, He will not suffer a man to be idle, butstirreth him up to all exercises of piety and godliness, and of true religion, to the love of God, to the patient suffering of afflictions, to prayer, to thanksgiving, and the exercise of charity towards all men.

0
0
Source
source
p. 320
4 months 4 weeks ago

Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.

0
0
Source
source
p. 53.
5 months 2 weeks ago

To dream of an enterprise of demolition that would spare none of the traces of the original Big Bang.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia