Skip to main content
6 months 1 week ago

The second is the partiality for unity proper to the philosophical mind, whence this wide-spread canon has flown forth: principles are not to be multiplied beyond supreme necessity, to which we give in our adhesion, not because we have insight into causal unity in the world either by reason or experience, but as seeking it by an impulse of the intellect which seems to itself to have by thus much advanced in the explication of phenomena, by as much as it is granted to it to descend from the same principle to a greater number of consequences,

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

Patriotism is an ephemeral motive that scarcely ever outlasts the particular threat to society that aroused it.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

Every man has his dignity. I'm willing to forget mine, but at my own discretion and not when someone else tells me to.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

When going to the temple to adore Divinity neither say nor do any thing in the interim pertaining to the common affairs of life.

0
0
Source
source
Symbol 1
6 months 2 weeks ago

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.

0
0
Source
source
Of Studies
3 months 3 weeks ago

Is Man so different from any of these Apes that he must form an order by himself? Or does he differ less from them than they differ from one another, and hence must take his place in the same order with them?

0
0
Source
source
Ch.2, p. 86
6 months 1 week ago

When the basic structure of society is publicly known to satisfy its principles for an extended period of time, those subject to these arrangements tend to develop a desire to act in accordance with these principles and to do their part in institutions which exemplify them.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter III, Section 29, pg.177
6 months 1 week ago

He regarded it with the feelings due not to a mere mental delusion, but to a great moral evil. He looked upon it as the greatest enemy of morality: first, by setting up factitious excellencies,-belief in creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies, not connected with the good of human kind,-and causing these to be accepted as substitutes for genuine virtues: but above all, by radically vitiating the standard of morals; making it consist in doing the will of a being, on whom it lavishes indeed all the phrases of adulation, but whom in sober truth it depicts as eminently hateful.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 40)
4 months 2 weeks ago

The world you perceive is drastically simplified model of the real world.

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

Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.

0
0
Source
source
Cited in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations by Subject, ed. Susan Ratcliffe (2010), p. 223
6 months 1 week ago

The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.

0
0
2 months 4 days ago

Now a man need not be very conversant in the writings of Chymists to observe, in how Laxe, Indefinite, and almost Arbitrary Senses they employ the Terms of Salt, Sulphur and Mercury; of which I could never find that they were agreed upon any certain Definitions or setled Notions; not onely differing Authors, but not unfrequently one and the same, and perhaps in the same Book, employing them in very differing senses.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.

0
0
Source
source
De l'Art de persuader ["On the Art of Persuasion"], written 1658; published posthumously.
4 months 5 days ago

How do we account for the current paranormal vogue in the popular media? Perhaps it has something to do with the millennium - in which case it's depressing to realise that the millennium is still three years away.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

A man who has to be punctually at a certain place at five o'clock has the whole afternoon from one to five ruined for him already.

0
0
Source
source
p. 163
2 months 3 weeks ago

Feuerbach ... recognizes ... "even love, in itself the truest, most inward sentiment, becomes an obscure, illusory one through religiousness, since religious love loves man only for God's sake, therefore loves man only apparently, but in truth God only." Is this different with moral love? Does it love the man, this man for this man's sake, or for morality's sake, for Man's sake, and so-for homo homini Deus-for God's sake?

0
0
Source
source
Cambridge 1995, p. 56
6 months 1 week ago

The prejudices of the second species, since they impose upon the intellect by the sensual conditions restricting the mind if it wishes in certain cases to attain to what is intellectual, lurk more deeply. One of them is that which affects knowledge of quantity, the other that affecting knowledge of qualities generally. The former is: every actual multiplicity can be given numerically, and hence, every infinite quantity; the latter, whatever is impossible contradicts itself. In either of them the concept of time, it is true, does not enter into the very notion of the predicate, nor is it attributed as a qualification to the subject. But yet it serves as a means for forming an idea of the predicate, and thus, being a condition, affects the intellectual concept of the subject to the extent that the latter is only attained by its aid.

0
0
2 months 4 weeks ago

In all European countries, especially in England, one class of Captains and commanders of men, recognizable as the beginning of a new real and not imaginary "Aristocracy," has already in some measure developed itself: the Captains of Industry;-happily the class who above all, or at least first of all, are wanted in this time. In the doing of material work, we have already men among us that can command bodies of men. And surely, on the other hand, there is no lack of men needing to be commanded: the sad class of brother-men whom we had to describe as "Hodge's emancipated horses," reduced to roving famine,-this too has in all countries developed itself; and, in fatal geometrical progression, is ever more developing itself, with a rapidity which alarms every one. On this ground, if not on all manner of other grounds, it may be truly said, the "Organization of Labor" (not organizable by the mad methods tried hitherto) is the universal vital Problem of the world.

0
0
5 months ago

The cry of equality pulls everyone down.

0
0
Source
source
Quoted in The Observer September 13, 1987.
2 months 5 days ago

No thefts of free will reported.

0
0
Source
source
(Hays translation) XI, 36
5 months 1 day ago

The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 2, sect. 2
5 months 4 days ago

It is no longer a question anywhere of inventing interconnections from out of our brains, but of discovering them in the facts.

0
0
Source
source
Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy
6 months 1 week ago

I did not know that mankind were suffering for want of gold. I have seen a little of it. I know that it is very malleable, but not so malleable as wit. A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom.

0
0
Source
source
p. 488
5 months 1 day ago

Dialectical logic undoes the abstractions of formal logic and of transcendental philosophy, but it also denies the concreteness of immediate experience. To the extent to which this experience comes to rest with the things as they appear and happen to be, it is a limited and even false experience. It attains its truth if it has freed itself from the deceptive objectivity which conceals the factors behind the facts - that is, if it understands its world as a historical universe, in which the established facts are the work of the historical practice of man.

0
0
Source
source
p. 141
7 months 1 week ago

If God stops a man on the road, and calls him with a revelation and sends him armed with divine authority among men, they say to him; from whom dost thou come? He answers: from God. But now God cannot help his messenger physically like a king, who gives him soldiers or policemen, or his ring or his signature, which is known to all; in short, God cannot help men by providing them with physical certainty that an Apostle is an Apostle-which would, moreover, be nonsense. Even miracles, if the Apostle has that gift, give no physical certainty; for the miracle is the object of faith.

0
0
6 months 4 days ago

The human being is not the lord of beings, but the shepherd of Being.

0
0
Source
source
Letter on Humanism
4 months 4 weeks ago

The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the "self-satisfied man."

0
0
Source
source
Chapter XI: The Self-Satisfied Age
6 months 1 week ago

All natural capacities of a creature are destined to evolve completely to their natural end. First Thesis Variant translations: All natural capacities of a creature are destined sooner or later to be developed completely and in conformity with their end. All natural capacities of a creature are destined to develop themselves completely and to their purpose.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

For my part, while I am as convinced a Socialist as the most ardent Marxian, I do not regard Socialism as a gospel of proletarian revenge, nor even, primarily, as a means of securing economic justice. I regard it primarily as an adjustment to machine production demanded by considerations of common sense, and calculated to increase the happiness, not only of proletarians, but of all except a tiny minority of the human race.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 7: The Case for Socialism
2 months 4 days ago

The Utopianism of the standpoint which expects an era of peace and retrenchment of militarism in the present social order is plainly revealed in the fact that it is having recourse to project making. For it is typical of Utopian strivings that, in order to demonstrate their practicability, they hatch "practical" recipes with the greatest possible details. To this also belongs the project of the "United States of Europe" as a basis for the limitation of international militarism.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

Nothing in this book is true.

0
0
5 months 4 weeks ago

When some one boasted that at the Pythian games he had vanquished men, Diogenes replied, "Nay, I defeat men, you defeat slaves."

0
0
Source
source
Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 33, 43
6 months 1 week ago

Where we find a difficulty we may always expect that a discovery awaits us. Where there is cover we hope for game.

0
0
Source
source
Reflections on the Psalms (1958), ch. III: Cursings
6 months 1 week ago

I observe that a very large portion of the human race does not believe in God and suffers no visible punishment in consequence. And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that he would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt his existence.

0
0
Source
source
Bertrand Russell's Best: Silhouettes in Satire (1958), "On Religion".
4 months 3 weeks ago

In the mid nineteenth century, the typical murderer was a drunken illiterate; a hundred years later the typical murderer regards himself as a thinking man.

0
0
Source
source
Introductory Essay, p. xiv
5 months 1 week ago

Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight. For not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do anything, we prefer sight to almost everything else. The reason is that this, most of all the senses, makes us know and brings to light many differences between things.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

Man can, indeed, act contrarily to the decrees of God, as far as they have been written like laws in the minds of ourselves or the prophets, but against that eternal decree of God, which is written in universal nature, and has regard to the course of nature as a whole, he can do nothing.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 2, Of Natural Right
5 months 5 days ago

This world is empty to him alone who does not understand how to direct his libido towards objects, and to render them alive and beautiful for himself, for Beauty does not indeed lie in things, but in the feeling that we give to them.

0
0
7 months 5 days ago

The preceding merely defines a way of thinking. But the point is to live.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy. All the characteristics you stress in the Negro people: their beauty, their capacity for joy, their warmth, and their humanity, are well-known characteristics of all oppressed people. They grow out of suffering and they are the proudest possession of all pariahs. Unfortunately, they have never survived the hour of liberation by even five minutes. Hatred and love belong together, and they are both destructive; you can afford them only in private and, as a people, only so long as you are not free.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to James Baldwin
2 months 3 weeks ago

Let words proceed as they please, provided only your soul keeps its own sure order, provided your soul is great and holds unruffled to its ideals, pleased with itself on account of the very things which displease others, a soul that makes life the test of its progress, and believes that its knowledge is in exact proportion to its freedom from desire and its freedom from fear.

0
0
4 months 1 day ago

Our media make crisis chatter out of news and fill our minds with anxious phantoms of the real thing - a summit in Helsinki, a treaty in Egypt, a constitutional crisis in India, a vote in the U.N., the financial collapse of New York. We can't avoid being politicized (a word as murky as the condition which it describes) because it is necessary after all to know what is going on. Worse yet, what is going on will not let us alone. Neither the facts nor the deformations, the insidious platitudes of the media (tormenting because the underlying realities are so large and so terrible), can be screened out. The study of literature itself is heavily "politicized."

0
0
Source
source
To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account (1976) [Viking/Penguin, 1998, ISBN 0-141-18075-7], p. 21
5 months 6 days ago

Women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions which men think it manly to pay to the sex, when, in fact, men are insultingly supporting their own superiority.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 4
4 months 1 week ago

It is indeed a matter of great difficulty to discover, and effectually to distinguish, the true motions of particular bodies from the apparent; because the parts of that immovable space, in which those motions are performed, do by no means come under the observation of our senses. Yet the thing is not altogether desperate; for we have some arguments to guide us, partly from the apparent motions, which are the differences of the true motions; partly from the forces, which are the causes and effects of the true motions.

0
0
Source
source
Definitions - Scholium
5 months 3 weeks ago

I think that when friendship and perception of kinship ruled everything, no one killed any creature, because people thought the other animals were related to them.

0
0
Source
source
2, 22, 1

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia