Skip to main content
1 month 4 days 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
1 week 6 days 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.
1 month 1 week ago

If God has made us in his image, we have returned him the favor.

0
0
Source
source
Notebooks, c.1735-c.1750
2 months 6 days ago

Socrates: I think the most likely view is, that these ideas exist in nature as patterns, and the other things resemble them and are imitations of them; their participation in ideas is assimilation to them, that and nothing else.Parmenides: It is impossible that anything be like the idea, or the idea like anything; for if they are alike, some further idea, in addition to the first, will always appear, and if that is like anything, still another, and a new idea will always be arising, if the idea is like that which partakes of it.

0
0
1 day ago

I have compassion on the multitude, because they continue with me now three days, and have nothing to eat: and I will not send them away fasting, lest they faint in the way.

0
0
Source
source
15:32 (KJV)
1 month 1 week ago

It is remarkable that among all the preachers there are so few moral teachers. The prophets are employed in excusing the ways of men.

0
0
Source
source
p. 489
1 month 1 week ago

""You do not love the mind of your race, nor the body. Any kind of creature will please you if only it is begotten by your kind as they now are. It seems to me, Thick One, what you really love is no completed creature but the very seed itself: for that is all that is left".

0
0
Source
source
Oyarsa
1 month 4 weeks ago

If you reject absolutely any single sensation without stopping to discriminate with respect to that which awaits confirmation between matter of opinion and that which is already present, whether in sensation or in feelings or in any immediate perception of the mind, you will throw into confusion even the rest of your sensations by your groundless belief and so you will be rejecting the standard of truth altogether. If in your ideas based upon opinion you hastily affirm as true all that awaits confirmation as well as that which does not, you will not escape error, as you will be maintaining complete ambiguity whenever it is a case of judging between right and wrong opinion.

0
0
4 days ago

The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.

0
0
1 week 2 days ago

What is Europe really but a sterile trunk which owes everything to oriental grafts?

0
0
Source
source
Letter of 18 December 1806 to Windischmann, quoted by Rene Gerard, L'Orient et la pensée romantique allemande, Paris 1963,, p. 213. quoted in Poliakov, L. (1974).
2 months 1 week ago
Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.
0
0
1 week 2 days ago

Even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it, in their inmost being still follow the Christian ideal, for hitherto neither their subtlety nor the ardor of their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of man and of virtue than the ideal given by Christ.

0
0

How do you think the transition from the present situation to community of Property is to be effected? The first, fundamental condition for the introduction of community of property is the political liberation of the proletariat through a democratic constitution.

0
0
Source
source
Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith
1 month 1 week ago

Love is a severe critic. Hate can pardon more than love.

0
0
Source
source
Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 159
1 month 1 week ago

Human beings are not born identical. There are many different temperaments and constitutions; and within each psycho-physical class one can find people at very different stages of spiritual development. Forms of worship and spiritual discipline which may be valuable for one individual maybe useless or even positively harmful for another belonging to a different class and standing, within that class, at a lower or higher level of development.

0
0
1 week 6 days ago

I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the time in which we live I am ready to worship it.

0
0
Source
source
Book Four, Chapter VII.
1 month 2 weeks ago

Labour not after riches first, and think thou afterwards wilt enjoy them. He who neglecteth the present moment, throweth away all that he hath. As the arrow passeth through the heart, while the warrior knew not that it was coming; so shall his life be taken away before he knoweth that he hath it.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

The universe is composed of matter, and, as a system, is sustained by motion. Motion is not a property of matter, and without this motion the solar system could not exist. Were motion a property of matter, that undiscovered and undiscoverable thing, called perpetual motion, would establish itself. It is because motion is not a property of matter, that perpetual motion is an impossibility in the hand of every being, but that of the Creator of motion. When the pretenders to Atheism can produce perpetual motion, and not till then, they may expect to be credited.

0
0
Source
source
A Discourse, &c. &c.
4 weeks ago

It is better to fight with a few good men against all the wicked, than with many wicked men against a few good men.

0
0
Source
source
§ 5
1 month 3 weeks ago

He who created us without our help will not save us without our consent.

0
0
Source
source
St. Augustine, Sermo 169, 11, 13: PL 38, 923 as quoted in Fr. Mitch Pacwa, S. J.. Saved: A Bible Study Guide for Catholics (p. 15). Our Sunday Visitor. Kindle Edition.
1 day ago

Go and shew John again those things which ye do hear and see: The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them. And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me.

0
0
Source
source
11:4-6 (KJV)
1 day ago

He also said to them, "You completely invalidate God's command in order to maintain your tradition! For Moses said: Honor your father and your mother; and, Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must be put to death.

0
0
Source
source
7:9-10

The possession of self-conscious reason, which belongs to us of the present world, did not arise suddenly, nor did it grow only from the soil of the present. This possession must be regarded as previously present, as an inheritance, and as the result of labour - the labour of all past generations of men.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction p. 2 Ibid
1 month 1 week ago

All the cruelty and torment of which the world is full is in fact merely the necessary result of the totality of the forms under which the will to live is objectified.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 2, Ch. 14, § 164
1 month 4 days ago

One might say: art shows us the miracles of nature. It is based on the concept of the miracles of nature.

0
0
4 days ago

We replace God as best we can; for every god is good, provided he perpetuates in eternity our desire for a crucial solitude. . . .

0
0
1 day ago

They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick. But go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.

0
0
Source
source
9:12-13 (KJV)
5 days ago

While moral rules may be propounded by authority the fact that these were so propounded would not validate them.

0
0
Source
source
"The Meaning of Life".
1 week 6 days 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
1 week 2 days ago

When we speak of the commerce with our [American] colonies, fiction lags after truth, invention is unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.

0
0
Source
source
Letter XVI
5 days ago

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn the literature of the whole world-all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls. Thus the soul has gradually been turned into a Nazareth from which nothing good can come.

0
0
Source
source
CW 12, par. 126 (p 99)
1 month 1 week ago

Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.

0
0
Source
source
Part 4, Section 7
1 month 1 week ago

In democratic countries, the most important private organizations are economic. Unlike secret societies, they are able to exercize their terrorism without illegality, since they do not threaten to kill their enemies, but only to starve them.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 12: Powers and forms of governments
2 weeks ago

To make an end of all things on Earth, and our Planetical System of the World, he (God) need but put out the Sun

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

Suppose atomic bombs had reduced the population of the world to one brother and one sister, should they let the human race die out? I do not know the answer, but I do not think it can be in the affirmative merely on the ground that incest is wicked.

0
0
Source
source
p. 47
1 month 3 days ago

The different pieces of evidence did not constitute so many neutral elements, until such time as they could be gathered together into a single body of evidence that would bring the final certainty of guilt. Each piece of evidence aroused a particular degree of abomination. Guilt did not begin when all the evidence was gathered together; piece by piece, it was constituted by each of the elements that made it possible to recognize a guilty person. Thus a semi-proof did not leave the suspect innocent until such time as it was completed; it made him semi-guilty; slight evidence of a serious crime marked someone as slightly criminal. In short, penal demonstration did not obey a dualistic system: true or false; but a principle of continuous gradation; a degree reached in the demonstration already formed a degree of guilt and consequently involved a degree of punishment.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter One, The body of the condemned, pp.23
1 day ago

It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.

0
0
Source
source
21:13 (KJV)
2 months 6 days ago

It is my own experience ... that commentators are far more ingenious at finding meaning than authors are at inserting it.

0
0
1 week 6 days ago

Gaiety - a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine.

0
0
Source
source
"Diseases"
1 month 4 days ago

Eternity, not as a static "now," nor as a sequence of "nows" rolling off into the infinite, but as the "now" that bends back into itself. ... Thinking the most difficult thought of philosophy means thinking being as time.

0
0
Source
source
p. 20
2 months 5 days ago

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

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

To choose this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because we can never choose evil. We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for us without being good for all.

0
0
Source
source
Existentialism and Human Emotions
1 month 1 week ago

When we have chosen the vocation in which we can contribute most to humanity, burdens cannot bend us because they are only sacrifices for all. Then we experience no meager, limited, egotistic joy, but our happiness belongs to millions, our deeds live on quietly but eternally effective, and glowing tears of noble men will fall on our ashes.

0
0
Source
source
Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, L. Easton, trans. (1967), p. 39
1 week 2 days ago

To be acutely conscious is a disease, a real, honest-to-goodness disease.

0
0
Source
source
Part 1, Chapter 2 (tr. David Magarshack, 1950) To think too much is a disease, a real, actual disease.
1 month 1 week ago

Acquisitiveness - the wish to possess as much as possible of goods, or the title to goods - is a motive which, I suppose, has its origin in a combination of fear with the desire for necessaries.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

Death cannot explain itself. The earnestness consists precisely in this, that the observer must explain it to himself.

0
0

In [Aristotle's] formal logic, thought is organized in a manner very different from that of the Platonic dialogue. In this formal logic, thought is indifferent toward its objects. Whether they are mental or physical, whether they pertain to society or to nature, they become subject to the same general laws of organization, calculation, and conclusion - but they do so as fungible signs or symbols, in abstraction from their particular "substance." This general quality (quantitative quality) is the precondition of law and order - in logic as well as in society - the price of universal control.

0
0
Source
source
p. 136
1 week 3 days ago

We're sold identity through consumption. You're not person but consumer, defined by purchases. This isn't natural - it's manufactured. Consumerism distracts from collective action, provides temporary satisfaction instead of lasting fulfillment, and keeps you working to buy things you don't need.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

The natural philosophy of Democritus and some others, who did not suppose a mind or reason in the frame of things, but attributed the form thereof able to maintain itself to infinite essays or proofs of nature, which they term fortune, seemeth to me... in particularities of physical causes more real and better inquired than that of Aristotle and Plato; whereof both intermingled final causes, the one as a part of theology, and the other as a part of logic, which were the favourite studies respectively of both those persons. Not because those final causes are not true, and worthy to be inquired, being kept within their own province; but because their excursions into the limits of physical causes hath bred a vastness and solitude in that tract.

0
0
Source
source
Book VII, 7

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia