Skip to main content
4 months 5 days ago

The seeds of heavenly bodies are deposited and cared for in the Milky Way, from which they emanate in swarms of comets that travel a ;long time and ordinarily gravitate towards various suns before becoming fixed in orbit.

0
0
Source
source
L'attraction passioneé
6 months 6 days ago

I hate Communism because it is the negation of liberty and because humanity is for me unthinkable without liberty. I am not a Communist, because Communism concentrates and swallows up in itself for the benefit of the State all the forces of society, because it inevitably leads to the concentration of property in the hands of the State, whereas I want the abolition of the State, the final eradication of the principle of authority and the patronage proper to the State, which under the pretext of moralizing and civilizing men has hitherto only enslaved, persecuted, exploited and corrupted them. I want to see society and collective or social property organized from below upwards, by way of free association, not from above downwards, by means of any kind of authority whatsoever.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Michael Bakunin (1937) by E.H. Carr, p. 356
7 months 3 weeks ago

Rules for Axioms. I. Not to omit any necessary principle without asking whether it is admittied, however clear and evident it may be. II. Not to demand, in axioms, any but things that are perfectly evident in themselves.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

It was evident that he revived by fits and starts. He would suddenly come to himself from actual delirium for a few minutes; he would remember and talk with complete consciousness, chiefly in disconnected phrases which he had perhaps thought out and learnt by heart in the long weary hours of his illness, in his bed, in sleepless solitude.

0
0
Source
source
Part 2, Chapter 10
3 months 1 week ago

The wife of my God is matter; they wrestle with each other, they laugh and weep, they cry out in the nuptial bed of flesh. They spawn and are dismembered. They fill sea, land, and air with species of plants, animals, men, and spirits. This primordial pair embraces, is dismembered, and multiplies in every living creature. All the concentrated agony of the Universe bursts out in every living thing. God is imperiled in the sweet ecstasy and bitterness of flesh. But he shakes himself free, he leaps out of brains and loins, then clings to new brains and new loins until the struggle for liberation again breaks out from the beginning.

0
0
6 months 1 day ago

At the classical origins of philosophic thought, the transcending concepts remained committed to the prevailing separation between intellectual and manual labor to the established society of enslavement. ... Those who bore the brunt of the untrue reality and who, therefore, seemed to be most in need of attaining its subversion were not the concern of philosophy. It abstracted from them and continued to abstract from them.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 134-135
7 months 3 weeks ago

So far as it goes, a small thing may give an analogy of great things, and show the tracks of knowledge.

0
0
Source
source
Book II, lines 123-124 (tr. Rouse)
6 months 5 days ago

I don't understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday.

0
0
4 months ago

The three great elements of modern civilization, gunpowder, printing, and the Protestant religion.

0
0
Source
source
The State of German Literature (1827).
6 months 1 day ago

Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.

0
0
Source
source
"On My Friendly Critics"
4 months 3 weeks ago

Instead of water belonging to millions of local communities, water too is to be controlled by five or six global water giants. These are recipes that use economic systems to appropriate for the few the base of survival of the majority.

0
0
5 months 6 days ago

Either be silent or say something better than silence.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 960
8 months 1 week ago
He who lives as children live who does not struggle for his bread and does not believe that his actions possess any ultimate significance remains childlike.
0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

Immature love says: "I love you because I need you." Mature love says: "I need you because I love you."

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 2
3 months 2 weeks ago

Such religion as there can be in modern life, every individual will have to salvage from the churches for himself.

0
0
Source
source
p. 397
3 months 2 weeks ago

On a certain level of generality A which I call the ground level, you have certain theorems that have been proved and certain unsolved problems P of recognised interest. Suppose you discover a generalisation of one of these theorems and thereby rise to a higher level of generality A'. Write it up, but lock it away in a drawer - unless or until it serves to solve one of the problems P on the ground level... But the deeper one drives the spade the harder the digging gets; maybe it has become too hard for us unless we are not given some outside help, be it even by such devilish devices as high-speed computing machines.

0
0
Source
source
At the Princeton Bicentennial, 17-19 December 1946
4 months 3 days ago

This shows, perhaps, why we have tried to put all physical phenomena into the same frame. But that can not pass for a definition of simultaneity, since this hypothetical intelligence, even if it existed, would be for us impenetrable. It is... necessary to seek something else.

0
0
6 months 1 day ago

The mollusk's motto would be: one must live to build one's house, and not build one's house to live in.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

Man ought to be content, it is said; but with what?

0
0
Source
source
Pensées, Remarques, et Observations de Voltaire; ouvrage posthume (1802)
6 months 1 week ago

It was the case of common soldiers deserting from their officers, to join a furious, licentious populace. It was a desertion to a cause, the real object of which was to level all those institutions, and to break all those connexions, natural and civil, that regulate and hold together the community by a chain of subordination; to raise soldiers against their officers; servants against their masters; tradesmen against their customers; artificers against their employers; tenants against their landlords; curates against their bishops; and children against their parents. That this cause of theirs was not an enemy to servitude, but to society.

0
0
Source
source
Speech in the House of Commons (9 February 1790), quoted in The Parliamentary History of England, From the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, Vol. XXVIII (1816), column 359
5 months 2 weeks ago

To me it seems clear that the descriptions of human life we find in the novels of Tolstoy or George Eliot are not mere entertainment; they teach us to perceive what goes on in social and individual life. And such descriptions require the many subtle distinctions that ordinary language has made available to us. The question of the relevance or irrelevance of "how we speak" is not just a question for philosophers, although it is that too. It is a question for philosophers because once ordinary language is laughed out of the room, philosophical theories are no longer held responsible at all to the ways we actually speak and actually live; but it is a question for more than just philosophers because, at bottom, contempt for ordinary language is contempt for all the humanities.

0
0
Source
source
"Science and Philosophy"
4 months 3 days ago

Scientists believe there is a hierarchy of facts and that among them may be made a judicious choice. They are right, since otherwise there would be no science...

0
0
4 months ago

The highest ensign that men ever met and embraced under, the Cross itself, had no meaning save an accidental extrinsic one.

0
0
Source
source
Bk. III, ch. 3.
6 months 5 days ago

I suddenly stopped and looked out at the sea and thought, my God, how beautiful this is ... for 26 years I had never really looked at it before.

0
0
Source
source
On his greater appreciation of the scenery of the world, after his near-death experience, as quoted in "Did atheist philosopher see God when he 'died'?" by William Cash, in National Post (3 March 2001).
4 months 4 days ago

To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough to make me ambitious.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to his elder sister Henriette (1841).
3 months 5 days ago

I suppose I must be out of sorts to feel everything so deeply. Sometimes, however, it seems to me that i am not really a human being at all, but like a bird or a beast in human form. I feel so much more at home even in a scrap of garden like the one here, and still more in the meadows when the grass is humming with bees than - at one of the our party congresses.

0
0
Source
source
Prison Letter, (May 12, 1917), Rosa Luxemburg Speaks
7 months 1 week ago

So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 10
6 months 6 days ago

Now to Some it appears not at all worth while to follow out the endless divisions of Nature; and moreover a dangerous undertaking, without fruit and issue. As we can never reach, say they, the absolutely smallest grain of material bodies, never find their simplest compartments, since all magnitude loses itself, forwards and backwards, in infinitude; so likewise is it with the species of bodies and powers; here too one comes on new species, new combinations, new appearances, even to infinitude. These seem only to stop, continue they, when our diligence tires; and so it is spending precious time with idle contemplations and tedious enumerations; and this becomes at last a true delirium, a real vertigo over the horrid Deep.

0
0
6 months 5 days ago

This is how I recognize an authentic poet: by frequenting him, living a long time in the intimacy of his work, something changes in myself, not so much my inclinations or my tastes as my very blood, as if a subtle disease had been injected to alter its course, its density and nature. To live around a true poet is to feel your blood run thin, to dream a paradise of anemia, and to hear, in your veins, the rustle of tears.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it, into which a young gentleman should be enter'd by degrees, as he can bear it; and the earlier the better, so he be in safe and skillful hands to guide him.

0
0
Source
source
Sec. 94
5 months 2 days ago

Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1
5 months 3 weeks ago

The chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence.

0
0
Source
source
Pt. V, ch. 1, sec. 1.
6 months 1 week ago

Only a very bad theologian would confuse the certainty that follows revelation with the truths that are revealed. They are entirely different things.

0
0
Source
source
Apology for the Abbé de Prades
3 months 6 days ago

In our contemporary social and intellectual plight, it is nothing less than shocking to discover that those persons who claim to have discovered an absolute are usually the same people who also pretend to be superior to the rest. To find people in our day attempting to pass off to the world and recommending to others some nostrum of the absolute which they claim to have discovered is merely a sign of the loss of and the need for intellectual and moral certainty, felt by broad sections of the population who are unable to look life in the face.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

Every crusader is apt to go mad. He is haunted by the wickedness which he attributes to his enemies; it becomes in some sort a part of him.

0
0
Source
source
Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudon Chatto & Windus, London, (1951), ch. 9, p. 274
7 months 1 week ago

I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him.

0
0
Source
source
Letter (19 April 1951); published in Letters of C. S. Lewis (1966), p. 230
7 months 4 days ago

My difficulty is only an - enormous - difficulty of expression.

0
0
Source
source
Journal entry (8 March 1915) p. 40
4 months 2 weeks ago

In the long run, there is nothing to stop intelligent agents from identifying the molecular signature of experience below hedonic zero and eliminating it altogether - even in insects. Nociception is vital; pain is optional. I tentatively predict that the world's last unpleasant experience in our forward light-cone will be a precisely datable event - perhaps some micro-pain in an obscure marine invertebrate a few centuries hence.

0
0
Source
source
The Radical Plan to Phase out Earth's Predatory Species, io9, 30 Jul. 2014
5 months 3 weeks ago

When television screens had only rare images of black folks, black people were more critically vigilant about these representations. Even when blackness was represented 'positiviely,' as it was in early black television shows like Julia, which focused on the life of a black nurse, the beauty standard was a reflection of white supremacist aesthetics.

0
0
7 months 4 days ago

You could attach prices to thoughts. Some cost a lot, some a little. And how does one pay for thoughts? The answer, I think, is: with courage.

0
0
Source
source
p. 52e
5 months 1 week ago

Environments work us over and remake us. It is man who is the content of and the message of the media, which are extensions of himself. Electronic man must know the effects of the world he has made above all things.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 90)
4 months 3 weeks ago

Every living creature commences its existence under a form different from, and simpler than, that which it eventually attains.

0
0
Source
source
Ch.2, p. 74
5 months 4 weeks ago

Ressentiment is always to some degree a determinant of the romantic type of mind. At least this is so when the romantic nostalgia for some past era (Hellas, the Middle Ages, etc.) is not primarily based on the values of that period, but on the wish to escape from the present. Then all praise of the "past" has the implied purpose of downgrading present-day reality.

0
0
Source
source
L. Coser, trans. (1973), p. 68
6 months 1 week ago

The people reign over the American political world as God rules over the universe. It is the cause and the end of all things; everything rises out of it and is absorbed back into it.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter IV, Part I.
5 months 2 weeks ago

Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

0
0
Source
source
D 25
5 months 1 week ago

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

0
0
Source
source
Commencement Address to Hobart and William Smith Colleges, May 26, 1974
7 months 1 week ago

The game of science is, in principle, without end. He who decides one day that scientific statements do not call for any further test, and that they can be regarded as finally verified, retires from the game.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 2 "On the Problem of a Theory of Scientific Method", Section 11: Methodological Rules as Conventions, p. 32.

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia