Skip to main content
1 month 1 week ago

For why do you hasten to remove things that hurt your eyes, but if anything gnaws your mind, defer the time of curing it from year to year?

0
0
Source
source
Book I, epistle ii, lines 37-39; translation by C. Smart
1 month 2 weeks ago

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1: Introductory
1 month 2 weeks ago

No nation was ever so virtuous as each believes itself, and none was ever so wicked as each believes the other.

0
0
Source
source
Justice in War-Time (1916), p. 70
1 month 3 weeks ago

God gave us the gift of life; it is up to us to give ourselves the gift of living well.

0
0
1 week 4 days ago

The determination of the mot juste, of the right incident in the right place, of exquisiteness of proportion, of the precise tone, hue, and shade that helps unify the whole while it defines a part, is accomplished by emotion. Not every emotion, however, can do this work, but only one informed by material that is grasped and gathered. Emotion is informed and carried forward when it is spent indirectly in search for material and in giving it order, not when it is directly expended.

0
0
Source
source
p. 73
2 days ago

Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labelled Utopian.

0
0
Source
source
"Socialism: Caught in the Political Trap", a lecture (c. 1912), published in Red Emma Speaks, Part 1 (1972) edited by Alix Kates Shulman
1 week 5 days ago

For I came to cause division, with a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. 36 Indeed, a man's enemies will be those of his own household.

0
0
Source
source
10:35,36, New World Translation
1 month 2 weeks ago

Mathematics is as little a natural science as philosophy is one of the humanities. Philosophy in its essence belongs as little in the philosophical faculty as mathematics belongs to natural science. To house philosophy and mathematics in this way today seems to be a blemish or a mistake in the catalog of the universities. Plato put over the entrance to his Academy the words: "Let no one who has not grasped the mathematical enter here!"

0
0
Source
source
p. 69,75
1 month 2 weeks ago

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.

0
0
Source
source
The Words (1964), speaking of his grandmother.
1 month 1 week ago

With an ill-famed man form no connection.

0
0
2 months 2 days ago

Love with delight discourses in my mind Upon my lady's admirable gifts...Beyond the range of human intellect.

0
0
Source
source
Trattato Terzo, line 1.
2 months 5 days ago

When the apostle James was talking about faith and works against those who thought their faith was enough, and didn't want to have good works, he said, You believe God is one; you do well; the demons also believe, and tremble.

0
0
Source
source
(Jas 2:19) 183:13:2
1 month 4 weeks ago

...it is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human understanding to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives...

0
0
Source
source
Aphorism 46
2 weeks 1 day ago

Philosophy offers an antidote to melancholy. And many still believe in the depth of philosophy!

0
0

No member of a crew is praised for the rugged individuality of his rowing.

0
0
Source
source
"Harvard: The Future," The Atlantic Monthly, September 1936

In spite of the universalistic spirit of the monotheistic Western religions and of the progressive political concepts that are expressed in the idea "that all men are created equal," love for mankind has not become a common experience. Love for mankind is looked upon as an achievement which, at best, follows love for an individual or as an abstract concept to be realized only in the future. But love for man cannot be separated from love for one individual. To love one person productively means to be related to his human core, to him as representing mankind. Love for one individual, in so far as it is divorced from love for man, can refer only to the superficial and to the accidental; of necessity it remains shallow.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 2
2 weeks 1 day ago

At this very moment, I am suffering - as we say in French, j'ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

It is as useless for a person to want first of all to decide the externals and after that the fundamentals as it is for a cosmic body, thinking to form itself, first of all to decide the nature of its surface, to what bodies it should turn its light, which its dark side, without first letting the harmony of centrifugal and centripetal forces realize its existence and letting the rest come of itself. One must learn to know oneself before knowing anything else (gnothi seauton). Not until a person has inwardly understood himself and then sees the course he is to take does his life gain peace and meaning.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.

0
0
Source
source
"Sermons in Cats"
3 weeks 3 days ago

Useful undertakings which require sustained attention and vigorous precision in order to succeed often end up by being abandoned, for, in America, as elsewhere, the people move forward by sudden impulses and short-lived efforts.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter V
1 week 5 days ago

Did ye never read in the scriptures, The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner: this is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes? Therefore say I unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof. And whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken: but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder.

0
0
Source
source
21:27-42 and 44 (KJV)

Industry controlled by society as a whole, and operated according to a plan, presupposes well-rounded human beings, their faculties developed in balanced fashion, able to see the system of production in its entirety.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

Philosophy of religion ... really amounts to ... philosophizing on certain favorite assumptions that are not confirmed at all.

0
0
Source
source
E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 143
2 months 3 weeks ago
Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him!
0
0
2 months 1 week ago

A man living without conflicts, as if he never lives at all.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

My body and my will are one.

0
0
Source
source
Book 1

It is a universal revolution and will, accordingly, have a universal range.

0
0
2 days ago

Upper middle-class upbringing has rooted out any element of what might appear to be self-assertion or egoism; good manners is to be like everyone else. So the male of the species becomes accustomed to suppress any stirring of impatience or originality. Shaw once said you can't learn to skate without making a fool of yourself; the British middle-class attitude seems to be that, in that case, you hadn't better skate at all. The result seems to be considerably more oppressive than being brought up in a Jewish ghetto or a west side slum.

0
0
Source
source
p. 112, An integrity born of hope: Notes on Christopher Isherwood
2 months 2 weeks ago

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.

0
0
2 days ago

...the Outsider's problem is the problem of denial of self-expression.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter Four The Attempt to Gain Control

I agree as to the doubtful value of competitive examination. The qualities which you really want, viz., self-control, self-reliance, habits of accurate thought, integrity and what you generally call trustworthiness, are not decided by competitive examination, which test little else than the memory.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Lord Stanley (May 17, 1857), published in Florence Nightingale on Wars and the War Office: Collected Works of Florence Nightingale. Vol. 15 (2011), edited by Lynn McDonald, p. 265.

Knowledge is employed in the service of the necessity of life and primarily in the service of the instinct of personal preservation. The necessity and this instinct have created in man the organs of knowledge and given them such capacity as they possess. Man sees, hears, touches, tastes and smells that which it is necessary for him to see, hear, touch, taste and smell in order to preserve his life. The decay or loss of any of these senses increases the risks with which his life is environed, and if it increases them less in the state of society in which we are actually living, the reason is that some see, hear, touch, taste and smell for others. A blind man, by himself and without a guide, could not live long. Society is an additional sense; it is the true common sense.

0
0

We fund wars but not healthcare, bombs but not schools, empire but not infrastructure. Military spending is jobs program for districts, profit for contractors, political power for hawks. The military-industrial complex bleeds resources that could transform lives, wasted on death.

0
0
1 month 1 day ago

Having departed from your house, turn not back; for the furies will be your attendants.

0
0
Source
source
Symbol 15
2 months 1 week ago

Luxurious food and drinks, in no way protect you from harm. Wealth beyond what is natural, is no more use than an overflowing container. Real value is not generated by theaters, and baths, perfumes or ointments, but by philosophy.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

Life is bristling with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one's garden.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Pierre-Joseph Luneau de Boisjermain (21 October 1769), from Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire: Correspondance [Garnier frères, Paris, 1882], vol. XIV, letter # 7692 (p. 478)
1 week 5 days ago

All the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and in time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death.

0
0
Source
source
Creative Evolution (1907), Chapter III. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911, p. 271
3 weeks 3 days ago

In America a woman loses her independence for ever in the bonds of matrimony. While there is less constraint on girls there than anywhere else, a wife submits to stricter obligations. For the former, her father's house is a home of freedom and pleasure; for the latter, her husband's is almost a cloister.

0
0
Source
source
Book Three, Chapter X.
1 month 2 weeks ago

Too busy with the crowded hour to fear to live or die.

0
0
Source
source
Quatrains, Nature
1 month 2 weeks ago

A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.

0
0
Source
source
Art
1 month 2 weeks ago

No doubt, when modesty was made a virtue, it was a very advantageous thing for the fools, for everybody is expected to speak of himself as if he were one.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 1, Ch. 3, Section 2: Pride
1 month 3 weeks ago

There cannot any one moral Rule be propos'd, whereof a Man may not justly demand a Reason.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, Ch. 3, sec. 4
1 month 3 weeks ago

I am convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganges, - astronomy, astrology, metempsychosis, etc.

0
0
Source
source
M. de Voltaire par M. Bailly et précédées de quelques lettres de M. de Voltaire a l'auteur, Paris 1777, quoted in E. F. Bryant, The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture (2001), Ch. 1
2 days ago

My theory was that we are all fundamentally 'multiple personalities', beginning with the baby and the child, and slowly developing into more complex selves. If, for some reason, we abruptly cease to develop -- through some trauma that undermines self-confidence -- all those potential personalities are stunted and repressed. And some accident or violent shock may give one of them the opportunity to 'take over'. This suggests, of course, that in some mysterious sense, our 'future' personalities are already there, in embryo, so to speak, and that they also develop as we mature. We move from personality to personality, as we might climb a ladder. The Beethovens and Leonardos got further up the ladder than most of us; yet even they failed to reach the top, as we can see if we study their lives.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 228- 229
1 month 3 weeks ago

Freedom of Men under Government is, to have a standing Rule to live by, common to every one of that Society, and made by the Legislative Power erected in it; a Liberty to follow my own Will in all things, where the Rule prescribes not; and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, Arbitrary Will of another Man: as Freedom of Nature is, to be under no other restraint but the Law of Nature.

0
0
Source
source
Second Treatise of Civil Government, Ch. IV, sec. 21
1 month 2 weeks ago

If someone asked us 'but is that true?' we might say "yes" to him; and if he demanded grounds we might say "I can't give you any grounds, but if you learn more you too will think the same."

0
0
2 weeks 1 day ago

I know that my birth is fortuitous, a laughable accident, and yet, as soon as I forget myself, I behave as if it were a capital event, indispensable to the progress and equilibrium of the world.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia