Skip to main content
7 months 1 week ago

If a single cell, under appropriate conditions, becomes a man in the space of a few years, there can surely be no difficulty in understanding how, under appropriate conditions, a cell may, in the course of untold millions of years, give origin to the human race.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. I, Part III: The Evolution of Life, Ch. 3 : General Aspects of the Evolution
8 months 1 week ago

All those to whom I looked up, were of opinion that the pleasure of sympathy with human beings, and the feelings which made the good of others, and especially of mankind on a large scale, the object of existence, were the greatest and surest sources of happiness. Of the truth of this I was convinced, but to know that a feeling would make me happy if I had it, did not give me the feeling.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 138)
6 months 3 weeks ago

Man is as much a slave to his immediate surroundings now as he was when he lived in tree-huts. Give him the highest, the most exciting thoughts about man's place in the universe, the meaning of history; they can all be snuffed out in a moment if he wants his dinner, or feels irritated by a child squalling on a bus. He is bound by pettiness.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter Two, World Without Values
5 months 3 days ago

By awakening the Heroic that slumbers in every heart, can any Religion gain followers.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

Sit and be still until in the time of no rain you hear beneath the dry wind's commotion in the trees the sound of flowing water among the rocks, a stream unheard before, and you are where breathing is prayer.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

You are never too old to set another goal, or to dream a new dream. Unknown, but also attributed to Les Brown, a motivational speaker. Commonly attributed to C.S. Lewis, but never with a primary source listed.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

The young watch television twenty-four hours a day, they don't read and they rarely listen. This incessant bombardment of images has developed a hypertrophied eye condition that's turning them into a race of mutants. They should pass a law for a total reeducation of the young, making children visit the Galleria Borghese on a daily basis.

0
0
Source
source
"Younger Generation"
6 months 3 weeks ago

We all observe that the reality of sexual intercourse is far from perfect; yet this does not convince us that sex is a greatly overrated occupation. Every time a man glimpses a pretty girl pulling up her stocking, he catches a glimpse of what might be called the "primal sexual vision." It is unfortunate that there seems to be a certain disparity between this primal vision and most ordinary sexual experience. But it dances in front of us like a will-o'-the-wisp, luring us into tormented effort. It can lead novelists to write novels, poets to write poems, and musicians to write symphonies.

0
0
Source
source
p. 39
8 months 1 week ago

Our condition is like that of the poor wolves: if one of the flock wound himself, or so much as limp, the rest eat him up incontinently. That serene Power interposes the check upon the caprices and officiousness of our wills.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

The best and most authentic reaction against feminism and against every other female aberration should not be aimed at women as such, but at men instead. It should not be expected of women that they return to what they really are and thus reestablish the necessary inner and outer conditions for a reintegration of a superior race, when men themselves retain only the semblance of true virility.

0
0
5 months 4 days ago

Pragmatism starts from assumptions similar to those of empiriocriticism, but differs from the latter by its striking formulations, loose aphorisms, and analytical unscrupulousness.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter Seven, Pragmatism and Positivism, p. 166
1 year 1 week ago

In the more sophisticated versions of the critics of ideology - that developed by the Frankfurt School, for example - it is not just a question of seeing things (that is, social reality) as they 'really are," of throwing away the distorting spectacles of ideology; the main point is to see how the reality itself cannot reproduce itself without this so-called ideological mystification. The mask is not simply hiding the real state of things; the ideological distortion is written into its very essence... the moment we see it 'as it really is,' this being dissolves itself into nothingness or, more precisely, it changes into another kind of reality. That is why we must avoid simple metaphors of demasking, of throwing away the veils which are supposed to hide the naked reality.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

Better to be ignorant of a matter than half know it.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 865
9 months 2 days ago

If I hear the Way [of truth] in the morning, I am content even to die in that evening.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

The rosy mountain peaks laughed like high lustrous thoughts,and Helen, speechless, raised her pale hands toward the sunand joyed to feel its warm rays falling on her frozen palms.

0
0
Source
source
Book IV, line 1361
7 months 1 week ago

Fear is the antidote to boredom: the remedy must be stronger than the disease.

0
0
9 months 1 week ago

The Autarch maintained his indifferent calm, but a certain lack of certainty was gathering, and he did not like to experience a lack of certainty. He liked nothing which made him aware of limitations. An Autarch should have no limitations, and on Lingane he had none that natural law did not impose.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

New truth is often uncomfortable, especially to the holders of power; nevertheless, amid the long record of cruelty and bigotry, it is the most important achievement of our intelligent but wayward species.

0
0
Source
source
Religion and Science (1935), Ch. X: Conclusion
5 months 3 days ago

Can the man say, Fiat lux, Let there be light; and out of chaos make a world? Precisely as there is light in himself, will he accomplish this.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

Depart then satisfied, for he also who releases thee is satisfied.

0
0
Source
source
XII, 36
7 months 1 week ago

That is a long word: forever!

0
0
Source
source
Act I.
7 months 4 days ago

All men cannot receive this saying, save they to whom it is given. For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother's womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.

0
0
Source
source
19:11-12 (KJV)
4 months 3 weeks ago

Cartan developed a general scheme of infinitesimal geometry in which Klein's notions were applied to the tangent plane and not to the n-dimensional manifold M itself. On the foundations of general infinitesimal geometry.

0
0
Source
source
Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 35 (1929) 716-725 doi:10.1090/S0002-9904-1929-04812-2 (quote on p. 716)
7 months 1 week ago

Three conceptions are perpetually turning up at every point in every theory of logic, and in the most rounded systems they occur in connection with one another. They are conceptions so very broad and consequently indefinite that they are hard to seize and may be easily overlooked. I call them the conceptions of First, Second, Third. First is the conception of being or existing independent of anything else. Second is the conception of being relative to, the conception of reaction with, something else. Third is the conception of mediation, whereby a first and second are brought into relation.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and Father of the University of Virginia. Epitaph, upon his instructions to erect a "a plain die or cube ... surmounted by an Obelisk" with "the following inscription, and not a word more...because by these, as testimonials that I have lived, I wish most to be remembered." It omits that he had been President of the United States, a position of political power and prestige, and celebrates his involvement in the creation of the means of inspiration and instruction by which many human lives have been liberated from oppression and ignorance.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

Descend you weary-laden, descend in the dark earth,help me to finish swiftly my dread master's shroud,let each hem hold my pain, each corner hide a crow,a lean, voracious crow to peck his heart out bit by bit.

0
0
Source
source
Slave's prayer, Book XI, line 708
4 months 1 week ago

During the last three centuries, there has been, by virtue of the Inquisition, a greater enjoyment of peace, and happiness, in Spain, than in the other nations of Europe.

0
0
Source
source
p. 57
8 months 3 weeks ago

As the soul is the life of the body, so God is the life of the soul. As therefore the body perishes when the soul leaves it, so the soul dies when God departs from it.

0
0
Source
source
p. 277
1 month 2 weeks ago

Religions have to accept universal human rights and respect that reality IS reality...then, it's really just cultural balance that becomes an issue. It's easier to move the location of a person than it is to change their minds...that's a reality we have to face.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

In default of any other proof, the thumb would convince me of the existence of a God.

0
0
Source
source
Stanislas (1856)
4 weeks ago

🤷‍♂️☠️...these are the rumors Christians....

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

If space in infinite, how about the space inside man? Blake said that eternity opens from the center of an atom. My former terror vanished. Now I saw that I was mistaken in thinking of myself as an object in a dead landscape. I had been assuming that man is limited because his brain is limited, that only so much can be packed into the portmanteau. But the spaces of the mind are a new dimension. The body is a mere wall between two infinities. Space extends to infinity outwards; the mind stretches to infinity inwards.

0
0
Source
source
p. 38
7 months 4 days ago

The office of the sovereign, be it a monarch or an assembly, consisteth in the end for which he was trusted with the sovereign power, namely the procuration of the safety of the people, to which he is obliged by the law of nature, and to render an account thereof to God, the Author of that law, and to none but Him. But by safety here is not meant a bare preservation, but also all other contentments of life, which every man by lawful industry, without danger or hurt to the Commonwealth, shall acquire to himself. And this is intended should be done, not by care applied to individuals, further than their protection from injuries when they shall complain; but by a general providence, contained in public instruction, both of doctrine and example; and in the making and executing of good laws to which individual persons may apply their own cases.

0
0
Source
source
The Second Part, Chapter 30: Of the Office of the Sovereign Representative
9 months 1 week ago

I can understand myself in believing, although in addition I can in a relative misunderstanding comprehend the human aspect of this life: but comprehend faith or comprehend Christ, I cannot.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

From time immemorial man has been made in such a way that his vision of the world, so long as it has not been instilled under hypnosis, his motivations and scale of values, his actions and intentions are determined by his personal and group experience of life.

0
0
7 months 4 weeks ago

Being summoned by the Athenians out of Sicily to plead for his life, Alcibiades absconded, saying that that criminal was a fool who studied a defence when he might fly for it.

0
0
Source
source
51 Alcibiades
7 months 1 week ago

What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

Marriage is a union between two persons - one man and one woman. A woman who has given herself up to one, can not give herself up to a second, for her whole dignity requires that she should belong only to this one.

0
0
Source
source
p. 406
1 month 1 week ago

"Perfection" is implied every time you fall short on a goal, but, it's imaginary and unattainable. Even if you met your goal, "perfection" haunts you...even though it is NOT....

0
0
8 months 2 days ago

Throw moderation to the winds, and the greatest pleasures bring the greatest pains.

0
0
7 months 3 days ago

Man is always something more than what he knows of himself. He is not what he is simply once and for all, but is a process...

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

A new development began for relativity theory after 1925 with its absorption into quantum physics. The first great success was scored by Dirac's quantum mechanical equations of the electron, which introduced a new sort of quantities, the spinors, besides the vectors and tensors into our physical theories. ...But difficulties of the gravest kind turned up when one passed from one electron or photon to the interaction among an indeterminate number of such particles. In spite of several advances a final solution of this problem is not yet in sight and may well require a deep modification of the foundation of quantum mechanics, such as would account in the same basic manner for the elementary electric charge e as relativity theory and our present quantum mechanics account for c and h.

0
0
Source
source
Preface to the First American Printing (1950) Note: see Paul Dirac, The Principles of Quantum Mechanics
7 months 4 days ago

Now I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.

0
0
Source
source
Last words
8 months 1 week ago

Society undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is Christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For everything that is given something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet; he has a fine Geneva watch, but cannot tell the hour by the sun.

0
0
Source
source
p. 243
4 months 3 weeks ago

The fox, when caught, is worth nothing: he is followed for the pleasure of following.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. I, ch. 6, "Of Occupation", p. 177
4 months 3 weeks ago

No wild beasts are such enemies to mankind as are most of the Christians in their deadly hatred of one another.

0
0
Source
source
Reported in Ammianus, Res gestae, bk. 22, ch. 5, sec. 4
6 months 1 week ago

Patience is a remedy for every sorrow.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 170

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia