Skip to main content
1 month 1 day ago

It seemed clear to me that life and the world somehow depended upon me now. I may almost say that the world now seemed created for me alone: if I shot myself the world would cease to be at least for me. I say nothing of its being likely that nothing will exist for anyone when I am gone, and that as soon as my consciousness is extinguished the whole world will vanish too and become void like a phantom, as a mere appurtenance of my consciousness, for possibly all this world and all these people are only me myself.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

People are deeply imbedded in philosophical, i.e., grammatical confusions. And to free them presupposes pulling them out of the immensely manifold connections they are caught up in.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 9 : Philosophy, p. 185
2 months 4 days ago

To love is to be delighted by the happiness of someone, or to experience pleasure upon the happiness of another. I define this as true love.

0
0
Source
source
The Elements of True Piety (c. 1677), The Shorter Leibniz Texts (2006) edited by Lloyd H. Strickland, p. 189
2 months 2 weeks ago

Why dost thou not retire like a guest sated with the banquet of life, and with calm mind embrace, thou fool, a rest that knows no care?

0
0
Source
source
Book III, lines 938-939 (tr. Bailey)
3 weeks 6 days ago

Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.

0
0
3 weeks 2 days ago

Fact be vertuous, or vicious, as Fortune pleaseth.

0
0
Source
source
The Second Part, Chapter 27, p. 153

Long after Plato's time the concept of the Ideas still represented the sphere of aloofness, independence, and in a certain sense even freedom, an objectivity that did not submit to 'our' interests.

0
0
Source
source
p. 46.
2 months 1 week ago

Man is forming thousands of ridiculous relations between himself and God.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 12
2 months 1 week ago

In this life it is necessary that we be on our guard. To begin with we must be constantly aware of the fact that life here below is best described as being a type of continual warfare. This is a fact that Job, that undefeated soldier of vast experience, tells us so plainly. Yet in this matter the great majority of mankind is often deceived, for the world, like some deceitful magician, captivates their minds with seductive blandishments, and as a result most individuals behave as if there had been a cessation of hostilities.

0
0
Source
source
p.61
2 months 1 day ago

It is sublime as night and a breathless ocean. It contains every religious sentiment, all the grand ethics, which visit in turn each noble poetic mind .... It is of no use to put away the book if I trust myself in the woods or in a boat upon the pond. Nature makes a Brahmin of me presently: eternal compensation, unfathomable power, unbroken silence .... This is her creed. Peace, she saith to me, and purity and absolute abandonment - these panaceas expiate all sin and bring you to the beatitude of the Eight Gods.

0
0
Source
source
Quoted in Nani Ardeshir Palkhivala, India's Priceless Heritage, 1st ed. (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1980) pp. 9-24
2 months 2 days ago

All movements go too far.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

Nothing can discourage the appetite for divinity in the heart of man.

0
0

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

0
0
Source
source
F 78
2 months ago

The law of progress holds that everything now must be better than what was there before. Don't you see if you want something better, and better, and better, you lose the good? The good is no longer even being measured.

0
0
Source
source
Interview with French writer Roger Errera in New York Review of Books
3 months 3 days ago
We have seen how it is originally language which works on the construction of concepts, a labor taken over in later ages by science. Just as the bee simultaneously constructs cells and fills them with honey, so science works unceasingly on this great columbarium of concepts, the graveyard of perceptions.
0
0
1 week 1 day ago

These papers are all written from what is called a realist perspective. The statements of science are in my view either true or false (although it is often the case that we don't know which) and their truth or falsity does not consist in their being highly derived ways of describing regularities in human experience. Reality is not a part of the human mind; rather the human mind is a part - and a small part at that - of reality.

0
0
Source
source
"Introduction: Science as approximation to truth"
2 months 2 weeks ago

We know, that of all living beings man is the best formed, and, as the gods belong to this number, they must have a human form. ... I do not mean to say that the gods have body and blood in them; but I say that they seem as if they had bodies with blood in them. . . , Epicurus, for whom hidden things were as tangible as if he had touched them with his finger, teaches us that gods are not generally visible, but that they are intelligible; that they are not bodies having a certain solidity . . . but that we can recognize them by their passing images; that as there are atoms enough in the infinite space to produce such images, these are produced before us . . . and make us realize what are these happy, immortal beings.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, Section 18
3 weeks 6 days ago

A word, once dissected, no longer signifies anything, is nothing. Like a body that, after an autopsy, is less than a corpse.

0
0
2 months 1 day ago

What's sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction, p. 37.
2 months 2 days ago

Power, like vanity, is insatiable. Nothing short of omnipotence could satisfy it completely. And as it is especially the vice of energetic men, the causal efficacy of love of power is out of all proportion to its frequency. It is, indeed, by far the strongest motive in the lives of important men. Love of power is greatly increased by the experience of power, and this applies to petty power as well as to that of potentates.

0
0
4 weeks ago

Blood will stream over Europe until the nations become aware of the frightful madness which drives them in circles. And then, struck by celestial music and made gentle, they approach their former altars all together, hear about the works of peace, and hold a great celebration of peace with fervent tears before the smoking altars.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in the Fourth Leaflet of the White Rose
1 month 1 day ago

I assert, that the ancient Whigs held doctrines, totally different from those I have last mentioned. I assert, that the foundations laid down by the Commons, on the trial of Doctor Sacheverel, for justifying the revolution of 1688, are the very same laid down in Mr. Burke's Reflections; that is to say,-a breach of the original contract, implied and expressed in the constitution of this country, as a scheme of government fundamentally and inviolably fixed in King, Lords, and Commons.-That the fundamental subversion of this antient constitution, by one of its parts, having been attempted, and in effect accomplished, justified the Revolution. That it was justified only upon the necessity of the case; as the only means left for the recovery of that antient constitution, formed by the original contract of the British state; as well as for the future preservation of the same government. These are, the points to be proved.

0
0
Source
source
p. 411
3 weeks 1 day ago

This new philosophy, however, was far from giving the temporal an inherent position and function in the constitution of things. Change was acting on the side of man but only because of fixed laws which governed the changes that take place. There was hope in change just because the laws that govern it do not change.

0
0
3 months 1 day ago

The question is asked in ignorance, by one who does not even know what can have led him to ask it.

0
0
1 month 1 day ago

The concessions of the weak are the concessions of fear.

0
0
3 weeks 1 day ago

Democracy means the belief that humanistic culture should prevail.

0
0
Source
source
Democracy and Human Nature, Freedom and Culture
3 weeks 6 days ago

Only optimists commit suicide, the optimists who can no longer be . . . optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why should they have any to die?

0
0
2 months ago

On recent and contemporary literature student's need is least and our help least. They ought to understand it better than we, and if they do not then there is something radically wrong either with them or with the literature. But I need not labour the point. There is an intrinsic absurdity in making current literature a subject of academic study, and the student who wants a tutor's assistance in reading the works of his own contemporaries might as well ask for a nurse's assistance in blowing his own nose.

0
0
Source
source
"Our English syllabus", Rehabilitations and Other Essays (1939). Reprinted in Image and Imagination: Essays and Reviews by C. S. Lewis (2013), Cambridge University Press
2 months 1 day ago

These considerations did not make us overlook the folly of premature attempts to dispense with the inducements of private interest in social affairs, while no substitute for them has been or can be provided: but we regarded all existing institutions and social arrangements as being (in a phrase I once heard from Austin) "merely provisional," and we welcomed with the greatest pleasure and interest all socialistic experiments by select individuals (such as the Co-operative Societies), which, whether they succeeded or failed, could not but operate as a most useful education of those who took part in them, by cultivating their capacity of acting upon motives pointing directly to the general good, or making them aware of the defects which render them and others incapable of doing so.

0
0
Source
source
(pp. 233-234)
3 weeks 1 day ago

The true antithesis of nature is not art but arbitrary conceit, fantasy, and stereotyped convention.

0
0
Source
source
p. 158
1 month 2 weeks ago

The Pythagoreans made kindness to beasts a training in humanity and pity.

0
0
Source
source
3, 20, 7

Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, and not by the intellect.

0
0
Source
source
Pt. IV, Ch. 30 : General Considerations
2 months 1 week ago

I think these things [firearms] were invented by Satan himself, for they can't be defended against with (ordinary) weapons and fists. All human strength vanishes when confronted with firearms. A man is dead before he sees what's coming.

0
0
Source
source
3552
1 week 6 days ago

Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in The New York Times
2 weeks 3 days ago

When at the beginning of the so-called modern age, at the Renaissance, the pagan sense of religion came to life again, it took the concrete form in the knightly ideal with its codes of conduct of love and honor. But it was a paganism Christianized, baptized. "Woman - la donna - was the divinity enshrined within those savage breasts. Whosoever will investigate the memorials of primitive times will find this ideal of woman in its full force and purity; the Universe is woman.

0
0
3 weeks 6 days ago

As soon as one returns to Doubt (if it could be said that one has ever left it), undertaking anything at all seems not so much useless as extravagant. Doubt works deep within you like a disease, or even more effectively, like a faith.

0
0

He who is enamored of himself will at least have the advantage of being inconvenienced by few rivals.

0
0
Source
source
H 10 Variant translation: He who is in love with himself has at least this advantage - he won't encounter many rivals.
3 weeks 6 days ago

When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, "What's your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act." And they do calm down.

0
0
2 months 3 days ago

As the analysis of a substantial composite terminates only in a part which is not a whole, that is, in a simple part, so synthesis terminates only in a whole which is not a part, that is, the world.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

Chi Wan thought thrice, and then acted. When the Master was informed of it, he said, "Twice may do."

0
0

The more is given the less the people will work for themselves, and the less they work the more their poverty will increase.

0
0
Source
source
Help for the Starving, Pt. III
3 months 3 days ago
The reasons and purposes for habits are always lies that are added only after some people begin to attack these habits and to ask for reasons and purposes. At this point the conservatives of all ages are thoroughly dishonest: they add lies.
0
0
2 months 2 days ago

Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.

0
0
2 months ago

To be taken without consent from my home and friends; to lose my liberty; to undergo all those assaults on my personality which modern psychotherapy knows how to deliver; to be re-made after some pattern of "normality" hatched in a Viennese laboratory to which I never professed allegiance; to know that this process will never end until either my captors have succeeded or I have grown wise enough to cheat them with apparent success-who cares whether this is called Punishment or not? "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment"

0
0
Source
source
1949
3 weeks 6 days ago

Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.

0
0
3 weeks 6 days ago

If to describe a misery were as easy to live through it!

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

Be ruled by time, the wisest counsellor of all.

0
0
Source
source
Pericles (Tr. Dryden and Clough)
3 weeks 2 days ago

Positive philosophy made its counter-attack against critical rationalism on two fronts. Comte fought against the French form of negative philosophy, against the heritage of Descartes and the Enlightenment. In Germany, the struggle was directed against Hegel's system. Schelling received an express commission from Frederick William IV 'to destroy the dragon seed' of Hegelianism, while Stahl, another anti-Hegelian, became the philosophical spokesman of the Prussian monarchy in 1840.

0
0
Source
source
P. 326
1 month 2 weeks ago

Count all wickedness foreign and alien.

0
0
Source
source
§ 5
2 months 2 weeks ago

Self-sufficiency is the greatest of all wealth.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia