Skip to main content

Main navigation

☰ ˟
  • Home
  • Articulation
  • Free Books
  • Contact
William James
William James
7 months 2 days ago
Worry means always and invariably inhibition...

Worry means always and invariably inhibition of associations and loss of effective power. Of course, the sovereign cure for worry is religious faith; and this, of course, you also know. The turbulent billows of the fretful surface leave the deep parts of the ocean undisturbed, and to him who has a hold on vaster and more permanent realities the hourly vicissitudes of his personal destiny seem relatively insignificant things. The really religious person is accordingly unshakable and full of equanimity, and calmly ready for any duty that the day may bring forth.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
"The Gospel of Relaxation"
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas
7 months 2 weeks ago
Man reaches the highest point of...

Man reaches the highest point of his knowledge about God when he knows that he knows him not, inasmuch as he knows that that which is God transcends whatsoever he conceives of him.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
q. 7, art. 5, ad 14
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
5 months 2 weeks ago
I feel sure that the police...

I feel sure that the police are helping us more than I could do in ten years. They are making more anarchists than the most prominent people connected with the anarchist cause could make in ten years. If they will only continue I shall be very grateful; they will save me lots of work.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
As quoted in "Arrest in Chicago of Emma Goldman, Preacher of Anarchy", The San Francisco Call
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
5 months 4 weeks ago
Awareness of time: assault on time...

Awareness of time: assault on time . . .

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Hilary Putnam
Hilary Putnam
5 months 1 week ago
To sum up: we have seen...

To sum up: we have seen that of the three notions of 'partial interpretation' discussed, each is either unsuitable for Carnap's purposes (starting with observation terms), or incompatible with a rather minimal scientific realism; and, in addition, the second notion depends upon gross and misleading changes in our use of language. Thus in none of these senses is 'a partially interpreted calculus in which only the observation terms are directly interpreted' an acceptable model for a scientific theory.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
"What theories are not"
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
7 months 3 days ago
The fundamental defect of fathers, in...

The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Ch. 14: Freedom Versus Authority in Education
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
5 months 3 weeks ago
Give an inch, he'll take an...

Give an inch, he'll take an ell.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Liberty and Necessity (no. 111)
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
7 months 4 days ago
The king Frederic has sent me...

The king Frederic has sent me some of his dirty linen to wash; I will wash yours another time.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Reply to General Manstein. Voltaire writes to his niece Dennis, July 24, 1752, "Voilà le roi qui m'envoie son linge à blanchir"; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed.,1919
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
5 days ago
Consider any individual....
0
⚖0
Main Content / General
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
7 months 4 weeks ago
The most elementary form of rebellion,...

The most elementary form of rebellion, paradoxically, expresses an aspiration for order.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
7 months 2 days ago
The normal process of life contains...

The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which insane melancholy is filled with, moments in which radical evil gets its innings and takes its solid turn. The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait till you arrive there yourself! ... Here on our very hearths and in our gardens the infernal cat plays with the panting mouse, or holds the hot bird fluttering in her jaws. Crocodiles and rattlesnakes and pythons are at this moment vessels of life as real as we are; their loathsome existence fills every minute of every day that drags its length along; and whenever they or other wild beasts clutch their living prey, the deadly horror which an agitated melancholiac feels is the literally right reaction on the situation.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Lectures VI and VII, "The Sick Soul"
Philosophical Maxims
Emperor Julian
Emperor Julian
3 months 1 week ago
We celebrate the most solemn of...

We celebrate the most solemn of our Games, dedicating it to the honour of the "Invincible Sun," during which it is not lawful for anything cruel (although necessary), which the previous month presented in its Shows, should be perpetrated on this occasion. The Saturnalia, being the concluding festival, are closely followed in cyclic order by the Festival of the Sun; the which I hope that the Powers above will grant me frequently to chaunt, and to celebrate; and above all others may the Sovereign Sun, lord of the universe! He who proceeding from all eternity in the generative being of the Good, stationed as the central one amidst the central intelligible deities, and replenishing them all with concord, infinite beauty, generative superabundance, and perfect intelligence, and with all blessings collectively without limit of time; and in time present illuminating his station which moves as the centre of all the heavens, his own possession from all eternity!

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Fukuyama
Francis Fukuyama
3 months 3 weeks ago
Liberalism is... a protection of human...

Liberalism is... a protection of human autonomy.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
11:06
Philosophical Maxims
Anaxagoras
Anaxagoras
6 months 3 weeks ago
The sun provides the moon with...

The sun provides the moon with its brightness.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Fragment in Plutarch De facie in orbe lunae, 929b, as quoted in The Riverside Dictionary of Biography (2005), p. 23
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Jaspers
Karl Jaspers
5 months 3 weeks ago
The masses are our masters; and...

The masses are our masters; and for every one who looks facts in the face his existence has become dependent on them, so that the thought of them must control his doings, his cares, and his duties. Even an articulated mass always tends to become unspiritual and inhuman. It is life without existence, superstitions without faith. It may stamp all flat; it is disinclined to tolerate independence and greatness, but prone to constrain people to become as automatic as ants.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
7 months 1 day ago
All-powerful god, who am I but...

All-powerful god, who am I but the fear that I inspire in others?

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
King Aegistheus to Jupiter, Act 2
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
2 months 4 weeks ago
You want praise from people who...

You want praise from people who kick themselves every fifteen minutes, the approval of people who despise themselves. (Is it a sign of self-respect to regret nearly everything you do?)

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
(Hays translation) VIII, 53
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
8 months ago
The whole business is the crudest...

The whole business is the crudest sort of stratagem, since we have no way of foreseeing it to the end. It is a mere paying out of rope on the chance that somewhere along the length of it will be a noose.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal
7 months 2 weeks ago
A few rules include all that...

A few rules include all that is necessary for the perfection of the definitions, the axioms, and the demonstrations, and consequently of the entire method of the geometrical proofs of the art of persuading.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Fukuyama
Francis Fukuyama
3 months 3 weeks ago
So today... red and blue voters...

So today... red and blue voters rely on a completely different set of facts. ...Polls ...suggest that a substantial... majority of Republican voters believe that the Democrats... stole the election, and that Joe Biden is not the legitimate president... When you don't have a common factual basis, you... reinforce the kinds of filter bubbles that people have started to move into.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard
5 months 5 days ago
When the real is no longer...

When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. "The Precession of Simulacra,"

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 6
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
8 months ago
Ten years on the moon could...

Ten years on the moon could tell us more about the universe than a thousand years on the earth might be able to.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
5 months 2 weeks ago
Apart from the fact there is...

Apart from the fact there is no normal standard of health, nobody has proved that man is necessarily cheerful by nature. And further, man, by the very fact of being man, of possessing consciousness, is, in comparison with the ass or the crab, a diseased animal. Consciousness is a disease.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
7 months 1 day ago
The only man for whom Hitler...

The only man for whom Hitler had "unqualified respect" was "Stalin the genius," and while in the case of Stalin and the Russian regime we do not... have the rich documentary material that is available for Germany, we nevertheless know since Khrushchev's speech before the Twentieth Party Congress that Stalin trusted only one man and that was Hitler.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Part 3, Ch. 10
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
7 months 3 days ago
Every philosophy is complete in itself...

Every philosophy is complete in itself and, like a genuine work of art, contains the totality. Just as the works of Apelles and Sophocles, if Raphael and Shakespeare had known them, should not have appeared to them as mere preliminary exercises for their own work, but rather as a kindred force of the spirit, so, too reason cannot find in its own earlier forms mere useful preliminary exercises for itself.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Difference of the Fichtean and Schellingean System of Philosophy, cited in W. Kaufmann, Hegel (1966), p. 49
Philosophical Maxims
Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry
3 months 2 days ago
We know enough of our own...

We know enough of our own history by now to be aware that people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love. To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
5 months 4 weeks ago
I used to ask myself, over...

I used to ask myself, over a coffin: "What good did it do the occupant to be born?," I now put the same question about anyone alive.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
5 months 2 days ago
When the woman showed her love...

When the woman showed her love for the children that were not her own, and wept over them, I saw in her the living God, and understood What men live by.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Ch. XI
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
7 months 2 days ago
I saw a moving sight the...

I saw a moving sight the other morning before breakfast in a little hotel where I slept in the dusty fields. The young man of the house shot a little wolf called coyote in the early morning. The little heroic animal lay on the ground, with his big furry ears, and his clean white teeth, and his little cheerful body, but his little brave life was gone. It made me think how brave all living things are. Here little coyote was, without any clothes or house or books or anything, with nothing to pay his way with, and risking his life so cheerfully - and losing it - just to see if he could pick up a meal near the hotel. He was doing his coyote-business like a hero, and you must do your boy-business, and I my man-business bravely, too, or else we won't be worth as much as a little coyote.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
28-Aug-89
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
3 months 2 weeks ago
There is no sorrow in the...

There is no sorrow in the world, when we have escaped from the fear of death.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
5 months 2 weeks ago
Those who will not worship at...

Those who will not worship at the shrine of money, need not hope for recognition. On the other hand, they will also not have to think other people's thoughts or wear other people's political clothes. They will not have to proclaim as true that which is false, nor praise that as humanitarian which is brutal.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
6 months 3 days ago
I decline the election. - It...

I decline the election. - It has ever been my rule through life, to observe a proportion between my efforts and my objects. I have never been remarkable for a bold, active, and sanguine pursuit of advantages that are personal to myself.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Speech at Bristol on declining the poll (9 September 1780), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II (1855), p. 170
Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
5 months 2 weeks ago
Attention consists of suspending our thought,...

Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object; it means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
7 months 2 days ago
Self-command is the main elegance. p....

Self-command is the main elegance.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 205
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas
7 months 2 weeks ago
It would be better if they...

It would be better if they [rulers] compelled the Jews to work for their living, as they do in parts of Italy, than that, living without occupation, they can grow rich only by usury .

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
art. 2
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
2 months 4 weeks ago
The world is nothing but change....

The world is nothing but change. Our life is only perception.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
(Hays translation) IV, 4
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
7 months 3 days ago
It is remarkable, that almost all...

It is remarkable, that almost all speakers and writers feel it to be incumbent on them, sooner or later, to prove or to acknowledge the personality of God. ... In reading a work on agriculture, we have to skip the author's moral reflections, and the words "Providence" and "He" scattered along the page, to come at the profitable level of what he has to say. What he calls his religion is for the most part offensive to the nostrils. ... There is more religion in men's science than there is science in their religion.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
6 months 1 week ago
The Americans never use the word...

The Americans never use the word peasant, because they have no idea of the class which that term denotes; the ignorance of more remote ages, the simplicity of rural life, and the rusticity of the villager have not been preserved among them; and they are alike unacquainted with the virtues, the vices, the coarse habits, and the simple graces of an early stage of civilization.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Chapter XVII.
Philosophical Maxims
William Whewell
William Whewell
3 months 2 days ago
Philological analogies are to be preserved...

Philological analogies are to be preserved if possible, but modified according to scientific convenience.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus
7 months 1 week ago
Once we have tasted the sweetness...

Once we have tasted the sweetness of what is spiritual, the pleasures of the world will have no attraction for us. If we disregard the shadows of things, then we will penetrate their inner substance.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm
5 months 2 weeks ago
Man's main task in life is...

Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Ch. 4 "Problems of Humanistic Ethics"
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
7 months 4 weeks ago
Homer tells us also that Sisyphus...

Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto could not endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire. He dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Democritus
Democritus
6 months 3 weeks ago
For a man petticoat government is...

For a man petticoat government is the limit of insolence.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Julien Offray de La Mettrie
Julien Offray de La Mettrie
3 months ago
We know in bodies only matter,...

We know in bodies only matter, and we observe the faculty of feeling only in bodies: on what foundation then can we erect an ideal being, disowned by all our knowledge?

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Ch. VI Concerning the Sensitive Faculty of Matter
Philosophical Maxims
Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek
11 months 1 week ago
Ghandi had balls

One should oppose the fascination with Hitler according to which Hitler was, of course, a bad guy, responsible for the death of millions — but he definitely had balls, he pursued with iron will what he wanted. … This point is not only ethically repulsive, but simply wrong: no, Hitler did not ‘have the balls’ to really change things; he did not really act, all his actions were fundamentally reactions, i.e., he acted so that nothing would really change, he stages a big spectacle of Revolution so that the capitalist order could survive.”
In this precise sense of violence, Gandhi was more violent than Hitler: Gandhi’s movement effectively endeavored to interrupt the basic functioning of the British colonial state.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay
4 months 3 weeks ago
I shall cheerfully bear the reproach...

I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history if I can succeed in placing before the English of the nineteenth century a true picture of the life of their ancestors.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Vol. I, ch. 1
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
5 months ago
The new science of communication is...

The new science of communication is percept, not concept.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
(p. 259)
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
2 months 4 weeks ago
Whatever may happen to thee, it...

Whatever may happen to thee, it was prepared for thee from all eternity; and the implication of causes was from eternity spinning the thread of thy being, and of that which is incident to it. Alternate Translation: Whatever may befall you, it was preordained for you from everlasting.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
X, 5
Philosophical Maxims
Nikos Kazantzakis
Nikos Kazantzakis
3 months 3 days ago
We come from a dark abyss,...

We come from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval life. As soon as we are born the return begins, at once the setting forth and the coming back; we die in every moment. Because of this many have cried out: The goal of life is death! But as soon as we are born we begin the struggle to create, to compose, to turn matter into life; we are born in every moment. Because of this many have cried out: The goal of ephemeral life is immortality! In the temporary living organism these two streams collide ... both opposing forces are holy. It is our duty, therefore, to grasp that vision which can embrace and harmonize these two enormous, timeless, and indestructible forces, and with this vision to modulate our thinking and our action.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
7 months 2 days ago
There's only one corner of the...

There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
  • Load More

User login

  • Create new account
  • Reset your password

Social

☰ ˟
  • Main Feed
  • Philosophical Maxims

Civic

☰ ˟
  • Propositions
  • Issue / Solution

Users

☰ ˟
  • All users
  • Historical Figures

Who's new

  • Enzo Soltani
  • Søren Kierkegaard
  • Jesus
  • Friedrich Nietzsche
  • VeXed

Who's online

There are currently 0 users online.

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia