Skip to main content
4 months 2 weeks 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
2 months 5 days ago

We cannot observe external things without some degree of Thought; nor can we reflect upon our Thoughts, without being influenced in the course of our reflection by the Things which we have observed.

0
0
Source
source
The Elements of Morality, Book 1, ch. 1., 1845
2 months 1 week ago

It is not enough to be wrong, one must also be polite.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in The Genius of Science: A Portrait Gallery (2000) by Abraham Pais, p. 24
5 months 2 days ago

The rights and duties of man thus simplified, it seems almost impertinent to attempt to illustrate truths that appear so incontrovertible: yet such deeply rooted prejudices have clouded reason, and such spurious qualities have assumed the name of virtues, that it is necessary to pursue the course of reason as it has been perplexed and involved in error, by various adventitious circumstances, comparing the simple axiom with casual deviations.Men, in general, seem to employ their reason to justify prejudices, which they have imbibed, they cannot trace how, rather than to root them out. The mind must be strong that resolutely forms its own principles; for a kind of intellectual cowardice prevails which makes many men shrink from the task, or only do it by halves. Yet the imperfect conclusions thus drawn, are frequently very plausible, because they are built on partial experience, on just, though narrow, views.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1
6 months 6 days ago

When people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid.

0
0
Source
source
Theory of Knowledge, 1913
7 months 6 days ago

Happy is the one in whom there is true sorrow over his sin, so that the extreme unimportance to him of everything else is only the negative expression of the confirmation that one thing is unconditionally important to him, so that the unconditional unimportance to him of everything else is a deadly sickness that still is very far from being a sickness unto death but is precisely unto life, because the life is in this, that one thing is unconditionally important to him: to find forgiveness.

0
0
5 months 5 days ago

To care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it's good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things.

0
0
Source
source
Part 1, Chapter 9
6 months 1 week ago

All registers which, it is acknowledged, ought to be kept secret, ought certainly never to exist.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter II, Part II, Appendix to Articles I and II, p. 935.
4 months 3 weeks ago

Now, apparently, many men are again feeling homesick for the herd. They devote themselves passionately to whatever there is left in them of the sheep. They want to march through life together, along the collective path, shoulder to shoulder, wool rubbing wool, and the head down. This is the reason why so many European peoples are looking for a shepherd and a sheep dog.

0
0
Source
source
p. 170
4 months 2 weeks ago

And this in turn makes it plain that the Right Man problem is a problem of highly dominant people. Dominance is a subject of enormous importance to biologists and zoologists because the percentage of dominant animals - or human beings - seems to be amazingly constant. Bernard Shaw once asked the explorer H. M. Stanley how many other men could take over leadership of the expedition if Stanley himself fell ill; Stanley replied promptly: "One in twenty." "Is that exact or approximate?" asked Shaw. "Exact." And biological studies have confirmed this as a fact. For some odd reason, precisely five per cent - one in twenty - of any animal group are dominant - have leadership qualities. During the Korean War, the Chinese made the interesting discovery that if they separated out the dominant five per cent of American prisoners of war, and kept them in separate compound, the remaining ninety-five per cent made no attempt to escape.

0
0
Source
source
p. 216
6 months ago

Without the presence of black people in America, European-Americans would not be "white"-- they would be Irish, Italians, Poles, Welsh, and other engaged in class, ethnic, and gender struggles over resources and identity.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 107-108)
5 months 5 days ago

All those countless battles-those endless, and... for the greater part, useless wars, of which... fills up for so many thousand years... are but little atoms compared with the great whole of human destiny.

0
0
2 months 5 days ago

Pain is not the only essence of our God, nor is hope in a future life or a life on this earth, neither joy nor victory. Every religion that holds up to worship one of these primordial aspects of God narrows our hearts and our minds. The essence of our God is STRUGGLE. Pain, joy, and hope unfold and labor within this struggle, world without end.

0
0
4 months 2 days ago

We may with advantage at times forget what we know.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 234
3 months 2 weeks ago

One can never pay in gratitude; one can only pay "in kind" somewhere else in life.

0
0
Source
source
North to the Orient (1935) Ch. 19
6 months 6 days ago

If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject." The argument is really no better than that.

0
0
Source
source
"The First-cause Argument"
6 months 4 days ago

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in The Concise Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1989) edited by Robert Andrews, p. 114
4 months 3 weeks ago

The happy consciousness is shaky enough-a thin surface over fear, frustration, and disgust.

0
0
Source
source
p. 76
4 months 3 weeks ago

I have never said that human society ought to be aristocratic, but a great deal more than that. What I have said, and still believe with ever-increasing conviction, is that human society is always, whether it will or no, aristocratic by its very essence, to the extreme that it is a society in the measure that it is aristocratic, and ceases to be such when it ceases to be aristocratic. Of course I am speaking now of society and not of the State.

0
0
Source
source
Chap.II: The Rise Of The Historic Level
1 month 3 weeks ago

...to the question whether or not the motion of the Earth in space can be made perceptible in terrestrial experiments. We have already remarked... that all attempts of this nature led to a negative result. Before the theory of relativity was put forward, it was difficult to become reconciled to this negative result.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

Do not imagine that it is less an accident by which you find yourself master of the wealth which you possess, than that by which this man found himself king.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

Pyrrhus said, "If I should overcome the Romans in another fight, I were undone."

0
0
Source
source
47 Pyrrhus
4 months 3 weeks ago

Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.

0
0
Source
source
The Nice and the Good (1968), ch. 14, p. 127. Murdoch attributed this opinion to her character Kate Gray. It was not her own.
6 months 5 days ago

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours ... In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.

0
0
Source
source
p. 364
4 months 1 day ago

For his purposes (and mine), scientific medicine is defined as the set of practices which submit themselves to the ordeal of being tested. Alternative medicine is defined as that set of practices which cannot be tested, refuse to be tested, or consistently fail tests. If a healing technique is demonstrated to have curative properties in properly controlled double-blind trials, it ceases to be alternative. It simply, as Diamond explains, becomes medicine. Conversely, if a technique devised by the President of the Royal College of Physicians consistently fails in double-blind trials, it will cease to be a part of 'orthodox' medicine. Whether it will then become 'alternative' will depend upon whether it is adopted by a sufficiently ambitious quack (there are always sufficiently gullible patients).

0
0
Source
source
Foreword to Snake Oil and Other Preoccupations by John Diamond, Vintage, 2001.
4 months 3 weeks ago

Well both original seizure and subsequent critical discrimination have equal claims, each to its own complete development and must not be forgotten that direct and unreasoned impression comes first. There is such occasions something of the quality of the wind that bloweth where it listeth. Sometimes it comes and sometimes it does not, even in the presence of the same object. It cannot be forced and when it does not arrive it is not wise to seek to recover by direct action the first fine rapture.

0
0
Source
source
p. 151
4 months 3 weeks ago

We cannot grasp any idea, any organ of meditation, we cannot possess it in full force, until we have felt and sensed it, as much so as if it were an odor or a color.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

Even if there never have been actions arising from such pure sources, what is at issue here is not whether this or that happened; that, instead, reason by itself and independently of all appearances commands what ought to happen; that, accordingly, actions of which the world has perhaps so far given no example, and whose very practicability might be very much doubted by one who bases everything on experience, are still inflexibly commanded by reason ... because ... duty ... lies, prior to all experience, in the idea of a reason determing the will by means of apriori grounds.

0
0
2 months 5 days ago

Alas for him who seeks salvation in good only!Balanced on God's strong shoulders, Good and Evil flaptogether like two mighty wings and lift him high.

0
0
Source
source
Odysseus, Book VIII, line 770
5 months 5 days ago

There is a boundary to men's passions when they act from feeling; none when they are under the influence of imagination.

0
0
Source
source
p. 460
4 months 2 weeks ago

Every man has his moral backside which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum.

0
0
Source
source
B 12 Variant translation: Everyone has a moral backside, which he does not show except in case of need and which he covers as long as possible with the breeches of respectability.
4 months 2 weeks ago

Everywhere and always, since its very inception, Christianity has turned the earth into a vale of tears; always it has made of life a weak, diseased thing, always it has instilled fear in man, turning him into a dual being, whose life energies are spent in the struggle between body and soul. In decrying the body as something evil, the flesh as the tempter to everything that is sinful, man has mutilated his being in the vain attempt to keep his soul pure, while his body rotted away from the injuries and tortures inflicted upon it.The Christian religion and morality extols the glory of the Hereafter, and therefore remains indifferent to the horrors of the earth. Indeed, the idea of self-denial and of all that makes for pain and sorrow is its test of human worth, its passport to the entry into heaven.

0
0

Cioran is the only philosopher I have seen that openly talks of suicide. It's one of the dimensions that makes him so emotionally felt. I have mixed feelings about it.....

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

What we should be after death, we have to attain in life, i.e. holiness and bliss. Here on earth the Kingdom of God begins.

0
0
2 months 5 days ago

With silent strides Odysseus then shot back the bolt,passed lightly through the courtyard and sped down the street.Some saw him take the graveyard's zigzag mountain path,some saw him leap on rocks that edged the savage shore,some visionaries saw him in the dead of nightswimming and talking secretly with the sea-demons,but only a small boy saw him in a lonely dreamsit crouched and weeping by the dark sea's foaming edge.

0
0
Source
source
Book II, line 457
4 months 3 weeks ago

Every peasant has a lawyer inside of him, just as every lawyer, no matter how urbane he may be, carries a peasant within himself.

0
0
Source
source
Civilization is Civilism
5 months 5 days ago

Men without their choice derive benefits from that association; without their choice they are subjected to duties in consequence of these benefits; and without their choice they enter into a virtual obligation as binding as any that is actual. Look through the whole of life and the whole system of duties. Much the strongest moral obligations are such as were never the results of our option. I allow, that if no supreme ruler exists, wise to form, and potent to enforce, the moral law, there is no sanction to any contract, virtual or even actual, against the will of prevalent power. On that hypothesis, let any set of men be strong enough to set their duties at defiance, and they cease to be duties any longer.

0
0
Source
source
p. 442
5 months 3 weeks ago

The man who is fortunate in his choice of son-in-law gains a son; the man unfortunate in his choice loses his daughter also.

0
0
Source
source
Freeman (1948), p. 169
4 months 3 weeks ago

Every philosophical, ethical, and political idea-its lifeline connecting it with its historical origins having been severed-has a tendency to become the nucleus of a new mythology, and this is one of the reasons why the advance of enlightenment tends at certain points to revert to superstition and paranoia. The majority principle ... has become the sovereign force to which thought must cater. It is a new god, not in the sense in which the heralds of the great revolutions conceived it, namely, as a power of resistance to existing injustice, but as a power of resistance to anything that does not conform.

0
0
Source
source
p. 30.
6 months 1 week ago

Let me give two cautions. 1) The one is, that you keep them to the practice of what you would have grow into a habit with them, by kind words, and gentle admonitions, rather as minding them of what they forget, than by harsh rebukes and chiding, as if they were wilfully guilty. 2) Another thing you are to take care of, is, not to endeavour to settle too many habits at once, lest by variety you confound them, and so perfect none. When constant custom has made any one thing easy and natural to 'em, and they practice it without reflection, you may then go on to another.

0
0
Source
source
Sec. 66
6 months 6 days ago

Rascals are always sociable - more's the pity! and the chief sign that a man has any nobility in his character is the little pleasure he takes in others' company.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 1, Ch. 5, § 9
4 months 3 weeks ago

Historians of ideas, however scrupulous and minute they may feel it necessary to be, cannot avoid perceiving their material in terms of some kind of pattern.

0
0
1 week 4 days ago

"Nothing great has great beginnings."
- Joseph de Maistre

See biography for Joseph de Maistre:
https://civilsimian.com/Joseph-de-Maistre

Read Joseph de Maistre's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/245/content

0
0
6 months 5 days ago

Of course I base my characters partly on the people I know-one can't escape it-but fictional characters are oversimplified; they're much less complex than the people one knows.

0
0
Source
source
Interview, The Paris Review, 1960
3 months 2 weeks ago

I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness and the willingness to remain vulnerable. All these and other factors combined, if the circumstances are right, can teach and can lead to rebirth.

0
0
Source
source
Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1929-1932 (1973), p. 3
2 months 2 weeks ago

We accepted a definition of ourselves which confined the self to the source and to the limitations of conscious attention. This definition is miserably insufficient, for in fact we know how to grow brains and eyes, ears and fingers, hearts and bones, in just the same way that we know how to walk and breathe, talk and think-only we can't put it into words. Words are too slow and too clumsy for describing such things, and conscious attention is too narrow for keeping track of all their details.

0
0
Source
source
p. 112
5 months 3 weeks ago

There is no work so mean, but it would amply serve me to furnish me with sustenance.

0
0
Source
source
iv. 35

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia