Skip to main content

With prophecies the commentator is often a more important man than the prophet.

0
0
Source
source
H 23
6 months 1 week ago

Thus, in this universal catastrophe, the sufferings of Christians have tended to their moral improvement, because they viewed them with eyes of faith.

0
0
Source
source
I, 9
5 months 2 days ago

Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory, every church or temple in the world. What is it, this egg, before the seed is introduced into it? An insentient mass. And after the seed has been introduced to into it? What is it then? An insentient mass. For what is the seed itself other than a crude and inanimate fluid? How is this mass to make a transition to a different structure, to sentience, to life? Through heat. And what will produce that heat in it? Motion. "Conversation Between D'Alembert and Diderot", as quoted in Selected Writings (1966) edited by Lester G. Crocker, and The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture (2004) by Louis K Dupré, p. 30 Variant translation: See this egg. It is with this that all the schools of theology and all the temples of the earth are to be overturned.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Diderot, Reason and Resonance (1982) by Élisabeth de Fontenay, p. 217
5 months 2 weeks ago

He who abhors and shuns the light of the Sun, He who refuses to behold with respect the living creation of God, He who leads the good to wickedness, He who makes the meadows waterless and the pastures desolate, He who lets fly his weapon against the innocent, An enemy of my faith, a destroyer of Thy principles is he, O Lord!

0
0
Source
source
Ahunuvaiti Gatha; Yasna 32, 10.
3 months 1 week ago

The only good that I can see in the demonstration of the truth of "Spiritualism" is to furnish an additional argument against suicide. Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a "medium" hired at a guinea a séance.

0
0
Source
source
Review in the Daily News (17 October 1871), quoted in Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley F.R.S (1900) edited by Leonard Huxley, Vol. 1, p. 452
1 month 4 weeks ago

We are not simple people who believe in happiness; nor weaklings who crumple to the ground in distress at the first reverse; nor skeptics observing the bloody effort of marching humanity from the lofty heights of a mocking, sterile wit. Believing in the fight, though we entertain no illusions about it, we are armed against every disappointment.

0
0
Source
source
Toda Raba
5 months 2 weeks ago

Now as of old the gods give men all good things, excepting only those that are baneful and injurious and useless. These, now as of old, are not gifts of the gods: men stumble into them themselves because of their own blindness and folly.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

The other conclusion is that art is the complement of science. Science as I have said is concerned wholly with relations, not with individuals. Art, on the other hand, is not only the disclosure of the individuality of the artist but also a manifestation of individuality as creative of the future, in an unprecedented response to conditions as they were in the past. Some artists in their vision of what might be, but is not, have been conscious rebels. But conscious protest and revolt is not the form which the labor of the artist in creation of the future must necessarily take. Discontent with things as they are is normally the expression of the vision of what may be and is not, art in being the manifestation of individuality is this prophetic vision.

0
0
5 months 4 weeks ago

To think that because those who wield power in society wield in the end that of government, therefore it is of no use to attempt to influence the constitution of the government by acting on opinion, is to forget that opinion is itself one of the greatest active social forces. One person with a belief is a social power equal to ninety-nine who have only interests.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. I: To What Extent Forms of Government Are a Matter of Choice (p. 155)
5 months 3 weeks ago

The Tories in England long imagined that they were enthusiastic about monarchy, the church, and the beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about ground rent.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

It is hard to have patience with people who say 'There is no death' or 'Death doesn't matter.' There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

A difficulty which confronts the synechistic philosophy is this. In considering personality, that philosophy is forced to accept the doctrine of a personal God; but in considering communication, it cannot but admit that if there is a personal God, we must have a direct perception of that person and indeed be in personal communication with him. Now, if that be the case, the question arises how it is possible that the existence of this being should ever have been doubted by anybody. The only answer that I can at present make is that facts that stand before our face and eyes and stare us in the face are far from being, in all cases, the ones most easily discerned. That has been remarked since time immemorial.

0
0
5 months 4 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
4 months 2 weeks ago

In fact, for a voluntarist like Schopenhauer, a theory so sanely and cautiously empirical and rational as that of Darwin, left out of account the inward force, the essential motive, of evolution. For what is, in effect, the hidden force, the ultimate agent, which impels organisms to perpetuate themselves and to fight for their persistence and propagation? Selection, adaptation, heredity, these are only external conditions. This inner, essential force has been called will on the supposition that there exists also in other beings that which we feel in ourselves as a feeling of will, the impulse to be everything, to be others as well as ourselves yet without ceasing to be what we are.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

Remember, however, before all else, to strip things of all that disturbs and confuses, and to see what each is at bottom; you will then comprehend that they contain nothing fearful except the actual fear.

0
0
Source
source
Line 12
2 months 3 weeks ago

The Left's identity politics poses a threat to free speech and to the kind of rational discourse needed to sustain a democracy... The focus on lived experience by identity groups prioritizes the emotional world of the inner self over the rational examination of issues in the outside world and privileges sincerely held opinions over a process of reasoned deliberation that may force one to abandon prior opinions.

0
0
Source
source
Against Identity Politics (14 August 2018), Foreign Affairs
6 months 6 days ago

We are wont to call that human reasoning which we apply to Nature the anticipation of Nature (as being rash and premature) and that which is properly deduced from things the interpretation of Nature.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

Art expresses, it does not state; it is concerned with existences in their perceived qualities, not with conceptions symbolized in terms.

0
0
Source
source
p. 139
2 months 3 weeks ago

The regular rhythms of factory production and its clear divisions of work time and nonwork time tend to decline in the realm of immaterial labor. Think how at the high end of labor market companies like Microsoft try to make the office more like home, offering free meals and exercise programs to keep employees in the office as many of their waking hours as possible. At the low end of the labor market workers have to juggle several job to make ends meet. Such practices always existed, but today, with the passage from Fordism to post-Fordism, the increased flexibility and mobility imposed on workers, and the decline of the stable, long-term employment typical of factory work, this tends to become the norm. At both the high end and low ends or labor market the new paradigm undermines the division between work time and the time of life.

0
0
Source
source
145
5 months 3 weeks ago

In any race between human numbers and natural resources, time is against us.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 12 (p. 113)
6 months 5 days ago

Faith looks to the word and the promise; that is, to the truth. But hope looks to that which the word has promised, to the gift.

0
0
Source
source
p. 221
5 months 4 weeks ago

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

0
0

People no longer look at each other, but there are institutes for that. They no longer touch each other, but there is contactotherapy. They no longer walk, but they go jogging, etc. Everywhere one recycles lost faculties, or lost bodies, or lost sociality, or the lost taste for food.

0
0
Source
source
"The Precession of Simulacra," p. 13
3 months 2 weeks ago

In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves.

0
0
Source
source
Foreword to The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom
1 month 3 weeks ago

In the North they are cool, sober, laborious, persevering, independent, jealous of their own liberties, and just to those of others, interested, chicaning, superstitious and hypocritical in their religion. In the South they are fiery, voluptuary, indolent, unsteady, independent, zealous for their own liberties, but trampling on those of others, generous, candid, without attachment or pretensions to any religion but that of the heart.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to François-Jean de Chastellux (September 2, 1785). archives.gov Also quoted in Thomas Jefferson, Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (1984), p. 827
5 months 4 weeks ago

If you think that your belief is based upon reason, you will support it by argument, rather than by persecution, and will abandon it if the argument goes against you. But if your belief is based on faith, you will realize that argument is useless, and will therefore resort to force either in the form of persecution or by stunting and distorting the minds of the young in what is called "education". This last is particularly dastardly, since it takes advantage of the defencelessness of immature minds. Unfortunately it is practiced in greater or less degree in the schools of every civilised country.

0
0
Source
source
p. 220
4 months 3 weeks 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
1 month 3 weeks ago

All large political questions are at bottom economic questions.

0
0
Source
source
General Introduction
5 months 4 weeks ago

The cheapest sort of pride is national pride; for if a man is proud of his own nation, it argues that he has no qualities of his own of which he can be proud; otherwise he would not have recourse to those which he shares with so many millions of his fellowmen. The man who is endowed with important personal qualities will be only too ready to see clearly in what respects his own nation falls short, since their failings will be constantly before his eyes. But every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud adopts, as a last resource, pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and glad to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 1, Ch. 3, Section 2: Pride
5 months 4 weeks ago

If the slavery of the parents be unjust, much more is their children's; if the parents were justly slaves, yet the children are born free; this is the natural, perfect right of all mankind; they are nothing but a just recompense to those who bring them up: And as much less is commonly spent on them than others, they have a right, in justice, to be proportionably sooner free.

0
0
4 months 5 days ago

There are two ways in which a science develops; in response to problems which is itself creates, and in response to problems that are forced on it from the outside.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 1, An Absent Family Of Ideas, p. 4.
5 months 2 weeks ago

Life grants nothing to us mortals without hard work.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, satire ix, line 59
4 months 1 week ago

Men can be provincial in time, as well as in place.

0
0
Source
source
Preface, p. ix
5 months 3 weeks ago

In a social order dominated by capitalist production even the non-capitalist producer is gripped by capitalist conceptions.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. III, Ch. I, Cost Price and Profit, p. 39.
6 months 1 day ago

Among civilized and thriving nations, on the contrary, though a great number of people do no labor at all, many of whom consume the produce of ten times, frequently of a hundred times more labour than the greater part of those who work; yet the produce of the whole labour of the society is so great, that all are often abundantly supplied, and a workman, even of the lowest and poorest order, if he is frugal and industrious, may enjoy a greater share of the necessaries and conveniencies of life than it is possible for any savage to acquire.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction and Plan of the Work, p. 2.
5 months 2 weeks ago

Almost as soon as I began to study philosophy, I was impressed by the way in which philosophical problems appeared, disappeared, or changed shape, as a result of new assumptions or vocabularies.

0
0
Source
source
Preface
6 months 5 days ago

Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little. Make use of time while it is present with you. It depends upon your will, and not upon the number of days, to have a sufficient length of life. Is it possible you can imagine never to arrive at the place towards which you are continually going? and yet there is no journey but hath its end. And, if company will make it more pleasant or more easy to you, does not all the world go the self-same way?

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

Thus the universe is to be conceived as attaining the active self-expression of its own variety of opposites of its own freedom and its own necessity, of its own multiplicity and its own unity, of its own imperfection and its own perfection. All the opposites are elements in the nature of things, and are incorrigibly there. The concept of God is the way in which we understand this incredible fact that what cannot be, yet is.

0
0
2 months 5 days ago

No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.

0
0
Source
source
"A Trip to Anhwei", in With Love And Irony (1940), p. 145
4 months 3 weeks ago

Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

Good wine is a necessity of life for me.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in The Man from Monticello : An Intimate Life of Thomas Jefferson (1969) by Thomas J. Fleming, p. 250
2 months 3 weeks ago

Among all the great men who have philosophized about this remarkable effect, I am more astonished at Kepler than at any other. Despite his open and acute mind, and though he has at his fingertips the motions attributed to the earth, he nevertheless lent his ear and his assent to the moon's dominion over the waters, to occult properties, and to such puerilities.

0
0
Source
source
In regard to Kepler's belief of the moon affecting the tides of the Earth, p. 328
1 month 3 weeks ago

Of my grandfather Verus I have learned to be gentle and meek, and to refrain from all anger and passion... I have learned both shamefastness and manlike behaviour. Of my mother I have learned to be religious, and bountiful; and to forbear, not only to do, but to intend any evil; to content myself with a spare diet, and to fly all such excess as is incidental to great wealth.

0
0
Source
source
I, 1
4 months 4 weeks ago

And now I ask, whether, with this map of misgovernment before me, I can suppose myself bound by my vote to continue, upon any principles of pretended public faith, the management of these countries in those hands? If I kept such a faith (which in reality is no better than a fides latronum) with what is called the Company, I must break the faith, the covenant, the solemn, original, indispensable oath, in which I am bound, by the eternal frame and constitution of things, to the whole human race.

0
0
Source
source
Speech in the House of Commons on India (1 December 1783), quoted in The Parliamentary Register: Or, History of the Proceedings and Debates of the House of Commons, Volume XII (1782), p. 247
2 months 2 weeks ago

War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against each other.

0
0
Source
source
Quoted by Emma Goldman in her essay, "Patriotism: A Menace to Liberty", chapter five of Anarchism and Other Essays (2nd revised edition, 1911).
5 months 4 weeks ago

I think if I had met him [Lenin] without knowing who he was, I should not have guessed that he was a great man; he struck me as too opinionated and narrowly orthodox. His strength comes, I imagine, from his honesty, courage, and unwavering faith-religious faith in the Marxian gospel, which takes the place of the Christian martyr's hopes of Paradise, except that it is less egotistical... I went to Russia a Communist; but contact with those who have no doubts has intensified a thousandfold my own doubts, not as to Communism in itself, but as to the wisdom of holding a creed so firmly that for its sake men are willing to inflict widespread misery.

0
0
Source
source
Part I, Ch. 3: Lenin, Trotsky and Gorky
5 months 3 weeks ago

The world is sacred because it gives an inkling of a meaning that escapes us.

0
0
Source
source
p. 280

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia