Skip to main content
2 months 2 weeks ago

The human body is essentially something other than an animal organism.

0
0
Source
source
Letter on Humanism
1 month 1 week ago

Use harms and even destroys beauty. The noblest function of an object is to be contemplated.

0
0
Source
source
Niebla [Mist]
2 weeks 4 days ago

It's almost impossible to say anything against Islam in this country, because you are accused of being racist or Islamophobic.

0
0
Source
source
2008 comment quoted in "Fury over Richard Dawkins's burka jibe as atheist tells of his 'visceral revulsion' at Muslim dress", Daily Mail
2 weeks 1 day ago

In politics continental Europe was infantile - horrifying. What America lacked, for all its political stability, was the capacity to enjoy intellectual pleasures as though they were sensual pleasures. This is what Europe offered, or was said to offer.

0
0
Source
source
"My Paris" (1983), p. 235
1 month 3 weeks ago

Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to guide me. A stranger appears and says to me: "My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly." This stranger is a theologian.

0
0
Source
source
Number VIII
2 weeks 6 days ago

Cartoons drove the photo back to myth and dream screen.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

There is no one who ever acts honestly in the administration of states, nor any helper who will save any one who maintains the cause of the just.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilized men.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1: Mysticism and Logic
2 months 3 weeks ago

The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

0
0
Source
source
"Psychological Observations"
2 months 2 weeks ago

At the end of reasons comes persuasion.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

I do not think it possible to get anywhere if we start from scepticism. We must start from a broad acceptance of whatever seems to be knowledge and is not rejected for some specific reason.

0
0
Source
source
p. 200
1 month 2 weeks ago

The origin of things, considered not as leading to anything, but in itself, contains the idea of First, the end of things that of Second, the process mediating between them that of Third. A philosophy which emphasises the idea of the One, is generally a dualistic philosophy in which the conception of Second receives exaggerated attention: for this One (though of course involving the idea of First) is always the other of a manifold which is not one. The idea of the Many, because variety is arbitrariness and arbitrariness is repudiation of any Secondness, has for its principal component the conception of First. In psychology Feeling is First, Sense of reaction Second, General conception Third, or mediation. In biology, the idea of arbitrary sporting is First, heredity is Second, the process whereby the accidental characters become fixed is Third. Chance is First, Law is Second, the tendency to take habits is Third. Mind is First, Matter is Second, Evolution is Third.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

To found a family. I think it would have been easier for me to found an empire.

0
0
3 months 1 day ago

Neither did the dispensation of God vary in the times after our Saviour came into the world; for our Saviour himself did first show His power to subdue ignorance, by His conference with the priests and doctors of the law, before He showed His power to subdue nature by His miracles. And the coming of this Holy Spirit was chiefly figured and expressed in the similitude and gift of tongues, which are but vehicula scientiæ.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. With the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion the devaluation of the world of men. Labour produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity - and does so in the proportion in which it produces commodities generally.

0
0
Source
source
p. 71, The Marx-Engels Reader
3 weeks 4 days ago

This world wants to be childish in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact that true childishness is everywhere-that it is that of the adults themselves who come here to act the child in order to foster illusions as to their real childishness.

0
0
Source
source
"The Precession of Simulacra," p. 13
1 month 3 weeks ago

The earth with yellow pears And overgrown with roses wild Upon the pond is bent, And swans divine, With kisses drunk You drop your heads In the sublimely sobering water. But where, with winter come, am I To find, alas, the floweres, and where The sunshine And the shadow of the world? Cold the walls stand And the wordless, in the wind The weathercocks are rattling.

0
0
Source
source
"Halves of Life"
2 months 3 weeks ago

It must not be supposed that this conflict is, on the part of the Teuton, aggressive in substance, whatever it may be in form. In substance it is defensive, the attempt to preserve Central Europe for a type of civilisation indubitably higher and of more value to mankind than that of any Slav State. The existence of the Russian menace on the Eastern border is, quite legitimately, a nightmare to Germany.

0
0
Source
source
War: The Offspring of Fear (1914), quoted in Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude, 1872-1921 (1996), p. 373
3 months 5 days ago

Love hath so long possessed me for his ownAnd made his lordship so familiar.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter XXIV
1 month 1 week ago

In books of psychology written from the spiritualist point of view, it is customary to begin the discussion of the existence of the soul as a simple substance, separable from the body, after this style: There is in me a principle which thinks, wills and feels... Now this implies a begging of the question. For it is far from being an immediate truth that there is in me such a principle; the immediate truth is that I think, will and feel. And I - the I that thinks, wills and feels - am immediately my living body with the states of consciousness which it sustains. It is my living body that thinks, wills and feels.

0
0
1 month 5 days ago

Nietzsche's great concept of Yea-saying gave him a notion of purpose that is seen as positive.

0
0
Source
source
Nietzsche, in short, was a religious mystic. p. 275
1 month 2 weeks ago

Incredible that the prospect of having a biographer has made no one renounce having a life.

0
0
3 weeks 1 day ago

The Churches as Churches have always been and cannot fail to be institutions not only alien to, but directly hostile towards, Christ's teaching.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter III, Christianity Misunderstood by Believers
2 weeks 4 days ago

I don't believe you until you tell me, do you really believe, for example, if they say they are Catholic, "Do you really believe that when a priest blesses a wafer, it turns into the body of Christ? Are you seriously telling me you believe that? Are you seriously saying that wine turns into blood?" Mock them. Ridicule them. In public. Don't fall for the convention that we're all too polite to talk about religion. Religion is not off the table. Religion is not off limits. Religion makes specific claims about the universe which need to be substantiated and need to be challenged and, if necessary, need to be ridiculed with contempt.

0
0
Source
source
Reason Rally, National Mall, Washington, DC, 2012-03-24 Richard Dawkins and his Foundation at the Reason Rally, YouTube, 7 April 2012
1 month 2 weeks ago

People will become faint out of fear and expectation of the things coming upon the inhabited earth, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. And then they will see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.

0
0
Source
source
21:26-27, NWT
1 month 2 weeks ago

When we come to inanimate elements, the prevailing view has been that time and sequential change are entirely foreign to their nature. According to this view they do not have careers; they simply change their relations is space. We have only to think of the classic conception of atoms. The Newtonian atom, for example, moved and was moved, thus changing its position in space, but it was unchangeable in its own being. ... In itself it was like a God, the same yesterday, today, and forever.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

That chastity of honour which felt a stain like a wound.

0
0
Source
source
Volume iii, p. 332
2 months 3 weeks ago

Love is better than hate, because it brings harmony instead of conflict into the desires of the persons concerned. Two people between whom there is love succeed or fail together, but when two people hate each other the success of either is the failure of the other.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

Psychologists have hitherto failed to realize that imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself.

0
0
Source
source
A 120
1 month 2 weeks ago

Building worlds is not enough for the deeper urging mind; but a loving heart sates the striving spirit.

0
0
Source
source
Fragment No. 91
2 months 3 weeks ago

Habit... makes the endurance of evil easy (which, under the name of patience, is falsely honored as a virtue), because sensations of the same type, when continued without alteration for a long time, draw our attention away from the senses so that we are scarcely conscious of them at all. On the other hand, habit also makes the consciousness and the remembrance of good that has been received more difficult, which then gradually leads to ingratitude (a real vice). [...] Acquired habit deprives good actions of their moral value because it undermines mental freedom and, moreover, it leads to thoughtless repetitions of the same acts (monotony), and thus becomes ridiculous.

0
0
Source
source
Kant, Immanuel (1996), pages 34-35
3 months 1 week ago

The confession of evil works is the first beginning of good works.

0
0
Source
source
Tractates on the Gospel of John; tractate XII on John 3:6-21, and 13
1 month 1 week ago

The assurance that we have no means of answering [final] questions is no valid excuse for callousness towards them. The more deeply should we feel, down to the roots of our being, their pressure and their sting. Whose hunger has ever been [sated] with the knowledge that he could not eat?

0
0
Source
source
p. 15
2 months 3 weeks ago

What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

0
0
Source
source
On Revolution (1963), ch. 2
3 months 3 weeks ago

Out of love, God becomes man. He says: Here you see what it is to be a human being; but he adds: Take care, for I am also God - blessed is he who takes no offense at me. 

0
0
Source
source
As translated by Howard V. Hong and EdnaH. Hong (1980) Variant translation; Out of love, God becomes man. He says: "See, here is what it is to be a human being."
1 month 5 days ago

To uphold the institutions of our country-that's it-the institutions which protect and sustain a handful of people in the robbery and plunder of the masses, the institutions which drain the blood of the native as well as of the foreigner, turn it into wealth and power

0
0
2 weeks 6 days ago

The potential of any new technology is always dissipated by its users involvement in its predecessors.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 210)
2 months 2 weeks ago

But what then is this confrontation below the language of reason? Where might this interrogation lead, following not reason in its horizontal becoming, but seeking to retrace in time this constant verticality, which, the length of Western culture, confronts it with what it is not, measuring it with its own extravagance?

0
0
Source
source
Preface to 1961 edition
2 months 3 weeks ago

He that uses his words loosely and unsteadily will either not be minded or not understood.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, Ch. 10, sec. 31
2 months 3 weeks ago

All happiness or unhappiness solely depends upon the quality of the object to which we are attached by love.

0
0
Source
source
I, 9; translation by W. Hale White (Revised by Amelia Hutchison Stirling)
2 months 3 weeks ago

Christianity possesses the great advantage over Judaism of being represented as coming from the mouth of the first Teacher not as a statutory but as a moral religion, and as thus entering into the closest relation with reason so that, through reason, it was able of itself, without historical learning, to be spread at all times and among all peoples with the greatest trustworthiness.

0
0
Source
source
Book IV, Part 1, Section 1, "The Christian religion as a learned religion"
1 month 2 weeks ago

The moment we believe we've understood everything grants us the look of a murderer.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

Praise be to God with all due praise, and a prayer for Muhammad His chosen servant and apostle. The purpose of this treatise is to examine, from the standpoint of the study of the Law, whether the study of philosophy and logic is allowed by the Law, or prohibited, or commanded either by way of recommendation or as obligatory.

0
0
3 weeks 4 days ago

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
1 month 1 week ago

By reducing any quality to quantity, myth economizes intelligence: it understands reality more cheaply.

0
0
Source
source
p. 153
3 months ago

So blind is the curiosity by which mortals are possessed, that they often conduct their minds along unexplored routes, having no reason to hope for success, but merely being willing to risk the experiment of finding whether the truth they seek lies there.

0
0
Source
source
Rules for the Direction of the Mind: IV
1 month ago

Statistics began as the systematic study of quantitative facts about the state.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 12, Political Arithmetic, p. 102.
2 months 3 weeks ago

[L]ike Coleridge, he might plead as a set-off that he had been to many persons, through his conversation, a source not only of much instruction but of great elevation of character. On me his influence was most salutary. It was moral in the best sense. He took a sincere and kind interest in me, far beyond what could have been expected towards a mere youth from a man of his age, standing, and what seemed austerity of character. There was in his conversation and demeanour a tone of high-mindedness which did not show itself so much, if the quality existed as much, in any of the other persons with whom at that time I associated. My intercourse with him was the more beneficial, owing to his being of a different mental type from all other intellectual men whom I frequented...

0
0
Source
source
(pp. 75-76)

What makes our poetry so contemptible nowadays is its paucity of ideas. If you want to be read, invent. Who the Devil wouldn't like to read something new?

0
0
Source
source
D 62

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia