Skip to main content
6 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 3 days ago

Prose is private drama; poetry is corporate drama.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 275)
8 months 6 days ago

In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

0
0
Source
source
Quotation and Originality
5 months 4 weeks ago

Conquered people tend to be witty.

0
0
Source
source
Mr. Sammler's Planet, (1976), p. 98
3 weeks 1 day ago

Exactly. It's important to separate sense from perception, or sense from sense perception. Just because our sense perception might be slightly different, we all come from common ancestors...we're not like creating our own world or some nonsense.

0
0
8 months 1 day ago

There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.

0
0
Source
source
(6.522) Original German: Es gibt allerdings Unaussprechliches. Dies zeigt sich, es ist das Mystische.
9 months 1 week ago
I now myself live, in every detail, striving for wisdom, while I formerly merely worshipped and idolized the wise.
0
0
9 months 6 days ago

I have never definitely broken with Christianity nor renounced it. To attack it has never been my thought. No, from the time when there could be any question of the employment of my powers, I was firmly determined to employ them all to defend Christianity, or in any case to present it in its true form.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

The motto should not be: Forgive one another; rather, Understand one another.

0
0
8 months 6 days ago

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields, Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air Hides hills and woods, the river and the heaven, And veils the farm-house at the garden's end.

0
0
Source
source
The Snow-Storm
4 months 3 weeks ago

Somehow, the practice of astronomy, physics, chemistry or biology normally fails to evoke the controversies over fundamentals that today seem endemic among, say, psychologists or sociologists. Attempting to discover the source of that difference led me to recognize the role in scientific research of what I have since called "paradigms." These I take to be universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions for a community of practitioners.

0
0
Source
source
p. xiii
7 months 1 week ago

When we consider the being and substance of that universe in which we are immutably set, we shall discover that neither we ourselves nor any substance doth suffer death; for nothing is in fact diminished in its substance, but all things, wandering through infinite space, undergo change of aspect.

0
0
Source
source
Introductory Epistle
7 months 2 days ago

Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor.

0
0
4 months 5 days ago

From the nature of things, every society must at all times possess within itself the sovereign powers of legislation. The feelings of human nature revolt against the supposition of a state so situated as that it may not in any emergency provide against dangers which perhaps threaten immediate ruin. While those bodies are in existence to whom the people have delegated the powers of legislation, they alone possess and may exercise those powers; but when they are dissolved by the lopping off one or more of their branches, the power reverts to the people, who may exercise it to unlimited extent, either assembling together in person, sending deputies, or in any other way they may think proper.

0
0
4 months 3 days ago

Creating difficulties for himself for the pleasure of resolving them is a strange human mania.

0
0
Source
source
p. 48
8 months 6 days ago

O tenderly the haughty day Fills his blue urn with fire; One morn is in the mighty heaven, And one in our desire.

0
0
Source
source
Ode, st. 1
9 months 3 days ago

Necessity makes a joke of civilization.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

By Natura naturans we must understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself, or such attributes of substance as express an eternal and infinite essence, that is ... God, insofar as he is considered as a free cause. But by Natura naturata I understand whatever follows from the necessity of God's nature, or from God's attributes, that is, all the modes of God's attributes insofar as they are considered as things which are in God, and can neither be nor be conceived without God.

0
0
Source
source
Part I, Prop. XXIX, Scholium, trans: Edwin Curley, London: Penguin, 1996
4 months 2 weeks ago

Lenin may be proud of what his comrades are doing; the Russian workers are acquiring immortal glory in attempting the realization of what hitherto had been only an abstract idea.....

0
0
Source
source
"For Lenin," Soviet Russia, Official Organ of The Russian Soviet Government Bureau, Vol. II, New York: NY, January-June 1920 (April 10, 1920), p. 356
8 months 6 days ago

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business.

0
0
Source
source
p. 485
6 months 4 weeks ago

Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.

0
0
Source
source
Matthew 7:7-8 (NKJV) (Also Luke 11:9-13)
4 months 4 weeks ago

A noble person attracts noble people, and knows how to hold on to them.

0
0
Source
source
Torquato Tasso, Act I, sc. i
8 months 1 week ago

We believe that the very beginning and end of salvation, and the sum of Christianity, consists of faith in Christ, who by His blood alone, and not by any works of ours, has put away sin, and destroyed the power of death.

0
0
Source
source
p. 224
5 months 3 weeks ago

The life, the fortune, and the happiness of every one of us, and, more or less, of those who are connected with us, do depend upon our knowing something of the rules of a game infinitely more difficult and complicated than chess. It is a game which has been played for untold ages, every man and woman of us being one of the two players in a game of his or her own. The chessboard is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance. To the man who plays well, the highest stakes are paid, with that sort of overflowing generosity with which the strong shows delight in strength. And one who plays ill is checkmated - without haste, but without remorse.

0
0
8 months 6 days ago

The merits of democracy are negative: it does not insure good government, but it prevents certain evils.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 18: The Taming of Power PT311 books.google
6 months 3 weeks ago

I have read descriptions of Paradise that would make any sensible person stop wanting to go there.

0
0
Source
source
No. 125. (Usbek writing to Rhedi)
8 months 1 week ago

The thirst after happiness is never extinguished in the heart of man.

0
0
Source
source
IX
7 months 1 day ago

The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly. The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master's interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence. This existence is assured only to the class as a whole.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

The best is the enemy of the good.

0
0
4 months 2 days ago

Death,-a stopping of impressions through the senses, and of the pulling of the cords of motion, and of the ways of thought, and of service to the flesh.

0
0
Source
source
VI, 28
8 months 2 weeks ago

The essence of the good is a certain kind of moral purpose, and that of the evil is a certain kind of moral purpose.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, ch. 29, 1
6 months 2 days ago

It is hard to believe that this simple truth is not understood by those leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods. They express a preference for 'natural' methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 7. Family planning
6 months 3 weeks ago

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.

0
0
Source
source
The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974) p. 37.
4 months 3 weeks ago

He who first shortened the labor of copyists by device of movable types was disbanding hired armies, and cashiering most kings and senates, and creating a whole new democratic world: he had invented the art of printing.

0
0
Source
source
Bk. I, ch. 5.
3 months 3 weeks ago

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

0
0
8 months 4 days ago

Looking for God-or Heaven-by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare's plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters or Stratford as one of the places. Shakespeare is in one sense present at every moment in every play.

0
0
Source
source
"The Seeing Eye", in Christian Reflections (1967), p. 167
7 months 3 weeks ago

Seek after the good, and with much toil shall ye find it; the evil turns up of itself without your seeking it.

0
0
4 months 5 days ago

We confide in our strength, without boasting of it; we respect that of others, without fearing it.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to William Carmichael and William Short
7 months 2 days ago

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

No wind serves him who addresses his voyage to no certain port.

0
0
Source
source
Book II, Ch. 1
6 months 1 week ago

There are clear cases in which "understanding" literally applies and clear cases in which it does not apply; and these two sorts of cases are all I need for this argument.

0
0
8 months 1 day ago

A hero looks death in the face, real death, not just the image of death. Behaving honourably in a crisis doesn't mean being able to act the part of a hero well, as in the theatre, it means being able to look death itself in the eye. For an actor may play lots of different roles, but at the end of it all he himself, the human being, is the one who has to die.

0
0
Source
source
p. 50e
6 months 5 days ago

In former times the chief method of justifying the use of violence and thereby infringing the law of love was by claiming a divine right for the rulers: the Tsars, Sultans, Rajahs, Shahs, and other heads of states. But the longer humanity lived the weaker grew the belief in this peculiar, God-given right of the ruler. That belief withered in the same way and almost simultaneously in the Christian and the Brahman world, as well as in Buddhist and Confucian spheres, and in recent times it has so faded away as to prevail no longer against man's reasonable understanding and the true religious feeling. People saw more and more clearly, and now the majority see quite clearly, the senselessness and immorality of subordinating their wills to those of other people just like themselves, when they are bidden to do what is contrary not only to their interests but also to their moral sense.

0
0
Source
source
III

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia