Skip to main content
4 months 2 weeks ago

I have twice gone fishing with rod and line just because other boys asked me to, but this sport was soon made impossible for me by the treatment of the worms that were put on the hook for bait, and the wrenching of the mouths of the fishes that were caught. I gave it up, and even found courage enough to dissuade other boys from going.

0
0
7 months 4 days ago

The blindness of those who think it absurd to suppose that complex organic forms may have arisen by successive modifications out of simple ones becomes astonishing when we remember that complex organic forms are daily being thus produced. A tree differs from a seed immeasurably in every respect... Yet is the one changed in the course of a few years into the other: changed so gradually, that at no moment can it be said - Now the seed ceases to be, and the tree exists.

0
0
8 months 4 days ago

Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

You have demanded of me, Novatus, that I should write how anger may be soothed, and it appears to me that you are right in feeling especial fear of this passion, which is above all others hideous and wild: for the others have some alloy of peace and quiet, but this consists wholly in action and the impulse of grief, raging with an utterly inhuman lust for arms, blood and tortures, careless of itself provided it hurts another, rushing upon the very point of the sword, and greedy for revenge even when it drags the avenger to ruin with itself.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

But what can be the attraction of getting to know such a tiny section of nature thoroughly, while one leaves everything subtler and more complex shyly and timidly alone? Does the product of such a modest effort deserve to be called by the proud name of a theory of the universe? In my belief the name is justified; for the general laws on which the structure of theoretical physics is based claim to be valid for any natural phenomenon whatsoever. With them, it ought to be possible to arrive at the description, that is to say, the theory, of every natural process, including life, by means of pure deduction, if that process of deduction were not far beyond the capacity of the human intellect. The physicist's renunciation of completeness for his cosmos is therefore not a matter of fundamental principle.

0
0
4 months 1 day ago

We are all made for mutual assistance, as the feet, the hands, and the eyelids, as the rows of the upper and under teeth, from whence it follows that clashing and opposition is perfectly unnatural.

0
0
Source
source
II, 1
8 months 1 week ago

Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside equally desperate to get out.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, Ch. 5
6 months 3 weeks ago

The revolution in scientific ideas just mentioned is primarily logical. It is due to recognition that the very method of physical science, with its primary standard units of mass, space, and time, is concerned with measurements of relations of change, not with individuals as such.

0
0
8 months 6 days ago

Let them have what instructions you will, and ever so learned lectures of breeding daily inculcated into them, that which will most influence their carriage will be the company they converse with, and the fashion of those about them.

0
0
Source
source
Sec. 67
3 months 3 weeks ago

Exactly. Paradox of tolerance. This is why culture itself is not above universal judgement.

0
0
7 months 5 days ago

Laws, like houses, lean on one another.

0
0
Source
source
From the Tracts Relative to the Laws Against Popery in Ireland (c. 1766), not published during Burke's lifetime.
4 months 2 weeks ago

Among the smaller duties of life I hardly know any one more important than that of not praising where praise is not due.

0
0
Source
source
Lecture IX : On the Conduct of the Understanding
8 months 1 week ago

She became the Mother of God, in which work so many and such great good things are bestowed on her as pass man's understanding. For on this there follows all honor, all blessedness, and her unique place in the whole of mankind, among which she has no equal, namely, that she had a child by the Father in heaven, and such a Child.... Hence men have crowded all her glory into a single word, calling her the Mother of God.... None can say of her nor announce to her greater things, even though he had as many tongues as the earth possesses flowers and blades of grass: the sky, stars; and the sea, grains of sand. It needs to be pondered in the heart what it means to be the Mother of God.

0
0
Source
source
Luther's Works, 21:326, cf. 21:346
4 months 2 weeks ago

Therefore, my dear Lucilius, begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.

0
0
4 months 1 day ago

The nature of the universe is the nature of things that are. Now, things that are have kinship with things that are from the beginning. Further, this nature is styled Truth; and it is the first cause of all that is true.

0
0
Source
source
IX, 1
4 months 2 weeks ago

Time is the primitive form of the stream of consciousness. ...If we project ourselves outside the stream of consciousness and represent its content as an object, it becomes an event happening in time, the separate stages of which stand to one another in the relations of earlier and later.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction
5 months 3 weeks ago

Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to H.S. Randall, author of a Life of Thomas Jefferson
8 months 1 week ago

Not because Socrates said so, but because it is in truth my own disposition - and perchance to some excess - I look upon all men as my compatriots, and embrace a Pole as a Frenchman, making less account of the national than of the universal and common bond.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 9
9 months 2 days ago

Once you've dissected a joke, you're about where you are when you've dissected a frog. It's dead. 

0
0
Source
source
Banquets of the Black Widowers (1984), p. 49; comparable to "Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind."
4 months 3 weeks ago

Who is there that can recognize real intellect, and do reverence to it; and discriminate it well from sham intellect, which is so much more abundant, and deserves the reverse of reverence? He that himself has it!-One really human Intellect, invested with command, and charged to reform Downing Street for us, would continually attract real intellect to those regions, and with a divine magnetism search it out from the modest corners where it lies hid. And every new accession of intellect to Downing Street would bring to it benefit only, and would increase such divine attraction in it, the parent of all benefit there and elsewhere!

0
0
6 months 2 days ago

Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.

0
0
Source
source
American scholar, Volume 35, 1965, p. 200
4 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
7 months ago

Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

Mussolini is a man no less extraordinary than Lenin. He, too, is a political genius, of a greater reach than all the statesmen of the day, with the only exception of Lenin...

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution: The Origins of Ideological Polarization in the 20th Century, Jacob L. Talmon, University of California Press (1981) p. 451.
6 months 4 days ago

The only thing that we know is that we know nothing - and that is the highest flight of human wisdom.

0
0
Source
source
Book V, Ch. I

To spendthrifts money is so living and actual-it is such a thin veil between them and their pleasures! There is only one limit to their fortune-that of time; and a spendthrift with only a few crowns is the Emperor of Rome until they are spent. For such a person to lose his money is to suffer the most shocking reverse, and fall from heaven to hell, from all to nothing, in a breath.

0
0
Source
source
A Lodging for the Night.
4 months 2 weeks ago

The wise man will live as long as he ought, not as long as he can.

0
0
Source
source
Line 4.
7 months 4 days ago

Supreme power rests in the will of all or of the majority.

0
0
4 months 4 days ago

When the representative body have lost the confidence of their constituents, when they have notoriously made sale of their most valuable rights, when they have assumed to themselves powers which the people never put into their hands, then indeed their continuing in office becomes dangerous to the state, and calls for an exercise of the power of dissolution.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

I agree as to the doubtful value of competitive examination. The qualities which you really want, viz., self-control, self-reliance, habits of accurate thought, integrity and what you generally call trustworthiness, are not decided by competitive examination, which test little else than the memory.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Lord Stanley (May 17, 1857), published in Florence Nightingale on Wars and the War Office: Collected Works of Florence Nightingale. Vol. 15 (2011), edited by Lynn McDonald, p. 265.
8 months 1 week ago

For a man to love again where he is loved, it is the charity of publicans contracted by mutual profit and good offices; but to love a man's enemies is one of the cunningest points of the law of Christ, and an imitation of the divine nature.

0
0
Source
source
Of The Exaltation of Charity
8 months 5 days ago

Love is a severe critic. Hate can pardon more than love.

0
0
Source
source
Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 159
6 months 1 week ago

It was Rudolf Carnap's dream for the last three decades of his life to show that science proceeds by a formal syntactic method; today no one to my knowledge holds out any hope for that project.

0
0
Source
source
Hilary Putnam, in: James Conant, Urszula M. Zeglen (2012) Hilary Putnam: Pragmatism and Realism. p. 14
6 months 2 weeks ago

Today's fashion magazines may carry an article about the dangers of anorexia while bombarding its readers with images of emaciated young bodies representing the height of beauty and desirability.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (2014), p.34
7 months 3 weeks ago

A sensible man takes pleasure in what he has instead of pining for what he has not.

0
0
8 months 5 days ago

Granted that any practice causes more pain to animals than it gives pleasure to man; is that practice moral or immoral? And if, exactly in proportion as human beings raise their heads out of the slough of selfishness, they do not with one voice answer 'immoral,' let the morality of the principle of utility be for ever condemned.

0
0
Source
source
Dr. Whewell on Moral Philosophy (1852), in Dissertations and Discussions: Political, Philosophical, and Historical, vol. 2, London: John W. Parker and son, 1859, p. 485
8 months 1 week ago

A Christian has no need of any law in order to be saved, since through faith we are free from every law. Thus all the acts of a Christian are done spontaneously, out of a sense of pure liberty. As Christians we do not seek our own advantage or salvation because we are already fully satisfied and saved by God's grace through faith. Now our only motive is to do that which is pleasing to God.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 75-76
8 months 4 days ago

That all men are equal is a proposition which at ordinary times no sane individual has ever given his assent.

0
0
Source
source
"The Idea of Equality"
7 months 5 days ago

Our patience will achieve more than our force.

0
0
8 months 2 weeks ago

When the Head and members are despised, then the whole Christ is despised, for the whole Christ, Head and body, is that just man against whom deceitful lips speak iniquity (Ps. 30:19).

0
0
Source
source
p.425
6 months 3 weeks ago

The only way to give finality to the world is to give it consciousness. For where there is no consciousness there is no finality, finality presupposing a purpose. And... faith in God is based simply upon the vital need of giving finality to existence, of making it answer to a purpose. We need God, not in order to understand the why, but in order to feel and sustain the ultimate wherefore, to give a meaning to the Universe.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

By this means all knowledge degenerates into probability; and this probability is greater or less, according to our experience of the veracity or deceitfulness of our understanding, and according to the simplicity or intricacy of the question.

0
0
Source
source
Part 4, Section 1

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia