Skip to main content
7 months 3 days ago

Since ancient times, philosophers have maintained that to strive too hard for one's own happiness is self-defeating.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 5, Reason And Genes, p. 145
7 months 1 week ago

What a queer work the Bible is. ...Some texts are very funny. Deut. XXIV, 5: "When a man hath taken a new wife, he shall not go out to war, neither shall he be charged with any business: but he shall be free at home one year, and shall cheer up his wife which he hath taken." I should never have guessed "cheer up" was a Biblical expression. Here is another really inspiring text: "Cursed be he that lieth with his mother-in-law. And all the people shall say, Amen." St Paul on marriage: "I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, It is good for them if they abide even as I. But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn." This has remained the doctrine of the Church to this day. It is clear that the Divine purpose in the text "it is better to marry than to burn" is to make us all feel how very dreadful the torments of Hell must be.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Colette, August 10, 1918
3 months 1 week ago

We do not only free God by battling and subduing the visible world about us; we also create God. "Open your eyes," God shouts; "I want to see! Prick up your ears, I want to hear! March in the front ranks: you are my head!"

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

It built itself up endlessly, like a chess game, and the telemetrists began to use a computer to program the computer that designed the program for the computer that programmed the robot-controlling computer.

0
0
6 months 5 days ago

Marx explains the alienation of labor as exemplified in, first, the relation of the worker to the product of his labor and, second, the relation of the worker to his own activity. P. 276

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

A single observation that is inconsistent with some generalization points to the falsehood of the generalization, and thereby 'points to itself'.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 4, Evidence, p. 34.
3 months 1 week ago

Everything harmonizes with me, which is harmonious to thee, O Universe. Nothing for me is too early or too late, which is in due time for thee. There is one light of the sun, though it is interrupted by walls, mountains and infinite other things. There is one common substance, though it is distributed among countless bodies which have their several qualities. There is one soul, though it is distributed among several natures and individual limitations. There is one intelligent soul, though it seems to be divided.

0
0
Source
source
XII, 30
3 months 1 week ago

A man has a right to use a saw, an axe, a plane, separately; may he not combine their uses on the same piece of wood? He has a right to use his knife to cut his meat, a fork to hold it; may a patentee take from him the right to combine their use on the same subject? Such a law, instead of enlarging our conveniences, as was intended, would most fearfully abridge them, and crowd us by monopolies out of the use of the things we have.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Oliver Evans (16 January 1814); published in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (1905) Vol. 13, p. 66
3 months 1 week ago

Historically, the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

I think only weirdos are driven by immortality these days.....

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

Trantor could win even such a war, but perhaps not without paying a price that would make victory only a pleasanter name for defeat.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perception...When these ratios change, men change.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

Man is essentially a dreamer, wakened sometimes for a moment by some peculiarly obtrusive element in the outer world, but lapsing again quickly into the happy somnolence of imagination. Freud has shown how largely our dreams at night are the pictured fulfilment of our wishes; he has, with an equal measure of truth, said the same of day-dreams; and he might have included the day-dreams which we call beliefs.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 2: Dreams and Facts
5 months 1 week ago

People try to do all sorts of clever and difficult things to improve life instead of doing the simplest, easiest thing-refusing to participate in activities that make life bad.

0
0
Source
source
p. 210
6 months 1 week ago

I assert, that the ancient Whigs held doctrines, totally different from those I have last mentioned. I assert, that the foundations laid down by the Commons, on the trial of Doctor Sacheverel, for justifying the revolution of 1688, are the very same laid down in Mr. Burke's Reflections; that is to say,-a breach of the original contract, implied and expressed in the constitution of this country, as a scheme of government fundamentally and inviolably fixed in King, Lords, and Commons.-That the fundamental subversion of this antient constitution, by one of its parts, having been attempted, and in effect accomplished, justified the Revolution. That it was justified only upon the necessity of the case; as the only means left for the recovery of that antient constitution, formed by the original contract of the British state; as well as for the future preservation of the same government. These are, the points to be proved.

0
0
Source
source
p. 411
6 months 1 week ago

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

0
0
Source
source
Volume iii, p. 332
3 months 1 week ago

I strive to discover how to signal my companions before I die, how to give them a hand, how to spell out for them in time one complete word at least, to tell them what I think this procession is, and toward what we go. And how necessary it is for all of us together to put our steps and hearts in harmony. To say in time a simple word to my companions, a password, like conspirators. Yes, the purpose of Earth is not life, it is not man. Earth has existed without these, and it will live on without them. They are but the ephemeral sparks of its violent whirling. Let us unite, let us hold each other tightly, let us merge our hearts, let us create - so long as the warmth of this earth endures, so long as no earthquakes, cataclysms, icebergs or comets come to destroy us - let us create for Earth a brain and a heart, let us give a human meaning to the superhuman struggle. This anguish is our second duty.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

Humans are prone to status quo bias. So let's do a thought-experiment. Imagine we stumble across an advanced civilisation that has abolished predation, disease, famine, and all the horrors of primitive Darwinian life. The descendants of archaic lifeforms flourish unmolested in their wildlife parks - free living, but not "wild". Should we urge scrapping their regime of compassionate stewardship of the living world - and a return to asphyxiation, disembowelling and being eaten alive? Or is a happy biosphere best conserved intact? Reply to "Should humans wipe out all carnivorous animals so the succeeding generations of herbivores can live in peace?"

0
0
Source
source
, Quora, 16 Jun. 2018
6 months 1 week ago

The idea of an all-powerful divine Being is present everywhere, unconsciously if not consciously, because it is an archetype. There is in the psyche some superior power, and if it is not consciously a god, it is the "belly" at least, in St. Paul's words. I therefore consider it wiser to acknowledge the idea of God consciously, for, if we do not, something else is made God, usually something quite inappropiate and stupid such as only an "enlightened" intellect could hatch forth.

0
0
Source
source
C. G. Jung. 2014. Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 7: Two Essays in Analytical Psychology. Princeton University Press. p. 71

What the English call "comfortable" is something endless and inexhaustible. Every condition of comfort reveals in turn its discomfort, and these discoveries go on for ever. Hence the new want is not so much a want of those who have it directly, but is created by those who hope to make profit from it.

0
0
Source
source
S. Dyde, trans. (1896), § 191
2 months 2 days ago

"From the fame opinion of a soul distinct from the body came the practice of praying, first for the dead, and then to them with a long train of other absurd opinions, and superstitious practices."
- Joseph Priestley

See biography for Joseph Priestley:
https://civilsimian.com/JosephPriestley

Read Joseph Priestley's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/347/content

#philosophy #quotes #CivilSimian #UniversalHumanism

0
0
5 months 5 days ago

Schopenhauer argues that the empirical world exists only as a representation: 'every object, whatever its origin, is, as object, already conditioned by the subject, and thus is essentially only the subject's representation.' A representation is a subjective state that has been ordered according to space, time and causality - the primary forms of sensibility and understanding. So long as we turn our thoughts towards the natural world, and search for the thing-in-itself behind the representation is futile. Every argument and every experience leads only to the same end: the system of representations, standing like a veil between the subject and the thing-in-itself. No scientific investigation can penetrate the veil; and yet it is only a veil, Schopenhauer affirms, a tissue of illusions which we can, if we choose, penetrate by other means. The way to penetrate the veil was stumbled upon by Kant.

0
0
Source
source
A Short History of Modern Philosophy (1981; 2nd ed. 1995), p. 177
6 months 1 week ago

Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

You have your brush, you have your colours, you paint paradise, then, in you go.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Journal of Modern Literature Vol. 2, No. 2, Nikos Kazantzakis
6 months 1 week ago

The abolition of private property is, doubtless, the shortest and most significant way to characterize the revolution in the whole social order which has been made necessary by the development of industry - and for this reason it is rightly advanced by communists as their main demand.

0
0
6 months 3 days ago

When all these things are lacking there is no culture; there is in the strictest sense of the word, barbarism. And let us not deceive ourselves, this is what is beginning to appear in Europe under the progressive rebellion of the masses. The traveller who arrives in a barbarous country knows that in that territory there are no ruling principles to which it is possible to appeal. Properly speaking, there are no barbarian standards. Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.

0
0
Source
source
Chap. VIII: The Masses Intervene In Everything, And Why Their Intervention Is Solely By Violence
8 months 1 week ago

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

0
0
4 months 5 days ago

The social contract between all people around the world only has one requirement: Don't kill. From there it's those who don't agree, those that agree but have some reactive justification, and those that agree and don't kill.

0
0
6 months 5 days ago

The way in which a society organizes the life of its members ... is one "project" of realization among others. But once the project has become operative in the basic institutions and relations, it tends to become exclusive and to determine the development of the society as a whole.

0
0
Source
source
p. xlviii
3 months 1 week ago

Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.

0
0
Source
source
Part of an endorsement statement for The Dying of the Trees (1997) by Charles E. Little
5 months 1 week ago

Electric technology is directly related to our central nervous systems, so it is ridiculous to talk of "what the public wants" played over its own nerves.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 68)
3 months 1 week ago

Discovery depends upon the previous cultivation or natural clearness of the appropriate Idea, and therefore no discovery is the work of accident.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

Drunkenness is temporary suicide.

0
0
2 weeks 6 days ago

AI: Rwanda, 1994. 100 days. 800,000 dead. The weapon was radio. The ammunition was language that stopped calling people people.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

The miracles in fact are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see. Of that larger script part is already visible, part is still unsolved. In other words, some of the miracles do locally what God has already done universally: others do locally what He has not yet done, but will do. In that sense, and from our human point of view, some are reminders and others prophecies.

0
0
Source
source
"Miracles" (1942), p. 29
7 months 1 week ago

Our aim as scientists is objective truth; more truth, more interesting truth, more intelligible truth. We cannot reasonably aim at certainty. Once we realize that human knowledge is fallible, we realize also that we can never be completely certain that we have not made a mistake.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

The vitality of the ordinary members of society is dependent on its Outsiders.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter Three, The Romantic Outsider
7 months 2 days ago

Perdiccas threatened to put him to death unless he came to him, "That's nothing wonderful," Diogenes said, "for a beetle or a tarantula would do the same."

0
0
Source
source
Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 44
8 months 1 week ago

No one is so modest as not to believe himself a competent amateur sleuth.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

For Leopardi evil is integral to the way the world works; but when he talks of evil he does not mean any kind of malign agency of the sort that Gnostics imagined. Evil is the suffering that is built into the scheme of things. 'What hope is there when evil is ordinary?' he asks. 'I mean, in an order where evil is necessary?' These rhetorical questions show why Leopardi had no interest in projects of revolution and reform. No type of human action - least of all the harlequinade of politics - could fundamentally alter a world in which evil was ordinary.

0
0
Source
source
The Faith of Puppets: Leopardi and the Souls of Machines (p.35-6)
7 months 4 weeks ago

Inasmuch as love grows in you, in so much beauty grows; for love is itself the beauty of the soul.

0
0
Source
source
as translated by H. Browne and J. H. Meyers, The Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers (1995)
3 months 2 days ago

Reading after a certain age diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking, just as the man who spends too much time in the theater is tempted to be content with living vicariously instead of living his own life.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

If in this book harsh words are spoken about some of the greatest among the intellectual leaders of mankind, my motive is not, I hope, the wish to belittle them. It springs rather from my conviction that, if our civilization is to survive, we must break with the habit of deference to great men. Great men may make great mistakes; and as the book tries to show, some of the greatest leaders of the past supported the perennial attack on freedom and reason. Their influence, too rarely challenged, continues to mislead those on whose defence civilization depends, and to divide them. The responsibility of this tragic and possibly fatal division becomes ours if we hesitate to be outspoken in our criticism of what admittedly is a part of our intellectual heritage. By reluctance to criticize some of it, we may help to destroy it all.

0
0
Source
source
Preface to the First Edition

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia