Skip to main content
6 months 2 weeks ago

In the tragedies of the early seventeenth century, madness too provided the dénouement, but it did so in liberating the truth. It still opened onto language, to a renewed form of speech, that of explanation and of the real regained. The most it could ever be was the penultimate moment of tragedy. Not the closing moment, as in Andromaque, where no truth appears, other than, in Delirium, the truth of a passion that finds its fullest, most perfect expression in madness.

0
0
Source
source
Part Two: 2. The Transcendence of Delirium
4 months 3 weeks ago

After Plotinus, says Schassler, fifteen centuries passed without the slightest scientific interest for the world of beauty and art. ...In reality, nothing of the kind happened. The science of aesthetics ... neither did nor could vanish, because it never existed. ... the Greeks were so little developed that goodness and beauty seemed to coincide. On that obsolete Greek view of life the science of aesthetics was invented by men of the eighteenth century, and especially shaped and mounted in Baumgarten's theory. The Greeks (as anyone may read in Bénard's book on Aristotle and Walter's work on Plato) never had a science of aesthetics.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

The fact is he made a prodigious blunder in commencing the attack, and now his only chance is to be silent and let people forget the exposure. I do not believe that in the whole history of science there is a case of any man of reputation getting himself into such a contemptible position.

0
0
Source
source
About Richard Owen's view on human and ape brains, in a letter to J.D. Hooker
2 months 3 weeks ago

Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.

0
0
Source
source
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front in Farming: A Hand Book
3 months 5 days ago

As a human being it is just my nature to enjoy and share philosophy. I do this in the same way that some birds are eagles and some doves, some flowers lilies and some roses.

0
0
Source
source
p. 22
7 months 3 days ago

Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.

0
0
Source
source
Of Studies
4 months 3 weeks ago

The press is a group confessional form that provides communal participation. The book is a private confessional form that provides a "point of view."

0
0
Source
source
(p. 204)
5 months 1 week ago

Marriage as a community of interests unfailingly means the degradation of the interested parties, and it is the perfidy of the world's arrangements that no one, even if aware of it, can escape such degradation. The idea might therefore be entertained that marriage without ignominy is a possibility reserved for those spared the pursuit of interests, for the rich. But the possibility is purely formal, for the privileged are precisely those in whom the pursuit of interests has become second-nature-they would not otherwise uphold privilege.

0
0
Source
source
E. Jephcott, trans. (1974), § 10
5 months 3 weeks ago

A living language can stand on a higher level of culture in comparison with another, but it can never in itself attain that perfection of development which a dead language quite easily attains. In the latter the connotation of words is fixed, and the possibilities of suitable combinations will also gradually become exhausted. Hence, he who wishes to speak this language must speak it just as it is; but, after he has once learnt to do this, the language speaks itself in his mouth and thinks and imagines for him.

0
0
Source
source
Consequences of the Difference p. 85
2 months 2 weeks ago

You're better off not giving the small things more time than they deserve.

0
0
Source
source
(Hays translation) IV, 32
5 months 2 weeks ago

To be is to be cornered.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

Mark at present so much; what the essence of Scandinavian and indeed of all Paganism is: a recognition of the forces of Nature as godlike, stupendous, personal Agencies,-as Gods and Demons. Not inconceivable to us. It is the infant Thought of man opening itself, with awe and wonder, on this ever-stupendous Universe. To me there is in the Norse system something very genuine, very great and manlike. A broad simplicity, rusticity, so very different from the light gracefulness of the old Greek Paganism, distinguishes this Scandinavian System. It is Thought; the genuine Thought of deep, rude, earnest minds, fairly opened to the things about them; a face-to-face and heart-to-heart inspection of the things,-the first characteristic of all good Thought in all times. Not graceful lightness, half-sport, as in the Greek Paganism; a certain homely truthfulness and rustic strength, a great rude sincerity, discloses itself here.

0
0
7 months 1 day ago

For truth itself has not the privilege to be spoken at all times and in all sorts.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, Ch. 13. Of Experience
5 months 2 weeks ago

There never comes a point where a theory can be said to be true. The most that one can claim for any theory is that it has shared the successes of all its rivals and that it has passed at least one test which they have failed.

0
0
Source
source
Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (1982) p. 133.
5 months 3 weeks ago

Taxing is an easy business. Any projector can contrive new impositions, any bungler can add to the old.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.

0
0
Source
source
"Walter Savage Landor", from The Dial, xii, 1841
6 months ago

Abstract terms (however useful they may be in argument) should be discarded in meditation, and the mind should be fixed on the particular and the concrete, that is, on the things themselves.

0
0
Source
source
Paragraph 4
5 months 3 weeks ago

Nature too remains, so far as we have yet come, ever a frightful Machine of Death: everywhere monstrous revolution, inexplicable vortices of movement; a kingdom of Devouring, of the maddest tyranny; a baleful Immense: the few light-points disclose but a so much the more appalling Night, and terrors of all sorts must palsy every observer.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

"You're a bitter man," said Candide. "That's because I've lived," said Martin.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

"I wish I had never been born," she said. "What are we born for?" "For infinite happiness," said the Spirit. "You can step out into it at any moment..."

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 8
6 months 3 weeks ago

A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them only that degree of certainty which the evidence warrants, would, if it became general, cure most of the ills from which the world is suffering. But at present, in most countries, education aims at preventing the growth of such a habit, and men who refuse to profess belief in some system of unfounded dogmas are not considered suitable as teachers of the young.

0
0
Source
source
preface xxiii-xxiv
5 months 1 week ago

In the past human life was lived in a bullock cart; in the future it will be lived in an aeroplane; and the change of speed amounts to a difference in quality.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 6: "The Nineteenth Century", p. 137
5 months 1 week ago

If the passion for truthfulness is merely controlled and stilled without being satisfied, it will kill the activities it is supposed to support. This may be one of the reasons why, at the present time, the study of the humanities runs a risk of sliding from professional seriousness, through professionalization, to a finally disenchanted careerism.

0
0
Source
source
p. 3
5 months 4 weeks ago

To me it's like standing on a platform of perpetual error. We can't just learn and remember.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.

0
0
Source
source
Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 177
5 months 4 weeks ago

What most astonishes me in the United States, is not so much the marvelous grandeur of some undertakings, as the innumerable multitude of small ones.

0
0
Source
source
Book Two, Chapter XIX.
5 months 2 weeks ago

The terrifying experience and obsession of death, when preserved in consciousness, becomes ruinous. If you talk about death, you save part of yourself. But at the same time, something of your real self dies, because objectified meanings lose the actuality they have in consciousness.

0
0
5 months 2 days ago

The world you perceive is drastically simplified model of the real world.

0
0
Source
source
p. xxvi.
4 months ago

Rather than trying to escape violence, human beings more often become habituated to it. History abounds with long conflicts - the Thirty Years' War in early seventeenth-century Europe, the Time of Troubles in Russia, twentieth-century guerrilla conflicts - in which continuous slaughter has been accepted as normal. Famously adaptable, the human animal quickly learns to live with violence and soon comes to find satisfaction in it.

0
0
Source
source
In the Puppet Theatre: Roof Gardens, Feathers and Human Sacrifice (p. 80)
6 months 5 days ago

Having departed from your house, turn not back; for the furies will be your attendants.

0
0
Source
source
Symbol 15
3 months 2 weeks ago

The rudest heathen that worshipped Canopus, or the Caabah Black-Stone, he, as we saw, was superior to the horse that worshipped nothing at all! Nay there was a kind of lasting merit in that poor act of his; analogous to what is still meritorious in Poets: recognition of a certain endless divine beauty and significance in stars and all natural objects whatsoever.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

Nothing great has great beginnings.

0
0
Source
source
XXIII, p. 73
7 months 1 week ago

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

The first who was king was a fortunate soldier: Who serves his country well has no need of ancestors.

0
0
Source
source
Mérope, act I, scene III (1743). Borrowed from Lefranc de Pompignan's "Didon"
4 months 3 weeks ago

One might think that it must be quite clear to people not deprived of reason, that violence breeds violence; that the only means of deliverance from violence lies in not taking part in it. This method, one would think, is quite obvious. It is evident that a great majority of men can be enslaved by a small minority only if the enslaved themselves take part in their own enslavement. If people are enslaved, it is only because they either fight violence with violence or participate in violence for their own personal profit. Those who neither struggle against violence nor take part in it can no more be enslaved than water can be cut. They can be robbed, prevented from moving about, wounded or killed, but they cannot be enslaved: that is, made to act against their own reasonable will.

0
0
Source
source
The Meaning of the Russian Revolution
7 months 2 weeks ago

Believe me, there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory...Everything is forgotten, even great love.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

Our book technology has Gutenberg at one end and the Ford assembly lines at the other. Both are obsolete.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 99)
5 months 2 weeks ago

I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass - which is better than trying to fill them.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

We do not know whether Hitler is going to found a new Islam. (He is already on the way; he is like Mohammed. The emotion in Germany is Islamic; warlike and Islamic. They are all drunk with a wild god.)

0
0
Source
source
The Symbolic Life - in The Collected Works: The Symbolic Life. Miscellaneous Writings (1977), p. 281
6 months 5 days ago

Do not even think of doing what ought not to be done.

0
0
Source
source
Pythagorean Ethical Sentences From Stobæus
3 months 2 days ago

We cannot ask ourselves whether 'woman' is superior or inferior to 'man' any more than we can ask ourselves whether water is superior or inferior to fire. There can be no doubt that a woman who is perfectly woman is superior to a man who is imperfectly man, just as a farmer who is faithful to his land and performs his work perfectly is superior to a king who cannot do his own work.

0
0
Source
source
Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex
5 months 1 week ago

In reading Jung's account of his cases, it is impossible not to be aware that his success was due partly to an element of ruthlessness; he was dominated by curiosity rather than compassion.

0
0
Source
source
p. 36
5 months 2 weeks ago

What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

Yes, yes, I see it all! - an enormous social activity, a mighty civilization, a profuseness of science, of art, of industry, of morality, and afterwords, when we have filled the world with industrial marvels, with great factories, with roads, museums and libraries, we shall fall exhausted at the foot of it all, and it will subsist - for whom? Was man made for science or was science made for man?

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

The eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia