Skip to main content
3 months 3 weeks ago

There are, in the Palætiological Sciences, two antagonist doctrines: 'Catastrophes' and 'Uniformity'. The doctrine of a 'uniform course of nature' is tenable only when we extend the notion of uniformity so far that it shall include catastrophes.

0
0
6 months 4 weeks ago

Shakespeare's fault is not the greatest into which a poet may fall. It merely indicates a deficiency of taste.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

It is freedom, it is particularity, it is solitude that we are aiming at, and not Evil for its own sake.

0
0
Source
source
p. 179
5 months 3 weeks ago

It is not sufficient to observe our mysteries in the seclusion of our lodge-we must act-act! We are drowsing, but we must act. (Pierre raised his notebook and began to read.) For the dissemination of pure truth and to secure the triumph of virtue," he read, "we must cleanse men from prejudice, diffuse principles in harmony with the spirit of the times, undertake the education of the young, unite ourselves in indissoluble bonds with the wisest men, boldly yet prudently overcome superstitions, infidelity, and folly, and form of those devoted to us a body linked together by unity of purpose and possessed of authority and power.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

The wraith of Sigmund said. "You know what this is, I suppose. Religious melancholia. Stop while there is time. If you dive, you dive into insanity."

0
0
Source
source
Pilgrim's Regress 168
7 months 3 weeks ago

All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience.

0
0
Source
source
"The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" in address to the Yale Philosophical Club, published in the International Journal of Ethics, April 1891
7 months 4 weeks ago

A propensity to hope and joy is real riches: One to fear and sorrow, real poverty.

0
0
Source
source
Part I, Essay 18: The Sceptic
8 months 3 weeks ago

Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

Those who keep the masses of men in subjection by exercising force and cruelty deprive them at once of two vital foods, liberty and obedience; for it is no longer within the power of such masses to accord their inner consent to the authority to which they are subjected. Those who encourage a state of things in which the hope of gain is the principal motive take away from men their obedience, for consent which is its essence is not something which can be sold.

0
0
Source
source
p. 97
2 weeks 6 days ago

"Perfection" is implied every time you fall short on a goal, but, it's imaginary and unattainable. Even if you met your goal, "perfection" haunts you...even though it is NOT....

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

Distinctive signs, full signs, never seduce us.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 59)
5 months 2 weeks ago

If wine is to withdraw its most poetic countenance, the sun of the white dinner-cloth, a deity to be invoked by two or three, all fervent, hushing their talk, degusting tenderly, and storing reminiscences-for a bottle of good wine, like a good act, shines ever in the retrospect-if wine is to desert us, go thy ways, old Jack!

0
0
Source
source
Pt. I, ch. III
6 months 1 week ago

There is no reason whatever to assume that woman, in her climb to emancipation, has been, or will be, helped by the ballot.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

He sees as well as you do that courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions.

0
0
Source
source
Letter XXIX
3 months 3 weeks ago

How much more damage anger and grief do than the things that cause them.

0
0
Source
source
(Hays translation) XI, 18
7 months 3 weeks ago

No one can be a great thinker who does not recognise, that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead...Not that it is solely, or chiefly, to form great thinkers, that freedom of thinking is required. On the contrary, it is as much and even more indispensable to enable average human beings to attain the mental stature which they are capable of.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. II: Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion
7 months 3 weeks ago

The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco.

0
0
Source
source
1859
4 months 5 days ago

The prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination which accords neither with Western science nor with the experimental philosophy-religions of the East - in particular the central and germinal Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism. This hallucination underlies the misuse of technology for the violent subjugation of man's natural environment and, consequently, its eventual destruction. We are therefore in urgent need of a sense of our own existence which is in accord with the physical facts and which overcomes our feeling of alienation from the universe.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

Much reading after a certain age diverts the mind 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 theaters is apt to be content with living vicariously instead of living his own life.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

Free trade is not based on utility but on justice.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself.

0
0
Source
source
p. 486
6 months 2 weeks ago

He that is not on my side is against me, and he that does not gather with me scatters.

0
0
Source
source
12:30, New World Translation
7 months 3 weeks ago

Be gentle with them, Timothy. They want to be free, but they don't know how. Teach them. Reassure them.

0
0
Source
source
Reported to be Huxley's last words to Timothy Leary, which Huxley whispered from his deathbed. Quoted in Leary, Timothy (1990) . "Life on a Grounded Space Colony".
6 months 2 weeks ago

All men cannot receive this saying, save they to whom it is given. For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother's womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.

0
0
Source
source
19:11-12 (KJV)
6 months 2 weeks ago

They ask you for facts, proofs, works, and all you can show them are transformed tears.

0
0
6 months 4 weeks ago

Gaiety - a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine.

0
0
Source
source
"Diseases"
4 months 2 weeks ago

Aesop's Fly, sitting on the axle of the chariot, has been much laughed at for exclaiming: What a dust I do raise!

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

Greater fates gain greater rewards.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

Time is heavy sometimes; imagine how heavy eternity must be.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

A man who has never been within the tropics does not know what a thunderstorm means; a man who has never looked on Niagara has but a faint idea of a cataract; and he who has not read Barère's Memoirs may be said not to know what it is to lie.

0
0
Source
source
Barère', The Edinburgh Review (April 1844), quoted in The Miscellaneous Writings of Lord Macaulay, Vol. II (1860), p. 109
8 months 3 weeks ago
Art furnishes us with eyes and hands and above all the good conscience to be able to turn ourselves into such a phenomenon.
0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man.

0
0
7 months 6 days ago

Meditate upon my counsels; love them; follow them; To the divine virtues will they know how to lead thee. I swear it by the One who in our hearts engraved The sacred Tetrad, symbol immense and pure, Source of Nature and model of the Gods.

0
0
Source
source
As translated by Fabre d'Olivet
8 months 3 weeks ago

This fact, that the opposite of sin is by no means virtue, has been overlooked. The latter is partly a pagan view, which is content with a merely human standard, and which for that very reason does not know what sin is, that all sin is before God. No, the opposite of sin is faith.

0
0
7 months 2 weeks ago

Let's put a limit to the scramble for money. ... Having got what you wanted, you ought to begin to bring that struggle to an end.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, satire i, lines 92-94, as translated by N. Rudd
3 months 3 weeks ago

When we consider that labor is the producer of all wealth, is it not evident that the impoverishment and, dependence of labor are abnormal conditions resulting from restrictions and usurpations, and that instead of accepting protection, what labor should demand is freedom. That those who advocate any extension of freedom choose to go no further than suits their own special purpose is no reason why freedom itself should be distrusted.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 2
4 months 1 week ago

No one ever saw Cato change, no matter how often the state changed: he kept himself the same in all circumstances-in the praetorship, in defeat, under accusation, in his province, on the platform, in the army, in death.

0
0
8 months 3 days ago

For we have in Latin only a few small streams and muddy puddles, while they have pure springs and rivers flowing in gold. I see that it is utter madness even to touch with the little finger that branch of theology that deals chiefly with the divine mysteries, unless one is also provided with the equipment of Greek.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World (2017) by By Eric Metaxas, p. 85
8 months 3 weeks ago

Q. You do not consider your statement a disloyal one? A. No, sir. Scientific truth is beyond loyalty and disloyalty. Q. You are sure that your statement represents scientific truth? A. I am.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

No tyranny is more cruel than the one practiced in the shadow of the laws and under color of justice - when, so to speak, one proceeds to drown the unfortunate on the very plank by which they had saved themselves.

0
0
Source
source
See Chap. XIV of Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence. Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline (1734), p. 89.
8 months 1 week ago

For human beings, the measure of every action is the impression of the senses.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, ch. 28, 10
6 months 2 weeks ago

The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, the cause, and the conclusion of time. Our reflexes and our pride transform into a planet the parcel of flesh and consciousness we are. If we had the right sense of our position in the world, if to compare were inseparable from to live, the revelation of our infinitesimal presence would crush us. But to live is to blind ourselves to our own dimensions. . . .

0
0
8 months 2 days ago

Habit is a second nature.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, Ch. 10
5 months 2 weeks ago

Why is it after a century of socialist disasters, and an intellectual legacy that has been time and again exploded, the left-wing position remains, as it were, the default position to which thinking people gravitate when called upon for a comprehensive philosophy? Why are "right-wingers" marginalised in the educational system, denounced in the media and regarded by our political class as untouchable, fit only to clean up after the orgies of luxurious nonsense indulged in by their moral superiors?

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia