Skip to main content

If all else fails, the character of a man can be recognized by nothing so surely as by a jest which he takes badly. K 46 Variant translation: A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.

0
0

There is no penalty attached to a lover's oath.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 23
1 month 3 days ago

Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.

0
0
2 weeks 1 day ago

In conclusion, then, no satisfactory interpretation of quantum mechanics exists today. The questions posed by the confrontation between the Copenhagen interpretation and the hidden variable theorists go to the very foundations of microphysics, but the answers given by hidden variable theorists and Copenhagenists are alike unsatisfactory. Human curiosity will not rest until those questions are answered, but whether they will be answered by conceptual innovations within the framework of the present theory or only within the framework of an as yet unforeseen theory is unknown. The first step toward answering them has been attempted here. It is the modest but essential step of becoming clear on the nature and magnitude of the difficulties.

0
0
Source
source
A philosopher looks at quantum mechanics
2 months 1 week ago

The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

0
0
Source
source
Worship

I saw the Emperor-this world-soul-riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.

0
0
Source
source
Hegel to Niethammer, October 13, 1806, in Hegel: the Letters (1998) translated by Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler, p. 114. Hegel: the Letters

Never find your delight in another's misfortune.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 467

Think about the two qualities that a virus, or any sort of parasitic replicator, demands of a friendly medium, the two qualities that make cellular machinery so friendly towards parasitic DNA, and that make computers so friendly towards computer viruses. These qualities are, firstly, a readiness to replicate information accurately, perhaps with some mistakes that are subsequently reproduced accurately; and, secondly, a readiness to obey instructions encoded in the information so replicated.

0
0
2 months 3 days ago

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something - because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. - And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.

0
0
Source
source
§ 129

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have a chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1. Why Are People?
3 weeks 2 days ago

Even the most insensitive hit song enthusiast cannot always escape the feeling that the child with a sweet tooth comes to know in the candy store.

0
0
Source
source
p. 290
1 month 3 days ago

Try as I will, I don't see what might exist...

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

You are a little soul carrying a corpse around, as Epictetus used to say.

0
0
Source
source
Fragment 26 (Oldfather translation). This fragment originates from Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, IV. 41.
2 months 2 days ago

We are observing ourselves being observed by the painter, and made visible to his eyes by the same light that enables us to see him. And just as we are about to apprehend ourselves, transcribed by his hand as though in a mirror, we find that we can in fact apprehend nothing of that mirror but its lusterless back. The other side of a psyche.

0
0
Source
source
Las Menias
3 weeks 2 days ago

Tactically, conceptualism is no doubt the strongest position of the three; for the tired nominalist can lapse into conceptualism and still allay his puritanic conscience with the reflection that he has not quite taken to eating lotus with the Platonists.

0
0
Source
source
"Logic and the Reification of Universals"
2 months 1 week ago

Essentially, this war...is a great race-conflict, a conflict of Teuton and Slav, in which certain other nations, England, France and Belgium, have been led into cooperation with the Slav. ... The conflict of Germany and Russia has been produced not by this or that diplomatic incident, but by primitive passions expressing themselves in the temper of the two races.

0
0
Source
source
War: The Offspring of Fear (1914), quoted in Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude, 1872-1921 (1996), p. 373

Aims, principles, &c., have a place in our thoughts, in our subjective design only; but not yet in the sphere of reality. That which exists for itself only, is a possibility, a potentiality; but has not yet emerged into Existence. A second element must be introduced in order to produce actuality - viz. actuation, realization; and whose motive power is the Will - the activity of man in the widest sense.

0
0

The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the ground rules of the environment. The ground rules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serves as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 93)
2 months 1 week ago

There are men who astonish and delight, men who instruct and guide. Some men's words I remember so well that I must often use them to express my thought. Yes, because I perceive that we have heard the same truth, but they have heard it better.

0
0
Source
source
Character

The new overkill is simply an extension of our nervous system into a total ecological service environment. Such a service environment can liquidate or terminate its beneficiaries as naturally as it sustains them.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 152)
2 months 1 week ago

Nothing but the most exemplary morals can give dignity to a man of small fortune.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter I, Part III, Article III, p. 874.
2 months 1 week ago

There are other letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus invented.

0
0
2 months 2 days ago

The problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of one's sex, but, rather, to use one's sexuality henceforth to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships. And, no doubt, homosexuality is not a form of desire but something desirable. Therefore, we have to work at becoming homosexuals.

0
0
Source
source
"Friendship as a Way of Life," interview in Gai pied, April 1981, as translated in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth (1994), pp. 135-136
2 months 3 days ago

A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.

0
0
Source
source
Conversation of 1930
1 month 4 days ago

While moral rules may be propounded by authority the fact that these were so propounded would not validate them.

0
0
Source
source
"The Meaning of Life".
2 months 1 week ago

I wiped away the weeds and foam, And fetched my sea-born treasures home; But the poor, unsightly, noisome things Had left their beauty on the shore With the sun, and the sand, and the wild uproar.

0
0
Source
source
Each and All, st. 3
1 month 1 week ago

There are few with whom I can communicate so freely as with Pope. But Pope cannot bear every truth. He has a timidity which hinders the full exertion of his faculties, almost as effectually as bigotry cramps those of the general herd of mankind. But whoever is a genuine follower of truth keeps his eye steady upon his guide, indifferent whither he is led, provided that she is the leader. And, my Lord, if it may be properly considered, it were infinitely better to remain possessed by the whole legion of vulgar mistakes, than to reject some, and, at the same time, to retain a fondness for others altogether as absurd and irrational. The first has at least a consistency, that makes a man, however erroneously, uniform at least; but the latter way of proceeding is such an inconsistent chimera and jumble of philosophy and vulgar prejudice, that hardly anything more ridiculous can be conceived.

0
0
1 month 3 days ago

Why don't I commit suicide? Because I am as sick of death as I am of life.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

We may define "faith" as a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. Where there is evidence, no one speaks of "faith". We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence. The substitution of emotion for evidence is apt to lead to strife, since different groups substitute different emotions.

0
0
Source
source
p. 215
3 months 5 days 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
1 week 2 days ago

Generally speaking, espionage offers each spy an opportunity to go crazy in a way he finds irresistible.

0
0
1 month 4 weeks ago

There can be no brotherhood when some nations indulge in previously unheard of luxuries, while others struggle to stave off famine.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 4, Reason, p. 119

I'm not clever enough to be a physicist. When asked about why he chose to become a biologist.

0
0
Source
source
UR Samtiden - Verklighetens magi 27 October 2012.

Although the medium is the message, the controls go beyond programming. The restraints are always directed to the "content," which is always another medium. The content of the press is literary statement, as the content of the book is speech, and the content of the movie is the novel. So the effects of radio are quite independent of its programming.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 267)
2 months 6 days ago

When Descartes said, "Conquer yourself rather than the world," what he meant was, at bottom, - the same - that we should act without hope. Marxists, to whom I have said thus have answered: "Your action is limited, obviously, by your death: but you can rely upon the help of others.

0
0
Source
source
p. 39
1 month ago

See ye not all these things? verily I say unto you, There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.

0
0
Source
source
24:2 (KJV)
1 month 5 days ago

The more I see of the world, the more I am convinced that civilisation is a blessing not sufficiently estimated by those who have not traced its progress; for it not only refines our enjoyments, but produces a variety which enables us to retain the primitive delicacy of our sensations. Without the aid of the imagination all the pleasures of the senses must sink into grossness, unless continual novelty serve as a substitute for the imagination, which, being impossible, it was to this weariness, I suppose, that Solomon alluded when he declared that there was nothing new under the sun!

0
0
Source
source
Letter 2
2 weeks 2 days ago

The function of knowledge in the decision-making process is to determine which consequences follow upon which of the alternative strategies. It is the task of knowledge to select from the whole class of possible consequences a more limited subclass, or even (ideally) a single set of consequences correlated with each strategy.

0
0
Source
source
p. 78.
1 month 3 weeks ago

Virtue is the same for a man and for a woman.

0
0
Source
source
§ 5
1 month 3 days ago

Second, by this and other means we are driven to perceive, what is quite evident in itself, that instantaneous feelings flow together in a continuum of feeling, which has in a modified degree the peculiar vivacity of feeling and has gained generality. And in reference to such general ideas, or continua of feeling, the difficulties about resemblance and suggestion and reference to the external, cease to have any force.

0
0
2 months 6 days ago

The French bourgeois doesn't dislike shit, provided it is served up to him at the right time.

0
0
Source
source
Book 2, "To Succeed in Being All, Strive to be Nothing in Anything"
2 months 1 week ago

Self-respect will keep a man from being abject when he is in the power of enemies, and will enable him to feel that he may be in the right when the world is against him.

0
0
Source
source
Authority and the Individual (1949), p. 59
3 weeks 2 days ago

A society like the Church, which claims to be Divine is perhaps more dangerous on account of the ersatz good which it contains then on account of the evil which sullies it. Something of the social labelled divine: an intoxicating mixture which carries with it every sort of license.

0
0
Source
source
Devil disguised. p. 122
2 weeks 1 day ago

To require that all of these must be reducible to a single version is to make the mistake of supposing that 'Which are the real objects?' is a question that makes sense independently of our choice of concepts.

0
0
Source
source
Lecture I: Is There Still Anything to Say about Reality and Truth?

Cautiousness in judgment is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient. ... To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.

0
0
Source
source
A 38
1 week 4 days ago

1. Fidelity & Allegiance sworn to the King is only such a fidelity and obedience as is due to him by the law of the land; for were that faith and allegiance more than what the law requires, we would swear ourselves slaves, and the King absolute; whereas, by the law, we are free men, notwithstanding those Oaths. 2. When, therefore, the obligation by the law to fidelity and allegiance ceases, that by the Oath also ceases...

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Dr. Covel Feb. 21, (1688-9) Thirteen Letters from Sir Isaac Newton to J. Covel, D.D.
2 months 1 week ago

The most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest.

0
0
Source
source
Author's prefaces to the First Edition.
4 weeks ago

The concept of guilt is found most powerfully developed even in the most primitive communal forms which we know: ... the man is guilty who violates one of the original laws which dominate the society and which are mostly derived from a divine founder; the boy who is accepted into the tribal community and learns its laws, which bind him thenceforth, learns to promise; this promise is often given under the sign of death, which is symbolically carried out on the boy, with a symbolical rebirth.

0
0
Source
source
p. 178
3 weeks 3 days ago

Faith which does not doubt is dead faith.

0
0
Source
source
La Agonía del Cristianismo (The Agony of Christianity)

Train any population rationally, and they will be rational. Furnish honest and useful employments to those so trained, and such employments they will greatly prefer to dishonest or injurious occupations. It is beyond all calculation the interest of every government to provide that training and that employment; and to provide both is easily practicable.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia