Skip to main content
6 months 4 weeks ago

The more you obey your conscience, the more your conscience will demand of you.

0
0
Source
source
Book IV, Chapter 8, "Is Christianity Hard or Easy?"
3 months 3 weeks ago

Who is the happiest of men? He who values the merits of others, And in their pleasure takes joy, even as though 'twere his own. Not in the morning alone, not only at mid-day he charmeth; Even at setting, the sun is still the same glorious planet.

0
0
Source
source
Distichs in The Poems of Goethe (1853) as translated in the original metres by Edgar Alfred Bowring
3 months 1 week ago

May the men who hold the destiny of peoples in their hands, studiously avoid anything that might cause the present situation to deteriorate and become even more dangerous. May they take to heart the words of the Apostle Paul: "If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men." These words are valid not only for individuals, but for nations as well. May these nations, in their efforts to maintain peace, do their utmost to give the spirit time to grow and to act.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

4 ways: Agnosticism, Relativism, Amorality, Morality. 

1) I don't know. 2) Everybody is different. 3) Do whatever you can. 4) Do what you should.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.

0
0
Source
source
The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man
5 months 2 weeks ago

The ascetic morality is a negative morality. And strictly, what is important for a man is not to die, whether he sins or not.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

If the press was to be free, nothing would be so important as precisely its liberation from every coercion that could be put on it in the name of a law. And, that it might come to that, I my own self should have to have absolved myself from obedience to the law.

0
0
Source
source
Cambridge 1995, p. 249
5 months 1 day ago

A series of accidents creates a positively lighthearted state.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 4
7 months 3 weeks ago

Well, it was healthy to miss once in a while. It kept self-confidence balanced at a point safely short of arrogance.

0
0
2 months 4 weeks ago

Our legislators are not sufficiently apprized of the rightful limits of their power; that their true office is to declare and enforce only our natural rights and duties, and to take none of them from us. No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another; and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him; every man is under the natural duty of contributing to the necessities of the society; and this is all the laws should enforce on him; and, no man having a natural right to be the judge between himself and another, it is his natural duty to submit to the umpirage of an impartial third. When the laws have declared and enforced all this, they have fulfilled their functions, and the idea is quite unfounded, that on entering into society we give up any natural right.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Francis W. Gilmer (27 June 1816); The Writings of Thomas Jefferson edited by Ford, vol. 10, p. 32
3 months 1 week ago

The grand discoveries which scientific experiment yielded at and about the turn of the century, in which investigators in many countries took an eminent part and which were destined all unexpectedly to give us a fresh insight into the structure of atoms, were due in the first instance, as all are aware, to the work of the great investigators of the English school, Sir Joseph Thomson and Sir Ernest Rutherford, who have inscribed their names on the tablets of the history of scientific research as distinguished witnesses to the truth that imagination and acumen are capable of penetrating the crowded mass of registered experience and of revealing Nature's simplicity to our gaze.

0
0
Source
source
Niels Bohr's speech at the Nobel Banquet in Stockholm
4 months 6 days ago

What I liked was Thatcherism's Bolshevik aspect, which was to shake up the whole of Britain quite fundamentally, and if you read what I wrote in those years I think you might agree that in taking the view that I did then - that this was necessary and desirable - I never subscribed to the main delusion of the Thatcherites, which was that you could change everything and everything would remain the same. If what you wanted was a very anarchic, globalised, polyglot, mixed-up society in which most of the structures which had somehow been renewed from the Edwardian period to the Sixties were destroyed, then Thatcherism was what would do the job.

0
0
Source
source
Quoted in Will Self, "John Gray: Forget everything you know," The Independent
2 months 4 weeks ago

The rule, acknowledged or not, seems to be that if we have great power we must use it. We would use a steam shovel to pick up a dime. We have experts who can prove there is no other way to do it.

0
0
Source
source
The Loss of the Future
2 months 3 weeks ago

Deem not life a thing of consequence. For look at the yawning void of the future, and at that other limitless space, the past.

0
0
Source
source
IV, 50
4 months 3 weeks ago

Many receive advice, few profit by it.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 149
5 months 3 weeks ago

Gentile himself call his doctrine 'absolute formalism': there is no; 'matter' apart from the pure 'form' of acting. 'The only matter there is in the spiritual act is the form itself, as activity.'

0
0
Source
source
P. 407
3 months 1 week ago

I never read a book before reviewing it: it prejudices a man so.

0
0
Source
source
Reported in Bon-Mots of Sydney Smith and R. Brinsley Sheridan, edited by Walter Jerrold with grotesques by Aubrey Beardsley (London: J. M. Dent and Company, 1893), p. 24
2 months 4 weeks ago

When alterations in technical terms become necessary, it is desirable that the new term should contain in its form some memorial of the old one.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

Ireland still remains the Holy Isle whose aspirations must on no account be mixed with the profane class-struggles of the rest of the sinful world ... the Irish peasant must not on any account know that the Socialist workers are his sole allies in Europe.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Karl Marx
5 months 2 weeks ago

I know well that many of my readers do not think as I do. This also is most natural and confirms the theorem. For although my opinion turn out erroneous, there will always remain the fact that many of those dissentient readers have never given five minutes' thought to this complex matter. How are they going to think as I do? But by believing that they have a right to an opinion on the matter without previous effort to work one out for themselves, they prove patently that they belong to that absurd type of human being which I have called the "rebel mass." It is precisely what I mean by having one's soul obliterated, hermetically closed. Here it would be the special case of intellectual hermetism.

0
0
Source
source
Chap. VIII: The Masses Intervene In Everything, And Why Their Intervention Is Solely By Violence
7 months 2 weeks ago

Even then [at the time of Peter's speech in Acts 2] it was the last days; how much more so now, when there must still be as much time till the end of the world as has passed since the ascension of the Lord! We do not know the end of the world, because it is not for us to know the times or the seasons that the Father has set in his power; but we know that, like the apostles, we live in the last times, in the last days, in the last hour. Those who lived after the apostles and before us were more in what we call the last times, and we ourselves are in them even more than they; those who will come after us will be so much more, till one gets to those who will be, if one may say so, the last of the last, and finally till that day, the very last, of which the Lord means to speak when he said, "And I will raise him up on the last day". How far are we from that day? That is an impenetrable secret.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

One ought to fast, watch, and labor to the extent that such activities are needed to harness the body's desires and longings; however, those who presume that they are justified by works pay no attention to the need for self-discipline but see the works themselves as the way to righteousness. They believe that if they do a great number of impressive works all will be well and righteousness will be the result. Sometimes this is pursued with such zeal that they become mentally unstable and their bodies are sapped of all strength. Such disastrous consequences demonstrate that the belief that we are justified and saved by works without faith is extremely foolish.

0
0
Source
source
p. 73
3 months 2 weeks ago

The one loves to do good, the other to do harm; the one to help even strangers, the other to attack even its dearest friends.

0
0

The pursuit of knowledge is, I think, mainly actuated by love of power. And so are all advances in scientific technique. In politics, also, a reformer may have just as strong a love of power as a despot. It would be a complete mistake to decry love of power altogether as a motive. Whether you will be led by this motive to actions which are useful, or to actions which are pernicious, depends upon the social system, and upon your capacities.

0
0
7 months 1 day ago

One thing I have frequently observed in children, that when they have got possession of any poor creature, they are apt to use it ill: they often torment, and treat it very roughly, young birds, butterflies, and such other poor animals which fall into their hands, and that with a seeming kind of pleasure. This I think should be watched in them, and if they incline to any such cruelty, they should be taught the contrary usage. For the custom of tormenting and killing of beasts, will, by degrees, harden their minds even towards men; and they will delight in the suffering and destruction of inferior creatures, will not be apt to be very compassionate or benign to those of their own kind. Our practice takes notice of this in the exclusion of butchers from juries of life and death.

0
0
Source
source
Sec. 116

I cannot do this easily...temporary moment specific amnesia....

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

Either everything is illusion, nature as well as revelation, or experience alone can explain faith.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

Or to create life changing satire...🤷‍♂️☠️

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes. Paraphrase of original text which reads "It does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

0
0
Source
source
The Way of Zen, Pt. 2, Ch. 2
2 months 3 weeks ago

As for the Mystical Writers scrupling to Communicate their Knowledge, they might less to their own Disparagement, and to the trouble of their Readers, have conceal'd it by writing no Books, then by Writing bad ones. If Themistius were here, he would not stick to say that Chymists write thus darkly, not because they think their Notions too precious to be explain'd, but because they fear that if they were explain'd, men would discern, that they are farr from being precious.

0
0
2 months 4 weeks ago

When a series of progressive numbers is given as the result of observation, it may generally be reduced to law by combinations of arithmetical and geometrical progressions. A true formula for a progressive series of numbers cannot commonly be obtained from a narrow range of observations.

0
0
4 months 2 days ago

In a free system any large, popular, revolutionary movement should be able to bring about its ends by such a voluntary process. As more and more people see how it works more and more will wish to participate in or support it. And so it will grow, without being necessary to force everyone or a majority or anyone into the pattern.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 10 : A Framework for Utopia; Utopian Means and Ends, p. 327
6 months 4 weeks ago

The manly part is to do with might and main what you can do.

0
0
Source
source
Wealth
6 months 3 weeks ago

We are aware of all the inconveniences of prison, and that it is dangerous when it is not useless. And yet one cannot 'see' how to replace it. It is the detestable solution, which one seems unable to do without.

0
0
Source
source
Part Four, Complete and austere institutions

Perhaps the best hope for the future of mankind is that ways will be found of increasing the scope and intensity of sympathy.

0
0
6 months 4 weeks ago

You know how much I admire Che Guevara. In fact, I believe that the man was not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age: as a fighter and as a man, as a theoretician who was able to further the cause of revolution by drawing his theories from his personal experience in battle.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Marianne Alexandre (ed.), !Viva Che!: Contributions in Tribute to Ernesto 'Che' Guevara, 1968
7 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
5 months 2 weeks ago

... classic philosophy maintained that change, and consequently time, are marks of inferior reality, holding that true and ultimate reality is immutable and eternal. Human reasons, all too human, have given birth to the idea that over and beyond the lower realm of things that shift like the sands on the seashore there is the kingdom of the unchanging, of the complete, the perfect. The grounds for the belief are couched in the technical language of philosophy, but the grounds for the cause is the heart's desire for surcease from change, struggle, and uncertainty. The eternal and immutable is the consummation of mortal man's quest for certainty.

0
0
7 months 1 day ago

It is the duty of every man, so far as his ability extends, to detect and expose delusion and error.

0
0
Source
source
The Theophilanthropist: Containing Critical, Moral, Theological and Literary Essays, in Monthly Numbers, p. 387
7 months 3 weeks ago

Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

Ideas are cheap. It's only what you do with them that counts.

0
0
6 months 4 weeks ago

Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

Conservatives have, on the whole, accepted nationality as a sphere of local duties and loyalties, defining an inheritance and a community that has a right to pass on its values from generation to generation. The nation may indeed be the best that we now have, by way of a society linking the dead to the unborn, in the manner extolled by Burke. And for this very reason it arouses the hostility of liberals, who are constantly searching for a place outside loyalty and obedience, from which all human claims can be judged. Hence, in the conflicts of our times, while conservatives leap to the defense of the nation and its interests, wishing to maintain its integrity and to enforce its law, liberals advocate transnational initiatives, international courts, and doctrines of universal rights, all of which, they believe, should stand in judgment over the nation and hold it to account.

0
0
Source
source
"The Limits of Liberty," The American Spectator
2 months 2 weeks ago

I claim credit for nothing. Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player.

0
0
7 months 2 days ago

I freely admit that the remembrance of David Hume was the very thing that many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave a completely different direction to my researches in the field of speculative philosophy.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia