Skip to main content
2 months 2 weeks ago

When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result.

0
0
Source
source
Location, Volume 1 Issues 1-2, 1963, p. 44
3 months 2 weeks ago

A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

Thus there is nothing waste, nothing dead in the universe; no chaos, no confusions, save in appearence. We might compare this to the appearence of a pond in the distance, where we can see the confused movement and swarming of the fish, without distinguishing the fish themselves.Thus we are that each living body has a dominante entelechy, which in case of an animal is the soul, but the members of this living body are full of other living things, plants and animals, of which each has in turn ita dominant entelechy or soul.

0
0
Source
source
Monadology (69-70).
3 months 6 days ago

I have told you that... we know nothing save what we have first, in one way or another, desired; and it may even be added that we can know nothing well save what we love, save what we pity.

0
0
2 months 4 weeks ago

Before one blames, one should always find out whether one cannot excuse. To discover little faults has been always the particularity of such brains that are a little or not at all above the average. The superior ones keep quiet or say something against the whole and the great minds transform without blaming.

0
0
Source
source
K 39 Variant translation: Before we blame we should first see whether we cannot excuse.
5 months 1 week ago

Sincerity is that whereby self-completion is effected, and its way is that by which man must direct himself.

0
0
4 weeks 1 day ago

Do unto others as you would have done to you.....says the sadistic, masochistic psychopath.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

To covet truth is a very distinguished passion.

0
0
Source
source
p. 48
4 months 2 weeks ago

You can't lead the people if you don't love the people. You can't save the people, if you don't serve the people.

0
0
Source
source
Hope on a Tightrope: Words and Wisdom (2008); also on "The Way I See It" Starbucks Coffee Cup #284
4 months 3 weeks ago

If you punish him for what he sees you practise yourself, he... will be apt to interpret it the peevishness and arbitrary imperiousness of a father, who, without any ground for it, would deny his son the liberty and pleasure he takes himself.

0
0
Source
source
Sec. 71
5 months 4 days ago

For on these matters we should not trust the multitude who say that none ought to be educated but the free, but rather to philosophers, who say that the educated alone are free.

0
0
Source
source
Book II, ch. 1, 22.
4 months 2 weeks ago

The particularity (Jeweiligkeit) of the places and their manifoldness are grounded in space, and the particularity of the time points is grounded in time. That basic characteristic of the thing, that essential determination of the thingness of the thing to be this one (je dieses), is grounded in the essence of space and time. Our question "What is a thing?" includes, therefore, the questions "What is space?" and "What is time?" It is customary The particularity (Jeweiligkeit) os the places.

0
0
Source
source
p. 16
1 month 1 week ago

To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.

0
0
Source
source
Preface, Dover abridged edition (1952), p. xxii
1 month 1 week ago

Space, subjectively, is the coexistence of perceptions - perceiving two objects at once.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 6 : Our Souls
1 month 1 week ago

Philosophy complains that Custom has hoodwinked us, from the first; that we do everything by Custom, even Believe by it; that our very Axioms, let us boast of Free-thinking as we may, are oftenest simply such Beliefs as we have never heard questioned. Nay, what is Philosophy throughout but a continual battle against Custom; an ever-renewed effort to transcend the sphere of blind Custom, and so become Transcendental?

0
0
Source
source
Bk. III, ch. 8.
2 months 2 weeks ago

Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the electronic world.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 30)
4 months 3 weeks ago

One must never forget to look at the aim of a matter.

0
0
Source
source
Act III, scene xi
4 months 1 week ago

At times the world sees straight, but many times the world goes astray.

0
0
Source
source
Book II, epistle i, line 63
4 weeks ago

These influences of my young childhood were greatest: 1, the mountain landscape, 2, my father the impossible idealist, and 3, the upringing of a closely-knit Christian home.

0
0
Source
source
Memoirs of an Octogenarian (1975), pp. 8-9
3 months 2 days ago

It reminds us that a man driven to desire to possess a certain female is a highly purposive individual. We have already noted that evolution tends to mark time when individuals have no reason to evolve. The same applies to individuals; they may be talented and intelligent, and yet waste their lives because they somehow lack the motivation to make use of these faculties. The best piece of luck that can befall any individual is to have a strong sense of purpose.

0
0
Source
source
p. 225
4 months 3 weeks ago

Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Louise Dorothea of Meiningen, duchess of Saxe-Gotha Madame, 30 January 1762
2 weeks 6 days ago

Monarch of earth, I shall confess my secret craft:I've always fought to purify wild flame to light,and kindle whatever light I found to burst in flame.

0
0
Source
source
Odysseus to Hades, Book XI, line 145
3 months 2 weeks ago

Community of women is a condition which belongs entirely to bourgeois society and which today finds its complete expression in prostitution. But prostitution is based on private property and falls with it. Thus, communist society, instead of introducing community of women, in fact abolishes it.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

England's genius filled all measure Of heart and soul, of strength and pleasure, Gave to the mind its emperor, And life was larger than before: Nor sequent centuries could hit Orbit and sum of Shakespeare's wit. The men who lived with him became Poets, for the air was fame.

0
0
Source
source
Solution, ll. 35-42
4 months 2 weeks ago

The Chinese are a great nation, incapable of permanent suppression by foreigners. They will not consent to adopt our vices in order to acquire military strength; but they are willing to adopt our virtues in order to advance in wisdom. I think they are the only people in the world who quite genuinely believe that wisdom is more precious than rubies. That is why the West regards them as uncivilized.

0
0
Source
source
The Problem of China (1922), Ch. XIII: Higher education in China
4 months 2 weeks ago

For a large class of cases - though not for all - in which we employ the word meaning it can be explained thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.

0
0
Source
source
§ 43, this has often been quoted as simply: The meaning of a word is its use in the language.
4 months 2 weeks ago

I soon perceived that she possessed in combination, the qualities which in all other persons whom I had known I had been only too happy to find singly. In her, complete emancipation from every kind of superstition (including that which attributes a pretended perfection to the order of nature and the universe), and an earnest protest against many things which are still part of the established constitution of society, resulted not from the hard intellect, but from strength of noble and elevated feeling, and co-existed with a highly reverential nature.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 186)
2 weeks 5 days ago

The 'Logic of Induction' consists in stating the Facts and the Inference in such a manner, that the evidence of the Inference is manifest; just as the Logic of Deduction consists in stating the Premises and the Conclusion in such a manner that the Evidence of the Conclusion is manifest.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

Every day should be passed as if it were to be our last.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 633
1 month 1 week ago

Such souls are, in these days, getting somewhat out of humour with the world. Your very Byron, in these days, is at least driven mad; flatly refuses fealty to the world. The world with its injustices, its golden brutalities, and dull yellow guineas, is a disgust to such souls: the ray of Heaven that is in them does at least pre-doom them to be very miserable here. Yes:-and yet all misery is faculty misdirected, strength that has not yet found its way. The black whirlwind is mother of the lightning. No smoke, in any sense, but can become flame and radiance! Such soul, once graduated in Heaven's stern University, steps out superior to your guinea.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

I do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible. I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.

0
0
Source
source
The Quest for Certainty (1929), Ch. XI
3 months 2 weeks ago

I do not forgive myself for being born. It is as if, creeping into this world, I had profaned a mystery, betrayed some momentous pledge, committed a fault of nameless gravity. Yet in a less assured mood, birth seems a calamity I would be miserable not having known.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: Every man I meet is my master at some point, and in that, I learn of him.

0
0
Source
source
Greatness
4 months 1 week ago

'Tis a grievous thing to be subject to an inferior.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

You see, if you say something positive like the whole of life - all living things - is descended from a single common ancestor which lived about 4,000 million years ago and that we are all cousins, well that is an exceedingly important and true thing to say and that is what I want to say. Somebody who is religious sees that as threatening and so I am represented as attacking religion, and I am forced into responding to their reaction. But you do not have to see my main purpose as attacking religion. Certainly I see the scientific view of the world as incompatible with religion, but that is not what is interesting about it. It is also incompatible with magic, but that also is not worth stressing. What is interesting about the scientific world view is that it is true, inspiring, remarkable and that it unites a whole lot of phenomena under a single heading. And that is what is so exciting for me.

0
0
Source
source
Kam Patel (28 April 1995) . "Going the whole hog". Times Higher Education.
4 months 2 weeks ago

...the prisoner's dreams is the guard's spirituality.

0
0
Source
source
p. 400

We have now but to prove a third attribute: I mean the faculty of feeling which the philosophers of all centuries have found in this same substance. ...The Cartesians have made, in vain, to rob matter of this faculty. But in order to avoid insurmountable difficulties, they have flung themselves into a labyrinth from which they have thought to escape by this absurd system "that animals are pure machines."An opinion so absurd has never gained admittance among philosophers... Experience gives us no less proof of the faculty of feeling in animals than of feeling in men.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. VI Concerning the Sensitive Faculty of Matter
3 months 2 weeks ago

[France is] a Country where the people, along with their political servitude, have thrown off the Yoke of Laws and morals.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to William Windham (27 September 1789), quoted in Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith (eds.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Volume VI: July 1789-December 1791 (1967), p. 25
3 months 1 week ago

In the world of action, we know that it is disastrous to treat animals or human beings as though they were stocks and stones. Why should we suppose this treatment to be any less mistaken in the world of ideas?

0
0
Source
source
p. 21.
1 month 4 days ago

Great also are the souls of the defenders-men who know that, as long as the path to death lies open, the blockade is not complete, men who breathe their last in the arms of liberty.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

The plain fact is that men's minds are built, as has been often said, in water-tight compartments. Religious after a fashion, they yet have many other things in them beside their religion, and unholy entanglements and associations inevitably obtain. The basenesses so commonly charged to religion's account are thus, almost all of them, not chargeable at all to religion proper, but rather to religion's wicked practical partner, the spirit of corporate dominion. And the bigotries are most of them in their turn chargeable to religion's wicked intellectual partner, the spirit of dogmatic dominion, the passion for laying down the law in the form of an absolutely closed-in theoretic system. The ecclesiastical spirit in general is the sum of these two spirits of dominion.

0
0
Source
source
Lectures XIV and XV, "The Value of Saintliness"
5 months 2 weeks ago

Every ideology is contrary to human psychology.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

The intolerant can be viewed as free-riders, as persons who seek the advantages of just institutions while not doing their share to uphold them.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter VI, Section 59, pg. 388
2 months 5 days ago

These examples... show that, in whatever proportion of its limbs the Gorilla differs from Man, the other Apes depart still more widely from the Gorilla and that, consequently, such differences of proportion can have no ordinal value.

0
0
Source
source
Ch.2, p. 89
1 month 2 weeks ago

Human nature is evil, and goodness is caused by intentional activity.

0
0
Source
source
Quoted in: Fayek S. Hourani (2012) Daily Bread for Your Mind and Soul, p. 336
3 months 6 days ago

I am dreaming ...? Let me dream, if this dream is my life. Do not awaken me from it. I believe in the immortal origin of this yearning for immortality, which is the very substance of my soul. But do I really believe in it ...? And wherefore do you want to be immortal? you ask me, wherefore? Frankly, I do not understand the question, for it is to ask the reason of the reason, the end of the end, the principle of the principle.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

There is a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation. ... They have no curiosity; they cannot give themselves over to random provocations; they do not take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own sake; and unless necessity lays about them with a stick, they will even stand still. It is no good speaking to such folk: they cannot be idle, their nature is not generous enough; and they pass those hours in a sort of coma, which are not dedicated to furious moiling in the gold-mill.

0
0
Source
source
An Apology for Idlers.
3 months 2 weeks ago

It makes no sense to say that death is the goal of life, but what else is there to say?

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia