Skip to main content
8 months 2 weeks ago

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

0
0
8 months 3 weeks ago

We may assume the superiority ceteris paribus [all things being equal] of the demonstration which derives from fewer postulates or hypotheses—in short from fewer premisses; for... given that all these are equally well known, where they are fewer knowledge will be more speedily acquired, and that is a desideratum. The argument implied in our contention that demonstration from fewer assumptions is superior may be set out in universal form...

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

And so one can imagine that in amorous seduction the other is the locus of your secret - the other unknowingly holds that which you will never have the chance to know.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 65)
7 months 3 weeks ago

The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1: In Praise of Idleness
7 months 3 weeks ago

When equality is treated not as a medicine or a safety-gadget, but as an ideal, we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all superiority. That mind is the special disease of democracy, as cruelty and servility are the special diseases of privileged societies. It will kill us all if it grows unchecked. The man who cannot conceive a joyful and loyal obedience on the one hand, nor an unembarrassed and noble acceptance of that obedience on the other - the man who has never even wanted to kneel or to bow - is a prosaic barbarian. But it would be wicked folly to restore these old inequalities on the legal or external plane. Their proper place is elsewhere.

0
0
7 months 5 days ago

There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in The Mystery of Matter‎ (1965) edited by Louise B. Young, p. 113
4 months 4 days ago

We cannot hope to give here a final clarification of the essence of fact, judgement, object, property; this task leads into metaphysical abysses; about these one has to seek advice from men whose name cannot be stated without earning a compassionate smile-e.g.

0
0
Source
source
Fichte. Das Kontinuum. Kritische Untersuchungen uber die Grundlagen der Analysis (1918), as quoted/translated by Erhard Scholz, "Philosophy as a Cultural Resource and Medium of Reflection for Hermann Weyl"
8 months 6 days ago

No one is ignorant that there are two avenues by which opinions are received into the soul, which are its two principal powers: the understanding and the will.

0
0
7 months 2 weeks ago

All who delight in the pleasures of the belly, exceeding all measure in eating and drinking and love, find that the pleasures are brief and last but a short while-only so long as they are eating and drinking-but the pains that come after are many and endure. The longing for the same things keeps ever returning, and whenever the objects of one's desire are realized forthwith the pleasure vanishes, and one has no further use for them. The pleasure is brief, and once more the need for the same things returns.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

In a constantly revolving circle every point is simultaneously a point of departure and a point of return. If we interrupt the rotation, not every point of departure is a point of return.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. II, Ch. IV, p. 104.
7 months 4 weeks ago

The world neither ever saw, nor ever will see, a perfectly fair lottery.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter X, Part I.
7 months 3 weeks ago

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

0
0
Source
source
Section 1, paragraph 19
4 months 1 week ago

I am owner of my might, and I am so when I know myself as unique. In the unique one the owner himself returns into his creative nothing, of which he is born. Every higher essence above me, be it God, be it man, weakens the feeling of my uniqueness, and pales only before the sun of this consciousness. If I concern myself for myself, the unique one, then my concern rests on its transitory, mortal creator, who consumes himself, and I may say: All things are nothing to me.

0
0
Source
source
Dover 2005, p. 366
8 months 3 weeks ago

For once touched by love, everyone becomes a poet.

0
0
8 months 2 weeks ago

Nothing is harder to understand than a symbolic work. A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.

0
0
6 months 4 weeks ago

After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the government then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence: it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

0
0
Source
source
Book Four, Chapter VI.
8 months 1 day ago

I am firmly convinced, therefore, that to set up a republic which is to last a long time, the way to set about it is to constitute it as Sparta and Venice were constituted; to place it in a strong position, and so to fortify it that no one will dream of taking it by a sudden assault; and, on the other hand, not to make it so large as to appear formidable to its neighbors. It should in this way be able to enjoy its form of government for a long time. For war is made on a commonwealth for two reasons: to subjugate it, and for fear of being subjugated by it.

0
0
Source
source
Book 1, Ch. 6 (as translated by LJ Walker and B Crick)
4 months 4 days ago

Man is something that is to be overcome.Logically considered, this, too, presents a contradiction: he who overcomes himself is admittedly the victor, but he is also the defeated. The ego succumbs to itself, when it wins; it achieves victory, when it suffers defeat. Yet the contradiction only arises when the two aspects of this unity are hardened into opposed, mutually exclusive conceptions. It is precisely the fully unified process of the moral life which overcomes and surpasses every lower state by achieving a higher one, and again transcends this latter state through one still higher. That man overcomes himself means that he reaches out beyond the bounds that the moment sets for him. There must be something at hand to be overcome, but it is only there in order to be overcome. Thus even as an ethical agent, man is the limited being that has no limit.

0
0
Source
source
p. 5-6 part of the first essay "Life as Transcendence"
8 months 1 day ago

Writing does not cause misery. It is born of misery.

0
0
8 months 3 weeks ago

Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

The Utopianism of the standpoint which expects an era of peace and retrenchment of militarism in the present social order is plainly revealed in the fact that it is having recourse to project making. For it is typical of Utopian strivings that, in order to demonstrate their practicability, they hatch "practical" recipes with the greatest possible details. To this also belongs the project of the "United States of Europe" as a basis for the limitation of international militarism.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

He who takes not counsel of the Unseen and Silent, from him will never come real visibility and speech.

0
0
Source
source
Bk. III, ch. 11.
7 months 3 weeks ago

As geological time goes, it is but a moment since the human race began and only the twinkling of an eye since the arts of civilization were first invented. In spite of some alarmists, it is hardly likely that our species will completely exterminate itself. And so long as man continues to exist, we may be pretty sure that, whatever he may suffer for a time, and whatever brightness may be eclipsed, he will emerge sooner or later, perhaps strengthened and reinvigorated by a period of mental sleep. The universe is vast and men are but tiny specks on an insignificant planet. But the more we realize our minuteness and our impotence in the face of cosmic forces, the more astonishing becomes what human beings have achieved.

0
0
Source
source
"If We are to Survive this Dark Time", The New York Times Magazine, 9/3/1950
7 months 3 weeks ago

Power may be defined as the production of intended effects.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 3: The Forms of Power
7 months 2 weeks ago

Common sense doesn't have the last word in ethics or anywhere else, but it has, as J. L. Austin said about language, the first word: it should be examined before it is discarded.

0
0
Source
source
p. 166.
5 months 1 week ago

Let us have "sweet girl graduates" by all means. They will be none the less sweet for a little wisdom; and the "golden hair" will not curl less gracefully outside the head by reason of there being brains within.

0
0
Source
source
Emancipation - Black and White
4 months 2 weeks ago

But, one will say, if raw experience can not legitimatize reasoning by recurrence, is it so of experiment aided by induction? We see successively that a theorem is true of the number 1, of the number 2, of the number 3 and so on; the law is evident, we say, and it has the same warranty as every physical law based on observations, whose number is very great but limited. But there is an essential difference. Induction applied to the physical sciences is always uncertain, because it rests on the belief in a general order of the universe, an order outside of us. Mathematical induction, that is, demonstration by recurrence, on the contrary, imposes itself necessarily, because it is only the affirmation of a property of the mind itself.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. I. (1905) Tr. George Bruce Halstead
6 months 1 week ago

It is the aim of public life to arrange that all forms of power are entrusted, so far as possible, to men who effectively consent to be bound by the obligation towards all human beings which lies upon everyone, and who understand the obligation. Law is the quality of the permanent provisions for making this aim effective.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

The possession and the exercise of political, and among others of electoral, rights, is one of the chief instruments both of moral and of intellectual training for the popular mind; and all governments must be regarded as extremely imperfect, until every one who is required to obey the laws, has a voice, or the prospect of a voice, in their enactment and administration.

0
0
Source
source
Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform (1859), p. 22
3 months 3 weeks ago

Only lay down true principles, and adhere to them inflexibly. Do not be frightened into their surrender by the alarms of the timid, or the croakings of wealth against the ascendency of the people.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

Have you learned the alphabet of heaven and can count three? Do you know the number of God's family? Can you put mysteries into words? Do you presume to fable of the ineffable? Pray, what geographer are you, that speak of heaven's topography? Whose friend are you that speak of God's personality? ... Tell me of the height of the mountains of the moon, or of the diameter of space, and I may believe you, but of the secret history of the Almighty, and I shall pronounce thee mad.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

Chaos is rejecting all you have learned. Chaos is being yourself.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.

0
0
Source
source
4:4 (KJV) Said to Satan. The reference is to Deuteronomy 8:3, "... that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man live." (KJV)
4 months 2 weeks ago

The regular rhythms of factory production and its clear divisions of work time and nonwork time tend to decline in the realm of immaterial labor. Think how at the high end of labor market companies like Microsoft try to make the office more like home, offering free meals and exercise programs to keep employees in the office as many of their waking hours as possible. At the low end of the labor market workers have to juggle several job to make ends meet. Such practices always existed, but today, with the passage from Fordism to post-Fordism, the increased flexibility and mobility imposed on workers, and the decline of the stable, long-term employment typical of factory work, this tends to become the norm. At both the high end and low ends or labor market the new paradigm undermines the division between work time and the time of life.

0
0
Source
source
145
6 months 2 weeks ago

The great decisions of human life have as a rule far more to do with the instincts and other mysterious unconscious factors than with conscious will and well-meaning reasonableness. The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. Each of us carries his own life-form-an indeterminable form which cannot be superseded by any other.

0
0
Source
source
p. 69
6 months 1 week ago

The philosophical thought of Kant, the supreme flower of the Germanic people, has its roots in the religious feeling of Luther, and it is not possible for Kantism, especially the practical part of it, to take root and bring forth flower and fruit in peoples who have not undergone the experience of the Reformation and who perhaps were incapable of experiencing it. Kantism is Protestant, and we Spaniards are fundamentally Catholic. And if Krause struck some roots here - more numerous and more permanent than is commonly supposed - it is because Krause has roots in pietism, and pietism, as Ritschl has demonstrated in his Geschichte des Pietismus, has specifically Catholic roots and may be described as the irruption, or rather the persistence of Catholic mysticism in the heart of Protestant rationalism. And this explains why not a few Catholic thinkers in Spain became followers of Krause.

0
0
8 months 3 weeks ago

Zeno: The many do not know that except by this devious passage through all things the mind cannot attain to the truth. Zeno: Most people are not aware that this roundabout progress through all things is the only way in which the mind can attain truth and wisdom.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man's resources?

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

I must before I die, find some way to say the essential thing that is in me, that I have never said yet - a thing that is not love or hate or pity or scorn, but the very breath of life, fierce and coming from far away, bringing into human life the vastness and fearful passionless force of non-human things...

0
0
Source
source
p. 261
7 months 3 weeks ago

In actions of enthusiasm, this drawback appears: but in those lower activities, which have no higher aim than to make us more comfortable and more cowardly, in actions of cunning, actions that steal and lie, actions that divorce the speculative from the practical faculty, and put a ban on reason and sentiment, there is nothing else but drawback and negation.

0
0
Source
source
Goethe; or, The Writer
7 months 3 weeks ago

The three great things that govern mankind are reason, passion and superstition. The first governs a few, the two last share the bulk of mankind and possess them in their turns. But superstition most powerfully produces the greatest mischief.

0
0
Source
source
Journal entry (16 May 1681), quoted in Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (1957; 1985), p. 200
6 months 2 weeks ago

Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master.

0
0
Source
source
"The British Character"
3 months 3 weeks ago

A free people claim their rights, as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

Accent is the soul of language; it gives to it both feeling and truth.

0
0
Source
source
English translation as quoted in A Dictionary of Thoughts: Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Best Authors of the World, Both Ancient and Modern (1908) by Tryon Edwards, p. 2.

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia