Skip to main content

An act of the mind of which we are conscious, as such, is called freedom. An act without consciousness of action is called spontaneity. I by no means assume as necessary any immediate consciousness of the act, but merely, that on subsequent reflection thou shouldst perceive it to be an act. The higher question of what it is that prevents any such state of indecision, or any consciousness of the act, we may perhaps subsequently be able to solve. This act of the mind is called thought and it is said that thought is a spontaneous act, to distinguish it from sensation, in which the mind is merely receptive and passive.

0
0
Source
source
Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p. 44
2 months 2 days ago

And as to you, Sir, treacherous in private friendship (for so you have been to me, and that in the day of danger) and a hypocrite in public life, the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor; whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any. 

0
0
Source
source
Letter to George Washington, 30 July 1796
3 months 1 day ago

Plato... introduces two infinities, because both in increase and diminution there appears to be transcendency, and a progression to infinity. Though... he did not use them: for neither is there infinity in numbers by diminution or division; since unity is a minimum: nor by increase; for he extends number as far as to the decad.

0
0
2 months 1 day ago

I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle; to allow moments of insight to give wisdom at more mundane times. Social: to see in imagination the society that is to be created, where individuals grow freely, and where hate and greed and envy die because there is nothing to nourish them. These things I believe, and the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

On the whole, a man who denies the existence of the effects arranged according to the causes in the question of arts, or whose wisdom cannot understand it, then he has no knowledge of the art of its Maker.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

Ah, Postumus! they fleet away, our years, nor piety one hour can win from wrinkles and decay, and Death's indomitable power.

0
0
Source
source
Book II, ode xiv, line 1 (trans. John Conington)
3 weeks ago

It is questionable whether there does not exist in man an obscure and blind will to make war; an impulse towards change, towards emergence from the familiarities of everyday life and from the stabilities of well-known conditions - something like a will to death as a will to annihilation and self-sacrifice, a vague enthusiasm for the upbuilding of a new world.

0
0
1 week 5 days ago

How very little can be done under the spirit of fear.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in The Book of Positive Quotations (2007) by John Cook, p. 479
2 months 2 weeks ago

It pertains to all men to know themselves and to learn self-control.

0
0
2 months 1 day ago

We, on the contrary, now send to the Brahmans English clergymen and evangelical linen-weavers, in order out of sympathy to put them right, and to point out to them that they are created out of nothing, and that they ought to be grateful and pleased about it. But it is Just the same as if we fired a bullet at a cliff. " In India, our religions wIll never at any time take root; the ancient wisdom of the human race will not be supplanted by the events in Galilee. On the contrary, Indian Wisdom flows back to Europe, and will produce a fundamental change in our knowledge and thought.

0
0
Source
source
Schopenhauer, Arthur The world as will and representation. Translated from the German by E. F. J. Payne. New York, Dover Publications [c1969 - Volume I, & 63 p. 356-357. quoted in Londhe, S. (2008).
3 days ago

The general nature of the speech act fallacy can be stated as follows, using "good" as our example. Calling something good is characteristically praising or commending or recommending it, etc. But it is a fallacy to infer from this that the meaning of "good" is explained by saying it is used to perform the act of commendation.

0
0
Source
source
P. 139.
1 month 1 day ago

There is no sin, and there can be no sin on all the earth, which the Lord will not forgive to the truly repentant! Man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God. Can there be a sin which could exceed the love of God?

0
0
Source
source
Book II, ch. 3 (trans. Constance Garnett) The Elder Zossima, speaking to a devout widow afraid of death
3 months 1 day ago

The person who is going to preach ought to live in the Christian thoughts and ideas: they ought to be his daily life. If so, this is the view of Christianity, then you, too, will have eloquence enough and precisely that which is needed when you speak extemporaneously without specific preparation. However, it is fallacious eloquence if someone, without otherwise occupying himself with, without living in these thoughts, once in a while sits down and laboriously collects such thoughts, perhaps in the field of literature, and then works them into a well-composed discourse, which is then committed to memory and delivered superbly, with respect both to voice and diction and gestures.

0
0
2 weeks 3 days ago

Underlying even the so-called problem of knowledge there is simply this human feeling, just as underlying the inquiry into the "why," the cause, there is simply the search for the "wherefore," the end. All the rest is either to deceive oneself or to wish to deceive others; and to wish to deceive others in order to deceive oneself.

0
0
2 months ago

If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist

0
0
Source
source
Marx quoted and translated by Engels (in an 1882 letter to Eduard Bernstein) about the peculiar Marxism which arose in France 1882.
2 months 1 day ago

This bird sees the white man come and the Indian withdraw, but it withdraws not. Its untamed voice is still heard above the tinkling of the forge... It remains to remind us of aboriginal nature.

0
0
Source
source
March 23, 1856; of the crow
2 months 4 days ago

The man who barely abstains from violating either the person, or the estate, or the reputation of his neighbours, has surely very little positive merit. He fulfils, however, all the rules of what is peculiarly called justice, and does every thing which his equals can with propriety force him to do, or which they can punish him for not doing. We may often fulfil all the rules of justice by sitting still and doing nothing.

0
0
Source
source
Section II, Chap. I.
2 months 3 days ago

In man (as the only rational creature on earth) those natural capacities which are directed to the use of his reason are to be fully developed only in the race, not in the individual.

0
0
Source
source
Second Thesis
2 months 3 days ago

A person who already displays ... cruelty to animals is also no less hardened towards men. We can already know the human heart, even in regard to animals.

0
0
Source
source
Part II, p. 212
2 months ago

Human beings are not born identical. There are many different temperaments and constitutions; and within each psycho-physical class one can find people at very different stages of spiritual development. Forms of worship and spiritual discipline which may be valuable for one individual maybe useless or even positively harmful for another belonging to a different class and standing, within that class, at a lower or higher level of development.

0
0
3 months 1 day ago

Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic - if it is pulled out I shall die.

0
0
2 months 4 weeks ago

The military mind remains unparalleled as a vehicle of creative stupidity.

0
0
2 months 1 day ago

It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 12: Free Thought and Official Propaganda
3 weeks 1 day ago

The cry of equality pulls everyone down.

0
0
Source
source
Quoted in The Observer September 13, 1987.
1 month 4 weeks ago

I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it.

0
0
1 month 4 weeks ago

If we cannot "practice the presence of God," it is something to practice the absence of God, to become increasingly aware of our unawareness till we feel like man who should stand beside a great cataract and hear no noise, or like a man in a story who looks in a mirror and finds no face there, or a man in a dream who stretches his hand to visible objects and gets no sensation of touch. To know that one is dreaming is to no longer be perfectly asleep. Bur for news of the fully waking world you must go to my betters.

0
0
Source
source
"Charity"
1 week 6 days ago

Those who devote themselves to rituals must ignore themselves. Rituals produce a distance from the self, a self-transcendence.

0
0
2 weeks 3 days ago

There is no tyranny in the world more hateful than that of ideas. Ideas bring ideophobia, and the consequence is that people begin to persecute their neighbors in the name of ideas. I loathe and detest all labels, and the only label that I could now tolerate would be that of ideoclast or idea breaker.

0
0
Source
source
Recalled by Walter Starkie from a conversation he had with Unamuno, as related in the Epilogue of Unamuno.
3 weeks 4 days ago

Big industry has brought all the people of the Earth into contact with each other, has merged all local markets into one world market, has spread civilization and progress everywhere and has thus ensured that whatever happens in civilized countries will have repercussions in all other countries. It follows that if the workers in England or France now liberate themselves, this must set off revolution in all other countries - revolutions which, sooner or later, must accomplish the liberation of their respective working class.

0
0

Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill? Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill.

0
0
Source
source
Fragment
3 weeks ago

Egos appear by setting themselves apart from other egos.

0
0

A clash of doctrines is not a disaster - it is an opportunity.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 12: "Religion and Science", p. 259
1 week 6 days ago

Since the war began, miles of paper and oceans of ink have been used to prove the barbarity, the cruelty, the oppression of Prussian militarism. Conservatives and radicals alike are giving their support to the Allies for no other reason than to help crush that militarism, in the presence of which, they say, there can be no peace or progress in Europe. But though America grows fat on the manufacture of munitions and war loans to the Allies to help crush Prussians the same cry is now being raised in America which, if carried into national action, would build up an American militarism far more terrible than German or Prussian militarism could ever be, and that because nowhere in the world has capitalism become so brazen in its greed and nowhere is the state so ready to kneel at the feet of capital.

0
0

If this is philosophy it is at any rate a philosophy that is not in its right mind.

0
0
Source
source
L 23
2 weeks 3 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 1 week ago

The method of not erring is sought by all the world. The logicians profess to guide it, the geometricians alone attain it, and apart from science, and the imitations of it, there are no true demonstrations.

0
0
2 months 4 days ago

II. The tax which each individual is bound to pay ought to be certain, and not arbitrary.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter II, Part II, p. 892.
3 weeks 4 days ago

Since the management of industry by individuals necessarily implies private property, and since competition is in reality merely the manner and form in which the control of industry by private property owners expresses itself, it follows that private property cannot be separated from competition and the individual management of industry. Private property must, therefore, be abolished and in its place must come the common utilization of all instruments of production and the distribution of all products according to common agreement - in a word, what is called the communal ownership of goods.

0
0
1 month 5 days ago

The first condition of unity is a subjective principle; and this principle in the Positive system is the subordination of the intellect to the heart: Without this the unity that we seek can never be placed on a permanent basis, whether individually or collectively. It is essential to have some influence sufficiently powerful to produce convergence amid the heterogeneous and often antagonistic tendencies of so complex an organism as ours.

0
0
Source
source
p. 24
2 months ago

Ramsgate is full of Jews and fleas.

0
0
Source
source
MEKOR IV, 490, 25 August 1879
4 weeks ago

The normal present connects the past and the future through limitation. Contiguity results, crystallization by means of solidification. There also exists, however, a spiritual present that identifies past and future through dissolution, and this mixture is the element, the atmosphere of the poet.

0
0
Source
source
Fragment No. 109
2 months ago

For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.

0
0
Source
source
"Sermons in Cats"
1 month 1 day ago

Corrupt influence, which is itself the perennial spring of all prodigality, and of all disorder; which loads us, more than millions of debt; which takes away vigor from our arms, wisdom from our councils, and every shadow of authority and credit from the most venerable parts of our constitution.

0
0

Should it be proved that woman is naturally weaker than man, from whence does it follow that it is natural for her to labour to become still weaker than nature intended her to be? Arguments of this cast are an insult to common sense, and savour of passion. The divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings, may, it is to be hoped, in this enlightened age, be contested without danger, and though conviction may not silence many boisterous disputants, yet, when any prevailing prejudice is attacked, the wise will consider, and leave the narrow-minded to rail with thoughtless vehemence at innovation.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 3
1 month 3 weeks ago

Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.

0
0
Source
source
p. 56e
2 months 1 week ago

For all knowledge and wonder (which is the seed of knowledge) is an impression of pleasure in itself.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, i, 3
2 months 2 days ago

The foundations on which several duties are built, and the foundations of right and wrong from which they spring, are not perhaps easily to be let into the minds of grown men, not us'd to abstract their thoughts from common received opinions. Much less are children capable of reasonings from remote principles. They cannot conceive the force of long deductions. The reasons that move them must be obvious, and level to their thoughts, and such as may be felt and touched. But yet, if their age, temper, and inclination be consider'd, they will never want such motives as may be sufficient to convince them.

0
0
Source
source
Sec. 81

Instinct is blind;-a consciousness without insight. Freedom, as the opposite of Instinct, is thus seeing, and clearly conscious of the grounds of its activity.

0
0
Source
source
p. 7
3 weeks 1 day ago

He felt neither guilt nor distress at the pleasure with which he was now filled by the proximity of this young creature, and when he discovered in himself even physical symptoms of his inclination he did not take fright, but continued cheerfully and serenely to see Nick whenever the ordinary run of his duties suggested it, congratulating himself upon the newly achieved solidity and rational calm of his spiritual life.

0
0
Source
source
The Bell (1958) p. 91
1 month 4 weeks ago

Man is a useless passion.

0
0
Source
source
Part 4, Chapter 2, III

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia