Skip to main content
2 months 1 week ago

Alexander, king of Macedon, began to study geometry; unhappy man, because he would thereby learn how puny was that earth of which he had seized but a fraction! Unhappy man, I repeat, because he was bound to understand that he was bearing a false title. For who can be "great" in that which is puny?

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

I am an enemy to all banks discounting bills or notes for anything but coin.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Thomas Cooper, 1814. ME 14:61
5 months 2 days ago

Animals and plants are living effects of Nature; this Nature ... is none other than God in things... Diverse living things represent diverse divinities and diverse powers, which, besides the absolute being they possess, obtain the being communicated to all things according to their capacity and measure. Whence all of God is in all things (although not totally, but in some more abundantly and in others less) ... Think thus, of the sun in the crocus, in the narcissus, in the heliotrope, in the rooster, in the lion.... To the extent that one communicates with Nature, so one ascends to Divinity through Nature.

0
0
Source
source
As translated by Arthur Imerti
6 months 4 weeks ago
All that exists that can be denied deserves to be denied; and being truthful means: to believe in an existence that can in no way be denied and which is itself true and without falsehood.
0
0
4 months 3 days ago

Well, he wasn't a relativist. There's a long and complicated story of the rise of a desire for scientific relativism. Part of it may well be simply sort of rage against reason, the fear of the sciences and a kind of total dislike of the arrogance of a great many scientists who say we're finding out the truth about everything-and here [with Kuhn] there was a way to undermine that arrogance.

0
0
Source
source
Ian Hacking, in Gary Stix, "A Q&A with Ian Hacking on Thomas Kuhn's Legacy as "The Paradigm Shift" Turns 50"
5 months 2 weeks ago

Life grants nothing to us mortals without hard work.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, satire ix, line 59
4 months 2 weeks ago

I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture. The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly. I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep.

0
0
Source
source
10:9-11
3 months 4 days ago

...it won't just be the quality and quantity of consciousness in the world that will be transformed in the post-Darwinian Transition. As (post-)humanity emerges from the neurochemical Dark Ages, enriched dopaminergic function in particular may sharpen the sheer intensity and meaningfulness of every moment of conscious existence. For a generation whose lifetimes span both modes of awareness, it will be as if they had just woken up. They will feel they had hitherto been sleep-walking through life in a twilit stupor. Thereafter their former mundane and minimal existence may be recalled only as some kind of zombified trance-state whose nature they were physiologically incapable of recognising...

0
0
Source
source
The Hedonistic Imperative: Heaven on Earth?, "Eden", BLTC Research
4 months 3 weeks ago

Why don't I kill myself? If I knew exactly what keeps me from doing so, I should have no more questions to ask myself since I should have answered them all.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

The way of the superior man may be compared to what takes place in traveling, when to go to a distance we must first traverse the space that is near, and in ascending a height, when we must begin from the lower ground.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

Certainly no nation ever before abandoned to the avarice and jugglings of private individuals to regulate according to their own interests, the quantum of circulating medium for the nation - to inflate, by deluges of paper, the nominal prices of property, and then to buy up that property at 1s. in the pound, having first withdrawn the floating medium which might endanger a competition in purchase. Yet this is what has been done, and will be done, unless stayed by the protecting hand of the legislature. The evil has been produced by the error of their sanction of this ruinous machinery of banks; and justice, wisdom, duty, all require that they should interpose and arrest it before the schemes of plunder and spoliation desolate the country.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to William C. Rives (1819) ME 15:232
1 month 3 weeks ago

Not to display anger or other emotions. To be free of passion and yet full of love.

0
0
Source
source
(Hays translation) I, 9
4 months 2 weeks ago

The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened.

0
0
Source
source
13:33 (KJV)

A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.

0
0
Source
source
E 19
5 months 3 weeks ago

Since Adam and Eve ate the apple, man has never refrained from any folly of which he was capable. The End.

0
0
Source
source
Full text of Russell's book History of the World in Epitome , written in 1959
4 months 3 weeks ago

If we would regain our freedom, we must shake off the burden of sensation, no longer react to the world by our senses, break our bonds. For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

Radio affects most intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener. That is the immediate aspect of radio. A private experience. The subliminal depths of radio are charged with the resonating echoes of tribal horns and antique drums. This is inherent in the very nature of this medium, with its power to turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 261)
3 months 3 weeks ago

Every man is his own doctor of divinity, in the last resort.

0
0
Source
source
An Inland Voyage (1878).
1 month 3 weeks ago

Tried myself in the school of affliction, by the loss of every form of connection which can rive the human heart, I know well, and feel what you have lost, what you have suffered, are suffering, and have yet to endure. The same trials have taught me that for ills so immeasurable, time and silence are the only medicines. I will not, therefore, by useless condolences, open afresh the sluices of your grief, nor, although mingling sincerely my tears with yours, will I say a word more where words are vain.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to John Adams (13 November 1818) regarding the death of Abigail Adams
1 month 3 weeks ago

The ruling power within, when it is in its natural state, is so related to outer circumstances that it easily changes to accord with what can be done and what is given it to do.

0
0
Source
source
IV, 1
5 months 3 weeks ago

Enough had been thought, and said, and felt, and imagined. It was about time that something should be done.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

My faculty for disappointment surpasses understanding. It is what lets me comprehend Buddha, but also what keeps me from following him.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

From the moment when labour can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolized, i.e., from the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital, from that moment, you say individuality vanishes.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

A gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion. Money must be so far beneath a gentleman that it is hardly worth troubling about.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

Evil perpetually tends to disappear.

0
0
Source
source
Part I, Ch. 2 : The Evanescence of Evil, § 2
4 months 3 weeks ago

As long as I live I shall not allow myself to forget that I shall die; I am waiting for death so that I can forget about it.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

For want of the apparatus of propositional functions, many logicians have been driven to the conclusion that there are unreal objects. It is argued, e.g., by Meinong, that we can speak about "the golden mountain," "the round square," and so on; we can make true propositions of which these are the subjects; hence they must have some kind of logical being, since otherwise the propositions in which they occur would be meaningless. In such theories, it seems to me, there is a failure of that feeling for reality which ought to be preserved even in the most abstract studies. Logic, I should maintain, must no more admit a unicorn than zoology can; for logic is concerned with the real world just as truly as zoology, though with its more abstract and general features.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 16: Descriptions
5 months 4 weeks ago

During such calm sunshine of the mind, these spectres of false divinity never make their appearance.

0
0
Source
source
Part XIV - Bad influence of popular religions on morality
5 months 4 weeks ago

Oh providence! Oh nature! Treasure of the poor, resource of the unfortunate. The person who feels, knows your holy laws and trusts them, the person whose heart is at peace and whose body does not suffer, thanks to you is not entirely prey to adversity.

0
0
Source
source
Second Dialogue; translated by Judith R. Bush, Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters
3 months 3 weeks ago

When we put our central nervous system outside us we returned to the primal nomadic state.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

Of things that are external, happen what will to that which can suffer by external accidents. Those things that suffer let them complain themselves, if they will; as for me, as long as I conceive no such thing, that that which is happened is evil, I have no hurt; and it is in my power not to conceive any such thing.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion.

0
0
4 months 1 day ago

Nationality, class, race, religion, culture....subgroup identity particularity does not supersede universality and humanity.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

Thou sufferest justly: for thou choosest rather to become good to-morrow than to be good to-day.

0
0
Source
source
VIII, 22
4 months 3 weeks ago

The real, the unique misfortune: to see the light of day. A disaster which dates back to aggressiveness, to the seed of expansion and rage within origins, to the tendency to the worst which first shook them up.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

Be not the slave of Words.

0
0
Source
source
Bk. I, ch. 8.

Not totally a fan...but he's right about some things.....

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

So, this is ooold school, like old old school. So, I think we've had it backward for a long time. I think we are entering a new era and it's time to directly say Existence>essence. Being>identity.

"being" here is referring to our contingent identity. But I think we have to face the fact we don't know what happens to the identity when we die. But we know, when the body exists, our identity persists. We can't let identity particularity subvert life. Subvert existence.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

0
0
Source
source
From an April 13, 1942 letter to poet Joë Bousquet, published in their collected correspondence
5 months 3 weeks ago

If the inner psychic ground of our individual appearance were not always the same, there could be no science of psychology, which qua science relies on a psychic "inside we are all alike," just as the science of physiology and medicine relies on the sameness of our inner organs. The monstrous sameness and pervasive ugliness so highly characteristic of the findings of modern psychology, and contrasting so obviously with the enormous variety and richness of overt human conduct, witness to the radical difference between the inside and the outside of the human body.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 34-35
3 months 4 days ago

The functional regions of the brain which subserve physical agony, the "pain centres", and the mainly limbic substrates of emotion, appear in phylogenetic terms to be remarkably constant in the vertebrate line. The neural pathways involving serotonin, the periaquaductal grey matter, bradykinin, dynorphin, ATP receptors, the major opioid families, substance P etc all existed long before hominids walked the earth. Not merely is the biochemistry of suffering disturbingly similar where not effectively type-identical across a wide spectrum of vertebrate (and even some invertebrate) species. It is at least possible that members of any species whose members have more pain cells exhibiting greater synaptic density than humans sometimes suffer more atrociously than we do, whatever their notional "intelligence".

0
0
Source
source
1.9 The Taste of Depravity
1 month 3 weeks ago

In matter of writing or reading thou must needs be taught before thou can do either: much more in matter of life.

0
0
Source
source
XI, 29 (el en)
4 months 3 weeks ago

No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.

0
0
5 months 4 weeks ago

In the natural state no concept of God can arise, and the false one which one makes for himself is harmful. Hence the theory of natural religion can be true only where there is no science; therefore it cannot bind all men together.

0
0
Source
source
Part III : Selection on Education from Kant's other Writings, Ch. I Pedagogical Fragments, # 60
2 months 2 weeks ago

Mathematics have a triple aim. They must furnish an instrument for the study of nature. But that is not all: they have a philosophic aim and, I dare maintain, an esthetic aim. They must aid the philosopher to fathom the notions of number, of space, of time. And above all, their adepts find therein delights analogous to those given by painting and music. They admire the delicate harmony of numbers and forms; they marvel when a new discovery opens to them an unexpected perspective; and has not the joy they thus feel the esthetic character, even though the senses take no part therein? Only a privileged few are called to enjoy it fully, it is true, but is not this the case for all the noblest arts?This is why I do not hesitate to say that mathematics deserve to be cultivated for their own sake, and the theories inapplicable to physics as well as the others. Even if the physical aim and the esthetic aim were not united, we ought not to sacrifice either.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 5: Analysis and Physics
4 months 3 weeks ago

The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society-the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society-this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a State. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not "abolished." It dies out.

0
0
Source
source
Socialism, Utopian and Scientific
5 months 2 weeks ago

The Enlightenment worldview held by Du Bois is ultimately inadequate, and, in many ways, antiquated, for our time. The tragic plight and absurd predicament of Africans here and abroad requires a more profound interpretation of the human condition - one that goes beyond the false dichotomies of expert knowledge vs. mass ignorance, individual autonomy vs. dogmatic authority, and self-mastery vs. intolerant tradition.

0
0
Source
source
The Future of the Race (1997) by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Cornel West, p. 64

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia