Skip to main content
1 month 3 weeks ago

We are firmly convinced, and we act on that conviction, that with nations, as with individuals, our interests, soundly calculated, will ever be found inseparable from our moral duties; and history bears witness to the fact that a just nation is taken on its word, when recourse is had to armaments and wars to bridle others.

0
0
5 months 4 weeks ago

A propensity to hope and joy is real riches: One to fear and sorrow, real poverty.

0
0
Source
source
Part I, Essay 18: The Sceptic
5 months 4 weeks ago

By liberty, then, we can only mean a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will.

0
0
Source
source
§ 8.23
6 months 3 weeks ago

Hypocrisy is a universal phenomenon. It ends with death, but not before.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

The acquisition of Canada this year, as far as the neighborhood of Quebec, will be a mere matter of marching, and will give us experience for the attack of Halifax the next, and the final expulsion of England from the American continent.

0
0
Source
source
Statement during an early stage of the War of 1812, in a letter to William Duane
4 months 1 week ago

Spirit is never an object; nor a spiritual reality an objective one. In the so-called objective world there's no such nature, thing, or objective reality as spirit. Hence it is easy to deny the reality of spirit. God is spirit because he is not object, because he is subject.

0
0
Source
source
p. 10
2 months 2 weeks ago

A certain degree of blindness as to the absoluteness of one's own values may be indispensable to extract the valuable qualities from the world, the qualities whose value is believed to be the highest. It is possible that in order to realize one's values one must have faith in their exclusive character.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter Eight, Logical Empiricism, p. 202-203
5 months 3 weeks ago

Granted that any practice causes more pain to animals than it gives pleasure to man; is that practice moral or immoral? And if, exactly in proportion as human beings raise their heads out of the slough of selfishness, they do not with one voice answer 'immoral,' let the morality of the principle of utility be for ever condemned.

0
0
Source
source
Dr. Whewell on Moral Philosophy (1852), in Dissertations and Discussions: Political, Philosophical, and Historical, vol. 2, London: John W. Parker and son, 1859, p. 485
2 months 3 weeks ago

We share bodies with two eyes, ten fingers, ten toes; we share life on this earth; we share capitalist regimes of production and exploitation; we share common dreams of a better future.

0
0
Source
source
128
5 months 3 weeks ago

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs 'pass,' so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.

0
0
Source
source
Lecture VI, Pragmatism's Conception of Truth
5 months 3 weeks ago

And suddenly I had an inkling of what it must feel like to be mad.

0
0
5 months 4 weeks ago

A mind of slow apprehension is therefore not necessarily a weak mind. The one who is alert with abstractions is not always profound, he is more often very superficial.

0
0
Source
source
Kant, Immanuel (1996), page 99
1 month 3 weeks ago

Botany is the school for patience, and it's amateurs learn resignation from daily disappointments.

0
0
Source
source
Thomas Jefferson, in letter to Madame de Tessé (25 Apr 1788). In Thomas Jefferson Correspondence: Printed from the Originals (1916), 7.
5 months 2 weeks ago

Beginning to reason is like stepping onto an escalator that leads upward and out of sight. Once we take the first step, the distance to be traveled is independent of our will and we cannot know in advance where we shall end.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 4, Reason, p. 88
5 months 3 weeks ago

When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor; and, for the most part, the only difference between us and our fellow is, that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not. In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office.

0
0
Source
source
p. 491
4 months 3 weeks ago

The first authentic record on this subject (alchemy) is an edict of Diocletian, about 300 years after Christ, ordering a diligent search to be made in Egypt for all the ancient books which treated of the art of making gold and silver, that they might be consigned to the flames. This edict necessarily presumes a certain antiquity to the pursuit; and fabulous history has recorded Solomon, Pythagoras, and Hermes among its distinguished votaries.

0
0
Source
source
Quoted by H.P. Blavatsky, in Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology, Vol. I, (1877) (p. 504)
5 months 3 weeks ago

God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself.

0
0
Source
source
Book II, Chapter 3, "The Shocking Alternative"

Ancient philosophy will always hold its own among those who are worthy to judge it, because it forms... a system that is solid and well articulated like the body, whereas all these scattered members of modern philosophy form no system.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. VI Concerning the Sensitive Faculty of Matter
4 months 4 days ago

The capacity of the human mind for formulating and solving complex problems is very small compared with the size of the problems whose solution is required for objectively rational behavior in the real world-or even for a reasonable approximation to such objective rationality.

0
0
Source
source
p. 198; Cited in: P. Slovic (1972) From Shakespeare to Simon: Speculations - And Some Evidence About Man's Ability to Process Information. Oregon Research Institute Monograph, 1972. p. 1.
4 months 3 weeks ago

All men that are ruined, are ruined on the side of their natural propensities.

0
0
Source
source
No. 1, volume v, p. 286
4 months 3 weeks ago

What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

I regard it as the irresistible effect of the Copernican astronomy to have made the theological scheme of redemption absolutely incredible.

0
0
Source
source
Quoted in Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson, the Mind On Fire (Univ. of Calif Press 1995), p. 124
4 months 3 weeks ago

His power to adore is responsible for all his crimes: a man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

We are not yet speaking about equality if we have not yet spoken about equal grievability, or the equal attribution of grievability. Grievability is a defining feature of equality. Those whose grievability is not assumed are those who suffer inequality-unequal value.

0
0
Source
source
p. 108
4 months 1 week ago

Traditional philosophy's claim to totality, culminating in the thesis that the real is rational, is indistinguishable from apologetics.

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

To resign oneself or to blow out one's brains, that is the choice one faces at certain moments. In any case, the only real dignity is that of exclusion.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

Emptiness empties the one seeing into what is seen.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

Hypocrisy, of course, delights in the most sublime speculations; for, never intending to go beyond speculation, it costs nothing to have it magnificent.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

I well knew that to propose something which would be called extreme, was the true way not to impede but to facilitate a more moderate experiment.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 294)
5 months 3 weeks ago

By 'arguing...' I mean... criticizing... inviting... criticism; and trying to learn from it.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

For once touched by love, everyone becomes a poet.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

To become properly acquainted with a truth, we must first have disbelieved it, and disputed against it.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

The abolition of the evil is not impossible; it ought never therefore to be despaired of. Every plan should be adopted, every experiment tried, which may do something towards the ultimate object.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

If all the parts of the universe are interchained in a certain measure, any one phenomenon will not be the effect of a single cause, but the resultant of causes infinitely numerous; it is, one often says, the consequence of the state of the universe the moment before.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

Big industry, and the limitless expansion of production which it makes possible, bring within the range of feasibility a social order in which so much is produced that every member of society will be in a position to exercise and develop all his powers and faculties in complete freedom. It thus appears that the very qualities of big industry which, in our present-day society, produce misery and crises are those which, in a different form of society, will abolish this misery and these catastrophic depressions.We see with the greatest clarity: (i) That all these evils are from now on to be ascribed solely to a social order which no longer corresponds to the requirements of the real situation; and (ii) That it is possible, through a new social order, to do away with these evils altogether.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life. It tells us that for every human being there is a diversity of existences, that the single existence is itself an illusion in part, that these many existences signify something, tend to something, fulfill something; it promises us meaning, harmony, and even justice.

0
0
Source
source
Nobel Prize lecture
1 month 3 weeks ago

The Ambassador answered us that it was founded on the laws of their Prophet; that it was written in their Koran; that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners; that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners; and that every Mussulman who was slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise. He said, also, that the man who was the first to board a vessel had one slave over and above his share, and that when they sprang to the deck of an enemy's ship, every sailor held a dagger in each hand and a third in his mouth; which usually struck such terror into the foe that they cried out for quarter at once. That it was a law that the first who boarded an Enemy's Vessell should have one slave.

0
0
Source
source
Concerning an interview in London with the ambassador from Tripoli, Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja.
4 months 3 weeks ago

The ordinary logic has a great deal to say about genera and species, or in our nineteeth century dialect, about classes. Now a class is a set of objects comprising all that stand to one another in a special relation of similarity. But where ordinary logic talks of classes the logic of relatives talks of systems. A system is a set of objects comprising all that stands to one another in a group of connected relations. Induction according to ordinary logic rises from the contemplation of a sample of a class to that of a whole class; but according to the logic of relatives it rises from the comtemplation of a fragment of a system to the envisagement of the complete system.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. IV, par. 5
3 months 2 weeks ago

What is imposed on us by birth and environment is what we are called upon to overcome.

0
0
Source
source
Part I, p. 28
2 months 1 week ago

Our minds must have relaxation: rested, they will rise up better and keener. Just as we must not force fertile fields (for uninterrupted production will quickly exhaust them), so continual labor will break the power of our minds. They will recover their strength, however, after they have had a little freedom and relaxation.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

The second half of a man's life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time (1979) by Laurence J. Peter, p. 299
3 months 2 weeks ago

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in The #1 New York Times Bestseller (1992) by John Bear, p. 93
2 months 3 weeks ago

The seeds of heavenly bodies are deposited and cared for in the Milky Way, from which they emanate in swarms of comets that travel a ;long time and ordinarily gravitate towards various suns before becoming fixed in orbit.

0
0
Source
source
L'attraction passioneé
5 months 2 weeks ago

But, when the elements have been mingled in the fashion of a man and come to the light of day, or in the fashion of the race of wild beasts or plants or birds, then men say that these come into being; and when they are separated, they call that woeful death. They call it not aright; but I too follow the custom, and call it so myself.

0
0
Source
source
fr. 9 As quoted by John Burnet, Early Greek philosophy (1908) p. 240
5 months 2 weeks ago

By virtue of its innermost intention, and like all questions about language, structuralism escapes the classical history of ideas which already supposes structuralism's possibility, for the latter naively belongs to the province of language and propounds itself within it.Nevertheless, by virtue of an irreducible region of irreflection and spontaneity within it, by virtue of the essential shadow of the undeclared, the structuralist phenomenon will deserve examination by the historian of ideas. For better or for worse. Everything within this phenomenon that does not in itself transparently belong to the question of the sign will merit this scrutiny; as will everything within it that is methodologically effective, thereby possessing the kind of infallibil-ity now ascribed to sleepwalkers and formerly attributed to instinct, which was said to be as certain as it was blind.

0
0
Source
source
Force and Signification
4 months 3 weeks ago

Now, to say that a lot of objects is finite, is the same as to say that if we pass through the class from one to another we shall necessarily come round to one of those individuals already passed; that is, if every one of the lot is in any one-to-one relation to one of the lot, then to every one of the lot some one is in this same relation.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia