Skip to main content
4 months 1 week ago

It is a palpable falsehood to say we can have specie for our paper whenever demanded. Instead, then, of yielding to the cries of scarcity of medium set up by speculators, projectors and commercial gamblers, no endeavors should be spared to begin the work of reducing it by such gradual means as may give time to private fortunes to preserve their poise, and settle down with the subsiding medium; and that, for this purpose, the States should be urged to concede to the General Government, with a saving of chartered rights, the exclusive power of establishing banks of discount for paper.

0
0
Source
source
6 November 1813, ME 13:431: The Writings of Thomas Jefferson "Memorial Edition" (20 Vols., 1903-04) edited by Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, Vol. 13, p. 431
8 months 2 weeks ago

Lastly, we must also know what Baptism signifies, and why God has ordained just such external sign and ceremony for the Sacrament by which we are first received into the Christian Church. But the act or ceremony is this, that we are sunk under the water, which passes over us, and afterwards are drawn out again. These two parts, to be sunk under the water and drawn out again, signify the power and operation of Baptism, which is nothing else than putting to death the old Adam, and after that the resurrection of the new man, both of which must take place in us all our lives, so that a truly Christian life is nothing else than a daily baptism, once begun and ever to be continued.

0
0
Source
source
On Infant Baptism, Large Catechism
6 months 5 days ago

Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life.

0
0
Source
source
A Gossip on Romance, printed in Longman's Magazine (November 1882).
8 months 3 weeks ago

The mind must not be forced; artificial and constrained manners fill it with foolish presumption, through unnatural elevation and vain and ridiculous inflation, instead of solid and vigorous nutriment.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments.

0
0
Source
source
par. 20
7 months 5 days ago

The need to devour oneself absolves one of the need to believe.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

corporate globalization is really about an aggressive privatization of the water, biodiversity, and food systems of the Earth, when these communities declare sovereignty and act on that sovereignty, they have developed a powerful response to globalization. Living democracy then is the democracy that is custodian of the living wealth on which people depend.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

God, our Father, has given us the life and the art of healing to protect and maintain it.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

Science is not distinguished from myth by science being literally true and myth only a type of poetic analogy. While their aims are different, both are composed of symbols we use to deal with a slippery world.

0
0
Source
source
Beyond the Last Thought: Freud's cigars and the long way round to Nirvana (p. 96)
8 months 1 week 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
8 months 1 week ago

In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.

0
0
Source
source
"The Art of Controversy" as translated by T. Bailey Saunders
5 months ago

Men's hearts ought not to be set against one another; but set with one another, and all against the Evil Thing only.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

History is a bath of blood.

0
0
8 months 2 weeks ago

Christ ought to be preached with this goal in mind - that we might be moved to faith in him so that he is not just a distant historical figure but actually Christ for you and me.

0
0
Source
source
p. 69
5 months 3 weeks ago

It doesn't matter that it can't last, that we don't find it more often. To know that there is such perfection, that there has been such perfection - it is worth living for. It exists. It has been - it is. One can contemplate it and feel complete peace.

0
0
7 months 4 weeks ago

Seek after the good, and with much toil shall ye find it; the evil turns up of itself without your seeking it.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

"And I say also this. I do not think the forest would be so bright, nor the water so warm, nor love so sweet, if there were no danger in the lakes."

0
0
Source
source
Hyoi, p. 76
4 months 2 weeks ago

If one does not preserve the learned in a state he will be injuring the state; if one is not zealous (to recommend) the virtuous upon seeing one, he will be neglecting the ruler. Enthusiasm is to be shown only to the virtuous, and plans for the country are only to be shared with the learned. Few are those, who, neglecting the virtuous and slighting the learned, could still maintain the existence of their countries. Book 1; Befriending the Learned Variant translation: To enter upon rulership of a country but not preserve its scholars will result in the downfall of the country. To see the worthy but not hasten to them will make the country's ruler less able to perform his duties. To the unworthy is due no attention. The ignorant should remain without inclusion in the state's affairs. To impede the virtuous and neglect the scholarly and still maintain the survival of the state has yet to be, indeed.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

The ideology of development has implied the globalization of the priorities, patterns, and prejudices of the West. Instead of self-generated, development is imposed. Instead of coming from within, it is externally guided. Instead of contributing to the maintenance of diversity, development has created homogeneity...

0
0
Source
source
Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity and Biotechnology
4 months 3 weeks ago

He has spent all his life in letting down empty buckets into empty wells; and he is frittering away his age in trying to draw them up again.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. I, ch. 9, p. 310
8 months 1 week ago

Several actual worlds without one another are not, therefore, impossible by the very concept, as Wolf hastily concluded from the notion of a complex or multiplicity which he deemed sufficient to a whole, as such, but only on condition that there exist but one necessary cause of all things. If several are admitted, several worlds without one another will be possible in the strictest metaphysical sense.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind.

0
0
Source
source
"Natural Kinds", in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (1969), p. 126
8 months 1 week ago

We feel and know that we are eternal.

0
0
Source
source
Part V, Prop. XXIII, Scholium
8 months 1 week ago

In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy. All the characteristics you stress in the Negro people: their beauty, their capacity for joy, their warmth, and their humanity, are well-known characteristics of all oppressed people. They grow out of suffering and they are the proudest possession of all pariahs. Unfortunately, they have never survived the hour of liberation by even five minutes. Hatred and love belong together, and they are both destructive; you can afford them only in private and, as a people, only so long as you are not free.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to James Baldwin
7 months 1 day ago

And this Feare of things invisible, is the naturall Seed of that, which every one in himself calleth Religion; and in them that worship, or feare that Power otherwise than they do, Superstition.

0
0
Source
source
The First Part, Chapter 11, p. 51
6 months 2 weeks ago

To conclude: there are two well-known minor ways in which language has mattered to philosophy. On the one hand there is a belief that if only we produce good definitions, often marking out different senses of words that are confused in common speech, we will avoid the conceptual traps that ensnared our forefathers. On the other hand is a belief that if only we attend sufficiently closely to our mother tongue and make explicit the distinctions there implicit, we shall avoid the conceptual traps. One or the other of these curiously contrary beliefs may nowadays be most often thought of as an answer to the question Why does language matter to philosophy? Neither seems to me enough.

0
0
Source
source
Ian Hacking (1975), Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy?, p. 7.
6 months 2 weeks ago

Rationality requires a choice among all possible alternative behaviors. In actual behavior, only a very few of all these possible alternatives come to mind.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

Since Sputnik, the earth has been wrapped in a dome-like blanket or bubble. Nature ended.

0
0
7 months 6 days ago

Man consists in Truth. If he exposes Truth, he exposes himself. If he betrays Truth, he betrays himself. We speak not here of lies, but of acting against Conviction.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

I hung my verse in the wind Time and tide their faults will find.

0
0
Source
source
"The Test", as quoted in Emerson As A Poet (1883) by Joel Benton, p. 40
5 months 6 days ago

Looking back we can see how indirectly we know the environment in which nevertheless we live. We can see that the news of it comes to us now fast, now slowly; but that whatever we believe to be a true picture, we treat as if it were the environment itself.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. I: "The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads", p. 4
4 months 6 days ago

As the nature of the universal has given to every rational being all the powers that it has, so we have received from it this power also. For as the universal nature converts and fixes in its predestined place everything which stands in the way and opposes it, and makes such things a part of itself, so also the rational animal is able to make every hindrance its own material, and to use it for such purpose as it may have designed.

0
0
Source
source
VIII, 35
8 months 2 weeks ago

Fashion is the science of appearances, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

The imagination is always restless and suggests a variety of thoughts, and the will, reason being laid aside, is ready for every extravagant project; and in this State, he that goes farthest out of the way, is thought fittest to lead, and is sure of most followers: And when Fashion hath once Established, what Folly or craft began, Custom makes it Sacred, and 'twill be thought impudence or madness, to contradict or question it. He that will impartially survey the Nations of the World, will find so much of the Governments, Religion, and Manners brought in and continued amongst them by these means, that they will have but little Reverence for the Practices which are in use and credit amongst Men.

0
0
Source
source
First Treatise of Government
7 months 6 days ago

Pure mathematics is religion.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

China is a much richer country than any part of Europe.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter XI, Part III, (First Period) p. 221.
5 months ago

There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man; also, it may be said, there is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.

0
0
7 months 5 days ago

As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

It is disgraceful, instead of proceeding ahead, to be carried along, and then suddenly, amid the whirlpool of events, to ask in a dazed way: "How did I get into this condition?"

0
0
5 months 4 days ago

Never has any one been less a priest than Jesus, never a greater enemy of forms, which stifle religion under the pretext of protecting it. By this we are all his disciples and his successors; by this he has laid the eternal foundation-stone of true religion; and if religion is essential to humanity, he has by this deserved the Divine rank the world has accorded him.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 5.
7 months 5 days ago

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

Nothing, in fact, is as universal or as ancient as the iniquitous and absurd; truth and justice, on the contrary, are the least universal, the youngest features in the development of human society.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

Go where he will, the wise man is at home, His hearth the earth, his hall the azure dome.

0
0
Source
source
Wood-notes, st. 3
8 months 1 week ago

The poor, short lone fact dies at birth. Memory catches it up into her heaven and bathes it in immortal waters.

0
0
Source
source
"Memory", p. 66
5 months ago

These things, which we state lightly enough here, are yet of deep import, and indicate a mighty change in our whole manner of existence. For the same habit regulates not our modes of action alone, but our modes of thought and feeling. Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force, of any kind. Not for internal perfection, but for external combinations and arrangements, for institutions, constitutions, for Mechanism of one sort or other, do they hope and struggle. Their whole efforts, attachments, opinions, turn on mechanism, and are of a mechanical character.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun. While this gives a moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise, and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body, and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be the constant companion of your walks. Never think of taking a book with you.

0
0
7 months 5 days ago

By an object, I mean anything that we can think, i.e. anything we can talk about.

0
0
Source
source
"Reflections on Real and Unreal Objects", Undated, MS 966
8 months 1 week ago

It is the duty of all who care for their country or for civilisation to point out that we cannot further any of our ideals by participation in the next war, and that we ought therefore to resist all measures based upon the assumption that we shall take part in it. In the late war it was arguable that victory, being possible, might do some good. With the modern technique of gas attack, no belligerent can hope for victory. Absolute pacifism, therefore, in every country, in which it is politically possible, is the only sane policy both for Governments and individuals.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to The New Statesman and Nation (10 August 1935), quoted in Yours Faithfully, Bertrand Russell

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia