Skip to main content
6 months 1 week ago

Lysander said, "Where the lion's skin will not reach, it must be pieced with the fox's."

0
0
Source
source
60 Lysander
5 months 2 days ago

Human nature asserts itself regardless of all laws, nor is there any plausible reason why nature should adapt itself to a perverted conception of morality.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

In obedience to the feeling of reality, we shall insist that, in the analysis of propositions, nothing "unreal" is to be admitted. But, after all, if there is nothing unreal, how, it may be asked, could we admit anything unreal? The reply is that, in dealing with propositions, we are dealing in the first instance with symbols, and if we attribute significance to groups of symbols which have no significance, we shall fall into the error of admitting unrealities, in the only sense in which this is possible, namely, as objects described.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 16: Descriptions
6 months 2 weeks ago

What does not exist must be something, or it would be meaningless to deny its existence; and hence we need the concept of being, as that which belongs even to the non-existent.

0
0
Source
source
Principles of Mathematics (1903), p. 450
6 months 4 weeks ago

In the same manner as we are cautioned by religion to show our faith by our works we may very properly apply the principle to philosophy, and judge of it by its works; accounting that to be futile which is unproductive, and still more so, if instead of grapes and olives it yield but the thistle and thorns of dispute and contention.

0
0
Source
source
Aphorism 73
5 months 1 week ago

The real field of knowledge is not the given fact about things as they are, but the critical evaluation of them as a prelude to passing beyond their given form. Knowledge deals with appearances in order to get beyond them. .... The concept of reality has thus turned into the concept of possibility. The real is not yet 'actual,' but is at first only the possibility of an actual.

0
0
Source
source
P. 145
6 months 3 weeks ago

Patriotism, when it wants to make itself felt in the domain of learning, is a dirty fellow who should be thrown out of doors.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 2, Ch. 21, § 255
3 months 1 week ago

History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

And having said this, Jesus smote his face with both his hands, and then smote the ground with his head. And having raised his head, he said: "Cursed be every one who shall insert into my sayings that I am the son of God." At these words the disciples fell down as dead, whereupon Jesus lifted them up, saying: 'Let us fear God now, if we would not be affrighted in that day.'

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 53
4 months 1 week ago

Schopenhauer argues that the empirical world exists only as a representation: 'every object, whatever its origin, is, as object, already conditioned by the subject, and thus is essentially only the subject's representation.' A representation is a subjective state that has been ordered according to space, time and causality - the primary forms of sensibility and understanding. So long as we turn our thoughts towards the natural world, and search for the thing-in-itself behind the representation is futile. Every argument and every experience leads only to the same end: the system of representations, standing like a veil between the subject and the thing-in-itself. No scientific investigation can penetrate the veil; and yet it is only a veil, Schopenhauer affirms, a tissue of illusions which we can, if we choose, penetrate by other means. The way to penetrate the veil was stumbled upon by Kant.

0
0
Source
source
A Short History of Modern Philosophy (1981; 2nd ed. 1995), p. 177
2 months 4 weeks ago

So long as you are a slave to the opinions of the many you have not yet approached freedom or tasted its nectar...But I do not mean by this that we ought to be shameless before all men and to do what we ought not; but all that we refrain from and all that we do, let us not do or refrain from merely because it seems to the multitude somehow honorable or base, but because it is forbidden by reason and the god within us.

0
0
Source
source
Oration to the Uneducated Cynics

The belly is an ungrateful wretch, it never remembers past favors, it always wants more tomorrow.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

It is enough to ask somebody for his weapons without saying 'I want to kill you with them', because when you have his weapons in hand, you can satisfy your desire.

0
0
Source
source
Book 1, Ch 44 (as translated by Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella)
6 months 2 weeks ago

Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 5
3 months 4 days ago

What profit is there in crossing the sea and in going from one city to another? If you would escape your troubles, you need not another place but another personality. Perhaps you have reached Athens, or perhaps Rhodes; choose any state you fancy, how does it matter what its character may be? You will be bringing to it your own.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

Philosophy can bake no bread; but she can procure for us God, Freedom, Immortality. Which, then, is more practical, Philosophy or Economy?

0
0
Source
source
The first sentence of this was used by William Torrey Harris for the motto of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy
5 months 3 weeks ago

This reasonable moderator, and equal piece of justice, Death.

0
0
Source
source
Section 38
5 months 2 weeks ago

The plea of anger or of drunkenness - as having placed the criminal for the moment beyond the control of his reason - relieves him from the charge of premeditated and malicious intent; but a rational legislation will rather provide more severe than milder punishment for such cases, particularly if such a state of mind is habitual with the accused; for a single unlawful act may well constitute an exception from an otherwise blameless life. But a person who pleads, "I habitually get so angry or so drunk as not to be any longer master of my senses!" confesses thereby that he changes himself into a beast on a fixed principle, and that he is, therefore, not fit to live among rational beings.

0
0
Source
source
P. 351
5 months 3 days ago

Promising, committment, and fidelity, for instance, are genuinely temporal practices.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

A utopia of judicial reticence: take away life, but prevent the patient from feeling it; deprive the prisoner of all rights, but do not inflict pain; impose penalties free of all pain. Recourse to psycho-pharmacology and to various physiological 'disconnectors', even if it is temporary, is a logical consequence of this 'non-corporal' penalty.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter One, The Spectacle of the Scaffold
5 months 2 weeks ago

The initial revelation of any monastery: everything is nothing. Thus begin all mysticisms. It is less than one step from nothing to God, for God is the positive expression of nothingness.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

The heavens are as deep as our aspirations are high.

0
0
Source
source
Quoted in Maturin M. Ballou (ed.) Pearls of Thought (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1881) p. 21
6 months 2 weeks ago

Every great study is not only an end in itself, but also a means of creating and sustaining a lofty habit of mind.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 4: The Study of Mathematics
6 months 2 weeks ago

There are two classes of poets - the poets by education and practice, these we respect; and poets by nature, these we love.

0
0
Source
source
Parnassus (1874) Preface
5 months 2 weeks ago

Humiliate the reason and distort the soul...

0
0
Source
source
Part 2, Chapter ?
5 months 1 week ago

The chief requirement of the good life... is to live without any image of oneself.

0
0
Source
source
The Bell (1958), ch. 9; 2001, p. 119.
5 months 1 week ago

If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple.

0
0
Source
source
14:26
6 months 1 week ago

Citizens of a Jeffersonian democracy can be as religious or irreligious as they please as long as they are not "fanatical." That is, they must abandon or modify opinion on matters of ultimate importance, the opinions that may hitherto have given sense and point to their lives, if these opinions entail public actions that cannot be justified to most of their fellow citizens.

0
0
5 months 5 days ago

If one is to take Lulu's twelve-tone chord as the integral totality of complementary harmony, then Berg's allegorical genius proves itself within a historical perspective which makes the brain reel: just as Lulu in the world of total illusion longs for nothing but her murderer and finally finds him in that sound, so does all harmony of unrequited happiness long for its fatal chord as the cipher of fulfillment - twelve-tone music is not to be separated from dissonance. Fatal: because all dynamics come to a standstill within it without finding release. The law of complementary harmony already implies the end of the musical experience of time, as this was heralded in the dissociation of time according to Expressionistic extremes.

0
0
Source
source
Philosophy of Modern Music (1973) as translated by Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster
6 months 1 week ago

He lit a lamp in broad daylight and said, as he went about, "I am looking for a human."

0
0
Source
source
Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 41. This line is frequently translated as "I am looking for an honest man."
5 months 1 week ago

When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. VI: Free Society
2 months 2 weeks ago

My new trade of nail-making is to me in this country what an additional title of nobility or the ensigns of a new order are in Europe.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson, by Henry Wiencek, Smithsonian Magazine,
3 months 1 week ago

Literary men are...a perpetual priesthood.

0
0
Source
source
The State of German Literature.
5 months 5 days ago

I too have a growing inner certainty that there is a deposit of pure gold in me which ought to be passed on. The trouble is that I am more and more convinced by my experience and observation of my contemporaries that there is no one to receive it.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

I fear that the chief Reason why Chymists have written so obscurely of their three Principles, may be, That not having Clear and Distinct Notions of them themselves, they cannot write otherwise then Confusedly of what they but Confusedly Apprehend. Not to say that divers of them, being Conscious to the Invalidity of their Doctrine, might well enough discerne that they could scarce keep themselves from being confuted, but by keeping themselves from being clearly understood.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

I am a weak, ephemeral creature made of mud and dream. But I feel all the powers of the universe whirling within me.

0
0
7 months 4 days ago

Custom renders love attractive; for that which is struck by oft-repeated blows however lightly, yet after long course of time is overpowered and gives way. See you not too that drops of water falling on rocks after long course of time scoop a hole through these rocks?

0
0
Source
source
Book IV, lines 1283-1287 (tr. Munro)
7 months 2 weeks ago

Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don't help us, who else in the world can help us do this?

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

0
0
Source
source
"War Shrines"
3 months 1 week ago

History a distillation of Rumour.

0
0
Source
source
Pt. I, Bk. VII, ch. 5.
5 months 2 weeks ago

When we know what words are worth, the amazing thing is that we try to say anything at all, and that we manage to do so. This requires, it is true, a supernatural nerve.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

Your reason is now mature enough to examine this object religion. In the first place divest yourself of all bias in favour of novelty & singularity of opinion. Indulge them in any other subject rather than that of religion. It is too important, & the consequences of error may be too serious. On the other hand shake off all the fears & servile prejudices under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.

0
0
Source
source
Scan of the original page at The Library of Congress.
2 months 1 week ago

We Jews have been too adaptable. We have been too eager to sacrifice our idiosyncrasies for the sake of social conformity. ... Even in modern civilization, the Jew is most happy if he remains a Jew.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

It must be said that charity can, in no way, exist along with mortal sin.

0
0
Source
source
Disputed Questions: On Charity, c. 1270

And the simple step of a simple courageous man is not to partake in falsehood, not to support false actions! Let THAT enter the world, let it even reign in the world - but not with my help. But writers and artists can achieve more: they can CONQUER FALSEHOOD! In the struggle with falsehood art always did win and it always does win! Openly, irrefutably for everyone! Falsehood can hold out against much in this world, but not against art. And no sooner will falsehood be dispersed than the nakedness of violence will be revealed in all its ugliness - and violence, decrepit, will fall.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia