Skip to main content
3 months 6 days ago

Childish and altogether ludicrous is what you yourself are and all philosophers; and if a grown-up man like me spends fifteen minutes with fools of this kind, it is merely a way of passing the time. I've now got more important things to do. Goodbye!

0
0
Source
source
Thrasymachus, in On the Indestructibility of our Essential Being by Death, in Essays and Aphorisms (1970) as translated by R. J. Hollingdale, p. 76
7 months 3 days ago

Think differently, but know when it's your duty to think the same...

0
0
3 months 5 days ago

[M]y father's rejection of all that is called religious belief, was not, as many might suppose, primarily a matter of logic and evidence: the grounds of it were moral, still more than intellectual. He found it impossible to believe that a world so full of evil was the work of an Author combining infinite power with perfect goodness and righteousness.

0
0
Source
source
(pp. 39-40)
3 months 5 days ago

Several excuses are always less convincing than one.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1
2 months 4 weeks ago

Ion is... a parrhesiastes, i.e., the sort... so valuable to democracy or monarchy since he is courageous enough to explain either to the demos or to the king just what the short-comings of their life really are.

0
0
3 months 5 days ago

You can hardly convince a man of an error in a lifetime, but must content yourself with the reflection that the progress of science is slow. If he is not convinced, his grandchildren may be.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

For the first time in sixty years, the priests, the old aristocracy and the people met in a common sentiment-a feeling of revenge, it is true, and not of affection; but even that is a great thing in politics, where a community of hatred is almost always the foundation of friendships.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago
The advantage of a bad memory is that one can enjoy the same good things for the first time several times.
0
0
3 months 5 days ago

To talk about religion except in terms of human psychology is an irrelevance.

0
0
Source
source
"One and Many," p. 3
3 months 6 days ago

If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence?

0
0
Source
source
"On the Sufferings of the World"
3 months 1 week ago

The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mould.... The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbour causes a war betwixt princes.

0
0
Source
source
Book II, Ch. 12. Apology for Raimond Sebond
2 months 1 day ago

Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

I am very fond of truth, but not at all of martyrdom.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Jean le Rond d'Alembert, 8 February 1776

The extent of the region of the uncertain, the number of the problems the investigation of which ends in a verdict of not proven, will vary according to the knowledge and the intellectual habits of the individual agnostic. I do not very much care to speak of anything as unknowable. What I am sure about is that there are many topics about which I know nothing, and which, so far as I can see, are out of reach of my faculties. But whether these things are knowable by any one else is exactly one of those matters which is beyond my knowledge, though I may have a tolerably strong opinion as to the probabilities of the case.

0
0
1 month 3 days ago

Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 48)
1 month 3 weeks ago

The wretched consciousness shrinks from it own annihilation, and just as an animal spirit newly severed from the womb of the world, finds itself confronted with the world and knows itself distinct from it, so consciousness must needs desire to possess another life than that of the world itself.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

"If God did not exist, he would have to be invented." But all nature cries aloud that he does exist: that there is a supreme intelligence, an immense power, an admirable order, and everything teaches us our own dependence on it.

0
0
Source
source
Voltaire quoting himself in his Letter to Prince Frederick William of Prussia (28 November 1770), translated by S.G. Tallentyre, Voltaire in His Letters, 1919
3 months 5 days ago

If you are describing any occurrence... make two or more distinct reports at different times... We discriminate at first only a few features, and we need to reconsider our experience from many points of view and in various moods in order to perceive the whole.

0
0
Source
source
March 24, 1857
3 months 2 weeks ago

If there is something more excellent than the truth, then that is God; if not, then truth itself is God.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

When you wish to instruct, be brief; that men's minds may take in quickly what you say, learn its lesson, and retain it faithfully. Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind.

0
0
Source
source
Lines 335-337; Edward Charles Wickham translation
1 month 2 weeks ago

Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 2
1 week 5 days ago

There are not two kinds of human being, savage and civilized. There is only the human animal, forever at war with itself.

0
0
Source
source
An Old Chaos: Frozen Horses and Deserts of Brick (p. 25)

There is nothing disastrous in the temporary nature of our ideas. They are always that. But there may very easily be a train of evil in the self-deception which regards them as final. I think God will forgive us our skepticism sooner than our Inquisitions.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. VII: "The Making of Creeds", p. 236
3 months 5 days ago

It is sublime as night and a breathless ocean. It contains every religious sentiment, all the grand ethics, which visit in turn each noble poetic mind .... It is of no use to put away the book if I trust myself in the woods or in a boat upon the pond. Nature makes a Brahmin of me presently: eternal compensation, unfathomable power, unbroken silence .... This is her creed. Peace, she saith to me, and purity and absolute abandonment - these panaceas expiate all sin and bring you to the beatitude of the Eight Gods.

0
0
Source
source
Quoted in Nani Ardeshir Palkhivala, India's Priceless Heritage, 1st ed. (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1980) pp. 9-24
1 month 4 days ago

While imprisoned in the shed Pierre had learned not with his intellect but with his whole being, by life itself, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of simple human needs, and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity. And now during these last three weeks of the march he had learned still another new, consolatory truth- that nothing in this world is terrible. He had learned that as there is no condition in which man can be happy and entirely free, so there is no condition in which he need be unhappy and lack freedom. He learned that suffering and freedom have their limits and that those limits are very near together....

0
0
Source
source
Bk. XIV, ch. 12
2 months 3 weeks ago

Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction to Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (1998).
2 weeks ago

The world's biggest power is the youth and beauty of a woman.

0
0
2 months 5 days ago

Evil perpetually tends to disappear.

0
0
Source
source
Part I, Ch. 2 : The Evanescence of Evil, § 2

The possibility of associating two or three hundred families in agricultural and manufacturing industry depends upon a system so entirely different from what now exists, that it will open to the reader a new social world. He must consequently, in the study which opens before him, follow the guide with confidence, bearing constantly in min the gigantic results which will flow from association. Such results are well worth the sacrifice of a few prejudices. Every sensible reader will be of this opinion, and will concur to follow the advice which I shall constantly give, namely, to neglect the form and style of presentation, and occupy himself solely with the substance of the theory, seeking to determine whether the process of association is really discovered or not.

0
0
Source
source
The Theory of Social Organization. Harmonian Man: Selected Writings of Charles Fourier, p. 5.
3 months 4 days ago

Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality.

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

Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.

0
0
3 months 6 days ago

Do not shorten the morning by getting up late, or waste it in unworthy occupations or in talk; look upon it as the quintessence of life, as to a certain extent sacred. Evening is like old age: we are languid, talkative, silly. Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 2, Ch. 2: Our Relation To Ourselves
3 months 6 days ago

In the name of national security, the Commission's hearings were held in secret, thereby continuing the policy which has marked the entire course of the case. This prompts my second question: If, as we are told, Oswald was the lone assassin, where is the issue of national security? Indeed, precisely the same question must be put here as was posed in France during the Dreyfus case: If the Government is so certain of its case, why has it conducted all its inquiries in the strictest secrecy? "

0
0
Source
source
16 Questions on the Assassination" in The Minority of One, ed. M.S. Arnoni (1964-09-06), pp. 6-8

To err is human also in so far as animals seldom or never err, or at least only the cleverest of them do so.

0
0
Source
source
G 30
3 months 4 days ago

To each according to his threat advantage does not count as a principle of justice.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter III, Section 24, pg. 141
3 months 3 weeks ago

Those who deny the first principle should be flogged or burned until they admit that it is not the same thing to be burned and not burned, or whipped and not whipped.

0
0
2 weeks 3 days ago

The wave of the future is coming and there is no fighting it.

0
0
Source
source
The Wave of the Future
2 months 1 day ago

Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings you conceive the objects of your conception to have. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. V, par. 438
3 months 5 days ago

God may forgive sins, he said, but awkwardness has no forgiveness in heaven or earth.

0
0
Source
source
Society and Solitude
3 months 6 days ago

The reason that I call my doctrine logical atomism is because the atoms that I wish to arrive at as the sort of last residue in analysis are logical atoms and not physical atoms. Some of them will be what I call "particulars" - such things as little patches of color or sounds, momentary things - and some of them will be predicates or relations and so on.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

Even those who have desired to work out a completely positive philosophy have been philosophers only to the extent that, at the same time, they have refused the right to install themselves in absolute knowledge. They taught not this knowledge, but its becoming in us, not the absolute but, at most, our absolute relation to it, as Kierkegaard said. What makes a philosopher is the movement which leads back without ceasing from knowledge to ignorance, from ignorance to knowledge, and a kind of rest in this movement.

0
0
Source
source
p. 5
3 months 5 days ago

The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all.

0
0
Source
source
par. 48
3 months 4 days ago

He came in sight of a pass guarded by armed men. 'you cannot pass ... Do you not know that all this country belongs to the Spirit of the Age? ... Here Enlightenment, take this fugitive to our Master.'

0
0
Source
source
Pilgrim's Regress 44-45
4 months 2 days ago

Economics is on the side of humanity now.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

Christian Kings may erre in deducing a Consequence, but who shall Judge?

0
0
Source
source
The Third Part, Chapter 43, p. 330
1 month 4 days ago

In former times the chief method of justifying the use of violence and thereby infringing the law of love was by claiming a divine right for the rulers: the Tsars, Sultans, Rajahs, Shahs, and other heads of states. But the longer humanity lived the weaker grew the belief in this peculiar, God-given right of the ruler. That belief withered in the same way and almost simultaneously in the Christian and the Brahman world, as well as in Buddhist and Confucian spheres, and in recent times it has so faded away as to prevail no longer against man's reasonable understanding and the true religious feeling. People saw more and more clearly, and now the majority see quite clearly, the senselessness and immorality of subordinating their wills to those of other people just like themselves, when they are bidden to do what is contrary not only to their interests but also to their moral sense.

0
0
Source
source
III
4 months 5 days 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
3 months 1 week ago

He that denies any of the doctrines that Christ has delivered, to be true, denies him to be sent from God, and consequently to be the Messiah; and so ceases to be a Christian.

0
0
Source
source
§ 232

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia