Skip to main content
7 months 2 weeks ago

In the world of today can there be peace anywhere until there is peace everywhere?

0
0
5 months 1 day ago

Faculty X is simply that latent power in human beings possess to reach beyond the present. After all, we know perfectly well that the past is as real as the present, and that New York and Singapore and Lhasa and Stepney Green are all as real as the place I happen to be in at the moment. Yet my senses do not agree. They assure me that this place, here and now, is far more real than any other place or any other time. Only in certain moments of great inner intensity do I know this to be a lie. Faculty X is a sense of reality, the reality of other places and other times, and it is the possession of it - fragmentary and uncertain though it is - that distinguishes man from all other animals.

0
0
Source
source
p. 59
4 months 2 weeks ago

Those who used to sacrifice animals did not take them for beasts. And even the Middle Ages, which condemned and punished them in due form, was in this way much closer to them than we are, we who are filled with horror at this practice. They held them to be guilty: which was a way of honoring them. We take them for nothing, and it is on this basis that we are "human" with them. We no longer sacrifice them, we no longer punish them, and we are proud of it, but it is simply that we have domesticated them, worse: that we have made of them a racially inferior world, no longer even worthy of our justice, but only of our affection and social charity, no longer worthy of punishment and of death, but only of experimentation and extermination like meat from the butchery.

0
0
Source
source
"The Animals: Territory and Metamorphoses," pp. 134-135
5 months 1 week ago

My path was not the normal one of professors of philosophy. I did not intend to become a doctor of philosophy by studying philosophy (I am in fact a doctor of medicine) nor did I by any means, intend originally to qualify for a professorship by a dissertation on philosophy. To decide to become a philosopher seemed as foolish to me as to decide to become a poet. Since my schooldays, however, I was guided by philosophical questions. Philosophy seemed to me the supreme, even the sole, concern of man. Yet a certain awe kept me from making it my profession.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

The most violent revolutions in an individual's beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one's own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity.

0
0
Source
source
"What Pragmatism Means," Pragmatism, pp. 60-61 (1931); lectures delivered at the Lowell Institute, Boston, Massachusetts
2 months 1 week ago

In the temple of science are many mansions, and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them thither. Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes. Were an angel of the Lord to come and drive all the people belonging to these two categories out of the temple, the assemblage would be seriously depleted, but there would still be some men, of both present and past times, left inside. Our Planck is one of them, and that is why we love him. I am quite aware that we have just now lightheartedly expelled in imagination many excellent men who are largely, perhaps chiefly, responsible for the buildings of the temple of science; and in many cases, our angel would find it a pretty ticklish job to decide. But of one thing I feel sure: if the types we have just expelled were the only types there were, the temple would never have come to be, any more than a forest can grow which consists of nothing but creepers. For these people any sphere of human activity will do if it comes to a point; whether they become engineers, officers, tradesmen, or scientists depends on circumstances.Now let us have another look at those who have found favor with the angel. Most of them are somewhat odd, uncommunicative, solitary fellows, really less like each other, in spite of these common characteristics, than the hosts of the rejected. What has brought them to the temple? That is a difficult question and no single answer will cover it.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other. Variant translation: We inhabit a language rather than a country.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

The fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself.

0
0
Source
source
Estranged Labour, p. 30.
3 months 1 week ago

It is truly a lordly spectacle how this great soul takes in all kinds of men and objects, a Falstaff, an Othello, a Juliet, a Coriolanus; sets them all forth to us in their round completeness; loving, just, the equal brother of all. Novum Organum, and all the intellect you will find in Bacon, is of a quite secondary order; earthy, material, poor in comparison with this. Among modern men, one finds, in strictness, almost nothing of the same rank. Goethe alone, since the days of Shakspeare, reminds me of it. Of him too you say that he saw the object; you may say what he himself says of Shakspeare: 'His characters are like watches with dial-plates of transparent crystal; they show you the hour like others, and the inward mechanism also is all visible.'.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

One always speaks badly when one has nothing to say.

0
0
Source
source
1827
6 months 3 weeks ago

Is Christ only to be adored? Or is the holy Mother of God rather not to be honoured? This is the woman who crushed the Serpent's head. Hear us. For your Son denies you nothing.

0
0
Source
source
Weimar edition of Martin Luther's Works, English translation edited by J. Pelikan [Concordia: St. Louis], Vol. 51, 128-129
6 months 2 weeks ago

People are said to believe in God, or to disbelieve in Adam and Eve. But in such cases what is believed or disbelieved is that there is an entity answering a certain description. This, which can be believed or disbelieved is quite different from the actual entity (if any) which does answer the description. Thus the matter of belief is, in all cases, different in kind from the matter of sensation or presentation, and error is in no way analogous to hallucination. A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.

0
0
Source
source
On the Nature of Acquaintance: Neutral Monism, 1914
6 months 2 weeks ago

The position of the revolutionary party in Germany is certainly difficult at the moment, but, with some critical analysis of the circumstances, clear nevertheless. As to the "governments," it is obvious from every point of view, if only for the sake of Germany's existence, that the demand must be put to them not to remain neutral, but, as you rightly say, to be patriotic. But the revolutionary point is to be given to the affair simply by emphasising the antagonism to Russia more strongly than the antagonism against Boustrapa.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Friedrich Engels (18 May 1859), quoted in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Correspondence, 1846-1895 (1943), p. 122
4 months 2 weeks ago

Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.

0
0
Source
source
American scholar, Volume 35, 1965, p. 200
2 months 2 weeks ago

Fortunately science, like that nature to which it belongs, is neither limited by time nor by space. It belongs to the world, and is of no country and of no age. The more we know, the more we feel our ignorance; the more we feel how much remains unknown; and in philosophy, the sentiment of the Macedonian hero can never apply, - there are always new worlds to conquer.

0
0
Source
source
Discourse Delivered at the Royal Society (30 November 1825)
2 months 3 weeks ago

Human history is not the product of the wise direction of human reason, but is shaped by the forces of emotion-our dreams, our pride, our greed, our fears, and our desire for revenge.

0
0
Source
source
Confucius Saw Nancy and Essays about Nothing (1936), p. 95
6 months 2 weeks ago

The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.

0
0
Source
source
Worship
6 months 1 week ago

Reading the Socratic dialogues one has the feeling: what a frightful waste of time! What's the point of these arguments that prove nothing and clarify nothing?

0
0
Source
source
p. 14e
6 months 2 weeks ago

We are speaking on this occasion, not as members of this or that nation, continent, or creed, but as human beings, members of the species Man, whose continued existence is in doubt.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

I suddenly stopped and looked out at the sea and thought, my God, how beautiful this is ... for 26 years I had never really looked at it before.

0
0
Source
source
On his greater appreciation of the scenery of the world, after his near-death experience, as quoted in "Did atheist philosopher see God when he 'died'?" by William Cash, in National Post (3 March 2001).
4 months 3 weeks ago

We do not think good metaphors are anything very important, but I think that a good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on...

0
0
Source
source
E 91 Variant translation: A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on.
2 months 4 weeks ago

Thus proletarian violence has become an essential factor in Marxism. Let us add once more that, if properly conducted, it will have the result of suppressing parliamentary socialism, which will no longer be able to pose as the leader of the working classes and as the guardian of order.

0
0
Source
source
p. 79
6 months 1 week ago

May we be those who shall heal this world.

0
0
Source
source
Yasna 30,9
7 months 3 days ago

The Apostle says: I make up in my flesh what is lacking to the sufferings of Christ (Col. 1:24). I make up, he tells us, not what is lacking to my sufferings, but what is lacking to the sufferings of Christ; not in Christ flesh, but in mine. not in Christ's flesh, but in mine. Christ is still suffering, not in His own flesh which He took with Him into heaven, but in my flesh, which is still suffering on earth.

0
0
Source
source
p.423
7 months 2 weeks ago

I do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible. I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

Man was born to live with his fellow human beings. Separate him, isolate him, his character will go bad, a thousand ridiculous affects will invade his heart, extravagant thoughts will germinate in his brain, like thorns in an uncultivated land.

0
0
Source
source
The character Suzanne Simon, in La Religieuse [The Nun]
4 months 2 weeks ago

What happens to one man may happen to all.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 171
2 months 2 weeks ago

We must understand well that we do not proceed from a unity of God to the same unity of God again. We do not proceed from one chaos to another chaos, neither from one light to another light, nor from one darkness to another darkness. What would be the value of our life then? What would be the value of all life? But we set out from an almighty chaos, from a thick abyss of light and darkness tangled. And we struggle - plants, animals, men, ideas - in this momentary passage of individual life, to put in order the Chaos within us, to cleanse the abyss, to work upon as much darkness as we can within our bodies and to transmute it into light.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

The method of "postulating" what we want has many advantages; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 7: Rational, Real and Complex Numbers
5 months 3 days ago

The aim of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. 'Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,' the eunuchlike sound of the jazz band both mocks and proclaims, 'and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite.

0
0
Source
source
Perennial Fashion - Jazz (1978), Prisms, p. 129, as translated by Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber
6 months 2 weeks ago

The doctrine of the Second Coming teaches us that we do not and cannot know when the world drama will end. The curtain may be rung down at any moment: say, before you have finished reading this paragraph.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

In the ceremonies of the public execution, the main character was the people, whose real and immediate presence was required for the performance.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter One, pp. 56
6 months 2 weeks ago

When by these steps he has got resolution enough not to be deterr'd from what he ought to do, by the apprehension of danger; when fear does not, in sudden or hazardous occurrences, decompose his mind, set his body a-trembling, and make him unfit for action, or run away from it, he has then the courage of a rational creature: and such an hardiness we should endeavour by custom and use to bring children to, as proper occasions come in our way.

0
0
Source
source
Sec. 115
6 months 3 weeks ago

It may indeed be doubted, whether butcher's meat is any where a necessary of life. Grain and other vegetables, with the help of milk, cheese, and butter, or oil, where butter is not to be had, it is known from experience, can, without any butcher's meat, afford the most plentiful, the most wholesome, the most nourishing, and the most invigorating diet.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter II, Part II, Appendix to Articles I and II.
6 months 2 weeks ago

God!' said the Ghost, glancing around the landscape. 'God what?' asked the Spirit. 'What do you mean, "God what"?' asked the Ghost. 'In our grammar God is a noun' said the Spirit.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 9
6 months 2 weeks ago

Nor is it the irrationality of the form which is taken as characteristic. On the contrary, one overlooks the irrational.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. II, Ch. I, p. 30.
5 months 2 weeks ago

...out of the tomb of the murdered Monarchy in France, has arisen a vast, tremendous, unformed spectre, in a far more terrific guise than any which ever yet have overpowered the imagination and subdued the fortitude of man.

0
0
Source
source
p. 7
4 months 1 day ago

Properties perceived in nature will depend on how one looks and how one looks depends on the economic interest one has in the resources of nature. The value of profit maximization is thus linked to reductionist systems, while the value of life and the maintenance of life is linked to holistic and ecological systems.

0
0
Source
source
Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development
5 months 1 week ago

In old days the plastic arts, music, and poesy were so germane to man in his totality that his Transcendence plainly manifest in them. ... What is to-day obvious to all is a decay in the essence of art. ... the opposition to man's true nature as man.

0
0
7 months 2 weeks ago

It was a purely Christian satisfaction to me that if ordinarily there was no one else there was one who in action tried a little to do the doctrine about loving the neighbor, alas, one who precisely by his act also received a frightful into what an illusion Christendom is and indeed, particularly later, also into how the common people let themselves be seduced by wretched journalists, whose striving and fighting for equality can only lead, if it leads to anything, since it is in the service of the lie, to making the elite, in self-defense, proud of their aloofness from the common man, and the common man brazen in his rudeness.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

Fools admire everything in an author of reputation.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

By nature a philosopher is not in genius and disposition half so different from a street porter, as a mastiff is from a greyhound.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter II, p. 17.
6 months 2 weeks ago

It is, I think, safe to say that nothing was more alien to the minds of the scientists, who brought about the most radical and most rapid revolutionary process the world has ever seen, than any will to power. Nothing was more remote than any wish to 'conquer space' and to go to the moon. It was indeed their search for 'true reality' that led them to lose confidence in appearances, in the phenomena as they reveal themselves of their own accord to human sense and reason. They were inspired by an extraordinary love of harmony and lawfulness which taught them that they would have to step outside any merely given sequence or series of occurrences if they wanted to discover the overall beauty and order of the whole, that is, the universe.

0
0
Source
source
On scientific discovery, in Between Past and Future (1961) as quoted in Ideas in literature: Ten things Hannah Arendt said that are eerily relevant in today's political times
6 months 2 weeks ago

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.

0
0
Source
source
1847
4 months 2 weeks ago

He doubly benefits the needy who gives quickly. Maxim 6

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia