Skip to main content
6 months 1 week ago

The man who esteems himself as he ought, and no more than he ought, seldom fails to obtain from other people all the esteem that he himself thinks due. He desires no more than is due to him, and he rests upon it with complete satisfaction.

0
0
Source
source
Section III.
4 months 4 days ago

Practice is the best of all instructors.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 439
4 months 3 weeks ago

One could count on one's fingers the number of scientists in the entire world who have a general idea of the history and development of their own particular science; there is not one who is really competent as regards sciences other than his own. As science forms an indivisible whole, one may say that there are no longer, strictly speaking, any scientists, but only drudges doing scientific work. . . .

0
0
Source
source
p. 13 (as quoted in On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God (1968), p.1)
6 months 1 week ago

I greatly doubt whether the men who become pirate chiefs are those who are filled with retrospective terror of their fathers, or whether Napoleon, at Austerlitz, really felt that he was getting even with Madame Mère. I know nothing of the mother of Attila, but I rather suspect that she spoilt the little darling, who subsequently found the world irritating because it sometimes resisted his whims.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 2: Leaders and Followers
2 months 1 week ago

Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bands. As long therefore as they can find employment in this line, I would not convert them into mariners, artisans, or any thing else. But our citizens will find employment in this line till their numbers, and of course their productions, become too great for the demand both internal and foreign.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to John Jay (23 August 1785); published in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (1953), edited by Julian P. Boyd, vol. 8, p. 426
2 months 3 weeks ago

Now why, if freedom is striven after for love of the I after all - why not choose the I himself as beginning, middle, and end?

0
0
Source
source
Dover 2005, p. 163
4 months ago

Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything.

0
0
Source
source
Humboldt's Gift (1975), p. 265
2 months 4 weeks ago

And some others that I have seen, were perhaps among the first. There is no third rising. Time sweeps all away with it so fast at this epoch. The Scottish Church has been short-lived, and was late in reaching thither.

0
0
7 months 3 days ago

Query: How to contrive not to waste one's time? Answer: By being fully aware of it all the while. Ways in which this can be done: By spending one's days on an uneasy chair in a dentist's waiting room; by remaining on one's balcony all a Sunday afternoon; by travelling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by queueing at the box-office of theatres and then not booking a seat.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

Poetry must be new as foam, and as old as the rock.

0
0
Source
source
March 1845
6 months 3 weeks ago

The necessary connexion of movement and time is real and time is something the soul constructs in movement.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

For eighteen hundred years, though perchance I have no right to say it, the New Testament has been written; yet where is the legislator who has wisdom and practical talent enough to avail himself of the light which it sheds on the science of legislation?

0
0
2 months 4 days ago

Consider thyself to be dead, and to have completed thy life up to the present time; and live according to nature the remainder which is allowed thee. Variant: Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now, take what's left and live it properly.

0
0
Source
source
VII, 56
6 months 1 week ago

A great affliction of all Philistines is that idealities afford them no entertainment, but to escape from boredom they are always in need of realities.

0
0
Source
source
E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 345
2 months 2 weeks ago

A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.

0
0
Source
source
The Gulag Archipelago
4 months 4 weeks ago

For he that hath strength enough to protect all, wants not sufficiency to oppresse all.

0
0
Source
source
De Cive (1642) Ch. 6
4 months 3 weeks ago

Strictly speaking, the mass, as a psychological fact, can be defined without waiting for individuals to appear in mass formation. In the presence of one individual we can decide whether he is "mass" or not. The mass is all that which sets no value on itself - good or ill - based on specific grounds, but which feels itself "just like everybody," and nevertheless is not concerned about it; is, in fact, quite happy to feel itself as one with everybody else.

0
0
Source
source
Chap.I: The Coming Of The Masses
2 months 4 weeks ago

History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

0
0
Source
source
On History.
6 months 1 week ago

It seems that sin is geographical. From this conclusion, it is only a small step to the further conclusion that the notion of "sin" is illusory, and that the cruelty habitually practised in punishing it is unnecessary.

0
0
Source
source
A Fresh Look at Empiricism: 1927-42 (1996), p. 283
2 months 4 weeks ago

Unless some Hero-worship, in its new appropriate form, can return, this world does not promise to be very habitable long.

0
0
2 months 1 week 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.
6 months 1 week ago

The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.

0
0
Source
source
Author's prefaces to the First Edition.
6 months 1 week 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
4 months 1 week ago

People no longer look at each other, but there are institutes for that. They no longer touch each other, but there is contactotherapy. They no longer walk, but they go jogging, etc. Everywhere one recycles lost faculties, or lost bodies, or lost sociality, or the lost taste for food.

0
0
Source
source
"The Precession of Simulacra," p. 13
6 months 2 weeks ago

If a woman becomes weary and at last dead from bearing, that matters not; let her only die from bearing, she is there to do it.

0
0
Source
source
Sermon Von dem ehelichen Stande (1519), p. 41 - as quoted in The Ethic of Freethought: A Selection of Essays and Lectures (1888) by Karl Pearson
1 month 3 weeks ago

The really good music, whether of the East or of the West, cannot be analyzed.

0
0
Source
source
Interview with Rabindranath Tagore (14 April 1930), published in The Religion of Man (1930) by Rabindranath Tagore, p. 222, and in The Tagore Reader (1971) edited by Amiya Chakravarty
6 months 1 week ago

There is a connected set of events (light-waves) travelling outward from a centre... there are some respects in which all events are alike, and others in which they differ... We must not think of a light-wave as a 'thing', but as a connected group of rhythmical events. The mathematical characteristics of such a group can be inferred by physics, but the intrinsic character of the component events cannot be inferred.

0
0
Source
source
An Outline of Philosophy Ch.15 The Nature of our Knowledge of Physics, 1927
4 months 5 days ago

Great ages of innovation are the ages in which entire cultures are junked or scrapped.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 309)
1 month 1 week ago

Talking and knowing ARE action.....c'mon with shit....

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

The world thought well of my schoolmaster guardian, because he was neither a liar, nor a scamp, nor a gambler; but he was coarse, avaricious, and ignorant; he knew nothing beyond the confused lessons which he taught to his classes. He imagined that in forcing a youth to become a monk he would be offering a sacrifice acceptable to God. He used to boast of the many victims which he devoted annually to Dominic and Francis and Benedict.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Life and Letters of Erasmus: Lectures Delivered at Oxford 1893-4 (1899) by James Anthony Froude
6 months 6 days ago

Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.

0
0
Source
source
Letter XVI
6 months 1 week ago

Necessity may be defined in two ways, conformably to the two definitions of cause, of which it makes an essential part. It consists either in the constant conjunction of like objects, or in the inference of the understating from one object to another.

0
0
Source
source
§ 8.27
2 months 6 days ago

In order to acquire any exact and solid knowledge, the student must possess with perfect precision the ideas appropriate to that part of knowledge: and this precision is tested by the student's 'perceiving' the axiomatic evidence of the 'axioms' belonging to each 'Fundamental Idea'.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

The believers in the non-natural character of sudden conversion have had practically to admit that there is no unmistakable class-mark distinctive of all true converts. The super-normal incidents, such as voices and visions and overpowering impressions of the meaning of suddenly presented scripture texts, the melting emotions and tumultuous affections connected with the crisis of change, may all come by way of nature, or worse still, be counterfeited by Satan. The real witness of the spirit to the second birth is to be found only in the disposition of the genuine child of God, the permanently patient heart, the love of self eradicated. And this, it has to be admitted, is also found in those who pass no crisis, and may even be found outside of Christianity altogether.

0
0
Source
source
Lecture X, "Conversion, concluded"
5 months 1 week 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
4 months 4 weeks ago

I disclose my mysteries to those who are worthy of my mysteries.

0
0
2 months 4 days ago

The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.

0
0
Source
source
VI, 6
2 months 4 days ago

He that dies in extreme old age will be reduced to the same state with him that is cut down untimely.

0
0
Source
source
IX, 33
3 months 1 week ago

Some anarchists have claimed not merely that we would be better off without a state, but that any state necessarily violates people's moral rights and hence is intrinsically immoral. Our starting point then, though nonpolitical, is by intention far from nonmoral. Moral philosophy sets the background for, and boundaries of, political philosophy. What persons may and may not do to one another limits what they may do through the apparatus of a state, or do to establish such an apparatus.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1 : Why State of Nature Theory?; Political Philosophy, p. 6
4 months 6 days ago

Three days later the little princess was buried, and Prince Andrei went up the steps to where the coffin stood, to give her the farewell kiss. And there in the coffin was the same face, though with closed eyes. "Ah, what have you done to me?" it still seemed to say, and Prince Andrei felt that something gave way in his soul and that he was guilty of a sin he could neither remedy nor forget.

0
0
Source
source
Bk. IV, Ch. 9
5 months 3 days ago

Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessor.

0
0
5 months 3 days ago

The problem of induction is, roughly speaking, the problem of finding a way to prove that certain empirical generalizations which are derived from past experience will hold good also in the future. There are only two ways of approaching this problem on the assumption that it is a genuine problem, and it is easy to see that neither of them can lead to its solution.

0
0
Source
source
p. 49.
2 months 2 weeks ago

We now come to a decisive step of mathematical abstraction: we forget about what the symbols stand for... [The mathematician] need not be idle; there are many operations which he may carry out with these symbols, without ever having to look at the things they stand for.

0
0
Source
source
The Mathematical Way of Thinking
5 months 3 days ago

I cannot contribute anything to this world because I only have one method: agony.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

Those who cannot find moral clarity are likely to settle for the far more dangerous simplicity, or purity, instead.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia