Skip to main content
1 month 2 weeks ago

Our assent to the hypothesis implies that it is held to be true of all particular instances. That these cases belong to past or to future times, that they have or have not already occurred, makes no difference in the applicability of the rule to them. Because the rule prevails, it includes all cases.

0
0
Source
source
Part II Of Knowledge, Book XI Of the Construction of Science, Chap. 5 Of Certain Characteristics of Scientific Induction
6 months 2 weeks ago
Good prose is written only face to face with poetry.
0
0
5 months 5 days ago

I will begin to speak when I am not going to say what were better left unsaid.

0
0
Source
source
Quoted by Plutarch, Life of Cato the Younger, 4 Bernadotte Perrin, ed. Plutarch's Lives, Vol. 8, LCL 100 (1919), pp. 247, 361
3 months 1 week ago

The new science of communication is percept, not concept.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 259)
6 months 2 weeks ago

Knowledge of the fact differs from knowledge of the reason for the fact.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on Earth.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

The Union was a measure from which infinite Good has been derived to this country.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to William Strahan (4 April 1760), quoted in Adam Smith, The Correspondence of Adam Smith, eds. E. C. Mossner and I. S. Ross (1987), p. 68
5 months 5 days ago

To a wise man, the whole earth is open; for the native land of a good soul is the whole earth.

0
0
Source
source
Freeman (1948), p. 166 \
1 month 3 weeks ago

However far the phenomena transcend the scope of classical physical explanation, the account of all evidence must be expressed in classical terms. The argument is that simply by the word "experiment" we refer to a situation where we can tell others what we have done and what we have learned and that, therefore, the account of the experimental arrangement and of the results of the observations must be expressed in unambiguous language with suitable application of the terminology of classical physics.

0
0
Source
source
Niels Bohr, "Discussions with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics," in Paul Arthur Schilpp, Albert Einstein: Philosopher Scientist (1949) pp. 199-241.
3 months 3 weeks ago

To me, believing that some correspondence intrinsically just is reference (not as a result of our operational and theoretical constraints, or our intentions, but as an ultimate metaphysical fact) amounts to a magical theory of reference. Reference itself becomes what Locke called a 'substantial form' (an entity which intrinsically belongs with a certain name) on such a view. Even if one is willing to contemplate such unexplainable metaphysical facts, the epistemological problems that accompany such a metaphysical view seem insuperable. For, assuming a world of mind- independent, discourse-independent entities (this is the presupposition of the view we are discussing), there are, as we have seen, many different 'correspondences' which represent possible or candidate reference relations (infinitely many, in fact, if there are infinitely many things in the universe).

0
0
Source
source
Chap. 2 : A problem about reference
5 months 2 weeks ago

Do not allow your dreams of a beautiful world to lure you away from the claims of men who suffer here and now. Our fellow men have a claim to our help; no generation must be sacrificed for the sake of future generations, for the sake of an ideal of happiness that may never be realised.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

To the West, it seems hardly imaginable that the relationship between man and man (which is morality) could be maintained without reference to a Supreme Being, while to the Chinese it is equally amazing that men should not, or could not, behave toward one another as decent beings without thinking of their indirect relationship through a third party.

0
0
Source
source
p. 106
4 months 2 weeks ago

I go to spread the tidings, I want to spread the tidings - of what? Of the truth, for I have seen it, have seen it with my own eyes, have seen it in all its glory.

0
0
6 months 1 day ago

By faithfulness we are collected and wound up into unity within ourselves, whereas we had been scattered abroad in multiplicity.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Footprints in Time : Fulfilling God's Destiny for Your Life (2007) by Jeff O'Leary, p. 223
2 months 4 weeks ago

Rollers on the beach, wind in the pines, the slow flapping of herons across sand dunes, drown out the hectic rhythms of city and suburb, time tables and schedules. One falls under their spell, relaxes, stretches out prone. One becomes, in fact, like the element on which one lies, flattened by the sea; bare, open, empty as the beach, erased by today's tides of all yesterday's scribblings.

0
0
2 months 6 days ago

There are depths in man which go down the length of the lowest Hell, as there are heights which reach the highest Heaven; - for are not both Heaven and Hell made out of him, everlasting Miracle and Mystery that he is?

0
0
Source
source
Pt. III, Bk. I, ch. 4. This was slightly paraphrased in A Dictionary of Thoughts : Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Best Authors, Both Ancient and Modern (1891) edited by Tryon Edwards. p. 327.
4 months 2 weeks ago

What is the use of all knowledge, if one does not act in accordance with it? This remark implies that knowledge is regarded as a means to action, and the latter as the real end. One could put the question the other way round and ask: How can we possibly act well without knowing what the Good is? This way of expressing it would regard knowledge as conditioning action. But both expressions are one-sided, and the truth is that both, knowledge as well as action, are in the same way inseparable elements of rational life.

0
0
Source
source
Consequences of the Difference p. 75
6 months 2 weeks ago

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

The young today cannot follow narrative but they are alert to drama. They cannot bear description but they love landscape and action.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Harold Adam Innis (14 March 1951), published in Essential McLuhan (1995), edited by Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, p. 74
5 months 1 week ago

Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages, for they are not as far removed from the understanding of spiritual matter as a twentieth-century Englishman. His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 131
2 months 1 week ago

At forty, I had attained the unperturbed mind.

0
0
Source
source
"Discipline and Character", no. 41
6 months 1 week ago

Straightforward preaching spoils the effectiveness of a story. If you can't resist the impulse to improve your fellow human beings, do it subtly.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

There can be no doubt that the Virgin Mary is in heaven. How it happened we do not know.

0
0
Source
source
Weimar edition of Martin Luther's Works (Translation by William J. Cole) Vol. 10, p. 268
4 months 6 days ago

Even to-day, in spite of some signs which are making a tiny breach in that sturdy faith, even to-day, there are few men who doubt that motorcars will in five years' time be more comfortable and cheaper than to-day. They believe in this as they believe that the sun will rise in the morning. The metaphor is an exact one. For, in fact, the common man, finding himself in a world so excellent, technically and socially, believes that it has been produced by nature, and never thinks of the personal efforts of highly-endowed individuals which the creation of this new world presupposed. Still less will he admit the notion that all these facilities still require the support of certain difficult human virtues, the least failure of which would cause the rapid disappearance of the whole magnificent edifice.... These traits together make up the well-known psychology of the spoilt child. Chap.

0
0
Source
source
VI: The Dissection Of The Mass-Man Begins
6 months 3 days ago

Now what has been said about the Jews is also to be understood about Cahorsins, and anyone else depending upon the depravity of usury.

0
0
Source
source
art. 4
1 month 3 weeks ago

I am of course confident that I will fulfil my tasks as a writer in all circumstances - from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death. But may it be that repeated lessons will finally teach us not to stop the writer's pen during his lifetime? At no time has this ennobled our history.

0
0
Source
source
Open letter to the Fourth Soviet Writers' Congress (16 May 1967); as translated in Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record (1970) edited by Leopold Labedz
2 months 3 weeks ago

Both natural selection and the historical record offer powerful reasons for doubting the trustworthiness of our naive moral intuitions. So the possibility that human civilisation might be founded upon some monstrous evil should be taken seriously - even if the possibility seems transparently absurd at the time.

0
0
Source
source
The Antispeciesist Revolution, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, 26 Jul. 2013
5 months 2 weeks ago

Self-trust is the first secret of success.

0
0
Source
source
Success
2 months 1 week ago

I think there's a certain amount of luck necessary to become rich. So fate is the right word in this sense. But it's interesting, this quote makes me want to react in a sense that nobody is fated better inherently.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

Free trade is not based on utility but on justice.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.

0
0
Source
source
To Carl Stumpf, 1 January 1886
6 months 1 day ago

But the inner part is the better part; for to it, as both ruler and judge, all these messengers of the senses report the answers of heaven and earth and all the things therein, who said, "We are not God, but he made us." My inner man knew these things through the ministry of the outer man, and I, the inner man, knew all this, I, the soul, through the senses of my body. I asked the whole frame of earth about my God, and it answered, "I am not he, but he made me."

0
0
Source
source
X, 6
6 months 2 weeks ago

For as only one thing is necessary, and as the theme of the talk is the willing of only one thing: hence the consciousness before God of one's eternal responsibility to be an individual is that one thing necessary.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

What are you waiting for in order to give up?

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

... the fight against suffering must be considered a duty, while the right to care for the happiness of others must be considered a privilege confined to the close circle of their friends. ... Pain, suffering, injustice, and their prevention, these are the eternal problems of public morals, the 'agenda' of public policy ...

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 2, Ch. 24 "Oracular Philosophy and the Revolt against Reason"
6 months 2 weeks ago
It is not enough to prove something, one has also to seduce or elevate people to it. That is why the man of knowledge should learn how to speak his wisdom: and often in such a way that it sounds like folly!
0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

Everything great glitters, glitter begets ambition, and ambition can easily have caused the inspiration or what we thought to be inspiration. But reason can no longer restrain one who is lured by the fury of ambition. He tumbles where his vehement drive calls him; no longer does he choose his position, but rather chance and luster determine it.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

If people would but understand that they are not the sons of some fatherland or other, nor of Governments, but are sons of God, and can therefore neither be slaves nor enemies one to another - those insane, unnecessary, worn-out, pernicious organizations called Governments, and all the sufferings, violations, humiliations and crimes which they occasion, would cease.

0
0
Source
source
Patriotism and Government
2 months 1 day ago

The workers have the most enormous power in their hands, and if one day they became truly aware of it and used it, then nothing could resist them; they would only have to stop work and look upon the products of work as their own and enjoy them. This is the meaning of the labor unrest that is looming here and there. The state is founded on the-slavery of labor. If labor becomes free, the state is lost.

0
0
Source
source
Landstreicher 2017, p. 133
5 months 2 weeks ago

Though they may think the proof incomplete that the universe is a work of design, and though they assuredly disbelieve that it can have an Author and Governor who is absolute in power as well as perfect in goodness, they have that which constitutes the principal worth of all religions whatever, an ideal conception of a Perfect Being, to which they habitually refer as the guide of their conscience; and this ideal of Good is usually far nearer to perfection than the objective Deity of those, who think themselves obliged to find absolute goodness in the author of a world so crowded with suffering and so deformed by injustice as ours.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 46)
5 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 1 week ago

Then we understand that rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love. Those who find no rest in God or in history are condemned to live for those who, like themselves, cannot live; in fact, for the humiliated.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies-the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distraction.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 4 (pp. 35-36)
5 months 2 weeks ago

The suppression of liberty is always likely to be irrational.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter IV, Section 33, p. 210
3 months 2 weeks ago

To affirm equality is to affirm a cohabitation defined in part by an interdependency that takes the edge off the individual boundaries of the body, or that works that edge for its social and political potential.

0
0
Source
source
p. 148
1 month 1 week ago

Suppose that thou hast detached thyself from the natural unity... yet here there is this beautiful provision, that it is in thy power again to unite thyself. God has allowed this to no other part, after it has been separated and cut asunder, to come together again. ...he has distinguished man, for he has put it in his power not to be separated at all from the universal ...he has allowed him to be returned and to be united and to resume his place as a part.

0
0
Source
source
VIII, 34
2 months 1 week ago

The facts we see depend on where we are placed, and the habits of our eyes.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. VI: "Stereotypes", p. 80

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia