Skip to main content
5 months 1 week ago

In comparing civilized man with the animal world, one is as the Alpine traveller, who sees the mountains soaring into the sky and can hardly discern where the deep shadowed crags and roseate peaks end, and where the clouds of heaven begin. Surely the awe-struck voyager may be excused if, at first, he refuses to believe the geologist, who tells him that these glorious masses are, after all, the hardened mud of primeval seas, or the cooled slag of subterranean furnaces-of one substance with the dullest clay, but raised by inward forces to that place of proud and seemingly inaccessible glory. But the geologist is right; and due reflection on his teachings, instead of diminishing our reverence and our wonder, adds all the force of intellectual sublimity, to the mere aesthetic intuition of the uninstructed beholder.

0
0
Source
source
Ch.2, p. 131-132
6 months 2 weeks ago

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

That liberal world that emerged after 1945 led to one of the most spectacularly successful periods in human history. There was material progress. There was stability. There was human freedom. There was the flourishing of many human activities that can only take place in a liberal, and therefore free society...

0
0
Source
source
10:06
8 months 1 week ago

To those whose talents are above mediocrity, the highest subjects may be announced. To those who are below mediocrity, the highest subjects may not be announced.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.

0
0
4 months 6 days ago

Growth is slow but collapse is rapid.

0
0
Source
source
Ugo Bardi (2017) . "The Seneca Effect: Why growth is slow but collapse is rapid". ISSN 1612-3018. DOI:10.1007/978-3-319-57207-9.
5 months 2 weeks ago

Money is a corporate image depending on society for its institutional status.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 133)
5 months 1 week ago

For every man the world is as fresh as it was at the first day, and as full of untold novelties for him who has the eyes to see them.

0
0
4 months 6 days ago

It is true that every increase of knowledge may possibly render depravity more depraved, as well as it may increase the strength of virtue. It is in itself only power; and its value depends on its application.

0
0
Source
source
"Female Education" (review of Thomas Broadhurst, Advice to Young Ladies on the Improvement of Mind, 1808), in The Edinburgh Review, No. 30 (January 1810), p. 314
8 months 1 week ago

Music is associated not only with speculation but with morality. When rhythms and modes reach an intellect through the ear, they doubtless affect and reshape that mind according to their particular character.

0
0
6 months 4 days ago

He was a man born into a world dominated by scientific materialism. His objection to this materialism was not merely intellectual, or even egotistical (the feeling 'If the world is wholly material, then I can't be very important'). It was the feeling that man is cut off from his inner powers by this superficial attitude.

0
0
Source
source
p. 166
7 months 3 weeks ago

Lincoln's place in the history of the United States and of mankind will, nevertheless, be next to that of Washington!

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

We cling in our public life to a brutal hypocrisy. In our century of almost universal violence of humans against fellow humans, and against our natural and cultural commonwealth, hypocrisy has been inescapable because our opposition to violence has been selective or merely fashionable. Some of us who approve of our monstrous military budget and our peacekeeping wars nonetheless deplore "domestic violence" and think that our society can be pacified by "gun control." Some of us are against capital punishment but for abortion. Some of us are against abortion but for capital punishment.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

They ask you for facts, proofs, works, and all you can show them are transformed tears.

0
0
8 months 2 weeks ago

Well, then, arrest him. You can accuse him of something or other afterward.

0
0
3 months 4 weeks ago

If one does not preserve the learned in a state he will be injuring the state; if one is not zealous (to recommend) the virtuous upon seeing one, he will be neglecting the ruler. Enthusiasm is to be shown only to the virtuous, and plans for the country are only to be shared with the learned. Few are those, who, neglecting the virtuous and slighting the learned, could still maintain the existence of their countries. Book 1; Befriending the Learned Variant translation: To enter upon rulership of a country but not preserve its scholars will result in the downfall of the country. To see the worthy but not hasten to them will make the country's ruler less able to perform his duties. To the unworthy is due no attention. The ignorant should remain without inclusion in the state's affairs. To impede the virtuous and neglect the scholarly and still maintain the survival of the state has yet to be, indeed.

0
0
8 months 2 weeks ago

Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

Because half-a-dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that of course they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.

0
0
Source
source
Volume iii, p. 344
6 months 1 week ago

Impulse, subjectivity and profanation, the old adversaries of materialistic alienation, now succumb to it. ... The representatives of the opposition to the authoritarian schema become witnesses to the authority of commercial success. ... In the service of success they renounce that insubordinate character which was theirs.

0
0
Source
source
p. 273

If by motivation we mean whatever it is that causes someone to follow a particular course of action, then every action is motivated - by definition. But in most human behavior the relation between motives and action is not simple; it is mediated by a whole chain of events and surrounding conditions. We observe a man scratching his arm. His motive (or goal)? To relieve an itch.

0
0
Source
source
p. 265.
6 months 1 week ago

The prestige which constitutes three-fourths of might is first of all made up of that superb indifference which the powerful have for the weak, an indifference so contagious that it is communicated even to those who are its object.

0
0
Source
source
in The Simone Weil Reader, p. 168
6 months 1 week ago

The teacher of love teaches struggle. The teacher of lifeless isolation from the world teaches peace.

0
0
7 months 2 weeks ago

It seems to me that I may be living too long. Indeed: my nearest relations have all died, and so have some of my best friends, and even some of my best pupils. However, I do not have a reason to complain. I am grateful and happy to be alive, and still be able to continue with my work, if only just. My work seems to me more important than ever.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in "At 90, and Still Dynamic : Revisiting Sir Karl Popper and Attending His Birthday Party" by Eugene Yue-Ching Ho, in Intellectus 23
6 months 4 days ago

There is no getting around authority and power, and no getting around the intellectual's relationship to them. How does the intellectual address authority: as a professional supplicant or as its unrewarded, amateurish conscience?

0
0
Source
source
p. 83
5 months 2 weeks ago

Writing turned a spotlight on the high, dim Sierras of speech; writing was the visualization of acoustic space. It lit up the dark.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 14)
6 months 2 weeks ago

If the individual were no longer compelled to prove himself on the market, as a free economic subject, the disappearance of this kind of freedom would be one of the greatest achievements of civilization. The technological processes of mechanization and standardization might release individual energy into a yet uncharted realm of freedom beyond necessity. The very structure of human existence would be altered; the individual would be liberated from the work world's imposing upon him alien needs and alien possibilities. The individual would be free to exert autonomy over a life that would be his own.

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

The erotic instinct is something questionable, and will always be so whatever a future set of laws may have to say on the matter. It belongs, on the one hand, to the original animal nature of man, which will exist as long as man has an animal body. On the other hand, it is connected with the highest forms of the spirit. But it blooms only when the spirit and instinct are in true harmony. If one or the other aspect is missing, then an injury occurs, or at least there is a one-sided lack of balance which easily slips into the pathological. Too much of the animal disfigures the civilized human being, too much culture makes a sick animal.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

Leading a human life is a full-time occupation, to which everyone devotes decades of intense concern.

0
0
Source
source
"The Absurd" (1971), p. 15.
7 months 1 week ago

Perdiccas threatened to put him to death unless he came to him, "That's nothing wonderful," Diogenes said, "for a beetle or a tarantula would do the same."

0
0
Source
source
Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 44
8 months 2 weeks ago

Q. You do not consider your statement a disloyal one? A. No, sir. Scientific truth is beyond loyalty and disloyalty. Q. You are sure that your statement represents scientific truth? A. I am.

0
0
8 months ago

Nay, number (itself) in armies, importeth not much, where the people is of weak courage; for (as Virgil saith) it never troubles the wolf how many the sheep be.

0
0
Source
source
Essays or Counsels Civil and Moral (1597), XXIX: "Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates."
7 months 3 weeks ago

Labour was the first price, the original purchase-money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased; and its value, to those who possess it, and who want to exchange it for some new productions, is precisely equal to the quantity of labour which it can enable them to purchase or command.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter V, p. 38.
7 months 2 weeks ago

The rule of Big Money and its attendant culture of cupidity and mendacity has so poisoned our hearts, minds and souls that a dominant self-righteous neoliberal soulcraft of smartness, dollars and bombs thrives with little opposition.

0
0
Source
source
America is spiritually bankrupt. We must fight back together. The Guardian,
6 months 2 weeks ago

A judgment, for me is not the mere grasping of a thought, but the admission of its truth.

0
0
Source
source
Gottlob Frege (1892). On Sense and Reference, note 7.
8 months 2 weeks ago

I get a certain pleasure in knowing that I live not merely in a city but in Manhattan, the center of New York City, a region so unique in many ways that I honestly believe that Earth is divided into halves: Manhattan and non-Manhattan.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

We are fulfilled only when we aspire to nothing, when we are impregnated by that nothing to the point of intoxication.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

At this point we find ourselves confronted by a very disquieting question: Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge?

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 12 (p. 116)
6 months 1 day ago

A leftist government doesn't exist because being on the left has nothing to do with governments.

0
0
Source
source
from L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze: G comme Gauche ("Gilles Deleuze's Alphabet Book: Left-wing Politics"), 1988-1989.
6 months 2 weeks ago

Sex-appeal is the keynote of our whole civilization.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter IV
6 months 3 weeks ago

There is no kind of harassment that a man may not inflict on a woman with impunity in civilized societies.

0
0
Source
source
"On Women" (1772), as translated in Selected Writings (1966) edited by Lester G. Crocker
4 months 1 week ago

The Hero as Divinity, the Hero as Prophet, are productions of old ages; not to be repeated in the new. They presuppose a certain rudeness of conception, which the progress of mere scientific knowledge puts an end to. There needs to be, as it were, a world vacant, or almost vacant of scientific forms, if men in their loving wonder are to fancy their fellow-man either a god or one speaking with the voice of a god. Divinity and Prophet are past.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

Casting my perils before swains.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

Life itself is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living: All things fall under this name. The Sun itself is but the dark simulacrum, and the light but the shadow of God.

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

Bullialdus wrote that all force respecting the Sun as its center & depending on matter must be reciprocally in a duplicate ratio of the distance from the center.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Edmund Halley (June 20, 1686) quoted in I. Bernard Cohen and George E. Smith, ed.s, The Cambridge Companion to Newton (2002) p. 204

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia