Skip to main content
6 months 1 day ago

Have courage, or cunning, when you deal with an enemy.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 156
8 months 5 days ago

Money is always to be found when men are to be sent to the frontiers to be destroyed: when the object is to preserve them, it is no longer so.

0
0
Source
source
"Charity", 1770
8 months 4 days ago

There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.

0
0
6 months 1 day ago

Familiarity breeds contempt.

0
0
4 months 3 days ago

Inquiry into the evidence of a doctrine is not to be made once for all, and then taken as finally settled. It is never lawful to stifle a doubt; for either it can be honestly answered by means of the inquiry already made, or else it proves that the inquiry was not complete. "But," says one, "I am a busy man; I have no time for the long course of study which would be necessary to make me in any degree a competent judge of certain questions, or even able to understand the nature of the arguments." Then he should have no time to believe.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

It is the nature of a real thing to be inexhaustible in content; we can get an ever deeper insight into this content by the continual addition of new experiences, partly in apparent contradiction, by bringing them into harmony with one another. In this interpretation, things of the real world are approximate ideas. From this arises the empirical character of all our knowledge of reality.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction
4 months 3 weeks ago

He that has a secret should not only hide it, but hide that he has it to hide.

0
0
Source
source
Pt. II, Bk. I, ch. 7.
4 months 2 weeks ago

Of war men ask the outcome, not the cause.

0
0
Source
source
line 407; (Lycus).
8 months 4 days ago

Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1: Mysticism and Logic
6 months 1 day ago

The Age of Writing has passed. We must invent a new metaphor, restructure our thoughts and feelings.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 14)
7 months 1 day ago

The world must be romanticized. In this way the originary meaning may be found again.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in The Experience of the Foreign : Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany (1992) by Antoine Berman Variant translation: Romanticize the world.
4 months ago

Conflicting intellectual positions may actually come to supplement one another. It is imperative in the present transitional period to make use of the intellectual twilight which dominates our epoch and in which all values and points of view appear in their genuine relativity. We must realize once and for all that the meanings which make up our world are simply an historically determined and continuously developing structure in which man develops, and are in no sense absolute.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

It is very difficult to understand proletarian violence as long as we try to think in terms of the ideas disseminated by bourgeois philosophy; according to this philosophy, violence is a relic of barbarism which is bound to disappear under the progress of enlightenment.

0
0
Source
source
p. 65
4 months 1 week ago

Zeal to do all that is in one's power is, in truth, a proof of piety.

0
0
Source
source
Fragment of a Letter to a Priest
6 months 1 week ago

Pascal is called the founder of modern probability theory. He earns this title not only for the familiar correspondence with Fermat on games of chance, but also for his conception of decision theory, and because he was an instrument in the demolition of probabilism, a doctrine which would have precluded rational probability theory.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 3, Opinion, p. 23.
8 months 3 days ago

Standing on the bare ground, - my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, - all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

0
0
Source
source
Nature
4 months 4 days ago

Never acknowledge the limitations of man. Smash all boundaries! Deny whatever your eyes see. Die every moment, but say: "Death does not exist."

0
0
4 months 3 days ago

The Presbyterian clergy are loudest, the most intolerant of all sects, the most tyrannical, and ambitious; ready at the word of the lawgiver, if such a word could be now obtained, to put the torch to the pile, and to rekindle in this virgin hemisphere, the flames in which their oracle Calvin consumed the poor Servetus, because he could not find in his Euclid the proposition which has demonstrated that three are one, and one is three, nor subscribe to that of Calvin that magistrates have a right to exterminate all heretics to Calvinistic creed.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to William Short
8 months 5 days ago

Let me have none of your Popish stuff! Get away with you, good morning.

0
0
Source
source
Last words (June 1809), as quoted in The Fortnightly, vol. 25; vol. 31, p. 398
8 months 4 days ago

The commodity is first of all, an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind. The nature of these needs, whether they arise, for example, from the stomach, or the imagination, makes no difference. Nor does it matter here how the thing satisfies man's need, whether directly as a means of subsistence, i.e. an object of consumption, or indirectly as a means of production.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. I, Ch. 1, Section 1, pg. 41.

The soul follows the progress of the body, as it does the progress of education.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

The value of money is in proportion to the quantity of the necessaries of life which it will purchase.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter II, Part II, Article IV.
8 months 4 days ago

Political ideals must be based upon ideals for the individual life. The aim of politics should be to make the lives of individuals as good as possible.

0
0
8 months 3 days ago

We can act as if there were a God; feel as if we were free; consider Nature as if she were full of special designs; lay plans as if we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life.

0
0
Source
source
Lecture III, "The Reality of the Unseen"
6 months 3 weeks ago

To look at a work of art in order to see how well certain rules are observed and canons conformed to impoverished perception. But to strive to note the ways in which certain conditions are fulfilled, such as the organic means by which the media is made to express and carry definite parts, or how the problem of adequate individualization is solved, sharpens esthetic perception and enriches its content.

0
0
Source
source
p. 213
4 months 2 weeks ago

One thing that specially saddened me was that the unfortunate animals had to suffer so much pain and misery. The sight of an old limping horse, tugged forward by one man while another kept beating it with a stick to get it to the knacker's yard at Colmar, haunted me for weeks. It was quite incomprehensible to me - this was before I began going to school - why in my evening prayers I should pray for human beings only. So when my mother had prayed with me and had kissed me good-night, I used to add silently a prayer that I had composed myself for all living creatures. It ran thus: "O, heavenly Father, protect and bless all things that have breath; guard them from all evil, and let them sleep in peace."

0
0
4 months 1 day ago

Wait for the appointed hour.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in The Lives of the Sophists by Eunapius (online exerpt)
8 months 3 days ago

Death is the only thing we haven't succeeded in completely vulgarizing.

0
0
Source
source
Eyeless in Gaza, 1936
6 months 2 weeks ago

And the soul, my soul at least, longs for something else, not absorption, not quietude, not peace, not appeasement, it longs ever to approach and never to arrive, it longs for the never-ending longing, for an eternal hope which is eternally renewed but never wholly fulfilled. And together with all this, it longs for an eternal lack of something and an eternal suffering. A suffering, a pain, thanks to which it grows without ceasing in consciousness and longing. Do not write upon the gate of heaven that sentence which Dante placed over the threshold of hell, Lasciate ogni speranza! [Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate: All hope abandon, ye who enter in] Do not destroy time!

0
0
6 months 4 weeks ago

By what aberration has suicide, the only truly normal action, become the attribute of the flawed?

0
0
4 months ago

How many, once lauded in song, are given over to the forgotten; and how many who sung their praises are clean gone long ago!

0
0
Source
source
VII, 6
6 months 6 days ago

You need to know at least one foreign language well enough so that you can read the best literature that that language has produced in the original, and so you carry on a reasonable conversation and have dreams in that language. There are several reasons why this is crucial, but the most important is perhaps this: you can never understand one language until you understand at least two.

0
0
7 months 4 weeks ago

If the only alternative to fascism we produce is a corporate-driven, milquetoast, neoliberal Democratic Party, fascism will come to America. Let us be very clear. It's like a Weimar America.

0
0
Source
source
Speaking to Chris Hedges on The Real News Network, Cornel West's presidential candidacy is 'for the least of these'. June 16, 2023.
4 months 3 weeks ago

Had there not been a natural goodness and indestructible force in my father, I see not how be could have bodied himself forth from these mean impediments. I suppose good precepts were not wanting. There was the Bible to read. Old John Orr, the schoolmaster, used from time to time to lodge with them; be was religious and enthusiastic (though in practice irregular with drink). In my grandfather, also, there seems to have been a certain geniality; for instance, he and a neighbor, Thomas Hogg, read "Anson's Voyages;" also tho "Arabian Nights," for which latter my father, armed with zealous conviction, scrupled not to censure them openly. By one means and another, at an early age he had acquired principles, lights that not only flickered, but shone steadily to guide his way.

0
0
7 months 4 weeks ago

I remind young people everywhere I go, one of the worst things the older generation did was to tell them for twenty-five years "Be successful, be successful, be successful" as opposed to "Be great, be great, be great". There's a qualitative difference.

0
0
Source
source
Speech in San Francisco: Democracy Matters
6 months 2 weeks ago

More and more it is becoming evident that what the West can most readily give to the East is its science and its scientific outlook. This is transferable from country to country, and from race to race, wherever there is a rational society.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1: "The Origins of Modern Science", p. 4
7 months 1 week ago

The single spirit doth simultaneously temper the whole together; this is the single soul of all things; all are filled with God.

0
0
Source
source
IV 9; as translated by Dorothea Waley Singer
5 months 1 week ago

Much more seriously, in those traditional eco-systems that we chose to retain, millions of non-human animals will continue periodically to starve, die horribly of thirst and disease, or even get eaten alive. This is commonly viewed as "natural" and hence basically OK. It would indeed be comforting to think that in some sense this ongoing animal holocaust doesn't matter too much. We often find it convenient to act as though the capacity to suffer were somehow inseparably bound up with linguistic ability or ratiocinative prowess. Yet there is absolutely no evidence that this is the case, and a great deal that it isn't.

0
0
Source
source
1.9 The Taste of Depravity
8 months 4 days ago

I do wish I believed in the life eternal, for it makes me quite miserable to think man is merely a kind of machine endowed, unhappily for himself, with consciousness.

0
0
Source
source
Greek Exercises (1888); at the age of fifteen, Russell used to write down his reflections in this book, for fear that his people should find out what he was thinking.
8 months 4 days ago

Man differs from other animals in one very important respect, and that is that he has some desires which are, so to speak, infinite, which can never be fully gratified, and which would keep him restless even in Paradise. The boa constrictor, when he has had an adequate meal, goes to sleep, and does not wake until he needs another meal. Human beings, for the most part, are not like this.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

For the mockers are those who die comically, and God laughs at their comic ending, while the nobler part, the part of tragedy, is theirs who endured the mockery.

0
0
8 months 4 days ago

The very cannibalism of the counterrevolution will convince the nations that there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.

0
0
Source
source
"The Victory of the Counter-Revolution in Vienna," Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 7 November 1848.
6 months 2 weeks ago

Most men have nothing in their heads but their physical needs; put them on a desert island with nothing to occupy their minds and they would go insane. They lack real motive. The curse of civilization is boredom.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter Eight, The Outsider as a Visionary
4 months 4 days ago

Every perfect traveller always creates the country where he travels.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Reporter in Red China (1966) by Charles Taylor
4 months 2 weeks ago

Our feeling about every obligation depends in each case upon the spirit in which the benefit is conferred; we weigh not the bulk of the gift, but the quality of the good-will which prompted it.

0
0
Source
source
Line 6
8 months 1 week ago

Wherever you encounter truth, look upon it as Christianity.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Erasmus of Rotterdam‎ (1934) by Stefan Zweig, Eden Paul, and Cedar Paul, p. 91; reprinted in Erasmus - The Right to Heresy (2008) by Stefan Zweig, p. 62

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia