Skip to main content
3 months 2 weeks ago

4 ways: Agnosticism, Relativism, Amorality, Morality. 

1) I don't know. 2) Everybody is different. 3) Do whatever you can. 4) Do what you should.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

Are there not many Arts which, though speechless, express their meanings with perfect adequacy, with satisfaction to the recipient, and serve at the same time as a medium of communication between soul and soul?

0
0
4 months 2 days ago

Revolution is indeed a violent process. But if it is to result only in a change of dictatorship, in a shifting of names and political personalities, then it is hardly worth while. It is surely not worth all the struggle and sacrifice, the stupendous loss in human life and cultural values that result from every revolution. If such a revolution were even to bring greater social well being (which has not been the case in Russia) then it would also not be worth the terrific price paid: mere improvement can be brought about without bloody revolution.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

0
0
Source
source
Part II Section II
3 months 2 days ago

No collection of facts is ever complete, because the Universe is without bounds. And no synthesis or interpretation is ever final, because there are always fresh facts to be found after the first collection has been provisionally arranged.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 1
4 months 4 days ago

The mentality of mankind and the language of mankind created each other. If we like to assume the rise of language as a given fact, then it is not going too far to say that the souls of men are the gift from language to mankind. The account of the sixth day should be written: He gave them speech, and they became souls.

0
0
Source
source
Modes of Thought (1938).
5 months 2 weeks ago

Whate'er we leave to God, God doesAnd blesses us.

0
0
Source
source
"Inspiration", in An American Anthology, 1900
4 months 2 weeks ago

Man has ever expressed some symbolical Philosophy of his Being in his Works and Conduct; he announces himself and his Gospel of Nature; he is the Messiah of Nature.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

To understand political power aright, and derive from it its original, we must consider what estate all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of Nature, without asking leave or depending upon the will of any other man.

0
0
Source
source
Second Treatise of Government, Ch. II, sec. 4
2 months 4 weeks ago

There is no fundamental biological reason why the human genome can't be rewritten to allow everyone to be "in" love with everyone else - if we should so choose. But simply loving each other will be miraculous enough; and will probably suffice. An empty religious piety can be transformed into a biological reality. 

0
0
Source
source
"Brave New World? A Defence of Paradise-Engineering", BLTC Research, 1998
5 months 3 weeks ago

A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, Ch. 5
3 months 1 week ago

Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent public is wonderfully patient with them, continues to read them, and endures disappointment after disappointment, waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy, social theory, and what it cannot hear from pure science. Out of the struggle at the center has come an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.

0
0
Source
source
Nobel Prize lecture
3 months 2 weeks ago

While we stop to think, we often miss our opportunity.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 185
4 months 1 week ago

Just because emotion is essential to that act of expression which produces a work of art, it is easy for inaccurate analysis to misconceive its mode of operation and conclude that the work of art has emotion for its significant content. One may cry out with joy or even weep upon seeing a friend from whom one has been long separated. The outcome is not an expressive object -- save to the onlooker. But if the emotion leads one to gather material that is affiliated to the mood which is aroused, a poem may result. In the direct outburst, an objective situation is the stimulus, the cause, of the emotion. In the poem, objective material becomes the content and matter of the emotion, not just its evocative occasion.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 71-72
6 months 4 days ago

For as children tremble and fear everything in the blind darkness, so we in the light sometimes fear what is no more to be feared than the things that children in the dark hold in terror and imagine will come true. This terror, therefore, and darkness of mind must be dispelled not by the rays of the sun and glittering shafts of daylight, but by the aspect and law of nature.

0
0
Source
source
Book II, lines 55-61 (tr. Rouse)
2 months 1 week ago

To apply oneself to great inventions, starting from the smallest beginnings, is no task for ordinary minds; to divine that wonderful arts lie hid behind trivial and childish things is a conception for superhuman talents.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

When even the dictators of today appeal to reason, they mean that they possess the most tanks. They were rational enough to build them; others should be rational enough to yield to them.

0
0
Source
source
p. 28.
1 month 3 weeks ago

The great extension of our experience in recent years has brought light to the insufficiency of our simple mechanical conceptions and, as a consequence, has shaken the foundation on which the customary interpretation of observation was based.

0
0
Source
source
Niels Bohr, "Atomic Physics and the Description of Nature"
3 months 3 weeks ago

I'm prepared to teach acceptance of religion, but, religion has to agree to the social contract. If we have to do it church by church, I'm ready.

0
0

What then is the place and role of the writer in this cruel, dynamic, split world on the brink of its ten destructions? After all we have nothing to do with letting off rockets, we do not even push the lowliest of hand-carts, we are quite scorned by those who respect only material power. Is it not natural for us too to step back, to lose faith in the steadfastness of goodness, in the indivisibility of truth, and to just impart to the world our bitter, detached observations: how mankind has become hopelessly corrupt, how men have degenerated, and how difficult it is for the few beautiful and refined souls to live amongst them? But we have not even recourse to this flight. Anyone who has once taken up the WORD can never again evade it; a writer is not the detached judge of his compatriots and contemporaries, he is an accomplice to all the evil committed in his native land or by his countrymen.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

Encourage therefore his inquisitiveness all you can, by satisfying his demands, and informing his judgement, as far as it is capable. When his reasons are any way tolerable, let him find the credit and commendation of it, without being laugh'd at for his mistake be gently put into the right; and if he shew a forwardness to be reasoning about things that come in his way, take care, as much as you can, that no body check this inclination in him, or mislead it by captious or fallacious ways of talking with him. For when all is done, this is the highest and most important faculty of our minds, deserves the greatest care and attention in cultivating it: the right improvement, and exercise of our reason being the highest perfection that a man can attain to in his life.

0
0
Source
source
Sec. 122
6 months 2 weeks ago

Every revolutionary ends as an oppressor or a heretic.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

In the constitution of that rational animal I see no virtue which is opposed to justice, but I see a virtue which is opposed to love of pleasure, and that is temperance.

0
0
Source
source
VIII, 39
4 months 2 weeks ago

How it could come to pass I do not know, but I remember it clearly. The dream embraced thousands of years and left in me only a sense of the whole. I only know that I was the cause of their sin and downfall. Like a vile trichina, like a germ of the plague infecting whole kingdoms, so I contaminated all this earth, so happy and sinless before my coming. They learnt to lie, grew fond of lying, and discovered the charm of falsehood.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

The world would be a happier place than it is if acquisitiveness were always stronger than rivalry. But in fact, a great many men will cheerfully face impoverishment if they can thereby secure complete ruin for their rivals. Hence the present level of taxation. Vanity is a motive of immense potency. Anyone who has much to do with children knows how they are constantly performing some antic, and saying "Look at me." "Look at me" is one of the most fundamental desires of the human heart. It can take innumerable forms, from buffoonery to the pursuit of posthumous fame.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

The three great American vices seem to be efficiency, punctuality, and the desire for achievement and success. They are the things that make the Americans so unhappy and so nervous.

0
0
Source
source
p. 162
5 months 2 weeks ago

I am not virtuous. Our sons will be if we shed enough blood to give them the right to be.

0
0
Source
source
Act 3, sc. 5
4 months 1 week ago

Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.

0
0
Source
source
4:10 (KJV) Said to Satan.
4 months 2 weeks ago

What man is to be, he must become; and as he is to be a being for himself, must become through himself. Nature completed all her works; only from man did she withdraw her hands, and precisely thereby gave him over to himself. Cultivability, as such, is the character of mankind. The impossibility of subsuming to the human form any other conception than that of his own Ego, is it, which forces every man inwardly to consider every other man as his equal.

0
0
Source
source
P. 119
6 months 2 weeks ago

This fact, that the opposite of sin is by no means virtue, has been overlooked. The latter is partly a pagan view, which is content with a merely human standard, and which for that very reason does not know what sin is, that all sin is before God. No, the opposite of sin is faith.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

[on Epicurus] His starting point is a conviction that apathy is impossible, and that pleasure - though not necessarily sensual pleasure - is the only conceivable, and quite legitimate, end of life and action. "Nature leads every organism to prefer its own good to every other good" - even the stoic finds a subtle pleasure in renunciation. "We must not avoid pleasures, but we must select them". Epicurus, then, is no epicurean, he exalts the joys of intellect rather than those of sense; he warns against pleasures that excite and disturb the soul which they should rather quite and appease. In the end he proposes to seek not pleasure in its usual sense, but ataraxia - tranquility, equaninimity, repose of mind; all of which trembles on the verge of Zeno's "Apathy"

0
0
3 months 4 weeks ago

I have remarked very clearly that I am often of one opinion when I am lying down and of another when I am standing up.

0
0
Source
source
F 73

In limitations he first shows himself the master,And the law can only bring us freedom.

0
0
Source
source
Was Wir Bringen
5 months 2 weeks ago

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose that you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn't you then first discover how much you really trusted it? ... Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

The Superego, in censoring the unconscious and in implanting conscience, also censors the censor.

0
0
Source
source
p. 76
4 months 2 weeks ago

The notion of nothingness is not characteristic of laboring humanity: those who toil have neither time nor inclination to weigh their dust; they resign themselves to the difficulties or the doltishness of fate; they hope: hope is a slave's virtue.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

Into the same rivers we step and do not step, we are and are not.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

And wonderful it is to see how the Ideal or Soul, place it in what ugliest Body you may, will irradiate said Body with its own nobleness; will gradually, incessantly, mould, modify, new-form or reform said ugliest Body, and make it at last beautiful, and to a certain degree divine!

0
0
4 months 2 days ago

Taken as a whole, the Cross Correspondences and the Willet scripts are among the most convincing evidence that at present exists for life after death. For anyone who is prepared to devote weeks to studying them, they prove beyond all reasonable doubt that Myers, Gurney, and Sidgwick went on communicating after death.

0
0
Source
source
p. 136
1 month 2 weeks ago

To change your mind and to follow him who sets you right is to be nonetheless the free agent that you were before. Remember that to change thy opinion and to follow him who corrects thy error is as consistent with freedom as it is to persist in thy error.

0
0
Source
source
(Long translation) VIII, 16
4 months 1 week ago

Who is my mother? and who are my brethren? And he stretched forth his hand toward his disciples, and said, Behold my mother and my brethren! For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother.

0
0
Source
source
12:48-50 (KJV)
3 months 4 weeks ago

Rationality requires a complete knowledge and anticipation of the consequences that will follow on each choice. In fact, knowledge of consequences is always fragmentary.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

Till society is very differently constituted, parents, I fear, will still insist on being obeyed, because they will be obeyed, and constantly endeavour to settle that power on a Divine right, which will not bear the investigation of reason.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 11
4 months 2 weeks ago

The tendency to regard continuity, in the sense in which I shall define it, as an idea of prime importance in philosophy conveniently may be be termed synechism. The present paper is intended chiefly to show what synechism is, and what it leads to.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

It is good to rub and polish our brain against that of others.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, Ch. 26
1 month 1 week ago

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to his son Eduard (5 February 1930), as quoted in Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007), p. 367
4 months 3 weeks ago

If it is not true, it is a good story.

0
0
Source
source
as quoted in A Book of Quotations, Proverbs and Household Words (1907) edited by Sir William Gurney Benham
1 month 2 weeks ago

Is it not better to use what is in thy power like a free man than to desire in a slavish and abject way what is not in thy power?

0
0
Source
source
IX, 40
5 months 4 weeks ago

I doubt if a single individual could be found from the whole of mankind free from some form of insanity. The only difference is one of degree. A man who sees a gourd and takes it for his wife is called insane because this happens to very few people.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Words from the Wise : Over 6,000 of the Smartest Things Ever Said (2007) by Rosemarie Jarski, p. 312. From The Praise of Folly.
3 months 2 weeks ago

Quite often a man goes on for years imagining that the religious teaching that had been imparted to him since childhood is still intact, while all the time there is not a trace of it left in him.

0
0
Source
source
Pt. I, ch. 1

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia