Skip to main content
5 months 1 week ago
Every tradition grows ever more venerable — the more remote its origin, the more confused that origin is. The reverence due to it increases from generation to generation. The tradition finally becomes holy and inspires awe.
0
0
4 months 1 week ago

It costs a beautiful person no exertion to paint her image on our eyes; yet how splendid is that benefit! It costs no more for a wise soul to convey his quality to other men.

0
0
Source
source
Uses of Great Men
1 week 3 days ago

When common words are appropriated as technical terms, this must be done so that they are not ambiguous in their application.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

That mysterious independent variable of political calculation, Public Opinion.

0
0
Source
source
Universities, Actual and Ideal
2 months 1 week ago

We often attribute "understanding" and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions.

0
0
4 months 1 day ago

Practice no sloth, so that the duty and good work, which it is necessary for thee to do, may not remain undone.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 59)
3 months 3 days ago

Ye fools, did not he that made that which is without make that which is within also?

0
0
Source
source
11:40 (KJV)
1 month 4 days ago

Yet when we speak of time... do we not unconsciously adopt this hypothesis... and put ourselves in the place of this imperfect god... Do not even the atheists put themselves in the place where god would be..?

0
0
3 months 3 days ago

Felicity is a continual progress of the desire from one object to another, the attaining of the former being still but the way to the latter.The cause whereof is that the object of man's desire is not to enjoy once only, and for one instant of time, but to assure forever the way of his future desire. And therefore the voluntary actions and inclinations of all men tend not only to the procuring, but also to the assuring of a contented life, and differ only in the way, which ariseth partly from the diversity of passions in diverse men, and partly from the difference of the knowledge or opinion each one has of the causes which produce the effect desired.

0
0
Source
source
The First Part, Chapter 11, p. 47
2 months 3 weeks ago

Witness the tragic condition of Russia. The methods of State centralization have paralysed individual initiative and effort; the tyranny of the dictatorship has cowed the people into slavish submission and all but extinguished the fires of liberty; organized terrorism has depraved and brutalized the masses and stifled every idealistic aspiration; institutionalized murder has cheapened human life, and all sense of the dignity of man and the value of life has been eliminated; coercion at every step has made effort bitter, labour a punishment, has turned the whole of existence into a scheme of mutual deceit, and has revived the lowest and most brutal instincts of man. A sorry heritage to begin a new life of freedom and brotherhood.

0
0
3 weeks 4 days ago

Allow me, excellent Lucilius, to utter a still bolder word: if any goods could be greater than others, I should prefer those which seem harsh to those which are mild and alluring, and should pronounce them greater. For it is more of an accomplishment to break one's way through difficulties than to keep joy within bounds.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

It is easy to see that this problem can be solved neither in theoretical nor in practical philosophy, but only in a higher discipline, which is the link that combines them, and neither theoretical nor practical, but both at once.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.

0
0

Archeologists have not discovered stages of human existence so early that they were without art. Right back in the early morning twilights of mankind we received it from Hands which we were too slow to discern. And we were too slow to ask: FOR WHAT PURPOSE have we been given this gift? What are we to do with it? And they were mistaken, and will always be mistaken, who prophesy that art will disintegrate, that it will outlive its forms and die. It is we who shall die - art will remain. And shall we comprehend, even on the day of our destruction, all its facets and all its possibilities?

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

Rather, power is most powerful, most stable, where it creates a feeling of freedom and where it does not need to resort to violence.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

Many of the actions by which men have become rich are far more harmful to the community than the obscure crimes of poor men, yet they go unpunished because they do not interfere with the existing order.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. V: Government and Law
3 months 3 days ago

And then if any man shall say to you, Lo, here is Christ; or, lo, he is there; believe him not: For false Christs and false prophets shall rise, and shall shew signs and wonders, to seduce, if it were possible, even the elect. But take ye heed: behold, I have foretold you all things. But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, And the stars of heaven shall fall, and the powers that are in heaven shall be shaken. And then shall they see the Son of man coming in the clouds with great power and glory. And then shall he send his angels, and shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from the uttermost part of the earth to the uttermost part of heaven.

0
0
Source
source
13:21-27 (KJV)
2 months 3 weeks ago

Proceeding from ourselves, from our own human consciousness, the only consciousness which we feel from within and in which feeling is identical with being, we attribute some sort of consciousness, more or less dim, to all living things, and even to the stones themselves, for they also live. And the evolution of organic beings is simply the struggle to realize fullness of consciousness through suffering, a continual aspiration to be others without ceasing to be themselves, to break and yet to preserve their proper limits.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

The principles of the good society call for a concern with an order of being--which cannot be proved existentially to the sense organs--where it matters supremely that the human person is inviolable, that reason shall regulate the will, that truth shall prevail over error.

0
0
Source
source
p. 127
1 week 3 days ago

A 'Natural System' is one which attempts to make 'all' the divisions natural, the widest as well as the narrowest; and therefore applies 'no' characters 'peremptorily'.

0
0
2 months 6 days ago

I do feel visceral revulsion at the burka because for me it is a symbol of the oppression of women.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Richard Dawkins causes outcry after likening the burka to a bin liner (10 August 2010), The Telegraph.
3 months 3 days ago

For thought and speech are of a thinking and speaking subject, and if the life of the latter depends on the performance of a superimposed function, it depends on fulfilling the requirements of this function - thus it depends on those who control these requirements.

0
0
Source
source
p. 128
1 month 1 day ago

I here, on the very threshold, protest against it in reference to Paganism, and to all other isms by which man has ever for a length of time striven to walk in this world. They have all had a truth in them, or men would not have taken them up. Quackery and dupery do abound; in religions, above all in the more advanced decaying stages of religions, they have fearfully abounded: but quackery was never the originating influence in such things; it was not the health and life of such things, but their disease, the sure precursor of their being about to die! Let us never forget this.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

Science is a cemetery of dead ideas, even though life may issue from them.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

New truth is often uncomfortable, especially to the holders of power; nevertheless, amid the long record of cruelty and bigotry, it is the most important achievement of our intelligent but wayward species.

0
0
Source
source
Religion and Science (1935), Ch. X: Conclusion
3 months 3 days ago

As for [...] Of all passions, that which inclineth men least to break the laws is fear.

0
0
Source
source
The Second Part, Chapter 27
3 months 1 week ago

A great revolution is on the point of being accomplished. It is a revolution not in human affairs, but in man himself.

0
0
Source
source
p. 2
3 months 1 week ago

Life is a disease of the spirit; a working incited by Passion. Rest is peculiar to the spirit.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

In looking over the catalogue of human actions (says a partizan of this principle) in order to determine which of them are to be marked with the seal of disapprobation, you need but to take counsel of your own feelings: whatever you find in yourself a propensity to condemn, is wrong for that very reason. For the same reason it is also meet for punishment: in what proportion it is adverse to utility, or whether it be adverse to utility at all, is a matter that makes no difference. In that same proportion also is it meet for punishment: if you hate much, punish much: if you hate little, punish little: punish as you hate. If you hate not at all, punish not at all: the fine feelings of the soul are not to be overborne and tyrannized by the harsh and rugged dictates of political utility.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 2: Of Principles Adverse to That of Utility
4 months 5 days ago

No differeance without alterity, no alterity without singularity, no singularity without here-now.

0
0
Source
source
Injunctions of Marx, p,31
4 months 1 week ago

The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact, though that fact be his neighbor, there is an unsettled wilderness between him and Canada, between him and the setting sun, or, farther still, between him and it.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

A little folly is desirable in him that will not be guilty of stupidity.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, Ch. 9. Of Vanity
1 month 6 days ago

Those who have taken the planets to be inanimate bodies without function, limited to traveling geometric paths, resemble idiots who would believe that the brain is inanimate because it has no visible function, or that the stomach is idle because it does no visible work as do our limbs. Civilizees have always been reproached for believing nature to be limited to known effects. If the planets were not animate creatures endowed with functions, God would then appear to be an advocate of laziness. He would have created universes furnished with large inert bodies spending eternity in purposeless meandering as do the idlers in our society.

0
0
Source
source
L'attraction passioneé
3 months 6 days ago

Some propose mere welfare measures - while others come forward with grandiose systems of reform which, under the pretense of re-organizing society, are in fact intended to preserve the foundations, and hence the life, of existing society. Communists must unremittingly struggle against these bourgeois socialists because they work for the enemies of communists and protect the society which communists aim to overthrow.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

We are in hell and I will have my turn!

0
0
Source
source
Inès warns Garcin and Estelle not to make love in her presence, Act 1, sc. 5
3 months 6 days ago

Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.

0
0
4 months 6 days ago

A hero looks death in the face, real death, not just the image of death. Behaving honourably in a crisis doesn't mean being able to act the part of a hero well, as in the theatre, it means being able to look death itself in the eye. For an actor may play lots of different roles, but at the end of it all he himself, the human being, is the one who has to die.

0
0
Source
source
p. 50e
4 months ago

Fools -- for their thoughts are not well-considered who suppose that not-being exists or that anything dies and is wholly annihilated.

0
0
Source
source
fr. 11
3 months 1 week ago

The normal present connects the past and the future through limitation. Contiguity results, crystallization by means of solidification. There also exists, however, a spiritual present that identifies past and future through dissolution, and this mixture is the element, the atmosphere of the poet.

0
0
Source
source
Fragment No. 109
2 months 1 week ago

The TV generation is postliterate and retribalized. It seeks by violence to scrub the old private image and to merge in a new tribal identity, like any corporate executive.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 201)
4 months 6 days ago

Make sure that your religion is a matter between you and God only.

0
0
Source
source
Comment to Maurice O'Connor Drury, as quoted in Wittgenstein Reads Freud : The Myth of the Unconscious (1996) by Jacques Bouveresse, as translated by Carol Cosman, p. 14
2 months 1 week ago

I've always been careful never to predict anything that had not already happened.

0
0
Source
source
Interview: Tom Wolfe, TVOntario, August 1970
5 months 1 week ago

It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.

0
0

It is not given to a cylinder to move everywhere by its own motion, nor yet to water nor to fire nor to anything else which is governed by nature or an irrational soul, for the things which check them and stand in the way are many. But intelligence and reason are able to go through everything that opposes them, and in such manner as they are formed by nature and as they choose. Place before thy eyes this facility with which the reason will be carried through all things, as fire upwards, as a stone downwards, as a cylinder down an inclined surface, and seek for nothing further. For all other obstacles either affect the body only, which is a dead thing; or, except for opinion and the yielding of reason itself, they do not crush nor do any harm of any kind; for if they did, he who felt it would immediately become bad.

0
0
Source
source
X, 33
3 months 6 days ago

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

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

The whole plan of our order should be based on the idea of preparing men of firmness and virtue bound together by unity of conviction-aiming at the punishment of vice and folly, and patronizing talent and virtue: raising worthy men from the dust and attaching them to our Brotherhood. Only then will our order have the power unobtrusively to bind the hands of the protectors of disorder and to control them without their being aware of it. In a word, we must found a form of government holding universal sway, which should be diffused over the whole world without destroying the bonds of citizenship, and beside which all other governments can continue in their customary course and do everything except what impedes the great aim of our order, which is to obtain for virtue the victory over vice.

0
0
Source
source
Book VI, Chapter VII
4 months 1 week ago

There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

This body which called itself and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

0
0
Source
source
Essai sur l'histoire générale et sur les mœurs et l'esprit des nations, Chapter 70, 1756

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia