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7 months 4 days ago

We used to think that Hitler was wicked when he wanted to kill all the Jews, but what Kennedy and Macmillan and others both in the East and in the West pursue policies which will probably lead to killing not only all the Jews but all the rest of us too. They are much more wicked than Hitler and this idea of weapons of mass extermination is utterly and absolutely horrible and it is a thing which no man with one spark of humanity can tolerate and I will not pretend to obey a government which is organising the massacre of the whole of mankind. I will do anything I can to oppose such Governments in any non-violent way that seems likely to be fruitful, and I should exhort all of you to feel the same way. We cannot obey these murderers. They are wicked and abominable. They are the wickedest people that ever lived in the history of man and it is our duty to do what we can.

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On Civil Disobedience, April 15th, 1961
3 months 3 weeks ago

To the wild deep-hearted man all was yet new, not veiled under names or formulas; it stood naked, flashing in on him there, beautiful, awful, unspeakable. Nature was to this man, what to the Thinker and Prophet it forever is, preternatural. This green flowery rock-built earth, the trees, the mountains, rivers, many-sounding seas;-that great deep sea of azure that swims overhead; the winds sweeping through it; the black cloud fashioning itself together, now pouring out fire, now hail and rain.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

When one is a stranger to oneself then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others.

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5 months 1 day ago

Many receive advice, few profit by it.

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Maxim 149
6 months 3 weeks ago

At one level, this movement on behalf of oppressed farm animals is emotional...Yet the movement is also the product of a deep intellectual ferment pioneered by the Princeton scholar Peter Singer...This idea popularized by Professor Singer - that we have ethical obligations that transcend our species - is one whose time appears to have come...What we're seeing now is an interesting moral moment: a grass-roots effort by members of one species to promote the welfare of others...animal rights are now firmly on the mainstream ethical agenda.

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Nicholas Kristof, "Humanity Even for Nonhumans," in The New York Times (8 April 2009).
7 months 2 days ago

Courtship is the time for sowing those seeds which will grow up ten years into domestic hatred.

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Letter XXVI
7 months 4 days ago

It is in this way that all my books have been composed. They were always written at least twice over; a first draft of the entire work was completed to the very end of the subject, then the whole begun again de novo; but incorporating, in the second writing, all sentences and parts of sentences of the old draft, which appeared as suitable to my purpose as anything which I could write in lieu of them. I have found great advantages in this system of double redaction. It combines, better than any other mode of composition, the freshness and vigour of the first conception, with the superior precision and completeness resulting from prolonged thought. In my own case, moreover, I have found that the patience necessary for a careful elaboration of the details of composition and expression, costs much less effort after the entire subject has been once gone through, and the substance of all that I find to say has in some manner, however imperfect, been got upon paper.

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(p. 222)
3 months 3 weeks ago

In a valiant suffering for others, not in a slothful making others suffer for us, did nobleness ever lie.

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7 months 2 days ago

Your crystal? That's silly. Whom do you think you are fooling? Come on, everyone knows that I threw the baby out of the window. The crystal is shattered on earth, and I do not care. I am no longer anything but a skin, and my skin does not belong to you.

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Estelle to Inès, Act 1, sc. 5
8 months 1 day ago

Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

I shall doubtless outlive some troublesome desires; but I am in no hurry about that; nor, when the time comes, shall I plume myself on the immunity just in the same way, I do not greatly pride myself on having outlived my belief in the fairy tales of Socialism. Old people have faults of their own; they tend to become cowardly, niggardly, and suspicious. Whether from the growth of experience or the decline of animal heat, I see that age leads to these and certain other faults; and it follows, of course, that while in one sense I hope I am journeying towards the truth, in another I am indubitably posting towards these forms and sources of error.

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Crabbed Age and Youth.
3 months 3 days ago

I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage with my books, my family and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post, which any human power can give.

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Letter to Alexander Donald
7 months 4 days ago

It is remarkable that among all the preachers there are so few moral teachers. The prophets are employed in excusing the ways of men.

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p. 489
7 months 6 days ago

Percepts and phenomena which precedes the logical use of the intellect is called appearance, while the reflex knowledge originating from several appearances compared by the intellect is called experience.

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7 months 6 days ago

The concept of space is not abstracted from external sensations.

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People often become scholars for the same reason they become soldiers: simply because they are unfit for any other station. Their right hand has to earn them a livelihood; one might say they lie down like bears in winter and seek sustenance from their paws.

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B 41
5 months 3 weeks ago

The world is so possessed by the power of what is and the efforts of adjustment to it, that the adolescent's rebellion, which once fought the father because his practices contradicted his own ideology, can no longer crop up. ... Psychologically, the father is ... replaced by the world of things.

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p. 41-42.
4 months 1 week ago

Human knowledge increases, while human irrationality stays the same. Scientific inquiry may be an embodiment of reason, but what such inquiry demonstrates is that humans are not rational animals. The fact that humanists refuse to accept the demonstration only confirms its truth.

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An Old Chaos: Humanism and Flying Saucers (p. 81)
5 months 1 day ago

Never promise more than you can perform.

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Maxim 528
3 months 3 weeks ago

Nothing is great but truth, and the smallest truth is great. The other day I had a thought, which I put like this: Even a harmful truth is useful, for it can be harmful only for the moment and will lead to other truths, which must always become useful, very much so. Conversely, even a useful error is harmful, for it can be useful only for the moment, enticing us into other errors, which become more and more harmful.

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Letter to Charlotte von Stein (1787) in Goethe's World View: Presented in His Reflections and Maxims (1963), Edited with an Introduction by Frederick Ungar, Translated by Heinz Norden, pp. 72-73, Frederick Ungar Publishing Company, New York.
7 months 1 week ago

A propensity to hope and joy is real riches: One to fear and sorrow, real poverty.

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Part I, Essay 18: The Sceptic
3 months 2 weeks ago

Friendship is always helpful, but love sometimes even does harm

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7 months 5 days ago

It is the duty of every patriot to protect his country from its government.

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Edward Abbey, "A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government." as written in "A Voice Crying in the Wilderness" (Vox Clamantis en Deserto): Notes from a Secret Journal (1990), ISBN 0312064888
5 months 6 days ago

One day, we shall stand up and our backsides will remain attached to our seats.

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3 months 1 day ago

The Pythagoreans thought those who teach for the sake of reward show themselves worse than sculptors, or artists who perform the work sitting. For these, when someone orders wood to make a statue of Hermes, search for wood suited to receive the proper form; while those pretend that they can readily produce the works of virtue from every nature.

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6 months 1 week ago

I pray you, magnificent Sir, do not trouble yourself to return to us, but await our coming to you.

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Third Dialogue
3 months 3 weeks ago

The inventive genius of great England will not forever sit patient with mere wheels and pinions, bobbins, straps and billy-rollers whirring in the head of it. The inventive genius of England is not a Beaver's, or a Spinner's or Spider's genius: it is a Man's genius, I hope, with a God over him!

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2 months 4 weeks ago

It's not about telling people how to be, outside of supporting ideals that teach us what to avoid.

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3 months 3 days ago

Our century of war, militarism, and political terror has produced great - and successful - advocates of true peace, among whom Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., are the paramount examples. The considerable success that they achieved testifies to the presence, in the midst of violence, of an authentic and powerful desire for peace and, more important, of the proven will to make the necessary sacrifices.

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7 months 3 days ago

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.

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November 8, 1838
5 months 3 weeks ago

The masses are our masters; and for every one who looks facts in the face his existence has become dependent on them, so that the thought of them must control his doings, his cares, and his duties. Even an articulated mass always tends to become unspiritual and inhuman. It is life without existence, superstitions without faith. It may stamp all flat; it is disinclined to tolerate independence and greatness, but prone to constrain people to become as automatic as ants.

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3 months 3 days ago

We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. ... We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. . . We must recover the sense of the majesty of the creation and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.

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"A Native Hill"
5 months 6 days ago

Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true.

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3 months ago

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.

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X, 33
6 months 1 day ago

What is Nature? An encyclopedical, systematic Index or Plan of our Spirit. Why will we content us with the mere catalogue of our Treasures? Let us contemplate them ourselves, and in all ways elaborate and use them.

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6 months 4 days ago

There are people with whom everything they consider a means turns mysteriously into an end.

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Philosophical Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991) § 428
6 months ago

The unconscious is not just evil by nature, it is also the source of the highest good: not only dark but also light, not only bestial, semihuman, and demonic but superhuman, spiritual, and, in the classical sense of the word, "divine."

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The Practice of Psychotherapy, p. 364
7 months 3 days ago

Money appears as measure (in Homer, e.g. oxen) earlier than as medium of exchange,because in barter each commodity is still its own medium of exchange. But it cannot be its own or its own standard of comparison.

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Notebook I, The Chapter on Money, p. 93.
3 months ago

Where have they gone, the brilliant, the insightful ones, the proud?

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(Hays translation) VIII, 25
3 months ago

The particular conception of ideology operates primarily with a psychology of interests, while the total conception uses a more formal functional analysis, without any reference to motivations, confining itself to an objective description of the structural differences in minds operating in different social settings. The former assumes that this or that interest is the cause of a given lie or deception. The latter presupposes simply that there is a correspondence between a given social situation and a given perspective, point of view, or apperception mass. In this case, while an analysis of constellations of interests may often be necessary it is not to establish causal connections but to characterize the total situation. Thus interest psychology tends to be displaced by an analysis of the correspondence between the situation to be known and the forms of knowledge.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Armies have endured all manner of want, have lived on roots, and have resisted hunger by means of food too revolting to mention. All this they have suffered to gain a kingdom, and-what is more marvellous-to gain a kingdom that will be another's. Will any man hesitate to endure poverty, in order that he may free his mind from madness?

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8 months 4 days ago

Confession should be only in secret before God, who knows everything anyway, and thus it could remain hidden in one's innermost being. But at a dinner and a woman! A dinner-it is not some hidden, remote place, nor is the lighting dim, nor is the mood like that among graves, nor are the listeners silent or invisibly present.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

This is a strange -- and rather alarming -- realisation. For it clearly implies that masturbation is one of our highest faculties that human beings have developed. Many animals masturbate -- but never without the presence of another animal, or some similar stimulus. A human being can masturbate in an empty room: a triumph of pure imagination.

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p. 90
7 months 4 days ago

Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for co-operation with oneself.

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Ch. 6: On the Scientific Method in Philosophy
5 months 4 weeks ago

Try to be free: you will die of hunger.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

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

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The Second Part, Chapter 27
6 months 4 days ago

Falsehood has a perennial spring.

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