Skip to main content
3 months 1 week ago

No man can visualize four dimensions, except mathematically ... I think in four dimensions, but only abstractly. The human mind can picture these dimensions no more than it can envisage electricity. Nevertheless, they are no less real than electro-magnetism, the force which controls our universe, within, and by which we have our being.

0
0
7 months 2 weeks ago

A totally unmystical world would be a world totally blind and insane.

0
0
Source
source
Grey Eminence, 1940
6 months 1 week ago

Calvin's theocentric irrationalism eventually revealed itself as the cunning to technocratic reason which had to shape its human material. Misery and the poor laws did not suffice to drive men into the workshops of the early capitalistic era. The new spirit helped to supplement external pressures with a concern for wife and child to which the moral autonomy of the introverted subject in reality was tantamount.

0
0
Source
source
p. 34.
6 months 2 weeks ago

By an object, I mean anything that we can think, i.e. anything we can talk about.

0
0
Source
source
"Reflections on Real and Unreal Objects", Undated, MS 966
7 months 2 weeks ago

If a man own land, the land owns him.

0
0
Source
source
Wealth
7 months 2 weeks ago

A great myth is relevant as long as the predicament of humanity lasts; as long as humanity lasts. It will always work, on those who can receive it, the same catharsis.

0
0
Source
source
"Haggard Rides Again", in Time and Tide, Vol. XLI, 9/3/1960
5 months 2 weeks ago

Maybe somewhere in some other galaxy there is a super-intelligence so colossal that from our point of view it would be a god. But it cannot have been the sort of God that we need to explain the origin of the universe, because it cannot have been there that early.

0
0
2 months 2 days ago

Just accept it....universality is unquestionable....

Free books here:
https://civilsimian.com/books-list

0
0
7 months 2 weeks ago

The religion and philosophy of the Hebrews are those of a wilder and ruder tribe, wanting the civility and intellectual refinements and subtlety of Vedic culture.

0
0
Source
source
A Tribute to Hinduism, 2008
3 months 3 weeks ago

There is something in the nature of tea that leads us into a world of quiet contemplation of life.

0
0
Source
source
p. 224
8 months 1 week ago

To study and not think is a waste. To think and not study is dangerous. Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.

0
0
8 months 2 weeks ago

Nature flies from the infinite, for the infinite is unending or imperfect, and Nature ever seeks an end.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

It's quite true that there were billions of years that I didn't exist that I was never bothered about.

Life itself is sitting in a room with a murderer, while eating a nice meal. You're just waiting for the meal to be over...

LIFE is the terrible condition.

0
0
3 months 4 weeks ago

We, holding Art in our hands, confidently consider ourselves to be its masters; boldly we direct it, we renew, reform and manifest it; we sell it for money, use it to please those in power; turn to it at one moment for amusement - right down to popular songs and night-clubs, and at another - grabbing the nearest weapon, cork or cudgel - for the passing needs of politics and for narrow-minded social ends. But art is not defiled by our efforts, neither does it thereby depart from its true nature, but on each occasion and in each application it gives to us a part of its secret inner light.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

To begin an affair of that kind now, and carry it on so long a time in form, is by no means a proper plan ... whatever assurances I may give her in private of my esteem for her, or whatever assurances I may ask in return from her, depend on it - they must be kept in private. Necessity will oblige me to proceed in a method which is not generally thought fair; that of treating with a ward before obtaining the approbation of her guardian. I say necessity will oblige me to it, because I never can bear to remain in suspense so long a time. If I am to succeed, the sooner I know it, the less uneasiness I shall have to go through. If I am to meet with a disappointment, the sooner I know it, the more of life I shall have to wear it off: and if I do meet with one, I hope in God, and verily believe; it will be the last.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to John Page (15 July 1763); published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson
5 months 2 weeks ago

We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.

0
0
7 months 2 weeks ago

From the winter of 1821, when I first read Bentham, and especially from the commencement of the Westminster Review, I had what might truly be called an object in life; to be a reformer of the world. My conception of my own happiness was entirely identified with this object. The personal sympathies I wished for were those of fellow labourers in this enterprise. I endeavoured to pick up as many flowers as I could by the way; but as a serious and permanent personal satisfaction to rest upon, my whole reliance was placed on this...

0
0
Source
source
(p. 132)
4 months 3 weeks ago

One might naively suppose that a negative utilitarian would welcome human extinction. But only (trans)humans - or our potential superintelligent successors - are technically capable of phasing out the cruelties of the rest of the living world on Earth. And only (trans)humans - or rather our potential superintelligent successors - are technically capable of assuming stewardship of our entire Hubble volume.

0
0
Source
source
"Unsorted Postings", Facebook, pre-2014
6 months 2 weeks ago

I know that my birth is fortuitous, a laughable accident, and yet, as soon as I forget myself, I behave as if it were a capital event, indispensable to the progress and equilibrium of the world.

0
0
7 months 2 weeks ago

Let us maintain inviolably equality in the sacred right of suffrage: public security can never have a basis more solid.

0
0
Source
source
Author's Inscription: French Edition
3 months 2 weeks ago

Our model citizen is a sophisticate who before puberty understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato.

0
0
Source
source
Think Little
7 months 1 week ago

The pleasures that give most joy are the ones that most rarely come.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

Everything that happens is either endurable or not. If it's endurable, then endure it. Stop complaining. If it's unendurable . . . then stop complaining. Your destruction will mean its end as well.

0
0
Source
source
(Hays translation) X, 3
7 months 3 weeks ago

... a penny saved is better than a penny earned.

0
0
Source
source
The Duty of a Husband and Wife (17 March 1539), No. 4408. LW 54:337
5 months 2 weeks ago

He doubly benefits the needy who gives quickly. 

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 6
4 months 1 week ago

Two difficulties: (1) Can we transform psychologic time, which is qualitative, into a quantitative time? (2) Can we reduce to one and the same measure facts which transpire in different worlds [of conscious beings]!

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

Man can, indeed, act contrarily to the decrees of God, as far as they have been written like laws in the minds of ourselves or the prophets, but against that eternal decree of God, which is written in universal nature, and has regard to the course of nature as a whole, he can do nothing.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 2, Of Natural Right
1 month 1 week ago

More rational? Doing the work to be less irrational....at a speed that's comfortable over a long period of time....that's the recipe....

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

Properly speaking, the Land belongs to these two: To the Almighty God; and to all His Children of Men that have ever worked well on it, or that shall ever work well on it. No generation of men can or could, with never such solemnity and effort, sell Land on any other principle: it is not the property of any generation, we say, but that of all the past generations that have worked on it, and of all the future ones that shall work on it.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

We are living even now among punishments and ruins.

0
0
Source
source
"A Few Words in Favor of Edward Abbey"

Now civilizations, I believe, come to birth and proceed to grow by successfully responding to successive challenges. They break down and go to pieces if and when a challenge confronts them which they fail to meet.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 8: Civilization on Trial
6 months 2 weeks ago

Boredom is connected naturally with time, with the horror of time, with the experience and the consciousness of time. Those who are not aware of time do not become bored. Basically life is only possible if one is not aware of time. If one should happen to want to experience consciously one of those moments that pass, one would be lost; life would become unbearable.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

Elias truly shall first come, and restore all things. But I say unto you, That Elias is come already, and they knew him not, but have done unto him whatsoever they listed. Likewise shall also the Son of man suffer of them.

0
0
Source
source
17:11-12 (KJV)
6 months 3 weeks ago

Even to have come forth is something, since I see that being able to conquer is placed in the hands of fate. However, there was in me, whatever I was able to do, that which no future century will deny to be mine, that which a victor could have for his own: Not to have feared to die, not to have yielded to any equal in firmness of nature, and to have preferred a courageous death to a noncombatant life.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

The world's biggest power is the youth and beauty of a woman.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

The nuclear bomb will turn warfare into the juggling of images.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 360)
5 months 2 weeks ago

The population of the US is nearly 300 million, including many of the best educated, most talented, most resourceful, humane people on earth. By almost any measure of civilised attainment, from Nobel prize-counts on down, the US leads the world by miles. You would think that a country with such resources, and such a field of talent, would be able to elect a leader of the highest quality. Yet, what has happened? At the end of all the primaries and party caucuses, the speeches and the televised debates, after a year or more of non-stop electioneering bustle, who, out of that entire population of 300 million, emerges at the top of the heap? George Bush.

0
0
Source
source
"Bin Laden's victory " The Guardian
7 months 2 weeks ago

Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.

0
0
Source
source
The German Ideology, International Publishers, ed. Chris Arthur, p. 103.
5 months 1 week ago

Women will be no longer made the slaves of, or dependent upon men ... They will be equal in education, rights, privileges and personal liberty.

0
0
Source
source
Sixth Part
11 months 3 weeks ago

I believe in clear-cut positions. I think that the most arrogant position is this apparent, multidisciplinary modesty of "what I am saying now is not unconditional, it is just a hypothesis," and so on. It really is a most arrogant position. I think that the only way to be honest and expose yourself to criticism is to state clearly and dogmatically where you are. You must take the risk and have a position.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

He will through life be master of himself and a happy man who from day to day can have said, "I have lived: tomorrow the Father may fill the sky with black clouds or with cloudless sunshine."

0
0
Source
source
Book III, ode xxix, line 41
7 months 1 week ago

One can say that the author is an ideological product, since we represent him as the opposite of his historically real function. (When a historically given function is represented in a figure that inverts it, one has an ideological production.) The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.

0
0
Source
source
What is an author?
8 months 2 weeks ago

Generals are usually a conservative force who can be relied on to oppose social change.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

An infirmity which affects the whole race, is no proper object for the scorn of an individual who belongs to that race, and who, before he could expose it, must himself have been its slave.

0
0
Source
source
p. 12
3 months 1 week ago

Granting, as Lenin wants, such absolute powers of a negative character to the top organ of the party, we strengthen, to a dangerous extent, the conservatism inherent in such an organ.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia