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5 months 1 week ago

"Not only can logos be seen in absolutely all animals, but in many of them it has the groundwork for being perfected."
- Porphyry

See biography for Porphyry:
https://civilsimian.com/Porphyry

Read Porphyry's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/103/content

#philosophy #quotes #CivilSimian #UniversalHumanism

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11 months 1 week ago

Inasmuch as love grows in you, in so much beauty grows; for love is itself the beauty of the soul.

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as translated by H. Browne and J. H. Meyers, The Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers (1995)
10 months 3 weeks 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.

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9 months 3 weeks ago

The saying that beauty is but skin deep is but a skin-deep saying.

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Vol. 2, Ch. XIV, Personal Beauty
7 months 1 week ago

When the British came there was, throughout India, a system of communal schools, managed by the village communities. The agents of the East India Company destroyed these village communities, and took steps to replace the schools; even today, after a century of effort to restore them, they stand at only 66% of their number a hundred years ago. Hence, the 93 % illiteracy of India.

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(source: The Case for India - By Will Durant Simon and Schuster, New York. 1930 p.44).
9 months 3 weeks ago

Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision sceptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature.

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7 months 6 days ago

You will thus understand that what you fear is either insignificant or short-lived.

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10 months 3 weeks ago

The softer you find your child is, the more you are to seek occasions, at fit times, thus to harden him. The great art in this is, to begin with what is but very little painful, and to proceed by insensible degrees, when you are playing, and in good humour with him, and speaking well of him: and when you have once got him to think himself made amends for his suffering by the praise is given him for his courage; when he can take pride in giving such marks of his manliness, and can prefer the reputation of being brave and stout, to the avoiding a little pain, or the shrinking under it; you need nor despair in time and by the assistance of his growing reason, to master his timorousness, and mend the weakness of his constitution.

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Sec. 115
10 months 3 weeks ago

I must before I die, find some way to say the essential thing that is in me, that I have never said yet - a thing that is not love or hate or pity or scorn, but the very breath of life, fierce and coming from far away, bringing into human life the vastness and fearful passionless force of non-human things...

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p. 261
10 months 3 weeks ago

The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. With the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion the devaluation of the world of men. Labour produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity - and does so in the proportion in which it produces commodities generally.

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p. 71, The Marx-Engels Reader
9 months 3 weeks ago

Well, which is the most rational theory about these ten millions of species? Is it most likely that there have been ten millions of special creations? or is it most likely that, by continual modifications due to change of circumstances, ten millions of varieties have been produced, as varieties are being produced still?

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7 months 6 days ago

I do not mean to be disrespectful, but the attempt of the Lords to stop the progress of reform reminds me very forcibly of the great storm at Sidmouth, and of the conduct of the excellent Mrs Partington on that occasion. In the winter of 1824 there set in a great flood upon that town - the tide rose to an incredible height - the waves rushed in upon the houses, and everything was threatened with destruction. In the midst of this sublime and terrible storm, Dame Partington, who lived upon the beach, was seen at the door of her house with mop and pattens, trundling her mop, squeezing out the sea-water, and vigorously pushing away the Atlantic Ocean. The Atlantic was roused; Mrs. Partington's spirit was up. But I need not tell you that the contest was unequal.

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The Atlantic Ocean beat Mrs. Partington. Speech at Taunton
10 months 4 weeks ago

Anyone who studies present and ancient affairs will easily see how in all cities and all peoples there still exist, and have always existed, the same desires and passions. Thus, it is an easy matter for him who carefully examines past events to foresee future events in a republic and to apply the remedies employed by the ancients, or, if old remedies cannot be found, to devise new ones based upon the similarity of the events. But since these matters are neglected or not understood by those who read, or, if understood, remain unknown to those who govern, the result is that the same problems always exist in every era.

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Book 1, Chapter 39
9 months 3 weeks ago

And having looked to Government for bread, on the very first scarcity they will turn and bite the hand that fed them.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

The poor man is ruined as soon as he begins to ape the rich.

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Maxim 941
9 months 2 weeks ago

The victor and the one who keeps My works to the end: I will give him authority over the nations and He will shepherd them with an iron scepter; He will shatter them like pottery just as I have received this from My Father.

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9 months 2 weeks ago

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

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"Why I Am Not a Marxist" "Modern Monthly: Volume: 9″ (April 1935); Page: 77-79.
10 months 4 weeks ago

His Mohammed, as has been said, commands that ruling is to be done by the sword, and in his Koran the sword is the commonest and noblest work. Thus the Turk is, in truth, nothing but a murderer or highwayman, as his deeds show before men's eyes.

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On War against the Turk
8 months 2 weeks ago

Better to be ignorant of a matter than half know it.

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Maxim 865
10 months 3 weeks ago

Always put the best interpretation on a tenet. Why not on Christianity, wholesome, sweet, and poetic? It is the record of a pure and holy soul, humble, absolutely disinterested, a trutn-speaker, and bent on serving, teaching, and uplifting men. Christianity taught the capacity, the element, to Jove the All-perfect without a stingy bargain for personal happiness. It taught that to love him was happiness,-to love him in other's virtues.

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10 months 2 weeks ago

The soul is the prison of the body.

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Discipline and Punish (1977) as translated by Alan Sheridan, p. 30
8 months 3 weeks ago

People hate it when they're tickled because laughter is not pleasant, if it goes on too long. I think it's a desperate sort of convulsion in desperate circumstances, which helps a little.

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Interview Public Radio International
4 months 4 weeks ago

Philosophy has single handedly propped up religion through absolute skepticism....

 

https://axiomaticpanic.substack.com/p/philosophers-should-stand-behind

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9 months 3 weeks ago

"You're a gentleman," they used to say to him. "You shouldn't have gone murdering people with a hatchet; that's no occupation for a gentleman."

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10 months 3 weeks ago

Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it - when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., - in short, when it is used by us. Although private property itself again conceives all these direct realizations of possession as means of life, and the life which they serve as means is the life of private property - labour and conversion into capital. In place of all these physical and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses - the sense of having. The human being had to be reduced to this absolute poverty in order that he might yield his inner wealth to the outer world.

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p. 87, The Marx-Engels Reader
2 months 1 week ago

Universality. Preserve life.

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9 months 2 weeks ago

Not content with real sufferings, the anxious man imposes imaginary ones on himself; he is a being for whom unreality exists, must exist; otherwise where would he obtain the ration of torment his nature demands?

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10 months 3 weeks ago

In fact of course, this 'productive' worker cares as much about the crappy shit he has to make as does the capitalist himself who employs him, and who also couldn't give a damn for the junk.

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Notebook II, The Chapter on Capital, p. 193.
6 months 3 weeks ago

To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; & believing he never claimed any other.

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Letter to Benjamin Rush
8 months 2 weeks ago

It is the interest of the individual and of all society, that he should be made, at the earliest period, to understand his own construction, the proper use of its parts, and how to keep them at all times in a state of health; and especially that he should be taught to observe the varied effects of different kinds of food, and different quantities, upon his own constitution. He should be taught the general and individual laws of health, thus early, that he may know how to prevent the approach of disease. And the knowledge of the particular diet best suited to his constitution, is one of the most essential laws of health.

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3rd Part
9 months 3 weeks ago

Should the believers in special creations consider it unfair thus to call upon them to describe how special creations take place, I reply that this is far less than they demand from the supporters of the Development Hypothesis. They are merely asked to point out a conceivable mode. On the other hand, they ask, not simply for a conceivable mode, but for the actual mode.

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10 months 3 weeks ago

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry. What is best in mathematics deserves not merely to be learnt as a task, but to be assimilated as a part of daily thought, and brought again and again before the mind with ever-renewed encouragement.

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9 months 4 days ago

The Kropotkins, the Perovskayas, the Breshkovskayas, and hosts of others repudiated wealth and station and refused to serve King Mammon. They went among the people, not to lift them up but themselves to be lifted up, to be instructed, and in return to give themselves wholly to the people. That accounts for the heroism, the art, the literature of Russia, the unity between the people, the mujik and the intellectual. That to some extent explains the literature of all European countries, the fact that the Strindbergs, the Hauptmanns, the Wedekinds, the Brieux, the Mirbeaus, the Steinlins and Rodins have never dissociated themselves from the people.

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7 months 1 week ago

Value is not intrinsic, it is not in things. It is within us; it is the way in which man reacts to the conditions of his environment. Neither is value in words and doctrines, it is reflected in human conduct. It is not what a man or groups of men say about value that counts, but how they act.

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8 months 3 weeks ago

Understand then all of you, especially the young, that to want to impose an imaginary state of government on others by violence is not only a vulgar superstition, but even a criminal work. Understand that this work, far from assuring the well-being of humanity is only a lie, a more or less unconscious hypocrisy, camouflaging the lowest passions we possess.

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Passage written for for The Law of Love and the Law of Violence (1908), released in 1917
10 months 3 weeks ago

I will not talk about people a thousand miles off, but come as near home as I can. As the time is short, I will leave out all the flattery, and retain all the criticism. Let us consider the way in which we spend our lives.

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p. 484
7 months 6 days ago

... the only contestant who can confidently enter the lists is the man who has seen his own blood, who has felt his teeth rattle beneath his opponent's fist, who has been tripped and felt the full force of his adversary's charge, who has been downed in body but not in spirit, one who, as often as he falls, rises again with greater defiance than ever.

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10 months 3 weeks ago

Whoever heard me assert that the grey cat playing just now in the yard is the same one that did jumps and tricks there five hundred years ago will think whatever he likes of me, but it is a stranger form of madness to imagine that the present-day cat is fundamentally an entirely different one.

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Quoted by Jorge Luis Borges in his essay "A History of Eternity"
10 months 3 weeks ago

By nature a philosopher is not in genius and disposition half so different from a street porter, as a mastiff is from a greyhound.

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Chapter II, p. 17.
9 months 2 weeks ago

...whoever is not against us is for us.

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9:40
4 months 2 weeks ago

Sometimes I just want to show that these guys are normal people. These quotes might seem boring, but they serve a contextual purpose. Bringing these guys down to eye level creates a practical, attainable context for philosophy. Maybe Elbert here is already at eye level...😁

See biography for Elbert Hubbard:
https://civilsimian.com/Elbert-Hubbard

Read Elbert Hubbard's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/295/content

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8 months 2 weeks ago

Whenever a system of communication evolves, there is always the danger that some will exploit the system for their own ends.

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Ch. 4. The Gene machine
2 months 1 week ago

I've got mixed feelings about this...maybe for some people it's good advice. In this age the public is driven by mis and disinformation, so, that part's not relevant anymore....

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