In quotation not only does...

In quotation not only does language turn on itself, but it does so word by word and expression by expression, and this reflexive twist is inseparable from the convenience and universal applicability of the device. Here we already have enough to draw the interest of the philosopher of language.

Some minds will jump here...

Some minds will jump here jump to the conclusion that a past idea cannot in any sense be present. But that is hasty and illogical. How extravagant too, to pronounce our whole knowledge of the past to be mere delusion! Yet it would seem that the past is completely beyond the bounds of possible experience as a Kantian thing-in-itself.

Later, after it was all...

Later, after it was all over, the historian Friedrich Meinecke tried to explain 'the German catastrophe' by arguing that technical specialization had caused some educated Germans (not him, needless to say) to lose sight of the humanistic values of Goethe and Schiller; thus they were unable to resist Hitler's 'mass Machiavellianism'. Thomas Mann was unusual in being able to recognize even at the time that, in 'Brother Hitler', the entire German Bildungsburgertum possessed a monstrous younger sibling who embodied some of their deepest-rooted aspirations. An academic education, far from inoculating people against Nazism, made them more likely to embrace it. So much for the greatness of the German universities. Their fall from grace was personified by the readiness of Martin Heidegger, the greatest German philosopher of his generation, to jump on the Nazi bandwagon, a swastika pin in his lapel.

Let us calculate the motion...

Let us calculate the motion of bodies, but also consult the plans of the Intelligence that makes them move.It seems that the ancient philosophers made the first attempts at this sort of science, in looking for metaphysical relationships between numbers and material bodies. When they said that God occupies himself with geometry, they surely meant that He unites in that science the works of His power with the perspectives of His wisdom.From the all too few ancient geometers who undertook such studies, we have little that is intelligible or well-founded. The perfection which geometry has acquired since their time puts us in a better position to succeed, and may more than compensate for the advantages that those great minds had over us.

No man who believes in...

No man who believes in force and violence is an Anarchist. The true Anarchist decries all influences save those of love and reason. Ideas are his only arms. Being an Anarchist I am also a Socialist. Socialism is the antithesis of Anarchy. One is the North Pole of Truth, the other the South. The Socialist believes in working for the good of all, while Anarchy is pure Individualism. I believe in every man working for the good of self; and in working for the good of self, he works for the good of all. To think, to see, to feel, to know; to deal justly; to bear all patiently; to act quietly; to speak cheerfully; to moderate one's voice — these things will bring you the highest good. They will bring you the love of the best, and the esteem of that Sacred Few, whose good opinion alone is worth cultivating. And further than this, it is the best way you can serve Society — live your life. The wise way to benefit humanity is to attend to your own affairs, and thus give other people an opportunity to look after theirs. If there is any better way to teach virtue than by practicing it, I do not know it. Would you make men better — set them an example. The millenium will never come until governments cease from governing, and the meddler is at rest. Politicians are men who volunteer the task of governing us, for a consideration. The political boss is intent on living off your labor. A man may seek an office in order to do away with the rascal who now occupies it, but for the most part office-seekers are rank rogues. Shakespeare used the word politician five times, and each time it is synonymous with knave. That is to say, a politician is one who sacrifices truth and honor for policy. The highest motive of his life is expediency — policy. In King Lear it is the "scurvy politician," who through tattered clothes beholds small vices, while robes and furred gowns, for him, covers all.

The fault with Hegel lies...

The fault with Hegel lies much deeper than in his glorification of the Prussian monarchy. He is guilty not so much of being servile as of betraying his highest philosophical ideas. His political doctrine surrenders society to nature, freedom to necessity, reason to caprice. And in so doing, it mirrors the destiny of the social order that falls, while in pursuit of its freedom, into a state of nature far below reason. P. 218

The non-evaluative general total conception...

The non-evaluative general total conception of ideology is to be found primarily in those historical investigations, where, provisionally and for the sake of the simplification of the problem, no judgments are pronounced as to the correctness of the ideas to be treated. This approach confines itself to discovering the relations between certain mental structures and the life-situations in which they exist. We must constantly ask ourselves how it comes about that a given type of social situation gives rise to a given interpretation. Thus the ideological element in human thought, viewed at this level, is always bound up with the existing life-situation of the thinker. According to this view human thought arises, and operates, not in a social vacuum but in a definite social milieu.

But the extraordinary insight which...

But the extraordinary insight which some persons are able to gain of others from indications so slight that it is difficult to ascertain what they are, is certainly rendered more comprehensible by the view here taken.

The degree of concentration of...

The degree of concentration of a consciousness varies in inverse ratio to the simplicity of the material compound...Spiritual perfection (or conscious 'centreity') and material synthesis (or complexity) are but two aspects or connected parts of one and the same phenomenon.

To supply a thought is...

To supply a thought is mental massage; but to evolve a thought of your own is an achievement. Thinking is a brain exercise — and no faculty grows save as it is exercised.

The way in which a...

The way in which a society organizes the life of its members … is one “project” of realization among others. But once the project has become operative in the basic institutions and relations, it tends to become exclusive and to determine the development of the society as a whole.

Let us not pretend to...

Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.

Two difficulties: (1) Can we...

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!

What is asked of a...

What is asked of a man that he may be able to pray for his enemies? To pray for one's enemies is the hardest thing of all. That is why it exasperates us so much in our present day situation.

The world can no more...

The world can no more have two summits than a circumference can have two centres.

From giant Oaks, that wave...

From giant Oaks, that wave their branches dark,To the dwarf Moss, that clings upon their bark,What Beaux and Beauties crowd the gaudy groves,And woo and win their vegetable Loves.How Snowdrops cold, and blue-eyed Harebels blendTheir tender tears, as o’er the stream they bend;The lovesick Violet, and the Primrose paleBow their sweet heads, and whisper to the gale;With secret sighs the Virgin Lily droops,And jealous Cowslips hang their tawny cups.How the young Rose in beauty’s damask prideDrinks the warm blushes of his bashful bride;With honey’d lips enamour’d Woodbines meet,Clasp with fond arms, and mix their kisses sweet.—  Stay thy soft-murmuring waters, gentle Rill;Hush, whispering Winds, ye ruflling Leaves, be still;Rest, silver Butterflies, your quivering wings;Alight, ye Beetles, from your airy rings;Ye painted Moths, your gold-eyed plumage furl,Bow your wide horns, your spiral trunks uncurl;Glitter, ye Glow-worms, on your mossy beds;Descend, ye Spiders, on your lengthen’d threads;Slide here, ye horned Snails, with varnish’d shells;Ye Bee-nymphs, listen in your waxen cells!—  Bᴏᴛᴀɴɪᴄ Mᴜsᴇ! who in this latter ageLed by your airy hand the Swedish sage,Bad his keen eye your secret haunts exploreOn dewy dell, high wood, and winding shore;Say on each leaf how tiny Graces dwell;How laugh the Pleasures in a blossom’s bell;How insect Loves arise on cobweb wings,Aim their light shafts, and point their little stings.

Paul Valéry insists on the...

Paul Valéry insists on the inescapable commitment of the poetic language to the negation. The verses of this language “ne parlent jamais que de choses absentes.” They speak of that which, though absent, haunts the established universe of discourse and behavior as its most tabooed possibility—neither heaven nor hell, neither good nor evil but simply “le bonheur.”

Have patience awhile; slanders are...

Have patience awhile; slanders are not long-lived. Truth is the child of time; erelong she shall appear to vindicate thee.

Every human being is tried...

Every human being is tried this way in the active service of expectancy. Now comes the fulfillment and relieves him, but soon he is again placed on reconnaissance for expectancy; then he is again relieved, but as long as there is any future for him, he has not yet finished his service. And while human life goes on this way in very diverse expectancy, expecting very different things according to different times and occasions and in different frames of mind, all life is again one nightwatch of expectancy.

The dissimulation of the woven...

The dissimulation of the woven texture can in any case take centuries to undo its web: a web that envelops a web, undoing the web for centuries; reconstituting it too as an organism, indefinitely regenerating its own tissue behind the cutting trace, the decision of each reading. There is always a surprise in store for the anatomy or physiology of any criticism that might think it had mastered the game, surveyed all the threads at once, deluding itself, too, in wanting to look at the text without touching it, without laying a hand on the "object," without risking- which is the only chance of entering into the game, by getting a few fingers caught- the addition of some new thread.

The bird of passage known...

The bird of passage known to us as the cuckoo.

He is only a very...

He is only a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of the Conservative.

Dialectical thought understands the critical...

Dialectical thought understands the critical tension between “is” and “ought” first as an ontological condition, pertaining to the structure of Being itself. However, the recognition of this state of Being — its theory — intends from the beginning a concrete practice. Seen in the light of a truth which appears in them falsified or denied, the given facts themselves appear false and negative.

The second is the partiality...

The second is the partiality for unity proper to the philosophical mind, whence this wide-spread canon has flown forth: principles are not to be multiplied beyond supreme necessity, to which we give in our adhesion, not because we have insight into causal unity in the world either by reason or experience, but as seeking it by an impulse of the intellect which seems to itself to have by thus much advanced in the explication of phenomena, by as much as it is granted to it to descend from the same principle to a greater number of consequences,

A son is a mirror...

A son is a mirror in which the father sees himself reflected, and the father is a mirror in which the son sees himself as he will be in the future.

The intellectual ... must try...

The intellectual ... must try never to forget the arguments of the adversary, or the uncertainty of the future, or the faults of one’s own side, or the underlying fraternity of ordinary men everywhere.

I suppose you imagined I...

I suppose you imagined I was so insanely in love with you that I could commit any folly. When will you women understand that one isn't insanely in love? All one asks for is a quiet life, which you won't allow one to have. I don't know what the devil ever induced me to marry you. It was all a damned stupid, practical joke. And now you go about saying I'm a murderer. I won't stand it.

Sometime ago I went with...

Sometime ago I went with some children to see Maeterlinck's fine and delicate fairy play about the Blue Bird that brought everybody happiness. For some reason or other it did not bring me happiness, and even the children were not quite happy. I will not go so far as to say that the Blue Bird was a Blue Devil, but it left us in something seriously like the blues. The children were party dissatisfied with it because it did not end with a Day of Judgment; because it was never revealed to the hero and heroine that the dog had been faithful and the cat faithless. For children are innocent and love justice; while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.

Another veteran communist calling for...

Another veteran communist calling for the revision of conventional contemporary Marxism was Herbert Marcuse. After emigrating from Nazi Germany in 1933, he took American citizenship and wrote prolifically about the need to graft several intellectual trends of the twentieth century – especially Freudianism and German sociology – on to the tree of the Marxist tradition. Marcuse rejected Stalin’s version of communism as dogmatic, narrow and plain wrong in its interpretation of Marx. He was a freer spirit than Lukács and refused to recognise Lenin as an absolute authority. He insisted that sexual drives as well as economic imperatives help to explain the mechanisms of politics and society. He scorned the Communist Party of the USA and refused to align himself with any organisation. His experiences as a young militant in Europe had eroded his faith in the revolutionary potential of the working class. Marcuse saw well-paid industrial workers as constituting one of the obstacles to humanity’s liberation from oppression. Based on the San Diego campus of the University of California, he counted instead upon the unemployed, the vagabond poor and the Hispanic immigrants; he also had a soft spot for college students. He regarded these groups as living in detachment from ‘bourgeois’ society and ready to overcome the ‘one-dimensional’ aspects of contemporary capitalist existence. Marcuse’s forte was as a philosopher. His preoccupation with epistemology and dialectics was typical of a growing trend among Marxist writers seeking to challenge the Marxism that had been customary since 1917.

... happiness is not an...

... happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination, resting on merely empirical grounds,

The law of nature teaches...

The law of nature teaches me to speak in my own defence: With respect to this charge of bribery I am as innocent as any man born on St. Innocents Day. I never had a bribe or reward in my eye or thought when pronouncing judgment or order (…). I am ready to make an oblation of myself to the King. (17 April 1621)

He lived year after year....

He lived year after year. He attended only to himself and to God and this picture-but he did not understand himself.

In Europe, you do philosophy...

In Europe, you do philosophy by performing discourse on another guy's text, and so Derrida will go over Heidegger, and Habermas will extend Marx's corpus; but in America you could never get away with kinky stuff like that, for you have to generate philosophy from real things—like computers or television. You need to look at Omni magazine to get a feel for this new kind of mail-order, Popular Mechanics science of mind. It's full of articles about meditation helmets and downloading the soul into computers so that when your body wears out you can live forever. What is completely missing in Europe is precisely what you will find in America: namely, an electronic Umwelt in which history is replaced with movies, education is replaced with entertainment, and nature is replaced with technology. This peculiar wedding of low kitsch and high tech generates a posthistoric world that no European literary intellectual can quite fathom.

Horror is the natural reaction...

Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history.

Brutes are merely brutal; men...

Brutes are merely brutal; men and women are capable of being devils and lunatics. They are no less capable of being fully human-even, occasionally, of being a bit more than fully human, of being saints, heroes and geniuses.

All slang is metaphor, and...

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

Two things fill the mind...

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within. I have not to search for them and conjecture them as though they were veiled in darkness or were in the transcendent region beyond my horizon; I see them before me and connect them directly with the consciousness of my existence. The former begins from the place I occupy in the external world of sense, and enlarges my connection therein to an unbounded extent with worlds upon worlds and systems of systems, and moreover into limitless times of their periodic motion, its beginning and continuance. The second begins from my invisible self, my personality, and exhibits me in a world which has true infinity, but which is traceable only by the understanding, and with which I discern that I am not in a merely contingent but in a universal and necessary connection, as I am also thereby with all those visible worlds. The former view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates as it were my importance as an animal creature, which after it has been for a short time provided with vital power, one knows not how, must again give back the matter of which it was formed to the planet it inhabits (a mere speck in the universe). The second, on the contrary, infinitely elevates my worth as an intelligence by my personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality and even of the whole sensible world, at least so far as may be inferred from the destination assigned to my existence by this law, a destination not restricted to conditions and limits of this life, but reaching into the infinite.

As we divided natural philosophy...

As we divided natural philosophy in general into the inquiry of causes, and productions of effects: so that part which concerneth the inquiry of causes we do subdivide according to the received and sound division of causes. The one part, which is physic, inquireth and handleth the material and efficient causes; and the other, which is metaphysic, handleth the formal and final causes.

The next thing you can...

The next thing you can learn from the woman who was a sinner, something she herself understood, is that with regard to finding forgiveness she is able to do nothing at all. P. 155

You need the "is of...

You need the "is of identity" to describe conspiracy theories. Korzybski would say that proves that illusions, delusions, and "mental" illnesses require the "is" to perpetuate them. (He often said, "Isness is an illness.") Korzybski also popularized the idea that most sentences, especially the sentences that people quarrel over or even go to war over, do not rank as propositions in the logical sense, but belong to the category that Bertrand Russell called propositional functions. They do not have one meaning, as a proposition in logic should have; they have several meanings, like an algebraic function.

Lord Edward was not listening...

Lord Edward was not listening to his assistant. He had taken his pipe out of his mouth, he had lifted his head and at the same time slightly cocked it on one side. He was frowning, as though making an effort to seize and remember something. He raised his hand in a gesture that commanded silence; Illidge interrupted himself in the middle of his sentence and also listened. A pattern of melody faintly traced itself upon the silence...Pongileoni's bowing and the scraping of the anonymous fiddlers had shaken the air in the great hall, had set the glass of the windows looking onto it vibrating: and thus in turn had shaken the air in Lord Edward's apartment on the further side. The shaking air rattled Lord Edward's membrane tympani; the interlocked malleus, incus, and stirrup bones were set in motion so as to agitate the membrane of the oval window and raise an infinitesimal storm in the fluid of the labyrinth. The hairy endings of the auditory nerve shuddered like weeds in a rough sea; a vast number of obscure miracles were performed in the brain, and Lord Edwards ecstatically whispered "Bach!" He smiled with pleasure, his eyes lit up. The young girl was singing to herself in solitude under the floating clouds. And then the cloud-solitary philosopher began poetically to meditate. "We must really go downstairs and listen," said Lord Edward. He got up, "Come," he said. "Work can wait. One doesn't hear this sort of thing every night."

It is the custom in...

It is the custom in our little epoch to sneer at the middle classes. Cockney artists profess to find the bourgeoisie dull; as if artists had any business to find anything dull. Decadents talk contemptuously of its conventions and its set tasks; it never occurs to them that conventions and set tasks are the very way to keep that greenness in the grass and that redness in the roses--which they have lost forever.

The only satisfied rationalists today...

The only satisfied rationalists today are blinkered scientists or Marxists.

Nature made women mature early...

Nature made women mature early and had them demand gentle and polite treatment from men, so that they would find themselves imperceptibly fettered by a child due to their own magnanimity; and they would find themselves brought, if not quite to morality itself, then at least to that which cloaks it, moral behavior, which is the preparation and introduction to morality.

The beginning is from God:...

The beginning is from God: for the business which is in hand, having the character of good so strongly impressed upon it, appears manifestly to proceed from God, who is the author of good, and the Father of Lights. Now in divine operations even the smallest beginnings lead of a certainty to their end. And as it was said of spiritual things, "The kingdom of God cometh not with observation," so is it in all the greater works of Divine Providence; everything glides on smoothly and noiselessly, and the work is fairly going on "before men are aware that it has begun. Nor should the prophecy of Daniel be forgotten, touching the last ages of the world: —"Many shall go to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased;" clearly intimating that the thorough passage of the world (which now by so many distant voyages seems to be accomplished, or in course of accomplishment), and the advancement of the sciences, are destined by fate, that is, by Divine Providence, to meet in the same age.

When Christianity came into the...

When Christianity came into the world the task was simply to proclaim Christianity. The same is the case wherever Christianity is introduced into a country the religion of which is not Christianity.

For those who want to...

For those who want to develop or use semantical methods, the decisive question is not the alleged ontological question of the existence of abstract entities but rather the question whether the rise of abstract linguistic forms or, in technical terms, the use of variables beyond those for things (or phenomenal data), is expedient and fruitful for the purposes for which semantical analyses are made, viz. the analysis, interpretation, clarification, or construction of languages of communication, especially languages of science.

At the core of the...

At the core of the Perennial Philosophy we find four fundamental doctrines.First: the phenomenal world of matter and of individualized consciousness — the world of things and animals and men and even gods — is the manifestation of a Divine Ground within which all partial realities have their being, and apart from which they would be non-existent.Second: human beings are capable not merely of knowing about the Divine Ground by inference; they can also realize its existence by a direct intuition, superior to discursive reasoning. This immediate knowledge unites the knower with that which is known.Third: man possesses a double nature, a phenomenal ego and an eternal Self, which is the inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul. It is possible for a man, if he so desires, to identify himself with the spirit and therefore with the Divine Ground, which is of the same or like nature with the spirit.Fourth: man's life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so to come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground.

Poets have been mysteriously silent...

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

I was shocked many years...

I was shocked many years ago when a physicist said to me that Kant was the greatest astrophysicist in a hundred-year period. And I asked “Why do you say that? You talk about Kant-Lagrange hypothesis?” He said “No, that was only a hypothesis. Kant showed by a very eloquent geometrical argument that we live near the edge of landscape galaxy in the center of the sphere that resembles Andromeda nebula”. I never heard of that, no philosopher told me that, no historian of philosophy told me that, an astronomer told me that! It was Steven Weinberg; he then said that Kant was the only astrophysicist in about a hundred years who believed that star clustering could be accounted for by gravitation alone.