Skip to main content
7 months 1 week ago

The End of the Life of Mankind on Earth is this,-that in this Life they may order all their relations with FREEDOM according to REASON.

0
0
Source
source
p. 5
6 months 1 week ago

I am extremely pleased by Daniel Fincke's article, which says exactly what I SHOULD have said and, to my regret, didn't make sufficiently clear in my Reason Rally speech. The best way to summarise it would be to modify the quotation from Johann Hari. Johann said, "I respect you too much to respect your ridiculous beliefs". From now on, my version will be, "I respect you too much to accept that you really believe anything so ridiculous as you claim. Please either defend those beliefs and explain why they are not ridiculous, or else declare that you do not hold them and publicly disown the church to which you claim loyalty."

0
0
Source
source
comment on Daniel Fincke (2 April 2012), "In Defense of Dawkins's Reason Rally Speech", RichardDawkins.net, retrieved on 1 May 2012
8 months 1 week ago

Those in the crossing must in the end know what is mistaken by all urging for intelligibility: that every thinking of being, all philosophy, can never be confirmed by "facts," ie, by beings. Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy. Those who idolize "facts" never notice that their idols only shine in a borrowed light. They are also meant not to notice this; for thereupon they would have to be at a loss and therefore useless. But idolizers and idols are used wherever gods are in flight and so announce their nearness.

0
0
Source
source
Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) [Beitrage Zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis)], notes of 1936-1938, as translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly
8 months 1 week ago

In the history of madness, two events signal this change with singular clarity: in 1657, the founding of the Hôpital Général, and the Great Confinement of the poor; and in 1794, the liberation of the mad in chains at Bicêtre. Between these two singular and symmetrical events, something happened, whose ambiguity has perplexed historians of medicine: blind repression in an absolutist regime, according to some, and, according to others, the progressive discovery, by science and philanthropy, of madness in its positive truth. In fact, beneath these reversible meanings, a structure was taking shape, which did not undo that ambiguity but was decisive for it. This structure explains the passage from the medieval and humanist experience of madness to the experience that is our own, which confines madness in mental illness.

0
0
Source
source
Preface to 1961 edition
6 months 2 weeks ago

And so one can imagine that in amorous seduction the other is the locus of your secret - the other unknowingly holds that which you will never have the chance to know.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 65)
7 months 3 weeks ago

Dispose thy Soul to all good and necessary things!

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

...be tolerant with others and strict with yourself. Remember, nothing belongs to you but your flesh and blood-and nothing else is under your control.

0
0
Source
source
(Hays translation) V, 33
5 months 1 week ago

A person who has been punished is not thereby simply less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.

0
0
Source
source
Beyond Freedom and Dignity
8 months 2 weeks ago

It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.

0
0
Source
source
The Prince (1513), Ch. 6; translated by W. K. Marriott
4 months 2 weeks ago

A slave's soul has no worth, my brothers; it lacks strengthto tread on this great earth with gallantry and freedom.I pity the poor slaves, they're nought but airy mist,a light breeze scatters them, a fragrance knocks them down;it's only just they crawl on the earth on hands and knees.Today I'll write a hymn to God and pray for this great grace.

0
0
Source
source
Egyptian high priest, Book X, line 90
6 months 1 week ago

Language is a sense, like touch.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 271)
7 months 3 days ago

The disparagement of empirical evidence in favor of a metaphysical world of illusion has its origin in the conflict between the emancipated individual of bourgeois society and his fate within that society.

0
0
Source
source
p. 138.
5 months 1 week ago

Learning proceeds until death and only then does it stop. ... Its purpose cannot be given up for even a moment. To pursue it is to be human, to give it up to be a beast.

0
0
Source
source
Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy (2001), p. 258
8 months 3 days ago

What needs saying is worth saying twice.

0
0
Source
source
fr. 25
5 months 4 days ago

Alas! such is the miseducation of these days, it is only among those that are called the uneducated classes - those educated by experience - that you can look for a Man. Even among these, such a sight is growing daily rarer. My father, in several respects, has not, that I can think of, left his fellow. Perhaps among Scottish peasants what Samuel Johnson was among English authors. I have a sacred pride in my peasant father, and would not exchange him, even now, for any king known to me. Gold and the guinea stamp - the Man and the clothes of the man. Let me thank God for that greatest of blessings, and strive to live worthily of it.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

There is perhaps nothing more interesting than to listen to a superior man talk of what he does not know. He advances slowly, and scarcely puts his foot down without knowing if the ground is solid; he looks for plausible analogies; he tries to attach his ideas to higher and incontestable principles; he always has the tone of looking, never that of teaching; and it often happens that, even if he is mistaken, he leaves a great enough idea of his mental honesty.

0
0
Source
source
p. 43
8 months 1 week ago

There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 11
8 months 1 week ago

One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.

0
0
Source
source
Journal entry (11 October 1914), p. 10e
8 months 1 week ago

Science is not a system of certain, or well established, statements; nor is it a statement which steadily advances towards state of finality. Our science is not knowledge (epistēmē): it can newer claim to have attained truth, or even substitute for it, such as probability. . . . We do not know; we can only guess.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 10 "Corroboration, or How a Theory Stands up to Tests", section 85: The Path of Science, p. 278.

With Leibnitz the extent to which thoughts advance is the extent of the universe; where comprehension ceases, the universe ceases, and God begins: so that later it was even maintained that to be comprehended was derogatory to God, because He was thus degraded into finitude. In that procedure a beginning is made from the determinate, this and that are stated to be necessary; but since in the next place the unity of these moments is not comprehended, it is transferred to God. God is therefore, as it were, the waste channel into which all contradictions flow: Leibnitz's Théodicée is just a popular summing up such as this.

0
0
Source
source
Third division, Chapter I. - The Metaphysics of the Understanding Alternate translation: "God is, as it were, the sewer into which all contradictions flow."
8 months 2 weeks ago

One must never forget to look at the aim of a matter.

0
0
Source
source
Act III, scene xi
7 months 1 week ago

The first philosophers were astronomers. The heavens remind man ... that he is destined not merely to act, but also to contemplate.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction, Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), pp. 101-102
9 months 1 week ago

For those of us who have been thrown into hell, mysterious melodies and the torturing images of a vanished beauty will always bring us, in the midst of crime and folly, the echo of that harmonious insurrection which bears witness, throughout the centuries, to the greatness of humanity.

0
0
8 months 3 weeks ago

There is no need for you to develop an armed insurrection. Christ himself has already begun an insurrection with his mouth.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 67-68
6 months 1 week ago

Any new technology is an evolutionary and biological mutation opening doors of perception and new spheres of action to mankind.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 67)

Nothing's changed...roughly 170 years later...even though their lives were probably way harsher...the general sentiment is the same....

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

Now the basic impulse behind existentialism is optimistic, very much like the impulse behind all science. Existentialism is romanticism, and romanticism is the feeling that man is not the mere he has always taken himself for. Romanticism began as a tremendous surge of optimism about the stature of man. Its aim - like that of science - was to raise man above the muddled feelings and impulses of his everyday humanity, and to make him a god-like observer of human existence.

0
0
Source
source
p. 96
6 months 1 week ago

Every day should be passed as if it were to be our last.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 633
4 months 1 week ago

For thus it is, men of Athens, in truth: wherever a man has placed himself thinking it is the best place for him, or has been placed by a commander, there in my opinion he ought to stay and to abide the hazard, taking nothing into the reckoning, either death or anything else, before the baseness of deserting his post.

0
0
Source
source
VII, 45
8 months 3 days ago

It is now generally accepted that the roots of our ethics lie in patterns of behavior that evolved among our pre-human ancestors, the social mammals and that we retain within our biological nature elements of these evolved responses. We have learned considerably more about these responses, and we are beginning to to understand how they interact with our capacity to reason.

0
0
Source
source
Preface To The 2011 edition, p. xi
6 months 3 weeks ago

Those who will not worship at the shrine of money, need not hope for recognition. On the other hand, they will also not have to think other people's thoughts or wear other people's political clothes. They will not have to proclaim as true that which is false, nor praise that as humanitarian which is brutal.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

"For many, abstract thinking is toil; for me, on good days, it is feast and frenzy." (XIV, 24) Abstract thinking a feast? The highest form of human existence? ... "The feast implies: pride, exuberance, frivolity; mockery of all earnestness and respectability; a divine affirmation of oneself, out of animal plenitude and perfection-all obviously states to which the Christian may not honestly say Yes. The feast is paganism par excellence." (WM, 916). For that reason, we might add that thinking never takes place in Christianity. That is to say, there is no Christian philosophy. There is no true philosophy that could be determined anywhere else than from within itself.

0
0
Source
source
p. 5
8 months 1 week ago

There are always two parties, the party of the Past and the party of the Future: the Establishment and the Movement. At times the resistance is reanimated, the schism runs under the world and appears in Literature, Philosophy, Church, State and social customs.

0
0
Source
source
p. 529, col. 1
9 months 1 week ago

An observer studying the Solar system dispassionately, and finding himself capable of bringing the four giant planets to his notice, could reasonably say that the Solar system consisted of one star, four planets, and some traces of debris.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

Genius borrows nobly. When Shakespeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies: "Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life."

0
0
Source
source
Quotation and Originality
4 months 4 weeks ago

At any rate, if you wish to sift doubtful meanings of this kind, teach us that the happy man is not he whom the crowd deems happy, namely, he into whose coffers mighty sums have flowed, but he whose possessions are all in his soul, who is upright and exalted, who spurns inconstancy, who sees no man with whom he wishes to change places, who rates men only at their value as men, who takes Nature for his teacher, conforming to her laws and living as she commands, whom no violence can deprive of his possessions, who turns evil into good, is unerring in judgment, unshaken, unafraid, who may be moved by force but never moved to distraction, whom Fortune when she hurls at him with all her might the deadliest missile in her armoury, may graze, though rarely, but never wound.

0
0
7 months 2 weeks ago

When we desire to confine our words, we commonly say they are spoken under the rose.

0
0
Source
source
Pseudodoxia Epidemica Book 5, Ch. 22, sect. 6

One never goes so far as when one doesn't know where one is going.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Carl Friedrich Zelter
7 months 1 week ago

The revolution must end and the republic must begin. In our constitution, right must take the place of duty, welfare that of virtue, and self-defense that of punishment. Everyone must be able to prevail and to live according to one's own nature.

0
0
Source
source
Act I.
7 months 4 days ago

I think that the philosopher must, for his own purposes, carry methodological strictness to an extreme when he is investigating and pursuing his truths, but when he is ready to enunciate them and give them out, he ought to avoid the cynical skill with which some scientists, like a Hercules at the fair, amuse themselves by displaying to the public the biceps of their technique.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 19-20
4 months 3 weeks ago

Can a man who's warm understand one who's freezing?

0
0
8 months 2 weeks 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.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 222)
3 weeks 1 day ago

First thoughts were "Google" and "Yahoo". Then I thought about the Cybertruck. I guess we should remember some things stay foolish.

0
0
7 months 2 weeks ago

If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free; if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.

0
0
Source
source
No. 1
8 months 1 week ago

When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart.

0
0
Source
source
December 10, 1824
8 months 2 weeks ago

His reputation will go on increasing because scarcely anyone reads him.

0
0
Source
source
"Dante", 1765

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia