philosophybits: “Truly man is a marvellously vain, diverse, and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgement on him.” — Michel de Montaigne, Essais ..read more

“Love and light have not availed against vitriol. What a horror would have seized us at the thought, once upon a time! That short phrase can annul all Schiller. We have shut our eyes and stopped our ears, we have built huge philosophic systems to shield us from this tiny thought. And now — now it seems we have no more feeling for Schiller and the great systems, we have no pity on our past beliefs. We now are seeking for words with which to sing the praises of our former enemy. Night, the dark, deaf, impenetrable night, peopled with horrors — does she not now loom before us, infinitely beautifu ..read more

philosophybits: “Knowledge, like other good things, is difficult, but not impossible; the dogmatist forgets the difficulty, the skeptic denies the possibility. Both are mistaken, and their errors, when widespread, produce social disaster.” — Bertrand Russell, On Education, Especially in Early Childhood ..read more

“It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment ..read more

philosophybits: “It is nonsense to assert that revelry, vice, ecstasy, passion, would become impossible if man and woman were equal in concrete matters.” — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex ..read more

“Society was saved by the negation of its own principles, by a revolution in its religion, and by violation of its most sacred rights. In this revolution, the idea of justice spread to an extent that had not before been dreamed of, never to return to its original limits. Heretofore justice had existed only for the masters; it then commenced to exist for the slaves.” - Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property ..read more

philosophybits: “Philosophical thought is inward action; it appeals to freedom; it is a summons to transcendence.” — Karl Jaspers, Way to Wisdom ..read more

“Every particular conception of God is mere gossip. But the idea of God is the Idea of ideas.” - Friedrich Schlegel, Ideas ..read more

philosophybits: “True social harmony grows naturally out of solidarity of interests. In a society where those who always work never have anything, while those who never work enjoy everything, solidarity of interests is non-existent; hence social harmony is but a myth.” — Emma Goldman, “Anarchism, What it Really Stands For”, Anarchism and Other Essays ..read more

thirdity: “The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence — as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence … The Photograph then becomes a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest shared hallucination (on the one hand ‘it is not there,’ on the other ‘but it has indeed been’): a mad image, chafed by reality.” — Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography ..read more