United States or New Caledonia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
What is remarked with much truth of many another writer, that he suggests more than he achieves, is in the highest degree applicable to Schopenhauer; and his obiter dicta, his sayings by the way, will always find an audience. Demopheles.
My consolation is that, alike in controversies and in taking mineral waters, the after effects are the true ones. Demopheles. Well, I hope it'll be beneficial in your case. Philalethes. It might be so, if I could digest a certain Spanish proverb. Demopheles. Which is? Philalethes. Behind the cross stands the devil. Demopheles. Come, don't let us part with sarcasms.
You are childish yourself and extremely ridiculous, and so are all philosophers; and when a sedate man like myself lets himself in for a quarter of an hour's talk with such fools, it is merely for the sake of amusement and to while away the time. I have more important matters to look to now; so, adieu! Demopheles.
The convictions of those who are thus locally convinced are taken on trust and believed by the masses everywhere. Demopheles. Well, no harm is done, and it doesn't make any real difference. As a fact, Protestantism is more suited to the North, Catholicism to the South.
The flag to which I have taken the oath is truth; I shall remain faithful to it everywhere, and whether I succeed or not, I shall fight for light and truth! If I see religion on the wrong side Demopheles. But you won't. Religion isn't a deception: it is true and the most important of all truths.
Even Machiavelli, in the eighteenth chapter of his book, most earnestly recommended religion to princes. Beyond this, one may say that revealed religions stand to philosophy exactly in the relation of "sovereigns by the grace of God," to "the sovereignty of the people"; so that the two former terms of the parallel are in natural alliance. Demopheles. Oh, don't take that tone!
Religion must be regarded as a necessary evil, its necessity resting on the pitiful imbecility of the great majority of mankind, incapable of grasping the truth, and therefore requiring, in its pressing need, something to take its place. Demopheles. Really, one would think that you philosophers had truth in a cupboard, and that all you had to do was to go and get it! Philalethes.
You mustn't ascribe to religion what results from innate goodness of character, by which compassion for the man who would suffer by his crime keeps a man from committing it. This is the genuine moral motive, and as such it is independent of all religions. Demopheles. But this is a motive which rarely affects the multitude unless it assumes a religious aspect.
Those special moral delinquencies for which we reproach the ancients, and which are perhaps less uncommon now-a-days than appears on the surface to be the case, are trifles compared with the Christian enormities I have mentioned. Can you then, all considered, maintain that mankind has been really made morally better by Christianity? Demopheles.
Everyone will admit that a race, the past duration of which on the earth all accounts, physical and historical, agree in placing at not more than some hundred times the life of a man of sixty, is as yet only in its first childhood. Demopheles.
Word Of The Day