What has to be accepted, the given, is forms of life.' (Wittgenstein) This is the fact, the given, from which all thinking must start; and thinking, which starts from this fact, is in turn itself but another form of life.
The philosopher seeks a generality beyond the boundaries of science; he attempts to frame a comprehensive and coherent framework of ideas within which the partial results of science may become more intelligible.
Love as a concrete foundation for an authentically functional civilization requires the around-the-clock labors of forgiveness. Without it, Love fails, Friendship fails, Intelligence fails, Humanity: fails.
Jesus incarnated when our Western civilization was changing from being predominantly baby soul to predominantly young. We are now in a similar transition, from young to mature.
Before Gutenberg, libraries were small -- the Cambridge University library had only 122 volumes in 1424, for instance; after Gutenberg literacy became widespread.
The world's most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As...
One obvious palliative of the evils of democracy in its present form would be to encourage much more publicity and initiative on the part of civil servants. They ought to have the right, and, on occasion, the duty, to frame Bills in their own names, ...
The sentiments attributed to Christ are in the Old Testament. They were familiar in the Jewish schools and to all the Pharisees, long before the time of Christ, as they were familiar in all the civilizations of the earth — Egyptian, Babylonian, and...
Courtesy is a silver lining around the dark clouds of civilization; it is the best part of refinement and in many ways, an art of heroic beauty in the vast gallery of man's cruelty and baseness.
Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. The...
Hard to believe that so nearby, just across the Channel, such atrocities could still occur in their supposedly civilized world, that one could wake up one morning and find oneself bereft of brothers, parents, friends, all with the slice of an ax.
It’s all I’ve seen, all I’ve been through,” I said, “that makes it damn nearly impossible for me to say anything. I’ve lost the knack of making sense. I speak gibberish to the civilized world, and it replies in kind.
She is probably by this time as tired of me, as I am of her; but as she is too Polite and I am too civil to say so, our letters are still as frequent and affectionate as ever, and our Attachment as firm and sincere as when it first commenced.
If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs?
I'll call you," he repeated. "If you call me, I won't pick up the phone." "You will wait by the phone for my call, and when it rings, you will pick it up and you will speak to me in a civil manner. If you don't know how, ask someone.
If language is lost, humanity is lost. If writing is lost, certain kinds of civilization and society are lost, but many other kinds remain - and there is no reason to think that those alternatives are inferior.
Places matter. Their rules, their scale, their design include or exclude civil society, pedestrianism, equality, diversity (economic and otherwise), understanding of where water comes from and garbage goes, consumption or conservation. They map our l...
Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigat...
A prayerless age will have but scant models of divine power. The age may be a better age than the past, but there is an infinite distance between the betterment of an age by the force of an advancing civilization and its betterment by the increase of...
Kita umat Islam di Indonesia terikat pada adat-kebiasaan dan kebudayaan kita, dan ini mempunyai pengaruh pula pada Islam yang kita amalkan di tanah air kita ini.
Tuhan ingin menyampaikan risalah kepada manusia. Untuk itu Tuhan mengirim Rasul-rasul dan Nabi Muhammad adalah salah satu dari Rasul-rasul itu. Risalah yang ingin disampaikan Tuhan ialah norma-norma akhlak dan syariat.
