Date: 1851
"The largest library in disorder is not so useful as a smaller but orderly one; in the same way the greatest amount of knowledge, if it has not been worked out in one’s own mind, is of less value than a much smaller amount that has been fully considered."
preview | full record— Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860)
Date: September 20, 1858
"The news of the new treaty wrung from China by the allied Plenipotentiaries has, it would appear, conjured up the same wild vistas of an immense extension of trade which danced before the eyes of the commercial mind in 1845, after the conclusion of the first Chinese war."
preview | full record— Marx, Karl (1818-1883)
Date: August 6 and 20, 1859
"The jaded cart-horse of the commonplace bourgeois mind falters of course in confusion in front of the ditch separating substance from appearance, and cause from effect; but one should not ride carthorses if one intends to go coursing over the very rough ground of abstract reasoning."
preview | full record— Engels, Friedrich (1820-1895)
Date: February 14, 1860
"But, in England, it is some subaltern spokesman, some worn-out place-hunter, some anonymous nonentity of a so-called Cabinet, that, relying on the donkey power of the Parliamentary mind and the bewildering evaporations of an anonymous press, without making any noise, without incurring any danger...
preview | full record— Marx, Karl (1818-1883)
Date: 1867
"As the hart pants after fresh water, so pants his soul after money, the only wealth."
preview | full record— Marx, Karl (1818-1883)
Date: 1867
"As capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital."
preview | full record— Marx, Karl (1818-1883)
Date: 1871
"The police-tinged bourgeois mind naturally figures to itself the International Working Men's Association as acting in the manner of a secret conspiracy, its central body ordering, from time to time, explosions in different countries."
preview | full record— Marx, Karl (1818-1883)
Date: 1878
"All religion, however, is nothing but the fantastic reflection in men's minds of those external forces which control their daily life, a reflection in which the terrestrial forces assume the form of supernatural forces."
preview | full record— Engels, Friedrich (1820-1895)
Date: 1911
"The psychical is divided (to speak metaphorically and not metaphysically) into monads that have no windows and are in communication only through empathy."
preview | full record— Husserl, Edmund (1859-1938)
Date: 1928, 1978
"Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his m...
preview | full record— Benjamin, Walter (1892-1940)