Daily commonplace
A shuffled feed of quotes and lessons, with today’s pick chosen by a date seed.
Today’s pick
Psychopathia Sexualis rewards readers who keep its categories in their own century before translating them into ours. It can sharpen modern judgment precisely because its insights and errors are both visible.
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“MARLEY was dead: to begin with”
A Christmas Carol — Charles Dickens
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“Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind-stone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner”
A Christmas Carol — Charles Dickens
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“If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
A Christmas Carol — Charles Dickens
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“You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are”
A Christmas Carol — Charles Dickens
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“I wear the chain I forged in life”
A Christmas Carol — Charles Dickens
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“Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business”
A Christmas Carol — Charles Dickens
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“This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy”
A Christmas Carol — Charles Dickens
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“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year”
A Christmas Carol — Charles Dickens
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“God bless us every one”
A Christmas Carol — Charles Dickens
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“I have been your doll-wife, just as at home I was papa's doll-child”
A Doll's House and Other Plays — Henrik Ibsen
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“I believe that before all else I am a reasonable human being, just as you are”
A Doll's House and Other Plays — Henrik Ibsen
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“Mother, give me the sun”
A Doll's House and Other Plays — Henrik Ibsen
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“The course of true love never did run smooth”
A Midsummer Night's Dream — William Shakespeare
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“I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection”
A Modest Proposal — Jonathan Swift
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“As liars, by the frequent repetition of their lies, come at last to remember them”
A Treatise of Human Nature — David Hume
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“When the imagination, from any extraordinary ferment of the blood and spirits, acquires such a vivacity as disorders all its powers and faculties, there is no means of distinguishing betwixt truth and falshood”
A Treatise of Human Nature — David Hume
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“reason is nothing but a wonderful and unintelligible instinct in our souls, which carries us along a certain train of ideas”
A Treatise of Human Nature — David Hume
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“I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception”
A Treatise of Human Nature — David Hume
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“they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement”
A Treatise of Human Nature — David Hume
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“The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations”
A Treatise of Human Nature — David Hume
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“I am first affrighted and confounded with that forelorn solitude, in which I am placed in my philosophy, and fancy myself some strange uncouth monster”
A Treatise of Human Nature — David Hume
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“Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium”
A Treatise of Human Nature — David Hume
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“I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends”
A Treatise of Human Nature — David Hume
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“Where reason is lively, and mixes itself with some propensity, it ought to be assented to”
A Treatise of Human Nature — David Hume
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“the minds of men are mirrors to one another, not only because they reflect each others emotions, but also because those rays of passions, sentiments and opinions may be often reverberated”
A Treatise of Human Nature — David Hume
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“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them”
A Treatise of Human Nature — David Hume
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“It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger”
A Treatise of Human Nature — David Hume
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“Morality, therefore, is more properly felt than judged of”
A Treatise of Human Nature — David Hume
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“I was not a little surprized to find many maniacs who at no period gave evidence of any lesion of the understanding, but who were under the dominion of instinctive and ab- stract fury”
A Treatise on Insanity — Philippe Pinel
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“Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man”
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding — David Hume
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“The most lively thought is still inferior to the dullest sensation”
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding — David Hume
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“All the objects of human reason or enquiry may naturally be divided into two kinds, to wit, _Relations of Ideas_, and _Matters of Fact”
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding — David Hume
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“Custom, then, is the great guide of human life”
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding — David Hume
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“nor has rhubarb always proved a purge, or opium a soporific to every one, who has taken these medicines”
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding — David Hume
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“A man in health possesses more of it than one languishing with sickness. We are more master of our thoughts in the morning than in the evening: Fasting, than after a full meal”
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding — David Hume
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“Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular”
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding — David Hume
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“A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence”
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding — David Hume
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“If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous, than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion”
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding — David Hume
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“Nature is always too strong for principle”
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding — David Hume
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“Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion”
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding — David Hume
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“it is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge”
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding — John Locke
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“The Candle that is set up in us shines bright enough for all our purposes”
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding — John Locke
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“Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas:—How comes it to be furnished”
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding — John Locke
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“For they do not appear to me to have lost the faculty of reasoning, but having joined together some ideas very wrongly, they mistake them for truths; and they err as men do that argue right from wrong principles”
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding — John Locke
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“a man who is very sober, and of a right understanding in all other things, may in one particular be as frantic as any in Bedlam”
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding — John Locke
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“For the colour and taste of opium are, as well as its soporific or anodyne virtues, mere powers, depending on its primary qualities”
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding — John Locke
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“it is but a supposed I know not what, to support those ideas we call accidents”
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding — John Locke
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“every one sees he would be the same PERSON with the prince, accountable only for the prince’s actions: but who would say it was the same MAN”
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding — John Locke
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“But is not a man drunk and sober the same person? why else is he punished for the fact he commits when drunk, though he be never afterwards conscious of it”
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding — John Locke
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“use the consolations of reason in this case, and you were as good preach ease to one on the rack, and hope to allay, by rational discourses, the pain of his joints tearing asunder”
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding — John Locke
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“A friend of mine knew one perfectly cured of madness by a very harsh and offensive operation”
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding — John Locke
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“though in that chamber he could dance excellently well, yet it was only whilst that trunk was there”
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding — John Locke
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“early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise”
Autobiography and Poor Richard's Almanack — Benjamin Franklin
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“Lo! the Spear-Danes' glory through splendid achievements The folk-kings' former fame we have heard of, How princes displayed then their prowess-in-battle”
Beowulf — Anonymous
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“SUPPOSING that Truth is a woman--what then”
Beyond Good and Evil — Friedrich Nietzsche
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“every great philosophy up till now has consisted of--namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious auto-biography”
Beyond Good and Evil — Friedrich Nietzsche
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“A living thing seeks above all to DISCHARGE its strength--life itself is WILL TO POWER; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent RESULTS thereof”
Beyond Good and Evil — Friedrich Nietzsche
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“a thought comes when "it" wishes, and not when "I" wish”
Beyond Good and Evil — Friedrich Nietzsche
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“Wherever the religious neurosis has appeared on the earth so far, we find it connected with three dangerous prescriptions as to regimen: solitude, fasting, and sexual abstinence”
Beyond Good and Evil — Friedrich Nietzsche
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“I did that," says my memory. "I could not have done that," says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually--the memory yields”
Beyond Good and Evil — Friedrich Nietzsche
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“There is no such thing as moral phenomena, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena”
Beyond Good and Evil — Friedrich Nietzsche
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“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee”
Beyond Good and Evil — Friedrich Nietzsche
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“Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology”
Beyond Good and Evil — Friedrich Nietzsche
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“Insanity in individuals is something rare--but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule”
Beyond Good and Evil — Friedrich Nietzsche
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“The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets successfully through many a bad night”
Beyond Good and Evil — Friedrich Nietzsche
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“skepticism is the most spiritual expression of a certain many-sided physiological temperament, which in ordinary language is called nervous debility and sickliness”
Beyond Good and Evil — Friedrich Nietzsche
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“The discipline of suffering, of GREAT suffering--know ye not that it is only THIS discipline that has produced all the elevations of humanity hitherto”
Beyond Good and Evil — Friedrich Nietzsche
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“There is MASTER-MORALITY and SLAVE-MORALITY”
Beyond Good and Evil — Friedrich Nietzsche
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“I would prefer not to”
Billy Budd and Other Stories — Herman Melville
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“Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men”
Billy Budd and Other Stories — Herman Melville
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“Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity”
Billy Budd and Other Stories — Herman Melville
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“the negro”
Billy Budd and Other Stories — Herman Melville
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“Struck dead by an angel of God. Yet the angel must hang”
Billy Budd and Other Stories — Herman Melville
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“God bless Captain Vere”
Billy Budd and Other Stories — Herman Melville
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“The first place that I can well remember was a large pleasant meadow with a pond of clear water in it”
Black Beauty — Anna Sewell
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“I hope you will grow up gentle and good, and never learn bad ways; do your work with a good will, lift up your feet when you trot, and never bite or kick even in play.”
Black Beauty — Anna Sewell
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“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.”
Cannery Row — John Steinbeck
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“Accordingly, two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self”
City of God — Augustine of Hippo
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“Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks.”
Civilization and Its Discontents — Sigmund Freud
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“Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God.”
Civilization and Its Discontents — Sigmund Freud