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3 months 3 weeks ago

We are all attached to the throne of the Supreme Being by a supple chain that restrains us without enslaving us. Nothing is more admirable in the universal order of things than the action of free beings under the divine hand. Freely slaves, they act voluntarily and necessarily at the same time; they really do what they will, but without being able to disturb the general plans. Each of these beings occupies the centre of a sphere of activity whose diameter varies according to the will of the Eternal Geometer, who can extend, restrict, check, or direct the will without altering its nature.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Science does not stand still, and neither does philosophy, although the latter has a tendency to walk in circles.

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Afterword To The 2011 Edition, p. 187
7 months 1 week ago

The only roads of enquiry there are to think of: one, that it is and that it is not possible for it not to be, this is the path of persuasion (for truth is its companion); the other, that it is not and that it must not be - this I say to you is a path wholly unknowable.

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Frag. B 2.2-6, quoted by Proclus, Commentary on the Timaeus I, 345
6 months 1 week ago

From the power to transform him into a thing by killing him there proceeds another power, and much more prodigious, that which makes a thing of him while he still lives.

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in The Simone Weil Reader, p. 155
6 months 6 days ago

Yet it must be acknowledged that there is a fundamental difference between the sexual impulse in men and women. Her need is for a lover, a protector, a father for her children. His desire is for mastery, conquest, to be allowed to use her body for his own satisfaction. He feels like a bee, burying itself in a flower, apparently doing nothing for the flower but taking its sweetness. If he loves her, then his desire is mixed with a kind of pity.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Innumerable men had passed by, across this Universe, with a dumb vague wonder, such as the very animals may feel; or with a painful, fruitlessly inquiring wonder, such as men only feel;-till the great Thinker came, the original man, the Seer; whose shaped spoken Thought awakes the slumbering capability of all into Thought. It is ever the way with the Thinker, the spiritual Hero. What he says, all men were not far from saying, were longing to say. The Thoughts of all start up, as from painful enchanted sleep, round his Thought; answering to it, Yes, even so! Joyful to men as the dawning of day from night;-is it not, indeed, the awakening for them from no-being into being, from death into life? We still honor such a man; call him Poet, Genius, and so forth: but to these wild men he was a very magician, a worker of miraculous unexpected blessing for them; a Prophet, a God!

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4 months 4 days ago

We cannot understand what happens in the universe. What is glorious in it is united with what is full of horror. What is full of meaning is united to what is senseless. The spirit of the universe is at once creative and destructive - it creates while it destroys and destroys while it creates, and therefore it remains to us a riddle. And we must inevitably resign ourselves to this.

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p. 5
7 months ago

If you believe in the future life and, instead of preparing for it, sell it in order to buy this world, then that is folly! You do not normally sell two things for one; how can you give up an endless life for a limited number of days.

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IV. The True Nature of Prophecy and the Compelling Need of All Creation for it, p. 67.

I wish I could get rich...to go on vacations...yeah...but also to see if I could truly maintain a virtuous stand while affected...you think you will...but you don't KNOW....

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7 months 3 weeks ago

There is needed, no doubt, a body of servants (ministerium) of the invisible church, but not officials (officiales), in other words, teachers but not dignitaries, because in the rational religion of every individual there does not yet exist a church as a universal union (omnitudo collectiva).

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Book IV, Part 1, Section 1, "The Christian religion as a natural religion"
7 months 3 weeks ago

Every crusader is apt to go mad. He is haunted by the wickedness which he attributes to his enemies; it becomes in some sort a part of him.

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Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudon Chatto & Windus, London, (1951), ch. 9, p. 274
6 months 3 weeks ago

On its pass through finitude, the being-for-itself of the counter-image expresses itself most potently as ""I-ness", as self-identical individuality. Just as a planet in its orbit no sooner reaches its farthest distance from the center than it returns to its closest proximity, so the point of the farthest distance from God, the I-ness, is also the moment of its return to the Absolute, of the re-absorption into the ideal.

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P. 30
7 months 3 weeks ago

The belief in a political Utopia is especially dangerous. This is possibly connected with the fact that the search for a better world, like the investigation of our environment, is (if I am correct) one of the oldest and most important of all the instincts.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

A good reputation is more valuable than money.

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Maxim 108
8 months 1 week ago

Never trust her at any time, when the calm sea shows her false alluring smile.

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Book II, lines 557-559 (tr. Rouse)
6 months 2 weeks ago

All philosophers should end their days at Pythia's feet. There is only one philosophy, that of unique moments.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

This life affords no solid satisfaction, but in the consciousness of having done well, and the hopes of another life.

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Letter to Anthony Collins (23 August 1704), in The Works of John Locke, Vol. X (London, 1823), p. 298; quoted by William Julius Mickle in Voltain in the Shades (London, 1770), p. 7
6 months 1 week ago

In organized groups such as the army or the Church there is either no mention of love whatsoever between the members, or it is expressed only in a sublimated and indirect way, through the mediation of some religious imagine in the love of whom the members unite and whose all-embracing love they are supposed to imitate in their attitude towards each other. ... It is one of the basic tenets of fascist leadership to keep primary libidinal energy on an unconscious level so as to divert its manifestations in a way suitable to political ends.

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"Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda," The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (1982), p. 123
6 months 2 weeks ago

The class of the wholly propertyless, who are obliged to sell their labor to the bourgeoisie in order to get, in exchange, the means of subsistence for their support. This is called the class of proletarians, or the proletariat.

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5 months 2 days ago

Both natural selection and the historical record offer powerful reasons for doubting the trustworthiness of our naive moral intuitions. So the possibility that human civilisation might be founded upon some monstrous evil should be taken seriously - even if the possibility seems transparently absurd at the time.

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The Antispeciesist Revolution, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, 26 Jul. 2013
8 months 1 week ago

Chance seldom interferes with the wise man; his greatest and highest interests have been, are, and will be, directed by reason throughout his whole life.

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8 months 1 week ago

Medicine considers the human body as to the means by which it is cured and by which it is driven away from health.

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6 months 1 week ago

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.

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p. 120
5 months ago

The most important feature of natural selection is that it is a process of drift. Evolution has no end-point or direction, so if the development of society is an evolutionary process it is one that is going nowhere.

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An Old Chaos: Humanism and Flying Saucers (p. 78)
7 months 2 weeks ago

Choose a wife who is of character, because that one is good who in the end is more respected.

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(p. 60)
6 months 6 days ago

The huge laugh is a most extreme expression of freedom.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Whatever we know without inference is mental.

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Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948), p. 224
4 months 1 day ago

Warrior spirit is characterised by direct, clear and loyal relations, based on fidelity and honour and a sound instinct for the various dignities, which it can well distinguish: it opposes everything which is impersonal and trivial.

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p. 117
6 months 2 weeks ago

In the world of action, we know that it is disastrous to treat animals or human beings as though they were stocks and stones. Why should we suppose this treatment to be any less mistaken in the world of ideas?

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p. 21.
7 months 3 weeks ago

A totally unmystical world would be a world totally blind and insane.

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Grey Eminence, 1940
7 months 3 weeks ago

A merchant, it has been said very properly, is not necessarily the citizen of any particular country.

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Chapter IV, p. 456.
6 months 2 weeks ago

Indeed, even this last moment will be recognized like the rest, at least, be just beginning to be so.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.

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(6.522) Original German: Es gibt allerdings Unaussprechliches. Dies zeigt sich, es ist das Mystische.
7 months 3 weeks ago

Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

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p. 486
7 months 3 weeks ago

We are, like Nebuchadnezzar, dethroned, bereft of reason, and eating grass like an ox.

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Prospects
5 months 1 week ago

The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm.

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Hallam', The Edinburgh Review (September 1828), quoted in T. B. Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to The Edinburgh Review, Vol. I (1843), p. 210
6 months 6 days ago

As man loses touch with his 'inner being', his instinctive depths, he finds himself trapped in the world of consciousness, that is to say, in the world of other people. Any poet knows this truth; when other people sicken him, he turns to hidden resources of power inside himself, and he knows then that other people don't matter a damn. He knows the 'secret life' inside him is the reality; other people are mere shadows in comparison. but the 'shadows' themselves cling to one another. 'Man is a political animal', said Aristotle, telling one of the greatest lies in human history. Man has more in common with the hills, or with the stars, than with other men.

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p. 170
6 months 4 weeks ago

Happiest are the people who give most happiness to others.

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As quoted in Happyology by Harald W. Tietze, p. 28
4 months 2 weeks ago

There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and shame the devil.

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Journalism and the Higher Law, p. 13
6 months 3 weeks ago

The arrogance of age must submit to be taught by youth.

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Letter to Frances Burney
6 months 1 week ago

In America I was liberated from a certain naïve belief in culture and attained the capacity to see culture from the outside. To clarify the point: in spite of all social criticism and all consciousness of the primacy of economic factors, the fundamental importance of the mind-"Geist"-was quasi a dogma self-evident to me from the very beginning. The fact that this was not a foregone conclusion, I learned in America, where no reverential silence in the presence of everything intellectual prevailed.

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as quoted in The Origin of Negative Dialectics (Free Press: 1977), p. 187
5 months 6 days ago

I mean to lead a simple life, to choose a simple shell I can carry easily - like a hermit crab. But I do not. I find that my frame of life does not foster simplicity. My husband and five children must make their way in the world. The life I have chosen as a wife and mother entrains a whole caravan of complications.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Can it really be that for us existence means exile, and nothingness, home?

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Avoid melancholy with all your might. It hurts the service of God more than sin. Satan takes less pleasure in sin than in a man's melancholy over having sinned again and so feeling that he is a slave to sin. Thus the Evil One has caught the poor soul in the net of despair.

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Rabbi Jaacob Yitzchak, p. 7

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