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2 months 3 weeks ago

His power to adore is responsible for all his crimes: a man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Except for music, everything is a lie, even solitude, even ecstasy. Music, in fact, is the one and the other, only better.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

In all ages a chief cause of the intestine disorders of states has been that the natural distribution of power and the legal distribution of power have not corresponded with each other.

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Speech in the House of Commons (28 February 1832), quoted in Speeches of the Right Honourable T. B. Macaulay, M.P. (1854), p. 91
3 months 3 weeks ago

The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,-a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.

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par. 5
1 month 3 weeks ago

I know that my unity with all people cannot be destroyed by national boundaries and government orders.

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My Religion (1884)
2 months 3 weeks ago

I used to ask myself, over a coffin: "What good did it do the occupant to be born?," I now put the same question about anyone alive.

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2 months 1 week ago

Rome is the Great Beast of atheism and materialism, adoring nothing but itself. Israel is the Great Beast of religion. Neither one nor the other is likable. The Great Beast is always repulsive.

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p. 123
2 months 3 weeks ago

If death had only negative aspects, dying would be an unmanageable action.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle. Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for the others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish for ever.

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Ch. 1: In Praise of Idleness
2 months 2 weeks ago

Nothing is lost, nothing wholly passes away, for in some way or another everything is perpetuated; and everything, after passing through time, returns to eternity.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Pray go back and recollect one of the conclusions to which I sought to lead you in my very first lecture. You may remember how I there argued against the notion that the worth of a thing can be decided by its origin. Our spiritual judgment, I said, our opinion of the significance and value of a human event or condition, must be decided on empirical grounds exclusively. If the fruits for life of the state of conversion are good, we ought to idealize and venerate it, even though it be a piece of natural psychology; if not, we ought to make short work of it, no matter what supernatural being may have infused it.

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Lecture IX, "Conversion, concluded"
3 months 3 weeks ago

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

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"Words and Behaviour", The Olive Tree, 1936
3 months 3 weeks ago

What do I know about God and the purpose of life? I know that this world exists. That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field. That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning. This meaning does not lie in it but outside of it. That life is the world. That my will penetrates the world. That my will is good or evil. Therefore that good and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world. The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God. And connect with this the comparison of God to a father. To pray is to think about the meaning of life.

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Journal entry (11 June 1916), p. 72e and 73e
1 month 1 week ago

We shall have to share out the fruits of technology among the whole of mankind. The notion that the direct and immediate producers of the fruits of technology have a proprietary right to these fruits will have to be forgotten. After all, who is the producer? Man is a social animal, and the immediate producer has been helped to produce by the whole structure of society, beginning with his own education.

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Surviving the Future (1971; Oxford UP, 1972) p. 95
2 months 2 weeks ago

Our dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand. The whole world is doing things.

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p. 199
3 months 2 days ago

A democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it.

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Chapter XIII.
4 months 2 weeks ago

Man has three ways of acting wisely. First, on meditation; that is the noblest. Secondly, on imitation; that is the easiest. Thirdly, on experience; that is the bitterest.

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4 months ago

A metaphysics of morals is therefore indispensably necessary, not merely because of a motive to speculation - for investigating the source of the practical basic principles that lie a priori in our reason - but also because morals themselves remain subject to all sorts of corruption as long as we are without that clue and supreme norm by which to appraise them correctly...

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1 week 5 days ago

Men do not care how nobly they live, but only how long, although it is within the reach of every man to live nobly, but within no man's power to live long.

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Line 17.
3 months 4 weeks ago

But there is a devil of a difference between barbarians who are fit by nature to be used for anything, and civilized people who apply them selves to everything.

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Introduction, p. 25.
1 month 1 week ago

Simplicity and nonviolence are the basis of an economy of wellbeing, and such an economy must be localised.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

The scientific attitude of mind involves a sweeping away of all other desires in the interests of the desire to know-it involves suppression of hopes and fears, loves and hates, and the whole subjective emotional life, until we become subdued to the material, able to see it frankly, without preconceptions, without bias, without any wish except to see it as it is, and without any belief that what it is must be determined by some relation, positive or negative, to what we should like it to be, or to what we can easily imagine it to be.

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2 weeks 4 days ago

The Great Man here too, as always, is a Force of Nature. Whatsoever is truly great in him springs up from the inarticulate deeps.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

The Law teaches that the universe was invented and created by God, and that it did not come into being by chance or by itself.

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Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today.
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3 months 4 weeks ago

A young man before he leaves the shelter of his father's house, and the guard of a tutor, should be fortify'd with resolution, and made acquainted with men, to secure his virtues, lest he should be led into some ruinous course, or fatal precipice, before he is sufficiently acquainted with the dangers of conversation, and his steadiness enough not to yield to every temptation.

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Sec. 70
2 months 1 week ago

It was the normal working of the antisuccess mechanism. In our overcrowded modern world a hit record, a best-selling book, a successful film, can reach more people in a week than Shakespeare or Beethoven reached in a whole lifetime. And so fame has become the most romantic, the most desirable of all commodities, the dream for which a modern Faust might sell his soul to the Devil. Once attained, fame is never as easy to hold on to as some people believe. The people who achieve fame by some accident of fashion are usually forgotten within a week; the ones who remain on top have to work to stay there. But few people understand this. The result is that anyone who achieves sudden notoriety arouses envy and hostility. The greater the success, the greater the reaction.

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p. 28
1 month 1 week ago

I find I am shedding hypocrisy in human relationships. What a rest that will be! The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere. That is why so much of social life is exhausting; one is wearing a mask. I have shed my mask.

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Ch. 2; part of this statement has often been paraphrased: "The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere."
3 months 4 weeks ago

The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others.

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Ch. 8: Eastern and Western Ideals of Happiness
4 months 3 weeks ago

You want to know whether I can make a long speech, such as you are in the habit of hearing; but that is not my way. Socrates speaking to Alcibiades

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4 months 4 weeks ago

Not merely in the realm of commerce but in the world of ideas as well our age is organizing a regular clearance sale. Everything is to be had at such a bargain that it is questionable whether in the end there is anybody who will want to bid. Every speculative price-fixer who conscientiously directs attention to the significant march of modern philosophy, every Privatdocent, tutor, and student, every crofter and cottar goes further. Perhaps it would be untimely and ill-timed to ask them where they are going.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Olympian bards who sung Divine ideas below, Which always find us young And always keep us so.

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Ode to Beauty, st. 2
1 month 3 weeks ago

Any new technology is an evolutionary and biological mutation opening doors of perception and new spheres of action to mankind.

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(p. 67)
2 months 2 weeks ago

This heaven will pass away, and the one above it will pass away. The dead are not alive, and the living will not die. In the days when you consumed what is dead, you made it what is alive. When you come to dwell in the light, what will you do? On the day when you were one you became two. But when you become two, what will you do?

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3 months 3 weeks ago

The law of the table is beauty, a respect to the common soul of the guests. Everything is unreasonable which is private to two or three, or any portion of the company. Tact never violates for a moment this law; never intrudes the orders of the house, the vices of the absent, or a tariff of expenses, or professional privacies; as we say, we never "talk shop" before company. Lovers abstain from caresses, and haters from insults, while they sit in one parlor with common friends.

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Social Aims
3 months 3 weeks ago

I mistrust illuminations: what we take for a discovery is very often only a familiar thought that we have not recognized.

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p. 439
2 months 2 weeks ago

While they denounce as subversive anarchy signs of independent thought, of thinking for themselves on the part of others lest such thought disturb the conditions by which they profit, they think quite literally for themselves, that is of themselves.

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Human Nature and Conduct (1921) Part 1 Section IV.
3 weeks 2 days ago

All wars today tend to be netwars.

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55
3 months 2 weeks ago

No one deserves to live who has not at least one good-man-and-true for a friend.

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1 week 5 days ago

Octavia lost Marcellus, whom both his father-in-law and his uncle had begun to depend upon, and to place upon his shoulders the weight of the empire - a young man of keen intelligence and firm character, frugal and moderate in his desires to an extent which deserved especial admiration in one so young and so wealthy, strong to endure labour, averse to indulgence, and able to bear whatever burden his uncle might choose to lay, or I may say to pile upon his shoulders. Augustus had well chosen him as a foundation, for he would not have given way under any weight, however excessive.

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2 weeks 4 days ago

The latest Gospel in this world is, Know thy work and do it. 'Know thyself:' long enough has that poor 'self' of thine tormented thee; thou wilt never get to 'know' it, I believe! Think it not thy business, this of knowing thyself; thou art an unknowable individual: know what thou canst work at; and work at it, like a Hercules! That will be thy better plan.

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1 month 1 week ago

It is true that if philosophers have suffered their cause has been amply avenged. Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain. But orthodoxy is the Bourbon of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget; and though, at present, bewildered and afraid to move, it is as willing as ever to insist that the first chapter of Genesis contains the beginning and the end of sound science... Darwiniana: the Origin of Species

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1860
1 week 1 day ago

The last fact which knowledge can discover is that the world is a manifestation, and in every way a puzzling manifestation, of the universal will to live.

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