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4 months 6 days ago

I fancy I need more than another to speak (rather than write), with such a formidable tendency to the lapidary style. I build my house of boulders.

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Letter to Thomas Carlyle, 30 October 1841
2 weeks 3 days ago

Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me. It is an uncomfortable doctrine which the true ethics whisper into my ear. You are happy, they say; therefore you are called upon to give much.

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Chapter 26
2 months 4 weeks ago

...whoever is not against us is for us.

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9:40
3 months 2 days ago

One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.

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2 months 6 days ago

Memento mori-remember death! These are important words. If we kept in mind that we will soon inevitably die, our lives would be completely different. If a person knows that he will die in a half hour, he certainly will not bother doing trivial, stupid, or, especially, bad things during this half hour. Perhaps you have half a century before you die-what makes this any different from a half hour?

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p. 209
1 month 4 weeks ago

Conservatism is a philosophy of inheritance and stewardship; it does not squander resources but strives to enhance them and pass them on.

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Stand up for the real meaning of freedom, The Spectator
5 months 1 week ago

The next thing you can learn from the woman who was a sinner, something she herself understood, is that with regard to finding forgiveness she is able to do nothing at all.

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Too many French scholars were the principal authors of the Revolution, too many approved and gave their support so long as the Revolution, like Tarquinius' sceptre, struck down only the tallest heads. Like so many others, they said, It is impossible to make a great revolution without incurring misfortunes. But when a philosopher justifies evil by the end in view, when he says in his heart, Let there be a hundred thousand murders, provided we are free, and Providence replies, I accept your offer, but you must be included in the number, where is the injustice?

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Chapter II, pp. 9-10
4 months 1 week ago

The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.

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2 months 4 weeks ago

It is no accident that all democracies have put a high estimate upon education; that schooling has been their first care and enduring charge. Only through education can equality of opportunity be anything more than a phrase. Accidental inequalities of birth, wealth, and learning are always tending to restrict the opportunities of some as compared with those of others. Only free and continued education can counteract those forces which are always at work to restore, in however changed a form, feudal oligarchy. Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.

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"The Need of an Industrial Education in an Industrial Democracy," Manual Training and Vocational Education17 (1916); also Middle Works 10: 137-143.
2 months 2 weeks ago

What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment.

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L 49
2 months 2 weeks ago

I might try to save the view that 'future contingents' have no truth value by saying that even present-tense statements have no truth value if they refer to the outcome of events that are so far away that a causal signal informing me of the outcome could not have reached me-now without traveling faster than light. In other words, I might attempt saying that statements about events that are in neither the upper half nor the lower half of my light-cone have no truth value. In addition, statements about events in the upper half of my light-cone have no truth value, since they are in my future according to every coordinate system. So only statements about events in the lower half of my light-cone have a truth value; only events that are in 'my past* according to all observers are determined.

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Time and physical geometry
2 months 2 weeks ago

When we resist impermanence, the self intensifies.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

If the subjectivist view hold true, thinking cannot be of any help in determining the desirability of any goal in itself. The acceptability of ideals, the criteria for our actions and beliefs, the leading principles of ethics and politics, all our ultimate decisions are made to depend upon factors other than reason. They are supposed to be matters of choice and predilection, and it has become meaningless to speak of truth in making practical, moral or esthetic decisions.

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pp. 7-8.
2 months 2 weeks ago

The Church is now more like the Scribes and Pharisees than like Christ... What are now called the "essential doctrines" of the Christian religion he does not even mention.

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As quoted in The Life of Florence Nightingale (1913) by Edward Tyas Cook, p. 392
4 months 3 weeks ago

The superior man loves his soul; the inferior man loves his property.

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Yes, you can--if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable. You will find rest from vain fancies if you perform every act in life as though it were your last.

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II, 5
4 months 3 weeks ago

The Catholic faith, I now realized could be maintained without presumption. This was especially true after I had heard one or two parts of the Old Testament explained allegorically, whereas before this, when I had interpreted them literally, they had killed me spiritually.

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A. Outler, trans. (Dover: 2002), Book 5, Chapter 14, p. 81.
2 months 1 week ago

Those who used to sacrifice animals did not take them for beasts. And even the Middle Ages, which condemned and punished them in due form, was in this way much closer to them than we are, we who are filled with horror at this practice. They held them to be guilty: which was a way of honoring them. We take them for nothing, and it is on this basis that we are "human" with them. We no longer sacrifice them, we no longer punish them, and we are proud of it, but it is simply that we have domesticated them, worse: that we have made of them a racially inferior world, no longer even worthy of our justice, but only of our affection and social charity, no longer worthy of punishment and of death, but only of experimentation and extermination like meat from the butchery.

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"The Animals: Territory and Metamorphoses," pp. 134-135
1 month 4 weeks ago

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.

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As quoted in The #1 New York Times Bestseller (1992) by John Bear, p. 93
4 months 1 week ago

Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 20, § 242
5 months 3 days ago

It's better to bet on this life than on the next.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

A theologian is born by living, nay dying and being damned, not by thinking, reading, or speculating.

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352
3 months 2 weeks ago

The mathematician speculates the causes of a certain sensible effect, without considering its actual existence; for the contemplation of universals excludes the knowledge of particulars; and he whose intellectual eye is fixed on that which is general and comprehensive, will think but little of that which is sensible and singular.

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A Dissertation on the Doctrine of Ideas, &c.
4 months 6 days ago

Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.

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Lectures IV and V, "The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness"

He knows his own strength; he knows that he was born to carry burdens.

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8 months 1 week ago

In the more sophisticated versions of the critics of ideology - that developed by the Frankfurt School, for example - it is not just a question of seeing things (that is, social reality) as they 'really are," of throwing away the distorting spectacles of ideology; the main point is to see how the reality itself cannot reproduce itself without this so-called ideological mystification. The mask is not simply hiding the real state of things; the ideological distortion is written into its very essence... the moment we see it 'as it really is,' this being dissolves itself into nothingness or, more precisely, it changes into another kind of reality. That is why we must avoid simple metaphors of demasking, of throwing away the veils which are supposed to hide the naked reality.

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All hypotheses respecting the manner in which the elements of inorganic bodies are arranged in space, must be constructed with regard to the general facts of crystallization.

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A modern theory of knowledge which takes account of the relational as distinct from the merely relative character of all historical knowledge must start with the assumption that there are spheres of thought in which it is impossible to conceive of absolute truth existing independently of the values and position of the subject and unrelated to the social context. Even a god could not formulate a proposition on historical subjects like 2 x 2 = 4, for what is intelligible in history can be formulated only with reference to problems and conceptual constructions which themselves arise in the flux of historical experience.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Christ is not valued at all unless He be valued above all.

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p. 395

It is to this law that our souls must adjust themselves, this they should follow, this they should obey. Whatever happens, assume that it was bound to happen, and do not be willing to rail at Nature. That which you cannot reform, it is best to endure, and to attend uncomplainingly upon the God under whose guidance everything progresses; for it is a bad soldier who grumbles when following his commander.

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4 months 1 week ago

Yes, if you happen to be interested in philosophy and good at it, but not otherwise - but so does bricklaying. Anything you're good at contributes to happiness. When asked "Does philosophy contribute to happiness?"

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(SHM 76), as quoted in The quotable Bertrand Russell (1993), p. 149

The human body is a machine which winds its own springs.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

The more man meditates upon good thoughts, the better will be his world and the world at large.

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4 months 5 days ago

Ideal legislators do not vote their interests.

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Chapter V, Section 43, p. 284
3 weeks 6 days ago

I warmly second the advice of the wisest of men-"Don't be ambitious; don't be at all too desirous to success; be loyal and modest." Cut down the proud towering thoughts that you get into you, or see they be pure as well as high. There is a nobler ambition than the gaining of all California would be, or the getting of all the suffrages that are on the planet just now.

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3 months 1 week ago

A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood.

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Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (3 April 1777); as published in The Works of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (1899), vol. 2, p. 206
2 months 4 weeks ago

Kierkegaard's individualistic interpretation of 'the negation of philosophy' inevitably developed a fierce opposition to Western rationalism. .... According to Kierkegaard, the individual is not the knowing but only the 'ethically existing subjectivity.' The sole reality that matters to him is his own 'ethical existence'.

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P. 263-264
4 months 1 week ago

This is that which I think great readers are apt to be mistaken in; those who have read of everything, are thought to understand everything too; but it is not always so. Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections ; unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment.

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As quoted in "Hand Book : Caution and Counsels" in The Common School Journal Vol. 5, No. 24 (15 December 1843) by Horace Mann, p. 371
3 months 1 week ago

I believe in God, although I live very happily with atheists... It is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley; but not at all so to believe or not in God.

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As quoted in Against the Faith (1985) by Jim Herrick, p. 75
4 months 2 days ago

In Nietzsche's view nihilism is not a Weltanschauung that occurs at some time and place or another; it is rather the basic character of what happens in Occidental history.

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p. 26
4 months 1 week ago

Society should treat all equally well who have deserved equally well of it, that is, who have deserved equally well absolutely. This is the highest abstract standard of social and distributive justice; towards which all institutions, and the efforts of all virtuous citizens, should be made in the utmost degree to converge.

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Ch. 5
5 months 1 week ago
Style ought to prove that one believes in an idea; not only that one thinks it but also feels it.
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4 months 2 days ago

If beings are grasped as will to power, the "should" which is supposed to hang suspended over them, against which they might be measured, becomes superfluous. If life itself is will to power, it is itself the ground, principium, of valuation. Then a "should" does not determine being. Being determines a "should." "When we talk of values we are speaking under the inspiration or optics of life: life itself compels us to set up values; life itself values through us whenever we posit values."

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(VIII, 89) p. 32
2 months 2 days ago

Scientific and technological progress themselves are value-neutral. They are just very good at doing what they do. If you want to do selfish, greedy, intolerant and violent things, scientific technology will provide you with by far the most efficient way of doing so. But if you want to do good, to solve the world's problems, to progress in the best value-laden sense, once again, there is no better means to those ends than the scientific way.

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4 months 1 week ago

It is absurd to excite reason against the primary postulates of pure time, as, for example, continuity, etc., since they follow from laws prior and superior to which nothing is found, and since reason herself in the use of the principle of contradiction cannot dispense with the support of this concept, so primitive and original is it.

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