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4 months 3 days ago

Suffering is a spiritual thing. It is the most immediate revelation of consciousness, and it may be that our body was given us simply in order that suffering might be enabled to manifest itself. A man who had never known suffering, either in greater or less degree, would scarcely possess consciousness of himself. The child first cries at birth when the air, entering into his lungs and limiting him, seems to say to him: You have to breathe me in order to live!

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2 months 1 week ago

Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the Devil; for which reason I have, long since, as good as renounced it.

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Bk. II, ch. 4.
1 month 2 weeks ago

The truth is, that the greatest enemies of the doctrine of Jesus are those, calling themselves the expositors of them, who have perverted them to the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in his genuine words. And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter ... But may we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated reformer of human errors.

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Letter to John Adams (11 April 1823) (Scan at The Library of Congress)
2 months 3 weeks ago

By far my greatest dread in life [...] is that (some variant of) the Everett interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is true. Dave's Diary, BLTC Research, May 1996

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6 months 2 weeks ago

If it were so, as conceited sagacity, proud of not being deceived, thinks, that we should believe nothing that we cannot see with our physical eyes, then we first and foremost ought to give up believing in love. ... We can be deceived by believing what is untrue, but we certainly are also deceived by not believing what is true. ... Which deception is more dangerous?

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4 months 1 week ago

Every civilized human being, whatever his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche. Just as the human body connects us with the mammals and displays numerous relics of earlier evolutionary stages going back to even the reptilian age, so the human psyche is likewise a product of evolution which, when followed up to its origins, show countless archaic traits.

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p. 126

And now the sagacious reader, who is capable of reading into these lines what does not stand written in them, but is nevertheless implied, will be able to form some conception of the serious feelings with which I then set foot in Emmendingen.

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Autobiography: Truth and Poetry Book xviii. London 1884 p. 115 books.google.de
3 months 5 days ago

Free trade, one of the greatest blessings which a government can confer on a people, is in almost every country unpopular.

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p. 161
2 months 1 day ago

Clothe yourself with a hero's courage, and withdraw for a little space from the opinions of the common man. Form a proper conception of the image of virtue, a thing of exceeding beauty and grandeur; this image is not to be worshipped by us with incense or garlands, but with sweat and blood.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

We are all instruments endowed with feeling and memory. Our senses are so many strings that are struck by surrounding objects and that also frequently strike themselves.

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"Conversation Between D'Alembert and Diderot"
3 months 3 weeks ago

Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason. From this we can see how useful it is to employ reason in seeking out the laws of taste.

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E 69
1 month 3 weeks ago

The transformation of human consciousness through meditation is frustrated, as long as we think of it in terms as something that I, my self can bring about. because it leads to endless games of spiritual oneupmanship, and Guru competitions.

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2 months 1 week ago

It is because simplicity and vastness are both beautiful that we seek by preference simple facts and vast facts; that we take delight, now in following the giant courses of the stars, now in scrutinizing the microscope that prodigious smallness which is also a vastness, and now in seeking in geological ages the traces of a past that attracts us because of its remoteness.

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Part I. Ch. 1 : The Selection of Facts, p. 23
1 month 6 days ago

Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed.

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4 months 1 week ago

For two thousand years, Jesus has revenged himself on us for not having died on a sofa.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

I find the Englishman to be him of all men who stands firmest in his shoes. They have in themselves what they value in their horses, - mettle and bottom.

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Manners
6 months 2 days ago

In matters that are so obscure and far beyond our vision, we find in Holy Scripture passages which can be interpreted in very different ways without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such cases, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search for truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it.

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I, xviii, 37. Modern translation by J.H. Taylor
5 months 2 weeks ago

Mr. Sensible learned only catchwords from them. He could talk like Epicurus of spare diet, but he was a glutton. He had from Montaigne the language of friendship, but no friend.

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Pilgrim's Regress 176
6 months 1 day ago

It is difficulties that show what men are.

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Book I, ch. 24, 1.
1 month 2 weeks ago

Never put off till tomorrow what you can do to-day.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Long hours of labour seem to be the secret of the rational and healthful processes, which are to raise the condition of the labourer by an improvement of his mental and moral powers and to make a rational consumer out of him.

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Vol. II, Ch. XXI, p. 520.
5 months 2 weeks ago

As the brain-changes are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream.

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Ch. 9
1 month 3 weeks ago

Self-respect is the cornerstone of all virtue.

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As quoted in A Toolbox for Humanity : More Than 9000 Years of Thought (2004) by Lloyd Albert Johnson, p. 147
4 months 1 week ago

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech.... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

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Introduction, sect. 2
6 months 6 days ago

The happiness which belongs to man, is that state in which he enjoys as many of the good things, and suffers as few of the evils incident to human nature as possible; passing his days in a smooth course of permanent tranquility. A wise man, though deprived of sight or hearing, may experience happiness in the enjoyment of the good things which yet remain; and when suffering torture, or laboring under some painful disease, can mitigate the anguish by patience, and can enjoy, in his afflictions, the consciousness of his own constancy.

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1 month 1 week ago

The human mind loves the bondage of words and is apt, when freed from one form of their tyranny, to set up another more oppressive than the last. The highest function of philosophy is to enforce the attitude of meditation and therewithal restrain the excessive volubility of the tongue. To us it seems that the reflective thinker wins his greatest victories when by what he says he compels us to recognise the relative insignificance of anything he can say. His task is not to capture Reality, but to free it from captivity.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

All men are liable to error; and most men are, in many points, by passion or interest, under temptation to it.

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Book IV, Ch. 20, sec. 17
5 months 2 weeks ago

Too busy with the crowded hour to fear to live or die.

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Quatrains, Nature
3 months 4 weeks ago

The spirit of militarism has already permeated all walks of life. Indeed, I am convinced that militarism is a greater danger here than anywhere else, because of the many bribes capitalism holds out to those whom it wishes to destroy.

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6 months 6 days ago

Character is destiny.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

I am very fond of truth, but not at all of martyrdom.

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Letter to Jean le Rond d'Alembert, 8 February 1776
1 month 6 days ago

No man can visualize four dimensions, except mathematically ... I think in four dimensions, but only abstractly. The human mind can picture these dimensions no more than it can envisage electricity. Nevertheless, they are no less real than electro-magnetism, the force which controls our universe, within, and by which we have our being.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Death is a friend of ours; and he that is not ready to entertain him is not at home.

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An Essay on Death, published in The Remaines of the Right Honourable Francis Lord Verulam (1648), which may not have been written by Bacon
5 months 1 week ago

Deconstruction never had meaning or interest, at least in my eyes, than as a radicalization, that is to say, also within the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism.

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Specters of Marx. Routledge, 1994. p. 115
4 months 1 week ago

Desire, to know why, and how, CURIOSITY; such as is in no living creature but Man; so that Man is distinguished, not only by his Reason; but also by this singular Passion from other Animals; in whom the appetite of food, and other pleasures of Sense, by predominance, take away the care of knowing causes; which is a Lust of the mind, that by a perseverance of delight in the continual and indefatigable generation of Knowledge, exceedeth the short vehemence of any carnal Pleasure.

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The First Part, Chapter 6, p. 26
4 months 2 weeks ago

It may be confidently asserted that no man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks. And the desire of rectifying these mistakes, is the noble ambition of an enlightened understanding, the impulse of feelings that Philosophy invigorates.

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A Vindication of the Rights of Men
2 months 1 week ago

A questioner asks: If human nature is evil, then where do ritual and rightness come from? I reply: ritual and rightness are always created by the conscious activity of the sages.

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Sources of Chinese Tradition (1999), vol. 1, p. 180
5 months 2 weeks ago

To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers, may at first appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers; but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers.

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Chapter VII, Part Third, p. 667.
3 months 4 weeks ago

The cravings of love and sex are met with absolute ignorance by the majority of parents, who consider it as something indecent and improper, something disgraceful, almost criminal, to be suppressed and fought like some terrible disease. The love and tender feelings in the young plant are turned into vulgarity and coarseness through the stupidity of those surrounding it, so that everything fine and beautiful is either crushed altogether or hidden in the innermost depths, as a great sin, that dares not face the light.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

We await the Indian thinker who will expound to us the mysticism of spiritual union with infinite Being as it is in itself, not as it is set down in the ancient texts or according to the meaning read into them by their interpreters. It belongs to the nature of mysticism that it is timeless and appeals to no other authority than that of the truth which it carries within it. The pathway from imperfect to perfect recognised truth leads through the valley of reality.

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Ch. XVI : Looking Backward and Forward, p. 256
4 months 1 week ago

The direction of society has been taken over by a type of man who is not interested in the principles of civilisation. Not of this or that civilisation but - from what we can judge to-day - of any civilisation. ...The type of man dominant to-day is a primitive one, a Naturmensch rising up in the midst of a civilised world.

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Chap.IX: The Primitive and the Technical
3 months 4 weeks ago

As a way of maintaining relative intellectual independence, having the attitude of an amateur instead of a professional is a better course.

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p. 87
4 months 2 weeks ago

Denotation by means of sounds and markings is a remarkable abstraction. Three letters designate God for me; several lines a million things. How easy becomes the manipulation of the universe here, how evident the concentration of the intellectual world! Language is the dynamics of the spiritual realm. One word of command moves armies; the word Liberty entire nations.

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Fragment No. 2
4 months 1 week ago

The spectacle of what religions have been in the past, of what certain religions still are to-day, is indeed humiliating for human intelligence. What a farrago of error and folly!'

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Chapter II : Static Religion
2 months 4 weeks ago

No collection of facts is ever complete, because the Universe is without bounds. And no synthesis or interpretation is ever final, because there are always fresh facts to be found after the first collection has been provisionally arranged.

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Vol. 1
6 months 2 weeks ago
The reasons and purposes for habits are always lies that are added only after some people begin to attack these habits and to ask for reasons and purposes. At this point the conservatives of all ages are thoroughly dishonest: they add lies.
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6 months 4 days ago

Now, as the Word of God is the Son of God, so the love of God is the Holy Spirit.

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Art. 8
5 months 2 weeks ago

I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared "that the sense of being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow".

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