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10 months 3 weeks ago

Think differently, but know when it's your duty to think the same...

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6 months 4 weeks ago

You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.

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Fate
6 months 4 weeks ago

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.

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Quotation and Originality
6 months 4 weeks ago

The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same. The basic fallacy, taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth.

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p. 15
5 months 3 weeks ago

I must also have a dark side if I am to be whole.

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3 months 1 week ago

When in the spring the withered gray of the pastures gives place to green, this is due to the millions of young shoots which sprout up freshly from the old roots. In like manner the revival of thought which is essential for our time can only come through a transformation of the opinions and ideals of the many brought about by individual and universal reflection about the meaning of life and of the world.

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p. 10
5 months 2 weeks ago

Just as eunuchs will never know aesthetics as applied to the selection of beautiful women, so neither will pure rationalists ever know ethics, nor will they ever succeed in defining happiness, for happiness is a thing that is lived and felt, not a thing that is reasoned or defined.

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5 months 1 day ago

One reason an egalitarian approach to the value of life is important is that it draws from ideals of radical democracy at the same time that it enters into ethical considerations about how best to practice nonviolence. The institutional life of violence will not be brought down by a prohibition, but only by a counter-institutional ethos and practice.

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p. 61
3 months 1 week ago

Instead of holding on to the Biblical view that we are made in the image of God, we come to realize that we are made in the image of the monkey.

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p. 36
6 months 4 weeks ago

Lincoln is not the product of a popular revolution. This plebeian, who worked his way up from stone-breaker to Senator in Illinois, without intellectual brilliance, without a particularly outstanding character, without exceptional importance-an average person of good will, was placed at the top by the interplay of the forces of universal suffrage unaware of the great issues at stake. The new world has never achieved a greater triumph than by this demonstration that, given its political and social organisation, ordinary people of good will can accomplish feats which only heroes could accomplish in the old world!

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6 months 5 days ago

The proximity between the counterfeit and the good coin does not make the good coin counterfeit nor the counterfeit good. In the same way the proximity between truth and falsehood does not make truth falsehood nor falsehood truth.

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III. The Classes of Seekers, p. 33.
5 months 1 week ago

What is Mysticism? Is it not the attempt to draw near to God, not by rites or ceremonies, but by inward disposition? Is it not merely a hard word for " The Kingdom of Heaven is within"? Heaven is neither a place nor a time. There might be a Heaven not only here but now. It is true that sometimes we must sacrifice not only health of body, but health of mind (or, peace) in the interest of God; that is, we must sacrifice Heaven. But "thou shalt be like God for thou shalt see Him as He is": this may be here and now, as well as there and then. And it may be for a time - then lost - then recovered - both here and there, both now and then.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

Gentlemen, the melancholy event of yesterday reads to us an awful lesson against being too much troubled about any of the objects of ordinary ambition. The worthy gentleman, who has been snatched from us at the moment of the election, and in the middle of contest, whilst his desires were as warm, and his hopes as eager as ours, has feelingly told us, what shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue.

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Speech at Bristol on declining the poll, referring to a Mr. Richard Coombe (9 September 1780), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II (1855), p. 171
6 months 4 weeks ago

Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any.

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Considerations by the Way
4 weeks ago

"Stars and blossoming fruit-trees: utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity."
- Simone Weil

See biography for Simone Weil:
https://civilsimian.com/Simone-Weil

Read Simone Weil's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/156/content

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Speaking with sense we must fortify ourselves in the common sense of all, as a city is fortified by its law, and even more forcefully. For all human laws are nourished by the one divine law. For it prevails as far as it will and suffices for all and is superabundant.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master.

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"The British Character"
7 months 1 week ago

Most Christians are superstitious rather than pious, and except for the name of Christ differ hardly at all from superstitious pagans.

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The Erasmus Reader (1990), pp. 140-141.
6 months 3 weeks ago

I focus on popular culture because I focus on those areas where black humanity is most powerfully expressed, where black people have been able to articulate their sense of the world in a profound manner. And I see this primarily in popular culture. Why not in highbrow culture? Because the access has been so difficult. Why not in more academic forms? Because academic exclusion has been the rule for so long for large numbers of black people that black culture, for me, becomes a search for where black people have left their imprint and fundamentally made a difference in terms of how certain art forms are understood. This is currently in popular culture. And it has been primarily in music, religion, visual arts and fashion.

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"Cornel West interviewed by bell hooks" in Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life
7 months 3 weeks ago

This was her finest role and the hardest one to play. Choosing between heaven and a ridiculous fidelity, preferring oneself to eternity or losing oneself in God is the age-old tragedy in which each must play his part.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

To eat, teeth must meet.

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The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974), p. 66.
1 month 2 weeks ago

This will make more sense post-scarcity....

"The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else."
- Aristotle

See biography for Aristotle:
https://civilsimian.com/Aristotle

Read Aristotle's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/4/content

#philosophy #quotes #CivilSimian #UniversalHumanism 

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5 months 1 week ago

What would become of the rich, if not for the poor? What would become of these idle, parasitic ladies, who squander more in a week than their victims earn in a year, if not for the eighty million wage-workers? Equality, who ever heard of such a thing?

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4 months 4 weeks ago

If one has no vanity in this life of ours, there is no sufficient reason for living.

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Ch. 23. This is not, as it is often quoted, a stand-alone Tolstoy epigram, but part of the narration by the novella's jealousy-ridden protagonist Pozdnyshev.
5 months 2 weeks ago

Greatness by nature includes a power, but not a will to power.

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p. 150
5 months 3 weeks ago

We should, out of decency, choose for ourselves the moment to disappear.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

The reaction against your own thought in itself lends life to thought. How this reaction is born is hard to describe, because it identifies with the very rare intellectual tragedies. - The tension, the degree and level of intensity of a thought proceeds from its internal antinomies, which in turn are derived from the unsolvable contradictions of a soul. Thought cannot solve the contradictions of the soul. As far as linear thinking is concerned, thoughts mirror themselves in other thoughts, instead of mirroring a destiny.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

Government must be a transparent garment which tightly clings to the people's body.

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Act I.
4 months 4 weeks ago

Error is the force that welds men together; truth is communicated to men only by deeds of truth. Only deeds of truth, by introducing light into the conscience of each individual, can dissolve the cohesion of error, and detach men one by one from the mass united together by the cohesion of error.

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My Religion (1884), Ch. 12
6 months 2 weeks ago

Thou shouldst not become presumptuous through great connections and race; for in the end thy trust is on thine own deeds.

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(p. 60)

Epicurus, the great teacher of happiness, has correctly and finely divided human needs into three classes. First there are the natural and necessary needs which, if they are not satisfied, cause pain. Consequently, they are only victus et amictus [food and clothing] and are easy to satisfy. Then we have those that are natural yet not necessary, that is, the needs for sexual satisfaction. ... These needs are more difficult to satisfy. Finally, there are those that are neither natural nor necessary, the needs for luxury, extravagance, pomp, and splendour, which are without end and very difficult to satisfy.

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E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 346
2 months 3 weeks ago

Granting, as Lenin wants, such absolute powers of a negative character to the top organ of the party, we strengthen, to a dangerous extent, the conservatism inherent in such an organ.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

I reduce to two the systems of philosophy which deal with man's soul. The first and older system is materialism; the second is spiritualism.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Often, writers on historical events tend to consider ... a loss of willingness to fight as a sign of "decadence," as though there were something despicable about not being a bully and not being willing to engage in mass murder. Perhaps we ought to feel instead that to cease to be warlike means to begin to be civilized and decent.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Let the modern eye look earnestly on that old midnight hour in St. Edmundsbury Church, shining yet on us, ruddy-bright, through the depths of seven hundred years; and consider mournfully what our Hero-worship once was, and what it now is!

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5 months 1 week ago

Is the child to be considered as an individuality, or as an object to be moulded according to the whims and fancies of those about it? This seems to me to be the most important question to be answered by parents and educators. And whether the child is to grow from within, whether all that craves expression will be permitted to come forth toward the light of day; or whether it is to be kneaded like dough through external forces, depends upon the proper answer to this vital question.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Names and attributes must be accommodated to the essence of things, and not the essence to the names, since things come first and names afterwards.

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As quoted in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (1957) by Stillman Drake, p. 92
6 months 2 weeks ago

A soldier told Pelopidas, "We are fallen among the enemies." Said he, "How are we fallen among them more than they among us?"

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63 Pelopidas
6 months 2 weeks ago

Make thyself pure, 0 righteous man! Anyone in the world here below can win purity for himself, namely, when he cleanses himself with Good Thoughts, Good Words, and Good Deeds.

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7 months 6 days ago

Never any good came out of female domination. God created Adam master and lord of living creatures, but Eve spoiled it all.

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-- Table Talk, quoted in Luther On "Woman"
6 months 1 week ago

You, Socrates, began by saying that virtue can't be taught, and now you are insisting on the opposite, trying to show that all things are knowledge, justice, soundness of mind, even courage, from which it would follow that virtue most certainly can be taught.

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As quoted in Protagoras by Plato
3 months 2 weeks ago

Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do.

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Essays. Goethe's Helena.
3 months 3 weeks ago

While Trump is not going to be president, Trumpism is going to survive. ...The Democrats need to look very very carefully at those election results because ...the Republicans did well not necessarily because people love what they represent, but because they don't like what the Democrats represent... Unless they sort out what that is, they are going to continue to lose elections.

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28:52:00
6 months 3 weeks ago

I must plunge into the water of doubt again and again.

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Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 119
5 months 1 week ago

There is in Shaw, as in Gurdjieff and Nietzsche, a recognition of the immense effort of Will that is necessary to express even a little freedom, that places them beside Pascal and St. Augustine as religious thinkers. Their view is saved from pessimism only by its mystical recognition of the possibilities of pure Will, freed from the entanglements of automatism.

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p. 292
5 months 4 weeks ago

To tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

And killing time is perhaps the essence of comedy, just as the essence of tragedy is killing eternity.

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