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8 months 4 days ago

Now drown care in wine.

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Book I, ode vii, line 32
8 months 2 weeks ago

Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery.

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Ch. 6: Machines and the Emotions
7 months 5 days 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
7 months 1 week ago

I cannot contribute anything to this world because I only have one method: agony.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.

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"Is Life Worth Living?"
8 months 2 weeks ago

The supreme enjoyment is in satisfaction with oneself ; it is in order to deserve this satisfaction that we are placed on earth and endowed with freedom.

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As quoted in Dreamer of Democracy by James Miller and Jim Miller, p. 194.
8 months 1 week ago

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.

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The Words (1964), speaking of his grandmother.
7 months 1 week ago

Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

The universe comprises all being in a totality; for nothing that exists is outside or beyond infinite being, as the latter has no outside or beyond.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

The wind is blowing, adore the wind.

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Symbol 8
8 months 2 weeks ago

You ask particularly after my health. I suppose that I have not many months to live; but, of course, I know nothing about it. I may add that I am enjoying existence as much as ever, and regret nothing.

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Last letter, to Myron Benton, March 31, 1862
7 months 2 weeks ago

I look upon you as a gem of the old rock. 

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Dedication
9 months 1 week ago

This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.

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8 months 4 weeks ago

But if one should guide his life by true principles, man's greatest riches is to live on a little with contented mind; for a little is never lacking.

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Book V, lines 1117-1119 (tr. Rouse)
4 months 2 weeks ago

It is useless to try to adjudicate a long-standing animosity by asking who started it or who is the most wrong. The only sufficient answer is to give up the animosity and try forgiveness, to try to love our enemies and to talk to them and (if we pray) to pray for them. If we can't do any of that, then we must begin again by trying to imagine our enemies' children who, like our children, are in mortal danger because of enmity that they did not cause.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

Another thing wherein they shew their love of dominion, is, their desire to have things to be theirs: They would have propriety and possession, pleasing themselves with the power which that seems to give, and the right that they thereby have, to dispose of them as they please. He that has not observ's these two humours working very betimes in children, has taken little notice of their actions: And he who thinks that these two roots of almost all the injustice and contention that so disturb human life, are not early to be weeded out, and contrary habits introduc'd, neglects the proper season to lay the foundations of a good and worthy man.

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Sec. 105
8 months 2 weeks ago

It is entirely clear that there is only one way in which great wars can be permanently prevented, and that is the establishment of an international government with a monopoly of serious armed force.

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"The Atomic Bomb and the Prevention of War" in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 10/1/1945
9 months 1 week ago

Great novelists are philosopher novelists, that is, the contrary of thesis-writers.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone; yet he is no more to be credited with the grand result than the acaleph which adds a cell to the coral reef which is the basis of the continent.

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Quotation and Originality
8 months 2 weeks ago

While loving glory so much how can you persist in a plan which will cause you to lose it?

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Letters of Voltaire and Frederick the Great (New York: Brentano's, 1927), transl. Richard Aldington, letter 130 from Voltaire to Frederick II of Prussia, October 1757.
8 months 2 days ago

When one asked him what boys should learn, "That," said he, "which they shall use when men."

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Of Agesilaus the Great
8 months 2 weeks ago

When I come to my own beliefs, I find myself quite unable to discern any purpose in the universe, and still more unable to wish to discern one.

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"Is There a God?", 1952
4 months 1 week ago

Everything that happens is either endurable or not. If it's endurable, then endure it. Stop complaining. If it's unendurable . . . then stop complaining. Your destruction will mean its end as well.

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(Hays translation) X, 3
8 months 2 weeks ago

We all look for happiness, but without knowing where to find it: like drunkards who look for their house, knowing dimly that they have one.

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Notebooks (c.1735-c.1750)
7 months 2 weeks ago

So many of my thoughts and feelings are shared by the English that England has turned into a second native land of the mind for me.

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Journeys to England and Ireland, 1835.
4 months 3 weeks ago

Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but rather as the development of methods of ordering and surveying human experience. In this respect our task must be to account for such experience in a manner independent of individual subjective judgement and therefore objective in the sense that it can be unambiguously communicated in ordinary human language.

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The Unity of Human Knowledge
5 months 1 week ago

One whose intentions and thoughts are cultivated will disregard wealth and nobility. One whose greatest concern is for the Way and righteousness will take lightly kings and dukes. It is simply that when one examines oneself on the inside, external goods carry little weight. A saying goes, "The gentleman makes things his servants. The petty man is servant to things.

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Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy (2001), p. 263
8 months 2 weeks ago

In regard to man's final end, all the higher religions are in complete agreement. The purpose of human life is the discovery of Truth, the unitive knowledge of the Godhead. The degree to which this unitive knowledge is achieved here on earth determines the degree to which it will be enjoyed in the posthumous state. Contemplation of truth is the end, action the means.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

Pride is an established conviction of one's own paramount worth in some particular respect, while vanity is the desire of rousing such a conviction in others, and it is generally accompanied by the secret hope of ultimately coming to the same conviction oneself. Pride works from within; it is the direct appreciation of oneself. Vanity is the desire to arrive at this appreciation indirectly, from without.

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Vol. 1, Ch. 4, § 2
4 months 2 weeks ago

I have stated that the constitutions of our several States vary more or less in some particulars. But there are certain principles in which all agree, and which all cherish as vitally essential to the protection of the life, liberty, property, and safety of the citizen:

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At root what is needed for scientific inquiry is just receptivity to data, skill in reasoning, and yearning for truth. Admittedly, ingenuity can help too.

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S.4
9 months 3 days ago

Charity, by which God and neighbor are loved, is the most perfect friendship.

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Disputed Questions: On Charity, c. 1270
4 months 2 weeks ago

One of the roots of the problem is the focus of environmentalists. The conservation movement, for one hundred years, has, at least in this country, focused on wilderness preservation-places of spectacular rocks and waterfalls-at the expense of what I would call the "economic landscapes" of farming, forestry, and mining.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Of what I am, I know no more than that I am, but here no tie is necessary between subject and object. My own being is this tie, I am at once the subject knowing, and the object known of; and this reflection or return of the knowledge on itself is what I designate by the term I, if I have any determinate meaning.

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Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p. 50
5 months 6 days ago

World,-this man is not a slave with thee! None of thy promotions is necessary for him. His place is with the stars of Heaven: to thee it may be momentous, to him it is indifferent, whether thou place him in the lowest hut, or forty feet higher at the top of thy stupendous high tower, while here on Earth. The joys of Earth that are precious, they depend not on thee and thy promotions. Food and raiment, and, round a social hearth, souls who love him, whom he loves: these are already his. He wants none of thy rewards;

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4 months 1 week ago

It is not given to a cylinder to move everywhere by its own motion, nor yet to water nor to fire nor to anything else which is governed by nature or an irrational soul, for the things which check them and stand in the way are many. But intelligence and reason are able to go through everything that opposes them, and in such manner as they are formed by nature and as they choose. Place before thy eyes this facility with which the reason will be carried through all things, as fire upwards, as a stone downwards, as a cylinder down an inclined surface, and seek for nothing further. For all other obstacles either affect the body only, which is a dead thing; or, except for opinion and the yielding of reason itself, they do not crush nor do any harm of any kind; for if they did, he who felt it would immediately become bad.

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X, 33
5 months 1 week ago

When an astronomer tells me that some stellar phenomenon, which his telescope reveals to him at this moment, happened... fifty years ago... I... ask... how he has measured the velocity of light.

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7 months 1 week ago

Ministers become a sort of miniature kings in their turn. Though they have the greatest opportunity of observing the impotence and unmeaningness of the character, they envy it. It is their trade perpetually to extol the dignity and importance of the master they serve; and men cannot long anxiously endeavor to convince others of the truth of any proposition without becoming half convinced themselves.

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Book V, Ch. 5
7 months 5 days ago

Torn in this way from its normal connection with contemplation, with being within one's self, pure action permits and produces only a chain of stupidities which we might better call "stupidity unchained." So we see today that an absurd attitude justifies the appearance of an opposing attitude no more reasonable; at least, reasonable enough, and so on indefinitely. Such is the extreme to which political affairs in the West have come!

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p. 34
8 months 2 weeks ago

From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.

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The Criticism of the Gotha Program (1875) Variant translation: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
8 months 2 weeks ago

These preachers of beauty, which light the world with their admonishing smile.

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p. 248 (Stars)
5 months 1 week ago

A multitude is irreducible multiplicity; the singular social differences that constitute the multitude must always be expressed and can never be flattened into sameness, unity, identity, or indifference. ... the compact identities of factory workers in the dominant countries have been undermined with the rise of short-term contracts and forced mobility of new forms of work; how migration has challenged traditional notions of national identity; how family identity has changed and so forth.

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105
7 months 3 weeks ago

Rest satisfied with doing well, and leave others to talk of you as they please.

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As quoted in The World's Laconics: Or, The Best Thoughts of the Best Authors (1853) by Everard Berkeley Variant: Rest satisfied with doing well, and leave others to talk of you as they will.
8 months 2 weeks ago

Philosophy, from the earliest times, has made greater claims, and achieved fewer results, than any other branch of learning.

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Lecture I, Current Tendencies, p. 11, New American Library edition, 1960
4 months 3 weeks ago

Violence, less and less embarrassed by the limits imposed by centuries of lawfulness, is brazenly and victoriously striding across the whole world, unconcerned that its infertility has been demonstrated and proved many times in history. What is more, it is not simply crude power that triumphs abroad, but its exultant justification. The world is being inundated by the brazen conviction that power can do anything, justice nothing.

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7 months 1 week ago

The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their life a meaning.

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