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1 month 3 weeks ago

We need a science to save us from science.

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NY Times Magazine, as reported in High Points in the Work of the High Schools of New York City, Vol. 34 (1952), p. 46
1 month 2 weeks ago

It has no sense and cannot just unless it comes to terms with death. Mine as (well as) that of the other. Between life and death, then, this is indeed the place of a sententious injunction that always feigns to speak the just.

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Exordium
1 month 1 week ago

Being nimble and light-footed, his father encouraged him to run in the Olympic race. "Yes," said he, "if there were any kings there to run with me."

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41 Alexander

There is nothing impossible in the existence of the supernatural: its existence seems to me decidedly probable.

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The Genteel Tradition at Bay
2 months 3 weeks ago
These people who have fled inward for their freedom also have to live outwardly, become visible, let themselves be seen; they are united with mankind through countless ties of blood, residence, education, fatherland, chance, the importunity of others; they are likewise presupposed to harbour countless opinions simply because these are the ruling opinions of the time; every gesture which is not clearly a denial counts as agreement.
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2 weeks 4 days ago

Accordingly, time logically supposes a continuous range of intensity of feeling. It follows then, from the definition of continuity, that when any particular kind of feeling is present, an infinitesimal continuum of all feelings differing infinitesimally from that, is present.

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Emptiness simply prevents what is individual from insisting on itself.

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Virtue by premeditation isn't worth much.

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H 13
2 weeks 4 days ago

Suppose a surface to be part red and part blue; so that every point on it is either red or blue, and of course, no part can be both red and blue. What then, is the color of the surface in the immediate neighborhood of the point. ...it follows that the boundary is half red and half blue. In like manner, we find it necessary to hold that consciousness essentially occupies time... Thus, the present is half past and half time to come. ...Take another case: the velocity of a particle at any instant of time is its mean velocity during an infinitesimal instant in which that time is consumed. Just so, my immediate feeling is my feeling through an infinitesimal duration containing the present instant.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

The past is the luxury of proprietors.

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3 weeks 1 day ago

Whether directly or indirectly all nations are originally nothing but Indian colonies... the oriental antiquity could, if we consented to deepen it, bring us back more safely towards the divine....

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Friedrich Schlegel, Essay on the Language and Wisdom of the Indians, quoted by Roger-Pol Droit in L'Oubli de I'Inde, Paris Presses Universitaires de France, 1989, p. 129.
1 month 2 weeks ago

Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.

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§ 6
1 month 3 weeks ago

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. But do not care to convince him. Men will believe what they see.

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Let them see. Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 222
1 month 3 weeks ago

Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there. It is next to beauty, and a very high art.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 32
1 month 2 weeks ago

It is, in fact, far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.

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The Human Condition
3 weeks 1 day ago

Humiliate the reason and distort the soul...

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Part 2, Chapter ?

All law relations are determined by this principle: each one must restrict his freedom by the possibility of the freedom of the other. ... My freedom is limited by the freedom of the other only on condition that he limits his freedom by the conception of mine. Otherwise he is lawless. Hence, if a law-relation is to result from my cognition of the other, the cognition and the consequent limitation of freedom must have been mutual. All law-relation between persons is, therefore, conditioned by their mutual cognition of each other, and is, at the same time, completely determined thereby.

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P. 173-175
1 month 4 weeks ago

For my own part, I may desire in general to be other than I am; I may condemn and dislike my whole form, and beg of Almighty God for an entire reformation, and that He will please to pardon my natural infirmity: but I ought not to call this repentance, methinks, no more than the being dissatisfied that I am not an angel or Cato. My actions are regular, and conformable to what I am and to my condition; I can do no better; and repentance does not properly touch things that are not in our power; sorrow does.. I imagine an infinite number of natures more elevated and regular than mine; and yet I do not for all that improve my faculties, no more than my arm or will grow more strong and vigorous for conceiving those of another to be so.

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Ch. 2
3 weeks 1 day ago

Granted I am a babbler, a harmless vexatious babbler, like all of us. But what is to be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is babble, that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?

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Part 1, Chapter 5
5 days ago

Taken as a whole, the Cross Correspondences and the Willet scripts are among the most convincing evidence that at present exists for life after death. For anyone who is prepared to devote weeks to studying them, they prove beyond all reasonable doubt that Myers, Gurney, and Sidgwick went on communicating after death.

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p. 136
2 months 3 weeks ago

Confession should be only in secret before God, who knows everything anyway, and thus it could remain hidden in one's innermost being. But at a dinner and a woman! A dinner-it is not some hidden, remote place, nor is the lighting dim, nor is the mood like that among graves, nor are the listeners silent or invisibly present.

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A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

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A Retrospective Glance at the Lifework of a Master of Books
1 month 3 weeks ago

He thinks like a philosopher, but governs like a king.

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Of Frederick the Great XII

That man and woman have an equality of duties and rights is accepted by woman even less than by man. Behind his destiny woman must annihilate herself, must be only his complement. A woman dedicates herself to the vocation of her husband; she fills up and performs the subordinate parts in it. But if she has any destiny, any vocation of her own, she must renounce it, in nine cases out of ten.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

If, then, in the sphere of action there is some one end which we desire for its own sake, and for the sake of which we desire every thing else; and if we do not choose every thing for the sake of something else, for this would go on without limit, and our desire would be idle and futile, it is clear that this must be the supreme good, and the best thing of all.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

There is nothing so eternally adhesive as the memory of power.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

I say, then, that belief is nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object, than what the imagination alone is ever able to attain.

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§ 4.9

Evil perpetually tends to disappear.

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Part I, Ch. 2 : The Evanescence of Evil, § 2
2 weeks 4 days ago

One hardly saves a world without ruling it.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

On recent and contemporary literature student's need is least and our help least. They ought to understand it better than we, and if they do not then there is something radically wrong either with them or with the literature. But I need not labour the point. There is an intrinsic absurdity in making current literature a subject of academic study, and the student who wants a tutor's assistance in reading the works of his own contemporaries might as well ask for a nurse's assistance in blowing his own nose.

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"Our English syllabus", Rehabilitations and Other Essays (1939). Reprinted in Image and Imagination: Essays and Reviews by C. S. Lewis (2013), Cambridge University Press

Fertilisation of the soul is the reason for the necessity of art.

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Ch. 13: "Requisites for Social Progress", p. 283
1 month 2 weeks ago

What do I care about Jupiter? Justice is a human issue, and I do not need a god to teach it to me.

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Orestes, Act 2
2 weeks ago

I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death. Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter.

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Revelation 1:18-19
1 month 3 weeks ago

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

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Civilization
1 month 2 weeks ago

I entered the [Communist] Party because its cause was just and I will leave it when it ceases to be just.

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Hugo to Hoederer, Act 5, sc. 3
1 week 5 days ago

The most immediate result of this unbalanced specialisation has been that to-day, when there are more "scientists" than ever, there are much less "cultured" men than, for example, about 1750. And the worst is that with these turnspits of science not even the real progress of science itself is assured. For science needs from time to time, as a necessary regulator of its own advance, a labour of reconstitution, and, as I have said, this demands an effort towards unification, which grows more and more difficult, involving, as it does, ever-vaster regions of the world of knowledge. Newton was able to found his system of physics without knowing much philosophy, but Einstein needed to saturate himself with Kant and Mach before he could reach his own keen synthesis. Kant and Mach - the names are mere symbols of the enormous mass of philosophic and psychological thought which has influenced Einstein.

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Chapter XII: The Barbarism Of "Specialisation"
1 month 1 week ago

We are but dust and shadow.

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Book IV, ode vii, line 16
2 months 2 weeks ago

Scientists have pushed back the horizon of time from the biblical 6,000 years to 4,600,000,000 years for the age of Earth a 760,000-fold increase.

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1 week 1 day ago

The Spirit of the Laws became the nobleman's Bible all over Europe.

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Catherine Behrens, The Ancien Régime (1967), p. 78
2 weeks 4 days ago

The first thinker was, without a doubt, the first man obsessed by why. An unaccustomed mania, not at all contagious: rare indeed are those who suffer from it, who are a prey to questioning, and who can accept no given because they were born in consternation.

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3 weeks 1 day ago

Even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it, in their inmost being still follow the Christian ideal, for hitherto neither their subtlety nor the ardor of their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of man and of virtue than the ideal given by Christ.

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The behaviour of individuals is the tool with which the organisation achieves its targets.

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p. 108.
1 month 3 weeks ago

The stronghold of the determinist argument is the antipathy to the idea of chance...This notion of alternative possibility, this admission that any one of several things may come to pass is, after all, only a roundabout name for chance.

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The Dilemma of Determinism (1884) p.153

The mollusk's motto would be: one must live to build one's house, and not build one's house to live in.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

No more useful inquiry can be proposed than that which seeks to determine the nature and the scope of human knowledge. ... This investigation should be undertaken once at least in his life by anyone who has the slightest regard for truth, since in pursuing it the true instruments of knowledge and the whole method of inquiry come to light. But nothing seems to me more futile than the conduct of those who boldly dispute about the secrets of nature ... without yet having ever asked even whether human reason is adequate to the solution of these problems.

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Rules for the Direction of the Mind in Key Philosophical Writings (1997), pp. 29-30
1 month 3 weeks ago

Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdain - under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core.

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The Social Value of the College-Bred
1 month 3 weeks ago

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.

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"A Case of Voluntary Ignorance" in Collected Essays, 1959
3 weeks 2 days ago

Student debt crushes generations, delaying homeownership, family formation, retirement. Not accident - policy choice. Debt disciplines workers, prevents risk-taking, ensures compliance. Student debt is control mechanism disguised as opportunity.

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The main importance of Francis Bacon's influence does not lie in any peculiar theory of inductive reasoning which he happened to express, but in the revolt against second-hand information of which he was a leader.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.

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As quoted without citation in Discovering Evolutionary Ecology: Bringing Together Ecology And Evolution (2006) by Peter J. Mayhew, p. 24

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