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3 months 3 days ago

Music is well said to be the speech of angels.

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The Opera (1852).
5 months 1 week ago

The formula 'two plus two equals five' is not without its attractions.

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Part 1, Chapter 9 (tr. ?)
6 months 1 week ago

In art the Chinese aim at being exquisite, and in life at being reasonable.

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The Problem of China (1922), Ch. XI: Chinese and Western Civilization Contrasted
6 months 1 week ago

Does man think because he has found that thinking pays? Does he bring his children up because he has found it pays?

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§ 467
4 months 3 weeks ago

In the past human life was lived in a bullock cart; in the future it will be lived in an aeroplane; and the change of speed amounts to a difference in quality.

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Ch. 6: "The Nineteenth Century", p. 137
4 months 4 weeks ago

The human soul has need of consented obedience and of liberty. Consented obedience is what one concedes to an authority because one judges it to be legitimate. It is not possible in relation to a political power established by conquest or coup d'etat nor to an economic power based upon money. Liberty is the power of choice within the latitude left between the direct constraint of natural forces and the authority accepted as legitimate. The latitude should be sufficiently wide for liberty to be more than a fiction, but it should include only what is innocent and should never be wide enough to permit certain kinds of crime.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

You remember Thurlow's answer to some one complaining of the injustice of a company. "Why, you never expected justice from a company, did you? they have neither a soul to lose, nor a body to kick."

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Vol. I, ch. 11, p. 428
2 months 1 week ago

You will recollect that before the Revolution, Coke Littleton was the universal elementary book of law students, and a sounder Whig never wrote, nor of profounder learning in the orthodox doctrines of the British constitution, or in what were called English liberties. You remember also that our lawyers were then all Whigs. But when his black-letter text, and uncouth, but cunning learning got out of fashion, and the honeyed Mansfieldism of Blackstone became the students' hornbook, from that moment, that profession (the nursery of our Congress) began to slide into toryism, and nearly all the young brood of lawyers now are of that hue. They suppose themselves, indeed, to be Whigs, because they no longer know what Whigism or republicanism means.

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Letter to James Madison (February 17, 1826), quoted in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. XVI (1905; 1907), p. 156
5 months 1 week ago

Sleep is for the inhabitants of Planets only. In another time, Man will sleep and wake continually at once. The greater part of our Body, of our Humanity itself, yet sleeps a deep sleep.

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Poetry is the universal art of the spirit which has become free in itself and which is not tied down for its realization to external sensuous material; instead, it launches out exclusively in the inner space and the inner time of ideas and feelings.

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As quoted in the Introduction to Aesthetics (1842), translated by T. M. Knox, (1979), p. 89
6 months 3 weeks ago

It is no advantage to be near the light if the eyes are closed.

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p. 607
4 months 1 week ago

Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously.

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5 months 1 week ago

It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.

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2 months 2 days ago

I claim credit for nothing. Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player.

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6 months 1 week ago

Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits ... A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.

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Ch. 9
6 months 2 weeks ago

A plant, an animal, the regular order of nature - probably also the disposition of the whole universe - give manifest evidence that they are possible only by means of and according to ideas; that, indeed, no one creature, under the individual conditions of its existence, perfectly harmonizes with the idea of the most perfect of its kind - just as little as man with the idea of humanity, which nevertheless he bears in his soul as the archetypal standard of his actions; that, notwithstanding, these ideas are in the highest sense individually, unchangeably, and completely determined, and are the original causes of things; and that the totality of connected objects in the universe is alone fully adequate to that idea.

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B 374
2 months 1 week ago

The universe is flux, life is opinion. The universe is (constant) change, life is (mere) presumption.

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(Analogous translation) The universe is transformation: life is opinion. (Translation by George Long)
6 months 1 week ago

The faith that stands on authority is not faith.

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The Over-soul
2 months 1 week ago

To imply by the word "terrorism" that this sort of terror is the work exclusively of "terrorists" is misleading. The "legitimate" warfare of technologically advanced nations likewise is premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against innocents. The distinction between the intention to perpetrate violence against innocents, as in "terrorism," and the willingness to do so, as in "war," is not a source of comfort.

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5 months 1 week ago

There is but one Temple in the World; and that is the Body of Man. Nothing is holier than this high form. Bending before men is a reverence done to this Revelation in the Flesh. We touch Heaven, when we lay our hand on a human body. Variant translation: There is but one temple in the Universe and that is the Body of Man.

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As inscribed on the Library of Congress, quoted in Handbook of the New Library of Congress (1897) by Herbert Small, p. 53
3 months 3 days ago

Man, little as he may suppose it, is necessitated to obey superiors. He is a social being in virtue of this necessity; nay he could not be gregarious otherwise. He obeys those whom he esteems better than himself, wiser, braver; and will forever obey such; and even be ready and delighted to do it.

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6 months 1 week ago

...and if you are common, you can dress up as a woman, show you behind or write poems: there's nothing offensive about a naked behind if it's everybody's; each person will be mirrored in it.

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p. 463
5 months 1 week ago

There is no false sensation.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

In default of any other proof, the thumb would convince me of the existence of a God.

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Stanislas (1856)
3 months 3 weeks ago

I have been overcome by the beauty and richness of our life together, those early mornings setting out, those evenings gleaming with rivers and lakes below us, still holding the last light. ... Those fields of daisies we landed on, and dusty fields and desert stretches. Memories of many skies and earths beneath us - many days, many nights of stars.

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6 months 1 week ago

Only in thought is man a God; in action and desire we are the slaves of circumstance.

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Letter to Lucy Donnely, November 25, 1902
2 months 2 days ago

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.

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Quoted in The Ultimate Quotable Einstein by Alice Calaprice (2010), p. 230
4 months 4 weeks ago

I would say that teleology is theology, and that God is not a "because," but rather an "in order to."

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5 months 3 days ago

Equally there is no rhythm when variations are not placed. There is a wealth of suggestions in the phrase "takes place". The change not only comes but it belongs; it had its definite place in a larger whole.

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p. 160
7 months 1 day ago

Honesty and trust are promoted, and good neighborliness cultivated.

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6 months 2 days ago

If I had followed the multitude, I should not have studied philosophy.

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As quoted by Diogenes Laërtius, vii. 182.
3 months 3 weeks ago

The educated man is the man who does not live in immediate intuition, but in his recollection so that little is new to him any longer.

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Chapter 4, Philosophy As Writing: The Case Of Hegel, p. 74
6 months 1 week ago

Every man I meet is in some way my superior, and in that, I can learn of him.

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As quoted in Think, Vol. 4-5 (1938), p. 32
2 months 3 weeks ago

Just as the schoolmen philosophized only inside the belief of the church, ... without ever throwing a doubt upon this belief; as authors fill whole folios on the State without calling in question the fixed idea of the State itself; as our newspapers are crammed with politics because they are conjured into the fancy that man was created to be a zoon politicon,-so also subjects vegetate in subjection, virtuous people in virtue, liberals in humanity, etc., without ever putting to these fixed ideas of theirs the searching knife of criticism. Undislodgeable, like a madman's delusion, those thoughts stand on a firm footing, and he who doubts them-lays hands on the sacred!

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Cambridge 1995, p. 44
6 months 1 week ago

What potent blood hath modest May!

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May-Day
6 months 1 week ago

You take souls for vegetables.... The gardener can decide what will become of his carrots but no one can choose the good of others for them.

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Heinrich, Act 5, sc. 3
4 months 3 weeks ago

No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.

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Ch. 32, January 13, 1944.
3 months 3 days ago

The Hero as Divinity, the Hero as Prophet, are productions of old ages; not to be repeated in the new. They presuppose a certain rudeness of conception, which the progress of mere scientific knowledge puts an end to. There needs to be, as it were, a world vacant, or almost vacant of scientific forms, if men in their loving wonder are to fancy their fellow-man either a god or one speaking with the voice of a god. Divinity and Prophet are past.

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6 months 1 week ago

We should be considerate to the living; to the dead we owe only the truth.

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Letter to M. de Grenonville, 1719
5 months 1 week ago

When we are young, we take a certain pleasure in our infirmities. They seem so new, so rich! With age, they no longer surprise us, we know them too well. Now, without anything unexpected in them, they do not deserve to be endured.

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2 months 1 week ago

Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties: 1. Those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes. 2. Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise depositary of the public interests. In every country these two parties exist, and in every one where they are free to think, speak, and write, they will declare themselves. Call them, therefore, liberals and serviles, Jacobins and Ultras, whigs and tories, republicans and federalists, aristocrats and democrats, or by whatever name you please, they are the same parties still and pursue the same object. The last appellation of aristocrats and democrats is the true one expressing the essence of all.

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Letter to Henry Lee
3 months 3 days ago

But oppression by your Mock-Superiors well shaken off, the grand problem yet remains to solve: That of finding government by your Real-Superiors! Alas, how shall we ever learn the solution of that, benighted, bewildered, sniffing, sneering, godforgetting unfortunates as we are? It is a work for centuries; to be taught us by tribulations, confusions, insurrections, obstructions; who knows if not by conflagration and despair! It is a lesson inclusive of all other lessons; the hardest of all lessons to learn.

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