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6 months 1 week ago

In a world, man must create his own essence: it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he gradually defines himself.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

This letter, if judged by the novelty and profundity of ideas it contains, is perhaps the most substantial piece of writing in the whole literature of mankind.

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Symmetry (1952), quote on p. 138; referring to a letter by Évariste Galois to Auguste Chevalier from May 29, 1832, two days before Galois' death, containing a testamentary summary of Galois' discoveries
6 months 1 week 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
6 months 1 week 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
6 months 1 week ago

The next thing is by gentle degrees to accustom children to those things they are too much afraid of. But here great caution is to be used, that you do not make too much haste, nor attempt this cure too early, for fear lest you increase the mischief instead of remedying it.

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Sec. 115
6 months 1 week ago

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose that you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn't you then first discover how much you really trusted it? ... Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief.

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6 months 1 week ago

Kant ... discovered "the scandal of reason," that is the fact that our mind is not capable of certain and verifiable knowledge regarding matters and questions that it nevertheless cannot help thinking about.

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p. 14
6 months 1 week ago

A thing, moderately good, is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper, is always a virtue; but moderation in principle, is a species of vice.

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2 months 1 week ago

To live your brief life rightly, isn't that enough?

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(Hays translation) X, 31
7 months 1 week ago
I will make an attempt to attain freedom, the youthful soul says to itself; and is it to be hindered in this by the fact that two nations happen to hate and fight one another, or that two continents are separated by an ocean, or that all around it a religion is taught with did not yet exist a couple of thousand years ago. All that is not you, it says to itself.
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6 months 1 week ago

I will now confess my own utopia. I devoutly believe in the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of some sort of socialistic equilibrium. The fatalistic view of the war function is to me nonsense, for I know that war-making is due to definite motives and subject to prudential checks and reasonable criticisms, just like any other form of enterprise. And when whole nations are the armies, and the science of destruction vies in intellectual refinement with the science of production, I see that war becomes absurd and impossible from its own monstrosity. Extravagant ambitions will have to be replaced by reasonable claims, and nations must make common cause against them.

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4 months 1 week ago

The inherent contradiction of human life has now reached an extreme degree of tension: on the one side there is the consciousness of the beneficence of the law of love, and on the other the existing order of life which has for centuries occasioned an empty, anxious, restless, and troubled mode of life, conflicting as it does with the law of love and built on the use of violence. This contradiction must be faced, and the solution will evidently not be favourable to the outlived law of violence, but to the truth which has dwelt in the hearts of men from remote antiquity: the truth that the law of love is in accord with the nature of man. But men can only recognize this truth to its full extent when they have completely freed themselves from all religious and scientific superstitions and from all the consequent misrepresentations and sophistical distortions by which its recognition has been hindered for centuries.

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VI
2 weeks 6 days ago

The cannibalistic nature of life is actually really disturbing....

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Every time that a man has, with a pure heart, called upon Osiris, Dionysus, Buddha, the Tao, etc., the Son of God has answered him by sending the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit has acted upon his soul, not by inciting him to abandon his religious tradition, but by bestowing upon him light - and in the best of cases the fullness of light - in the heart of that same religious tradition. ... It is, therefore, useless to send out missions to prevail upon the peoples of Asia, Africa or Oceania to enter the Church.

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Section 8
6 months 1 week ago

Heroism feels and never reasons and therefore is always right.

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Heroism
5 months 6 days ago

Fear is the antidote to boredom: the remedy must be stronger than the disease.

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4 months 1 week ago

There are some remedies worse than the disease.

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Maxim 301
4 months 3 weeks ago

Today, tattoos lack symbolic power. All they do is point toward the uniqueness of the bearer. The body is neither a ritual stage nor a surface of projection; rather, it is an advertising space.

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6 months 1 week ago

The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanise them.

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As quoted in Ideas in literature: Ten things Hannah Arendt said that are eerily relevant in today's political times
6 months 2 weeks ago

Though I certainly deserve no ill treatment from mortals, yet if the insults and repulses I receive were attended with any advantage to them, I would content myself with lamenting in silence my own unmerited indignities and man's injustice.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Faith which refuses to face indisputable facts is but little faith. Truth is always gain, however hard it is to accommodate ourselves to it. To linger in any kind of untruth proves to be a departure from the straight way of faith.

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p. 290
5 months 1 week ago

He who has thought most deeply loves what is most alive.

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6 months 1 week ago

The heroic cannot be the common, nor can the common be heroic.

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Quotation and Originality
2 months 3 weeks ago

Who else is the enemy of Nature but he who mistakes himself for more intelligent than Nature, though it is the highest school for all of us?

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5 months 6 days ago

No longer ask me for my program: isn't breathing one?

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11 months 2 days ago
A common goal...
Issue:

Because of subgrouping, physical separation, different types of genetics and other cultural factors, as well as limited isolation people subjectively deviate from their universal human necessity. They become aware of it when they are exposed to difference regularly.

Solution:

With controlled information delivery, as well as a clear ideological goal like universality, we can clear away the noise of chaos to understand deterministic goals directly.

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4 months 1 week ago

If your parent is just, revere him; if not, bear with him.

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Maxim 27
5 months 1 day ago

Whoever abhors the name and fancies that he is godless - when he addresses with his whole devoted being the Thou of his life that cannot be restricted by any other, he addresses God.

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6 months 1 week ago

I believe that Communism is necessary to the world, and I believe that the heroism of Russia has fired men's hopes in a way which was essential to the realization of Communism in the future. Regarded as a splendid attempt, without which ultimate success would have been very improbable, Bolshevism deserves the gratitude and admiration of all the progressive part of mankind.

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Preface
6 months 6 days ago

We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.

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2 months 1 week ago

Joy! Joy! I did not know that all this world is so much part of me, that we are all one army, that windflowers and stars struggle to right and left of me and do not know me; but I turn to them and hail them. The Universe is warm, beloved, familiar, and it smells like my own body. It is Love and War both, a raging restlessness, persistence and uncertainty. Uncertainty and terror. In a violent flash of lightning I discern on the highest peak of power the final, the most fearful pair embracing: Terror and Silence. And between them, a Flame.

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4 months 1 week ago

No man is happy who does not think himself so.

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Maxim 584
5 months 1 week ago

Under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition, men have at all times, and in all countries, called in some physical aid to their moral consolations - wine, beer, opium, brandy, or tobacco.

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6 months 1 day ago

With a greedy man thou shouldst not be a partner, and do not trust him with the leadership.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

No wild beasts are such enemies to mankind as are most of the Christians in their deadly hatred of one another.

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Reported in Ammianus, Res gestae, bk. 22, ch. 5, sec. 4
3 months 1 day ago

Luther's merit in literary history is of the greatest: his dialect became the language of all writing. They are not well written, these Four-and-twenty Quartos of his; written hastily, with quite other than literary objects. But in no Books have I found a more robust, genuine, I will say noble faculty of a man than in these. A rugged honesty, homeliness, simplicity; a rugged sterling sense and strength. He dashes out illumination from him; his smiting idiomatic phrases seem to cleave into the very secret of the matter. Good humor too, nay tender affection, nobleness and depth: this man could have been a Poet too! He had to work an Epic Poem, not write one.

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5 months 6 days ago

In the case of colors, there is a tridimensional spread of feelings. Originally all feelings may have been connected in the same way, and the presumption is that the number of dimensions was endless. For development essentially involves a limitation of possibilities. But given a number of dimensions of feeling, all possible varieties are obtainable by varying the intensities of the different elements.

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2 months 1 week ago

In the middle ages of Christianity opposition to the State opinions was hushed. The consequence was, Christianity became loaded with all the Romish follies. Nothing but free argument, raillery & even ridicule will preserve the purity of religion.

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Notes on Religion (October 1776), published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 2, p. 256
5 months 3 days ago

Institutionalized desublimation thus appears to be an aspect of the "conquest of transcendence" achieved by the one-dimensional society. Just as this society tends to reduce, and even absorb opposition (the qualitative difference!) in the realm of politics and higher culture, so it does in the instinctual sphere. The result is the atrophy of the mental organs for grasping the contradictions and the alternatives and, in the one remaining dimension of technological rationality, the Happy Consciousness comes to prevail.

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p. 79
5 months 6 days ago

I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.

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4 months 6 days ago

The popularity of the paranormal, oddly enough, might even be grounds for encouragement. I think that the appetite for mystery, the enthusiasm for that which we do not understand, is healthy and to be fostered. It is the same appetite which drives the best of true science, and it is an appetite which true science is best qualified to satisfy.

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"Science Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder", John Brockman, Edge.org, December 29, 1996
5 months 1 week ago

We have an enemy, to whose virtues we can owe nothing; but on this occasion we are infinitely obliged to one of his vices. We owe more to his insolence than to our own precaution.

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p.3
6 months 1 week ago

If we must absolutely mention this state of affairs, I suggest that we call ourselves "absent", that is more proper.

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Estelle, refusing to use the word "dead", Act 1, sc. 5
3 months 3 weeks ago

So dazzling was the spread of constellations that it had the impact of a vision, of some hidden insight. I drove home saying to myself: The dead, too, are like this, blazing within us - invisibly.

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As quoted in No More Words : A Journal of My Mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh (2001) by Reeve Lindbergh, p. 41
2 months 1 week ago

Constantly contemplate the whole of time and the whole of substance, and consider that all individual things as to substance are a grain of a fig, and as to time the turning of a gimlet.

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X, 17

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