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3 months 1 week ago

It is the failing of a certain literature to believe that life is tragic because it is wretched. Life can be magnificent and overwhelming that is its whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would be almost easy to live. And M. Sartre's hero does not perhaps give us the real meaning of his anguish when he insists on those aspects of man he finds repugnant, instead of basing his reasons for despair on certain of man's signs of greatness. The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but the consequences and rules of action drawn from it.

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The object of oratory alone is not truth, but persuasion.

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'On the Athenian Orators', Knight's Quarterly Magazine (August 1824), quoted in The Miscellaneous Writings of Lord Macaulay, Vol. I (1860), p. 135
1 month 5 days ago

All names of God remain hallowed because they have been used not only to speak of God but also to speak to him.

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1 month 1 week ago

The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, the cause, and the conclusion of time. Our reflexes and our pride transform into a planet the parcel of flesh and consciousness we are. If we had the right sense of our position in the world, if to compare were inseparable from to live, the revelation of our infinitesimal presence would crush us. But to live is to blind ourselves to our own dimensions. . . .

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2 months 2 days ago

And when the physician said, "Sir, you are an old man," "That happens," replied Pausanias, "because you never were my doctor."

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Of Pausanias the Son of Phistoanax
1 month 1 week ago

Everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.

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19:29
1 month 2 weeks ago

To kill someone for committing murder is a punishment incomparably worse than the crime itself. Murder by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than murder by brigands.

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Part 1, Chapter 2

The aim of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. 'Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,' the eunuchlike sound of the jazz band both mocks and proclaims, 'and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite.

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Perennial Fashion - Jazz (1978), Prisms, p. 129, as translated by Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber
1 month 2 weeks ago

On its pass through finitude, the being-for-itself of the counter-image expresses itself most potently as ""I-ness", as self-identical individuality. Just as a planet in its orbit no sooner reaches its farthest distance from the center than it returns to its closest proximity, so the point of the farthest distance from God, the I-ness, is also the moment of its return to the Absolute, of the re-absorption into the ideal.

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P. 30
2 months 2 weeks ago

I have often thought that the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: "This is the real me!"

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To his wife, Alice Gibbons James, 1878
1 month 2 weeks ago

The Scientific discourse extracts truths from the errors which surround and oppose it on all sides and in every form; and, by demolition of these opposing views as error, and as impossible to true thought, shows the truth as that which alone remains after their withdrawal, and therefore as the only possible truth:--and in this separation of opposites, and elucidation of the truth from the confused chaos in which truth and error lie mingled together, consists the peculiar and characteristic nature of the Scientific discourse. This method creates and produces truth, before our eyes, out of a world full of error.

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P. 26-27
2 months 3 weeks ago

Seek first the virtues of the mind; and other things either will come, or will not be wanted.

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Book II, xxxi
2 months 2 days ago

Diogenes the Cynic, when a little before his death he fell into a slumber, and his physician rousing him out of it asked him whether anything ailed him, wisely answered, "Nothing, sir; only one brother anticipates another,-Sleep before Death."

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2 months 1 week ago

If someone is merely ahead of his time, it will catch up to him one day.

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p. 8e
1 month 1 week ago

No one has the audacity to exclaim: "I don't want to do anything!" - we are more indulgent with a murderer than with a mind emancipated from actions.

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3 weeks 6 days ago

The Outsider has his proper place in the Order of Society, as the impractical dreamer.

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Chapter Three, The Romantic Outsider
1 week 3 days ago

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.

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El Dorado.
1 month 1 week ago

Why did we obey? The question hardly occurred to us. We had formed the habit of deferring to our parents and teachers. All the same we knew very well that it was because they were our parents, because they were our teachers. Therefore, in our eyes, their authority came less from themselves than from their status in relation to us.

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Chapter I: Moral Obligation
1 week 5 days ago

Human perception is literally incarnation.

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"Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters", in Christian Humanism in Letters, The McAuley Lectures (1954), p. 49-67
1 month 2 weeks ago

Whilst shame keeps its watch, virtue is not wholly extinguished in the heart; nor will moderation be utterly exiled from the minds of tyrants.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

The power of the people and the power of reason are one.

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Act III.
2 months 2 weeks ago

Because people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal cards, and try and win one another's money. Idiots!

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1 month 3 weeks ago

If melodiously piping flutes sprang from the olive, would you doubt that a knowledge of flute-playing resided in the olive? And what if plane trees bore harps which gave forth rhythmical sounds? Clearly you would think in the same way that the art of music was possessed by plane trees. Why, then, seeing that the universe gives birth to beings that are animate and wise, should it not be considered animate and wise itself?

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As quoted in De Natura Deorum by Cicero, ii. 8.
3 months 1 week ago

Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Who lives longer? the man who takes heroin for two years and dies, or a man who lives on roast beef, water and potatoes 'till 95? One passes his 24 months in eternity. All the years of the beefeater are lived only in time.

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The Shortcut: 20 Stories To Get You From Here To There (2006) by Kevin A Fabiano, p. 179

Deniers do not get their views just from simple mistakes about language and truth. Rather, they believe that there is something to worry about in important areas of our thought and in traditional interpretations of those areas; they sense that it has something to do with truth; and (no doubt driven by the familiar desire to say something at once hugely general, deeply important, and reassuringly simple) they extend their worry to the notion of truth itself.

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p. 6
1 month 2 weeks ago

Man needed one moral constitution to fit him for his original state; he needs another to fit him for his present state; and he has been, is, and will long continue to be, in process of adaptation. And the belief in human perfectibility merely amounts to the belief that, in virtue of this process, man will eventually become completely suited to his mode of life. Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity. Instead of civilization being artificial, it is part of nature; all of a piece with the development of the embryo or the unfolding of a flower. The modifications mankind have undergone, and are still undergoing, result from a law underlying the whole organic creation; and provided the human race continues, and the constitution of things remains the same, those modifications must end in completeness.

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Pt. I, Ch. 2 : The Evanescence of Evil, concluding paragraph
1 week 5 days ago

The public has yet to see TV as TV. Broadcasters have no awareness of its potential. The movie people are just beginning to get a grasp on film.

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quoted in "Marshall McLuhan, Author, Dies; Declared 'Medium Is the Message'" by Alden Whitman, The New York Times, January 1, 1981
2 months 3 weeks ago

The people resemble a wild beast, which, naturally fierce and accustomed to live in the woods, has been brought up, as it were, in a prison and in servitude, and having by accident got its liberty, not being accustomed to search for its food, and not knowing where to conceal itself, easily becomes the prey of the first who seeks to incarcerate it again.

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Book 1, Ch. 16
2 months 2 weeks ago

Democracy is still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only bulwark.

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Robert Gould Shaw: Oration upon the Unveiling of the Shaw Monument
2 months 2 weeks ago

It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living.

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Ch. 12: Free Thought and Official Propaganda
2 months 2 weeks ago

I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad Gita. It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us.

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October 1, 1848
3 weeks 6 days ago

Those who devote themselves to rituals must ignore themselves. Rituals produce a distance from the self, a self-transcendence.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

This right which you have, is not founded any more than his upon any quality or any merit in yourself which renders you worthy of it. Your soul and your body are, of themselves, indifferent to the state of boatman or that of duke; and there is no natural bond that attaches them to one condition rather than to another.

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2 weeks 2 days ago

Possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread. Undoing Gender.

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Psychology Press. 2004. p. 29. ISBN 978-0-415-96922-2.
2 months 2 weeks ago

Descartes is rightly regarded as the father of modern philosophy primarily and generally because he helped the faculty of reason to stand on its own feet by teaching men to use their brains in place whereof the Bible, on the one hand, and Aristotle, on the other, had previously served.

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

Whatever we know without inference is mental.

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Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948), p. 224
1 month 1 week ago

There is no original truth, only original error.

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

There are no arguments. Can anyone who has reached the limit bother with arguments, causes, effects, moral considerations, and so forth? Of course not. For such a person there are only unmotivated motives for living. On the heights of despair, the passion for the absurd is the only thing that can still throw a demonic light on chaos. When all the current reasons - moral, esthetic, religious, social, and so on - no longer guide one's life, how can one sustain life without succumbing to nothingness? Only by a connection with the absurd, by love of absolute uselessness, loving something which does not have substance but which simulates an illusion of life. I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing.

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Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.

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C 33
1 month 1 week ago

The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.

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1 month 1 day ago

In the root of the word "faith" itself... there is implicit the idea of confidence, of surrender to the will of another, to a person. Confidence is placed only in persons. We trust in Providence, which we perceive as something personal and conscious, not in Fate, which is something impersonal. And thus it is in the person who tells us the truth, in the person that gives us hope, that we believe, not directly or immediately in truth itself or in hope itself.

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1 month 1 week ago

The words of the world want to make sentences.

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Ch. 5, sect. 4
3 weeks 6 days ago

Following Foucault, we may define the art of life as a practice of suicide, of giving oneself to death, of depsychologizing oneself, of playing.

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The great tragedy of Science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

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Presidential Address at the British Association, "Biogenesis and abiogenesis" (1870); later published in Collected Essays, Vol. 8, p. 229
1 week 5 days ago

Let a fool hold his tongue and he will pass for a sage.

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Maxim 914

All the world's not a stage.

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E. Jephcott, trans. (1974), § 94
3 months 1 week ago

Art, at least, teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for his existence in the order of nature.

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