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3 months 2 weeks ago

Never acknowledge the limitations of man. Smash all boundaries! Deny whatever your eyes see. Die every moment, but say: "Death does not exist."

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4 months 2 weeks ago

All achievement should be measured in human happiness.

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Ch. IV: "The Golden Rule and After", p. 90
6 months 1 week ago

A scientist can hardly meet with anything more undesirable than to have the foundations give way just as the work is finished. I was put in this position by a letter from Mr. Bertrand Russell when the work was nearly through the press.

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Note in the appendix of Grundlagen der Arithmetik (Vol. 2) after Frege had received a letter of Bertrand Russell in which Russell had explained his discovery of, what is now known as, Russell's paradox.
5 months 1 week ago

Many politicians of our time are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim. If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed have to wait forever.

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p. 42
5 months 2 weeks ago

A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist.

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6 months 1 day ago

Normally man's mind is composed only of a consciousness of his immediate needs, which is to say that this consciousness at any moment can be defined as ''his awareness of his own power to satisfy those needs.'' He thinks in terms of what he intends to do in half an hour's time, a day's time, a month's time an no more. He never asks himself: what are the ''limits'' of my powers? In a sense, he is like a man who has a fortune is the bank, who never asks himself, How much money have I got, but only, Have I enough for a pound of cheese, a new tie, etc.

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Chapter Six, The Question of Identity
4 months 2 weeks ago

The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.

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Contingencies of Reinforcement: A Theoretical Analysis
8 months 2 weeks ago

.... In a word, acts of any kind produce habits or characters of the same kind. Hence we ought to make sure that our acts are of a certain kind; for the resulting character varies as they vary. It makes no small difference, therefore, whether a man be trained in his youth up in this way or that, but a great difference, or rather all the difference.

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6 months 1 week ago

We return to our analysis of qualities. Something preserves itself throughout this flux, something that passes into other things, but also stands against them as a being for itself. This something can exist only as the product of a process through which it integrates its otherness with its own proper being. Hegel says that its existence comes about through 'the negation of the negation.' The first negation is the otherness in which it turns, and the second is the incorporation of this other into its own self. Such a process presupposes that things possess a certain power over their movement, that they exist in a certain self-relation that enables them to 'mediate' their existential conditions.

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P. 132-133
5 months 2 weeks ago

There is certainly some chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and laborious science; but it is all round about you, and for the trouble of looking, that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life.

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An Apology for Idlers.
8 months 6 days ago

Down in adoration falling,Lo! the sacred Host we hail;Lo! o'er ancient forms departing,Newer rites of grace prevail;Faith for all defects supplying,Where the feeble senses fail.

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Pange, Lingua, stanza 5 (Tantum Ergo)
7 months 1 week ago

Anger is a momentary madness so control your passion or it will control you.

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Book I, epistle ii, line 62
5 months 1 week ago

I discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, "To hell with you."

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Quoted in "Feeling Rejected? Join Updike, Mailer, Oates..." by Barbara Bauer and Robert F. Moss, New York Times (21 July 1985), section 7, page 1, column 1
7 months 2 weeks ago

The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.

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The Life of the Mind (1978), "Thinking"
7 months 2 weeks ago

No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that what has been written latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an improvement on what was written previously; and that every change means progress. Men who think and have correct judgment, and people who treat their subject earnestly, are all exceptions only. Vermin is the rule everywhere in the world: it is always at hand and busily engaged in trying to improve in its own way upon the mature deliberations of the thinkers.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

The ego involved in responsibility is me and no one else, me with whom one whould have liked to pair up a sister soul, from whom one would have substitution and sacrifice.

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The Levinas reader by Levinas, Emmanuel p. 116
3 months 2 weeks ago

Our particular principles of religion are a subject of accountability to our god alone. I enquire after no man's and trouble none with mine; nor is it given to us in this life to know whether yours or mine, our friend's or our foe's, are exactly the right.

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Letter to Miles King
8 months 6 days ago

Anything done against faith or conscience is sinful.

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Commentary on Romans, cap 14, I 3
3 months 2 weeks ago

War is divine in itself, since it is a law of the world. War is divine through its consequences of a supernatural nature which are as much general as particular, consequences little known because little studied, but which are nevertheless incontestable. War is divine in the mysterious glory that surrounds it and in the no less inexplicable attraction that draws us to it. War is divine by the manner in which it breaks out.

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Seventh Dialogue, p. 218
7 months 2 weeks ago

Enjoin him to play so many hours every day, and look that he do it; and you shall see he will quickly be sick of it; and willing to leave it. By this means making the recreations you dislike a business to him, he will of himself with delight betake himself to those things you would have him do, especially if they be proposed as rewards for having performed the task in that play which is commanded of him.

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Sec. 129
4 months 1 week ago

Rooted in freedom, bonded in the fellowship of danger, sharing everywhere a common human blood, we declare again that all men are brothers, and that mutual tolerance is the price of liberty.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Most boys or youths who have had much knowledge drilled into them, have their mental capacities not strengthened, but over-laid by it. They are crammed with mere facts, and with the opinions or phrases of other people, and these are accepted as a substitute for the power to form opinions of their own: and thus the sons of eminent fathers, who have spared no pains in their education, so often grow up mere parroters of what they have learnt, incapable of using their minds except in the furrows traced for them. Mine, however, was not an education of cram. My father never permitted anything which I learnt to degenerate into a mere exercise of memory. He strove to make the understanding not only go along with every step of the teaching, but, if possible, precede it. Anything which could be found out by thinking I never was told, until I had exhausted my efforts to find it out for myself.

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(p. 31)
4 months 3 days ago

What fools these mortals be!

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6 months 1 week ago

Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continual comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.

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Ch. VIII: Ideal Society
5 months 2 weeks ago

It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.

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(p. 9)
7 months 2 weeks ago

As for Adler, I was much impressed by a personal experience. Once, in 1919, I reported to him a case which to me did not seem particularly Adlerian, but which he found no difficulty in analyzing in terms of his theory of inferiority feelings, although he had not even seen the child. Slightly shocked, I asked him how he could be so sure. "Because of my thousandfold experience," he replied; whereupon I could not help saying: "And with this new case, I suppose, your experience has become thousand-and-one-fold."

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1 month 3 weeks ago

This is closer to the truth about poverty. The other day there was a quote that said poverty made people "light of heart"...I forget who said it.....

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Your reason is now mature enough to examine this object religion. In the first place divest yourself of all bias in favour of novelty & singularity of opinion. Indulge them in any other subject rather than that of religion. It is too important, & the consequences of error may be too serious. On the other hand shake off all the fears & servile prejudices under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.

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Scan of the original page at The Library of Congress.
6 months 1 week ago

Language transcends us and yet, we speak.

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p. 349
4 months 1 week ago

Friendship ... receives its real sustenance from an equality that, to proceed without a limp, must have its two limbs equal.

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Part 3
7 months 3 weeks ago

It is difficult for the isolated individual to work himself out of the immaturity which has become almost natural for him. He has even become fond of it and for the time being is incapable of employing his own intelligence, because he has never been allowed to make the attempt. Statutes and formulas, these mechanical tools of a serviceable use, or rather misuse, of his natural faculties, are the ankle-chains of a continuous immaturity. Whoever threw it off would make an uncertain jump over the smallest trench because he is not accustomed to such free movement. Therefore there are only a few who have pursued a firm path and have succeeded in escaping from immaturity by their own cultivation of the mind.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

The word of man is the most durable of all material.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 25, sect. 298
4 months 4 days ago

Political freedom means this: that the polis, the state, is free; religious freedom this: that religion is free, just as freedom of conscience indicates that conscience is free; thus, it does not that I am free from state, from religion, from conscience, or that I am rid of them. It does not mean my freedom, but the freedom of a power that rules and vanquishes me; it means that one of my oppressors, like state, religion, conscience, is free.

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Landstreicher, p. 76
6 months 4 days ago

In a world that has been thoroughly permeated by the structures of the social order, a world that so overpowers every individual that scarcely any option remains but to accept it on its own terms, such naiveté reproduces itself incessantly and disastrously. What people have forced upon them by a boundless apparatus, which they themselves constitute and which they are locked into, virtually eliminates all natural elements and becomes "nature" to them.

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p. 12
7 months 2 weeks ago

Landlords... grow richer, as it were in their sleep, without working, risking, or economizing.

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Book V, Chapter 1, Section 5
8 months 4 days ago

My mother spoke of Christ to my father, by her feminine and childlike virtues, and, after having borne his violence without a murmur or complaint, gained him at the close of his life to Christ.

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Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 351
5 months 2 weeks ago

It's almost impossible to say anything against Islam in this country, because you are accused of being racist or Islamophobic.

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2008 comment quoted in "Fury over Richard Dawkins's burka jibe as atheist tells of his 'visceral revulsion' at Muslim dress", Daily Mail
7 months 1 week ago

Man is a universe in little.

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Freeman (1948), p. 150
5 months 2 weeks ago

The new media are not bridges between man and nature - they are nature...The new media are not ways of relating us to the old world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.

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Media as the New Nature, 1969, p. 14
8 months 4 days ago

In this one man, the whole Church has been assumed by the Word.

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p.434
5 months 4 weeks ago

Once the good man was dead, one wore his hat and another his sword as he had worn them, a third had himself barbered as he had, a fourth walked as he did, but the honest man that he was - nobody any longer wanted to be that.

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C 36
8 months 2 weeks ago

With rebellion, awareness is born.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

The essential trait in the moral consciousness, is the control of some feeling or feelings by some other feeling or feelings.

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Ch. 7, The Psychological View
6 months 1 day ago

There can be no freedom in the large sense of the word, no harmonious development, so long as mercenary and commercial considerations play an important part in the determination of personal conduct.

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7 months 1 week ago

The interpretation of a case is corroborated only by the successful continuation of a self-formative process, that is by the completion of self-reflection, and not in any unmistakable way by what the patient says or how he behaves.

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p. 266

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