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7 months 1 week ago

The human understanding is unquiet; it cannot stop or rest, and still presses onward, but in vain. Therefore it is that we cannot conceive of any end or limit to the world, but always as of necessity it occurs to us that there is something beyond... But he is no less an unskilled and shallow philosopher who seeks causes of that which is most general, than he who in things subordinate and subaltern omits to do so.

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Aphorism 48
3 months 3 weeks ago

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

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"New methods and new aims in teaching", in New Scientist, 22(392) (21 May 1964), pp.483-4
7 months 4 days ago

The inscrutable wisdom through which we exist is not less worthy of veneration in respect to what it denies us than in respect to what it has granted.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Thinking which displaces, or otherwise defines, the sacred has been called atheistic, and that philosophy which does not place it here or there, like a thing, but at the joining of things and words, will always be exposed to this reproach without ever being touched by it.

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p. 46
6 months 1 week ago

Seeing therefore they are both [heat and pain] immediately perceived at the same time, and the fire affects you only with one simple, or uncompounded idea, it follows that this same simple idea is both the intense heat immediately perceived, and the pain; and consequently, that the intense heat immediately perceived, is nothing distinct from a particular sort of pain.

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Philonous to Hylas
3 months 1 week ago

We celebrate the most solemn of our Games, dedicating it to the honour of the "Invincible Sun," during which it is not lawful for anything cruel (although necessary), which the previous month presented in its Shows, should be perpetrated on this occasion. The Saturnalia, being the concluding festival, are closely followed in cyclic order by the Festival of the Sun; the which I hope that the Powers above will grant me frequently to chaunt, and to celebrate; and above all others may the Sovereign Sun, lord of the universe! He who proceeding from all eternity in the generative being of the Good, stationed as the central one amidst the central intelligible deities, and replenishing them all with concord, infinite beauty, generative superabundance, and perfect intelligence, and with all blessings collectively without limit of time; and in time present illuminating his station which moves as the centre of all the heavens, his own possession from all eternity!

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7 months 1 day ago

A spectre is haunting Europe; the spectre of Communism.

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Preamble, paragraph 1, line 1.
3 months 3 weeks ago

If all the parts of the universe are interchained in a certain measure, any one phenomenon will not be the effect of a single cause, but the resultant of causes infinitely numerous; it is, one often says, the consequence of the state of the universe the moment before.

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7 months 1 day ago

That power should be exercised over any portion of mankind without any obligation of consulting them, is only tolerable while they are in an infantine, or a semi-barbarous state. In any civilized condition, power ought never to be exempt from the necessity of appealing to the reason, and recommending itself by motives which justify it to the conscience and feelings, of the governed.

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Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform (1859), p. 24
2 months 4 weeks ago

Shame on the soul, to falter on the road of life while the body still perseveres.

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VI. 29, trans. Maxwell Staniforth
7 months 1 day ago

Every one is familiar with the phenomenon of feeling more or less alive on different days. Every one knows on any given day that there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth, but which he might display if these were greater. Most of us feel as if we lived habitually with a sort of cloud weighing on us, below our highest notch of clearness in discernment, sureness in reasoning, or firmness in deciding. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half-awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.

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The Energies of Men
3 months 1 day ago

Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add "within the limits of the law" because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.

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Letter to Isaac H. Tiffany

It is easier to discover a deficiency in individuals, in states, and in providence, than to see their real import or value.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Philosophy complains that Custom has hoodwinked us, from the first; that we do everything by Custom, even Believe by it; that our very Axioms, let us boast of Free-thinking as we may, are oftenest simply such Beliefs as we have never heard questioned. Nay, what is Philosophy throughout but a continual battle against Custom; an ever-renewed effort to transcend the sphere of blind Custom, and so become Transcendental?

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Bk. III, ch. 8.
5 months 3 weeks ago

I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

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14:06
7 months 2 days ago

A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the State with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated by it as enemies.

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7 months 1 day ago

An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing: "There is very little difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very important." This distinction seems to me to go to the root of the matter.

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"The Importance of Individuals"
4 months 1 week ago

Whoever imposes severe punishment becomes repulsive to the people; while he who awards mild punishment becomes contemptible. But whoever imposes punishment as deserved becomes respectable. For punishment when awarded with due consideration, makes the people devoted to righteousness and to works productive of wealth and enjoyment; while punishment, when ill-awarded under the influence of greed and anger or owing to ignorance, excites fury even among hermits and ascetics dwelling in forests, not to speak of householders.

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Book I : "Concerning Discipline" Chapter 4 "Determination of the Place of Varta and of Dandaniti"
7 months 2 weeks ago

Although life is a matter of indifference, the use which you make of it is not a matter of indifference.

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Book II, ch. 6, 1.
7 months 2 weeks ago

If any one will piously and soberly consider the sermon which our Lord Jesus spoke on the mount, as we read it in the Gospel according to Matthew, I think that he will find in it, so far as regards the highest morals, a perfect standard of the Christian life: and this we do not rashly venture to promise, but gather it from the very words of the Lord Himself. For the sermon itself is brought to a close in such a way, that it is clear there are in it all the precepts which go to mould the life. He has sufficiently indicated, as I think, that these sayings which He uttered on the mount so perfectly guide the life of those who may be willing to live according to them, that they may justly be compared to one building upon a rock.

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On the Sermon on the Mount, as translated by William Findlay (1888), Book I, Ch. 1
7 months 4 weeks ago

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

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7 months 2 days ago

Obstinacy is the result of the will forcing itself into the place of the intellect.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 26, § 321
6 months 1 day ago

The first philosophers were astronomers. The heavens remind man ... that he is destined not merely to act, but also to contemplate.

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Introduction, Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), pp. 101-102
5 months 2 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.
5 months 3 weeks ago

To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression. I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

No man ought to glory except in that which is his own.

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7 months 1 week ago

We are brought to a belief of God either by reason or by force. Atheism being a proposition as unnatural as monstrous, difficult also and hard to establish in the human understanding, how arrogant soever, there are men enough seen, out of vanity and pride, to be the authors of extraordinary and reforming opinions, and outwardly to affect the profession of them; who, if they are such fools, have, nevertheless, not the power to plant them in their own conscience. Yet will they not fail to lift up their hands towards heaven if you give them a good thrust with a sword in the breast, and when fear or sickness has abated and dulled the licentious fury of this giddy humour they will easily re-unite, and very discreetly suffer themselves to be reconciled to the public faith and examples.

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Ch. 12
3 months 3 weeks ago

There have been other Priests perhaps equally notable, in calmer times, for doing faithfully the office of a Leader of Worship; bringing down, by faithful heroism in that kind, a light from Heaven into the daily life of their people; leading them forward, as under God's guidance, in the way wherein they were to go. But when this same way was a rough one, of battle, confusion and danger, the spiritual Captain, who led through that, becomes, especially to us who live under the fruit of his leading, more notable than any other.

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6 months 1 week ago

Happy is that City that hath a wise man to govern it.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Doutbless, revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim, or else we are tangled in the subtleties of remorse; so vengeance too has its venom, though it comes closer to what we are, to what we feel, to the very law of the self; it is also healthier than magnanimity. The Furies were held to antedate the gods, Zeus included. Vengeance before Divinity! This is the Major intuition of ancient mythology. p. 70.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Time, subjectively, is the conscious sequence of perceptions.

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Ch. 6 : Our Souls
3 months 2 weeks ago

There were nowhere more docile disciples of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin than the Nazis were.

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7 months 1 week ago

The Idols of Tribe have their foundation in human nature itself, and in the tribe or race of men. For it is a false assertion that the sense of man is the measure of things. On the contrary, all perceptions as well of the sense as of the mind are according to the measure of the individual and not according to the measure of the universe. And the human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.

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Aphorism 41
7 months ago

100 per cent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased.

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3 months 1 day ago

The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society.

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Letter to Éleuthère Irénée du Pont de Nemours
6 months 1 day ago

Each new ontological theory, propounded in lieu of previous ones shown to be untenable, has been followed by a new criticism leading to a new scepticism. All possible conceptions have been one by one tried and found wanting; and so the entire field of speculation has been gradually exhausted without positive result: the only result reached being the negative one above stated, that the reality existing behind all appearances is, and must ever be, unknown.

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Pt. I, The Unknowable; Ch. IV, The Relativity of All Knowledge
6 months 6 days ago

That children dream not the first half year, that men dream not in some countries, with many more, are unto me sick men's dreams, dreams out of the Ivory gate, and visions before midnight.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

He has spent all his life in letting down empty buckets into empty wells; and he is frittering away his age in trying to draw them up again.

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Vol. I, ch. 9, p. 310
5 months 3 weeks ago

All that is Life in me urges me to give up God.

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7 months 1 day ago

If conquest constitutes a natural right on the part of the few, the many have only to gather sufficient strength in order to acquire the natural right of reconquering what has been taken from them.

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The Abolition of Landed Property Letter to Robert Applegarth, 3 December 1869
3 months 3 weeks ago

We have not a direct intuition of the equality of two intervals of time.

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7 months 1 day ago

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free," said Jefferson, "it expects what never was and never will be."

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Chapter 4 (p. 34)
3 months 2 weeks ago

Man with the great M is only an ideal, the species only something thought of.

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Dover 2005, p. 182
4 months 1 week ago

Everyone knows that time is Death, that Death hides in clocks. Imposing another time powered by the Clock of the Imagination, however, can refuse his law. Here, freed of the Grim Reaper's scythe, we learn that pain is knowledge and all knowledge pain.

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"Death"

But don't forget...rationalizations for owning man as a commodity...well...through his never-ending service, anyway...☠️
 

See biography for Herbert Marcuse:

https://civilsimian.com/Herbert-Marcuse

Read Herbert Marcuse's work:

https://civilsimian.com/user/142/content

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Few persons care to study logic, because everybody conceives himself to be proficient enough in the art of reasoning already. But I observe that this satisfaction is limited to one's own ratiocination and does not extend to that of other men. We come to the full possession of our power of drawing inferences the last of all our faculties, for it is not so much a natural gift as a long and difficult art.

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Illustrations of the Logic of Science First Paper - The Fixation of Belief", in Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 12
8 months 1 day ago

For the purposes of poetry a convincing impossibility is preferable to an unconvincing possibility.

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