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5 months 1 week ago

A little river seems to him, who has never seen a larger river, a mighty stream; and so with other things-a tree, a man-anything appears greatest to him that never knew a greater.

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Book VI, lines 674-677 (quoted in The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, tr. W. C. Hazlitt)
3 months 1 week ago

What the learned world tends to offer is one second-hand scrap of information illustrating ideas derived from another second-hand scrap of information. The second-handedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Honour is the mysticism of legality.

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Aphorism 77, of Ideas as translated in The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics (1996) edited by Frederick C. Beiser, p. 131
3 weeks 4 days ago

Behind the stream of my mind and body, behind the stream of my race and all mankind, behind the stream of plants and animals, I watch with trembling the Invisible, treading on all visible things and ascending. Behind his heavy and blood-splattered feet I hear all living things being trampled on and crushed. His face is without laughter, dark and silent, beyond joy and sorrow, beyond hope.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

However long Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians struggle to find multiple meanings in this text, the dominant seems to be this: Abraham's unquestioning willingness to heed gods command to sacrifice the thing he loved most is what qualified him to become the father of what are called still the Abrahamic faiths.

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3 months 2 days ago

Opinion is the companion of probability within the medieval epistemology.

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Chapter 3, Opinion, p. 28.
2 months 1 week ago

The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm.

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Hallam', The Edinburgh Review (September 1828), quoted in T. B. Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to The Edinburgh Review, Vol. I (1843), p. 210
3 months 2 weeks ago

Since the only things we remember are humiliations and defeats, what is the use of all the rest?

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4 months 4 weeks ago

The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniences of life which it annually consumes.

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Introduction and Plan of the Work, p. 1.
3 months 6 days ago

The existential split in man would be unbearable could he not establish a sense of unity within himself and with the natural and human world outside.

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p. 262

In your actions, don't procrastinate. In your conversations, don't confuse. In your thoughts, don't wander. In your soul, don't be passive or aggressive. In your life, don't be all about business.

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VIII. 51:209
2 months 1 day ago

Talk of secularism is meaningful when it refers to the weakness of traditional religious belief or the lack of power of churches and other religious bodies. That is what is meant when we say Britain is a more secular country than the United States, and in this sense secularism is an achievable condition. But if it means a type of society in which religion is absent, secularism is a kind of contradiction, for it is defined by what it excludes. Post-Christian secular societies are formed by the beliefs they reject, whereas a society that had truly left Christianity behind would lack the concepts that shaped secular thought.

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Post-Apocalypse: After Secularism (pp. 267-8)
3 months 2 weeks ago

Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.

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Ch. 4
4 months 2 weeks ago

The problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of one's sex, but, rather, to use one's sexuality henceforth to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships. And, no doubt, homosexuality is not a form of desire but something desirable. Therefore, we have to work at becoming homosexuals.

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"Friendship as a Way of Life," interview in Gai pied, April 1981, as translated in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth (1994), pp. 135-136
4 months 3 weeks ago

I think people who are unhappy are always proud of being so, and therefore do not like to be told that there is nothing grand about their unhappiness. A man who is melancholy because lack of exercise has upset his liver always believes that it is the loss of God, or the menace of Bolshevism, or some such dignified cause that makes him sad. When you tell people that happiness is a simple matter, they get annoyed with you.

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Letter to W. W. Norton, 17 February, 1931
4 months 3 weeks ago

I am sure, zeal or love for truth can never permit falsehood to be used in the defence of it.

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187
4 months 3 weeks ago

The study a posteriori of the distribution of consciousness shows it to be exactly such as we might expect in an organ added for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself.

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Ch. 5
1 month 1 week ago

Everything of this sort is not anger, but the semblance of anger, like that of boys who want to beat the ground when they have fallen upon it, and who often do not even know why they are angry, but are merely angry without any reason or having received any injury, yet not without some semblance of injury received, or without some wish to exact a penalty for it.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

What I had to say was so clear and I felt it so deeply that I am amazed by the tediousness, repetitiousness, verbiage, and disorder of this writing. What would have made it lively and vehement coming from another's pen is precisely what has made it dull and slack coming from mine. The subject was myself, and I no longer found on my own interest that zeal and vigor of courage which can exalt a generous soul only for another person's cause.

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On the Subject and Form of This Writing; translated by Judith R. Bush, Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters
4 months 3 weeks ago

Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.

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Success
3 months 1 week ago

In the empire of signs, the soul, psychology, is erased. There is no soul to infect the holy seriousness of ritual play.

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I see a clock, but I cannot envision the clockmaker. The human mind is unable to conceive of the four dimensions, so how can it conceive of a God, before whom a thousand years and a thousand dimensions are as one?

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From Cosmic Religion: with Other Opinions and Aphorisms (1931), Albert Einstein, pub. Covici-Friede. Quoted in The Expanded Quotable Einstein, Princeton University Press; 2nd edition (May 30, 2000); Page 208,
3 months 2 weeks ago

If, as I believe, the ends of men are many, and not all of them are in principle compatible with each other, then the possibility of conflict - and of tragedy - can never wholly be eliminated from human life, either personal or social. The necessity of choosing between absolute claims is then an inescapable characteristic of the human condition. This gives its value to freedom as Acton conceived of it - as an end in itself, and not as a temporary need, arising out of our confused notions and irrational and disordered lives, a predicament which a panacea could one day put right.

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3 months 1 week ago

The eulogies of my intelligence are positively intended to evade the question "Is what she says true?"

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Letter to her parents (1943), as quoted in the Introduction by Siân Miles p. 2
3 months 2 weeks ago

Time with its continuity logically involves some other kind of continuity than its own. Time, as the universal form of change, cannot exist unless there is something to undergo change, and to undergo a change continuous in time, there must be a continuity of changeable qualities.

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3 weeks 3 days ago

'Natural History' ought to form a part of intellectual education, in order to correct certain prejudices which arise from cultivating the intellect by means of mathematics alone and in order to lead the student to see that the division of things into kinds, and the attribution and use of names, are processes susceptible of great precision.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

The woman wants to dominate, the man wants to be dominated.

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Kant, Immanuel (1996), page 220
1 month 1 week ago

It is the quality of a great soul to scorn great things and to prefer that which is ordinary rather than that which is too great.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

They say in the grave there is peace, and peace and the grave are one and the same.

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Act I.
4 months 3 weeks ago

We boil at different degrees.

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Eloquence
4 months 3 weeks ago

...this our world, which is so real, with all its suns and milky ways is-nothing.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

The plebeian must expect to find himself neglected and despised in proportion as he is remiss in cultivation the objects of esteem; the lord will always be surrounded with sycophants and slaves. The lord therefore has no motive to industry and exertion; no stimulus to rouse him from the lethargic 'oblivious pool', out of which every human intellect originally arose.

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Book V, Chapter 10, "Of Hereditary Distinction"
2 months 2 weeks ago

To be overwise is to ossify; and the scruple-monger ends by standing stockstill.

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314
5 months 2 days ago

Some will object that the Law is divine and holy. Let it be divine and holy. The Law has no right to tell me that I must be justified by it.

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Chapter 2
4 months 2 weeks ago

Reaching and understanding is the process of bringing about an agreement on the presupposed basis of validity claims that are mutually recognized.

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p. 23
4 months 2 weeks ago

We should infer in the case of a beautiful dwelling-place that it was built for its owners and not for mice; we ought, therefore, in the same way to regard the universe as the dwelling-place of the gods.

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As quoted in De Natura Deorum by Cicero, iii. 10.
1 month 1 week ago

Fortune has taken away, but Fortune has given.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

The object of this Essay is to explain as clearly as I am able grounds of an opinion which I have held from the very earliest period when I had formed any opinions at all on social political matters, and which, instead of being weakened or modified, has been constantly growing stronger by the progress reflection and the experience of life. That the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes - the legal subordination of one sex to the other - is wrong itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.

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Ch. 1
3 months 1 week ago

You've got the temperament of a scholar, and you live on your own and write books. You don't have anything to do with civilization. You've been in London a few days and you can't wait to get back home. But how about the people who can't write books -- people there's no outlet for in this civilization? What about your new men who don't know what to do?

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p. 200
5 months 2 weeks ago

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

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3 weeks 3 days ago

After World War II, we hoped the world might be united for the sake of peacemaking. Now the world is being "globalized" for the sake of trade and the so-called free market - for the sake, that is, of plundering the world for cheap labor, cheap energy, and cheap materials. How nations, let alone regions and communities, are to shape and protect themselves within this "global economy" is far from clear.

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2 months 3 weeks 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
5 months 1 week ago

Religious law makes it illegal for the ignorant to drink wine, but intelligence makes it legal for the intellectual.

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What the history of Philosophy shows us is a succession of noble minds, a gallery of heroes of thought, who, by the power of reason, have penetrated into the being of things, of nature and of spirit, into the Being of God, and have won for us by their labours the highest treasure, the treasure of reasoned knowledge.

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Introduction p. 1 Lectures on the history of philosophy, Translated from German by E. S. Haldane in Three Volumes (1892-96) full text
4 months 3 weeks ago

Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?

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"The Will to Believe" p. 14
1 month 2 weeks ago

They have their belief, these poor Thibet people, that Providence sends down always an Incarnation of Himself into every generation. At bottom some belief in a kind of Pope! At bottom still better, belief that there is a Greatest Man; that he is discoverable; that, once discovered, we ought to treat him with an obedience which knows no bounds! This is the truth of Grand Lamaism; the "discoverability" is the only error here.

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