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3 months 2 weeks ago

I care not so much what I am to others as what I am to myself. I will be rich by myself, and not by borrowing.

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Book II, Ch. 16
1 month 2 weeks ago

Sabbath rest does not follow creation; it brings creation to completion.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

Whatever be the substance which takes possession of such a soul, it will produce the same result, and will change into a pretext for not conforming to any concrete purpose. If it appears as reactionary or anti-liberal it will be in order to affirm that the salvation of the State gives a right to level down all other standards, and to manhandle one's neighbour, above all if one's neighbour is an outstanding personality. But the same happens if it decides to act the revolutionary; the apparent enthusiasm for the manual worker, for the afflicted and for social justice, serves as a mask to facilitate the refusal of all obligations, such as courtesy, truthfulness and, above all, respect or esteem for superior individuals. ... As regards other kinds of Dictatorship, we have seen only too well how they flatter the mass-man, by trampling on everything that appeared to be above the common level.

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Chapter XV: We Arrive At The Real Question
3 months 2 weeks ago

Lying and guile need only to be revealed and recognized to be undone. When once lying is recognized as such, it needs no second stroke; it falls of itself and vanishes in shame.

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p. 60

Marxism was a philosophical or semi-philosophical doctrine and a political ideology which was used by the communist state as the main source of legitimacy and the obligatory faith.

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New Preface, p. v
3 months 6 days ago

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

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Book III, Chapter 10, "Hope"
2 months 3 days ago

How many disappointments are conducive to bitterness? One or a thousand, depending on the subject.

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1 month 1 week ago

It is terrible when people do not know God, but it is worse when people identify as God what is not God.

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p. 5
2 months 4 days ago

Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.

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The Transcendent Function ("Die Transzendente Funktion") (1916) Volume 8: Structure & Dynamics of the Psyche, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung
2 months 3 days ago

Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.

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The Message to the Planet (1989) p. 43.
3 months 6 days ago

When you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell a story: the plausible disappears at the same time as the friends. You let events flow by too: you suddenly see people appear who speak and then go away; you plunge into stories of which you can't make head or tail: you'd make a terrible witness.

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Diary entry of Tuesday, 30 January
1 month 2 weeks ago

The most important misunderstanding seems to me to lie in a confusion between the human necessities which I consider part of human nature, and the human necessities as they appear as drives, needs, passions, etc., in any given historical period. This division is not very different from Marx's concept of "human nature in general", to be distinguished from "human nature as modified in each historical period". The same distinction exists in Marx when he distinguishes between "constant" or "fixed" drives and "relative" drives. The constant drives "exist under all circumstances and ... can be changed by social conditions only as far as form and direction are concerned". The relative drives "owe their origin only to a certain type of social organization".

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3 months 3 days ago

We think of beauty as being most worthy of reverence. But what is most worthy of reverence lights up only where the magnificent strength to revere is alive. To revere is not a thing for the petty and lowly, the incapacitated and underdeveloped. It is a matter of tremendous passion; only what flows from such passion is in the grand style.

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p. 125

What an incalculable debt do we owe to that little speck of land, Greece.-The principles of taste, the finest models of composition, the doctrines and the glorious examples to which we owe political freedom, the arts, the sciences, architecture, sculpture, every thing that is great and splendid in literature and politics, must be considered as ultimately derived from that little peninsula.

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Letter to Zachary Macaulay (8 September 1821), quoted in The Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay, Volume I: 1807-February 1831, ed. Thomas Pinney (1974), p. 163
1 month ago

This "knowing what to do"... is a matter of having the right purpose, the purpose appropriate to the situation in hand... The one who "knows what to do" is the one on whom you can rely to make the best shot at success, whenever success is possible.

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"Knowledge and Feeling" (p. 35)
3 months 1 week ago

Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.

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3 months 1 week ago

To love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues.

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Letter to Anthony Collins, 29 October 1703
2 months 1 week ago

Moderation is the spirit of castrated narrow-mindedness.

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"Selected Aphorisms from the Athenaeum (1798)", Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, trans. (Pennsylvania University Press:1968) #64
3 months 1 week ago

In England, and in all Roman Catholic countries, the lottery of the church is in reality much more advantageous than is necessary.

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Chapter X, Part II, p. 155.
1 month 2 weeks ago

Optimism is an alienated form of faith, pessimism an alienated form of despair. If one truly responds to man and his future, ie, concernedly and "responsibly." one can respond only by faith or by despair. Rational faith as well as rational despair are based on the most thorough, critical knowledge of all the factors that are relevant for the survival of man.

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p. 483
3 months 3 weeks ago

Since love grows within you, so beauty grows. For love is the beauty of the soul.

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3 months 1 week ago

A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain, or but a very insignificant one; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighboring palace rises in equal or even in greater measure, the occupant of the relatively little house will always find himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls.

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Wage Labour and Capital (December 1847), in Marx Engels Selected Works, Volume I, p. 163.

All his life he [the American] jumps into the train after it has started and jumps out before it has stopped; and he never once gets left behind, or breaks a leg.

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"Materialism and Idealism" p. 175 (Hathi Trust)
3 months 3 weeks ago

Listen widely to remove your doubts and be careful when speaking about the rest and your mistakes will be few. See much and get rid of what is dangerous and be careful in acting on the rest and your causes for regret will be few. Speaking without fault, acting without causing regret: 'upgrading' consists in this.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

And the central assertion of his philosophy is that this inner realm is the 'spiritual world' and that once man has learned to enter this realm, he realizes that it is not a mere imaginative reflection of the external world, but a world that possesses its own independent reality.

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p. 161
1 month 3 weeks ago

Not all women, in fact, very few, have had the good fortune to live and work among women and men actively involved in the feminist movement. Many of us live in circumstances and environments where we must engage in feminist struggle alone, with only occasional support and affirmation.

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Acknowledgments.
3 months 6 days ago

It is too early to love. We will buy the right to do so by shedding blood.

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Act 1
3 months 2 days ago

The most defenseless tenderness and the bloodiest of powers have a similar need of confession. Western man has become a confessing animal.

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Vol. I, p. 59
3 months 6 days ago

Existentialism is nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position. Its intention is not in the least that of plunging men into despair. And if by despair one means as the Christians do - any attitude of unbelief, the despair of the existentialists is something different. Existentialism is not atheist in the sense that it would exhaust itself in demonstrations of the non-existence of God. It declares, rather, that even if God existed that would make no difference from its point of view. Not that we believe God does exist, but we think that the real problem is not that of His existence; what man needs is to find himself again and to understand that nothing can save him from himself, not even a valid proof of the existence of God. In this sense existentialism is optimistic. It is a doctrine of action, and it is only by self-deception, by confining their own despair with ours that Christians can describe us as without hope.

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p. 56
1 month 4 weeks ago

Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place.

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Ch. VI: Nature, Mind and the Subject

If I work incessantly to the last, nature owes me another form of existence when the present one collapses.

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Letter to Eckermann
2 months 1 week ago

The foremost, or indeed the sole condition which is required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community, is to love equality, or to get men to believe you love it. Thus the science of despotism, which was once so complex, is simplified, and reduced as it were to a single principle.

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Book Four, Chapter IV.
3 months 2 weeks ago

Finally, every man will become dear and pleasing to every other man; all will be beloved by all! and, what is still more desirable, beloved also by Christ; to become acceptable to whom is the highest felicity of human nature.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Alonso of Aragon was wont to say in commendation of age, that age appears to be best in four things - old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.

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No. 97
2 months 1 week ago

On the whole, Borne, Heine, Feuerbach, and such authors are the individualities who have great interest for someone who is composing an imaginary construction. They frequently are well informed about the religious-that is, they know definitely that they do not want to have anything to do with it. This is a great advantage over the systematicians, who without knowing where the religious really is located take it upon themselves to explain it-sometimes obsequiously, sometimes superciliously, but always unsuccessfully.

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Soren Kierkegaard, Stages on Life's Way, 1845, Hong 1988 p. 452
1 month 2 weeks ago

I believe that the fundamental alternative for man is the choice between "life" and "death"; between creativity and destructive violence; between reality and illusions; between objectivity and intolerance; between brotherhood-independence and dominance-submission.

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3 months 1 week ago

England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.

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"The British Rule in India," New York Daily Tribune, 10 June 1853.
1 month 5 days ago

By simply moving information and brushing information against information, any medium whatever creates vast wealth.

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4 months 4 days ago

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

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3 months 1 week ago

Have patience awhile; slanders are not long-lived. Truth is the child of time; erelong she shall appear to vindicate thee.

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As quoted in Gems of Thought (1888) edited by Charles Northend
1 month 2 weeks ago

The huge laugh is a most extreme expression of freedom.

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4 months 1 week ago
Good prose is written only face to face with poetry.
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2 weeks 2 days ago

Suffering exists only because it was good for our genes. Conditionally-activated negative emotions were fitness-enhancing in the ancestral environment. In the current era, apologists for mental pain are serving as the innocent mouthpieces of the nasty bits of code which spawned them.

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The Good Drug Guide: The Responsible Parent's Guide to Healthy Mood-Boosters for All the Family, BLTC Research, 2012
2 months 3 days ago

Only those moments count when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than to exchange a word with someone.

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4 months 4 days ago

At my age one's got to be sincere. Lying's too much effort.

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3 months 6 days ago

...the prisoner's dreams is the guard's spirituality.

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p. 400
3 months 6 days ago

He wanted to assume his entire condition, to carry the world on his shoulders and to become, in defiance of all, what all have made of him.

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p. 384

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