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4 weeks ago

He [Jesus] not only forbids actual uncleanness, but all irregular desires, upon pain of hell-fire; causeless divorces; swearing in conversation, as well as forswearing in judgment; revenge; retaliation; ostentation of charity, of devotion, and of fasting; repetitions in prayer, covetousness, worldly care, censoriousness: and on the other side commands loving our enemies, doing good to those that hate us, blessing those that curse us, praying for those that despitefully use us; patience and meekness under injuries, forgiveness, liberality, compassion: and closes all; his particular injunctions, with this general golden rule, Matt. VII. 12, "All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do you even so to them, for this is the law and the prophets." And to show how much He is in earnest, and expects obedience to these laws, He tells them, Luke VI. 35, That if they obey, " great shall be their reward".

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1 month 3 weeks ago

I see again what I thought I saw the first time, when I sent forth the little book that was compared to and in fact could best be compared to a humble little flower under the cover of the great forest.

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3 weeks 5 days ago

Perhaps the best hope for the future of mankind is that ways will be found of increasing the scope and intensity of sympathy.

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3 weeks 6 days ago

In youth it is the outward aspect of things that most engages us; while in age, thought or reflection is the predominating quality of the mind. Hence, youth is the time for poetry, and age is more inclined to philosophy. In practical affairs it is the same: a man shapes his resolutions in youth more by the impression that the outward world makes upon him; whereas, when he is old, it is thought that determines his actions.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

There is no sin, but it is you who make sin when you do the things that are like the nature of adultery, which is called sin.That is why the Good came into your midst, to the essence of every nature in order to restore it to its root.Then He continued and said, That is why you become sick and die, for you are deprived of the one who can heal you. Chapter 4, in response to a question by Peter: "Since you have now explained all things to us, tell us this: what is the sin of the world?" Adultery is also translated as "fornication".

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2 weeks 2 days ago

Thus to the Lord doth Asha, the Truth, reply:"No guide is known who can shelter the world from woe,None who knows what moves and works Thy lofty plans."

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3 weeks 4 days ago

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

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1 month 3 days ago

We do not become righteous by doing righteous deeds but, having been made righteous, we do righteous deeds.

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4 weeks 1 day ago

With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches, which in their eye is never so complete as when they appear to possess those decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselves.

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3 weeks 5 days ago

Our condition is like that of the poor wolves: if one of the flock wound himself, or so much as limp, the rest eat him up incontinently. That serene Power interposes the check upon the caprices and officiousness of our wills.

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1 month 3 days ago

Nothing prints more lively in our minds than something we wish to forget.

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3 weeks 5 days ago

Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Irony limits, finitizes, and circumscribes and thereby yields truth, actuality, content; it disciplines and punishes and thereby yields balance and consistency.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.

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1 month 1 week ago

We can open our hearts to God, but only with Divine help.

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3 weeks 3 days ago

In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy. All the characteristics you stress in the Negro people: their beauty, their capacity for joy, their warmth, and their humanity, are well-known characteristics of all oppressed people. They grow out of suffering and they are the proudest possession of all pariahs. Unfortunately, they have never survived the hour of liberation by even five minutes. Hatred and love belong together, and they are both destructive; you can afford them only in private and, as a people, only so long as you are not free.

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4 weeks ago

I do not, therefore, need any penetrating acuteness to see what I have to do in order that my volition be morally good. Inexperienced in the course of the world, incapable of being prepared for whatever might come to pass in it, I ask myself only: can you also will that your maxim become a universal law?

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1 month 3 days ago

Courtesy is a science of the highest importance. It is, like grace and beauty in the body, which charm at first sight, and lead on to further intimacy and friendship, opening a door that we may derive instruction from the example of others, and at the same time enabling us to benefit them by our example, if there be anything in our character worthy of imitation.

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3 weeks 3 days ago

As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.

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1 month 3 days ago

Live as long as you please, you will strike nothing off the time you will have to spend dead.

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3 weeks 4 days ago

If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. It would take as long for us to recall a space of time as it took the original time to elapse, and we should never get ahead with our thinking. All recollected times undergo, accordingly, what M. Ribot calls foreshortening; and this foreshortening is due to the omission of an enormous number of the facts which filled them.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

It is only afterward that a new idea seems reasonable. To begin with, it usually seems unreasonable.

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3 weeks 5 days ago

The tool, as we have seen, is not exterminated by the machine.

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3 weeks 4 days ago

The proper study of mankind is books.

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We must plow through the whole of language.

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1 month 3 days ago

Justice is a temporary thing that must at last come to an end; but the conscience is eternal and will never die.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

The ancients, even though they believed in destiny, believed primarily in nature, in which they participated wholeheartedly. To rebel against nature amounted to rebelling against oneself.

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2 weeks 1 day ago

Count all wickedness foreign and alien.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

The majority of mankind and people who lack refinement conceive it to be pleasure, and hence they approve a life of sensual enjoyment.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Continence is a branch of temperance, which prevents the diseases, infamy, remorse, and punishment, to which those are exposed, who indulge themselves in unlawful amours.

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3 weeks 3 days ago

What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world-and defines himself afterwards. If man as the existentialist see him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing - as he wills to be after that leap towards existence. Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism.

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3 weeks 4 days ago

Our psychological experiences are all equally facts. There is nothing to choose between them. No psychological experience is "truer," so far as we are concerned, than any other. For even if one should correspond more closely to things in themselves as perceived by some hypothetical non-human being, it would be impossible for us to discover which it was. Science is no "truer" than common sense, or lunacy, or art, or religion. It permits us to organize our experience profitably; but tells us nothing about the real nature of the world to which our experiences are supposed to refer. From the internal reality, by which I mean the totality of psychological experiences, it actually separates us. Art, for example, deals with many more aspects of this internal reality than does science, which confines itself deliberately and by convention to the study of one very limited class of experiences - the experiences of sense.

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3 weeks 3 days ago

In all sectors of society there should be roughly equal prospects of culture and achievement for everyone similarly motivated and endowed. The expectations of those with the same abilities and aspirations should not be affected by their social class.

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1 month 3 days ago

Love to his soul gave eyes; he knew things are not as they seem. The dream is his real life; the world around him is the dream.

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1 month 1 week ago

After death the sensation is either pleasant or there is none at all. But this should be thought on from our youth up, so that we may be indifferent to death, and without this thought no one can be in a tranquil state of mind. For it is certain that we must die, and, for aught we know, this very day. Therefore, since death threatens every hour, how can he who fears it have any steadfastness of soul?

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The whole life of an American is passed like a game of chance, a revolutionary crisis, or a battle.

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3 weeks 3 days ago

For those who want 'to change life", 'to reinvent love,' God is nothing but a hindrance.

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3 weeks 5 days ago

I am sorry to say that at the moment I am so busy as to be convinced that life has no meaning whatever... I do not see that we can judge what would be the result of the discovery of truth, since none has hitherto been discovered.

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2 days ago

How can even the lowest mind, if he reflects at all the marvels of this earth and sky, the brilliant fashioning of plants and animals, remain blind to the fact that this wonderful world with its settled order must have a maker to design, determine and direct it?

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Every explanation is after all an hypothesis.

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3 weeks 5 days ago

Every man is a new method.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

For well-being and health, again, the homestead should be airy in summer, and sunny in winter. A homestead possessing these qualities would be longer than it is deep; and its main front would face the south.

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4 weeks 1 day ago

The more exquisite any good is, of which a small specimen is afforded us, the sharper is the evil, allied to it; and few exceptions are found to this uniform law of nature. The most sprightly wit borders on madness; the highest effusions of joy produce the deepest melancholy; the most ravishing pleasures are attended with the most cruel lassitude and disgust; the most flattering hopes make way for the severest disappointments. And, in general, no course of life has such safety (for happiness is not to be dreamed of) as the temperate and moderate, which maintains, as far as possible, a mediocrity, and a kind of insensibility, in every thing. As the good, the great, the sublime, the ravishing are found eminently in the genuine principles of theism; it may be expected, from the analogy of nature, that the base, the absurd, the mean, the terrifying will be equally discovered in religious fictions and chimeras.

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3 weeks 3 days ago

The difference principle, for example, requires that the higher expectations of the more advantaged contribute to the prospects of the least advantaged.

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2 weeks 6 days ago

Beneath the humanization of the penalties, what one finds are all those rules that authorize, or rather demand, 'leniency', as a calculated economy of the powder to punish. But they also provoke a shift in the point of application of this power: it is no longer the body, with the ritual play of excessive pains, spectacular branding in the ritual of the public execution; it is the mind or rather a play of representations and sings circulating discreetly but necessarily and evidently in the minds of all. It is no longer the body, but the soul, said Mably. And we see very clearly what he meant by this term: the correlative of a technique of power. Old 'anatomies' of punishment are abandoned, But have we really entered the age of non-corporal punishment?

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2 weeks 6 days ago

This market way of life promotes addictions to stimulation and obsessions with comfort and convenience.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Where without any change in circumstances the things held to be just by law are seen not to correspond with the concept of justice in actual practice, such laws are not really just; but wherever the laws have ceased to be advantageous because of a change in circumstances, in that case the laws were for that time just when they were advantageous for the mutual dealings of the citizens, and subsequently ceased to be just when they were no longer advantageous.

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3 weeks 5 days ago

In the vaunted works of Art The master stroke is Nature's part.

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3 weeks 5 days ago

I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom.

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1 month 1 week 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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