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1 month 3 weeks ago

How many, once lauded in song, are given over to the forgotten; and how many who sung their praises are clean gone long ago!

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VII, 6
5 months 3 weeks ago

As a general rule-never substitute the symbol for the thing signified, unless it is impossible to show the thing itself; for the child's attention is so taken up with the symbol that he will forget what it signifies.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

The happiness and unhappiness of the rational, social animal depends not on what he feels but on what he does; just as his virtue and vice consist not in feeling but in doing.

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IX, 16
6 months 1 day ago

If you only notice human proceedings, you may observe that all who attain great power and riches, make use of either force or fraud; and what they have acquired either by deceit or violence, in order to conceal the disgraceful methods of attainment, they endeavor to sanctify with the false title of honest gains. Those who either from imprudence or want of sagacity avoid doing so, are always overwhelmed with servitude and poverty; for faithful servants are always servants, and honest men are always poor; nor do any ever escape from servitude but the bold and faithless, or from poverty, but the rapacious and fraudulent. God and nature have thrown all human fortunes into the midst of mankind; and they are thus attainable rather by rapine than by industry, by wicked actions rather than by good. Hence it is that men feed upon each other, and those who cannot defend themselves must be worried.

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Book III, Chapter 13
4 months 2 weeks ago

So it is that you come to know what a real God is. ... The God wants my life. He wants to go with me, sit at the table with me, work with me. Above all he wants to be ever-present.

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P. 291
4 months 2 weeks ago

A heart without music is like beauty without melancholy.

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4 months 1 week ago

It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.

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Ch. 13: "Requisites for Social Progress", p. 291
6 months 3 weeks ago

Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household. One keeps this anxiety at a distance by looking at the many round about who are related to him as kin and friends, but the anxiety is still there, nevertheless, and one hardly dares think of how he would feel if all this were taken away.

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4 months 1 week ago

The philosophy of Bergson, which is a spiritualist restoration, essentially mystical, medieval, Quixotesque, has been called a demi-mondaine philosophy. Leave out the demi; call it mondaine, mundane. Mundane - yes, a philosophy for the world and not for philosophers, just as chemistry ought to be not for chemists alone. The world desires illusion (mundus vult decipi) - either the illusion antecedent to reason, which is poetry, or the illusion subsequent to reason, which is religion. And Machiavelli has said that whosoever wishes to delude will always find someone willing to be deluded. Blessed are they who are easily befooled!

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4 months 1 week ago

What is obscene about pornography is not an excess of sex, but the fact that it contains no sex at all.

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6 months 3 days ago

The world's a bubble, and the life of man Less than a span.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Commerce with all nations, alliance with none, should be our motto.

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Letter to Thomas Lomax
4 months 3 weeks ago

In all persuasions the bigots are persecutors; the men of a cool and reasonable piety are favourers of toleration; because the former sort of men not taking the pains to be acquainted with the grounds of their adversaries tenets, conceive them to be so absurd and monstrous, that no man of sense can give into them in good earnest. For which reason they are convinced that some oblique bad motive induces them to pretend to the belief of such doctrines, and to the maintaining of them with obstinacy. This is a very general principle in all religious differences, and it is the corner stone of all persecution.

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Volume II, p. 148
2 months 1 week ago

There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

The bigger the crowd, the more negligible the individual.

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p 14
5 months 1 week ago

He said they that were serious in ridiculous matters would be ridiculous in serious affairs.

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Cato the Elder
5 months 3 weeks ago

The true function of logic ... as applied to matters of experience ... is analytic rather than constructive; taken a priori, it shows the possibility of hitherto unsuspected alternatives more often than the impossibility of alternatives which seemed prima facie possible. Thus, while it liberates imagination as to what the world may be, it refuses to legislate as to what the world is.

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p. 8
6 months 2 days ago

There can be no doubt that the Virgin Mary is in heaven. How it happened we do not know.

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Weimar edition of Martin Luther's Works (Translation by William J. Cole) Vol. 10, p. 268
1 week 5 days ago

"A large part of mankind is angry not with the sins, but with the sinners."
- Seneca the Younger

See biography for Seneca the Younger:
https://civilsimian.com/SenecatheYounger

Read Seneca the Younger's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/219/content

#philosophy #quotes #CivilSimian #UniversalHumanism

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5 months 2 weeks ago

The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

You will hear every day the maxims of a low prudence. You will hear, that the first duty is to get land and money, place and name. "What is this Truth you seek? What is this Beauty?" men will ask, with derision. If, nevertheless, God have called any of you to explore truth and beauty, be bold, be firm, be true. When you shall say, "As others do, so will I. I renounce, I am sorry for it, my early visions; I must eat the good of the land, and let learning and romantic expectations go, until a more convenient season." - then dies the man in you; then once more perish the buds of art, and poetry, and science, as they have died already in a thousand thousand men. The hour of that choice is the crisis of your history; and see that you hold yourself fast by the intellect. ... Bend to the persuasion which is flowing to you from every object in Nature, to be its tongue to the heart of man, and to show the besotted world how passing fair is wisdom.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Human justice is very prolix, and yet at times quite mediocre; divine justice is more concise and needs no information from the prosecution, no legal papers, no interrogation of witnesses, but makes the guilty one his own informer and helps him with eternity's memory.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

I am obliged to confess that I do not regard the abolition of slavery as a means of warding off the struggle of the two races in the Southern states. The Negroes may long remain slaves without complaining; but if they are once raised to the level of freemen, they will soon revolt at being deprived of almost all their civil rights; and as they cannot become the equals of the whites, they will speedily show themselves as enemies.

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Chapter XVIII.
3 months 2 weeks ago

I suppose it is written that any one who sets up for a bit of a philosopher, must contradict himself to his very face. For here have I fairly talked myself into thinking that we have the whole thing before us at last; that there is no answer to the mystery, except that there are as many as you please; that there is no centre to the maze because, like the famous sphere, its centre is everywhere; and that agreeing to differ with every ceremony of politeness, is the only "one undisturbed song of pure concent" to which we are ever likely to lend our musical voices.

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Crabbed Age and Youth.
4 months 3 weeks ago

He who has thought most deeply loves what is most alive.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Ethical control may survive in small groups, but the control of the population as a whole must be delegated to specialists-to police, priests, owners, teachers, therapists, and so on, with their specialized reinforcers and their codified contingencies.

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Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), p. 155
5 months 3 weeks ago

Since the working-class lives from hand to mouth,it buys as long as it has the means to buy.

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Vol. II, Ch. XX, p. 449.
1 month 3 weeks ago

For if experience has ever taught a truth, it is that a plurality in the supreme Executive will forever split into discordant factions, distract the nation, annihilate its energies, and force the nation to rally under a single head, generally an usurper. We have, I think, fallen on the happiest of all modes of constituting the Executive, that of easing and aiding our President, by permitting him to choose Secretaries of State, of Finance, of War, and of the Navy, with whom he may advise, either separately or all together, and remedy their divisions by adopting or controlling their opinions at his discretion; this saves the nation from the evils of a divided will, and secures to it a steady march in the systematic course which the President may have adopted for that of his administration.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

We may, to be more precise, have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth.

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p. 170
4 months 2 weeks ago

The medieval peasant prior to the 13th century does not compare himself to the feudal lord, nor does the artisan compare himself to the knight. ... From the king down to the hangman and the prostitute, everyone is "noble" in the sense that he considers himself as irreplaceable. In the "system of free competition," on the other hand, the notions on life's tasks and their value are not fundamental, they are but secondary derivations of the desire of all to surpass all the others. No "place" is more than a transitory point in this universal chase.

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L. Coser, trans. (1973), p. 56
4 months 2 weeks ago

If death had only negative aspects, dying would be an unmanageable action.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

Were a stranger to drop on a sudden into this world, I would show him, as a specimen of its ills, a hospital full of diseases, a prison crowded with malefactors and debtors, a field of battle strewed with carcasses, a fleet foundering in the ocean, a nation languishing under tyranny, famine, or pestilence. To turn the gay side of life to him, and give him a notion of its pleasures; whither should I conduct him? to a ball, to an opera, to court? He might justly think, that I was only showing him a diversity of distress and sorrow.

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Demea to Philo, Part X
3 months 3 days ago

To understand how indirect communication is possible we must grasp what it is about ordinary communication that is being changed.

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Chapter 6, Indirect Communication, p. 110
4 months 1 week ago

The jargon of authenticity ... is a trademark of societalized chosenness, ... sub-language as superior language.

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pp. 5-6
3 months 3 weeks ago

The positivist philosophy of Comte and the I doctrine deduced from it that humanity is an organism, and Darwin's doctrine of a law of the struggle for existence that is supposed to govern life, with the differentiation of various breeds of people which follows from it, and the anthropology, biology, and sociology of which people are now so fond-all have the same aim. These have all become favourite sciences because they serve to justify the way in which people free themselves from the human obligation to labour, while consuming the fruits of other people's labour.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

No longer let thy breathing only act in concert with the air which surrounds thee, but let thy intelligence also now be in harmony with the intelligence which embraces all things. For the intelligent power is no less diffused in all parts and pervades all things for him who is willing to draw it to him than the aërial power for him who is able to respire it.

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VIII, 54
4 months 1 week ago

I see myself immersed in the depths of human existence and standing in the face of the ineffable mystery of the world and of all that is. And in that situation, I am made poignantly and burningly aware that the world cannot be self-sufficient, that there is hidden in some still greater depth a mysterious, transcendent meaning. This meaning is called God. Men have not been able to find a loftier name, although they have abused it to the extent of making it almost unutterable. God can be denied only on the surface; but he cannot be denied where human experience reaches down beneath the surface of flat, vapid, commonplace existence.

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As translated in In Love with Eternity : Philosophical Essays and Fragments (2005) by Richard Schain, p. 47
4 months 3 weeks ago

In dreams you sometimes fall from a height, or are stabbed, or beaten, but you never feel pain unless, perhaps, you really bruise yourself against the bedstead, then you feel pain and almost always wake up from it. It was the same in my dream. I did not feel any pain, but it seemed as though with my shot everything within me was shaken and everything was suddenly dimmed, and it grew horribly black around me. I seemed to be blinded, and it benumbed, and I was lying on something hard, stretched on my back; I saw nothing, and could not make the slightest movement.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb, because it is through us - through our brains, our symbolic culture and our technology - that the explosion may proceed to the next stage and reverberate through deep space.

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Ch. 5: The Replication Bomb
4 months 2 weeks ago

What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Let us pardon him his hope of a vain apocalypse, and of a second coming in great triumph upon the clouds of heaven. Perhaps these were the errors of others rather than his own; and if it be true that he himself shared the general illusion, what matters it, since his dream rendered him strong against death, and sustained him in a struggle to which he might otherwise have been unequal?

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Ch. 17.
4 months 1 week ago

An absolute power would be one that never becomes apparent, never pointed to itself, one that rather blended completely into what goes without saying. Power shines in its own absence.

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2 months 1 week ago

As you talk, so is your heart.

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6 months 3 weeks ago
One common false conclusion is that because someone is truthful and upright towards us he is spreading the truth. Thus the child believes his parents' judgements, the Christian believes the claims of the church's founders. Likewise, people do not want to admit that all those things which men defended with the sacrifice of their lives and happiness in earlier centuries were nothing but errors.
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4 months 6 days ago

The spirit of a production-centered, commodity-greedy society is such that only the non-conformist can defend himself sufficiently against it. Those who are seriously concerned with love as the only rational answer to the problem of human existence must, then, arrive at the conclusion that important and radical changes in our social structure are necessary, if love is to become a social and not a highly individualistic, marginal phenomenon.

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