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2 months 1 week ago

I love Emil, but I can't get behind this relativism. Disapproval of somebody's haircut or clothing is not a reason to kill them. Severity is everything....

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7 months 4 weeks ago

Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others, and this is a gift interred only by the self.

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Behavior
7 months 2 weeks ago

I will begin to speak when I am not going to say what were better left unsaid.

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Quoted by Plutarch, Life of Cato the Younger, 4 Bernadotte Perrin, ed. Plutarch's Lives, Vol. 8, LCL 100 (1919), pp. 247, 361
6 months 1 week ago

I have said that, in a sense, the parasites were a 'shadow' of man's cowardice and passivity. Their strength could increase in an atmosphere of defeat and panic, for it fed on human fear. In that case, the best way to combat them was to change the atmosphere to one of strength and purpose.

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p. 188
5 months 3 weeks ago

A good conscience is eight parts of courage.

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Catriona, ch. XI (1893).
8 months 3 weeks ago

It is my own experience ... that commentators are far more ingenious at finding meaning than authors are at inserting it.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

A good guide will take you through the more important streets more often than he takes you down side streets; a bad guide will do the opposite. In philosophy I'm a rather bad guide.

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As quoted in Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Information (2008) edited by Alois Pichler and Herbert Hrachovec, p. 140
6 months 2 weeks ago

If all men, by the act of being born, are destined to suffer violence, that is a truth to which the empire of circumstances closes their minds.

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in The Simone Weil Reader, p. 163
7 months 3 weeks ago

The circle of day and night is the law of the classical world: the most restricted but most demanding of the necessities of the world, the most inevitable but the simplest of the legislations of nature.This was a law that excluded all dialectics and all reconciliation, consequently laying the foundations for the smooth unity of knowledge as well as the uncompromising division of tragic existence. It reigns on a world without darkness, which knows neither effusiveness nor the gentle charms of lyricism. All is waking or dreams, truth or error, the light of being or the nothingness of shadow.

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Part Two: 2. The Transcendence of Delirium
8 months 1 week ago

It was truly very good reason that we should be beholden to God only, and to the favour of his grace, for the truth of so noble a belief, since from his sole bounty we receive the fruit of immortality, which consists in the enjoyment of eternal beatitude.... The more we give and confess to owe and render to God, we do it with the greater Christianity.

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Ch. 12
4 months 2 weeks ago

All greatness is unconscious, or it is little and naught.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

While imprisoned in the shed Pierre had learned not with his intellect but with his whole being, by life itself, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of simple human needs, and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity. And now during these last three weeks of the march he had learned still another new, consolatory truth- that nothing in this world is terrible. He had learned that as there is no condition in which man can be happy and entirely free, so there is no condition in which he need be unhappy and lack freedom. He learned that suffering and freedom have their limits and that those limits are very near together....

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Bk. XIV, ch. 12
9 months ago

Concerning the generation of animals akin to them, as hornets and wasps, the facts in all cases are similar to a certain extent, but are devoid of the extraordinary features which characterize bees; this we should expect, for they have nothing divine about them as the bees have.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Some economists also use the terms Fordism and pos-Fordism to mark the shift from an economy characterized by the stable-long-term employment typical of factory workers to one marked by flexible, mobile, and precarious labor relations: flexible because workers have to adapt to different tasks, mobile because workers have to move frequently between jobs, and precarious because no contracts guarantee stable, long-term employment. Whereas economic modernization, which developed Fordist labor relations, centered on the conomies of scale and larga systems of production and exchange, economic postmodernization, with its post-Fordist labor relations, develops smaller-scale, flexible systems.

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112
8 months 1 week ago

The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.

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The Prince (1513), Ch. 22
7 months 5 days ago

To me it's like standing on a platform of perpetual error. We can't just learn and remember.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Then are the children free. Notwithstanding, lest we should offend them, go thou to the sea, and cast an hook, and take up the fish that first cometh up; and when thou hast opened his mouth, thou shalt find a piece of money: that take, and give unto them for me and thee.

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17:26-27 (KJV)
7 months 2 weeks ago

Those who have a well-ordered character lead also a well-ordered life.

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7 months 4 weeks ago

It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accepts the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints.

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Lecture II, "Circumscription of the Topic"
7 months 4 weeks ago

Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances...Strong men believe in cause and effect.

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Worship
5 months 4 weeks ago

To be good and lead a good life means to give to others more than one takes from them.

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Ch. VII
6 months 3 weeks ago

I can prove now, for instance, that two human hands exist. How? By holding up my two hands, and saying, as I make a certain gesture with the right hand, "Here is one hand," and adding, as I make a certain gesture with the left, "and here is another." And if, by doing this, I have proved ipso facto the existence of external things, you will all see that I can also do it now in numbers of other ways: there is no need to multiply examples.

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"Proof of an External World," Proceedings of the British Academy 25 (1939).
4 months 1 week ago

It must be obvious... that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

The rule of Big Money and its attendant culture of cupidity and mendacity has so poisoned our hearts, minds and souls that a dominant self-righteous neoliberal soulcraft of smartness, dollars and bombs thrives with little opposition.

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America is spiritually bankrupt. We must fight back together. The Guardian,
8 months 1 week ago

If we do not secure the foundation, we cannot secure the edifice.

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6 months 4 weeks ago

The "I" who speaks in this book is by no means the author. Rather, the author wishes that the reader may come to see himself in this "I": that the reader may not simply relate to what is said here as he would to history, but rather that while reading he will actually converse with himself, deliberate back and forth, deduce conclusions, make decisions like his representative in the book, and through his own work and reflection, purely out of his own resources, develop and build within himself the philosophical disposition that is presented to him in this book merely as a picture.

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P. Preuss, trans. (1987), p. 2
6 months 2 weeks ago

The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda.

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As quoted in Encounter with Martin Buber (1972) by Aubrey Hodes, p. 135
4 months 2 weeks ago

Nature admits no lie.

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Latter Day Pamphlet, No. 5.
8 months 1 week ago

Mahomet established a religion by putting his enemies to death; Jesus Christ, by commanding his followers to lay down their own lives.

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Thoughts on Religion and Philosophy (W. Collins, 1838), Ch. XVI, p. 202
5 months 3 weeks ago

It is always the psychic and social grounds, brought into play by each medium or technology, that readjust the balance of the hemispheres and of human sensibilities into equilibrium with those grounds.

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p. 82
9 months ago

Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

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8 months 3 weeks ago

The fact is that I've never called myself a genius, and I think the term has been cheapened by overuse into meaninglessness. If other people want to call me that, that's their problem.

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6 months 1 week ago

I have been taught that the land should belong to those who till the soil. With all of his deep-seated sympathies with the Arabs, our comrade cannot possibly deny that the Jews in Palestine have tilled the soil. Tens of thousands of them, young and deeply devout idealists, have flocked to Palestine, there to till the soil under the most trying pioneer conditions. They have reclaimed wastelands and have turned them into fertile fields and blooming gardens. Now I do not say that therefore Jews are entitled to more rights than the Arabs, but for an ardent socialist to say that the Jews have no business in Palestine seems to me rather a strange kind of socialism.

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8 months 1 day ago

A young man before he leaves the shelter of his father's house, and the guard of a tutor, should be fortify'd with resolution, and made acquainted with men, to secure his virtues, lest he should be led into some ruinous course, or fatal precipice, before he is sufficiently acquainted with the dangers of conversation, and his steadiness enough not to yield to every temptation.

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Sec. 70
7 months 6 days ago

Of the eternal corporeal substance (which is not producible ex nihilo, nor reducible ad nihilum, but rarefiable, condensable, formable, arrangeable, and "fashionable") the composition is dissolved, the complexion is changed, the figure is modified, the being is altered, the fortune is varied, only the elements remaining what they are in substance, that same principle persevering which was always the one material principle, which is the true substance of things, eternal, ingenerable and incorruptible.

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As translated by Arthur Imerti
6 months 2 weeks ago

The highest and ultimate personality values are declared to be independent of contrasts like rich and poor, healthy and sick, etc. The world had become accustomed to considering the social hierarchy, based on status, wealth, vital strength, and power, as an exact image of the ultimate values of morality and personality. The only way to disclose the discovery of anew and higher sphere of being and life, of the "kingdom of God" whose order is independent of that worldly and vital hierarchy, was to stress the vanity of the old values in this higher order.

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L. Coser, trans. (1961), p. 98
8 months 3 weeks ago

Those who purge the soul believe that the soul can receive no benefit from any teachings offered to it until someone by cross-questioning reduces him who is cross-questioned to an attitude of modesty, by removing the opinions that obstruct the teachings, and thus purges him and makes him think that he knows only what he knows, and no more.

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6 months 1 week ago

You must go to Mahometanism, to Buddhism, to the East, to the Sufis & Fakirs, to Pantheism, for the right growth of mysticism.

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Letter (2 March 1853), quoted in Suggestions for Thought : Selections and Commentaries (1994), edited by Michael D. Calabria and Janet A. MacRae, p. xiii
7 months 4 weeks ago

There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant.

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Demonology
4 months 2 weeks ago

Did you ever hear my definition of marriage? It is, that it resembles a pair of shears, so joined that they can not be separated; often moving in opposite directions, yet always punishing anyone who comes between them.

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Vol. I, ch. 11, p. 415; paraphrased variant: "Marriage resembles a pair of shears, so joined that they can not be separated; often moving in opposite directions, yet always punishing anyone who comes between them."
5 months 3 weeks ago

In all the areas of life where people have sought and found consolation through forbidding their desires-sex in particular, and taste in general-the habit of judgment is now to be stamped out.

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"Rays of Hope" (p. 106)

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