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7 months 2 weeks ago

Time, and Industry, produce everyday new knowledge.

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The Second Part, Chapter 30, p. 176
5 months 2 days ago

From my youth onwards, I have felt sure that all thought which thinks itself out to an issue ends in mysticism. In the stillness of the African jungle I have been able to work out this thought and give it expression.

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5 months 1 week ago

It is life that educates, and perhaps love more than anything else in life.

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Ch. 2 : On Youth
8 months 3 weeks ago

The plan we are advocating amounts essentially to this: that a certain small income, sufficient for necessaries, should be secured to all, whether they work or not, and that a larger income, as much larger as might be warranted by the total amount of commodities produced, should be given to those who are willing to engage in some work which the community recognizes as useful.

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Ch. IV: Work and Pay, discussing Universal Basic Income (UBI)
7 months 3 weeks ago

The divine origin of man, as taught by Vedanta, IS continually inculcated, to stimulate his efforts to return, to animate him in the struggle, and incite him to consider a reunion and reincorporation with Divinity as the one primary object of every action and reaction. Even the loftiest philosophy of the European, the idealism of reason as it is set forth by the Greek philosophers, appears in comparison with the abundant light and vigor of Oriental idealism like a feeble Promethean spark in the full flood of heavenly glory of the noonday sun, faltering and feeble and ever ready to be extinguished.

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quoted in Londhe, S. (2008). A tribute to Hinduism: Thoughts and wisdom spanning continents and time about India and her culture. New Delhi: Pragun Publication.
8 months 2 weeks ago

I think they do it to pass the time, nothing more. But time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.

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Diary entry of Friday (2 February), concerning a card game
6 months 3 weeks ago

Rational mechanics must be the science of the motions which result from any forces, and of the forces which are required for any motions, accurately propounded and demonstrated. For many things induce me to suspect, that all natural phenomena may depend upon some forces by which the particles of bodies are either drawn towards each other, and cohere, or repel and recede from each other: and these forces being hitherto unknown, philosophers have pursued their researches in vain. And I hope that the principles expounded in this work will afford some light, either to this mode of philosophizing, or to some mode which is more true.

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Preface, translation in William Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences
9 months ago

My Lord St. Albans said that Nature did never put her precious jewels into a garret four stories high, and therefore that exceeding tall men had ever very empty heads.

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No. 17
8 months 3 weeks ago

Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

The original thinking force of the universe progresses and develops itself in all possible determinations of which it is capable, just as the other original natural forces progress and assume all possible configurations. I am a particular determination of the formative force, like the plant; a particular determination of the peculiar motive force, like the animal; and in addition to this a determination of the thinking force: and the union of these three basic forces into one force, into one harmonious development, is the distinguishing characteristic of my species.

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P. Preuss, trans. (1987), p. 12
8 months 3 weeks ago

We cannot suppose that an individual's thinking survives bodily death, since that destroys the organization of the brain and dissipates the energy which utilized the brain tracks. God and immortality, the central dogma of the Christian religion, find no support in science. But we in the West have come to think of them as the irreducible minimum of theology. No doubt people will continue to entertain these beliefs, because they are pleasant, just as it is pleasant to think ourselves virtuous and our enemies wicked. But for my part I cannot see any grounds for either. I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove Satan is a fiction. The Christian God may exist, so might the Gods of Olympus, Ancient Egypt or Babylon; but no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other. They lie outside the region of provable knowledge and there is no reason to consider any of them.

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8 months 3 weeks ago

Man is free at the instant he wants to be.

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Source Brutus, act II, scene I, 1730

Those who have racked their brains to discover new proofs have perhaps been induced to do so by a compulsion they could not quite explain to themselves. Instead of giving us their new proofs they should have explained to us the motivation that constrained them to search for them.

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L24
9 months 2 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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8 months 3 weeks ago

A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the State with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated by it as enemies.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Philosophy's error is to be too endurable.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Jesus, in some respects, was an anarchist, for he had no idea of civil government. That government seems to him purely and simply an abuse.

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Ch. 7.
6 months 1 week ago

Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

The limits of this strategy were evident as the century drew to a close.

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The Marxist left had to confront the fact that actual Communist societies in the Soviet Union and China had turned into grotesque and oppressive dictatorships. p. 112
9 months 3 weeks ago

If I were to imagine a girl deeply in love and some man who wanted to use all his reasoning powers and knowledge to ridicule her passion, well, there's surely no question of the enamoured girl having to choose between keeping her wealth and being ridiculed. No, but if some extremely cool and calculating man calmly told the young girl, "I will explain to you what love is," and the girl admitted that everything he told her was quite correct, I wonder if she wouldn't choose his miserable common sense rather than her wealth?

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5 months 2 weeks ago

This [experimentation] is the custom-and properly so-in those sciences where mathematical demonstrations are applied to natural phenomena, as is seen in the case of perspective, astronomy, mechanics, music, and others where the principles, once established by well-chosen experiments, become the foundations of the entire superstructure.

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Salviati, Third Day. Change of Position
8 months 5 days ago

Again, Amyclas the Heracleotean, one of Plato's familiars, and Menæchmus, the disciple, indeed, of Eudoxus, but conversant with Plato, and his brother Dinostratus, rendered the whole of geometry as yet more perfect. But Theudius, the Magnian, appears to have excelled, as well in mathematical disciplines, as in the rest of philosophy. For he constructed elements egregiously, and rendered many particulars more universal. Besides, Cyzicinus the Athenian, flourished at the same period, and became illustrious in other mathematical disciplines, but especially in geometry. These, therefore, resorted by turns to the Academy, and employed themselves in proposing common questions.

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Ch. IV.
5 months ago

Man is constituted as a speculative being; he contemplates the world, and the objects around him, not with a passive indifferent eye, but as a system disposed with order and design.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Blood will stream over Europe until the nations become aware of the frightful madness which drives them in circles. And then, struck by celestial music and made gentle, they approach their former altars all together, hear about the works of peace, and hold a great celebration of peace with fervent tears before the smoking altars.

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As quoted in the Fourth Leaflet of the White Rose
7 months 2 weeks ago

As incompetent in life as in death, I loathe myself and in this loathing I dream of another life, another death. And for having sought to be a sage such as never was, I am only a madman among the mad.

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5 months 6 days ago

Correspondences are like small clothes before the invention of suspenders; it is impossible to keep them up.

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Vol. II, letter to Catherine Crowe (31 January 1841), pp. 441-442
7 months 3 weeks ago

I must say, that the whole Scheme of the war is mistaken, (or appears to me to be so), for it ought to be, not for Dunkirk, or this or t'other Town-but to drive Jacobinism from the world.

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Letter to Dr Charles Burney (14/15 September 1793), quoted in P. J. Marshall and John A. Woods (eds.)
6 months 3 weeks ago

Materialism ends up denying the existence of any irreducible subjective qualitative states of sentience or awareness.

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Consciousness and Language (2002) p. 47.

He that gives quickly gives twice.

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Adagia, 1508
7 months 3 weeks ago

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.

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Vol. 3, Ch. IX, State-Tamperings with Money and Banks
4 months 2 weeks ago

Though thou be destined to live three thousand years and as many myriads besides, yet remember that no man loseth other life than that which he liveth, nor liveth other than that which he loseth.

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II, 14
5 months 6 days ago

Two elements must therefore be rooted out once for all-the fear of future suffering, and the recollection of past suffering; since the latter no longer concerns me, and the former concerns me not yet.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Dialectical thought understands the critical tension between "is" and "ought" first as an ontological condition, pertaining to the structure of Being itself. However, the recognition of this state of Being - its theory - intends from the beginning a concrete practice. Seen in the light of a truth which appears in them falsified or denied, the given facts themselves appear false and negative.

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p. 133
8 months 3 weeks ago

It requires twenty years for a man to rise from the vegetable state in which he is within his mother's womb, and from the pure animal state which is the lot of his early childhood, to the state when the maturity of reason begins to appear. It has required thirty centuries to learn a little about his structure. It would need eternity to learn something about his soul. It takes an instant to kill him.

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"Man: General Reflection on Man", 1771
7 months 2 weeks ago

Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you. Howbeit this kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting.

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17:20-21 (KJV)
8 months 1 week ago

If we tried to rely entirely on reason, and pressed it hard, our lives and beliefs would collapse - a form of madness that may actually occur if the inertial force of taking the world and life for granted is somehow lost. If we lose our grip on that, reason will not give it back to us.

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"The Absurd" (1971), p. 20.
7 months 1 week ago

The needs of a human being are sacred. Their satisfaction cannot be subordinated either to reasons of state, or to any consideration of money, nationality, race, or colour, or to the moral or other value attributed to the human being in question, or to any consideration whatsoever. There is no legitimate limit to the satisfaction of the needs of a human being except as imposed by necessity and by the needs of other human beings. The limit is only legitimate if the needs of all human beings receive an equal degree of attention.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

The Kingdom is like a wise fisherman who cast his net into the sea and drew it up from the sea full of small fish. Among them the wise fisherman found a fine large fish. He threw all the small fish back into the sea and chose the large fish without difficulty. Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear.

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5 months 1 week ago

Before a man can do things there must be things he will not do.

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Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction (IVP, 1980), Ch 2
8 months 3 weeks ago

It is amusing to hear the modern Christian telling you how mild and rationalistic Christianity really is and ignoring the fact that all its mildness and rationalism is due to the teaching of men who in their own day were persecuted by all orthodox Christians.

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"Sources of Intolerance"
8 months 3 weeks ago

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

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"Rights", 1771
6 months 2 weeks ago

In an age of enormities, the emotions are naturally weakened. We are continually called upon to have feelings - about genocide, for instance, or about famine or the blowing up of passenger planes - and we are all aware that we are incapable of reacting appropriately. A guilty consciousness of emotional inadequacy or impotence makes people doubt their own human weight.

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"The Distracted Public" (1990), p. 156
5 months 1 week ago

All things are subject to decay and change.

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The General History of Polybius as translated by James Hampton' (1762), Vol. II, pp. 177-178

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