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2 weeks 6 days ago

And truly... if men could be persuaded to mind more the advancement of natural philosophy than that of their own reputations, it were not, methinks, very uneasy to make them sensible, that one of the considerablest services, that they could do mankind, were to set themselves diligently and industriously to make experiments and collect observations, without being over-forward to establish principles and axioms, believing it uneasy to erect such theories, as are capable to explicate all the phænomena of nature, before they have been able to take notice of the tenth part of those phænomena, that are to be explicated.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

And as in other things, so in men, not the seller, but the buyer determines the Price.

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The First Part, Chapter 10, p. 42
5 months 3 weeks ago

God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but He does what is still more wonderful: He makes saints out of sinners.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Situation seems to be the mould in which men's characters are formed.

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Letter 23
2 months 3 weeks ago

In former times the chief method of justifying the use of violence and thereby infringing the law of love was by claiming a divine right for the rulers: the Tsars, Sultans, Rajahs, Shahs, and other heads of states. But the longer humanity lived the weaker grew the belief in this peculiar, God-given right of the ruler. That belief withered in the same way and almost simultaneously in the Christian and the Brahman world, as well as in Buddhist and Confucian spheres, and in recent times it has so faded away as to prevail no longer against man's reasonable understanding and the true religious feeling. People saw more and more clearly, and now the majority see quite clearly, the senselessness and immorality of subordinating their wills to those of other people just like themselves, when they are bidden to do what is contrary not only to their interests but also to their moral sense.

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III
1 month 5 days ago

Let us not violate the RIGHT of the artist to express exclusively his own experiences and introspections, disregarding everything that happens in the world beyond. Let us not DEMAND of the artist, but - reproach, beg, urge and entice him - that we may be allowed to do. After all, only in part does he himself develop his talent; the greater part of it is blown into him at birth as a finished product, and the gift of talent imposes responsibility on his free will. Let us assume that the artist does not OWE anybody anything: nevertheless, it is painful to see how, by retiring into his self-made worlds or the spaces of his subjective whims, he CAN surrender the real world into the hands of men who are mercenary, if not worthless, if not insane.

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5 months 1 week ago

If the room is smoky, if only moderately, I will stay; if there is too much smoke I will go. Remember this, keep a firm hold on it, the door is always open.

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Book I, ch. 25, 18.
4 months 3 weeks ago

With what consistency, or decency they complain so loudly of attempts to enslave them, while they hold so many hundred thousands in slavery; and annually enslave many thousands more, without any pretence of authority, or claim upon them?

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5 months 3 weeks ago

The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. There can be no true goodness, nor true love, without the utmost clear-sightedness.

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5 months 1 week ago

What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.

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As quoted in Quote, Unquote (1977) by Lloyd Cory, p. 197
3 months 1 week ago

It is not religion but revolution which is the opium of the people.

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p. 159
5 months 1 week ago

We know, that of all living beings man is the best formed, and, as the gods belong to this number, they must have a human form. ... I do not mean to say that the gods have body and blood in them; but I say that they seem as if they had bodies with blood in them. . . , Epicurus, for whom hidden things were as tangible as if he had touched them with his finger, teaches us that gods are not generally visible, but that they are intelligible; that they are not bodies having a certain solidity . . . but that we can recognize them by their passing images; that as there are atoms enough in the infinite space to produce such images, these are produced before us . . . and make us realize what are these happy, immortal beings.

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Book I, Section 18
5 months 2 days ago

In plain truth, lying is an accursed vice. We are not men, nor have any other tie upon another, but by our word.

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Book I, Ch. 9
1 month 3 days ago

As for the beauty of the gods, not even Hermes tried to describe it in his tale; he said that it transcended description, and must be comprehended by the eye of the mind; for in words it was hard to portray and impossible to convey to mortal ears. Never indeed will there be or appear an orator so gifted that he could describe such surpassing beauty as shines forth on the countenance of the gods.

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3 months 1 week ago

It is characteristic of theistic "tolerance" that no one really cares what the people believe in, just so they believe or pretend to believe.

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1 month 5 days ago

We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated "egos" inside bags of skin.

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Inside Information
2 months 3 weeks ago

Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes. But I warn you, if you don't tell me that this means war, if you still try to defend the infamies and horrors perpetrated by that Antichrist-I really believe he is Antichrist-I will have nothing more to do with you and you are no longer my friend, no longer my 'faithful slave,' as you call yourself! But how do you do? I see I have frightened you-sit down and tell me all the news.

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Bk. I, Ch. I

Every soul, the philosopher says, is involuntarily deprived of truth; consequently in the same way it is deprived of justice and temperance and benevolence and everything of the kind. It is most necessary to keep this in mind, for thus thou wilt be more gentle towards all.

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VII, 63
2 months 3 weeks ago

The ascription of an unconscious intentional phenomenon to a system implies that the phenomenon is in principle accessible to consciousness. A statement of the author's "connection principle."

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"Consciousness, Explanatory Inversion, and Cognitive Science," The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13, 4 (December 1990): 585-696.
4 months 3 weeks ago

I will take it all: tongs, molten lead, prongs, garrotes, all that burns, all that tears, I want to truly suffer. Better one hundred bites, better the whip, vitriol, than this suffering in the head, this ghost of suffering which grazes and caresses and never hurts enough.

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Act 1, sc. 5
2 months 3 weeks ago

Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons.

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p. 97
5 months 3 days ago

The human understanding is unquiet; it cannot stop or rest, and still presses onward, but in vain. Therefore it is that we cannot conceive of any end or limit to the world, but always as of necessity it occurs to us that there is something beyond... But he is no less an unskilled and shallow philosopher who seeks causes of that which is most general, than he who in things subordinate and subaltern omits to do so.

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Aphorism 48
4 months 3 weeks ago

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

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Art
3 months 2 weeks ago

What, by a word lacking even in grammar, is called amorality, is a thing that does not exist. If you are unwilling to submit to any norm, you have, nolens volens, to submit to the norm of denying all morality, and this is not amoral, but immoral. It is a negative morality which preserves the empty form of the other.

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

To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

There is a freemasonry among the dull by which they recognize and are sociable with the dull, as surely as a correspondent tact in men of genius.

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1827
4 months 3 weeks ago

Money appears as measure (in Homer, e.g. oxen) earlier than as medium of exchange,because in barter each commodity is still its own medium of exchange. But it cannot be its own or its own standard of comparison.

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Notebook I, The Chapter on Money, p. 93.
4 months 1 week ago

Lamachus chid a captain for a fault; and when he had said he would do so no more, "Sir," said he, "in war there is no room for a second miscarriage." Said one to Iphicrates, "What are ye afraid of?" "Of all speeches," said he, "none is so dishonourable for a general as 'I should not have thought of it.'"

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52 Iphicrates
3 months 2 weeks ago

Such abstraction which refuses to accept the given universe of facts as the final context of validation, such "transcending" analysis of the facts in the light of their arrested and denied possibilities, pertains to the very structure of social theory.

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p. xliii
4 months 3 weeks ago

This world is but canvas to our imaginations.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

The right-minded man, ever inclined to righteous and lawful deeds, is joyous day and night, and strong, and free from care. But if a man take no heed of the right, and leave undone the things he ought to do, then will the recollection of no one of all his transgressions bring him any joy, but only anxiety and self-reproaching.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

There is a kind of selective memory that afflicts men when they view the past. They see the good and overlook the evil.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Government has no other end than the preservation of property.

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Second Treatise of Government, Ch. VII. sec. 94
4 months 3 weeks ago

In order to abolish the idea of private property, the idea of communism is completely sufficient. It takes actual communist action to abolish actual private property. History will com to it; and this movement, which in theory we already know to be a self-transcending movement, will constitute in actual fact a very severe and protracted process. But we must regard it as a real advance to have gained beforehand a consciousness of the limited character a well as of the goal of this historical movement - and a consciousness which reaches out beyond it.

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p. 99, The Marx-Engels Reader
3 months 3 weeks ago

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

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4 months 3 weeks ago

What can be said can and should always be said more and more simply and clearly.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Mathematical and physiological researches have shown that the space of experience is simply an actual case of many conceivable cases, about whose peculiar properties experience alone can instruct us.

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p. 205; On the space of experience.
4 months 3 weeks ago

The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

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Worship
3 months 2 weeks ago

Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God: but if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.

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19:17 (KJV)
4 months 2 weeks ago

You could attach prices to ideas. Some cost a lot some little. ... And how do you pay for ideas? I believe: with courage.

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p. 60e
4 months 3 weeks ago

With despair, true optimism begins: the optimism of the man who expects nothing, who knows he has no rights and nothing coming to him, who rejoices in counting on himself alone and in acting alone for the good of all.

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9 months ago

The general reference of the philosophical discussion is usually the triangle world: world-language-subject, the relation of the subject to the world of objects, mediated through language.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

In England, success in the profession of the law leads to some very great objects of ambition; and yet how few men, born to easy fortunes, have ever in this country been eminent in that profession?

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Chapter I, Part III, p. 824.
3 weeks 1 day ago

Man cannot be wicked without being evil, nor evil without being degraded, nor degraded without being punished, nor punished without being guilty. In short ... there is nothing so intrinsically plausible as the theory of original sin.

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Second Dialogue, p. 38
4 months 3 weeks ago

I am a rationalist. ...I mean ...[I] wish... to understand the world, and to learn by arguing with others. (...I do not say a rationalist holds the mistaken theory that men are... rational.)

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4 months 3 weeks ago

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.

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Ch. 4

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