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7 months 2 weeks ago

If God has made us in his image, we have returned him the favor.

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Notebooks, c.1735-c.1750
5 months 2 weeks ago

Genes do indirectly control the manufacture of bodies, and the influence is strictly one way: acquired characteristics are not inherited. No matter how much knowledge and wisdom you acquire during your life, not one jot will be passed on to your children by genetic means. Each new generation starts from scratch.

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Ch. 3. Immortal Coils
6 months 1 week ago

See thou tell no man; but go thy way, shew thyself to the priest, and offer the gift that Moses commanded, for a testimony unto them.

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8:4 (KJV) Said to a man cured of leprosy.
3 months 2 weeks ago

Philosophy has been called the search for the Permanent amid the changing. With this account of philosophy there is no need to quarrel. But having accepted it, a distinction remains to be observed, a distinction of capital importance, which we are in constant danger of forgetting. It is one thing to find the Permanent; it is another thing to find a form of words in which the Permanent shall stand permanently expressed. It is one thing to experience something fixed and changeless; it is another thing to fix this something by a changeless definition. The first may be possible, while the second remains impossible for ever.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Among all my patients in the second half of life-that is to say, over thirty-five-there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost what the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook.

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Chap. 11 (Psychotherapists or the Clergy), p. 229
6 months 2 weeks ago

The conscious mind allows itself to be trained like a parrot, but the unconscious does not - which is why St. Augustine thanked God for not making him responsible for his dreams.

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par. 51 p.46
6 months 3 days ago

In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world.

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Ch. 5: "The Romantic Reaction", p. 128
7 months 2 weeks ago

You come from attending the funeral of mankind to attend to a natural phenomenon. A little thought is sexton to all the world.

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p. 490
6 months 1 day ago

One simple method is to take a pen or pencil and hold it up against a blank wall or ceiling. Now concentrate on the pen as if it is the most important thing in the world. Then allow your sense to relax, so you see the pen against the background of the wall. Concentrate again. Relax again. Keep on doing this until you become aware of the ability to focus attention at will. You will find that this unaccustomed activity of the will is tiring; it produces a sense of strain behind the eyes. My own perception is that if you persist, in spite of the strain, the result is acute discomfort, followed by a sudden immense relief - the 'peak experience'.

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p. 33
6 months 1 day ago

And the central assertion of his philosophy is that this inner realm is the 'spiritual world' and that once man has learned to enter this realm, he realizes that it is not a mere imaginative reflection of the external world, but a world that possesses its own independent reality.

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p. 161
5 months 2 weeks ago

Well, I've worried some about, you know, why write books ... why are we teaching people to write books when presidents and senators do not read them, and generals do not read them. And it's been the university experience that taught me that there is a very good reason, that you catch people before they become generals and presidents and so forth and you poison their minds with ... humanity, and however you want to poison their minds, it's presumably to encourage them to make a better world.

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"A Talk with Kurt Vonnegut. Jr." by Robert Scholes in The Vonnegut Statement (1973) edited by Jerome Klinkowitz and John Somer October 1966), later published in Conversations With Kurt Vonnegut (1988), p. 123
5 months 2 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
7 months 2 weeks ago

In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly.

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"Is Life Worth Living?"
7 months 2 weeks ago

Nothing is so common as to imitate one's enemies, and to use their weapons.

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"Oracles", 1770
7 months 3 weeks ago

A Christian has no need of any law in order to be saved, since through faith we are free from every law. Thus all the acts of a Christian are done spontaneously, out of a sense of pure liberty. As Christians we do not seek our own advantage or salvation because we are already fully satisfied and saved by God's grace through faith. Now our only motive is to do that which is pleasing to God.

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pp. 75-76
5 months 1 week ago

What concerns me most here are the ways in which contemporary voices considered to be leftist have abandoned the philosophical ideas that are central to any left-wing standpoint: a commitment to universalism over tribalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress.

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Polity (2023), p. 5
5 months 2 weeks ago

Every one who has a heart and eyes sees that you, working men, are obliged to pass your lives in want and in hard labor, which is useless to you, while other men, who do not work, enjoy the fruits of your labor-that you are the slaves of these men, and that this ought not to exist.

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To the Working People, Complete Works, trans. Leo Wiener, Vol 24, p. 129
5 months 4 weeks ago

Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficulty: elephants and poodles find many things obscure.

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E 36
7 months 3 weeks ago

When I endeavour to examine my own conduct, when I endeavour to pass sentence upon it, and either to approve or condemn it, it is evident that, in all such cases, I divide myself, as it were, into two persons; and that I, the examiner and judge, represent a different character from that other I, the person whose conduct is examined into and judged of.

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Chap. I.
7 months 3 weeks ago

Amongst so many borrowed things, I am glad if I can steal one, disguising and altering it for some new service.

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Book III, Ch. 12. Of Physiognomy
5 months 2 weeks ago

If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.

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To Wilfred Watson, October 6 1965. Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p. 325
5 months 3 weeks ago

To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction; or, the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts.

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Laws of Motion, III
7 months 2 weeks ago

Capitalist production does not exist at all without foreign commerce.

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Vol. II, Ch. XX, p. 474 (See also...David Ricardo, The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, Ch. VII, p. 81).
7 months 3 weeks ago

Monopoly of one kind or another, indeed, seems to be the sole engine of the mercantile system.

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Chapter VII, Part Third, p. 684.
3 months 4 weeks 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
3 months 3 weeks ago

I go into the Upanishads to ask questions.

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As quoted in God Is Not One : The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World and Why Their Differences Matter (2010), by Stephen Prothero, Ch, 4 : Hinduism : The Way of Devotion, p. 144
6 months 2 weeks ago

All my life, I have lived with the feeling that I have been kept from my true place. If the expression "metaphysical exile" had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Men are not allowed to think freely about chemistry and biology: why should they be allowed to think freely about political philosophy?

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As quoted in A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (1991) by Alan Lindsay Mackay
5 months 2 weeks ago

When things fall out opportunely for the person concerned, he is not apt to be critical about the how or why, his own immediate personal convenience seeming a sufficient reason for the strangest oddities and revolutions in our sublunary things.

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The Sire de Maletroit's Door.
8 months 3 days ago

To none is life given in freehold; to all on lease.

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Book III, line 971 (tr. R. E. Latham)
6 months 4 days ago

Dadaism and surrealism ... represented the intoxication of total license, the intoxication in which the mind wallows when it has made a clean sweep of value and surrendered to the immediate. The good is the pole towards which the human spirit is necessarily oriented, not only in action but in every effort, including the effort of pure intelligence. The surrealists have set up non-oriented thought as a model; they have chosen the total absence of value as their supreme value. Men have always been intoxicated by license, which is why, throughout history, towns have been sacked. But there has not always been a literary equivalent for the sacking of towns. Surrealism is such an equivalent.

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"The responsibility of writers," p. 167
6 months 3 days ago

In the past human life was lived in a bullock cart; in the future it will be lived in an aeroplane; and the change of speed amounts to a difference in quality.

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Ch. 6: "The Nineteenth Century", p. 137
3 months 4 weeks ago

All relationships of people to each other rest, as a matter of course, upon the precondition that they know something about each other. The merchant knows that his correspondent wants to buy at the lowest price and to sell at the highest price. The teacher knows that he may credit to the pupil a certain quality and quantity of information. Within each social stratum the individual knows approximately what measure of culture he has to presuppose in each other individual.

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p. 441: First lines of the article.
5 months 4 days ago

Life is too short to occupy oneself with the slaying of the slain more than once. One of a series of exchanges when Richard Owen repeated generally repudiated claims about the Gorilla brain in a Royal Institution lecture.

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Athenaeum (13 April 1861) p. 498; Browne Vol 2, p. 159
6 months 2 weeks ago

Death is the most blessed dream.

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Act II.
6 months 1 week ago

The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.

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"Dickens"
7 months 2 weeks ago

Man is essentially a dreamer, wakened sometimes for a moment by some peculiarly obtrusive element in the outer world, but lapsing again quickly into the happy somnolence of imagination. Freud has shown how largely our dreams at night are the pictured fulfilment of our wishes; he has, with an equal measure of truth, said the same of day-dreams; and he might have included the day-dreams which we call beliefs.

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Ch. 2: Dreams and Facts
6 months 2 weeks ago

To have grazed every form of failure, including success.

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5 months 1 week ago

I finished the Iliad to-day... I never admired the old fellow so much, or was so strongly moved by him. What a privilege genius like his enjoys! I could not tear myself away. I read the last five books at a stretch during my walk to-day, and was at last forced to turn into a bypath, lest the parties of walkers should see me blubbering for imaginary beings, the creations of a ballad-maker who has been dead two thousand seven hundred years. What is the power and glory of Caesar and Alexander to that? Think what it would be to be assured that the inhabitants of Monomotapa would weep over one's writings.

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Anno Domini 4551! Letter to his niece Margaret (August 1851), quoted in George Otto Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, Volume II (1876), pp. 186-187
7 months 2 weeks ago

All human activities are equivalent ... and ... all are on principle doomed to failure.

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Conclusion, II
7 months 2 weeks ago

Technology is in its essence something that human beings cannot master of their own accord.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.

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Art
7 months 2 weeks ago

Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Genuine religion is not about speculating about God or the soul or about what happened in the past or will happen in the future; it cares only about one thing-finding out exactly what should or should not be done in this lifetime.

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p. 3
5 months 1 week ago

A civilization is a social entity that manifests religious, political , legal, and customary uniformity over an extended period, and which confers on its members the benefits of socially accumulated knowledge.

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"What is Culture?" (p. 2)

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