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4 months 2 weeks ago

I am the center of my universe, the center of the universe, and in my supreme anguish I cry with Michelet, "Mon moi, ils m'arrachent mon moi!" What is a man profited if he shall gain the world and lose his own soul? (Matt. xvi. 26).

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4 months 3 weeks ago

To disappear into deep water or to disappear toward a far horizon, to become part of depth of infinity, such is the destiny of man that finds its image in the destiny of water.

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Introduction
3 months 4 weeks ago

There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew.

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Statement in 1965, in reference to Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963) by Buckminster Fuller
5 months 2 weeks ago

The hopes of the right-minded may be realized, those of fools are impossible.

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2 months 1 week ago

One of the commonplaces of modern historiography is the polemical exaltation of the civilization of the Renaissance over and against medieval civilization. This is not just the expression of a typical misunderstanding, since this mentality is the effect of one among the innumerable deceptions purposely spread in modern culture by the leaders of global subversion. The truth is that after the collapse of the ancient world, if there ever was a civilization that deserves the name of Renaissance, this was the civilization of the Middle Ages. In its objectivity, its virile spirit, its hierarchical structure, its proud antihumanistic simplicity so often permeated by the sense of the sacred, the Middle Ages represented a return to the origins.

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p.309
2 months 3 weeks ago

Tsze-Kung asked Confucius, saying, "Master, are you a sage?" Confucius answered him: "A sage is what I cannot rise to. I learn without satiety, and teach without being tired." Tsze-Kung said: "You learn without satiety: that shows your wisdom. You teach without being tired: that shows your benevolence. Benevolent and wise:- Master, you are a sage."

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"Humility", no. 139
6 months 1 day ago

A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst of architects from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.

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Vol. I, Ch. 7, pg. 198.

Do not yet see, that, if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.

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par. 43
7 months 1 day ago

Every art, and every system, and in like manner every action and purpose aims, it is thought, at some good; for which reason a common and by no means a bad description of the good is, that at which all things aim.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

No furniture so charming as books.

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Vol. I, ch. 9, p. 289
6 months 1 week ago

What if he has borrowed the matter and spoiled the form, as it oft falls out?

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Book III, Ch. 8. Of the Art of Conversation
6 months 2 weeks ago

For this too is a very pleasant strand woven into the Cynic's pattern of life; he must needs be flogged like an ass, and while he is being flogged he must love the men who flog him, as though he were the father or brother of them all.

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Book III, ch. 22, 54
4 months 2 weeks ago

The soul was not made to dwell in a thing; and when forced to it, there is no part of that soul but suffers violence.

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in The Simone Weil Reader, p. 155
4 months 3 weeks ago

For lack of empirical data I have neither knowledge nor understanding of such forms of being, which are commonly called spiritual. ...Nevertheless, we have good reason to suppose that behind this veil there exists the uncomprehended absolute object which affects and influences us-and to suppose it even, or particularly, in the case of psychic phenomena about which no verifiable statements can be made.

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p.351
3 months 2 weeks ago

The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all the other woes of mankind, is wisdom.

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5 months 1 week ago

In the pursuit of truth we must beware of being misled by terms which we do not rightly understand. That is the chief point. Almost all philosophers utter the caution; few observe it.

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Paragraph 1
2 months 3 weeks ago

My purpose is to set forth a very new science dealing with a very ancient subject. There is, in nature, perhaps nothing older than motion, concerning which the books written by philosophers are neither few nor small; nevertheless I have discovered by experiment some properties of it which are worth knowing and which have not hitherto been either observed or demonstrated. Some superficial observations have been made, as, for instance, that the free motion [naturalem motum] of a heavy falling body is continuously accelerated; but to just what extent this acceleration occurs has not yet been announced; for so far as I know, no one has yet pointed out that the distances traversed, during equal intervals of time, by a body falling from rest, stand to one another in the same ratio as the odd numbers beginning with unity.

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Author, Third Day. Change of Position

Necessity, as well as patriotism and confidence, will make us all eager to receive treasury notes, if founded on specific taxes. Congress may borrow of the public, and without interest, all the money they may want, to the amount of a competent circulation, by merely issuing their own promissory notes, of proper denominations for the larger purposes of circulation, but not for the small. Leave that door open for the entrance of metallic money.

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Letter to Thomas Cooper, 1814. ME 14:189
4 months 2 weeks ago

Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up.

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On high culture and popular culture, in a letter to Walter Benjamin
4 months 3 weeks ago

At different degrees, everything is pathology, except for indifference.

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4 months 1 week ago

In fact, we had a number of extreme leftists and trade unionists among us, and they seemed to take it for granted that we all agreed that the rich must somehow be forced to surrender their ill-gotten gains. Yet there was an air of good humor about their idealism that made me feel they would not be too offended if I admitted that I regard socialists as well-meaning but muddle-headed brigands.

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p. 30
4 months 3 weeks ago

The utmost possible regarding an individual is a statement as to some order of probability about the future. Heisenberg's principle has been seized upon as a basis for wild statements to the effect that the doctrine of arbitrary free will and totally uncaused activity are now scientifically substantiated. Its actual force and significance is generalization of the idea that the individual is a temporal career whose future cannot logically be deduced from its past.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

The more Lil' Kim distorted her natural beauty to become a cartoonlike caricature of whiteness, the larger her success.

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5 months 6 days ago

Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares with memory, a great part even of our living beings; we slightly remember our felicities, and the smartest strokes of affliction leave but short smart upon us. Sense endureth no extremities, and sorrows destroy us or themselves. To weep into stones are fables.

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Chapter V
4 months 3 weeks ago

Without a strategic retreat into the self, without vigilant thought, human life is impossible. Call to mind all that mankind owes to certain great withdrawals into the self! It is no chance that all the great founders of religions preceded their apostolates by famous retreats. Buddha withdraws to the forest; Mahomet withdraws to his tent, and even there he withdraws from his tent by wrapping his head in his cloak; above all, Jesus goes apart into the desert for forty days.

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p. 35
2 months 1 day ago

Speak straight and clear! I only hear that manly prayerwhich like a huge fist breaks my head against the stones.

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Odysseus, Book VIII, line 530
6 months 1 day ago

If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. As if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down!

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p. 485
4 months 3 weeks ago

The present stage redefines the possibilities of man and nature in accordance with the new means available for their realization.

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p. 65
2 months ago

The Process of Induction may be resolved into three steps ; the 'Selection of the Idea', the 'Construction of the Conception', and the 'Determination of the Magnitudes'. These three steps correspond to the determination of the 'Independent Variable', the 'formula', and the 'coefficients', in mathematical investigations; or to the 'Argument', the 'Law', and the 'Numerical Data', in a Table of an Inequality. The conceptions involved in scientific truths have attained the requisite degree of clearness by means of the Discussions respecting ideas which have taken place among discoverers and their followers. Such discussions are very far from being unprofitable

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3 months 3 weeks ago

To train and educate the rising generation will at all times be the first object of society, to which every other will be subordinate.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

That you may know that they whom anger possesses are not sane, look at their appearance; for as there are distinct symptoms which mark madmen, such as a bold and menacing air, a gloomy brow, a stern face

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5 months 6 days ago

A little water makes a sea, a small puff of wind a Tempest.

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4 months 1 week ago

Parents will strip themselves of everything, will sacrifice everything for the physical well-being of their child, will wake nights and stand in fear and agony before some physical ailment of their beloved one; but will remain cold and indifferent, without the slightest understanding before the soul cravings and the yearnings of their child, neither hearing nor wishing to hear the loud knocking of the young spirit that demands recognition. On the contrary, they will stifle the beautiful voice of spring, of a new life of beauty and splendor of love; they will put the long lean finger of authority upon the tender throat and not allow vent to the silvery song of the individual growth, of the beauty of character, of the strength of love and human relation, which alone make life worth living.

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2 months 1 week ago

There is obviously a place in life for a religious attitude for awe and astonishment at existence. That is also a basis for respect for existence. We don't have much of it in this culture, even though we call it materialistic. In this culture we call materialistic, today we are of course bent on the total destruction of material and its conversion into junk and poisonous gases. This is of course not a materialistic culture because it has no respect for material. And respect is in turn based on wonder.

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Images of God
5 months 4 weeks ago

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

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I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.

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Letter to William Charles Jarvis
6 months 1 week ago

I would advise no one to send his child where the Holy Scriptures are not supreme. Every institution that does not unceasingly pursue the study of God's word becomes corrupt. Because of this we can see what kind of people they become in the universities and what they are like now. Nobody is to blame for this except the pope, the bishops, and the prelates, who are all charged with training young people. The universities only ought to turn out men who are experts in the Holy Scriptures, men who can become bishops and priests, and stand in the front line against heretics, the devil, and all the world. But where do you find that? I greatly fear that the universities, unless they teach the Holy Scriptures diligently and impress them on the young students, are wide gates to hell.

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To the Christian Nobility of the German States (1520), translated by Charles M. Jacobs, reported in rev. James Atkinson, The Christian in Society, I (Luther's Works, ed. James Atkinson, vol. 44), p. 207

Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.

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May 1849
5 months ago

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts!

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Ch. 8, Humanity
5 months 4 weeks ago

If there is equality, it is in His love, not in us.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

Computers can do better than ever what needn't be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly.

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(p. 109)
6 months 2 days ago

Since sounds have no natural connection with our ideas ... the doubtfulness and uncertainty of their signification ... has its cause more in the ideas they stand for than in any incapacity there is in one sound more than another to signify any idea.

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Book III, Ch. 9, sec. 4

It has always been denied by the republican party in this country, that the Constitution had given the power of incorporation to Congress. On the establishment of the Bank of the United States, this was the great ground on which that establishment was combated; and the party prevailing supported it only on the argument of its being an incident to the power given them for raising money.

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Letter to Dr. Maese, 1809. ME 12:231

Every hero becomes a bore at last.

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Uses of Great Men
5 months 3 weeks ago

If someone is merely ahead of his time, it will catch up to him one day.

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p. 8e

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