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3 months 3 weeks ago

If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? For the Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels; and then he shall reward every man according to his works. Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.

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16:24-28 (KJV)
1 month 1 week ago

All the future of socialism resides in the autonomous development of workers' syndicates.

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As quoted in Essays in Political Philosophy, Vidya Dhar Mahajan, Doaba House, Lahore, 1943 p. 41
5 months 5 days ago

As soon as we have contrived to give our pupil an idea of the word "Useful," we have got an additional means of controlling him, for this word makes a great impression on him, provided that its meaning for him is a meaning relative to his own age, and provided he clearly sees its relation to his own well-being. This word makes no impression on your scholars because you have taken no pains to give it a meaning they can understand, and because other people always undertake to supply their needs so that they never require to think for themselves, and do not know what utility is. "What is the use of that?"

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4 months 3 weeks ago

This dysfunction of power was related to a central excess: what might be called the monarchical 'super-power', which identified the right to punish with the personal power of the sovereign.

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Chapter Two, pp.80
6 months ago

Parnenides: When there is a number of things which seem to you to be great, you may think, as you look at them all, that there is one and the same idea in them, and hence you think the great is one. But if with your mind's eye you regard the absolute great and these many great things in the same way, will not another great appear beyond, by which all these must appear to be great?

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5 months 1 week ago

You must acquire the best knowledge first, and without delay; it is the height of madness to learn what you will later have to unlearn.

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Letter to Christian Northoff (1497), as translated in Collected Works of Erasmus (1974), p. 114
4 months 2 days ago

The poverty of the incapable, the distresses that come upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so many "in shallows and in miseries," are the decrees of a large, far-seeing benevolence.

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Pt. III, Ch. 25 : Poor-Laws
4 months 3 days ago

Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.

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5 months 1 week ago

But by far the greatest obstacle to the progress of science and to the undertaking of new tasks and provinces therein is found in this - that men despair and think things impossible.

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Aphorism 92
5 months 2 days ago

Blessed are those who have no talent!

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February 1850
5 months 4 days ago

Why has the Revolution of France been stained with crimes, which the Revolution of the United States of America was not? Men are physically the same in all countries; it is education that makes them different. Accustom a people to believe that priests or any other class of men can forgive sins, and you will have sins in abundance.

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Worship and Church Bells, 1797
4 weeks 1 day ago

Pain is the opposite of strength, and so is anger.

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(Hays translation) XI, 18
5 months 2 days ago

The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.

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Ch. 11 - Clifford's Lectures and Essays, 1879
1 month 3 days ago

The centuries are thick, dark waves that rise and fall, steeped in blood. Every moment is a gaping abyss. Gaze on the dark sea without staggering, confront the abyss every moment without illusion or impudence or fear. ... But this is not enough; take a further step: battle to give meaning to the confused struggles of man.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

History proves nothing because it contains everything.

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4 weeks 1 day ago

Thou sufferest justly: for thou choosest rather to become good to-morrow than to be good to-day.

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VIII, 22
5 months 3 days ago

A European who goes to New York and Chicago sees the future... when he goes to Asia he sees the past.

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Ch. 8: Eastern and Western Ideals of Happiness
1 month 4 weeks ago

The newspaper is in all its literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct.

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What Modern Liberty Means, p. 47. Essay first published in The Atlantic (November 1919).
3 months 4 weeks ago

Except for music, everything is a lie, even solitude, even ecstasy. Music, in fact, is the one and the other, only better.

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5 months 1 week ago

Physicians have this advantage: the sun lights their success and the earth covers their failures.

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Ch. 37
3 months 3 weeks ago

O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt.

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15:28 (KJV)
4 months 3 weeks ago

A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest.

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"Practicing criticism, or, is it really important to think?", interview by Didier Eribon, May 30-31, 1981, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture, ed. L. Kriztman (1988), p. 155
2 months 4 weeks ago

Human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.

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Chapter 3 "Accumulating Small Change" (p. 50)
5 months 2 days ago

United States! the ages plead, - Present and Past in under-song, - Go put your creed into your deed, Nor speak with double tongue.

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Ode, st. 5
3 months 2 weeks ago

We live in a nightmare of falsehoods, and there are few who are sufficiently awake and aware to see things as they are. Our first duty is to clear away illusions and recover a sense of reality. If war should come, it will do so on account of our delusions, for which our hag-ridden conscience attempts to find moral excuses. To recover a sense of reality is to recover the truth about ourselves and the world in which we live, and thereby to gain the power of keeping this world from flying asunder.

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p. 80
3 months 4 weeks ago

Endless brooding over a question undermines you as much as a dull pain.

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5 months 2 days ago

Be gentle with them, Timothy. They want to be free, but they don't know how. Teach them. Reassure them.

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Reported to be Huxley's last words to Timothy Leary, which Huxley whispered from his deathbed. Quoted in Leary, Timothy (1990) . "Life on a Grounded Space Colony".
4 weeks 1 day ago

In order to be transmuted into knowledge, every perception is and must be ordered and organized into categories. The extent, however, to which we can organize and express our experience in such conceptual forms is, in turn, dependent upon the frames of reference which happen to be available at a given historical moment. The concepts which we have and the universe of discourse in which we move, together with the directions in which they tend to elaborate themselves, are dependent largely upon the historical-social situation of the intellectually active and responsible members of the group.

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5 months 3 days ago

I don't care for the applause one gets by saying what others are thinking; I want actually to change people's thoughts. Power over people's minds is the main personal desire of my life; and this sort of power is not acquired by saying popular things.

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Letter to Lucy Martin Donnelly, February 10, 1916
1 month 3 days ago

My prayer is not the whimpering of a beggar nor a confession of love. Nor is it the petty reckoning of a small tradesman: Give me and I shall give you. My prayer is the report of a soldier to his general: This is what I did today, this is how I fought to save the entire battle in my own sector, these are the obstacles I encountered, this is how I plan to fight tomorrow.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

This remark provides the key to the problem, how much truth there is in solipsism. For what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest. The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world.

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-5.62
5 months 1 week ago

But the exceedingly foul deed of Onan, the basest of wretches, follows. Onan must have been a malicious and incorrigible scoundrel. This is a most disgraceful sin. It is far more atrocious than incest and adultery. We call it unchastity, yes a Sodomitic sin. For Onan goes in to her; that is, he lies with her and copulates, and when it comes to the point of insemination, spills the semen, lest the woman conceive. Surely at such a time the order of nature established by God in procreation should be followed. Accordingly, it was a most disgraceful crime to produce semen and excite the woman, and to frustrate her at that very moment.

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Luther's works Vol. 7 (1965), Lectures on Genesis, Chapters 38-44
3 months 2 weeks ago

Poetry and imagination begin life. A child will fall on its knees on the gravel walk at the sight of a pink hawthorn in full flower, when it is by itself, to praise God for it.

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3 months 2 days ago

So the majority of the highest classes of that age, even the popes and ecclesiastics, really believed in nothing at all. They did not believe in the Church doctrine, for they saw its insolvency; but neither could they follow Francis of Assisi, Kelchitsky, and most of the sectarians in acknowledging the moral, social teaching of Christ, for that undermined their social position. And so these people remained without any religious view of life. And, having none, they could have no standard with which to estimate what was good and what was bad art, but that of personal enjoyment.

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5 months 3 days ago

There is a further advantage [to hydrogen bombs]: the supply of uranium in the planet is very limited, and it might be feared that it would be used up before the human race was exterminated, but now that the practically unlimited supply of hydrogen can be utilized, there is considerable reason to hope that homo sapiens may put an end to himself, to the great advantage of such less ferocious animals as may survive. But it is time to return to less cheerful topics.

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Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948), part I, "The World of Science", chapter 3, "The World of Physics", p. 41
1 month 3 weeks ago

Any American ally will welcome Biden as president, will be happy that he was elected, but will be a little... distrustful because the Republicans could make a come-back in 2022. They could win the presidency again in 2024. ...There's is still a good third of the American public that remain very strong Trump voters. They're very angry and... are not going to go away... Therefore the ability of the United States to resume its role as the chief defender of the liberal order... is going to be contested, both domestically and... by American friends. If this leads to more self-reliance on their part, that may not be the worst thing in the world, but it is going to mean a very different kind of world order than the one I grew up arguing with Owen Harries about.

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30:41:00

I am a perfect stranger to France, which I have never seen, and I expect nothing from her king, whom I shall never know.

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Chapter VIII, p. 76
4 months 3 weeks ago

Into the middle things.

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Line 148
6 months ago

I see your vile implication. My only explanation for it is that you are criminally insane.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

At last I have attained true glory. As I walked through Fleet Street the day before yesterday, I saw a copy of Hume at a bookseller's window with the following label: "Only 2l. 2s. Hume's History of England in eight volumes, highly valuable as an introduction to Macaulay." I laughed so convulsively that the other people who were staring at the books took me for a poor demented gentleman.

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Alas for poor David! Journal entry (8 March 1849), quoted in George Otto Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, Volume II (1876), p. 253
3 months 2 weeks ago

Emptiness simply prevents what is individual from insisting on itself.

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1 month 1 week ago

To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.

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The Essence of Alan Watts
1 month 3 weeks ago

Indeed, I think we may concede to our Academician, without flattery, his claim that in the principle [principio, i. e., accelerated motion] laid down in this treatise he has established a new science dealing with a very old subject. Observing with what ease and clearness he deduces from a single principle the proofs of so many theorems, I wonder not a little how such a question escaped the attention of Archimedes, Apollonius, Euclid and so many other mathematicians and illustrious philosophers, especially since so many ponderous tomes have been devoted to the subject of motion.

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(Galileo referred to himself as the/our Academician in his dialogue) Sagredo, Third Day P. 242
4 weeks 1 day ago

By a tranquil mind I mean nothing else than a mind well ordered.

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IV, 3
4 months 3 days ago

A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

That a man be willing, when others are so too, as farre-forth, as for Peace, and defence of himself he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things; and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself.

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The First Part, Chapter 14, p. 64-65
4 months 3 weeks ago

The idea that in order to get clear about the meaning of a general term one had to find the common element in all its applications has shackled philosophical investigation; for it has not only led to no result, but also made the philosopher dismiss as irrelevant the concrete cases, which alone could have helped him understand the usage of the general term.

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p. 19
3 months 2 weeks ago

The respect inspired by the link between man and the reality alien to this world can make itself evident to that part of man which belongs to the reality of this world. The reality of this world is necessity. The part of man which is in this world is the part which is in bondage to necessity and subject to the misery of need. The one possibility of indirect expression of respect for the human being is offered by men's needs, the needs of the soul and of the body, in this world.

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