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6 months 2 weeks ago

The ordinary surroundings of life which are esteemed by men (as their actions testify) to be the highest good, may be classed under the three heads - Riches, Fame, and the Pleasures of Sense: with these three the mind is so absorbed that it has little power to reflect on any different good.

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I, 3 Variant translation: The things which ... are esteemed as the greatest good of all ... can be reduced to these three headings, to wit : Riches, Fame, and Pleasure. With these three the mind is so engrossed that it cannot scarcely think of any other
2 months 1 week ago

As for life, it is a battle and a sojourning in a strange land; but the fame that comes after is oblivion.

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II, 17
6 months 2 weeks ago

What do you think of the aspect of the money market? ... This time, by the by, the thing has assumed European dimensions such as have never been seen before, and I don't suppose we'll be able to spend much longer here merely as spectators. The very fact that I've at last got round to setting up house again and sending for my books seems to me to prove that the 'mobilisation' of our persons is AT HAND.

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Letter to Friedrich Engels (26 September 1856), quoted in The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Volume 40. Letters 1856-59 (2010), pp. 71-72
5 months 2 weeks ago

To be nameless in worthy deeds exceeds an infamous history.But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity. Who can but pity the founder of the Pyramids? Herostratus lives that burnt the Temple of Diana, he is almost lost that built it.

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Chapter V
4 months 3 weeks ago

It is the private dominion over things that condemns millions of people to be mere nonentities, living corpses without originality or power of initiative, human machines of flesh and blood, who pile up mountains of wealth for others and pay for it with a gray, dull and wretched existence for themselves. I believe that there can be no real wealth, social wealth, so long as it rests on human lives - young lives, old lives and lives in the making.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

If it be said, that an Omnipotent Creator, though under no necessity of employing contrivances such as man must use, thought fit to use them in order to leave traces that would enable man to recognize his creative hand, the answer is that this equally implies a limit to his omnipotence. For if he wanted men to know that they themselves and the world are his work, he, being omnipotent, had only to will that they should be aware of it.

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pages 177-178;Early Modern Texts page 16
6 months 2 weeks ago

TO LOVE is to find pleasure in the happiness of others. Thus the habit of loving someone is nothing other than BENEVOLENCE by which we want the good of others, not for the profit that we gain from it, but because it is agreeable to us in itself. CHARITY is a general benevolence. And JUSTICE is charity in accordance with wisdom. ... so that one does not do harm to someone without necessity, and that one does as much good as one can, but especially where it is best employed.

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"A Dialogue" (after 1695), as quoted in The Shorter Leibniz Texts (2006) edited by Lloyd H. Strickland, p. 170
2 months 3 weeks ago

Anyone who proposes to do good must not expect people to roll stones out of his way, but must accept his lot calmly if they even roll a few more upon it. A strength which becomes clearer and stronger through its experience of such obstacles is the only strength that can conquer them. Resistance is only a waste of strength.

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p. 164
6 months 1 week ago

God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love.

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3 months 1 week ago

The Scientist must set in order. Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.

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Ch. IX: Hypotheses in Physics, Tr. George Bruce Halsted
2 months 3 weeks ago

When you tell a girl how beautiful she is, she will say, "Now isn't that just like a man! All you men think about is bodies. OK, so I'm beautiful, but I got my body from my parents and it was just luck. I prefer to be admired for myself, not my chassis." Poor little chauffeur! All she is saying is that she has lost touch with her own astonishing wisdom and ingenuity, and wants to be admired for some trivial tricks that she can perform with her conscious attention. And we are all in the same situation, having dissociated ourselves from our bodies and from the whole network of forces in which bodies can come to birth and live.

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p. 112
6 months 2 weeks ago

No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience.

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Book II, Ch. 1, sec. 19
6 months 2 weeks ago

Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over influence.

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par. 19
2 months 1 week ago

Of Fronto, to how much envy and fraud and hypocrisy the state of a tyrannous king is subject unto, and how they who are commonly called [Eupatridas Gk.], i.e. nobly born, are in some sort incapable, or void of natural affection.

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I, 8
6 months 4 days ago

Speciesism-the word is not an attractive one, but I can think of no better term-is a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one's own species and against those of members of other species.

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Ch. 1: All Animals Are Equal
4 months 3 weeks ago

A single observation that is inconsistent with some generalization points to the falsehood of the generalization, and thereby 'points to itself'.

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Chapter 4, Evidence, p. 34.
4 months 3 weeks ago

It reminds us that a man driven to desire to possess a certain female is a highly purposive individual. We have already noted that evolution tends to mark time when individuals have no reason to evolve. The same applies to individuals; they may be talented and intelligent, and yet waste their lives because they somehow lack the motivation to make use of these faculties. The best piece of luck that can befall any individual is to have a strong sense of purpose.

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p. 225
4 months 1 week ago

The nuclear bomb will turn warfare into the juggling of images.

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(p. 360)
2 months 2 weeks ago

If by religion, we are understand sectarian dogmas, in which no two of them agree, then your exclamation on that hypothesis is just, "that this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it." But if the moral precepts, innate in man, and made a part of his physical constitution, as necessary for a social being, if the sublime doctrines of philanthropism and deism taught us by Jesus of Nazareth, in which all agree, constitute true religion, then, without it, this would be, as you again say, "something not fit to be named, even indeed, a hell."

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4 months 1 week ago

The old land is still the true love, the others are but pleasant infidelities.

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Pt. I, ch. IV
4 months 1 week ago

Treat your friend as if he might become an enemy.

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Maxim 401
6 months 2 weeks ago

Music is the poor man's Parnassus.

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Poetry and Imagination
4 months 3 weeks ago

If an angel were ever to tell us anything of his philosophy I believe many propositions would sound like 2 times 2 equals 13.

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B 44
6 months 1 week ago

An individual who finds that he enjoys seeing others in positions of lesser liberty understands that he has no claim whatever to this enjoyment.

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Chapter I, Section 6, pg. 31
6 months 1 week ago

The victory of vivisection marks a great advance in the triumph of ruthless, non-moral utilitarianism over the old world of ethical law; a triumph in which we, as well as animals, are already the victims, and of which Dachau and Hiroshima mark the more recent achievements.

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"Vivisection" (1947), p. 228
2 months 2 weeks ago

We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. ... We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. . . We must recover the sense of the majesty of the creation and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.

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"A Native Hill"
4 months 3 weeks ago

One of the principal motifs of Nietzsche's work is that Kant had not carried out a true critique because he was not able to pose the problem of critique in terms of values.

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p. 1
6 months 2 weeks ago

Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.

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6 months 4 weeks ago

The Apostle says: I make up in my flesh what is lacking to the sufferings of Christ (Col. 1:24). I make up, he tells us, not what is lacking to my sufferings, but what is lacking to the sufferings of Christ; not in Christ flesh, but in mine. not in Christ's flesh, but in mine. Christ is still suffering, not in His own flesh which He took with Him into heaven, but in my flesh, which is still suffering on earth.

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p.423
2 months 2 weeks ago

We cling in our public life to a brutal hypocrisy. In our century of almost universal violence of humans against fellow humans, and against our natural and cultural commonwealth, hypocrisy has been inescapable because our opposition to violence has been selective or merely fashionable. Some of us who approve of our monstrous military budget and our peacekeeping wars nonetheless deplore "domestic violence" and think that our society can be pacified by "gun control." Some of us are against capital punishment but for abortion. Some of us are against abortion but for capital punishment.

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2 months 1 week 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
4 months 1 week ago

The popularity of the paranormal, oddly enough, might even be grounds for encouragement. I think that the appetite for mystery, the enthusiasm for that which we do not understand, is healthy and to be fostered. It is the same appetite which drives the best of true science, and it is an appetite which true science is best qualified to satisfy.

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"Science Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder", John Brockman, Edge.org, December 29, 1996
6 months 1 week ago

God can make good use of all that happens, but the loss is real.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Do not commence your exercises in philosophy in those regions where an error can deliver you over to the executioner.

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C 16
4 months 3 weeks ago

Husserl has shown that man's prejudices go a great deal deeper than his intellect or his emotions. Consciousness itself is 'prejudiced' - that is to say, intentional.

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p. 54
5 months 2 weeks ago

We are far more liable to catch the vices than the virtues of our associates.

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As quoted in Thesaurus of Epigrams: A New Classified Collection of Witty Remarks, Bon Mots and Toasts (1942) by Edmund Fuller
7 months 1 week ago

The best way to describe anyone is to give an example of the kind of thing he would do.

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4 months 1 week ago

We have become like the most primitive Palaeolithic man, once more global wanderers, but information gatherers rather than food gatherers. From now on the source of food, wealth and life itself will be information.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Sex is no longer a serious taboo. Teenagers sometimes know more about it than adults.

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Inside Information p. 4
2 months 4 days ago

Science is international but its success is based on institutions, which are owned by nations. If therefore, we wish to promote culture we have to combine and to organize institutions with our own power and means.

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4 months 1 week ago

The loss which is unknown is no loss at all.

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Maxim 38
5 months 1 week ago

Boredom is connected naturally with time, with the horror of time, with the experience and the consciousness of time. Those who are not aware of time do not become bored. Basically life is only possible if one is not aware of time. If one should happen to want to experience consciously one of those moments that pass, one would be lost; life would become unbearable.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

How shall the dead arise, is no question of my faith; to believe only possibilities, is not faith, but mere philosophy.

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Section 48
6 months 3 weeks ago

The world is but a perpetual see-saw.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or thing, having an independent existence of its own; and if no real entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something peculiarly abstruse and mysterious, too high to be an object of sense. The meaning of all general, and especially of all abstract terms, became in this way enveloped in a mystical base...

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Note to Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829) by James Mill, edited with additional notes by John Stuart Mill, 1869

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