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5 months 1 week ago

It is our deliberate opinion that the French Revolution, in spite of all its crimes and follies, was a great blessing to mankind.

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'Sir James Mackintosh', The Edinburgh Review (July 1835), quoted in T. B. Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to The Edinburgh Review, Vol. II (1843), p. 215
5 months 3 weeks ago

The whole life of the upper classes is a constant inconsistency. The more delicate a man's conscience is, the more painful this contradiction is to him.

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Chapter V, Contradiction Between our Life and our Christian Conscience
6 months 2 weeks ago

No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

All the cases in which means and ends are external to one another are non-esthetic.

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p. 205
8 months 1 week ago

What the great learning teaches, is to illustrate illustrious virtue; to renovate the people; and to rest in the highest excellence. The point where to rest being known, the object of pursuit is then determined; and, that being determined, a calm unperturbedness may be attained to. To that calmness there will succeed a tranquil repose. In that repose there may be careful deliberation, and that deliberation will be followed by the attainment of the desired end.

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7 months 5 days ago

To use Virtue is perfect blessedness.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Scientific Method... is even less existent than some other non-existent subjects.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Why? Surely they can find other men. Russell's reply when asked "if it wasn't unkind of him to love and leave so many women";

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as quoted in My Father - Bertrand Russell (1975) by Katharine Tait, p. 106
3 months 2 weeks ago

The non-evaluative general total conception of ideology is to be found primarily in those historical investigations, where, provisionally and for the sake of the simplification of the problem, no judgments are pronounced as to the correctness of the ideas to be treated. This approach confines itself to discovering the relations between certain mental structures and the life-situations in which they exist. We must constantly ask ourselves how it comes about that a given type of social situation gives rise to a given interpretation. Thus the ideological element in human thought, viewed at this level, is always bound up with the existing life-situation of the thinker. According to this view human thought arises, and operates, not in a social vacuum but in a definite social milieu.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

My interests drew me in different directions. On the one hand I was powerfully attracted by science, with its truths based on facts; on the other hand I was fascinated by everything to do with comparative religion. In science I missed the factor of meaning; and in religion, that of empiricism.

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p. 72
4 months 3 weeks ago

It's quite true that there were billions of years that I didn't exist that I was never bothered about.

Life itself is sitting in a room with a murderer, while eating a nice meal. You're just waiting for the meal to be over...

LIFE is the terrible condition.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

There was a time when time did not yet exist. ... The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. It would take as long for us to recall a space of time as it took the original time to elapse, and we should never get ahead with our thinking. All recollected times undergo, accordingly, what M. Ribot calls foreshortening; and this foreshortening is due to the omission of an enormous number of the facts which filled them.

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Ch. 16
6 months 2 weeks ago

Go into the city to such a man, and say unto him, The Master saith, My time is at hand; I will keep the passover at thy house with my disciples.

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26:18 (KJV)
8 months 3 weeks ago

They despised everything but virtue, caring little for their present state of life, and thinking lightly of the possession of gold and other property, which seemed only a burden to them; neither were they intoxicated by luxury; nor did wealth deprive them of their self-control; but they were sober, and saw clearly that all these goods are increased by virtue and friendship with one another, whereas by too great regard and respect for them, they are lost and friendship with them.

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6 months 1 week ago

There is nothing that comes closer to true humility than the intelligence. It is impossible to feel pride in one's intelligence at the moment when one really and truly exercises it.

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As quoted in the Introduction (by Siân Miles) p. 35
3 months 2 weeks ago

He who lives in harmony with himself lives in harmony with the universe.

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Attributed in The Life You Were Born to Live : Finding Your Life Purpose (1995) by Dan Millman, Pt. 2, Ch. 2 : Cooperation and Balance
3 months 3 weeks ago

We cannot observe external things without some degree of Thought; nor can we reflect upon our Thoughts, without being influenced in the course of our reflection by the Things which we have observed.

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The Elements of Morality, Book 1, ch. 1., 1845
7 months 3 weeks ago

The gods we stand by are the gods we need and can use, the gods whose demands on us are reinforcements of our demands on ourselves and on one another. What I then propose to do is, briefly stated, to test saintliness by common sense, to use human standards to help us decide how far the religious life commends itself as an ideal kind of human activity . ... It is but the elimination of the humanly unfit, and the survival of the humanly fittest, applied to religious beliefs; and if we look at history candidly and without prejudice, we have to admit that no religion has ever in the long run established or proved itself in any other way. Religions have approved themselves; they have ministered to sundry vital needs which they found reigning. When they violated other needs too strongly, or when other faiths came which served the same needs better, the first religions were supplanted.

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Lectures XIV and XV, "The Value of Saintliness"
5 months 3 weeks ago

There is but a step between a proud man's glory and his disgrace.

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Maxim 138
7 months 3 weeks ago

I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.

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4 months 3 days ago

Above all, the ominous clouds of those phenomena that we are with varying success seeking to explain by means of the quantum of action, are throwing their shadows over the sphere of physical knowledge, threatening no one knows what new revolution.

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Ch. 3 "Relativity of Space and Time"
8 months 3 weeks ago

If, then, in the sphere of action there is some one end which we desire for its own sake, and for the sake of which we desire every thing else; and if we do not choose every thing for the sake of something else, for this would go on without limit, and our desire would be idle and futile, it is clear that this must be the supreme good, and the best thing of all.

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6 months 1 week ago

Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of human life is to grasp as much as we can out of the infinitude.

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Ch. 21, June 28, 1941.
1 week 2 days ago

😁...I agree...but...who are the "little men"?😂

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1 week 1 day ago

"What was was ever, and ever shall be. For, if it had come into being, it needs must have been nothing before it came into being. Now, if it were nothing, in no wise could anything have arisen out of nothing."
- Melissus of Samos

See biography for Melissus of Samos:
https://civilsimian.com/Melissus-of-Samos

Read Melissus of Samos' work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/250/content

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6 months 1 week ago

It is precisely those artists and writers who are most inclined to think of their art as the manifestation of their personality who are in fact the most in bondage to public taste.

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p. 57
6 months 3 weeks ago

Neither a person nor a nation can exist without some higher idea. And there is only one higher idea on earth, and it is the idea of the immortality of the human soul, for all other "higher" ideas of life by which humans might live derive from that idea alone.

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A Writer's Diary, Vol. 1: 1873-1876, ed. Kenneth Lantz (1994), p. 734
8 months 2 days ago

The world thought well of my schoolmaster guardian, because he was neither a liar, nor a scamp, nor a gambler; but he was coarse, avaricious, and ignorant; he knew nothing beyond the confused lessons which he taught to his classes. He imagined that in forcing a youth to become a monk he would be offering a sacrifice acceptable to God. He used to boast of the many victims which he devoted annually to Dominic and Francis and Benedict.

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As quoted in Life and Letters of Erasmus: Lectures Delivered at Oxford 1893-4 (1899) by James Anthony Froude
1 month 3 weeks ago

Thinking, talking and writing IS action...

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7 months 3 weeks ago

As to the Approbation or Esteem of those Blockheads who call themselves the Public, & whom a Bookseller, a Lord, a Priest, or a Party can guide, I do most heartily despise it.

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Letter 138, To Gilbert Elliot of Minto; August 9, 1757
5 months 3 weeks ago

When the evolutionary process shifts from biology to software technology the body becomes the old hardware environment. The human body is now a probe, a laboratory for experiments.

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(p. 180)
7 months 3 weeks ago

I cannot guess what may be the fate of Quakerism in America; but I perceive it loses ground daily in England. In all countries, where the established religion is of a mild and tolerating nature, it will at length swallow up all the rest.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

To conceive a thought - just one, but one that would tear the universe to pieces.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Never aim at more precision than... required by the problem...

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6 months 2 weeks ago

He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.

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8:7 (King James Version)
7 months 3 weeks ago

In order to make himself thoroughly undesirable, he will speak.

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p. 463
7 months 3 weeks ago

An evil may be real, tho' its cause has no relation to us: It may be real, without being peculiar: It may be real, without shewing itself to others: It may be real, without being constant: And it may be real, without falling under the general rules. Such evils as these will not fail to render us miserable, tho' they have little tendency to diminish pride: And perhaps the most real and the most solid evils of life will be found of this nature.

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Part 1, Section 6
6 months 3 weeks ago

On our earth we can only love with suffering and through suffering. We cannot love otherwise, and we know of no other sort of love. I want suffering in order to love. I long, I thirst, this very instant, to kiss with tears the earth that I have left, and I don't want, I won't accept life on any other!"

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3 months 3 weeks ago

One power descends and wants to scatter, to come to a standstill, to die. The other power ascends and strives for freedom, for immortality. These two armies, the dark and the light, the armies of life and of death, collide eternally.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields, Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air Hides hills and woods, the river and the heaven, And veils the farm-house at the garden's end.

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The Snow-Storm
6 months 2 weeks ago

Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.

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"The Sublime and the Good", in the Chicago Review, Vol. 13 Issue 3 (Autumn 1959) p. 51.
6 months 2 weeks ago

Religion comforts us for the defeat of our will to power. It adds new worlds to ours, and thus brings us hope of new conquests and new victories. We are converted to religion out of fear of suffocating within the narrow confines of this world.

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6 months 1 week ago

If one only wished to be Sad, this could be horrible for the rest of civilisation; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.

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As quoted in A Dictionary of Thoughts : Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Best Authors, Both Ancient and Modern (1891) edited by Tryon Edwards.
4 months 1 day ago

I am doing my best to glorify the scamp or vagabond. I hope I shall succeed. For things are not so simple as they sometimes seem. In this present age of threats to democracy and individual liberty, probably only the scamp and the spirit of the scamp alone will save us from being lost in serially numbered units in the masses of disciplined, obedient, regimented and uniformed coolies. The scamp will be the last and most formidable enemy of dictatorships. He will be the champion of human dignity and individual freedom, and will be the last to be conquered. All modern civilization depends entirely upon him.

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Ch. I : The Awakening, p. 12
3 months 2 weeks ago

Nature which governs the whole will soon change all things which thou seest, and out of there substance will make other things, and again other things from the substance of them, in order that the world may ever be new.

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VII, 25 (See also Charles Darwin)
4 months 2 days ago

I am not indeed ignorant that certain over-wise people will call these legends "old wives' fables," and not worth listening to; but I think, for my part, that in such matters it is better to believe the testimony of nations than of those witty individuals, whose little soul is acute indeed, but has a clear insight into no one thing.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

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Poetry and Imagination
6 months 2 weeks ago

From the cradle to the grave, each individual pays for the sin of not being God. That's why life is an uninterrupted religious crisis, superficial for believers, shattering for doubters.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

If the flesh came into being because of spirit, it is a wonder. But if spirit came into being because of the body, it is a wonder of wonders. Indeed, I am amazed at how this great wealth has made its home in this poverty.

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