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6 months 6 days ago

We boil at different degrees.

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Eloquence
2 months 1 week ago

Once more I realized to what an extent earthly happiness is made to the measure of man. It is not a rare bird which we must pursue at one moment in heaven, at the next in our minds. Happiness is a domestic bird found in our own courtyards.

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"Italy", Ch. 18, p. 182
6 months 1 week ago

The commodities of Europe were almost all new to America, and many of those of America were new to Europe. A new set of exchanges, therefore, began..and which should naturally have proved as advantageous to the new, as it certainly did to the old continent. The savage injustice of the Europeans rendered an event, which ought to have been beneficial to all, ruinous and destructive to several of those unfortunate countries.

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Chapter I, p. 481.
7 months 1 week ago

The person who is going to preach ought to live in the Christian thoughts and ideas: they ought to be his daily life. If so, this is the view of Christianity, then you, too, will have eloquence enough and precisely that which is needed when you speak extemporaneously without specific preparation. However, it is fallacious eloquence if someone, without otherwise occupying himself with, without living in these thoughts, once in a while sits down and laboriously collects such thoughts, perhaps in the field of literature, and then works them into a well-composed discourse, which is then committed to memory and delivered superbly, with respect both to voice and diction and gestures.

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6 months 1 week ago

The guidelines for achieving wisdom consist of three leading maxims: 1) Think for yourself; 2) (in communication with other people) Put yourself in the place of the other person; 3) Always think by remaining faithful to your own self.

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Kant, Immanuel (1996), page 95
6 months 5 days ago

Man is a useless passion.

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Part 4, Chapter 2, III
4 months 2 weeks ago

Indeed much of the literature written about black folks in the post-civil rights era emphasized the need for jobs. Material advancement was deemed the pressing agenda. Mental health concerns were not a high priority.

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6 months 1 week 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).
2 months 6 days ago

I believe... that every human mind feels pleasure in doing good to another.

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Letter to John Adams
7 months 1 week ago

A line by Thomas à Kempis which perhaps could be used as a motto sometime. He says of Paul: Therefore he turned everything over to God, who knows all, and defended himself solely by means of patience and humility . . . . He did defend himself now and then so that the weak would not be offended by his silence.

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2 months 3 days ago

Often injustice lies in what you aren't doing, not only in what you are doing.

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IX. 5:223
4 months 2 weeks ago

I believe that the man choosing progress can find a new unity through the full development of all his human forces, which are produced in three orientations. These can be presented separately or together: biophilia, love for humanity and nature, and independence and freedom.

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5 months 3 days ago

That higher and "complete" man is begotten by the "unknown" father and born from Wisdom, and it is he who, in the figure of the puer aeternus-"vultu mutabilis albus et ater"-represents our totality, which transcends consciousness. It was this boy into whom Faust had to change, abandoning his inflated onesidedness which saw the devil only outside. Christ's "Except ye become as little children" is a prefiguration of this, for in them the opposites lie close together; but what is meant is the boy who is born from the maturity of the adult man, and not the unconscious child we would like to remain.

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Answer to Job, R. Hull, trans. (1984), pp. 157-158
1 month 3 weeks ago

There are certain occupations, even in modern society, which entail living in isolation and do not require great physical or intellectual effort. Such occupations as the service of lighthouses and lightships come to mind. Would it not be possible to place young people who wish to think about scientific problems, especially of a mathematical or philosophical nature, in such occupations? Very few young people with such ambitions have, even during the most productive period of their lives, the opportunity to devote themselves undisturbed for any length of time to problems of a scientific nature.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Great abuses in the world are begotten, or, to speak more boldly, all the abuses of the world are begotten, by our being taught to be afraid of professing our ignorance, and that we are bound to accept all things we are not able to refute: we speak of all things by precepts and decisions. The style at Rome was that even that which a witness deposed to having seen with his own eyes, and what a judge determined with his most certain knowledge, was couched in this form of speaking: "it seems to me." They make me hate things that are likely, when they would impose them upon me as infallible.

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Ch. 12, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Carew Hazlitt, 1877
6 months 5 days ago

Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows.

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Ch. 5
4 months 3 weeks ago

The great man, whether we comprehend him in the most intense activity of his work or in the restful equipoise of his forces, is powerful, involuntarily and composedly powerful, but he is not avid for power. What he is avid for is the realization of what he has in mind, the incarnation of the spirit.

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p. 151
6 months 1 week ago

I frequently asked myself, if I could, or if I was bound to go on living, when life must be passed in this manner. I generally answered to myself, that I did not think I could possibly bear it beyond a year.

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(p. 140)
3 months 3 weeks ago

Education is the instruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature, under which name I include not merely things and their forces, but men and their ways; and the fashioning of the affections and of the will into an earnest and loving desire to move in harmony with those laws. For me, education means neither more nor less than this. Anything which professes to call itself education must be tried by this standard, and if it fails to stand the test, I will not call it education, whatever may be the force of authority, or of numbers, upon the other side.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

The best books are those, which those who read them believe they themselves could have written.

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6 months 6 days ago

Character is higher than intellect...A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think.

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par. 27
3 months 3 weeks ago

Within the last half century, the labours of such men as Von Baer, Rathke, Reichert, Bischof, and Remak, have almost completely unravelled... the successive stages of development which... are now as well known to the embryologist as are the steps of the metamorphosis of the silk-worm moth to the school boy.

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Ch.2, p. 75
4 months 1 week ago

To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. 'Tis much better to do a little with certainty, & leave the rest for others that come after you, than to explain all things by conjecture without making sure of any thing.

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Statement from unpublished notes for the Preface to Opticks (1704) quoted in Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (1983) by Richard S. Westfall, p. 643
6 months 2 weeks ago

I have here only made a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the thread that ties them together.

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Book III, Ch. 12. Of Physiognomy
6 months 1 day ago

A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game. A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible. Its law and its rules are not, however, harbored in the inaccessibility of a secret; it is simply that they can never be booked, in the present, into anything that could rigorously be called a perception.

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Plato's Pharmacy, intro
4 months 6 days ago

Science may fall back on its stupid excuse that science works for science, and that when it has been developed by the scientists it will become accessible to the people also; but art, if it be art, should be accessible to all, and particularly to those for whom it is produced. And the position of our art strikingly arraigns the producers of art for not wishing, not knowing how, and being unable, to serve the people.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

No man is free who is not master of himself.

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Fragment 35 (Oldfather translation)
2 months 2 days ago

Being Gentlemen and very far from the litigious humour of loving to wrangle about words or terms or notions as empty; they had before his coming in, readily agreed promiscuously to use when they pleased Elements and Principles as terms equivalent: and to understand both by the one and the other, those primitive and simple bodies of which the mixt ones are said to be composed, and into which they are ultimately resolved.

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6 months 1 week ago

Although the whole of this life were said to be nothing but a dream and the physical world nothing but a phantasm, I should call this dream or phantasm real enough, if, using reason well, we were never deceived by it.

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As quoted in The World of Mathematics (1956) by J. R. Newman, p. 1832
6 months 2 days ago

We ourselves are the entities to be analyzed.

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Macquarrie & Robinson translation
5 months 3 weeks ago

He is not poor who has enough of things to use. If it is well with your belly, chest and feet, the wealth of kings can give you nothing more.

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Book I, epistle xii, line 4
6 months 2 weeks ago

Is it not a noble farce, wherein kings, republics, and emperors have for so many ages played their parts, and to which the whole vast universe serves for a theatre?

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Book II, Ch. 36. Of the most Excellent Men
2 months 3 weeks ago

Withdraw into yourself, as far as you can. Associate with those who will make a better man of you. Welcome those whom you yourself can improve. The process is mutual; for men learn while they teach.

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Line 8.
6 months 3 weeks ago

I am not my soul.

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Super I ad Corinthios, 15.2
6 months 1 week ago

Virtue is debased by self-justification.

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Oedipe, act II, scene IV, 1718
3 months 4 weeks ago

Conservatives believe that our identities and values are formed through our relations with other people, and not through our relation with the state. The state is not an end but a means. Civil society is the end, and the state is the means to protect it. The social world emerges through free association, rooted in friendship and community life. And the customs and institutions that we cherish have grown from below, by the 'invisible hand' of co-operation. They have rarely been imposed from above by the work of politics, the role of which, for a conservative, is to reconcile our many aims, and not to dictate or control them.

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"Stand up for the real meaning of freedom," The Spectator
5 months 4 days ago

You rejoice in having made a convert to Atheism. I think there is something unnatural in a zeal of proselytism in an Atheist. I do not believe in an intellectual God, a God made after the image of man. In the vulgar acceptation of the word, therefore, I think a man is right who does not believe in God, but I am also persuaded that a man is wrong who is without religion.

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Letter to H. B. Rosser (7 March 1820), quoted in C. Kegan Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, Vol. II (1876), p. 263
6 months 5 days ago

One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.

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Act 5, sc. 2
5 months 2 days ago

There is no false sensation.

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6 months 6 days ago

Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy.

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Social Aims
6 months 1 week ago

It is the privilege of true genius, and certainly of the genius that opens a new road, to make without punishment great mistakes.

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"Siècle de Louis XIV," ch. 32 (1751), qtd. in Arthur Schopenhauer, "The World as Will and Representation," Criticism of the Kantian philosophy, 1818
6 months 1 week ago

Democracy is the road to socialism.

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Attributed to Marx in recent years, including in Communism (2007) by Tom Lansford, p. 48
4 months 3 weeks ago

The characteristic activity of science is not construction, but induction. The more often something has occurred in the past, the more certain that it will in all the future. Knowledge relates solely to what is and to its recurrence. New forms of being, especially those arising from the historical activity of man, lie beyond empiricist theory. Thoughts which are not simply carried over from the prevailing pattern of consciousness, but arise from the aims and resolves of the individual, in short, all historical tendencies that reach beyond what is present and recurrent, do not belong to the domain of science.

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p. 144.
5 months 2 days ago

As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.

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5 months 2 days ago

What each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed.

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Letter to Jean-Richard Bloch
10 months 1 week ago

Precisely as an enigma, the symptom, so to speak, announces its dissolution through interpretation: the aim of psychoanalysis is to re-establish the broken network of communication by allowing the patient to verbalize the meaning of his symptom: through this verbalization the symptom is automatically dissolved. This, then is the basic point: in its very construction, the symptom implies the field of the big Other as consistent, complete, because its very function is an appeal to the Other which contains its meaning.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

The ground of democratic ideas and practices is faith in the potentialities of individuals, faith in the capacity for positive developments if proper conditions are provided. The weakness of the philosophy originally advanced to justify the democratic movement was that it took individuality to be something given ready-made, that is, in abstraction from time, instead of as a power to develop.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

This adoration, too, was not the same as the worship of God. In my opinion they did not yet recognize him as God, but they acted in keeping with the custom mentioned in Scripture, according to which Kings and important people were worshiped; this did not mean more than falling down before them at their feet and honoring them.

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Sermon on The Gospel for the Festival of the Epiphany, 1522. Luther's Works, American Ed., Hans J. Hillerbrand, Helmut T. Lehmann eds., Philadelphia, Concordia Publishing House/Fortress Press, 1974, ISBN 0800603524 (Sermons II), vol. 52:198

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