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6 months 2 weeks ago

Into the same rivers we step and do not step, we are and are not.

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4 months 1 week ago

Perhaps it is not true to speak of God as a judge at all, or of his judgements. There does not seem to be really any evidence that His worlds are places of trial but rather schools, place of training, or that He is a judge but rather a Teacher, a Trainer, not in the imperfect sense in which men are teachers, but in the sense of His contriving and adapting His whole universe for one purpose of training every intelligent being to be perfect. ... I think God would not be the Almighty, the All-Wise, the All-Good, if he were the judge, in the sense that the evangelical and Roman Catholic Christians impute judgement to him. ... Our business is, I think, to understand, not to judge. What He does, as far as we know, to rule by law down to the most infinitesimally small portion of His universe, not to judge.

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As quoted in Florence Nightingale's Theology: Collected Works of Florence Nightingale (2002) by Lynn McDonald, pps. 177-179
4 months 3 weeks ago

Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.

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The Book and the Brotherhood (1987) p. 248.
6 months 1 day ago

Never self-possessed, or prudent, love is all abandonment.

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p. 158
3 months 2 weeks ago

When Bill Gates pours money into Africa for feeding the poor in Africa and preventing famine, he's pushing the failed Green Revolution, he's pushing chemicals, pushing GMOs, pushing patterns.

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On Bill Gate's philanthropic activities, from "Bill Gates is continuing the work of Monsanto, Vandana Shiva tells France24" France24
6 months 1 day ago

Not from a vain or shallow thought His awful Jove young Phidias brought.

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The Problem, st. 2
6 months 1 day ago

He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.

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The Method of Nature, 1841
6 months ago

An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing: "There is very little difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very important." This distinction seems to me to go to the root of the matter.

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"The Importance of Individuals"
6 months 1 day ago

Hence money may be dirt, although dirt is not money.

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Vol. I, Ch. 3, Section 2, pg. 123.
2 months 1 week ago

The good effects that emanate from the same source are equally diffused upon the earth. Different regions become partakers in these benefits in different ways; so that neither their production comes to an end, nor does the Deity confer his blessings upon the recipient world with any degree of variation. For where the substance is the same, so is the action thereof, in the case of Divine Powers; especially with him who is king of them all, namely, the Sun; of whom the motion is the most simple amongst all the bodies that move in a contrary direction to the world, which fact that most excellent philosopher, Aristotle, adduces to prove the superiority of that luminary to the others.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

As the Swiss inscription says: Sprechen ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden- "Speech is silvern, Silence is golden"; or, as I might rather express it: speech is of time, silence is of eternity.

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Bk. III, ch. 3.
2 months 3 weeks ago

That's... the crisis. The number of liberal democracies measured by... Freedom House in its annual survey of freedom around the world has been in decline for 16 straight years, and the biggest declines recently have been in the two biggest liberal democracies, India and the United States. So... we're dealing with a big global problem.

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7:18
7 months 1 day ago

Every human being is tried this way in the active service of expectancy. Now comes the fulfillment and relieves him, but soon he is again placed on reconnaissance for expectancy; then he is again relieved, but as long as there is any future for him, he has not yet finished his service. And while human life goes on this way in very diverse expectancy, expecting very different things according to different times and occasions and in different frames of mind, all life is again one nightwatch of expectancy.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

But there is nothing sweeter than to dwell in towers that rise On high, serene and fortified with teachings of the wise, From which you may peer down upon the others as they stray This way and that, seeking the path of life, losing their way: The skirmishing of wits, the scramble for renown, the fight, Each striving harder than the next, and struggling day and night, To climb atop a heap of riches and lay claim to might.

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Book II, lines 7-13 (tr. Stallings)
4 months 2 days ago

Science fiction is like other writing. It is just novels and short stories with machines.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

On the more conservative side... Liberalism has been associated with... the right to own private property... one of the most fundamental individual rights that is protected in true liberal societies, and that right is... what made possible the modern economic world. As any economist would tell you, without secure property rights and contract enforcement, you don't get investment and therefore economic growth.

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13:44
6 months 1 week ago

A wise man never loses anything, if he has himself.

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Ch. 38. Of Solitude, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Hazlitt, 1842
2 months 1 week ago

As a general rule, all that has been hitherto advanced respecting the nature of this deity, must be understood to refer to his properties: for the nature of the god is not one thing, and his influence another: and truly, besides these two, his energy a third thing: seeing that all things which he wills, these he is, he can, and he works. For neither doth he will that which he is not; nor is he without strength to do that which he wills; nor doth he will that which he cannot effect. Now this is very different in the case of men, for theirs is a double nature mixed up in one, that of soul and body; the former divine, the latter full of darkness and obscurity: hence naturally arise warfare and discord between the two.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

What's interesting about the world today is that the fundamental division is... a... sociological one between people that have better educations, that live in big urban agglomerations, that then can then benefit from... a global economy, versus people who live in... smaller cities and towns, or in the countryside... with more traditional values. That division exists almost universally, in Turkey... Hungary... the United States, in Britain... It does reflect different economic opportunities, but more fundamentally... it reflects a... way of life, that in the urban case is... liberal and open, but in some cases... people would say a little... too open and too tolerant of... people that want to break traditional norms that are still maintained by... other parts of the population. So it's really that cultural fight... that's at the center of populism, related to,.. but certainly not fundamentally driven by economic inequality.

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52:39:00
3 months 4 weeks ago

The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.

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3 months 1 week ago

If our universe is one of many, unlike others in containing observers like ourselves, there is no need to posit a designer. Most universes will be too chaotic to allow the emergence of life or mind. In that case, the fact that humans exist in this universe needs no special explanation.

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Sweet Morality (p. 222)
5 months 5 days ago

Shakespeare's fault is not the greatest into which a poet may fall. It merely indicates a deficiency of taste.

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6 months 1 day ago

I cannot escape from the conclusion that the great ages of progress have depended upon a small number of individuals of transcendent ability. 

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Ch. 8: Western Civilisation
3 months 3 weeks ago

It is generally characteristic of arms races, including human ones, that although all would be better off if none of them escalated, so long as one of them escalates none can afford not to.

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Chapter 7 "Constructive Evolution" (p. 184)
2 months 1 week ago

The individual is reduced to a negligible quantity, perhaps less in his consciousness than in his practice and in the totality of his obscure emotional states that are derived from this practice. The individual has become a mere cog in an enormous organization of things and powers which tear from his hands all progress, spirituality, and value in order to transform them from their subjective form into the form of a purely objective life. It needs merely to be pointed out that the metropolis is the genuine arena of this culture which outgrows all personal life. Here in buildings and educational institutions, in the wonders and comforts of space-conquering technology, in the formations of community life, and in the visible institutions of the state, is offered such an overwhelming fullness of crystallized and impersonalized spirit that the personality, so to speak, cannot maintain itself under its impact.

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p. 422
6 months 2 days ago

Clever tyrants are never punished.

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Mérope, act V, scene V, 1743
7 months 3 days ago
Are designations congruent with things? Is language the adequate expression of all realities? It is only by means of forgetfulness that man can ever reach the point of fancying himself to possess a "truth" of the grade just indicated. If he will not be satisfied with truth in the form of tautology, that is to say, if he will not be content with empty husks, then he will always exchange truths for illusions.
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6 months 1 day ago

Take the question whether other people exist. ...It is plain that it makes for happiness to believe that they exist - for even the greatest misanthropist would not wish to be deprived of the objects of his hate. Hence the belief that other people exist is, pragmatically, a true belief. But if I am troubled by solipsism, the discovery that a belief in the existence of others is 'true' in the pragmatist's sense is not enough to allay my sense of loneliness: the perception that I should profit by rejecting solipsism is not alone sufficient to make me reject it. For what I desire is not that the belief in solipsism should be false in the pragmatic sense, but that other people should in fact exist. And with the pragmatist's meaning of truth, these two do not necessarily go together. The belief in solipsism might be false even if I were the only person or thing in the universe.

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"William James's Conception of Truth" , published in Philosophical Essays, London, 1910
6 months ago

Our psychological experiences are all equally facts. There is nothing to choose between them. No psychological experience is "truer," so far as we are concerned, than any other. For even if one should correspond more closely to things in themselves as perceived by some hypothetical non-human being, it would be impossible for us to discover which it was. Science is no "truer" than common sense, or lunacy, or art, or religion. It permits us to organize our experience profitably; but tells us nothing about the real nature of the world to which our experiences are supposed to refer. From the internal reality, by which I mean the totality of psychological experiences, it actually separates us. Art, for example, deals with many more aspects of this internal reality than does science, which confines itself deliberately and by convention to the study of one very limited class of experiences - the experiences of sense.

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"One and Many," p. 5-6
2 months 3 weeks ago

We have to construct the figure of a new David, the multitude as champion of asymmetrical combat, immaterial workers who became a new kind of combatants, cosmopolitan bricoleurs of resistance and cooperation.

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50
2 months 2 weeks ago

What fools these mortals be!

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6 months 1 day ago

I wiped away the weeds and foam, And fetched my sea-born treasures home; But the poor, unsightly, noisome things Had left their beauty on the shore With the sun, and the sand, and the wild uproar.

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Each and All, st. 3
4 months 2 weeks ago

Error is the price we pay for progress.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

I am a determinist. As such, I do not believe in free will. The Jews believe in free will. They believe that man shapes his own life. I reject that doctrine philosophically. In that respect, I am not a Jew.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

I would say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree [probably Caesar Baronius]: "The intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes.

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Variant translation: I would say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree: "That the intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how the heavens go."
2 months 2 weeks ago

If one doesn't know his mistakes, he won't want to correct them.

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Line 9
6 months 1 day ago

The average man's opinions are much less foolish than they would be if he thought for himself: in science, at least, his respect for authority is on the whole beneficial.

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On Education, Especially in Early Childhood (1926), Ch. 2: The Aims of Education, p. 63
6 months 4 weeks ago

No multitude is able to acquire any art whatsoever. Then if there is a kingly art, neither the collective body of the wealthy nor the whole people could ever acquire this science of statesmanship.

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6 months 2 days ago

The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the false appearance things present and which mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 1, § 17
5 months 1 day ago

People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel.

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2 months 1 day ago

We do not only free God by battling and subduing the visible world about us; we also create God. "Open your eyes," God shouts; "I want to see! Prick up your ears, I want to hear! March in the front ranks: you are my head!"

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Man's preeminent advantage is his organism. ...Only through nature do we have any good qualities; to her we owe all that we are.

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6 months 2 days ago

Religion may be purified. This great work was begun two hundred years ago: but men can only bear light to come in upon them by degrees.

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The critical review, or annals of literature, Volume XXVI, by A Society of Gentlemen (1768) p. 450
6 months 1 day ago

I cannot read a sentence in the book of the Hindoos without being elevated as upon the table-land of the Ghauts. It has such a rhythm as the winds of the desert, such a tide as the Ganges, and seems as superior to criticism as the Himmaleh Mounts. Even at this late hour, unworn by time with a native and inherent dignity it wears the English dress as indifferently as the Sanscrit.

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August 6, 1841
6 months 1 week ago

Let men learn (as we have said above) the difference that exists between the idols of the human mind, and the ideas of the Divine mind. The former are mere arbitrary abstractions; the latter the true marks of the Creator on his creatures, as they are imprinted on, and defined in matter, by true and exquisite touches. Truth, therefore, and utility are here perfectly identical.

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Aphorism 124
6 months 1 week ago

I do myself a greater injury in lying than I do him of whom I tell a lie.

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Book II, Ch. 17

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