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3 months 1 week ago

Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

You worldly-minded people are most unfortunate! You are surrounded with sorrows and troubles overhead and underfoot and to the right and to the left, and you are enigmas even to yourselves.

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p. 37
1 month 3 weeks ago

We should always speak what would please the man of whom we expect a favour, like the hunter who sings sweetly when he desires to shoot a deer.

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5 months 1 week ago

Of all the means which wisdom acquires to ensure happiness throughout the whole of life, by far the most important is friendship.

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3 months 3 days ago

But if Germany, thanks to Hitler and his successors, were to enslave the European nations and destroy most of the treasures of their past, future historians would certainly pronounce that she had civilized Europe.

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p. 124
1 month 1 week ago

The Noble in the high place, the Ignoble in the low; that is, in all times and in all countries, the Almighty Maker's Law.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Manufacture was all the time sheltered by protective duties in the hoe market, by monopolies in the colonial market, and broad as much as possible by differential duties.

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ibid, pp. 183
4 months 2 weeks ago

The difference between the first- and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition - it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind - yet what miles away in the point of preciousness!

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To Henry Rutgers Marshall, 7 February 1899
4 months 2 weeks ago

The perception of beauty is a moral test.

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June 21, 1852
3 months 1 week ago

Only thoughts that are randomly born die. The other thoughts we carry with us without knowing them. They have abandoned themselves to forgetfulness so that they can be with us all the time.

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3 months 1 week ago

We are accustomed to speak of ideas as reproduced, as passed from mind to mind, as similar or dissimilar to one another, and, in short, as if they were substantial things; nor can any reasonable objection be raised to such expressions. But taking the word "idea" in the sense of an event in an individual consciousness, it is clear that an idea once past is gone forever, and any supposed recurrence of it is another idea. These two ideas are not present in the same state of consciousness, and therefore cannot possibly be compared.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

My own sense of how to behave in a simulation has more traditional roots in the theory of perception. I've long believed that each of us lives in an egocentric simulation of the world run by the mind/brain. Since the zombies of each (waking) simulation have sentient real world counterparts, one should treat them as though they were real. Nonetheless as an angst-ridden teenager, my dawning acceptance of an inferential realist theory of perception made me feel as if I'd been condemned to solitary confinement for life. The sense of loneliness was indescribable. Naïve realism is better for one's mental health.

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Origins and Theory of the World Transhumanist Association, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, 26 Dec. 2007

I wonder why I bother to tell the truth when people ask me what I think of this and that and how I feel about this and that. I get so complicated and introspective that people often don't understand and are frankly puzzled and (naturally enough) bored. So why bother! It would be so much easier to say what they expected you to, and everything would be easy and pleasant.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Milton Ashe is not the type to marry a head of hair and a pair of eyes.

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4 months 1 week ago

You could attach prices to ideas. Some cost a lot some little. ... And how do you pay for ideas? I believe: with courage.

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p. 60e
2 months 2 weeks ago

Boredom is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face.

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Chapter 3
4 months 2 weeks ago

If A were not allowed his better position, B would be even worse off than he is.

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Chapter II, Section 17, pg. 103
3 months 1 week ago

There is nothing impossible in the existence of the supernatural: its existence seems to me decidedly probable.

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The Genteel Tradition at Bay

Yes, boorish people do boorish things. What's strange or unheard-of about that? Isn't it yourself you should reproach-for not anticipating that they'd act this way?

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(Hays translation) IX, 42
1 month 2 days ago

The best ideas are common property.

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Line 11.
2 months 1 week ago

In one way or another, all my books have been devoted to expounding and exploring the almost limitless power of the Darwinian principle-power unleashed whenever and wherever there is enough time for the consequences of primordial self-replication to unfold. Preface

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3 months 1 week ago

If by enlightenment and intellectual progress we mean the freeing of man from superstitious belief in evil forces, in demons and fairies, in blind fate-in short, emancipation of fear-then denunciation of what is currently called reason is the greatest service reason can render.

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2 months 4 weeks ago

Happiness is the indication that man has found the answer to the problem of human existence: the productive realization of his potentialities and thus, simultaneously, being one with the world and preserving the integrity of his self. In spending his energy productively he increases his powers, he "burns without being consumed."

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p.189
4 months 2 weeks ago

I will now confess my own utopia. I devoutly believe in the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of some sort of socialistic equilibrium. The fatalistic view of the war function is to me nonsense, for I know that war-making is due to definite motives and subject to prudential checks and reasonable criticisms, just like any other form of enterprise. And when whole nations are the armies, and the science of destruction vies in intellectual refinement with the science of production, I see that war becomes absurd and impossible from its own monstrosity. Extravagant ambitions will have to be replaced by reasonable claims, and nations must make common cause against them.

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3 months 1 week ago

Anxiety - or the fanaticism of the worst.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

For those of us who have been thrown into hell, mysterious melodies and the torturing images of a vanished beauty will always bring us, in the midst of crime and folly, the echo of that harmonious insurrection which bears witness, throughout the centuries, to the greatness of humanity.

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3 months 1 week ago

The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.

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8:20 (KJV)
2 months 3 weeks ago

Here take back the stuff that I am, nature, knead it back into the dough of being, make of me a bush, a cloud, whatever you will, even a man, only no longer make me me.

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B 37 "Speech of a suicide composed shortly before the act."

Human life. Duration: momentary. Nature: changeable. Perception: dim. Condition of Body: decaying. Soul: spinning around. Fortune: unpredictable. Lasting Fame: uncertain. Sum Up: The body and its parts are a river, the soul a dream and mist, life is warfare and a journey far from home, lasting reputation is oblivion.

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(Hays translation) II, 17
4 months 2 weeks ago

Reason, if consulted with, would advise, that their children's time should be spent in acquiring what might be useful to them when they come to be men, rather than to have their heads stuff'd with a deal of trash, a great part whereof they usually never do ('tis certain they never need to) think on again as long as they live: and so much of it as does stick by them they are only the worse for.

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Sec. 94
1 month 1 week ago

Colonization on a grand scale is a political necessity of absolutely the first order. A nation that does not colonize is irrevocably vowed to socialism, to war between rich and poor. The conquest of a nation of inferior race by a superior race, which establishes itself as the ruler, has nothing shocking about it.

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92-93
4 months 3 weeks ago

It is an article of faith that Mary is Mother of the Lord and still a Virgin.

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Weimar edition of Martin Luther's Works, English translation edited by J. Pelikan [Concordia: St. Louis], Vol. 11, 319-320
2 months 1 week ago

Nothing like a little judicious levity.

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The Wrong Box, ch. 7 (1889).
4 months 3 weeks ago

Lucid intervals and happy pauses.

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History of King Henry VII, III
5 months 2 days ago

You are a little soul carrying a corpse around, as Epictetus used to say.

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Fragment 26 (Oldfather translation). This fragment originates from Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, IV. 41.
2 weeks 3 days ago

One of our fan-coloring biographers, who paints small men as very great, inquired of me lately with real affection too, whether he might consider as authentic, the change of my religion much spoken of in some circles. Now this supposed that they knew what had been my religion before, taking for it the word of their priests, whom I certainly never made the confidants of my creed. My answer was "say nothing of my religion. It is known to my God and myself alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life; if that has been honest and dutiful to society, the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one."

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Letter to John Adams (11 January 1817), published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 12, pp. 48-49
2 weeks 3 days ago

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.

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Letter to Roger C. Weightman, declining to attend July 4th ceremonies in Washington D.C. celebrating the 50th anniversary of Independence, because of his health. This was Jefferson's last letter.
4 months 2 weeks ago

There are some simple maxims which I think might be commanded to writers of expository prose. First: never use a long word if a short word will do. Second: if you want to make a statement with a great many qualifications, put some of the qualifications in separate sentences. Third: do not let the beginning of your sentence lead the reader to an expectation which is contradicted by the end.

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"How I Write", The Writer, September 1954
2 months 3 weeks ago

A major task in organizing is to determine, first, where the knowledge is located that can provide the various kinds of factual premises that decisions require.

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p. 24.
4 months 2 weeks ago

Correct and accurate conclusions may be arrived at if we carefully observe the relation of the spheres of concepts, and only conclude that one sphere is contained in a third sphere, when we have clearly seen that this first sphere is contained in a second, which in its turn is contained in the third. On the other hand, the art of sophistry lies in casting only a superficial glance at the relations of the spheres of the concepts, and then manipulating these relations to suit our purposes, generally in the following way: - When the sphere of an observed concept lies partly within that of another concept, and partly within a third altogether different sphere, we treat it as if it lay entirely within the one or the other, as may suit our purpose.

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Vol. I, Ch. 10, as translated by R. B. Haldane
4 months 2 weeks ago

The virtues of society are the vices of the saints.

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Circles
3 months 1 week ago

We have reached the point where the Objective Logic turns into the Subjective Logic, or, where subjectivity emerges as the true form of objectivity. We may sum up Hegel's analysis in the following schema: The true form of reality requires freedom. Freedom requires self-consciousness and knowledge of the truth. Self-consciousness and knowledge of the truth are the essentials of the subject. The form of reality must be conceived as subject.

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P. 154-155
4 months 2 weeks ago

Without effort and change, human life cannot remain good. It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.

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3 months 1 week ago

Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Gradually the village murmur subsided, and we seemed to be embarked on the placid current of our dreams, floating from past to future as silently as one awakes to fresh morning or evening thoughts.

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5 months 1 week ago

The many are mean; only the few are noble.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

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Worship
4 months 3 weeks ago

René Descartes is more widely known as a philosopher than as a mathematician, although his philosophy has been controverted while his mathematics has not. ...In accordance with the ideals of his age, when experimental science was first seriously challenging arrogant speculation, Descartes set a greater store by his philosophy than his mathematics. But he fully appreciated the power of his new method in geometry.

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Eric Temple Bell, The Development of Mathematics

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