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6 months 1 week ago

I do not overlook the fact that there are irrationalists who love mankind, and that not all forms of irrationalism engender criminality. But I hold that he who teaches that not reason but love should rule opens up the way for those who rule by hate. (Socrates, I believe, saw something of this when he suggested that mistrust or hatred of argument is related to mistrust or hatred of man).

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Vol. 2, Ch. 24 "Oracular Philosophy and the Revolt against Reason"
2 months 1 week ago

Don't let yourself forget how many doctors have died, after furrowing their brows over how many deathbeds. How many astrologers, after pompous forecasts about others' ends. How many philosophers, after endless disquisitions on death and immortality. How many warriors, after inflicting thousands of casualties themselves. How many tyrants, after abusing the power of life and death atrociously, as if they were themselves immortal.

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(Hays translation) IV, 48
2 months 1 week ago

The idea of creating a national bank I do not concur in, because it seems now decided that Congress has not that power (although I sincerely wish they had it exclusively), and because I think there is already a vast redundancy rather than a scarcity of paper medium.

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Letter to Thomas Law, 1813. FE 9:433
5 months 6 days ago

The premonition of madness is complicated by the fear of lucidity in madness, the fear of the moments of return and reunion, when the intuition of disaster is so painful that it almost provokes a greater madness. One would welcome chaos if one were not afraid of lights in it.

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7 months 1 week ago

This is approximately the way Christendom relates to the essentially Christian, the unconditioned. After seventeen, eighteen detours and running all around someone finally has his finite existence assured, and then we receive a sermon about Seek first the kingdom of God. Is this sobriety or is this intoxication?

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If I work incessantly to the last, nature owes me another form of existence when the present one collapses.

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Letter to Eckermann
6 months 1 week ago

Classical political economy nearly touches the true relation of things, without, however,consciously formulating it. This it cannot so long as it sticks in its bourgeois skin.

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Vol. I, Ch. 19, pg. 594.
5 months 1 day ago

It is no accident that all democracies have put a high estimate upon education; that schooling has been their first care and enduring charge. Only through education can equality of opportunity be anything more than a phrase. Accidental inequalities of birth, wealth, and learning are always tending to restrict the opportunities of some as compared with those of others. Only free and continued education can counteract those forces which are always at work to restore, in however changed a form, feudal oligarchy. Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.

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"The Need of an Industrial Education in an Industrial Democracy," Manual Training and Vocational Education17 (1916); also Middle Works 10: 137-143.
6 months ago

From Richard McKeon and Robert Brumsbaugh I learned to view the history of philosophy as a series, not of alternative solutions to the same problems, but of quite different sets of problems. From Rudolph Carnap and Carl Hempel I learned how pseudo-problems could be revealed as such by restarting them in the formal mode of speech. From Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss I learned how they could be so revealed by being translated into Whiteheadian or Hegelian terms.

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Preface
4 months 2 weeks ago

As the few adepts in such things well know, universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones. There is so much goodness and ingenuity in a raindrop that an apothecary wouldn't let it go for less than half-a-crown.

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B 33
2 months 2 weeks ago

In my work, I have always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful. In a conversation with Freeman Dyson.

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Quoted in Chandrasekhar, S. (2010-12-01) . "Beauty and the quest for beauty in science". Physics Today 63 (12): 57-62. ISSN 0031-9228. DOI:10.1063/1.3529003.

Trivializing life and exaggerating identity particularity is the inversion of the psychopath....

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6 months 1 week ago

I quite understand the principle of confining employment as far as possible to the British without regard for efficiency. I think, however, that the Ministry is not applying the principle sufficiently widely. I know many Englishmen who have married foreigners, and many English potential wives who are out of a job. Would not a year be long enough to train an English wife to replace the existing foreign one in such cases?

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Enclosed reply to the Ministry of Labour, in defense of A. S. Neill (who declined to send it), 27 January, 1931
4 months 1 week ago

The TV camera has no shutter. It does not deal with aspects or facets of objects in high resolution. It is a means of direct pick-up by the electrical groping over surfaces.

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Arts in society, Volume 3, 1964, p. 242
6 months 1 week ago

Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!

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Vol. I, Ch. 24, Section 3, pg. 652.
6 months 2 weeks ago

All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.

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Chapter IV, p. 448.
5 months 6 days ago

Self-pity is not as sterile as we suppose. Once we feel its mere onset, we assume a thinker's attitude, and come to think of it, we come to think!

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5 months 6 days ago

Philosophy's error is to be too endurable.

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6 months 1 week ago

I don't like the spirit of socialism - I think freedom is the basis of everything.

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Letter to Constance Malleson (Colette), September 29, 1916
6 months 1 week ago

Love is of all the passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart, and the body.

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Le Dernier Volume Des Œuvres De Voltaire: Contes - Comédie - Pensées - Poésies - Lettres, 1862
6 months 2 weeks ago

We only labor to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.

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Book I, Ch. 25
6 months 1 week ago

Nothing contributes more to nourish elevation of sentiments in a people, than the large and free character of their habitations.

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(p. 55)
5 months 4 weeks ago

In adversity, remember to keep an even mind.

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Book II, ode iii, line 1
4 months 3 weeks ago

The motto should not be: Forgive one another; rather, Understand one another.

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To him who looks upon the world rationally, the world in its turn presents a rational aspect. The relation is mutual.

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6 months 4 weeks ago

Thus, where'er the drift of hazardSeems most unrestrained to flow,Chance herself is reined and bitted,And the curb of law doth know.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Observe, observe perpetually.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Moral activity? There is scarcely such a thing possible! Everything is sketchy. The world does nothing but sketch.

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2 months 1 week ago

No one has a natural right to the trade of a money lender, but he who has the money to lend. Let those then among us who have a moneyed capital and who prefer employing it in loans rather than otherwise, set up banks and give cash or national bills for the notes they discount. Perhaps, to encourage them, a larger interest than is legal in the other cases might be allowed them, on the condition of their lending for short periods only.

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ME 13:277
4 months 3 weeks ago

Implication is thus the very texture of our web of belief, and logic is the theory that traces it.

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S. 41
4 months 1 week ago

Never promise more than you can perform.

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Maxim 528
6 months 1 week ago

Accent is the soul of language; it gives to it both feeling and truth.

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English translation as quoted in A Dictionary of Thoughts: Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Best Authors of the World, Both Ancient and Modern (1908) by Tryon Edwards, p. 2.
5 months 6 days ago

Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.

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Vol. V, par. 265
6 months 4 days ago

The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence...the soul is the effect and instrument of political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Nothing is quite so wretchedly corrupt as an aristocracy which has lost its power but kept its wealth and which still has endless leisure to devote to nothing but banal enjoyments. All its great thoughts and passionate energy are things of the past, and nothing but a host of petty, gnawing vices now cling to it like worms to a corpse.

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Book Three, Chapter XI.
6 months 5 days ago

I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again "I know that that's a tree", pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell them: "This fellow isn't insane. We are only doing philosophy."

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5 months 1 week ago

Tyrants seldom want pretexts.

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3 months 4 days ago

I think I have already said somewhere that mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.

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Part I. Ch. 2 : The Future of Mathematics, p. 31
4 months 3 weeks ago

The Outsider wants to cease to be an Outsider. He wants to be 'balanced'. He would like to achieve a vividness of sense-perception (Lawrence, Van Gogh, Hemingway) He would also like to understand the human soul and its working and, be 'possessed' by a Will topower, to more life. (Barbusse and Mitya Karamazov) He would like to escape triviality forever. Above all, he would like to know how to express himself because that is the means by which he can get to know himself and hi unknown possibilities.

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Chapter Seven, The Great Synthesis…
3 months 2 weeks ago

When Bernard Marx tells the Savage he will try to secure permission for him and his mother to visit the Other Place, John is initially pleased and excited. Echoing Miranda in The Tempest, he exclaims: "O brave new world that has such people in it." Heavy irony. Like innocent Miranda, he is eager to embrace a way of life he neither knows nor understands. And of course he comes unstuck. Yet if we swallow such fancy literary conceits, then ultimately the joke is on us. It is only funny in the sense there are "jokes" about Auschwitz. For it is Huxley who neither knows nor understands the glory of what lies ahead. A utopian society in which we are sublimely happy will be far better than we can presently imagine, not worse. And it is we, trapped in the emotional squalor of late-Darwinian antiquity, who neither know nor understand the lives of the god-like super-beings we are destined to become. "Brave New World? A Defence of Paradise-Engineering", BLTC Research, 1998

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2 months 1 week ago

Your first duty, in completing your service to your race, is to feel within you all your ancestors. Your second duty is to throw light on their onrush and to continue their work. Your third duty is to pass on to your son the great mandate to surpass you.

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2 months 1 week ago

We do not struggle for ourselves, nor for our race, not even for humanity. We do not struggle for Earth, nor for ideas. All these are the precious yet provisional stairs of our ascending God, and they crumble away as soon as he steps upon them in his ascent. In the smallest lightning flash of our lives, we feel all of God treading upon us, and suddenly we understand: if we all desire it intensely, if we organize all the visible and invisible powers of earth and fling them upward, if we all battle together like fellow combatants eternally vigilant - then the Universe might possibly be saved. It is not God who will save us - it is we who will save God, by battling, by creating, and by transmuting matter into spirit.

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6 months 1 week 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
2 months 3 weeks ago

The prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination which accords neither with Western science nor with the experimental philosophy-religions of the East - in particular the central and germinal Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism. This hallucination underlies the misuse of technology for the violent subjugation of man's natural environment and, consequently, its eventual destruction. We are therefore in urgent need of a sense of our own existence which is in accord with the physical facts and which overcomes our feeling of alienation from the universe.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

We might liken the 'two selves' to Laurel and Hardy. Ollie is the objective mind, 'you'. Stan is the subjective mind, the 'hidden you'. But Stan happens to be in control of your energy supply. So if you wake up feeling low and discouraged, you (Ollie) tend to transmit your depression to Stan, who fails to send you energy, which makes you feel lower than ever. This vicious circle is the real cause of most mental illness.

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p. 121
5 months 4 weeks ago

Let's put a limit to the scramble for money. ... Having got what you wanted, you ought to begin to bring that struggle to an end.

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Book I, satire i, lines 92-94, as translated by N. Rudd
4 months 3 weeks ago

In one sense, I do believe I am "like a man," as Parthe [the writer's sister] says. But how? In having sympathy. ... Women crave for being loved, not for loving. They scream out at you for sympathy all day long, they are incapable of giving any in return, for they cannot remember your affairs long enough to do so. ... They cannot state a fact accurately to another, nor can that other attend to it accurately enough for it to become information. Now is not all this the result of want of sympathy?

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Letter to Madame Mohl
5 months 1 week ago

Men have superior strength of body; but were it not for mistaken notions of beauty, women would acquire sufficient to enable them to earn their own subsistence, the true definitions of independence; and to bear those bodily inconveniences and exertions that are requisite to strengthen the mind. Let us then, by being allowed to take the same exercise as boys, not only during infancy, but youth, arrive at perfection of body, that we may know how far the nation superiority of man extends . For what reason or virtue can be expected from a creature when the seed-time of life is neglected? None; did not the winds of heaven casually scatter many useful seeds in fallow ground.

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Ch.5

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