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3 months 2 weeks ago

Genes do indirectly control the manufacture of bodies, and the influence is strictly one way: acquired characteristics are not inherited. No matter how much knowledge and wisdom you acquire during your life, not one jot will be passed on to your children by genetic means. Each new generation starts from scratch.

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Ch. 3. Immortal Coils
4 months 1 week ago

Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.

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John 20:17 (KJV)
1 month 2 weeks ago

I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground: That "all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States or to the people." To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition. The incorporation of a bank, and the powers assumed by this bill, have not, in my opinion, been delegated to the United States, by the Constitution... They are not among the powers specially enumerated...

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Opinion against the constitutionality of a National Bank (1791), also quoted in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson "Memorial Edition" (20 Vols., 1903-04) edited by Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, Vol. 3, p. 146
4 months 2 weeks ago

It is better to be unhappy and know the worst, than to be happy in a fool's paradise!

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Part 4, Chapter 5
5 months 3 weeks ago

He who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live.

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Ch. 18. That Men are not to judge of our Happiness till after Death, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Hazlitt, 1842
5 months 2 weeks ago

All students of man and society who possess that first requisite for so difficult a study, a due sense of its difficulties, are aware that the besetting danger is not so much of embracing falsehood for true, as of mistaking part of the truth for the whole.

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"Coleridge". London and Westminster Review., March 1840
5 months 2 weeks ago

When I was 4 years old ... I dreamt that I'd been eaten by a wolf, and to my great surprise I was in the wolf's stomach and not in heaven.

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BBC interview on "Face to Face" (1959); The Listener, Vol. 61 (1959), p. 503
2 months 2 weeks ago

In order to properly understand the big picture, everyone should fear becoming mentally clouded and obsessed with one small section of truth.

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Quoted in: Joan Klostermann-Ketels (2011) HumaniTrees, p. 96
4 months 2 weeks ago

The world is chaos. Nothingness is the yet-to-be-born god of the world.

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Act IV
3 months 4 weeks ago

What concerns me alone I only think, what concerns my friends I tell them, what can be of interest to only a limited public I write, and what the world ought to know is printed...

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B 52
1 month 2 weeks ago

The rosy mountain peaks laughed like high lustrous thoughts,and Helen, speechless, raised her pale hands toward the sunand joyed to feel its warm rays falling on her frozen palms.

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Book IV, line 1361
6 months 2 weeks ago

Well, then, arrest him. You can accuse him of something or other afterward.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

In these frequent talks about the books I read, he used, as opportunity offered, to give me explanations and ideas respecting civilization, government, morality, mental cultivation, which he required me afterwards to restate to him in my own words. He also made me read, and give him a verbal account of, many books which would not have interested me sufficiently to induce me to read them of myself: among others, Millar's Historical View of the English Government, a book of great merit for its time, and which he highly valued; Mosheim's Ecclesiastical History, McCrie's Life of John Knox, and even Sewel's and Rutty's Histories of the Quakers. He was fond of putting into my hands books which exhibited men of energy and resource in unusual circumstances, struggling against difficulties and overcoming them: of such works I remember Beaver's African Memoranda, and Collins's account of the first settlement of New South Wales.

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(p. 8)
5 months 1 week ago

A person may be greedy, envious, cowardly, cold, ungenerous, unkind, vain, or conceited, but behave perfectly by a monumental effort of will.

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"Moral Luck" (1976), p. 32.
4 months 2 weeks ago

It is false that kings are entitled to the eminence they obtain. They possess no intrinsic superiority over their subjects. The line of distinction that is drawn is the offspring of pretense, an indirect means employed for effecting certain purposes, and not the language of truth. It tramples upon the genuine nature of things, and depends for its support upon this argument, 'that, were it not for impositions of a similar nature, mankind would be miserable.'

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Book V, Ch. 6, "Of Subjects"
4 months 5 days ago

It is the furious longing to give finality to the Universe, to make it conscious and personal, that has brought us to believe in God, to wish that God may exist, to create God, in a word. To create Him, yes! This saying ought not to scandalize even the most devout theist. For to believe in God is, in a certain sense, to create Him, although He first creates us. It is He who is continually creating Himself.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Popery so threatens and so nearly surrounds us...every sober man would think it seasonable at this time that all dissenting Protestants should be brought to a good understanding and compliance one with another...I think all Protestants ought now by all ways to be stirred up against them [Catholics] as People that have declared themselves ready by blood, violence, and destruction to ruine our Religion and Government...they are nothing but either Enemys in our bowells or spies among us, whilst their General commanders whom they blindly obey declare warr, and an unalterable designe to destroy us.

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Critical Notes Upon Edward Stillingfleet's Mischief and Unreasonableness of Separation' (c. May 1681), quoted in John Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 110
6 months 1 day ago

Thus he had a double thought: the one by which he acted as king, the other by which he recognized his true state, and that it was accident alone that had placed him in his present condition.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

If the true is what is grounded, then the ground is not true, nor yet false.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

We term sleep a death, and yet it is waking that kills us, and destroys those spirits that are the house of life.

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Section 12
3 months 2 weeks ago

There is certainly some chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and laborious science; but it is all round about you, and for the trouble of looking, that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life.

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An Apology for Idlers.
4 months 2 days ago

When I was in my teens, I invented a term to describe them. I call it 'holiday consciousness' . . . because I often experienced this sense of optimism and wide-awakeness when setting out on a journey or a holiday. It was always the feeling that the world is self-evidently complex and beautiful, and that life is so obviously good that man's boredom and defeat is an absurdity . . . And then I used to ask: Why do men forget this so easily? And the answer seemed obvious: because the human will is so flabby and weak. Instead of being self-controlled, self-driven creatures, most men are little more than leaves on a stream, they drift along hoping for the best. I once wrote that men are like grandfather clocks driven by watchsprings.

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p. 75
1 month 2 weeks ago

I never will, by any word or act, bow to the shrine of intolerance, or admit a right of inquiry into the religious opinions of others.

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Letter to Edward Dowse
3 months 2 weeks ago

A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral.

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Writings on Civil Disobedience and Nonviolence
4 months 3 weeks ago

In no other country in the world is the love of property keener or more alert than in the United States, and nowhere else does the majority display less inclination toward doctrines which in any way threaten the way property is owned.

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Book Three, Chapter XXI.
1 month 4 weeks ago

It is especially important for Westerners to understand that high lamas, Zen masters, and Hindu gurus in the discipline of yoga are human beings, not supermen. We must not put them, as we have put Jesus Christ, on pedestals of reverence so high that we automatically exclude ourselves from their states of consciousness.

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Foreward to The Secret Oral Teachings in the Tibetan Buddhist Sects (1964)], by Alexandra David Neel
5 months 3 weeks ago

I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.

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5 months 1 week ago

Follow your desire as long as you live and do not perform more than is ordered; do not lessen the time of following desire, for the wasting of time is an abomination to the spirit... When riches are gained, follow desire, for riches will not profit if one is sluggish.

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Maxim no. 11.
4 months 2 weeks ago

He was not merely a chip of the old Block, but the old Block itself.

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On Pitt's First Speech (26 February 1781), from Wraxall's Memoirs, First Series, vol. i. p. 342
5 months 2 weeks ago

And suddenly I had an inkling of what it must feel like to be mad.

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What is Mysticism? Is it not the attempt to draw near to God, not by rites or ceremonies, but by inward disposition? Is it not merely a hard word for " The Kingdom of Heaven is within"? Heaven is neither a place nor a time. There might be a Heaven not only here but now. It is true that sometimes we must sacrifice not only health of body, but health of mind (or, peace) in the interest of God; that is, we must sacrifice Heaven. But "thou shalt be like God for thou shalt see Him as He is": this may be here and now, as well as there and then. And it may be for a time - then lost - then recovered - both here and there, both now and then.

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2 months 1 week ago

But leaving this, let us remark one thing which is very plain: That whatever be the uses and duties, real or supposed, of a Secretary in Parliament, his faculty to accomplish these is a point entirely unconnected with his ability to get elected into Parliament, and has no relation or proportion to it, and no concern with it whatever.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

I have often thought that nothing would do more extensive good at small expense than the establishment of a small circulating library in every county, to consist of a few well-chosen books, to be lent to the people of the country under regulations as would secure their safe return in due time.

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Letter to John Wyche
4 months 1 day ago

To uphold the institutions of our country-that's it-the institutions which protect and sustain a handful of people in the robbery and plunder of the masses, the institutions which drain the blood of the native as well as of the foreigner, turn it into wealth and power

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5 months 2 weeks ago

If I had had more time, this letter would have been shorter.

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Written by Voltaire in an over-long letter to a friend, quoted to A. P. Martinich in Philosophical Writing: An Introduction, Note to the Second Edition, 1996
1 month 3 weeks ago

Such religion as there can be in modern life, every individual will have to salvage from the churches for himself.

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p. 397
3 months 2 weeks ago

No tears are shed, when an enemy dies.

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Maxim 376
5 months 3 weeks ago

His character does not appear more extraordinary and unusual by the mixture of so much absurdity with so much penetration, than by his tempering such violent ambition, and such enraged fanaticism with so much regard to justice and humanity.

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Volume III, Chapter LXI; referring to Oliver Cromwell
1 month 2 weeks ago

But in life, as we are cognizant of it, mental development can go but a little way. The mind hardly begins to awake ere the bodily powers decline - it but becomes dimly conscious of the vast fields before it, but begins to learn and use its strength, to recognize relations and extend its sympathies, when, with the death of the body, it passes away. Unless there is something more, there seems here a break, a failure. Whether it be a Humboldt or a Herschel, a Moses who looks from Pisgah, a Joshua who leads the host, or one of those sweet and patient souls who in narrow circles live radiant lives, there seems, if mind and character here developed can go no further, a purposelessness inconsistent with what we can see of the linked sequence of the universe.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him.

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Ch. 9
4 months 1 week ago

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

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A Retrospective Glance at the Lifework of a Master of Books
6 months 3 weeks ago
All that exists that can be denied deserves to be denied; and being truthful means: to believe in an existence that can in no way be denied and which is itself true and without falsehood.
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5 months 2 weeks ago

In the revolt against idealism, the ambiguities of the word "experience" have been perceived, with the result that realists have more and more avoided the word. It is to be feared, however, that if the word is avoided the confusions of thought with which it has been associated may persist.

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On the Nature of Acquaintance: Neutral Monism, 1914
4 months 2 weeks ago

Only those moments count when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than to exchange a word with someone.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

It was evident that he revived by fits and starts. He would suddenly come to himself from actual delirium for a few minutes; he would remember and talk with complete consciousness, chiefly in disconnected phrases which he had perhaps thought out and learnt by heart in the long weary hours of his illness, in his bed, in sleepless solitude.

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Part 2, Chapter 10
1 month 4 weeks ago

Religion is always falling apart. Buddhism, the Religion of No-Religion.

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3 months 2 days ago

Owning our seeds through seed freedom, our own food through food freedom, our own minds and intelligence through intellectual freedom, our own economies through freedom to produce and consume ecologically and locally, is the 'barbarianism' that the 1% would like to extinguish.

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