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3 months 3 weeks ago

Humanity unceasingly strives forward from a lower, more partial and obscure understanding of life to one more general and more lucid. And in this, as in every movement, there are leaders - those who have understood the meaning of life more clearly than others - and of those advanced men there is always one who has in his words and life, manifested this meaning more clearly, accessibly, and strongly than others. This man's expression ... with those superstitions, traditions, and ceremonies which usually form around the memory of such a man, is what is called a religion. Religions are the exponents of the highest comprehension of life ... within a given age in a given society ... a basis for evaluating human sentiments. If feelings bring people nearer to the religion's ideal ... they are good, if these estrange them from it, and oppose it, they are bad.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Conquered people tend to be witty.

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Mr. Sammler's Planet, (1976), p. 98
3 months 2 weeks ago

In an age of enormities, the emotions are naturally weakened. We are continually called upon to have feelings - about genocide, for instance, or about famine or the blowing up of passenger planes - and we are all aware that we are incapable of reacting appropriately. A guilty consciousness of emotional inadequacy or impotence makes people doubt their own human weight.

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"The Distracted Public" (1990), p. 156
4 months 6 days ago

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.

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Ch. 3
6 months 3 weeks ago

Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Everyone sits in the prison of his own ideas; he must burst it open, and that in his youth, and so try to test his ideas on reality.

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[http://books.google.com/books?id=cvlOAAAAMAAJ&q=%22Everyone+sits+in+the+prison+of+his+own+ideas+he+must+burst+it+open+and+that+in+his+youth+and+so+try+to+test+his+ideas+on+reality%22&pg=PA104#v=onepage Miscellaneous], Cosmic Religion, p. 104 (1931)
4 months 2 weeks ago

All which a man loves, for which he leaves everything else but that, is his god, thus the glutton and drunkard has for his idol his own flesh, the fornicator has for his idol the harlot and the greedy has for his idol silver and gold, and so the same for every other sinner.

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Ch. 33
5 months 3 weeks ago

Ha! to forget. How childish! I feel you in my bones. Your silence screams in my ears. You may nail your mouth shut, you may cut out your tongue, can you keep yourself from existing? Will you stop your thoughts.

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Inès reiterating to Garcin that they cannot ignore one another, Act 1, sc. 5
1 month 3 weeks ago

All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression. Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Do not think that what is hard for you to master is humanly impossible; but if a thing is humanly possible, consider it to be within your reach.

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VI, 19
5 months 3 weeks ago

Virtue is harder to be got than knowledge of the world; and, if lost in a young man, is seldom recovered.

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Sec. 70
5 months 2 weeks ago

Form no covetous desire, so that the demon of greediness may not deceive thee, and the treasure of the world may not be tasteless to thee.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Luther's merit in literary history is of the greatest: his dialect became the language of all writing. They are not well written, these Four-and-twenty Quartos of his; written hastily, with quite other than literary objects. But in no Books have I found a more robust, genuine, I will say noble faculty of a man than in these. A rugged honesty, homeliness, simplicity; a rugged sterling sense and strength. He dashes out illumination from him; his smiting idiomatic phrases seem to cleave into the very secret of the matter. Good humor too, nay tender affection, nobleness and depth: this man could have been a Poet too! He had to work an Epic Poem, not write one.

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6 months 2 days ago

At the very beginning of my fevers and sicknesses that cast me down, whilst still entire, and but little, disordered in health, I reconcile myself to Almighty God by the last Christian, offices, and find myself by so doing less oppressed and more easy, and have got, methinks, so much the better of my disease. And I have yet less need of a notary or counsellor than of a physician.

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Ch. 9
1 month 3 weeks ago

This is a fine saying of Plato: That he who is discoursing about men should look also at earthly things as if he viewed them from some higher place; should look at them... a mixture of all things and an orderly combination of contraries.

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VII, 48
1 month 2 weeks ago

The most beautiful fate of a physical theory is to point the way to the establishment of a more inclusive theory, in which it lives on as a limiting case.

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(1917) as quoted by , The Advancement of Science, and Its Burdens: the Jefferson Lecture and Other Essays (1986)
5 months 2 weeks ago

One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.

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Journal entry (11 October 1914), p. 10e
4 months 3 weeks ago

There can be little question that good composition is far less dependent upon acquaintance with its laws, than upon practice and natural aptitude. A clear head, a quick imagination, and a sensitive ear, will go far towards making all rhetorical precepts needless.

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Pt. I, sec. 1, "The Principle of Economy"
5 months 2 weeks ago

In the old system, the body of the condemned man became the king's property, on which the sovereign left his mark and brought down the effects of his power. Now he will be rather the property of society, the object of a collective and useful appropriation.

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Chapter Three, The Gentle Way in Punishment
4 months 3 weeks ago

Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

But love for an object eternal and infinite feeds the mind with joy alone, and a joy which is free from all sorrow. This is something greatly to be desired and to be sought with all our strength.

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I, 10; translation by W. Hale White (Revised by Amelia Hutchison Stirling)
6 months 3 days ago

Alonso of Aragon was wont to say in commendation of age, that age appears to be best in four things - old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.

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No. 97
4 months 3 days ago

Before we can establish any immutable 'principles' of administration, we must be able to describe, in words, exactly how an administrative organization looks and exactly how it works.

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p. xiv.
5 months 3 weeks ago

You come from attending the funeral of mankind to attend to a natural phenomenon. A little thought is sexton to all the world.

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p. 490
10 months ago

They are trying as directly as possible to sell you experiences, i.e. what you are able to do with the car, not the car as a product itself. An extreme example of this is this existing economic marketing concept, which basically evaluates the value of you as a potential consumer of your own life. Like how much are you worth, in the sense of all you will spend to buy back your own life as a certain quality life. You will spend so much in doctors, so much in beauty, so much in transcendental meditation, so much for music, and so on. What you are buying is a certain image and practice of your life. So what is your market potential, as a buyer of your own life in this sense?

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Cornered vessel without corners, strange cornered vessel, strange cornered vessel.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

The learning of the gentleman enters through his ears, fastens to his heart, spreads through his four limbs, and manifests itself in his actions. ... The learning of the petty person enters through his ears and passes out his mouth. From mouth to ears is only four inches-how could it be enough to improve a whole body much larger than that?

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Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy (2001), p. 259
3 months 3 days ago

Philosophy is an everlasting fire, sometimes damped down by setting itself limits, then flaring into new life as it consumes them. Every field of inquiry is limited, but philosophy has an essential relation to the question of limits, to its own limits.

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Introduction, p. xiii
5 months 3 weeks ago

In our science and philosophy, even, there is commonly no true and absolute account of things. The spirit of sect and bigotry has planted its hoof amid the stars. You have only to discuss the problem, whether the stars are inhabited or not, in order to discover it.

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p. 490
5 months 3 weeks ago

The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 1, § 1
5 months 3 weeks ago

If a person is stupid, we excuse him by saying that he cannot help it; but if we attempted to excuse in precisely the same way the person who is bad, we should be laughed at.

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E. Payne, trans., vol. 2, p. 230
4 months 3 weeks ago

The pursuit of individual happiness within those limits prescribed by social conditions, is the first requisite to the attainment of the greatest general happiness.

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Ethics (New York:1915), § 70, pp. 190-191
6 months 1 week ago

Since it is Reason which shapes and regulates all other things, it ought not itself to be left in disorder.

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Book I, ch. 17, 1.
1 month 3 weeks ago

God confronts me with terror and love - for I am His only hope - and says: "This Ecstatic, who gives birth to all things, who rejoices in them all and yet destroys them, this Ecstatic is my Son!"

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5 months 1 day ago

All things are in the Universe, and the universe is in all things: we in it, and it in us; in this way everything concurs in a perfect unity.

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5 months 1 day ago

If man's love for himself be necessary, then his love for Him through whom, first his coming-to-be, and second, his continuance in his essential being with all his inward and outward traits, his substance and his accidents, occur must also be necessary. Whoever is so besotted by his fleshy appetites as to lack this love neglects his Lord and Creator. He possesses no authentic knowledge of Him; his gaze is limited to his cravings and to things of sense. 

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Al-Ghazali on Love, Longing, Intimacy & Contentment, Translated with an introduction and notes by Eric Ormsby. Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society (2011), p. 25.
1 month 3 weeks ago

The first among the sciences is that of statesmanship. That cannot be learnt in academies. No great minister, from Suger to Richelieu, ever occupied himself with physics or mathematics. The genius of the natural sciences makes impossible that other kind of genius, which is a talent unto itself.

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"Eighth Dialogue," p. 297-298
1 month 3 weeks ago

Fools, art is a heavy task, more heavy than gold crowns;it's far more difficult to match firm words than armies,they're disciplined troops, unconquered, to be placed in rhythm,the mind's most mighty foe, and not disperse in air.I'd give, believe me, a whole land for one good song,for I know well that only words, that words alone,like the high mountains, have no fear of age or death.

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Pharaoh, Book X, line 688
5 months 2 weeks ago

False men and shams talk big and do nothing.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

To Xeniades, who had purchased Diogenes at the slave market, he said, "Come, see that you obey orders."

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Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 36
4 months 2 weeks ago

The prestige of the Nobel Prize is due to many causes, but in particular to its twofold idealistic and international character: idealistic in that it has been designed for works of lofty inspiration; international in that it is awarded after the production of different countries has been minutely studied and the intellectual balance sheet of the whole world has been drawn up. Free from all other considerations and ignoring any but intellectual values, the judges have deliberately taken their place in what the philosophers have called a community of the mind.

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In a letter accepting the 1927 Nobel Prize in literature, read by the French minister, Armand Bernard.
6 months 2 days ago

The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.

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The Prince (1513), Ch. 22
3 months 3 days ago

In the long run, there is nothing to stop intelligent agents from identifying the molecular signature of experience below hedonic zero and eliminating it altogether - even in insects. Nociception is vital; pain is optional. I tentatively predict that the world's last unpleasant experience in our forward light-cone will be a precisely datable event - perhaps some micro-pain in an obscure marine invertebrate a few centuries hence.

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The Radical Plan to Phase out Earth's Predatory Species, io9, 30 Jul. 2014
2 months 1 week ago

As our acts and our thoughts are, so will our lives be.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

To say that man is a compound of strength and weakness, light and darkness, smallness and greatness, is not to indict him, it is to define him.

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As quoted in The Anchor Book of French Quotations with English Translations (1963) by Norbert Gutermam
5 months 2 weeks ago

Boasting, like gilded armour, is very different inside from outside.

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Stobaeus, iii. 22. 40
2 months 2 weeks ago

Philosophy accepts the hard and hazardous task of dealing with problems not yet open to the methods of science - problems like good and evil, beauty and ugliness, order and freedom, life and death; so soon as a field of inquiry yields knowledge susceptible of exact formulation it is called science. Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Economy is a distributive virtue, and consists not in saving but selection. Parsimony requires no providence, no sagacity, no powers of combination, no comparison, no judgment.

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