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3 months 2 weeks ago

Let every man be occupied, and occupied in the highest employment of which his nature is capable, and die with the consciousness that he has done his best.

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Vol. I, ch. 6, "Of Occupation", p. 178
3 months 3 weeks ago

This shows, perhaps, why we have tried to put all physical phenomena into the same frame. But that can not pass for a definition of simultaneity, since this hypothetical intelligence, even if it existed, would be for us impenetrable. It is... necessary to seek something else.

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7 months 4 days ago

Metaphysics has as the proper object of its enquiries three ideas only: God, freedom, and immortality.

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B 395
3 months 1 week ago

By association with nature's enormities, a man's heart may truly grow big also. There is a way of looking upon a landscape as a moving picture and being satisfied with nothing less big as a moving picture, a way of looking upon tropic clouds over the horizon as the backdrop of a stage and being satisfied with nothing less big as a backdrop, a way of looking upon the mountain forests as a private garden and being satisfied with nothing less as a private garden, a way of listening to the roaring waves as a concert and being satisfied with nothing less as a concert, and a way of looking upon the mountain breeze as an air-cooling system and being satisfied with nothing less as an air-cooling system. So do we become big, even as the earth and firmaments are big.

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Like the "Big Man" described by Yuan Tsi (A.D. 210-263), one of China's first romanticists, we "live in heaven and earth as our house." p. 282
5 months 1 week ago

In the dominant Western religious system, the love of God is essentially the same as the belief in God, in God's existence, God's justice, God's love. The love of God is essentially a thought experience. In the Eastern religions and in mysticism, the love of God is an intense feeling experience of oneness, inseparably linked with the expression of this love in every act of living.

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Ch. 2
7 months 5 days ago

The establishment of any new manufacture, of any new branch of commerce, or any new practice in agriculture, is always a speculation, from which the projector promises himself extraordinary profits. These profits sometimes are very great, and sometimes, more frequently, perhaps, they are quite otherwise; but in general they bear no regular proportion to those of other older trades in the neighbourhood. If the project succeeds, they are commonly at first very high. When the trade or practice becomes thoroughly established and well known, the competition reduces them to the level of other trades.

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Chapter X, Part I, p. 136 (tendency of the rate of profit to fall).
7 months 5 days ago

The education of the common people requires, perhaps, in a civilized and commercial society, the attention of the public more than that of people of some rank and fortune.

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Chapter I, Part III, p. 845.
7 months 2 weeks ago

The world is divided into men who have wit and no religion and men who have religion and no wit.

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Courage, garrulousness and the mob are on our side. What more do we want?

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E 32
5 months 2 weeks ago

Rationalism is an adventure in the clarification of thought.

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Pt. I, ch. 1, sec. 3.
6 months 3 weeks ago

Thou shouldst not become presumptuous through much treasure and wealth; for in the end it is necessary for thee to leave all.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

He said they that were serious in ridiculous matters would be ridiculous in serious affairs.

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Cato the Elder
3 months 2 weeks ago

Besides, he who is feared, fears also; no one has been able to arouse terror and live in peace of mind.

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3 months 1 day ago

No mathematician can give any meaning to language about matter, force, inertia, used in text-books of mechanics.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Becky Sharp's acute remark that it is not difficult to be virtuous on ten thousand a year, has its application to nations; and it is futile to expect a hungry and squalid population to be anything but violent and gross.

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"Joseph Priestley"
6 months 3 weeks ago

Today, criminal justice functions and justifies itself only by this perpetual reference to something other than itself, by this unceasing reinscription in non-juridical systems.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Without doubt, if we are to go back to that ultimate, integral experience, unwarped by the sophistications of theory, that experience whose elucidation is the final aim of philosophy, the flux of things is one ultimate generalization around which we must weave our philosophical system.

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Pt. II, ch. 10, sec. 1.
2 months 3 weeks ago

We Jews have been too adaptable. We have been too eager to sacrifice our idiosyncrasies for the sake of social conformity. ... Even in modern civilization, the Jew is most happy if he remains a Jew.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Missionaries, whether of philosophy or of religion, rarely make rapid way, unless their preachings fall in with the prepossessions of the multitude of shallow thinkers, or can be made to serve as a stalking-horse for the promotion of the practical aims of the still larger multitude, who do not profess to think much, but are quite certain they want a great deal.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

A good American makes propaganda for whatever existence has forced him to become.

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"Cousins," from Him With His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories (1984), p. 263
7 months 2 days ago

In fact of course, this 'productive' worker cares as much about the crappy shit he has to make as does the capitalist himself who employs him, and who also couldn't give a damn for the junk.

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Notebook II, The Chapter on Capital, p. 193.
4 months 2 weeks ago

The coming of Buddhism to the West may well prove to be the most important event of the Twentieth Century.

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In Lama Surya Das, Awakening the Buddha Within
7 months 3 days ago

Children have as much mind to shew that they are free, that their own good actions come from themselves, that they are absolute and independent, as any of the proudest of you grown men, think of them as you please.

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Sec. 73
3 months 1 week ago

To the question whether I am a pessimist or an optimist, I answer that my knowledge is pessimistic, but my willing and hoping are optimistic.

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Epilogue, p. 242
7 months 4 days ago

All that time is lost which might be better employed.

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As quoted in A Dictionary of Quotations in Most Frequent Use: Taken Chiefly from the Latin and French, but comprising many from the Greek, Spanish, and Italian Languages, translated into English (1809) by David Evans Macdonnel
5 months 4 days ago

The discourse of truth is quite simply impossible. It eludes itself. Everything eludes itself, everything scoffs at its own truth, seduction renders everything elusive. The fury to unveil the truth, to get at the naked truth, the one which haunts all discourses of interpretation, the obscene rage to uncover the secret, is proportionate to the impossibility of ever achieving this. ...But this rage, this fury, only bears witness to the eternity of seduction and to the impossibility of mastering it.

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(p. 73)
7 months 2 days ago

The degree of one's emotion varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts - the less you know the hotter you get.

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Attributed to Russell in Distilled Wisdom (1964) by Alfred Armand Montapert, p. 145
7 months ago

I wrote the books I should have liked to read. That's always been my reason for writing. People won't write the books I want, so I have to do it for myself.

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As quoted in C.S. Lewis (1963), by Roger Lancelyn Green, p. 9
11 months 1 week ago

Ideology is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to escape insupportable; in its basic dimension, it is a fantasy-construction which serves as a support for our reality itself; an illusion which structures our effective, real social relations and thereby masks some insupportable, real, impossible kernel.

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2 months 4 weeks ago

Let no act be done at haphazard, nor otherwise than according to the finished rules that govern its kind.

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IV, 2
7 months 2 days ago

Righteousness cannot be born until self-righteousness is dead.

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Justice in War-Time (1916), p. 192
7 months ago

But you must see that if two things are alike, then it is a further question whether the first is copied from the second, or the second from the first, or both from a third.''What would the third be?''Some have thought that all these loves were copies of our love for the Landlord.'

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Pilgrim's Regress 59
8 months 2 days ago

Spontaneous love can reach the point of despair, shows that it is in despair, that even when it is happy it loves with the power of despair.

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7 months 1 week ago

There is nothing so easy, so sweet, and so favourable, as the divine law: it calls and invites us to her, guilty and abominable as we are; extends her arms and receives us into her bosom, foul and polluted as we at present are, and are for the future to be. But then, in return, we are to look upon her with a respectful eye; we are to receive this pardon with all gratitude and submission, and for that instant at least, wherein we address ourselves to her, to have the soul sensible of the ills we have committed, and at enmity with those passions that seduced us to offend her.

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Ch. 56, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Carew Hazlitt, 1877
3 months 1 week ago

To fight on "the path of God" has been characterized as "medieval" fanaticism; conversely, it has been characterized as a most sacred cause to fight for "patriotic" and "nationalistic" ideals and for other myths that in our contemporary era have eventually been unmasked and shown to be the instruments of irrational, materialistic, and destructive forces... Soldiers went to the front to experience war as something else, namely, as a crisis that all too often did not turn out to be an authentic and heroic transfiguration of the personality, but rather the regression of the individual to a plane of savage instincts, "reflexes," and reactions that retain very little of the human...

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7 months 4 weeks ago

Fate is not in man but around him.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

My conduct must be the best proof, the moral proof, of my supreme desire; and if I do not end by convincing myself, within the bounds of the ultimate and irremediable uncertainty of the truth of what I hope for, it is because my conduct is not sufficiently pure. Virtue, therefore, is not based upon dogma, but dogma upon virtue, and it is not faith that creates martyrs but martyrs who create faith. There is no security or repose - so far as security and repose are obtainable in this life, so essentially insecure and unreposeful - save in conduct that is passionately good.

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7 months 1 week ago

Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.

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Ch. 2
3 months 1 week ago

To be honest, as critical as I am of people for being anti-human, I love everybody so much for sinking on this ship with me. Admit it or not, we're all dying together.

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3 months 1 day ago

I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love.

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"Health is Membership"
7 months 2 weeks ago

Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer. ... Cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labor to make all one glow or beauty and never cease chiseling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendor of virtue.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

The new order contradicts reason so fundamentally that reason does not dare to doubt it. Even the consciousness of oppression fades. The more incommensurate become the concentration of power and the helplessness of the individual, the more difficult for him to penetrate the human origin of his misery.

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p. 44.
5 months 4 days ago

The world is not dialectical -- it is sworn to extremes, not to equilibrium, sworn to radical antagonism, not to reconciliation or synthesis. This is also the principle of evil.

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Jean Baudrillard in: Eldon Taylor What Does That Mean?: Exploring Mind, Meaning, and Mysteries, Hay House, Inc, 15 January 2010, p. 171
7 months 5 days ago

Does a man of sense run after every silly tale of hobgoblins or fairies, and canvass particularly the evidence? I never knew anyone, that examined and deliberated about nonsense who did not believe it before the end of his enquiries.

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Letters
7 months 5 days ago

A merchant, it has been said very properly, is not necessarily the citizen of any particular country.

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Chapter IV, p. 456.

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