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2 weeks 3 days ago

Men's hearts ought not to be set against one another; but set with one another, and all against the Evil Thing only.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

The most essential characteristic of scientific technique is that it proceeds from experiment, not from tradition. The experimental habit of mind is a difficult one for most people to maintain; indeed, the science of one generation has already become the tradition of the next...

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The Scientific Outlook, 1931
2 weeks 3 days ago

It lies deep in our habits, confirmed by all manner of educational and other arrangements for several centuries back, to consider human talent as best of all evincing itself by the faculty of eloquent speech. Our earliest schoolmasters teach us, as the one gift of culture they have, the art of spelling and pronouncing, the rules of correct speech; rhetorics, logics follow, sublime mysteries of grammar, whereby we may not only speak but write. And onward to the last of our schoolmasters in the highest university, it is still intrinsically grammar, under various figures grammar. To speak in various languages, on various things, but on all of them to speak, and appropriately deliver ourselves by tongue or pen,-this is the sublime goal towards which all manner of beneficent preceptors and learned professors, from the lowest hornbook upwards, are continually urging and guiding us.

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4 months 1 week ago

God only pours out his light into the mind after having subdued the rebellion of the will by an altogether heavenly gentleness which charms and wins it.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Wealth brings a heavy purse; poverty, a light spirit.

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p. 88
3 months 3 weeks ago

So in the end when one is doing philosophy one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound.

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§ 261
3 months 2 weeks ago

He who upholds Truth with all the might of his power, He who upholds Truth the utmost in his word and deed,He, indeed, is Thy most valued helper, O Mazda Ahura!

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Ahunuvaiti Gatha; Yasna 31, 22.
3 months 3 weeks ago

Persecution of powerless or power-losing groups may not be a very pleasant spectacle, but it does not spring from human meanness alone. What makes men obey or tolerate real power and, on the other hand, hate people who have wealth without power, is the rational instinct that power has a certain function and is of some general use. Even exploitation and oppression still make society work and establish some kind of order. Only wealth without power or aloofness without a policy are felt to be parasitical, useless, revolting, because such conditions cut all the threads which tie men together. Wealth which does not exploit lacks even the relationship which exists between exploiter and exploited; aloofness without policy does not imply even the minimum concern of the oppressor for the oppressed.

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Part 1, Ch. 1, § 1
2 months 3 weeks ago

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.

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4 months ago

Good roads, canals, and navigable rivers, by diminishing the expence of carriage, put the remote parts of the country more nearly upon a level with those of the neighbourhood of the town. They are upon that the greatest of all improvements.

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Chapter XI, Part I, p. 174.
1 month 3 weeks ago

Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.

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'La Fère of Cursed Memory', 15th vignette of An Inland Voyage (1878), in Collected Memoirs, Travel Sketches and Island Literature of Robert Louis Stevenson, Stevenson, e-artnow
4 months 2 weeks ago

Leaving virtue without proper cultivation; not thoroughly discussing what is learned; not being able to move towards righteousness of which a knowledge is gained; and not being able to change what is not good: these are the things which occasion me solicitude.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed Wisdom. And then I know exactly what is going to follow: Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

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Conversation of 1934
2 weeks 3 days ago

Curious, if we will reflect on it, this of having no books. Except by what he could see for himself, or hear of by uncertain rumor of speech in the obscure Arabian Desert, he could know nothing. The wisdom that had been before him or at a distance from him in the world, was in a manner as good as not there for him. Of the great brother souls, flame-beacons through so many lands and times, no one directly communicates with this great soul. He is alone there, deep down in the bosom of the Wilderness; has to grow up so,-alone with Nature and his own Thoughts. But, from an early age, he had been remarked as a thoughtful man.

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2 months 1 week ago

And in a flash I understood the meaning of sex. It is a craving for the mingling of consciousness, whose symbol is the mingling of bodies. Every time a man and a woman slake their thirst in the strange waters of the other's identity, they glimpse the immensity of their freedom.

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p. 252
3 months 3 weeks ago

It is not by recognizing the want of courage in someone else that you acquire courage yourself.

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p. 44e
3 months 3 weeks ago

Character is higher than intellect...A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think.

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par. 27
3 months 4 weeks ago

"If God did not exist, he would have to be invented." But all nature cries aloud that he does exist: that there is a supreme intelligence, an immense power, an admirable order, and everything teaches us our own dependence on it.

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Voltaire quoting himself in his Letter to Prince Frederick William of Prussia (28 November 1770), translated by S.G. Tallentyre, Voltaire in His Letters, 1919
2 months 1 week ago

The salvation of reality is its obstinate, irreducible, matter-of-fact entities, which are limited to be no other than themselves. Neither science, nor art, nor creative action can tear itself away from obstinate, irreducible, limited facts.

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Ch. 5: "The Romantic Reaction", p. 132
3 months 3 weeks ago

Music is the poor man's Parnassus.

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Poetry and Imagination
1 month 1 week ago

Those least responsible for climate change are worst affected by it.

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Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis
1 month 3 days ago

If there is anything unique about the human animal it is that it has the ability to grow knowledge at an accelerating rate while being chronically incapable of learning from experience. Science and technology are cumulative, whereas ethics and politics deal with recurring dilemmas. Whatever they are called, torture and slavery are universal evils; but these evils cannot be consigned to the past like redundant theories in science. They return under different names: torture as enhanced interrogation techniques, slavery as human trafficking. Any reduction in universal evils is an advance in civilization. But, unlike scientific knowledge, the restraints of civilized life cannot be stored on a computer disc. They are habits of behaviour, which once broken are hard to mend. Civilization is natural for humans, but so is barbarism.

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An Old Chaos: Humanism and Flying Saucers (p. 75)
4 months ago

Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.

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Chapter IX, p. 117.
3 months 4 weeks ago

Do not most of us resemble that old general of ninety who, having come upon some young officers debauching some girls, said to them angrily: "Gentlemen, is that the example I give you?" "Character"

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1764
2 months 1 week ago

It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.

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Ch. 5: "The Romantic Reaction", p. 106
1 week 5 days ago

On the contrary, to educate rational people, that should be sufficient; it is not really intended for sensible people; to understand things and conditions, there is the matter ended,-to understand oneself does not seem to be everyman's concern.

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p. 22
4 months 3 weeks ago

This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

There is no penalty attached to a lover's oath.

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Maxim 23
1 month 3 weeks ago

I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.

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Maxim 1070
3 months 4 weeks ago

Define your terms, you will permit me again to say, or we shall never understand one another.

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"Miracles", 1764
3 months 3 weeks ago

The collective name for the ripe fruits of religion in a character is Saintliness. The saintly character is the character for which spiritual emotions are the habitual centre of the personal energy; and there is a certain composite photograph of universal saintliness, the same in all religions, of which the features can easily be traced.

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Lectures XI, XII, AND XIII : "Saintliness"
3 months 3 weeks ago

Yes, I am so free. And what a superb absence is my soul.

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Orestes, Act 1
3 months 3 weeks ago

Between the fine point of the brush and the steely gaze, the scene is about to yield up its volume.

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Las Meninas
1 week 4 days ago

Clothe yourself with a hero's courage, and withdraw for a little space from the opinions of the common man. Form a proper conception of the image of virtue, a thing of exceeding beauty and grandeur; this image is not to be worshipped by us with incense or garlands, but with sweat and blood.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

I long to be free - desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.

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"The Moral Problem"
2 months 1 week ago

It seems as if the female spirit of the world were mourning everlastingly over blessings, not lost, but which she has never had, and which, in her discouragement she feels that she never will have, they are so far off.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

For the purposes of poetry a convincing impossibility is preferable to an unconvincing possibility.

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4 months ago

By Natura naturans we must understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself, or such attributes of substance as express an eternal and infinite essence, that is ... God, insofar as he is considered as a free cause. But by Natura naturata I understand whatever follows from the necessity of God's nature, or from God's attributes, that is, all the modes of God's attributes insofar as they are considered as things which are in God, and can neither be nor be conceived without God.

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Part I, Prop. XXIX, Scholium, trans: Edwin Curley, London: Penguin, 1996
4 months 4 days ago

The veneration of Mary is inscribed in the very depths of the human heart.

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Weimar edition of Martin Luther's Works (Translation by William J. Cole) 10, III, p. 313
2 months 3 weeks ago

The plea of anger or of drunkenness - as having placed the criminal for the moment beyond the control of his reason - relieves him from the charge of premeditated and malicious intent; but a rational legislation will rather provide more severe than milder punishment for such cases, particularly if such a state of mind is habitual with the accused; for a single unlawful act may well constitute an exception from an otherwise blameless life. But a person who pleads, "I habitually get so angry or so drunk as not to be any longer master of my senses!" confesses thereby that he changes himself into a beast on a fixed principle, and that he is, therefore, not fit to live among rational beings.

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P. 351
2 months 2 weeks ago

Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.

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(Matthew 7:1-2) (KJV)
2 months 1 week ago

The greatest height of heroism to which an individual, like a people, can attain is to know how to face ridicule; better still, to know how to make oneself ridiculous and not to shrink from the ridicule.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious Idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, [play or] a game in which one releases surplus energy, ...not the production of pleasing objects, and is above all, not pleasure itself, but it is the means of union among mankind, joining them in the same feelings, and necessary for the life and progress toward the good of the individual and of humanity.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.

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p. 94.
2 months 2 weeks ago

Because the peculiarity of man is that his machinery for reaction on external things has involved an imaginative transcript of these things, which is preserved and suspended in his fancy; and the interest and beauty of this inward landscape, rather than any fortunes that may await his body in the outer world, constitute his proper happiness. By their mind, its scope, quality, and temper, we estimate men, for by the mind only do we exist as men, and are more than so many storage-batteries for material energy. Let us therefore be frankly human. Let us be content to live in the mind.

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p. 64
1 month 3 weeks ago

To forget the wrongs you receive, is to remedy them.

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Maxim 383
2 weeks 3 days ago

A well-written Life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.

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Richter (1827).

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