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6 months 1 week ago

I... believe in the rationalist tradition of a commonwealth of learning, and in the urgent need to preserve this tradition.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Be bold to look towards God and say, "Use me henceforward for whatever you want; I am of one mind with you; I am yours; I refuse nothing that seems good to you; lead me where you will; wrap me in what clothes you will."

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Book II, ch. 16, 42
2 months 1 week ago

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.

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Education through Recreation (1932), p. 1.

It must be emphasized that the warrior spirit is one thing and the military spirit quite another. Militarism was unknown in the Middle Ages. The soldier signifies the degeneration of the warrior, corrupted by the industrialist. The soldier is an armed industrialist, a bourgeois who has invented gunpowder. He was organized by the state to make war on the castles. With his coming, long-distance warfare appeared, the abstract war waged by cannon and machine gun.

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7 months 6 days ago

Real fulfillment, for the man who allows absolutely free rein to his desires, and who must dominate everything, lies in hatred.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.

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As quoted in Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007) by Karen Michelle Barad, p. 254
5 months 2 weeks ago

For those endowed with insight there is in reality no object of love but God, nor does anyone but He deserve love Love, Longing, Intimacy and Contentment.

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Islamic Texts Society. 2011. p. 23. ISBN 978-1-903682-27-2. Translated with an introduction and notes by Eric Ormsby.
6 months 1 week ago

The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information.

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Chapter 6 (p. 47)
4 months 1 week ago

Without an understanding of causality there can be no theory of communication. What passes as information theory today is not communication at all, but merely transportation.

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(p. 362)
4 months 1 week ago

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

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Maxim 383
7 months 1 week ago

How then to enforce peace? Not by reason, certainly, nor by education. If a man could not look at the fact of peace and the fact of war and choose the former in preference to the latter, what additional argument could persuade him? What could be more eloquent as a condemnation of war than war itself? What tremendous feat of dialectic could carry with it a tenth the power of a single gutted ship with its ghastly cargo?

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2 months 3 weeks ago

But let the individual man lay claim to ever so many rights because Man or the concept man 'entitles' him to them, because his being man does it: what do I care for his right and his claim? If he has his right only from Man and does not have it from me, then for me he has no right. His life, for example, counts to me only for what it is worth to me. I respect neither a so-called right of property (or his claim to tangible goods) nor yet his right to the 'sanctuary of his inner nature' (or his right to have the spiritual goods and divinities, his gods, remain un-aggrieved). His goods, the sensuous as well as the spiritual, are mine, and I dispose of them as proprietor, in the measure of my - might.

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Cambridge 1995, p. 219
2 months 1 week ago

Self-interest, or rather self-love, or egoism, has been more plausibly substituted as the basis of morality. But I consider our relations with others as constituting the boundaries of morality. With ourselves, we stand on the ground of identity, not of relation, which last, requiring two subjects, excludes self-love confined to a single one. To ourselves, in strict language, we can owe no duties, obligation requiring also two parties. Self-love, therefore, is no part of morality. Indeed, it is exactly its counterpart.

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Letter to Thomas Law
3 months 3 weeks ago

The business of grabbing and money-making, through a violent extractive economy that the 1% have built, is burdening the earth and humanity with unbearable and non-sustainable costs, and has brought us to the brink of extinction. We do not have to escape from the earth; we have to escape from the illusions that enslave our minds and make extinction look inevitable.

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5 months ago

We have a tendency to overcome any strong tension between desire and impotence by depreciating or denying the positive value of the desired object.

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L. Coser, trans. (1973), p. 73
5 months 6 days ago

The assumption that the human psyche possesses layers that lie below consciousness is not likely to arouse serious opposition. But... there could just as well be layers lying above consciousness... The conscious mind can only claim a relatively central position and must put up with the fact that the unconscious psyche transcends and as it were surrounds it on all sides. Unconscious contents connect it backward with the physiological states on the one hand and archetypal data on the other. But it is extended forward by intuitions which are conditioned partly by archetypes and partly by subliminal perceptions depending on the relativity of time and space in the unconscious.

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p. 132
5 months 6 days ago

Bach: a scale of tears upon which our desires for God ascend.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Blair has been the modern man he claims to be: for him, a sense of subjective certainty is all that is needed for an action to be right. If deception is needed to realise the providential design, it cannot be truly deceitful.

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Neoconned!: How Blair took New Labour for a ride, The Independent
6 months 1 week ago

The process of philosophizing, to my mind, consists mainly in passing from those obvious, vague, ambiguous things, that we feel quite sure of, to something precise, clear, definite, which by reflection and analysis we find is involved in the vague thing that we start from, and is, so to speak, the real truth of which that vague thing is a sort of shadow.

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2 months 4 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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6 months 5 days ago

Tell them I've had a wonderful life.

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Last words, to his doctor's wife (28 April 1951)-as quoted in Ludwig Wittgenstein : A Memoir (1966) by Norman Malcolm, p. 100
3 months 1 day ago

No, the Great Man does not boast himself sincere, far from that; perhaps does not ask himself if he is so: I would say rather, his sincerity does not depend on himself; he cannot help being sincere! The great Fact of Existence is great to him. Fly as he will, he cannot get out of the awful presence of this Reality. His mind is so made; he is great by that, first of all. Fearful and wonderful, real as Life, real as Death, is this Universe to him. Though all men should forget its truth, and walk in a vain show, he cannot. At all moments the Flame-image glares in upon him; undeniable, there, there!-I wish you to take this as my primary definition of a Great Man. A little man may have this, it is competent to all men that God has made: but a Great Man cannot be without it.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

A sword by itself does not slay; it is merely the weapon used by the slayer.

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Line 30 Seneca is here describing arguments used by 'certain men,' not stating his own opinion.
6 months 1 week ago

All movements go too far.

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4 months 1 week ago

The savage recognizes life only in himself and his personal desires. His interest in life is concentrated on himself alone. The highest happiness for him is the fullest satisfaction of his desires. The motive power of his life is personal enjoyment. His religion consists in propitiating his deity and in worshiping his gods, whom he imagines as persons living only for their personal aims.

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Chapter IV, Christianity Misunderstood by Men of ScienceChapter IV, Christianity Misunderstood by Men of Science
6 months 2 weeks ago

Seek first the virtues of the mind; and other things either will come, or will not be wanted.

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Book II, xxxi
4 months 2 weeks ago

People often become scholars for the same reason they become soldiers: simply because they are unfit for any other station. Their right hand has to earn them a livelihood; one might say they lie down like bears in winter and seek sustenance from their paws.

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B 41
5 months 2 days ago

At the classical origins of philosophic thought, the transcending concepts remained committed to the prevailing separation between intellectual and manual labor to the established society of enslavement. ... Those who bore the brunt of the untrue reality and who, therefore, seemed to be most in need of attaining its subversion were not the concern of philosophy. It abstracted from them and continued to abstract from them.

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pp. 134-135
5 months 5 days ago

Scientists believe there is a hierarchy of facts and that among them may be made a judicious choice. They are right, since otherwise there would be no science... One need only open the eyes to see that the conquests of industry which have enriched so many practical men would never have seen the light, if these practical men alone had existed and if they had not been preceded by unselfish devotees who died poor, who never thought of utility, and yet had a guide far other than caprice.As Mach says, these devotees have spared their successors the trouble of thinking.

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Henri Poincaré, The Value of Science (1907) Author's Essay Prefatory to the Translation: "The Choice of Facts," p.4, Tr. George Bruce Halsted
6 months 2 weeks ago

The ceaseless labour of your life is to build the house of death.

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Book I, Ch. 20
6 months 1 week ago

In man (as the only rational creature on earth) those natural capacities which are directed to the use of his reason are to be fully developed only in the race, not in the individual.

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Second Thesis
2 weeks 5 days ago

I love Emil, but I can't get behind this relativism. Disapproval of somebody's haircut or clothing is not a reason to kill them. Severity is everything....

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4 months 1 week ago

The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving towards the grand fallacy.

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(p. 154)
3 months 5 days ago

A person who has been punished is not thereby simply less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.

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Beyond Freedom and Dignity
3 months 1 day ago

He who takes not counsel of the Unseen and Silent, from him will never come real visibility and speech.

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Bk. III, ch. 11.
5 months 4 weeks ago

The mountains will be in labor, and a ridiculous mouse will be brought forth.

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Line 139. Horace is hereby poking fun at heroic labours producing meager results; his line is also an allusion to one of Æsop's fables, The Mountain in Labour. Cf. Matthew Paris (AD 1237): Fuderunt partum montes: en ridiculus mus.
5 months 2 weeks ago

In the United States a man builds a house to spend his latter years in it and he sells it before the roof is on. He plants a garden and lets it just as the trees are coming into bearing. He brings a field into tillage and leaves other men to gather the crops. He embraces a profession and gives it up. He settles in a place which he soon afterward leaves to carry his changeable longings elsewhere. If his private affairs leave him any leisure he instantly plunges into the vortex of politics and if at the end of a year of unremitting labour he finds he has a few days' vacation, his eager curiosity whirls him over the vast extent of the United States, and he will travel fifteen hundred miles in a few days to shake off his happiness.

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Chapter XXIX.
6 months 3 weeks ago

But the inner part is the better part; for to it, as both ruler and judge, all these messengers of the senses report the answers of heaven and earth and all the things therein, who said, "We are not God, but he made us." My inner man knew these things through the ministry of the outer man, and I, the inner man, knew all this, I, the soul, through the senses of my body. I asked the whole frame of earth about my God, and it answered, "I am not he, but he made me."

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X, 6
6 months 3 weeks ago

If a man has reported to you, that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make any defense (answer) to what has been told you: but reply, The man did not know the rest of my faults, for he would not have mentioned these only.

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(33) [tr. George Long (1888)].
4 months 2 days ago

We mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of intellectuals.

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Herzog (1964) [Penguin Classics, 2003, ISBN 0-142-43729-8], p. 82
5 months 1 week ago

To disrespect the masses is moral; to honor them, lawful.

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Lucinde and the Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991), "Athenaeum Fragments" § 211
4 months 3 weeks ago

Is there not therefore rational necessity, but vital anguish that impels us to believe in God. And to believe in God - I must reiterate it yet again - is, before all and above all, to feel a hunger for God, a hunger for divinity, to be sensible to his lack and absence, to wish that God may exist. And it is the wish to save the human finality of the Universe. For one might even come to resign oneself to being absorbed by God, if it be that our consciousness is based upon Consciousness, if consciousness is the end of the Universe.

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4 months 1 week ago

Adversity shows whether we have friends, or only the shadows of friends.

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Maxim 35
2 months 3 weeks ago

Before I became old I tried to live well; now that I am old, I shall try to die well; but dying well means dying gladly.

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Line 2.
6 months 4 weeks ago

If a man has no humaneness what can his propriety be like? If a man has no humaneness what can his happiness be like?

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4 months 1 week ago

Our design, not respecting arts, but philosophy, and our subject, not manual, but natural powers, we consider chiefly those things which relate to gravity, levity, elastic force, the resistance of fluids, and the like forces, whether attractive or impulsive; and therefore we offer this work as mathematical principles of philosophy; for all the difficulty of philosophy seems to consist in this - from the phenomena of motions to investigate the forces of nature, and then from these forces to demonstrate the other phenomena...

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Preface
2 months 6 days ago

If a man is mistaken, instruct him kindly and show him his error. But if thou art not able, blame thyself, or blame not even thyself.

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X, 4

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