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3 months 2 weeks ago

All things are artificial, for nature is the Art of God.

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Section 16
1 month 2 days ago

Ever, as before, does Madness remain a mysterious-terrific, altogether infernal boiling-up of the Nether Chaotic Deep, through this fair-painted Vision of Creation, which swims thereon, which we name the Real.

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Bk. III, ch. 8.
3 months 1 week ago

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

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Act IV
3 weeks 5 days ago

At any rate, if you wish to sift doubtful meanings of this kind, teach us that the happy man is not he whom the crowd deems happy, namely, he into whose coffers mighty sums have flowed, but he whose possessions are all in his soul, who is upright and exalted, who spurns inconstancy, who sees no man with whom he wishes to change places, who rates men only at their value as men, who takes Nature for his teacher, conforming to her laws and living as she commands, whom no violence can deprive of his possessions, who turns evil into good, is unerring in judgment, unshaken, unafraid, who may be moved by force but never moved to distraction, whom Fortune when she hurls at him with all her might the deadliest missile in her armoury, may graze, though rarely, but never wound.

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4 months 1 week ago

A dog cannot relate his autobiography; however eloquently he may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were honest but poor.

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Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948), part II, chapter 1, p. 74
2 months 4 weeks ago

Apart from the fact there is no normal standard of health, nobody has proved that man is necessarily cheerful by nature. And further, man, by the very fact of being man, of possessing consciousness, is, in comparison with the ass or the crab, a diseased animal. Consciousness is a disease.

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3 months 4 days ago

And in these foure things, Opinion of Ghosts, Ignorance of second causes, Devotion towards what men fear, and Taking of things Casuall for Prognostics, consisteth the Natural seed of Religion; which by reason of the different Fancies, Judgements, and Passions of severall men, hath grown up into ceremonies so different, that those which are used by one man, are for the most part ridiculous to another.

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The First Part, Chapter 12, p. 54
1 week 4 days ago

If a due participation of office is a matter of right, how are vacancies to be obtained? Those by death are few; by resignation, none.

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Letter to Elias Shipman and others of New Haven (12 July 1801). Often misquoted as, "few die and none resign".
2 months 3 weeks ago

The bourgeoisie hides the fact that it is the bourgeoisie and thereby produces myth; revolution announces itself openly as revolution and thereby abolishes myth.

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p. 146
2 months 1 week ago

Applied knowledge in the Renaissance had to take the form of translation of the auditory into visual terms, of the plastic into retinal form.

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(p. 180)
3 weeks 5 days ago

But no wall can be erected against Fortune which she cannot take by storm; let us strengthen our inner defences. If the inner part be safe, man can be attacked, but never captured.

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3 months 1 week ago

My interests drew me in different directions. On the one hand I was powerfully attracted by science, with its truths based on facts; on the other hand I was fascinated by everything to do with comparative religion. [...] In science I missed the factor of meaning; and in religion, that of empiricism.

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p. 72
2 months 1 week ago

Success makes some crimes honorable.

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Maxim 326
4 months 3 weeks ago

Everything has two handles, the one by which it may be carried, the other by which it cannot. If your brother acts unjustly, don't lay hold on the action by the handle of his injustice, for by that it cannot be carried; but by the opposite, that he is your brother, that he was brought up with you; and thus you will lay hold on it, as it is to be carried.

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(43).
2 months 1 week ago

Science has adapted itself entirely to the wealthy classes and accordingly has set itself to heal those who can afford everything, and it prescribes the same methods for those who have nothing to spare.

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1 month 2 days ago

Can there be a more horrible object in existence than an eloquent man not speaking the truth?

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Address as Lord Rector of Edinburgh University, (1866), reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
2 months 4 weeks ago

It is beyond dispute that the state exercises very great power over human life and it always shows a tendency to go beyond the limits laid down for it.

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Slavery and Freedom (1939), p. 145
3 months 4 days ago

The words of the world want to make sentences.

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Ch. 5, sect. 4
2 months 3 weeks ago

Rituals are also symbolic practices... in the sense that they bring people together to create an alliance, a wholeness, a community.

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3 months 1 week ago

Life is not, and death is a dream. Suffering has invented them both as self-justification. Man alone is torn between an unreality and an illusion.

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1 week 1 day ago

The healthy eye ought to see all visible things and not to say, I wish for green things; for this is the condition of the diseased eye. And the healthy hearing and smelling ought to be ready to perceive all that can be heard and smelled. And the healthy stomach ought to be with respect to all food just as the mill with respect to all things which it is formed to grind. And accordingly the healthy understanding ought to be prepared for everything which happens; but that which says, Let my dear children live, and let all men praise whatever I may do, is an eye which seeks for green things, or teeth which seek for soft things.

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X, 35
2 months 1 week ago

In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession.

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"Innovation is obsolete", Evergreen review, Volume 15, Issues 86-94, Grove Press, 1971, p. 64
1 month 5 days ago

All laws are... deduced from experiment; but to enunciate them, a special language is needful... ordinary language is too poor...This... is one reason why the physicist can not do without mathematics; it furnishes him the only language he can speak. And a well-made language is no indifferent thing;...the analyst, who pursues a purely esthetic aim, helps create, just by that, a language more fit to satisfy the physicist....law springs from experiment, but not immediately. Experiment is individual, the law deduced from it is general; experiment is only approximate, the law is precise...In a word, to get the law from experiment, it is necessary to generalize... But how generalize? ...in this choice what shall guide us?It can only be analogy. ...What has taught us to know the true profound analogies, those the eyes do not see but reason divines?It is the mathematical spirit, which disdains matter to cling only to pure form.

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4 months 1 day ago

Now drown care in wine.

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Book I, ode vii, line 32
4 months 1 week ago

Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind.

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Existentialism and Human Emotions
3 months 2 days ago

Man, if he is to remain man, must advance by way of consciousness. There is no road leading backward. ... We can no longer veil reality from ourselves by renouncing self-consciousness without simultaneously excluding ourselves from the historical course of human existence.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

The evidence of science and history is that humans are only ever partly and intermittently rational, but for modern humanists the solution is simple: human beings must in future be more reasonable. These enthusiasts for reason have not noticed that the idea that humans may one day be more rational requires a greater leap of faith than anything in religion. Since it requires a miraculous breach in the order of things, the idea that Jesus returned from the dead is not as contrary to reason as the notion that human beings will in future be different from how they have always been.

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An Old Chaos: Humanism and Flying Saucers (p. 75)
1 month 6 days ago

In a liberal society you're not going to agree on the deepest... moral frameworks, but you are going to agree on factual information, and... if you can't agree on factual information it's very hard to deliberate in common... on what needs to be done in the future, and that's the situation we now face.

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23:00
4 months 6 days ago

When I say that this phase is necessary, the word phase is perhaps not the most rigorous one. It is not a question of a chronological phase, a given moment, or a page that one day simply will be turned, in order to go on to other things. The necessity of this phase is structural; it is the necessity of an interminable analysis: the hierarchy of dual oppositions always reestablishes itself. Unlike those authors whose death does not await their demise, the time for overturning is never a dead letter.

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p. 41-42
3 months 4 days ago

Science is the knowledge of Consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another: by which, out of that we can presently do, we know how to do something else when we will, or the like, another time.

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The First Part, Chapter 5, p. 21
4 months 2 weeks ago

The perfection of a thing does not annul its existence, but, on the contrary, asserts it. Imperfection, on the other hand, does annul it ; therefore we cannot be more certain of the existence of anything, than of the existence of a being absolutely infinite or perfect-that is, of God. For inasmuch as his essence excludes all imperfection, and involves absolute perfection, all cause for doubt concerning his existence is done away, and the utmost certainty on the question is given. This, I think, will be evident to every moderately attentive reader.

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Part I, Prop. XI
4 months 1 week ago

There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse. It is precisely as being solemn experiences that I wish to interest you in religious experiences. ... The divine shall mean for us only such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor a jest.

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Lecture II, "Circumscription of the Topic"
2 months 1 week ago

No one should be judge in his own cause.

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Maxim 545
2 months 3 weeks ago

Underlying the concept of positivity is the conviction that the positive is intrinsically positive in itself, without anyone pausing to ask what is to be regarded as positive. ... It is significant and really quite interesting that the term 'positive' actually contains this ambivalence. On the one hand, 'positive' means what is given, is postulated, is there-as when we speak of positivism as the philosophy that sticks to the facts. But, equally, 'positive' also refers to the good, the approvable, in a certain sense, the ideal. And I imagine that this semantic constellation expresses with precision what countless people actually feel to be the case.

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p. 18
1 month 6 days ago

It has been observed that missiles and projectiles describe a curved path of some sort; however no one has pointed out the fact that this path is a parabola. But this and other facts, not few in number or less worth knowing, I have succeeded in proving; and what I consider more important, there have been opened up to this vast and most excellent science, of which my work is merely the beginning, ways and means by which other minds more acute than mine will explore its remote corners.

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Author, Third Day. Change of Position
3 months 3 weeks ago

Educate the children and it won't be necessary to punish the men.

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As quoted in Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists‎ (2007) by James Geary
3 months 4 days ago

A whole dimension of human activity and passivity has been de-eroticized. The environment from which the individual could obtain pleasure-which he could cathect as gratifying almost as an extended zone of the body-has been rigidly reduced. Consequently, the "universe" of libidinous cathexis is likewise reduced. The effect is a localization and contraction of libido, the reduction of erotic to sexual experience and satisfaction.

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p. 73
1 month 2 days ago

A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.

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Article on Biography.
1 month 5 days ago

We do not have and cannot have any means of discovering whether or not we are carried along in a uniform motion of translation.

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L'état actuel et l'avenir de la physique mathematique
4 months 2 weeks ago

Men never do good unless necessity drives them to it; but when they are free to choose and can do just as they please, confusion and disorder become rampant.

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Book 1, Ch. 3 (as translated by LJ Walker and B Crick)
4 months 3 weeks ago

test

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1 week 2 days ago

Do not listen to the reasoners; there has been too much reasoning in France, and reasoning has banished reason. Put aside your fears and reservations, and trust the infallible instinct of your conscience. Do you want to redeem yourselves in your own eyes? Do you want to acquire the right of self-esteem? Do you want to accomplish a sovereign act? . . . Recall your sovereign.

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Chapter VIII, p. 76
2 months 3 weeks ago

The huge laugh is a most extreme expression of freedom.

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1 week 2 days ago

If we do not return to the old maxims, if education is not restored into the hands of priests, and if science is not every where placed in the second rank, the evils which await us are incalculable: we shall become brutalized by science, and this is the lowest degree of brutality.

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XXXIX, p. 112
4 months 1 week ago

It seems to me certain that more people are killed out of righteous stupidity than out of wickedness.

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p. 368
4 months 6 days ago

You can't lead the people if you don't love the people. You can't save the people, if you don't serve the people.

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Hope on a Tightrope: Words and Wisdom (2008); also on "The Way I See It" Starbucks Coffee Cup #284
1 month 2 weeks ago

Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second and you can hop from one place to another. It's a language made of image. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.

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As quoted in Rolling Stone no. 421

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