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7 months 3 weeks ago

Suppose a person entering a house were to feel heat on the porch, and going further, were to feel the heat increasing, the more they penetrated within. Doubtless, such a person would believe there was a fire in the house, even though they did not see the fire that must be causing all this heat. A similar thing will happen to anyone who considers this world in detail: one will observe that all things are arranged according to their degrees of beauty and excellence, and that the nearer they are to God, the more beautiful and better they are.

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Art. 1
7 months 1 week ago

There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 254
3 months 1 week ago

The Constitution of the United States asserts that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty.

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Letter to Justice William Johnson
5 months 2 weeks ago

Anarchism, more than any other social theory, values human life above things.

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5 months 3 days ago

It's been suggested that if the super-naturalists really had the powers they claim, they'd win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science. Either way, why are they wasting their talents doing party turns on television?By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.

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7 months 1 week ago

All human knowledge begins with intuitions, proceeds from thence to concepts, and ends with ideas.

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B 730; Variant translation: All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.
6 months 1 week ago

He who seeks freedom for anything but freedom's self is made to be a slave.

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p. 204
5 months 2 weeks ago

We're tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They've made us suffer too much. All of arborescent culture is founded on them, from biology to linguistics. Nothing is beautiful or loving or political aside from underground stems and aerial root, adventitious growths and rhizomes.

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from A Thousand Plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, p. 15
1 month 2 weeks ago

Well, the states have to maintain justice...

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4 months 2 weeks ago

We shall have to share out the fruits of technology among the whole of mankind. The notion that the direct and immediate producers of the fruits of technology have a proprietary right to these fruits will have to be forgotten. After all, who is the producer? Man is a social animal, and the immediate producer has been helped to produce by the whole structure of society, beginning with his own education.

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Surviving the Future (1971; Oxford UP, 1972) p. 95
6 months 2 weeks ago

Our youth we can have but to-day, We may always find time to grow old. Can Love be controlled by Advice?

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reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
5 months 3 weeks ago

The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction.

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Pt. I, ch. 2, sec. 2.
7 months 1 week ago

In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.

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Quotation and Originality
5 months 5 days ago

It is a very hard undertaking to seek to please everybody.

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Maxim 675
8 months 4 days ago

Then we understand that rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love. Those who find no rest in God or in history are condemned to live for those who, like themselves, cannot live; in fact, for the humiliated.

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6 months ago

Every good mathematician is at least half a philosopher, and every good philosopher is at least half a mathematician.

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Attributed to Frege in: A. A. B. Aspeitia (2000), Mathematics as grammar: 'Grammar' in Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics during the Middle Period, Indiana University, p. 25
7 months 6 days ago

...wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong way. You can be good for the mere sake of goodness: you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness. You can do a kind action when you are not feeling kind and when it gives you no pleasure, simply because kindness is right; but no one ever did a cruel action simply because cruelty is wrong - only because cruelty was pleasant or useful to him. in other words badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness.

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Book II, Chapter 2, "The Invasion"
7 months 1 week ago

Those things which now most engage the attention of men, as politics and the daily routine, are, it is true, vital functions of human society, but should be unconsciously performed, like the corresponding functions of the physical body. They are infra-human, a kind of vegetation. I sometimes awake to a half-consciousness of them going on about me, as a man may become conscious of some of the processes of digestion in a morbid state, and so have the dyspepsia, as it is called.

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p. 495
7 months 1 week ago

Virtue supposes liberty, as the carrying of a burden supposes active force. Under coercion there is no virtue, and without virtue there is no religion. Make a slave of me, and I shall be no better for it. Even the sovereign has no right to use coercion to lead men to religion, which by its nature supposes choice and liberty. My thought is no more subject to authority than is sickness or health.

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"Canon Law: Ecclesiastical Ministry", 1771
8 months 1 week ago
Most men are too concerned with themselves to be malicious.
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7 months 1 week ago

Look round the world: contemplate the whole and every part of it: You will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines, which again admit of subdivisions, to a degree beyond what human senses and faculties can trace and explain. All these various machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy, which ravishes into admiration all men, who have ever contemplated them. The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles exactly, though it much exceeds, the productions of human contrivance; of human design, thought, wisdom, and intelligence.

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Philo to Cleanthes, Part II
7 months 1 week ago

Thus the labour of a manufacture adds, generally, to the value of the materials which he works upon, that of his own maintenance, and of his masters profits. The labour of a menial servant, on the contrary, adds to the value of nothing.

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Chapter III, p. 364 (see Proverbs 14-23 KJV).
6 months ago

I hope I may claim in the present work to have made it probable that the laws of arithmetic are analytic judgments and consequently a priori. Arithmetic thus becomes simply a development of logic, and every proposition of arithmetic a law of logic, albeit a derivative one. To apply arithmetic in the physical sciences is to bring logic to bear on observed facts; calculation becomes deduction.

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Gottlob Frege (1950 ). The Foundations of Arithmetic. p. 99.
6 months 1 week ago

The strides of humanity are slow, they can only be counted in centuries.

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Act II.
6 months 3 days ago

With this as its basic constitution, civilization achieved things of which gentile society was not even remotely capable. But it achieved them by setting in motion the lowest instincts and passions in man and developing them at the expense of all his other abilities. From its first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization; wealth and again wealth and once more wealth, wealth, not of society, but of the single scurvy individual-here was its one and final aim. If at the same time the progressive development of science and a repeated flowering of supreme art dropped into its lap, it was only because without them modern wealth could not have completely realized its achievements.

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The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) as translated by Ernest Untermann (1902)
4 months 2 weeks ago

Even if I set out to make a film about a fillet of sole, it would be about me.

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On the autobiographical nature of his films, in The Atlantic
5 months 1 week ago

Literature is idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines in only twenty-six symbols, ten arabic numbers, and about eight punctuation marks.

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Public conversation with Lee Stringer, in Like Shaking Hands With God
7 months 1 week ago

Life is just a notebook with blank pages. Every time we make a mistake, the pages get stained and living in it becomes impossible.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

By incestuous symbiosis is meant the tendency to stay tied to the mother and to her equivalents - blood, family, tribe - to fly from the unbearable weight of responsibility, of freedom, of awareness, and to be protected and loved in a state of certainty dependence that the individual pays for with the ceasing of his own human development.

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3 months 1 week ago

They have retired into the Judiciary as a stronghold. There the remains of federalism are to be preserved and fed from the Treasury; and from that battery all the works of republicanism are to be beaten down and erased.

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Letter to J. Dickinson
3 months 3 weeks ago

If you could be alarmed into the semblance of modesty, you would charm everybody; but remember my joke against you about the Moon and the Solar System;-"Damn the solar system! bad light - planets too distant - pestered with comets - feeble contriviance; - could make a better with great ease."

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Vol. II, letter to Lord Jeffrey (1806), p. 23 Discussed in David A. Kent, D. R. Ewen, "Romantic Parodies, 1797-1831", The Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 44, No. 175, (1993), pp. 430-432
6 months 1 week ago

When an opinion has taken root in a democracy and established itself in the minds of the majority, it afterward persists by itself, needing no effort to maintain it since no one attacks it. Those who at first rejected it as false come in the end to adopt it as accepted, and even those who still at the bottom of their hearts oppose it keep their views to themselves, taking great care to avoid a dangerous and futile contest.

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Book Three, Chapter XXI.

Liberal philosophy, at this point, ceases to be empirical and British in order to become German and transcendental. Moral life, it now believes, is not the pursuit of liberty and happiness of all sorts by all sorts of different creatures; it is the development of a single spirit in all life through a series of necessary phases, each higher than the preceding one. No man, accordingly, can really or ultimately desire anything but what the best people desire. This is the principle of the higher snobbery; and in fact, all earnest liberals are higher snobs.

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"The Irony of Liberalism"
7 months 1 week ago

Mercantile jealousy is excited, and both inflames, and is itself inflamed, by the violence of national animosity.

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Chapter III, Part II, p. 534.
6 months ago

Being is continuous becoming.

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P. 136
8 months 1 week ago

It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.

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6 months 3 days ago

It is unjust to call imaginary the diseases which are, on the contrary, only too real, since they proceed from our mind, the only regulator of our equilibrium and our health.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

I have never seen a greater monster or miracle in the world than myself.

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Book III, Ch. 11. Of Cripples
6 months 3 days ago

Time is heavy sometimes; imagine how heavy eternity must be.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

...it is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human understanding to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives...

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Aphorism 46
3 months 3 weeks ago

... the only contestant who can confidently enter the lists is the man who has seen his own blood, who has felt his teeth rattle beneath his opponent's fist, who has been tripped and felt the full force of his adversary's charge, who has been downed in body but not in spirit, one who, as often as he falls, rises again with greater defiance than ever.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

And so I am not concerned to justify the perpetrators of violence but to enquire into the function of the violence of the working classes in contemporary socialism.

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p. 42
2 months 3 weeks ago

How can this cosmic religious experience be communicated from man to man, if it cannot lead to a definite conception of God or to a theology? It seems to me that the most important function of art and of science is to arouse and keep alive this feeling in those who are receptive.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

I have never had the least sympathy with the a priori reasons against orthodoxy, and I have by nature and disposition the greatest possible antipathy to all the atheistic and infidel school. Nevertheless I know that I am, in spite of myself, exactly what the Christian would call, and, so far as I can see, is justified in calling, atheist and infidel.

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Letter to Charles Kingsley
7 months 6 days ago

For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.

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"Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare", Rehabilitations and Other Essays, 1939
7 months 1 week ago

The criminal law has, from the point of view of thwarted virtue, the merit of allowing an outlet for those impulses of aggression which cowardice, disguised as morality, restrains in their more spontaneous forms. War has the same merit. You must not kill you neighbor, whom perhaps you genuinely hate, but by a little propaganda this hate can be transferred to some foreign nation, against whom all your murderous impulses become patriotic heroism.

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Part III: Man and Himself, Ch. 17: Fear, p. 175
5 months 4 weeks ago

In the ancient notion of love, on the other hand, there is an element of anxiety. The noble fears the descent to the less noble, is afraid of being infected and pulled down. The "sage" of antiquity does not have the same firmness, the same inner certainty of himself and his own value, as the genius and hero of Christian love.

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L. Coser, trans. (1961), p. 92

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