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3 months 1 week ago

He was arrested twice; he was taken in 1922 for a midnight interrogation with Dzerjinsky; Kamenev was also there. ... But Berdyaev did not humiliate himself, he did not beg, he firmly professed the moral and religious principles by virtue of which he did not adhere to the party in power; and not only did they judge that there was no point in putting him on trial, but he was freed. Now there is a man who had a "point of view"!

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Richard Schain, in In Love with Eternity : Philosophical Essays and Fragments (2005), Ch. 7 : Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev - A Champion of the Spirit, p. 47
4 months 6 days ago

Wisdom thoroughly learned, will never be forgotten. Science is got by diligence; but Discretion and Wisdom cometh of GOD.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

At the speed of light there is no sequence; everything happens at the same instant.

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5 months 1 week ago

What is it, in your opinion, to be a great nobleman? It is to be master of several objects that men covet, and thus to be able to satisfy the wants and the desires of many. It is these wants and these desires that attract them towards you, and that make them submit to you: were it not for these, they would not even look at you; but they hope, by these services... to obtain from you some part of the good which they desire, and of which they see that you have the disposal.

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5 months 3 days ago

Above all, every relation must be considered as suspicious, which depends in any degree upon religion, as the prodigies of Livy: And no less so, everything that is to be found in the writers of natural magic or alchemy, or such authors, who seem, all of them, to have an unconquerable appetite for falsehood and fable.

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Aphorism 29
3 months 2 weeks ago

The sensate body possesses an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis The Visible and the Invisible, trans.

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A. Lingis (Evanston: 1968), p. 135
5 months 2 weeks ago

The superior man honors his virtuous nature, and maintains constant inquiry and study, seeking to carry it out to its breadth and greatness, so as to omit none of the more exquisite and minute points which it embraces, and to raise it to its greatest height and brilliancy, so as to pursue the course of the Mean. He cherishes his old knowledge, and is continually acquiring new. He exerts an honest, generous earnestness, in the esteem and practice of all propriety. Thus, when occupying a high situation he is not proud, and in a low situation he is not insubordinate. When the kingdom is well governed, he is sure by his words to rise; and when it is ill governed, he is sure by his silence to command forbearance to himself.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Beings who are so uniquely constituted must necessarily express themselves in other ways than ordinary men. It is impossible that with souls so differently modified, they should not carry over into the expression of their feelings and ideas the stamp of those modifications.

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First Dialogue; translated by Judith R. Bush, Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters
3 months 3 weeks ago

God, I have said, is the fulfiller, or the reality, of the human desires for happiness, perfection, and immortality. From this it may be inferred that to deprive man of God is to tear the heart out of his breast. But I contest the premises from which religion and theology deduce the necessity and existence of God, or of immortality, which is the same thing. I maintain that desires which are fulfilled only in the imagination, or from which the existence of an imaginary being is deduced, are imaginary desires, and not the real desires of the human heart; I maintain that the limitations which the religious imagination annuls in the idea of God or immortality, are necessary determinations of the human essence, which cannot be dissociated from it, and therefore no limitations at all, except precisely in man's imagination.

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Lecture XXX, Atheism alone a Positive View
1 month 2 weeks ago

I came hither [Craigenputtoch] solely with the design to simplify my way of life and to secure the independence through which I could be enabled to remain true to myself.

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Letter to Goethe, (1828).
1 month 4 weeks ago

Our principles fix what our life stands for, our aims create the light our life is bathed in, and our rationality, both individual and coordinate, defines and symbolizes the distance we have come from mere animality. It is by these means that our lives come to more than what they instrumentally yield. And by meaning more, our lives yield more.

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The Nature of Rationality (1993), Ch. V : Instrumental Rationality and Its Limits; Rationality's Imagination, p. 181
4 months 3 weeks ago

Intellect is invisible to the man who has none.

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Our Relation to Others, § 23
4 months 3 weeks ago

Her face seems ravaged by both lightning and hail. But on yours there is something like the promise of a storm: one day passion will burn it to the bone.

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Act 1
3 months 2 weeks ago

Sooner or later, each desire must encounter its lassitude: its truth . . .

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4 months 4 weeks ago

Human infirmity in moderating and checking the emotions I name bondage: for, when a man is a prey to his emotions, he is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune: so much so, that he is often compelled, while seeing that which is better for him, to follow that which is worse.

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Part IV, Preface; translation by R. H. M. Elwes
4 months 3 weeks ago

Quite a heavy weight, a name too quickly famous.

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La Henriade, chant troisième, l.41, 1722

Let it not be in any man's power to say truly of thee that thou art not simple or that thou art not good; but let him be a liar whoever shall think anything of this kind about thee; and this is altogether in thy power.

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X, 32
3 months 3 weeks ago

Wit is the appearance, the external flash of imagination. Thus its divinity, and the witty character of mysticism.

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Aphorism 26, as translated in Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms (1968)
3 months 3 weeks ago

Men may one day feel that they are partakers of a common nature, and that true freedom and perfect equity, like food and air, are pregnant with benefit to every constitution.

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Vol. 1, bk. 1, ch. 3
4 months 2 weeks ago

If our intention now is to reveal classical unreason on its own terms, outside of its ties with dreams and error, it must be understood not as a form of reason that is somehow diseased, lost or mad, but quite simply as reason dazzled.

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Part Two: 2. The Transcendence of Delirium
5 months 3 days ago

For all knowledge and wonder (which is the seed of knowledge) is an impression of pleasure in itself.

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Book I, i, 3
4 months 2 weeks ago

Common sense doesn't have the last word in ethics or anywhere else, but it has, as J. L. Austin said about language, the first word: it should be examined before it is discarded.

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p. 166.
4 months 3 weeks ago

If you try to imagine, as nearly as you can, what an amount of misery, pain and suffering of every kind the sun shines upon in its course, you will admit that it would be much better if, on the earth as little as on the moon, the sun were able to call forth the phenomena of life; and if, here as there, the surface were still in a crystalline state.

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"On the Sufferings of the World"
3 months 3 weeks ago

If you want to be respected by others the great thing is to respect yourself. Only by that, only by self-respect will you compel others to respect you.

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Part III, Chapter 2
4 months 3 weeks ago

Many conservative writers have contended that the tendency to equality in modern social movements is the expression of envy. In this way they seek to discredit this trend, attributing it to collectively harmful impulses.

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Chapter IX, Section 82, p. 538
3 months 2 weeks ago

The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.

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The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them. In this methodological uncertainty, one might suppose that there were any number of possible systems of theoretical physics all equally well justified; and this opinion is no doubt correct, theoretically. But the development of physics has shown that at any given moment, out of all conceivable constructions, a single one has always proved itself decidedly superior to all the rest.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

There is a science of Dynamics in man's fortunes and nature, as well as of Mechanics. There is a science which treats of, and practically addresses, the primary, unmodified forces and energies of man, the mysterious springs of Love, and Fear, and Wonder, of Enthusiasm, Poetry, Religion, all which have a truly vital and infinite character; as well as a science which practically addresses the finite, modified developments of these, when they take the shape of immediate "motives," as hope of reward, or as fear of punishment.

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3 weeks 3 days ago

The solution is, that we do not see the image on the retina at all, we only see by means of it.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Space, subjectively, is the coexistence of perceptions - perceiving two objects at once.

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Ch. 6 : Our Souls
3 months 2 weeks ago

I don't understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn't it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Just then another visitor entered the drawing room: Prince Andrew Bolkónski, the little princess' husband. He was a very handsome young man, of medium height, with firm, clearcut features. Everything about him, from his weary, bored expression to his quiet, measured step, offered a most striking contrast to his quiet, little wife. It was evident that he not only knew everyone in the drawing room, but had found them to be so tiresome that it wearied him to look at or listen to them. And among all these faces that he found so tedious, none seemed to bore him so much as that of his pretty wife. He turned away from her with a grimace that distorted his handsome face, kissed Anna Pávlovna's hand, and screwing up his eyes scanned the whole company.

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Bk. I, Ch. IV
4 months 2 weeks ago

Once he saw the officials of a temple leading away some one who had stolen a bowl belonging to the treasurers, and said, "The great thieves are leading away the little thief."

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Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 45
3 months 4 weeks ago

Disturbances in society are never more fearful than when those who are stirring up the trouble can use the pretext of religion to mask their true designs.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

When you know that every problem is only a false problem, you are dangerously close to salvation.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

In morals, truth is but little prized when it is a mere sentiment, and only attains its full value when realized in the world as fact.

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Ch. 5.
4 months ago

We vainly accuse the fury of guns, and the new inventions of death; it is in the power of every hand to destroy us, and we are beholden unto every one we meet he doth not kill us.

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Section 44
3 weeks 4 days ago

To SEE and accept the boundaries of the human mind without vain rebellion, and in these severe limitations to work ceaselessly without protest - this is where man's first duty lies.

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4 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"
5 months 2 weeks ago

When one cultivates to the utmost the principles of his nature, and exercises them on the principle of reciprocity, he is not far from the path. What you do not like when done to yourself, do not do to others.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

A fool with a heart and no sense is just as unhappy as a fool with sense and no heart.

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Part 1, Chapter 7
5 months 3 weeks ago

Those who purge the soul believe that the soul can receive no benefit from any teachings offered to it until someone by cross-questioning reduces him who is cross-questioned to an attitude of modesty, by removing the opinions that obstruct the teachings, and thus purges him and makes him think that he knows only what he knows, and no more.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

An infirmity which affects the whole race, is no proper object for the scorn of an individual who belongs to that race, and who, before he could expose it, must himself have been its slave.

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p. 12
5 months 2 days ago

Tis the sharpness of our mind that gives the edge to our pains and pleasures.

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Book I, Ch. 14
1 month 4 days 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
3 months 2 weeks ago

Movement in direct experience is alteration in the qualities of objects, and space as experienced is an aspect of this qualitative change. Up and down, back and front, to and fro, this side and that- or right and left- here and there, feel differently. The reason they do is that they are not static points in something itself static, but objects in movement, qualitative changes of value. For "back" is short for backwards and front for forwards. So with velocity. Mathematically there are no such things as fast and slow. They mark simply greater and less on a number scale. As experienced they are qualitatively as unlike as noise and silence, heat and cold, black and white. To be forced to wait a long time for an important event to happen is a length very different from that measured by the movements of the hands of a clock. It is something qualitative.

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3 months 1 week ago

Traditional philosophy's claim to totality, culminating in the thesis that the real is rational, is indistinguishable from apologetics.

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p. 7

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