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5 months 6 days ago

Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact.

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6 months 6 days ago

Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

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6 months 1 week ago

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. First line.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

The best doctor is the one you run for and can't find.

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As quoted in Selected Thoughts from the French: XV Century - XX Century, with English Translations (1913) by James Raymond Solly, p. 67
6 months 6 days ago

A hero looks death in the face, real death, not just the image of death. Behaving honourably in a crisis doesn't mean being able to act the part of a hero well, as in the theatre, it means being able to look death itself in the eye. For an actor may play lots of different roles, but at the end of it all he himself, the human being, is the one who has to die.

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p. 50e
5 months 6 days ago

To try curing someone of a "vice," of what is the deepest thing he has, is to attack his very being, and this is indeed how he himself understands it, since he will never forgive you for wanting him to destroy himself in your way and not his.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

With all our boasted reforms, our great social changes, and our far-reaching discoveries, human beings continue to be sent to the worst of hells, wherein they are outraged, degraded, and tortured, that society may be "protected" from the phantoms of its own making.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

The entire method consists in the order and arrangement of the things to which the mind's eye must turn so that we can discover some truth.

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Rules for the Direction of the Mind: X.379 As quoted in Clarke, Desmond M. (2006). Descartes : a Biography. Cambridge Press. p. 67. ISBN 978-0-521-82301-2.
6 months 2 weeks ago

When you see a person squirming in the clutches of the Law, say to him: "Brother, get things straight. You let the Law talk to your conscience. Make it talk to your flesh.

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Chapter 2, Verse 19
5 months 3 days ago

Why did we obey? The question hardly occurred to us. We had formed the habit of deferring to our parents and teachers. All the same we knew very well that it was because they were our parents, because they were our teachers. Therefore, in our eyes, their authority came less from themselves than from their status in relation to us.

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Chapter I: Moral Obligation
6 months 1 week ago

In the same year in which I began Latin, I made my first commencement in the Greek poet with the Iliad. After I had made some progress in this, my father put Pope's translation into my hands. It was the first English verse I had cared to read, and it became one of the books in which for many years I most delighted: I think I must have read it from twenty to thirty times through. I should not have thought it worth while to mention a taste apparently so natural to boyhood, if I had not, as I think, observed that the keen enjoyment of this brilliant specimen of narrative and versification is not so universal with boys, as I should have expected both à priori and from my individual experience.

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(p. 10)
5 months 2 days ago

Understanding being nothing else, but conception caused by Speech.

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The First Part, Chapter 4, p. 17
6 months 5 days ago

The soul is the prison of the body.

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Discipline and Punish (1977) as translated by Alan Sheridan, p. 30
6 months 1 week ago

The worker's existence is thus brought under the same condition as the existence of every other commodity. The worker has become a commodity, and it is a bit of luck for him if he can find a buyer, And the demand on which the life of the worker depends, depends on the whim of the rich and the capitalists.

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Wages of Labor, p. 20.
6 months 1 week ago

It is a serious question among them whether they [Africans] are descended from monkeys or whether the monkeys come from them. Our wise men have said that man was created in the image of God. Now here is a lovely image of the Divine Maker: a flat and black nose with little or hardly any intelligence. A time will doubtless come when these animals will know how to cultivate the land well, beautify their houses and gardens, and know the paths of the stars: one needs time for everything.

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Les Lettres d'Amabed (1769): Septième Lettre d'Amabed
6 months 1 week ago

Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.

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The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), Dedication: "To Lucy Barfield"
5 months 3 weeks ago

He said they that were serious in ridiculous matters would be ridiculous in serious affairs.

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Cato the Elder
6 months 1 week ago

The economic concept of value does not occur in antiquity.

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Notebook VII, The Chapter on Capital, p. 696.
4 months 2 weeks ago

If it were true what in the end would be gained? Nothing but another truth. Is this such a mighty advantage? We have enough old truths still to digest, and even these we would be quite unable to endure if we did not sometimes flavor them with lies.

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E 10
7 months ago

If you would govern a state of a thousand chariots (a small-to-middle-size state), you must pay strict attention to business, be true to your word, be economical in expenditure and love the people. You should use them according to the seasons.

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6 months 1 week ago

What we principally thought of, was to alter people's opinions; to make them believe according to evidence, and know what was their real interest, which when they once knew, they would, we thought, by the instrument of opinion, enforce a regard to it upon one another. While fully recognizing the superior excellence of unselfish benevolence and love of justice, we did not expect the regeneration of mankind from any direct action on those sentiments, but from the effect of educated intellect, enlightening the selfish feelings. Although this last is prodigiously important as a means of improvement in the hands of those who are themselves impelled by nobler principles of action, I do not believe that any one of the survivors of the Benthamites or Utilitarians of that day, now relies mainly upon it for the general amendment of human conduct.

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(pp. 111-112)
6 months ago

He who has begun has half done. Dare to be wise; begin!

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Book I, epistle ii, lines 40-41
4 months 1 week ago

Several times I asked myself, "Can it be that I have overlooked something, that there is something which I have failed to understand? Is it not possible that this state of despair is common to everyone?" And I searched for an answer to my questions in every area of knowledge acquired by man. For a long time I carried on my painstaking search; I did not search casually, out of mere curiosity, but painfully, persistently, day and night, like a dying man seeking salvation. I found nothing.

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Pt. I, ch. 5
2 months 1 week ago

A science that observes the laws of causation, and so is value-free, threatens human freedom and man's religious, ethical, and legal responsibility. The philosophy of values raised to that challenge, in the sense that it opposed a sphere of values, as a realm of ideal valuations, to a sphere of being that was only causally understood. It was an attempt to assert the human being as a free, responsible creature, indeed not in itself, but at least, in its valuation, what one called value. That attempt was put forth as a positivistic substitute for the metaphysical.

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6 months 1 day ago

The ethical commonplaces of any period include ideas that may have been radical discoveries in a previous age. This is true of modern conceptions of liberty, equality, and democracy, and we are in the midst of ethical debates which will probably result two hundred years hence in a disseminated moral sensibility that people of our time would find very unfamiliar.

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"Ethics without Biology" (1978), p. 143.
5 months 2 days ago

When we come to inanimate elements, the prevailing view has been that time and sequential change are entirely foreign to their nature. According to this view they do not have careers; they simply change their relations is space. We have only to think of the classic conception of atoms. The Newtonian atom, for example, moved and was moved, thus changing its position in space, but it was unchangeable in its own being. ... In itself it was like a God, the same yesterday, today, and forever.

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3 months 3 days ago

We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are.

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The Idolatry of Politics, U.S. Jefferson Lecture speech
4 months 1 week ago

Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement.

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(p. 113)
6 months 1 week ago

Talk of mysteries! - Think of our life in nature, - daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, - rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?

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The Maine Woods (1848)
2 months 3 weeks ago

The cause of anger is the belief that we are injured; this belief, therefore, should not be lightly entertained. We ought not to fly into a rage even when the injury appears to be open and distinct: for some false things bear the semblance of truth. We should always allow some time to elapse, for time discloses the truth.

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De Ira (On Anger): Book 2, cap. 22, line 2 Alternate translation: Time discovers truth. (translator unknown).
4 months 3 weeks ago

Rituals are processes of embodiment and bodily performances. In them, the valid order and values of a community are physically experienced and solidified.

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6 months 1 week ago

Thought is all light, and publishes itself to the universe. It will speak, though you were dumb, by its own miraculous organ. It will flow out of your actions, your manners, and your face. It will bring you friendships. It will impledge you to truth by the love and expectation of generous minds. By virtue of the laws of that Nature, which is one and perfect, it shall yield every sincere good that is in the soul, to the scholar beloved of earth and heaven.

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5 months 3 days ago

O my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done.

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26:42 (KJV)
5 months 3 weeks ago

The wind is blowing, adore the wind.

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Symbol 8
6 months 5 days ago

Bernie Sanders is...an anti-racist in his heart. Two, he's old-school. He's like me. He doesn't know the buzzwords. He doesn't endorse reparations, one moment in the last 30 years, silent on it. He has the consistency over the years decade after decade and therefore it's true in his language, in his rhetoric. There are times in which he doesn't... use the same kind of buzzwords. But when it comes to his fight against racism, going to jail in Chicago as a younger brother and he would go to jail again. He and I would go to jail together again in terms of fighting against police brutality. So in that sense, I would just tell my brothers and sisters, but especially my chocolate ones that they shouldn't be blinded by certain kinds of words they're looking for, that in the end, he is a long distance runner in the struggle against white supremacy.

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Quoted in: Cornel West on Bernie, Trump, and Racism, The Intercept, Mehdi Hasan
2 months 1 week ago

What is the purpose of this struggle? This is what the wretched self-seeking mind of man is always asking, forgetting that the Great Spirit does not toil within the bounds of human time, place, or casualty. The Great Spirit is superior to these human questionings. It teems with many rich and wandering drives which to our shallow minds seem contradictory; but in the essence of divinity they fraternize and struggle together, faithful comrades-in-arms. The primordial Spirit branches out, overflows, struggles, fails, succeeds, trains itself. It is the Rose of the Winds.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Those who read and rightly understand my teaching will not start an insurrection; they have not learned that from me.

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p. 65
7 months 1 week ago

Not merely in the realm of commerce but in the world of ideas as well our age is organizing a regular clearance sale. Everything is to be had at such a bargain that it is questionable whether in the end there is anybody who will want to bid. Every speculative price-fixer who conscientiously directs attention to the significant march of modern philosophy, every Privatdocent, tutor, and student, every crofter and cottar goes further. Perhaps it would be untimely and ill-timed to ask them where they are going.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

If you know that "I", in the sense of the person, the front, the ego, it really doesn't exist. Then...it won't go to your head too badly, if you wake up and discover that you're God.

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4 months 1 week ago

Government is violence, Christianity is meekness, non-resistance, love. And, therefore, government cannot be Christian, and a man who wishes to be a Christian must not serve government.

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Letter to Dr. Eugen Heinrich Schmitt (October 12, 1896), translated by Nathan Haskell Dole
6 months 1 week ago

Sophistry is only fit to make men more conceited in their ignorance.

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3 months 2 days ago

He who exerts his mind to the utmost knows his nature.

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7A:1, as translated by Wing-tsit Chan in A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (1963), p. 62
7 months 1 week ago

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

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