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6 months ago

If man of himself could in a perfect manner know all things visible and invisible, it would indeed be foolish to believe what he does not see. But our manner of knowing is so weak that no philosopher could perfectly investigate the nature of even one little fly.

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Prologue (trans. Joseph B. Collins)
3 months 1 week ago

If we sit and talk in a dark room, words suddenly acquire new meanings and different textures...and on the radio. Given only the sound of a play, we have to fill in all of the senses, not just the sight of the action. So much do-it-yourself, or completion and "closure" of action, develops a kind of independent isolation in the young that makes them remote and inaccessible.

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(p. 264)
5 months 1 week ago

It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true Word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him.

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Letter (8 November 1952); published in Letters of C. S. Lewis (1966), p. 247
5 months 1 week ago

No one can be a great thinker who does not recognise, that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead...Not that it is solely, or chiefly, to form great thinkers, that freedom of thinking is required. On the contrary, it is as much and even more indispensable to enable average human beings to attain the mental stature which they are capable of.

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Ch. II: Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion
3 months 3 weeks ago

I am convinced we do not only love ourselves in others but hate ourselves in others too.

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F 54
1 month 1 week ago

I had always hoped that the younger generation receiving their early impressions after the flame of liberty had been kindled in every breast, & had become as it were the vital spirit of every American, that the generous temperament of youth, analogous to the motion of their blood, and above the suggestions of avarice, would have sympathized with oppression wherever found, and proved their love of liberty beyond their own share of it.

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1 month 2 days ago

The most beautiful fate of a physical theory is to point the way to the establishment of a more inclusive theory, in which it lives on as a limiting case.

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(1917) as quoted by , The Advancement of Science, and Its Burdens: the Jefferson Lecture and Other Essays (1986)
5 months 1 week ago

Political Economy regards the proletarian ... like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being. It leaves this to criminal law, doctors, religion, statistical tables, politics, and the beadle. ... (1) What is the meaning, in the development of mankind, of this reduction of the greater part of mankind to abstract labor? (2) What mistakes are made by the piecemeal reformers, who either want to raise wages and thereby improve the situation of the working class, or - like Proudhon - see equality of wages as the goal of social revolution?.

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First Manuscript - Wages of Labour, p. 6.
3 months 1 week ago

Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.

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(p. 132)
3 months 1 week ago

The appreciation of the merits of art (of the emotions it conveys) depends upon an understanding of the meaning of life, what is seen as good and evil. Good and evil are defined by religions.

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2 months 1 week ago

All of those who are "without" - without employment, without residence, without housing - are really excluded only in part.

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129
6 months 1 week ago

Every human being is tried this way in the active service of expectancy. Now comes the fulfillment and relieves him, but soon he is again placed on reconnaissance for expectancy; then he is again relieved, but as long as there is any future for him, he has not yet finished his service. And while human life goes on this way in very diverse expectancy, expecting very different things according to different times and occasions and in different frames of mind, all life is again one nightwatch of expectancy.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

And yet Catholicism does not abandon ethics. No! No modern religion can leave ethics on one side. But our religion - although its doctors may protest against this - is fundamentally and for the most part a compromise between eschatology and ethics; it is eschatology pressed into the service of ethics. What else but this is that atrocity of the eternal pains of hell, which agrees so ill with the Pauline apocatastasis? Let us bear in mind these words which the Theologica Germanica, the manual of mysticism that Luther read, puts into the mouth of God: "If I must recompense your evil, I must recompense it with good, for I am and have no other." And Christ said: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," and there is no man who perhaps knows what he does.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Eloquence may strike the ear, but the language of poverty strikes the heart; the first may charm like music, but the second alarms like a knell. 

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The Case of the Officers of Excise (1772), p. 20
4 months 1 week ago

One would have to be as unenlightened as an angel or an idiot to imagine that the human escapade could turn out well.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

No one ever saw Cato change, no matter how often the state changed: he kept himself the same in all circumstances-in the praetorship, in defeat, under accusation, in his province, on the platform, in the army, in death.

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We hardly know any instance of the strength and weakness of human nature so striking, and so grotesque, as the character of this haughty, vigilant, resolute, sagacious blue-stocking, half Mithridates and half Trissotin, bearing up against a world in arms, with an ounce of poison in one pocket and a quire of bad verses in the other.

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'Frederic the Great', The Edinburgh Review (April 1842), quoted in T. B. Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to The Edinburgh Review: A New Edition (1852), p. 802
4 months 1 week ago

Government was intended to suppress injustice, but its effect has been to embody and perpetuate it.

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"Summary of Principles" 2.7
3 months 3 weeks ago

No sacrifice is lost for a great ideal!

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(p. 135)
4 months 1 week ago

Hope is the normal form of delirium.

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3 months 1 week ago

Whenever a system of communication evolves, there is always the danger that some will exploit the system for their own ends.

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Ch. 4. The Gene machine
2 months 3 days ago

Books-there is a good kind of a book and a bad kind of a book. I am not to assume that you are all ill acquainted with this; but I may remind you that it is a very important consideration at present. It casts aside altogether the idea that people have that if they are reading any book-that if an ignorant man is reading any book, he is doing rather better than nothing at all.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

I believe that man is in the last resort so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested.

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L 98
6 months 2 days ago

Only after Winter comes do we know that the pine and the cypress are the last to fade.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

God is denied either because the world is so bad or because the world is so good.

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Original: Бога отрицают или потому, что мир так плох, или потому, что мир так хорош.
6 months 1 week ago

As you hope to prove your own great value to the state, and having proved it, to attain at once to absolute power, so do I indulge a hope that I shall be the supreme power over you, if I am able to prove my own great value to you. Socrates speaking to Alcibiades

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Obviously, Anarchism, or any other social theory, making man a conscious social unit, will act as a leaven for rebellion.

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4 months 1 week ago

Lord, give me the capacity of never praying, spare me the insanity of all worship, let this temptation of love pass from me which would deliver me forever unto You. Let the void spread between my heart and heaven! I have no desire to people my deserts by Your presence, to tyrannize my nights by Your light, to dissolve my Siberias beneath Your sun.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.

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As quoted in Niels Bohr : The Man, His Science, & the World They Changed (1966) by Ruth Moore, p. 196
5 months 1 week ago

Ever since the war began, I have felt that I could no longer go on being a pacifist, but I have hesitated to say so, because of the responsibility involved. If I were young enough to fight myself, I should do so, but it is more difficult to urge others. Now, however, I feel that I ought to announce that I have changed my mind.

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Letter to Kingsley Martin (June 1940), quoted in Kingsley Martin, Editor: A Second Volume of Autobiography, 1931-45 (1968), p. 207
5 months 1 week ago

I was not the one to invent lies: they were created in a society divided by class and each of us inherited lies when we were born. It is not by refusing to lie that we will abolish lies: it is by eradicating class by any means necessary.

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Act 5, sc. 3
5 months 2 weeks ago

When Scipio became consul and was keen on getting the province of Africa, promising that Carthage should be completely destroyed, and the senate would not agree to this because Fabius Maximus was against it, he threatened to appeal to the people, for he knew full well how pleasing such projects are to the populace.

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Book 1, Ch. 53 (as translated by LJ Walker and B Crick)
5 months 1 week ago

Nothing contributes more to nourish elevation of sentiments in a people, than the large and free character of their habitations.

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(p. 55)
2 months 3 days ago

Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with; as if, observes our author himself, any originality but our own could be expected to content us! In fact all strange thing are apt, without fault of theirs, to estrange us at first view, and unhappily scarcely anything is perfectly plain, but what is also perfectly common.

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Richter.
6 months 1 week ago

It is only afterward that a new idea seems reasonable. To begin with, it usually seems unreasonable.

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3 months 1 week ago

The revolutionaries say: "The government organization is bad in this and that respect; it must be destroyed and replaced by this and that." But a Christian says: "I know nothing about the governmental organization, or in how far it is good or bad, and for the same reason I do not want to support it."

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Chapter IX, The Acceptance of the Christian Conception of Life will Emancipate Men from the Miseries of our Pagan Life
5 months 2 weeks ago

I always made one prayer to God, a very short one. Here it is: "O Lord, make our enemies quite ridiculous!" God granted it.

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16 May 1767, Letter to Étienne Noël Damilaville
4 months 3 days ago

In ordinary visual perception, we see by means of light; we distinguish by means of reflected and refracted colors. But in ordinary perception, this medium of color is mixed, adulterated. While we see, we also hear; we feel pressures, and heat and cold. In a painting, color renders the scene without these alloys and impurities. They are part of the dross that is squeezed out and left behind in an act of intensified expression. The medium becomes color alone, and since color alone must now carry the qualities of movement, touch, sound, etc., that are present physically on their own account in ordinary vision, the expressiveness and energy of color are enhanced.

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p. 203
5 months 1 week ago

Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, and no force of character can make any stand against good wit.

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The Comic
5 months 2 days ago

Virtue cannot dwell with wealth either in a city or in a house.

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Stobaeus, iv. 31c. 88
5 months 2 weeks ago

Upstart greatness is everywhere less respected than ancient greatness.

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Chapter I, Part II, p. 773.
5 months 1 week ago

The end of man (as a factual anthropological limit) is announced to thought from the vantage of the end of man (as a determined opening or the infinity of a telos). Man is that which is in relation to his end, in the fundamentally equivocal sense of the word. Since always.

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"The Ends of Man," Margins of Philosophy, tr. w/ notes by Alan Bass. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago, 1982. (original French published in Paris, 1972, as Marges de la philosophie). p. 123
6 months 2 days ago

To throw oneself into strange teachings is quite dangerous.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Men are eager to tread underfoot what they have once too much feared.

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Book V, line 1140 (tr. Rouse)
5 months 2 days ago

The sun provides the moon with its brightness.

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Fragment in Plutarch De facie in orbe lunae, 929b, as quoted in The Riverside Dictionary of Biography (2005), p. 23
4 months 1 week ago

One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.

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5 months 1 week ago

Apart from autograph hunters, I get... many letters from Hindus, beseeching me to adopt some form of mysticism, from young Americans, asking me where I think the line should be drawn in petting, and from Poles, urging me to admit that while all other nationalism may be bad that of Poland is wholly noble. I get letters from engineers who cannot understand Einstein, and from parsons who think that I cannot understand Genesis, from husbands whose wives have deserted them - not (they say) that that would matter, but the wives have taken the furniture with them, and what in these circumstances should an enlightened male do? ...I get letters (concerning whose genuineness I am suspicious) trying to get me to advocate abortion, and I get letters from young mothers asking my opinion of bottle-feeding.

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Letter to Mr C. L. Aiken, March 19, 1930
3 months 6 days ago

Where are these rational practices to be taught and acquired? Not within the four walls of a bare building, in which formality predominates... But in the nursery, play-ground, fields, gardens, workshops, manufactures, museums and class-rooms. ...The facts collected from all these sources will be concentrated, explained, discussed, made obvious to all, and shown in their direct application to practice in all the business of life.

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3rd Part
4 months 1 week ago

The healthy man does not torture others-generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

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In Du, May 1941
5 months 3 weeks ago

Whilst in speaking of human things, we say that it is necessary to know them before we can love them...the saints on the contrary say in speaking of divine things that it is necessary to love them in order to know them, and that we only enter truth through charity.

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