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3 months 3 weeks ago

The noblest people are those despising wealth, learning, pleasure and life; esteeming above them poverty, ignorance, hardship and death.

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Stobaeus, iv. 29a. 19
4 months 1 week ago

As we divided natural philosophy in general into the inquiry of causes, and productions of effects: so that part which concerneth the inquiry of causes we do subdivide according to the received and sound division of causes. The one part, which is physic, inquireth and handleth the material and efficient causes; and the other, which is metaphysic, handleth the formal and final causes.

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Book VII, 3
3 months 4 days ago

Whoever finishes a revolution only halfway, digs his own grave.

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Act I.
4 months 5 days ago

It is not to be supposed that she was, or that any one, at the age at which I first saw her, could be, all that she afterwards became. Least of all could this be true of her, with whom self-improvement, progress in the highest and in all senses, was a law of her nature; a necessity equally from the ardour with which she sought it, and from the spontaneous tendency of faculties which could not receive an impression or an experience without making it the source or the occasion of an accession of wisdom. Up to the time when I first saw her, her rich and powerful nature had chiefly unfolded itself according to the received type of feminine genius. To her outer circle she was a beauty and a wit, with an air of natural distinction, felt by all who approached her: to the inner, a woman of deep and strong feeling, of penetrating and intuitive intelligence, and of an eminently meditative and poetic nature.

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(p. 185)
4 months 3 weeks ago

Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.

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As quoted in InfoWorld, Vol. 23, No. 16, 16 April 2001, p. 49. This had been attributed previously to many other sources from 1908 on, according to this analysis by Quote Investigator.
3 months 5 days ago

To be in love is not the same as loving. You can be in love with a woman and still hate her.

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3 months 5 days ago

Is it really not possible to touch the gaming table without being instantly infected by superstition?

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3 months ago

The feeling of being ten thousand years behind, or ahead, of the others, of belonging to the beginnings or to the end of humanity...

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3 months 2 weeks ago

It is told that those who first brought out the irrationals from concealment into the open perished in shipwreck, to a man. For the unutterable and the formless must needs be concealed. And those who uncovered and touched this image of life were instantaneously destroyed and shall remain forever exposed to the play of the eternal waves.

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As quoted by Tobias Dantzig, Number: The Language of Science (1930) also see Proclus, scholium to Book X of Euclid's Elements, vol. V.
1 week 6 days ago

But how many are the final causes of union, the most beautiful, which this deity contains within himself? The Sun, that is, Apollo, is "Leader of the Muses;" and inasmuch as he completes our life with good order, he produces in the world Æsculapius; for even before the world was, he had the latter by his side. But were one to discuss the numerous other qualities belonging to this god, he would never arrive to the end of them.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as if it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasoning grasps at straws for premises and floats on gossamer for deductions.

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p. 91.

The old dualistic notion of mind and matter, so prominent in Cartesianism, as two radically different kinds of substance, will hardly find defenders to-day. Rejecting this, we are driven to some form of hylopathy, otherwise called monism.

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4 months 1 week ago

There is no need for you to develop an armed insurrection. Christ himself has already begun an insurrection with his mouth.

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pp. 67-68
2 months 3 weeks ago

Why tempt ye me, ye hypocrites? Shew me the tribute money.

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22:18-19 (KJV)
4 months 1 week ago

The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education.

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Chapter II, p. 17.
1 month 3 weeks ago

Those who cannot find moral clarity are likely to settle for the far more dangerous simplicity, or purity, instead.

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It has always been denied by the republican party in this country, that the Constitution had given the power of incorporation to Congress. On the establishment of the Bank of the United States, this was the great ground on which that establishment was combated; and the party prevailing supported it only on the argument of its being an incident to the power given them for raising money.

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Letter to Dr. Maese, 1809. ME 12:231
4 months 5 days ago

Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract. Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say.

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The Scientific Outlook, 1931
1 month 2 weeks ago

I have learned by some experience, by many examples, and by the writings of countless others before me, also occupied in the search, that certain environments, certain modes of life, certain rules of conduct are more conducive to inner and outer harmony than others. There are, in fact, certain roads that one may follow. Simplification of life is one of them.

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1 week 5 days ago

The greatest ideal that man can aspire to is not to be a show-case of virtue, but just to be a genial, likable and reasonable human being.

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p. 242
5 months 1 day ago

O light! This is the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer. Return to Tipasa (1954) Variant translation: In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

The ideal of strictly scientific method in mathematics which I have tried to realise here, and which perhaps might be named after Euclid I should like to describe in the following way... The novelty of this book does not lie in the content of the theorems but in the development of the proofs and the foundations on which they are based... With this book I accomplish an object which I had in view in my Begriffsschrift of 1879 and which I announced in my Grundlagen der Arithmetik. I am here trying to prove the opinion on the concept of number that I expressed in the book last mentioned.

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Vol. 1. pp. 137-140, as cited in: Ralph H. Johnson (2012), Manifest Rationality: A Pragmatic Theory of Argument, p. 87

No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free no one ever will.

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Letter to George Washington (9 September 1792) The word "censor" in this context means one who censures or an adverse critic not an official who decides what can be published.
3 months 3 weeks ago

Disease of the home and of the life comes about in the same way as that of the body.

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Freeman (1948), p. 170 Variant: Disease occurs in a household, or in a life, just as it does in a body.
3 months 2 weeks ago

By the air which I breathe, and by the water which I drink, I will not endure to be blamed on account of this discourse.

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As reported by Heraclides Ponticus (c. 360 BC), and Diogenes Laërtius, in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, "Pythagoras", Sect. 6, in the translation of C. D. Yonge
3 weeks 4 days ago

It is a most earnest thing to be alive in this world; to die is not sport for a man. Man's life never was a sport to him; it was a stern reality, altogether a serious matter to be alive!

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3 months 1 week ago

As the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity. Variant translation: When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness.

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Book Four, Chapter VIII
3 months 4 days ago

The End of the Life of Mankind on Earth is this,-that in this Life they may order all their relations with FREEDOM according to REASON.

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p. 5
4 months 5 days ago

Righteousness cannot be born until self-righteousness is dead.

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Justice in War-Time (1916), p. 192
3 months 4 weeks ago

I shall develop the thesis that anyone acting communicatively must, in performing any speech act, raise universal validity claims and suppose that they can be vindicated.

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p. 22
2 months 1 week ago

It is the perfection of God's works that they are all done with the greatest simplicity. He is the God of order and not of confusion. And therefore as they would understand the frame of the world must endeavor to reduce their knowledge to all possible simplicity, so must it be in seeking to understand these visions.

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Cited in Rules for methodizing the Apocalypse, Rule 9, from a manuscript published in The Religion of Isaac Newton (1974) by Frank E. Manuel
3 months 3 weeks ago

In adversity, remember to keep an even mind.

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Book II, ode iii, line 1
2 months 2 weeks ago

Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.

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p. 135; Ch. 17, December 15, 1939.

To cleave that sea in the gentle autumnal season, murmuring the name of each islet, is to my mind the joy most apt to transport the heart of man into paradise.

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On the Aegean Sea, in Ch. 2
2 months 2 weeks ago

Instead of gambling on the eternal impossibility of the revolution and on the fascist return of a war-machine in general, why not think that a new type of revolution is in the course of becoming possible, and that all kinds of mutating, living machines conduct wars, are combined and trace out a plane of consistence which undermines the plane of organization of the World and the States?

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from Dialogues with Claire Parnet, p. 147 [emphasis in original].
2 months 3 weeks ago

He that is not with me is against me: and he that gathereth not with me scattereth.

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Luke 11:23 (KJV)
2 months 2 days ago

There is but a step between a proud man's glory and his disgrace.

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Maxim 138
2 months 2 weeks ago

The emptiness of Zen Buddhism... creates a neighborly nearness between things.

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4 months 6 days ago

It is very important to note that some 2,500 years ago at the least Pythagoras went from Samos to the Ganges to learn geometry...But he would certainly not have undertaken such a strange journey had the reputation of the Brahmins' science not been long established in Europe...

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Voltaire, Fragments historiques sur l'Inde. Quoted in Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.
4 months 5 days ago

Philosophy, if it cannot answer so many questions as we could wish, has at least the power of asking questions which increase the interest of the world, and show the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things of daily life.

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4 months 5 days ago

The method of "postulating" what we want has many advantages; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil.

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Ch. 7: Rational, Real and Complex Numbers
4 months 6 days ago

Monotheistic religions alone furnish the spectacle of religious wars, religious persecutions, heretical tribunals, that breaking of idols and destruction of images of the gods, that razing of Indian temples and Egyptian colossi, which had looked on the sun 3,000 years: just because a jealous god had said, 'Thou shalt make no graven image.'

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4 months 5 days ago

The pursuit of philosophy is founded on the belief that knowledge is good, even if what is known is painful. A man imbued with the philosophic spirit, whether a professional philosopher or not, will wish his beliefs to be as true as he can make them, and will, in equal measure, love to know and hate to be in error. This principle has a wider scope than may be apparent at first sight.

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4 months 3 days ago

But, if it will help ease your irritated souls, please know, dearly departed, that you have ruined our lives.

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Aegistheus, Act 2
1 month 1 week ago

What right have humans to impose our values on members of another race or species? The charge is seductive but misplaced. There is no anthropomorphism here, no imposition of human values on alien minds. Human and nonhuman animals are alike in an ethically critical respect. The pleasure-pain axis is universal to sentient life. No sentient being wants to be harmed - to be asphyxiated, dismembered, or eaten alive. The wishes of a terrified toddler or a fleeing zebra to flourish unmolested are not open to doubt even in the absence of the verbal capacity to say so.

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"The Radical Plan to Phase out Earth's Predatory Species", io9, 30 Jul. 2014
4 months 5 days ago

It is a bad thing to perform menial duties even for the sake of freedom; to fight with pinpricks, instead of with clubs. I have become tired of hypocrisy, stupidity, gross arbitrariness, and of our bowing and scraping, dodging, and hair-splitting over words. Consequently, the government has given me back my freedom.

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Letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge (25 January 1843)
4 months 4 days ago

So much of our time is spent in preparation, so much in routine and so much in retrospect, that the amount of each person's genius is confined to a very few hours.

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Quoted in Simon Brown (ed.) The New England Farmer, vol. 9 (January 1857) p. 18
4 months 5 days ago

I am sorry to say that at the moment I am so busy as to be convinced that life has no meaning whatever... I do not see that we can judge what would be the result of the discovery of truth, since none has hitherto been discovered.

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Letter to Will Durant, 20 June, 1931

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