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5 months 1 week ago

The vicious circle of dread of war which leads the nations to arm themselves for self-protection, with the result that bloated armaments ultimately lead to the war which they were intended to avert, can be broken in either of two conceivable ways. There might arise a unique world power, brought into being by the unification of all those now in possession of weapons, and equipped with the capacity to forbid the lesser and unarmed nations to make war. On the other hand, it may arise by the working of a fate to us still inscrutable which, out of ruin, will disclose a way towards the development of a new human being. To will the discovery of this way would be blind impotence, but those who do not wish to deceive themselves will be prepared for the possibility.

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2 months 1 week ago

I am happy because I want nothing from anyone. I do not care about money. Decorations, titles or distinctions mean nothing to me. I do not crave praise. The only thing that gives me pleasure, apart from my work, my violin, and my sailboat, is the appreciation of my fellow workers.

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2 weeks 3 days ago

This could be a reply to the previous post: Be gentle to all and stern with yourself. -Teresa of Avila

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3 months 1 week ago

All great peoples are conservative; slow to believe in novelties; patient of much error in actualities; deeply and forever certain of the greatness that is in law, in custom once solemnly established, and now long recognized as just and final.

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6 months 4 weeks ago

A penny saved is of more value than a penny paid out.

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What Luther Says, Section on "Life, Human," No. 2438. Rules for a Thrifty Life. 2, p. 784
6 months 3 weeks ago

To teach him betimes to love and be good-natur'd to others, is to lay early the true foundation of an honest man; all injustice generally springing from too great love of ourselves and too little of others.

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Sec. 139
6 months 3 weeks ago

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. But do not care to convince him. Men will believe what they see.

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Let them see. Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 222
5 months 6 days ago

If anyone possesses this faculty, then his attention is in reality directed beyond the world, whether he is aware of it or not. The link which attaches the human being to the reality outside the world is, like the reality itself, beyond the reach of human faculties. The respect that it makes us feel as soon as it is recognized cannot be shown to us by evidence or testimony.

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Investigate what is, and not what pleases.

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Der Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt (The Attempt as Mediator of Object and Subject)
3 months 2 weeks ago

A Muslim who knows French will never be a dangerous Muslim.

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quoted in Arvidsson, Stefan (2006), Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science, translated by Sonia Wichmann, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.'(107)
3 months 1 week ago

In the true Literary Man there is thus ever, acknowledged or not by the world, a sacredness: he is the light of the world; the world's Priest;-guiding it, like a sacred Pillar of Fire, in its dark pilgrimage through the waste of Time.

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3 months 5 days ago

"It is nothing-a trifling matter at most; keep a stout heart and it will soon cease"; then in thinking it slight, you will make it slight. Everything depends on opinion; ambition, luxury, greed, hark back to opinion. It is according to opinion that we suffer.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

The mere word 'design' by itself has no consequences and explains nothing. It is the barrenest of principles. The old question of whether there is design is idle. The real question is what is the world, whether or not it have a designer - and that can be revealed only by the study of all nature's particulars.

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Lecture III, Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered
4 months 2 weeks ago

It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in the retrospect. We should have been cut-throats to do otherwise. And there's an end. We ought to know distinctly that we are damned for what we do wrong; but when we have done right, we have only been gentlemen, after all. There is nothing to make a work about.

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"Reflections and Remarks on Human Life", VI: Right and Wrong, published in Works: Letters and Miscellanies of Robert Louis Stevenson -- Sketches, Criticisms, Etc. (1895), p. 628.
3 months 1 day ago

The pity of all this is, you know, a man like that [Sri Ramakrishna] has to have disciples, or no one would ever hear about him. But somehow, as the generations pass, the flame dies out. And eventually the disciples kill him.I wish that there was a way of putting a time-bomb into scriptures and records - not a time-bomb, but some kind of invisible ink, so that all scriptures would un-print themselves about fifty years after the master's death. And just dissolve.

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Audio lecture Ramakrishna, Ramana, and Krishnamurti
5 months 6 days ago

It is not in a person's nature to desire what he already has. Desire is a tendency, the start of a movement toward something, toward a point from which one is absent. If, at the very outset, this movement doubles back on itself toward its point of departure, a person turns round and round like a squirrel in a cage or a prisoner in a condemned cell. Constant turning soon produces revulsion. All workers, especially though not exclusively those who work under inhumane conditions, are easily the victims of revulsion, exhaustion and disgust and the strongest are often the worst affected.

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p. 245
3 months 6 days ago

Now why, if freedom is striven after for love of the I after all - why not choose the I himself as beginning, middle, and end?

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Dover 2005, p. 163
2 months 2 weeks ago

The Plan of the System, may aim at a Natural or an Artificial System. But no classes can be absolutely artificial, for if they were, no assertions could be made concerning them.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

The world would be a happier place than it is if acquisitiveness were always stronger than rivalry. But in fact, a great many men will cheerfully face impoverishment if they can thereby secure complete ruin for their rivals. Hence the present level of taxation. Vanity is a motive of immense potency. Anyone who has much to do with children knows how they are constantly performing some antic, and saying "Look at me." "Look at me" is one of the most fundamental desires of the human heart. It can take innumerable forms, from buffoonery to the pursuit of posthumous fame.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

The vices are very justly man's executioners.

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Chapter X, p. 85
5 months 1 week ago

In the human reality, all existence that spends itself in procuring the prerequisites of existence is thus an "untrue" and unfree existence. Obviously this reflects the not at all ontological condition of a society based on the proposition that freedom is incompatible with the activity of procuring the necessities of life, that this activity is the "natural" function of a specific class, and that cognition of the truth and true existence imply freedom from the entire dimension of such activity. ... Society still is organized in such a way that procuring the necessities of life constitutes the full-time and life-long occupation of specific social classes, which are therefore unfree and prevented from a human existence. In this sense, the classical proposition according to which truth is incompatible with enslavement by socially necessary labor is still valid.

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pp. 127-128
4 months 3 days ago

By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Every true thinker for himself is so far like a monarch; he is absolute, and recognises nobody above him. His judgments, like the decrees of a monarch, spring from his own sovereign power and proceed directly from himself. He takes as little notice of authority as a monarch does of a command; nothing is valid unless he has himself authorised it. On the other hand, those of vulgar minds, who are swayed by all kinds of current opinions, authorities, and prejudices, are like the people which in silence obey the law and commands.

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"Thinking for Oneself," H. Dirks, trans.
7 months 2 weeks ago

Korell is that frequent phenomenon in history: the republic whose ruler has every attribute of the absolute monarch but the name. It therefore enjoyed the usual despotism unrestrained even by those two moderating influences in the legitimate monarchies: regal, honor and court etiquette.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Alas, time comes and time goes, it subtracts little by little; then it deprives a person of a good, the loss of which he indeed feels, and his pain is great. Alas, and he does not discover that long ago it has already taken away from him the most important thing of all-the capacity to make a resolution-and it has made him so familiar with this condition that there is no consternation over it, the last thing that could help gain new power for renewed resolution!

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5 months 2 weeks ago

The manufacturing worker almost always lives in the countryside and in a more or less patriarchal relation to his landlord or employer; the proletarian lives, for the most part, in the city and his relation to his employer is purely a cash relation. The manufacturing worker is torn out of his patriarchal relation by big industry, loses whatever property he still has, and in this way becomes a proletarian.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Evil perpetually tends to disappear.

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Part I, Ch. 2 : The Evanescence of Evil, § 2
6 months 4 weeks ago

All the passages in the Holy Scriptures that mention assistance are they that do away with "free-will", and these are countless...For grace is needed, and the help of grace is given, because "free-will" can do nothing.

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p. 270
2 months 2 weeks ago

The most beautiful monuments of Athens belong to the century of Pericles. In Rome, what writers were produced under the Republic? Only Plautus and Terence. Lucretius, Sallust, and Cicero saw the Republic die. Then came the century of Augustus when the nation was all that it could be by way of talents. The arts, in general, need a king; they only flourish under the influence of sceptres. Even in Greece, the only country where they flourished in the milieu of a republic, Lysippos and Apelles worked for Alexander. Aristotle owed to Alexander's generosity the means to compose his history of animals; and, after the death of this monarch, the poets, scholars, and artists went to look for protection and rewards in the courts of his successors.

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p. 179
6 months 2 weeks ago

Friendship, I have said, is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself..."

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6 months 1 week ago

The universe itself is God and the universal outpouring of its soul.

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As quoted in De Natura Deorum by Cicero, i. 15.
6 months 3 weeks ago

I had obtained some distinction, and felt myself of some importance, before the desire of distinction and of importance had grown into a passion: and little as it was which I had attained, yet having been attained too early, like all pleasures enjoyed too soon, it had made me blasé and indifferent to the pursuit. Thus neither selfish nor unselfish pleasures were pleasures to me. And there seemed no power in nature sufficient to begin the formation of my character anew, and create in a mind now irretrievably analytic, fresh associations of pleasure with any of the objects of human desire.

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(p. 139)
6 months 2 weeks ago

For the trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods.

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"Lying in Politics"
6 months 3 weeks ago

I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: "The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair." In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.

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p. 31
4 months 4 weeks ago

Philosophy was never just ontotheology, and even when philosophers were concerned with ontotheology, they were concerned with much more than that. That is the first reason that the idea of a fundamental "crisis" in philosophy and of the "end of philosophy" is deeply mistaken. And if the questions of philosophy are indeed "unsettleable," in the sense that they will always be with us, that is a wonderful thing, not something to be regretted.

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Science and Philosophy
7 months 3 weeks ago

I will not by suppression, or by performing tricks, try to produce the impression that the ordinary Christianity in the land and the Christianity of the New Testament are alike. "What Do I Want?"

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4 weeks ago

I will say that limitless skepticism creates existential alienation that directly contradicts any mission of resolution. It's unnecessary, as some philosophical ideas and concepts can be known, with certainty, for all intents and purposes and should be allowed to stand unquestioned.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

The standard that I always come back to is the health of the world, which is the same as our own personal health. We can't distinguish our health from the health of everything else. And we know enough from the ecologists now to know that health is a very complex and un-understandable complexity of relationships that makes the world whole.

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We are obliged to regard many of our original minds as crazy - at least until we have become as clever as they are.

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D 97
2 months 1 week ago

If A is success in life, then A = x + y + z. Work is x, play is y and z is keeping your mouth shut.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Recalling all the erroneous things that doctors have been able to say about sex or madness does us a fat lot of good. I think that what is currently politically important is to determine the regime of verediction established at a given moment ... on the basis of which you can now recognize, for example, that doctors in the nineteenth century said so many stupid things about sex. ... It is not so much the history of the true or the history of the false as the history of verediction which has a political significance.

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Lecture 2, January 17, 1979, p. 36
3 months 1 week ago

A well-written Life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.

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Richter (1827).
5 months 3 days ago

It has been said of old, all roads lead to Rome. In paraphrased application to the tendencies of our day, it may truly be said that all roads lead to the great social reconstruction. The economic awakening of the workingman, and his realization of the necessity for concerted industrial action; the tendencies of modern education, especially in their application to the free development of the child; the spirit of growing unrest expressed through, and cultivated by, art and literature, all pave the way to the Open Road.

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4 months 3 days ago

Compassion is the desire that moves the individual self to widen the scope of its self-concern to embrace the whole of the universal self.

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The Toynbee-Ikeda Dialogue: Man Himself Must Choose

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