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2 months 1 week ago

The first and the simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind is Curiosity.

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Part I Section I
1 month 1 week ago

You see, if you say something positive like the whole of life - all living things - is descended from a single common ancestor which lived about 4,000 million years ago and that we are all cousins, well that is an exceedingly important and true thing to say and that is what I want to say. Somebody who is religious sees that as threatening and so I am represented as attacking religion, and I am forced into responding to their reaction. But you do not have to see my main purpose as attacking religion. Certainly I see the scientific view of the world as incompatible with religion, but that is not what is interesting about it. It is also incompatible with magic, but that also is not worth stressing. What is interesting about the scientific world view is that it is true, inspiring, remarkable and that it unites a whole lot of phenomena under a single heading. And that is what is so exciting for me.

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Kam Patel (28 April 1995) . "Going the whole hog". Times Higher Education.
1 month 4 weeks ago

"The bitterest sorrow that man can know is to aspire to do much and to achieve nothing"... so Herodotus relates that a Persian said to a Theban at a banquet (book ix., chap. xvi.). And it is true. With knowledge and desire we can embrace everything , or almost everything; with the will nothing, or almost nothing. And contemplation is not happiness - no! not if this contemplation implies impotence. And out of this collision between our knowledge and our power pity arises.

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3 months 1 week ago

Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.

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Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach
4 months 2 days ago

It is said in the Book of Poetry, "In silence is the offering presented, and the spirit approached to; there is not the slightest contention." Therefore the superior man does not use rewards, and the people are stimulated to virtue. He does not show anger, and the people are awed more than by hatchets and battle-axes.

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1 week ago

Colonization on a grand scale is a political necessity of absolutely the first order. A nation that does not colonize is irrevocably vowed to socialism, to war between rich and poor. The conquest of a nation of inferior race by a superior race, which establishes itself as the ruler, has nothing shocking about it.

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92-93
3 months 1 week ago

When all is said and done, we are in the end absolutely dependent on the universe; and into sacrifices and surrenders of some sort, deliberately looked at and accepted, we are drawn and pressed as into our only permanent positions of repose. Now in those states of mind which fall short of religion, the surrender is submitted to as an imposition of necessity, and the sacrifice is undergone at the very best without complaint. In the religious life, on the contrary, surrender and sacrifice are positively espoused: even unnecessary givings-up are added in order that the happiness may increase. Religion thus makes easy and felicitous what in any case is necessary; and if it be the only agency that can accomplish this result, its vital importance as a human faculty stands vindicated beyond dispute. It becomes an essential organ of our life, performing a function which no other portion of our nature can so successfully fulfill.

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Lecture II, "Circumscription of the Topic"
1 month 1 week ago

To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years, and take rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched and none the wiser. It is as if a ship captain should sail to India from the Port of London; and having brought a chart of the Thames on deck at his first setting out, should obstinately use no other for the whole voyage.

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Crabbed Age and Youth.
3 months 2 weeks ago

All of the days go toward death and the last one arrives there.

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Ch. 20. Of the Force of Imagination
3 months 2 weeks ago

The Apostle Paul wants us to work with our hands in order to share with the needy (Ephesians 5:28). Notice that he could have said that we should work to support ourselves. But Paul says that we work to give to those in need. This is why caring for our body is also a Christian work. If the body is healthy and fit, we are able to work and save money that can be used to help those in need.

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p. 80
2 months 1 week ago

A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime...

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3 months 2 days ago

Death takes the mean man with the proud; The fatal urn has room for all.

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Book III, ode i, line 14 (trans. John Conington)
2 months 5 days ago

Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.

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John 20:17 (KJV)
3 months 3 weeks ago

No man is free who is not master of himself.

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Fragment 35 (Oldfather translation)
2 months 1 week ago

The Protestant churches generally hold that the elements of the sacrament are flesh and blood only in a tropical sense; they nourish our souls as meat and the juice of it would our bodies. But the Catholics maintain that they are literally just that; although they possess all the sensible qualities of wafer-cakes and diluted wine. But we can have no conception of wine except what may enter into a belief, either -

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1 month 3 days ago

Whenever you say anything good about East Germany, immediately somebody jumps up and says, "My God, you're a Stalinist..." I'm not defending everything about it, of course. But I laboured on the chapter that talks about the east. I fact-checked it; I had somebody else fact-check it. I knew that I was going to get a lot of flak for that. But in the beginning, East Germany did a better job. They just did.

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From an interview with Alex Clark, as cited in "Nazism, slavery, empire: can countries learn from national evil?", The Guardian
2 months 1 week ago

Tears do not burn except in solitude.

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4 months 1 day ago

Music is associated not only with speculation but with morality. When rhythms and modes reach an intellect through the ear, they doubtless affect and reshape that mind according to their particular character.

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4 months 1 week ago

Knowledge of the fact differs from knowledge of the reason for the fact.

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1 month 1 week ago

We've reached a truly remarkable situation: a grotesque mismatch between the American intelligentsia and the American electorate. A philosophical opinion about the nature of the universe which is held by the vast majority of top American scientists, and probably the majority of the intelligentsia generally, is so abhorrent to the American electorate that no candidate for popular election dare affirm it in public. If I'm right, this means that high office in the greatest country in the world is barred to the very people best qualified to hold it: the intelligentsia, unless they are prepared to lie about their beliefs. To put it bluntly American political opportunities are heavily loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest.

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Richard Dawkins on militant atheism,
1 week 2 days ago

There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the information by which to detect lies.

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What Modern Liberty Means, p. 64
3 months 2 weeks ago

It is not without good reason said, that he who has not a good memory should never take upon him the trade of lying.

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Ch. 9. Of Liars, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Hazlitt, 1842
1 month 3 weeks ago

Steiner goes further than this -- and this is his own central contribution to modern thought. He states that once we have made a habit of remembering Mozart and the stars, we shall find ourselves developing powers of 'spiritual vision.' We shall never again feel ourselves to be helpless victims of the external world.

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p. 169
3 months 2 weeks ago

For my own part, I cannot without grief see so much as an innocent beast pursued and killed that has no defence, and from which we have received no offence at all.

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Ch. 11, tr. Cotton, 1685
2 months 3 weeks ago

Do not even think of doing what ought not to be done.

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Pythagorean Ethical Sentences From Stobæus
1 month 1 week ago

New technological environments are commonly cast in the molds of the preceding technology out of the sheer unawareness of their designers.

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(p. 47)
2 months 1 week ago

The seat of faith, however, is not consciousness but spontaneous religious experience, which brings the individual's faith into immediate relation with God. Here we must ask: Have I any religious experience and immediate relation to God, and hence that certainty which will keep me, as an individual, from dissolving in the crowd?

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p 85
3 months 1 week ago

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

And why should man, added he, pretend to an exemption from the lot of all other animals? The whole earth, believe me, PHILO, is cursed and polluted. A perpetual war is kindled amongst all living creatures. Necessity, hunger, want, stimulate the strong and courageous: Fear, anxiety, terror, agitate the weak and infirm. The first entrance into life gives anguish to the new-born infant and to its wretched parent: Weakness, impotence, distress, attend each stage of that life: and it is at last finished in agony and horror.

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Demea to Philo, Part X
3 months 2 days ago

As it has long been and shall be, not ever, I think, will unfathomable time be emptied of either. This quote refers to Love and Strife, the fundamental opposing and ordering forces in Empedocles' model of the cosmos.

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fr. 16
1 month 1 week ago

A cock has great influence on his own dunghill.

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Maxim 357
3 months 2 weeks ago

The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings, capable of laws, where there is no law there is no freedom.

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Second Treatise of Government, Ch. VI, sec. 57
3 months 1 week ago

To live without duties is obscene.

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Aristocracy
3 months 1 week ago

[T]hings are impressed better by active than by passive repetition. ...[I]t pays better to wait and recollect by an effort from within, than to look at the book again.

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Ch. 16
3 months 4 weeks ago

He who disdained not to assume us unto Himself, did not disdain to take our place and speak our words, in order that we might speak His words.

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p.421
3 months 1 week ago

The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one - particularly if he plays golf, which he usually does.

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Introduction to The New Generation, 1930
1 month 5 days ago

Faith exalts the human heart, by removing it from the market-place, making it sacred and unexchangeable. Under the jurisdiction of religion our deeper feelings are sacralized, so as to become raw material for the ethical life: the life lived in judgement.

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"Avant-garde and Kitsch" (p. 91)
1 month 1 week ago

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

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(p. 132)
3 months 2 weeks ago

I remembered the way out suggested by a great princess when told that the peasants had no bread: "Well, let them eat cake".

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This passage contains a statement Qu'ils mangent de la brioche that has usually come to be attributed to Marie Antoinette; this was written in 1766, when Marie Antoinette was 10
3 months 1 week ago

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would be either a lunatic-on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg-or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

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Book II, Chapter 3, "The Shocking Alternative"
3 months 3 days ago

Thou shouldst not become presumptuous through life; for death comes upon thee at last, and the perishable part falls to the ground.

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2 months 1 week ago

Neither a person nor a nation can exist without some higher idea. And there is only one higher idea on earth, and it is the idea of the immortality of the human soul, for all other "higher" ideas of life by which humans might live derive from that idea alone.

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A Writer's Diary, Vol. 1: 1873-1876, ed. Kenneth Lantz (1994), p. 734
3 months 1 week ago

There is no spiritual sustenance in flat equality. It is a dim recognition of this fact which makes much of our political propaganda sound so thin. We are trying to be enraptured by something which is merely the negative condition of the good life. That is why the imagination of people is so easily captured by appeals to the craving for inequality, whether in a romantic form of films about loyal courtiers or in the brutal form of Nazi ideology. The tempter always works on some real weakness in our own system of values - offers food to some need which we have starved.

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To receive applause for works which do not demand all our powers hinders our advance towards a perfecting of our spirit. It usually means that thereafter we stand still.

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K 42
3 months 1 week ago

I fancy I need more than another to speak (rather than write), with such a formidable tendency to the lapidary style. I build my house of boulders.

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Letter to Thomas Carlyle, 30 October 1841
4 months 1 week ago

It is all too easy to forget that there are emotional motivations in history, as well as economic ones.

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3 months 1 week ago

Abjection is a methodological conversion, like Cartesian doubt and Husserlian epoche: it establishes the world as a closed system which consciousness regards from without, in the manner of divine understanding.

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p. 141

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