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8 months 5 days ago

The activity of to-day and the assurance of to-morrow.

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p. 215
9 months 2 days ago

It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the "why" arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Don't let your hearts grow numb. Stay alert. It is your soul which matters.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

We ought to acquiesce in the reasoning of the Egyptian priests, who raise altars to the Sun conjointly with Jupiter; nay, rather we should assent to Apollo himself (long before them), who sits on the same throne with Jove, and whose words are,

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8 months 5 days ago

Who is going to educate the human race in the principles and practice of conservation?

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Chapter 12 (p. 112)
7 months 6 days ago

Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.

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No. 1, volume v, p. 331
7 months 3 weeks ago

As Cæsar was at supper the discourse was of death,-which sort was the best. "That," said he, "which is unexpected."

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Cæsar
7 months 2 weeks ago

None but a Craftsman can judge of a craft.

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8 months 6 days ago

You ask particularly after my health. I suppose that I have not many months to live; but, of course, I know nothing about it. I may add that I am enjoying existence as much as ever, and regret nothing.

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Last letter, to Myron Benton, March 31, 1862
4 months 2 weeks ago

Everyone has a religion, whether admitted or not, because it is impossible to be human without having some basic assumptions (or intuitions) about existence and the good life.

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p. 123
7 months 5 days ago

The poverty of the incapable, the distresses that come upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so many "in shallows and in miseries," are the decrees of a large, far-seeing benevolence.

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Pt. III, Ch. 25 : Poor-Laws
4 months 3 weeks ago

Man, little as he may suppose it, is necessitated to obey superiors. He is a social being in virtue of this necessity; nay he could not be gregarious otherwise. He obeys those whom he esteems better than himself, wiser, braver; and will forever obey such; and even be ready and delighted to do it.

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6 months 4 weeks ago

Many, and I think the determining, constitutive facts remain outside the reach of the operational concept. And by virtue of this limitation-this methodological injunction against transitive concepts which might show the facts in their true light and call them by their true name-the descriptive analysis of the facts blocks the apprehension of facts and becomes an element of the ideology that sustains the facts. Proclaiming the existing social reality as its own norm, this sociology fortifies in the individuals the "faithless faith" in the reality whose victims they are.

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p. 119
6 months 2 weeks ago

One has to do something new in order to see something new.

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J 1770
7 months 1 day ago

Love's great (and sole) originality is to make happiness indistinct from misery.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

The world thought well of my schoolmaster guardian, because he was neither a liar, nor a scamp, nor a gambler; but he was coarse, avaricious, and ignorant; he knew nothing beyond the confused lessons which he taught to his classes. He imagined that in forcing a youth to become a monk he would be offering a sacrifice acceptable to God. He used to boast of the many victims which he devoted annually to Dominic and Francis and Benedict.

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As quoted in Life and Letters of Erasmus: Lectures Delivered at Oxford 1893-4 (1899) by James Anthony Froude
6 months 4 weeks ago

And though this may seem to subtile a deduction of the Lawes of Nature, to be taken notice of by all men;whereof the most part are too busie in getting food, and the rest too negligent to understand; yet to leave all men unexcusable, they have been contracted into one easie sum, intelligble, even to the meanest capacity; and that is, Do not that to another, which thou wouldest not have done to thyselfe; which sheweth him, that he has no more to do in learning the Lawes of Nature, but, when weighing the actions of other men with his own, they seem too heavy, to put them into the other part of the balance, and his own into their place, that his own passions, and selfe love, may adde nothing to the weight; and then there is none of these Laws of Nature that will not appear unto him very reasonable.

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The First Part, Chapter 15, p. 79
6 months 2 weeks ago

The chief error in philosophy is overstatement.

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Pt. I, ch. 1, sec. 1.
7 months 3 weeks ago

Ethics is inescapable.

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Preface, p. xv
6 months 4 weeks ago

And having said this, Jesus smote his face with both his hands, and then smote the ground with his head. And having raised his head, he said: "Cursed be every one who shall insert into my sayings that I am the son of God." At these words the disciples fell down as dead, whereupon Jesus lifted them up, saying: 'Let us fear God now, if we would not be affrighted in that day.'

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Ch. 53
8 months 4 days ago

That is precisely what we should have expected, since Genet wants to live simultaneously creation, destruction, the impossibility of destroying and the impossibility of creating, since he wants both to show his rejection of the divine creation and to manifest, in the absolute, human impotence as man's reproval of God and as the testimony of his grandeur.

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p. 424
8 months 4 days ago

The history of mankind could... be described as a history of outbreaks of fashionable philosophical and religious maladies. These... have... one serious function... evoking criticism.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

To believe in God is to yearn for His existence and, furthermore, it is to act as if He did exist.

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1 week 6 days ago

In the minimal sense that there are those who try to do good things but don't have any real empathetic understanding...I think this sentiment is true...beyond that it's torn apart in two seconds...

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8 months 1 week ago

A man of intellect is like an artist who gives a concert without any help from anyone else, playing on a single instrument - a piano, say, which is a little orchestra in itself. Such a man is a little world in himself; and the effect produced by various instruments together, he produces single-handed, in the unity of his own consciousness. Like the piano, he has no place in a symphony; he is a soloist and performs by himself - in solitude, it may be; or if in the company with other instruments, only as principal; or for setting the tone, as in singing.

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9 months 3 days ago

Ideas are cheap. It's only what you do with them that counts.

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8 months 5 days ago

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

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Poetry and Imagination
4 months 2 weeks ago

A new theory by the author has been added, which draws the physical inferences consequent on the extension of the foundations of geometry beyond Reimann... and represents an attempt to derive from world-geometry not only gravitational but also electromagnetic phenomena. Even if this theory is still only in its infant stage, I feel convinced that it contains no less truth than Einstein's Theory of Gravitation-whether this amount of truth is unlimited or, what is more probable, is bounded by the Quantum Theory.

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From the Author's Preface to Third Edition
6 months 3 days ago

Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perception...When these ratios change, men change.

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8 months 6 days ago

When the intensity of emotional conviction subsides, a man who is in the habit of reasoning will search for logical grounds in favour of the belief which he finds in himself.

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Ch. 1: Mysticism and Logic
8 months 1 week ago

The heights of popularity and patriotism are still the beaten road to power and tyranny ; flattery to treachery ; standing armies to arbitrary government ; and the glory of God to the temporal interest of the clergy.

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Part I, Essay 8: Of Public Credit (This appears as a footnote in editions H to P. Other editions include it in the body of the text, and some number it Essay 9.)
8 months 2 weeks ago

Careful thought about this will reveal how few there are who are truly converted from evil habits, especially among those who have prolonged their lives of sin right up to the end. The path down to evil is quick, slippery, and easy. But to turn and "to go forth to the upper air . . . this is effort, this is toil." Think of Aesop's goat before you descend and remember that climbing out is not easy.

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p. 147
8 months 5 days ago

There has been a general trend in recent times toward a Unitarian mythology and the worship of one God. This is the tendency which it is customary to regard as spiritual progress. On what grounds? Chiefly, so far as one can see, because we in the Twentieth Century West are officially the worshippers of a single divinity. A movement whose consummation is Us must be progressive. Quod erat demonstrandum.

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"One and Many," p. 16
7 months 6 days ago

Even there, in the mines, underground, I may find a human heart in another convict and murderer by my side, and I may make friends with him, for even there one may live and love and suffer. One may thaw and revive a frozen heart in that convict, one may wait upon him for years, and at last bring up from the dark depths a lofty soul, a feeling, suffering creature; one may bring forth an angel, create a hero! There are so many of them, hundreds of them, and we are to blame for them.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

So far as cerebral structure goes... it is clear that Man differs less from the Chimpanzee or the Orang, than these do even from the Monkeys, and that the difference between the brains of the Chimpanzee and of Man is almost insignificant, when compared with that between the Chimpanzee brain and that of a Lemur.

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Ch.2, p. 120
7 months 6 days ago

I should not be surprized at seeing a French Army conveyed by a British Navy to an attack upon this Kingdom.

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Letter to French Laurence (12 May 1797) after hearing of the mutinies in the Royal Navy, quoted in R. B. McDowell (ed.)
5 months 3 weeks ago

The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm.

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Hallam', The Edinburgh Review (September 1828), quoted in T. B. Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to The Edinburgh Review, Vol. I (1843), p. 210
4 months 2 days ago

We are all made for mutual assistance, as the feet, the hands, and the eyelids, as the rows of the upper and under teeth, from whence it follows that clashing and opposition is perfectly unnatural.

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II, 1
4 months 4 weeks ago

Names and attributes must be accommodated to the essence of things, and not the essence to the names, since things come first and names afterwards.

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As quoted in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (1957) by Stillman Drake, p. 92
4 months 2 weeks ago

Man is constituted as a speculative being; he contemplates the world, and the objects around him, not with a passive indifferent eye, but as a system disposed with order and design.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

One man will say a thing of himself without comprehending its excellence, in which another will discern a marvelous series of conclusions, which makes us affirm that it is no longer the same expression, and that he is no more indebted for it to the one from whom he has learned it, than a beautiful tree belongs to the one who cast the seed, without thinking of it, or knowing it, into the fruitful soil which caused its growth by its own fertility.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

... the only contestant who can confidently enter the lists is the man who has seen his own blood, who has felt his teeth rattle beneath his opponent's fist, who has been tripped and felt the full force of his adversary's charge, who has been downed in body but not in spirit, one who, as often as he falls, rises again with greater defiance than ever.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

I spoke after Sasha, for an hour. I discussed the farce of a government undertaking to carry democracy abroad by suppressing the last vestiges of it at home. I took up the contention of Judge Mayer that only such ideas are permissible as are "within the law." Thus he had instructed the jurymen when he had asked them if they were prejudiced against those who propagate unpopular ideas. I pointed out that there had never been an ideal, however humane and peaceful, which in its time had been considered "within the law." I named Jesus, Socrates, Galileo, Giordano Bruno. "Were they 'within the law"?" I asked. "And the men who set America free from British rule, the Jeffersons and the Patrick Henrys? The William Lloyd Garrisons, the John Browns, the David Thoreaus and Wendell Phillipses-were they within the law?"

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chapter 45
8 months 1 week ago

Morality is everywhere the same for all men, therefore it comes from God; sects differ, therefore they are the work of men.

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"Atheist", 1764

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