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2 months 1 week ago

I am quite at a loss about the nailboys remaining with mr Stewart. they have long been a dead expence instead of profit to me. in truth they require a vigour of discipline to make them do reasonable work, to which he cannot bring himself. on the whole I think it will be best for them also to be removed to mr Lilly's control.

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In a letter to James Dinsmore as quoted in The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson, by Henry Wiencek, Smithsonian Magazine,
5 months 3 days ago

In the Gospels, for instance, we sometimes find the kingdom of heaven illustrated by principles drawn from observation of this world rather than from an ideal conception of justice; ... They remind us that the God we are seeking is present and active, that he is the living God; they are doubtless necessary if we are to keep religion from passing into a mere idealism and God into the vanishing point of our thought and endeavour.

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Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900), p. 54
6 months 2 weeks ago

Nothing prints more lively in our minds than something we wish to forget.

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Book II, Ch. 12
6 months 3 weeks ago

If they have entered into the spirit if these rules, and if the rules have made sufficient impression on them to become rooted and established in their minds, they will feel how much difference there is between what is said here and what a few logicians may perhaps have written by chance approximating to it in a few passages of their works.

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5 months 1 week ago

Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.

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Many politicians of our time are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim. If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed have to wait forever.

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p. 42
6 months 1 week ago

Savage - There is only one way fit for a man - Heroism, or Master-Morality, or Violence. All the other people in between are ploughing the sand.

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Pilgrim's Regress 100
6 months 1 week ago

I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred. I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant.

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Considerations by the Way

Techno trash feudal lords....

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6 months 1 week ago

Some old poet's grand imagination is imposed on us as adamantine everlasting truth, and God's own word! Pythagoras says, truly enough, "A true assertion respecting God, is an assertion of God"; but we may well doubt if there is any example of this in literature.

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2 months 1 week ago

Never have nations been civilized, except by religion.

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XXXIII, p. 99
2 months 1 week ago

All things are changing; and thou thyself art in continuous mutation and in a manner in continuous destruction and the whole universe to.

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IX, 19
7 months 1 week ago

He realized now that to be afraid of this death he was staring at with animal terror meant to be afraid of life. Fear of dying justified a limitless attachment to what is alive in man. And all those who had not made the gestures necessary to live their lives, all those who feared and exalted impotence — they were afraid of death because of the sanction it gave to a life in which they had not been involved. They had not lived enough, never having lived at all.

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2 months 1 week ago

Religious beauty is superior to ideal beauty, since it is the ideal of the ideal.

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p. 287
5 months 3 days ago

Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.

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"On My Friendly Critics"
6 months 3 weeks ago

One of the principal reasons that diverts those who are entering upon this knowledge so much from the true path which they should follow, is the fancy that they take at the outset that good things are inaccessible, giving them the name great, lofty, elevated, sublime. This destroys everything. I would call them low, common, familiar: these names suit it better; I hate such inflated expressions.

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6 months 1 week ago

Money is itself a product of circulation.

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Notebook VI, The Chapter on Capital, p. 579.
4 months 4 days ago

There's something that remains barbarous in educated people, and lately I've more and more had the feeling that we are nonwondering primitives. And why is it that we no longer marvel at these technological miracles? They've become the external facts of every life. We've all been to the university, we've had introductory courses in everything, and therefore we have persuaded ourselves that if we had the time to apply ourselves to these scientific marvels, we would understand them. But of course that's an illusion. It couldn't happen. Even among people who have had careers in science. They know no more about how it all works than we do. So we are in the position of savage men who, however, have been educated into believing that they are capable of understanding everything. Not that we actually do understand, but that we have the capacity.

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"A Half Life" (1990), pp. 302-303
5 months 2 days ago

Dialogue and monologue are silenced. Bundled together, men march without Thou and without I, those of the left who want to abolish memory, and those of the right who want to regulate it: hostile and separated hosts, they march into the common abyss.

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p. 33
6 months 1 week 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)
5 months 2 days ago

Individuality, conceived as a temporal development involves uncertainty, indeterminacy, or contingency. Individuality is the source of whatever is unpredictable in the world.

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3 months 5 days ago

It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover. To know how to criticize is good, to know how to create is better.

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Part II. Ch. 2 : Mathematical Definitions and Education, p. 129
2 months 3 weeks ago

Do you seek Alcides' equal? None is, except himself.

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line 84; (Juno)
5 months 1 week ago

He was not merely a chip of the old Block, but the old Block itself.

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On Pitt's First Speech (26 February 1781), from Wraxall's Memoirs, First Series, vol. i. p. 342
6 months 2 weeks ago

All... good and useful properties of character have a price in exchange for others which have just as much use. Talent has a market price, since the sovereign or estate-owner can use a talented person in all sorts of ways. Temperament has a fancy price,22 since one can converse well with such a person; he is a pleasant companion. But, character has an inner value[,] and it is above all price.

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Kant, Immanuel (1996), page 203
6 months 1 week ago

Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them.

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Part III: Man and Himself, Ch. 16: Ideas Which Have Become Obsolete, p. 158
2 months 1 week ago

The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest, and was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood? My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam & an Eve left in every country, & left free, it would be better than as it now is.

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Letter to William Short (January 3, 1793), quoted in Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism (1995), pp. 316-317

I have found a paper of mine among some others in which I call architecture 'petrified music.' Really there is something in this; the tone of mind produced by architecture approaches the effect of music.

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Conversations with Eckermann (23 March 1829) - Often quoted as "Architecture is frozen music."
6 months 1 week ago

The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all.

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par. 48
2 months 3 weeks 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

Faith, like light, should ever be simple and unbending; while love, like warmth, should beam forth on every side, and bend to every necessity of our brethren.

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p. 220
3 months 3 weeks ago

A great chapter of the history of the world is written in the chalk. Few passages in the history of man can be supported by such an overwhelming mass of direct and indirect evidence as that which testifies to the truth of the fragment of the history of the globe, which I hope to enable you to read, with your own eyes, tonight. Let me add, that few chapters of human history have a more profound significance for ourselves. I weigh my words well when I assert, that the man who should know the true history of the bit of chalk which every carpenter carries about in his breeches-pocket, though ignorant of all other history, is likely, if he will think his knowledge out to its ultimate results, to have a truer, and therefore a better, conception of this wonderful universe, and of man's relation to it, than the most learned student who is deep-read in the records of humanity and ignorant of those of Nature.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

We cannot stem linguistic change, but we can drag our feet. If each of us were to defy Alexander Pope and be the last to lay the old aside, it might not be a better world, but it would be a lovelier language.

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Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary (1987), p. 231
2 months 1 week ago

The resolution of complex Facts into precise and measured partial Facts, we call the 'Decomposition of Facts'. This process is requisite for the progress of science, but does not necessarily lead to progress. The Conceptions by which Facts are bound together, are suggested by the sagacity of discoverers. But a supply of appropriate hypotheses cannot be constructed by rule, nor without inventive talent. The truth of tentative hypotheses must be tested by their application to facts. The discoverer must be ready, carefully to try his hypotheses in this manner, and to reject them if they will not bear the test, in spite of indolence and vanity.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Be not hasty to speak; nor slow to hear!

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

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D 25
5 months 1 week ago

If our Bodily Life is a burning, our Spiritual Life is a being burnt, a Combustion (or, is precisely the inverse the case?); Death, therefore, perhaps a Change of Capacity.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

The individual is reduced to a negligible quantity, perhaps less in his consciousness than in his practice and in the totality of his obscure emotional states that are derived from this practice. The individual has become a mere cog in an enormous organization of things and powers which tear from his hands all progress, spirituality, and value in order to transform them from their subjective form into the form of a purely objective life. It needs merely to be pointed out that the metropolis is the genuine arena of this culture which outgrows all personal life. Here in buildings and educational institutions, in the wonders and comforts of space-conquering technology, in the formations of community life, and in the visible institutions of the state, is offered such an overwhelming fullness of crystallized and impersonalized spirit that the personality, so to speak, cannot maintain itself under its impact.

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p. 422
6 months 2 weeks ago

As to fidelity, there is no animal in the world so treacherous as man. Our histories have recorded the violent pursuits that dogs have made after the murderers of their masters.

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Ch. 12, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Carew Hazlitt, 1877
7 months 1 week ago

Let us be understood. If the Japanese surrender after the destruction of Hiroshima, having been intimidated, we will rejoice. But we refuse to see anything in such grave news other than the need to argue more energetically in favor of a true international society, in which the great powers will not have superior rights over small and middle-sized nations, where such an ultimate weapon will be controlled by human intelligence rather than by the appetites and doctrines of various states. Before the terrifying prospects now available to humanity, we see even more clearly that peace is the only goal worth struggling for. This is no longer a prayer but a demand to be made by all peoples to their governments a demand to choose definitively between hell and reason.

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6 months 1 week ago

Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom.

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L'imagination (Imagination: A Psychological Critique)
6 months 1 week ago

A ruddy drop of manly blood The surging sea outweighs, The world uncertain comes and goes; The lover rooted stays.

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Friendship
6 months 1 week ago

A testimony is sufficient when it rests on: 1st. A great number of very sensible witnesses who agree in having seen well. 2d. Who are sane, bodily and mentally. 3d. Who are impartial and disinterested. 4th. Who unanimously agree. 5th. Who solemnly certify to the fact.

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As quoted by H. P. Blavatsky in Isis Unveiled, Vol. I, p. 108, 1877
6 months 1 week ago

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

I think that democratic communities have a natural taste for freedom: left to themselves, they will seek it, cherish it, and view any privation of it with regret. But for equality, their passion is ardent, insatiable, incessant, invincible: they call for equality in freedom; and if they cannot obtain that, they still call for equality in slavery.

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Book Two, Chapter I.
6 months 6 days ago

Subjects who reciprocally recognize each other as such, must consider each other as identical, insofar as they both take up the position of subject; they must at all times subsume themselves and the other under the same category. At the same time, the relation of reciprocity of recognition demands the non-identity of one and the other, both must also maintain their absolute difference, for to be a subject implies the claim of individuation.

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Habermas (1972) "Sprachspiel, intention und Bedeutung. Zu Motiven bei Sellars und Wittgenstein". In R.W. Wiggerhaus (Ed.) Sprachanalyse and Soziologie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp). p. 334 This is called the paradoxical achievement of intersubjectivity
7 months ago

If we admit the existence of the prophetic mission, by putting the idea of possibility, which is in fact ignorance, in place of certainty, and make miracles a proof of the truth of man who claims to be a prophet it becomes necessary that they should not be used by a person, who says that they can be performed by others than prophets, as the Mutakallimun do.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

For where God built a church, there the Devil would also build a chapel...Thus is the Devil ever God's ape.

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67. Compare "Where God hath a temple, the Devil will have a chapel", Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, part III, section 4, member 1, subsection 1
6 months 1 week ago

I hate victims who respect their executioners.

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Loser Wins (Les Séquestrés d'Altona: A Play in Five Acts)

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