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3 months 3 weeks ago

To think is to submit to the whims and commands of an uncertain health.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Self-pity is not as sterile as we suppose. Once we feel its mere onset, we assume a thinker's attitude, and come to think of it, we come to think!

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3 months 1 week ago

Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.

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Ch. 4 "Problems of Humanistic Ethics"
3 months 3 weeks ago

Why don't I commit suicide? Because I am as sick of death as I am of life.

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We obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual; whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species, but only with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us.
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5 months 5 days ago

Some will object that the Law is divine and holy. Let it be divine and holy. The Law has no right to tell me that I must be justified by it.

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Chapter 2
5 months 5 days ago

I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice; for it is myself that I portray...I am myself the matter of my book. To the Reader

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tr. Donald M. Frame, 1957
4 months 3 weeks ago

It is a sign of wisdom to be able to use parrhesia without falling into the garrulousness of athuroglossos... One of the problems... how to distinguish that which must be said from that which should be kept silent.

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What the English call "comfortable" is something endless and inexhaustible. Every condition of comfort reveals in turn its discomfort, and these discoveries go on for ever. Hence the new want is not so much a want of those who have it directly, but is created by those who hope to make profit from it.

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S. Dyde, trans. (1896), § 191
5 months 6 days ago

Cleanness of body was ever deemed to proceed from a due reverence to God.

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Book II
3 weeks 3 days ago

Retire into thyself. The rational principle which rules has this nature, that it is content with itself when it does what is just, and so secures tranquility.

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VII, 28
4 months 4 weeks ago

Either we must have war against Russia, before she has the atom bomb, or we will have to lie down and let them govern us. ... Anything is better than submission.

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Speech quoted in The Observer (21 November 1948), quoted in Robert Skildesky, Oswald Mosley (1981), p. 542 and Martin Ceadel, Thinking about Peace and War (1987), p. 52
3 months 2 weeks ago

Christian Kings may erre in deducing a Consequence, but who shall Judge?

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The Third Part, Chapter 43, p. 330
4 months 3 weeks ago

The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.

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Chapter I, Section 3, pg. 12
3 months 2 weeks ago

Martyrs create faith, faith does not create martyrs.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and gave him triumphal processions. Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the 'new, wonderful good society' which shall now be Rome, interpreted to mean 'more money, more ease, more security, more living fatly at the expense of the industrious.

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This is also from the 1965 essay by Justice Millard Caldwell. It is not clear if this is based in any specific dialogue.
3 months ago

I cannot recall a time when American education was not in a "crisis." We have lived through Sputnik (when we were "falling behind the Russians"), through the era of "Johnny can't read," and through the upheavals of the Sixties. Now a good many books are telling us that the university is going to hell in several different directions at once. I believe that, at least in part, the crisis rhetoric has a structural explanation: since we do not have a national consensus on what success in higher education would consist of, no matter what happens, some sizable part of the population is going to regard the situation as a disaster. As with taxation and relations between the sexes, higher education is essentially and continuously contested territory. Given the history of that crisis rhetoric, one's natural response to the current cries of desperation might reasonably be one of boredom.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

I have always thought respectable people scoundrels, and I look anxiously at my face every morning for signs of my becoming a scoundrel.

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Quoted in Alan Wood Bertrand Russell: The Passionate Skeptic: A Biography, Vol. 2 (1958), p. 233
4 months 2 days ago

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Feeling does not succeed in converting consolation into truth, nor does reason succeed in converting truth into consolation.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

It cannot at this time be too often repeated; line upon line; precept upon precept; until it comes into the currency of a proverb, To innovate is not to reform.

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p. 20
3 months 1 week ago

Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality.Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing. The limitation, and the basis arising from what is already actual, are both of them necessary and interconnected.

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Religion in the Making (February 1926), Lecture IV: "Truth and Criticism".
3 months 2 weeks ago

In the form of the oeuvre, the actual circumstances are placed in another dimension where the given reality shows itself as that which it is. Thus it tells the truth about itself; its language ceases to be that of deception, ignorance, and submission. Fiction calls the facts by their name and their reign collapses; fiction subverts everyday experience and shows it to be mutilated and false.

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p. 62
4 months 2 weeks ago

If things emerged from a spaceship which we could not be sure were machines or conscious beings, what we were wondering about would have an answer even if the things were so different from anything we were familiar with that we could never discover it. It would depend on whether there was something it was like to be them, not on whether behavioral similarities warranted our saying so. ... [W]e need ... to ask whether experience is present in [the] alien thing[s], ... whether there is something it is like to be them, and ... the answer to that question is what determines whether they are conscious.

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"Panpsychism" (1979), pp. 191-193.
4 months 3 weeks ago

If you die, I will lie down beside you and I will stay there until the end, without eating or drinking, you will rot in my arms and I will love you as carcass: for you love nothing if you do not love everything.

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Act 10, sc. 2
5 months 3 weeks ago

Those who purge the soul believe that the soul can receive no benefit from any teachings offered to it until someone by cross-questioning reduces him who is cross-questioned to an attitude of modesty, by removing the opinions that obstruct the teachings, and thus purges him and makes him think that he knows only what he knows, and no more.

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2 months 1 day ago

You can't satisfy everybody; especially if there are those who will be dissatisfied unless not everybody is satisfied.

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Ch. 10 : A Framework for Utopia; The Framework as Utopian Common Ground, p. 320
2 weeks 3 days ago

We may assume the existence of an aether; only we must give up ascribing a definite state of motion to it, i.e. we must by abstraction take from it the last mechanical characteristic which Lorentz had still left it. ... But this ether may not be thought of as endowed with the quality characteristic of ponderable media, as consisting of parts which may be tracked through time. The idea of motion may not be applied to it.

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On the irrelevance of the luminiferous aether hypothesis to physical measurements, in [https://www.refcm.org/scripture-science-stott/aarch/pages/12-einstein-sidelights-relativity.htm an address at the University of Leiden (5 May 1920)]
4 months 4 weeks ago

That which parents should take care of... is to distinguish between the wants of fancy, and those of nature.

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Sec. 107
4 months 1 week ago

Be not hasty to speak; nor slow to hear!

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4 months 4 weeks ago

The South has conquered nothing - but a graveyard.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Discourses are tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force relations; there can exist different and even contradictory discourses within the same strategy; they can, on the contrary, circulate without changing their form from one strategy to another, opposing strategy.

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Vol I, pp. 101-102
1 month 2 weeks ago

All old Poems, Homer's and the rest, are authentically Songs. I would say, in strictness, that all right Poems are; that whatsoever is not sung is properly no Poem, but a piece of Prose cramped into jingling lines,-to the great injury of the grammar, to the great grief of the reader, for most part! What we wants to get at is the thought the man had, if he had any: why should he twist it into jingle, if he could speak it out plainly? It is only when the heart of him is rapt into true passion of melody, and the very tones of him, according to Coleridge's remark, become musical by the greatness, depth and music of his thoughts, that we can give him right to rhyme and sing; that we call him a Poet, and listen to him as the Heroic of Speakers,-whose speech is Song.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

When a person inflates his own importance, he does not see his own sins; and his sins get bigger right along with him.

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p. 108
5 months 1 week ago

Wonderful is the depth of Thy oracles, whose surface is before us, inviting the little ones; and yet wonderful is the depth, O my God, wonderful is the depth. It is awe to look into it; and awe of honour, and a tremor of love. The enemies thereof I hate vehemently. Oh, if Thou wouldest slay them with Thy two-edged sword, that they be not its enemies! For thus do I love, that they should be slain unto themselves that they may live unto Thee.

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XII, 14
2 months 3 weeks ago

The audience, as ground, shapes and controls the work of art.

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p. 48
4 months 3 weeks ago

We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.

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1 month 1 week ago

There are two kinds of openness, the openness of indifference-promoted with the twin purposes of humbling our intellectual pride and letting us be whatever we want to be, just as long as we don't want to be knowers-and the openness that invites us to the quest for knowledge and certitude, for which history and the various cultures provide a brilliant array of examples for examination.

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p. 41.
3 months 4 weeks ago

I hate tyranny, at least I think I do; but I hate it most of all where most are concerned in it. The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny. If, as society is constituted in these large countries of France and England, full of unequal property, I must make my choice (which God avert!) between the despotism of a single person, or of the many, my election is made. As much injustice and tyranny has been practised in a few months by a French democracy, as in all the arbitrary monarchies in Europe in the forty years of my observation.

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Letter to Captain Thomas Mercer (26 February 1790), quoted in Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith (eds.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Volume VI: July 1789-December 1791 (1967), p. 96
4 months 4 weeks ago

If I negate powdered wigs, I am still left with unpowdered wigs.

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5 months 6 days ago

Not to be a proud and haughty person, you have to follow the old proverb and "know thyself." That is to say, you must regard your special talents, whatever beauty or fame you have, as gifts from God, and not as things you earned for yourself. Whatever is low and mean is not God's doing, however. Here you can only blame yourself. Remember the squalor of your birth and how naked and poor you were when you crawled into the light of day like a little animal.

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p.154
4 months 3 weeks ago

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

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"Is Theology Poetry?", 1945
5 months 4 weeks ago

That a woman is presented as a teacher, as a prototype of piety, cannot amaze anyone who knows that piety or godliness is fundamentally womanliness. ... from a woman you learn concern for the one thing needful, from Mary, sister of Lazarus, who sat silent at Christ's feet with her heart's choice: the one thing needful.

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5 months 1 week ago

The confession of evil works is the first beginning of good works.

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Tractates on the Gospel of John; tractate XII on John 3:6-21, and 13
1 month 1 week ago

[Successful meditation brings about realizations:] That we are no longer this poor little stranger and afraid in a world it never made. But that you are this universe and you are creating it in every moment... Because you see it starts now, it didn't begin in the past, there was no past. See, if the universe began in the past when that happened it was now; see, but it's still now - and the universe is still beginning now, and it's trailing off like the wake of a ship from now, and that wake fades out so does the past. You can look back there to explain things, but the explanation disappears. You'll never find it there. ... Things are not explained by the past, they are explained by what Happens Now. That Creates the past, and it begins here... That's the birth of responsibility.

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On deep meditation and enlightenment that transcends temporal experiences and most notions of selfhoody
5 months 1 day ago

It is a great mortification to the vanity of man, that his utmost art and industry can never equal the meanest of nature's productions, either for beauty or value. Art is only the under-workman, and is employed to give a few strokes of embellishment to those pieces, which come from the hand of the master.

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Part I, Essay 15: The Epicurean
4 months 4 weeks ago

I do not think it possible to get anywhere if we start from scepticism. We must start from a broad acceptance of whatever seems to be knowledge and is not rejected for some specific reason.

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p. 200

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