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1 month 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
1 month 1 week ago

Subject matters in general do not exist. There are no subject matters; no branches of learning-or, rather, of inquiry: there are only problems, and the urge to solve them.

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The new order contradicts reason so fundamentally that reason does not dare to doubt it. Even the consciousness of oppression fades. The more incommensurate become the concentration of power and the helplessness of the individual, the more difficult for him to penetrate the human origin of his misery.

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p. 44.
1 month 2 weeks ago

All the opinions of the world agree in this, that pleasure is our end.

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Ch. 20. Of the Force of Imagination, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Carew Hazlitt, 1877
1 month 1 week ago

We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He has disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ's death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and, if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself.

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Book II, Chapter 4, "The Perfect Penitent"
1 week 6 days ago

Uber, Airbnb, TaskRabbit - the sharing economy shares nothing. It's corporations extracting profit from individuals who bear all risk, receive no benefits, and compete desperately. Precarity rebranded as flexibility. Exploitation marketed as entrepreneurship. There's no sharing, only extraction.

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1 month 6 days ago

The task of universal pragmatics is to identify and reconstruct universal conditions of possible mutual understanding.

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p. 21
1 month 1 week ago

Wherever we turn we find that the real obstacles to peace are human will and feeling, human convictions, prejudices, opinions. If we want to get rid of war we must get rid first of all of its psychological causes. Only when this has been done will the rulers of the nations even desire to get rid of the economic and political causes.

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Ch. 9, p. 138 [2012 reprint]
1 month 2 weeks ago

But the best demonstration by far is experience, if it go not beyond the actual experiment.

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Aphorism 70
1 month 3 weeks ago
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Variant translation: To sing is characteristic of the lover. 336
1 week ago

To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.

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3 weeks 2 days ago

The most difficult thing in life is to know yourself.

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Know thyself. As quoted in Diogenes Laërtius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, I, 40 Variant
1 month 2 weeks ago

it is absurd ... to hope that maybe another Newton may some day arise, to make intelligible to us even the genesis of but a blade of grass

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("Dialectic of Teleological Judgment" §75)
1 month 2 weeks ago

You worry whether the drought will end. It is far better that you pray that God may water your mind lest virtue wither away in it. You are greatly concerned with money that is lost or being wasted, or you worry about the advance of old age. I think it much to be desired that you provide first of all for the needs of your soul.

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1 month 1 week ago

Opinions have caused more ills than the plague or earthquakes on this little globe of ours.

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Letter to Élie Bertrand, 5 January 1759
1 month 1 week ago

There are always two parties, the party of the Past and the party of the Future: the Establishment and the Movement. At times the resistance is reanimated, the schism runs under the world and appears in Literature, Philosophy, Church, State and social customs.

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p. 529, col. 1
1 week 4 days ago

With a higher moral nature will come a restriction on the multiplication of the inferior.

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The Principles of Biology, Vol. II (1867), Part VI: Laws of Multiplication, ch. 8: Human Population in the Future
2 weeks 3 days ago

They that endeavour to abolish vice destroy also virtue, for contraries, though they destroy one another, are yet the life of one another.

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Section 4
1 month 2 weeks ago

A theologian is born by living, nay dying and being damned, not by thinking, reading, or speculating.

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352

A philosopher worthy of the name has never said more than a single thing: and even then it is something he has tried to say, rather than actually said. And he has said only one thing because he has seen only one point: and at that it was not so much a vision as a contact...

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"L'intuition philosophique (Philosophical Intuition)" (10 April 1911); translated by Mabelle L. Andison in: Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, Courier Dover Publications, 2012, p. 91

To understand this for sense it is not required that a man should be a geometrician or a logician, but that he should be mad. On the proposition that the volume generated by revolving the region under 1/x from 1 to infinity has finite volume.

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Quoted in Mathematical Maxims and Minims by N. Rose
1 month 2 weeks ago

And I must speak plainly. If I were a judge, I would have such a poisonous, syphilitic whore tortured by being broken on the wheel and having her veins lacerated, for it is not to be denied what damage such a filthy whore does to young blood, so that it is unspeakably damaged before it is even fully grown and destroyed in the blood.

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pp. 552-554 (1566); cited in Susan C. Karant-Nunn & Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks [editors and translators], Luther on Women: a Sourcebook, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 157-158)
4 days ago

It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.

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21:13 (KJV)
1 month 1 week ago

Beauty is the main positive form of the aesthetic assimilation of reality, in which aesthetic ideal finds it direct expression... 

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About Beauty
1 month 1 week ago

Two men who differ as to the ends of life cannot hope to agree about education.

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Ch. 12: Education and Discipline
1 month 1 week ago

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one's death, one dies one's life.

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Book 2, "The Melodious Child Dead in Me"
1 month 1 week ago

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

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Ch. 1, p. 9 [2012 reprint]. Also in "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" in Adonis and the Alphabet (1956); later in Collected Essays (1959), p. 293
1 month 4 weeks ago

Now what has been said about the Jews is also to be understood about Cahorsins, and anyone else depending upon the depravity of usury.

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art. 4
1 week 5 days ago

The power of discretionary disqualification by one law of Parliament, and the necessity of paying every debt of the Civil List by another law of Parliament, if suffered to pass unnoticed, must establish such a fund of rewards and terrors as will make Parliament the best appendage and support of arbitrary power that ever was invented by the wit of man. This is felt. The quarrel is begun between the Representatives and the People. The Court Faction have at length committed them. In such a strait the wisest may well be perplexed, and the boldest staggered. The circumstances are in a great measure new. We have hardly any land-marks from the wisdom of our ancestors, to guide us. At best we can only follow the spirit of their proceeding in other cases.

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Volume i, p. 516
1 month 1 week ago

The Managers of that Trade themselves, and others, testify, that many of these African nations inhabit fertile countries, are industrious farmers, enjoy plenty, and lived quietly, averse to war, before the Europeans debauched them with liquors, and bribing them against one another; and that these inoffensive people are brought into slavery, by stealing them, tempting Kings to sell subjects, which they can have no right to do, and hiring one tribe to war against another, in order to catch prisoners. By such wicked and inhuman ways the English are said to enslave towards one hundred thousand yearly; of which thirty thousand are supposed to die by barbarous treatment in the first year; besides all that are slain in the unnatural wars excited to take them. So much innocent blood have the Managers and Supporters of this inhuman Trade to answer for to the common Lord of all!

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2 weeks 3 days ago

The heart of man is the place the devil dwells in; I feel sometimes a hell within myself.

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Section 51
1 month 4 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.
1 week ago

The only subversive mind is the one that questions the obligation to exist; all the others, the anarchist at the top of the list, compromise with the established order.

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Thought without language, says Lavelle, would not be a purer thought; it would be no more than the intention to think. And his last book offers a theory of expressiveness which makes of expression not "a faithful image of an already realized interior being, but the very means by which it is realized."

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p. 8
1 month 1 day ago

One day, observing a child drinking out of his hands, he cast away the cup from his wallet with the words, "A child has beaten me in plainness of living."

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Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 37

As one advances in life, one realises more and more that the majority of men - and of women - are incapable of any other effort than that strictly imposed on them as a reaction to external compulsion. And for that reason, the few individuals we have come across who are capable of a spontaneous and joyous effort stand out isolated, monumentalised, so to speak, in our experience. These are the select men, the nobles, the only ones who are active and not merely reactive, for whom life is a perpetual striving, an incessant course of training. Training = askesis. These are the ascetics.

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Chap. VII: Noble Life And Common Life, Or Effort And Inertia
1 month 2 weeks ago

If nature has been frugal in her gifts and endowments, there is the more need of art to supply her defects. If she has been generous and liberal, know that she still expects industry and application on our part, and revenges herself in proportion to our negligent ingratitude. The richest genius, like the most fertile soil, when uncultivated, shoots up into the rankest weeds; and instead of vines and olives for the pleasure and use of man, produces, to its slothful owner, the most abundant crop of poisons.

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Part I, Essay 16: The Stoic
1 month 1 week ago

Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently He thought it worth the risk.

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Book II, Chapter 3, "The Shocking Alternative"
1 month 1 week ago

If this labourer were in possession of his own means of production, and was satisfied to live as a labourer, he need not work beyond beyond the time necessary for the reproduction of his means of subsistence, say 8 hours a day.

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Vol. I, Ch. 11, pg. 336.
1 week 5 days ago

Paper, they say, does not blush, but I assure you it's not true and that it's blushing just as I am now, all over.

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2 days ago

It is questionable whether there does not exist in man an obscure and blind will to make war; an impulse towards change, towards emergence from the familiarities of everyday life and from the stabilities of well-known conditions - something like a will to death as a will to annihilation and self-sacrifice, a vague enthusiasm for the upbuilding of a new world.

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1 month 6 days ago

The painter is turning his eyes towards us only in so far as we happen to occupy the same position as his subject. We, the spectators, are an additional factor. Though greeted by that gaze, we are also dismissed by it, replaced by that which was always there before we were: the model itself. But, inversely, the painter's gaze, addressed to the void confronting him outside the picture, accepts as many models as there are spectators; in this precise but neutral place, the observer and the observed take part in a ceaseless exchange.

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Las Menias

I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.

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"The Irony of Liberalism"
1 month 1 week ago

Tell him to live by yes and no - yes to everything good, no to everything bad.

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As quoted in The Thought and Character of William James (1935) by Ralph Barton Perry, Vol. II, ch. 91
1 week 4 days ago

We are only puppets, our strings are being pulled by unknown forces.

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Act II.

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

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"Tipperary"
1 month 1 week ago

And every man, in love or pride, Of his fate is ever wide.

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Nemesis
1 month 1 week ago

... the attempt to make heaven on earth invariably produces hell. It leads to intolerance. It leads to religious wars, and to the saving of souls through the inquisition. And it is, I believe, based on a complete misunderstanding of our moral duties. It is our duty to help those who need help; but it cannot be our duty to make others happy, since this does not depend on us, and since it would only too often mean intruding on the privacy of those towards whom we have such amiable intentions.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 24 "Oracular Philosophy and the Revolt against Reason"

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