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2 months 2 weeks ago

Some people, when they do someone a favor, are always looking for a chance to call it in. And some aren't, but they're still aware of it--still regard it as a debt. But others don't even do that. They're like a vine that produces grapes without looking for anything in return. (Hays translation) A man makes no noise over a good deed, but passes on to another as a vine to bear grapes again in season.

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V, 6
5 months 3 weeks ago

A Dialogue between two Infants in the womb concerning the state of this world, might handsomely illustrate our ignorance of the next, whereof methinks we yet discourse in Plato's Den, and are but Embryon Philosophers.

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Chapter IV
5 months 3 weeks ago

There is but One Principle that proceeds from God; and thus, in consequence of the unity of the Power, it is possible for each Individual to schematise his World of Sense in accordance with the law of that original harmony; - and every Individual, under the condition of being found on the way towards the recognition of the Imperative, must so schematise it. I might say: - Every Individual can and must, under the given condition, construct the True World of Sense, - for this indeed has beyond the universal and formal laws above deduced, no other Truth and Reality than this universal harmony.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

His reputation will go on increasing because scarcely anyone reads him.

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"Dante", 1765
5 months 2 weeks ago

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

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Quoted in The Times (6 July 1989).
4 months 6 days ago

We are either going to have a future where women lead the way to make peace with the Earth or we are not going to have a future at all.

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Quoted in "Woman power to the fore," by R.S. Binuraj, The Hindu
6 months 3 weeks ago

Consider the Koran... this wretched book was sufficient to start a world-religion, to satisfy the metaphysical need of countless millions for twelve hundred years, to become the basis of their morality and of a remarkable contempt for death, and also to inspire them to bloody wars and the most extensive conquests. In this book we find the saddest and poorest form of theism. Much may be lost in translation, but I have not been able to discover in it one single idea of value.

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E. Payne, trans., Vol. II, Ch. XVII: On Man's Need for Metaphysics
6 months 3 weeks ago

There are men who astonish and delight, men who instruct and guide. Some men's words I remember so well that I must often use them to express my thought. Yes, because I perceive that we have heard the same truth, but they have heard it better.

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Character
3 months 1 week ago

Whoso belongs only to his own age, and reverences only its gilt Popinjays or smoot-smeared Mumbojumbos, must needs die with it.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

But such a straight identification of religion with any and every form of happiness leaves the essential peculiarity of religious happiness out. The more commonplace happinesses which we get are 'reliefs,' occasioned by our momentary escapes from evils either experienced or threatened. But in its most characteristic embodiments, religious happiness is no mere feeling of escape. It cares no longer to escape. It consents to the evil outwardly as a form of sacrifice - inwardly it knows it to be permanently overcome. ... In the Louvre there is a picture, by Guido Reni, of St. Michael with his foot on Satan's neck. The richness of the picture is in large part due to the fiend's figure being there. The richness of its allegorical meaning also is due to his being there - that is, the world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.

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Lecture II, "Circumscription of the Topic"
6 months 3 weeks ago

Wit and good nature meeting in a fair young lady as they do in you make the best resemblance of an angel that we know; and he that is blessed with the conversation and friendship of a person so extraordinary enjoys all that remains of paradise in this world.

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Letter to Mary Clarke (7 May 1682), quoted in Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (1957; 1985), p. 221
6 months 3 weeks ago

Drunkenness is temporary suicide.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

The work of each individual contributes to a totality and so becomes an undying part of the totality. That totality of human lives - past and present and to come - forms a tapestry that has been in existence now for many thousands of years and has been growing more elaborate and, on the whole, more beautiful in all that time. Even the Spacers are an offshoot of the tapestry and they, too, add to the elaborateness and beauty of the pattern. An individual life is one thread in the tapestry and what is one thread compared to the whole?

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3 months 1 week ago

Why not? What is to hinder this Samson from governing? There is in him what far transcends all apprenticeships; in the man himself there exists a model of governing, something to govern by! There exists in him a heart-abhorrence of whatever is incoherent, pusillanimous, unveracious,-that is to say, chaotic, _un_governed; of the Devil, not of God. A man of this kind cannot help governing! He has the living ideal of a governor in him; and the incessant necessity of struggling to unfold the same out of him.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Only geometry can hand us the thread [which will lead us through] the labyrinth of the continuum's composition, the maximum and the minimum, the infinitesimal and the infinite; and no one will arrive at a truly solid metaphysic except he who has passed through this [labyrinth].

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Spring 1676
7 months 3 weeks ago

The first philosophers, in investigating the truth and the nature of things, wandered, as if led by ignorance, into a certain... path. Hence, they say that no being is either generated or corrupted, because it is necessary that what is generated should be generated either from being or non-being: but both these are impossible; for neither can being be generated, since it already is; and from nothing, nothing can be generated... And thus... they said that there were not many things, but that being alone had a subsistence. ...the ancient philosophers ...through this ignorance added so much to their want of knowledge, as to fancy that nothing else was generated or had a being; but they subverted all generation.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

The rich in all societies may be thrown into two classes. The first is of those who are powerful as well as rich, and conduct the operations of the vast political machine. The other is of those who employ their riches wholly in the acquisition of pleasure. As to the first sort, their continual care and anxiety, their toilsome days and sleepless nights, are next to proverbial. These circumstances are sufficient almost to level their condition to that of the unhappy majority; but there are other circumstances which place them in a far lower condition. Not only their understandings labour continually, which is the severest labour, but their hearts are torn by the worst, most troublesome, and insatiable of all passions, by avarice, by ambition, by fear and jealousy. No part of the mind has rest. Power gradually extirpates from the mind every humane and gentle virtue. Pity, benevolence, friendship, are things almost unknown in high stations.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

The, diverse states of the soul are always correlative with those of the body.

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5 months 1 day ago

Organizations and institutions provide the general stimuli and attention-directors that channelize the behaviors of the members of the group, and that provide those members with the intermediate objectives that stimulate action.

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p. 100.
5 months 2 weeks ago

No man is bound by the words themselves, either to kill himselfe, or any other man.

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The Second Part, Chapter 21, p. 112
2 months 3 weeks ago

I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master. Could the contrary of this be proved, I should conclude either that there is no god, or that he is a malevolent being.

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Letter to David Hartley
5 months 3 weeks ago

If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free; if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.

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No. 1
5 months 2 weeks ago

Philosophy: impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own ugly way.

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p. 98e
5 months 1 week ago

While they denounce as subversive anarchy signs of independent thought, of thinking for themselves on the part of others lest such thought disturb the conditions by which they profit, they think quite literally for themselves, that is of themselves.

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Human Nature and Conduct (1921) Part 1 Section IV.
5 months 2 weeks ago

This organization of functional discourse is of vital importance; it serves as a vehicle of coordination and subordination. The unified, functional language is an irreconcilably anti-critical and anti-dialectical language. In it, operational and behavioral rationality absorbs the transcendent, negative, oppositional elements of Reason.

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p. 97
7 months 1 day ago

If thou shalt aspire after the glorious acts of men, thy working shall be accompanied with compunction and strife, and thy remembrance followed with distaste and upbraidings; and justly doth it come to pass towards thee, O man, that since thou, which art God's work, doest him no reason in yielding him well-pleasing service, even thine own works also should reward thee with the like fruit of bitterness.

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Of The Works Of God and Man
6 months 3 weeks ago

One may discover the root of a Hindoo religion in his own private history, when, in the silent intervals of the day or night, he does sometimes inflict on himself like austerities with a stern satisfaction.

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Snakes in the Ganga, 2022
5 months 2 weeks ago

We are fulfilled only when we aspire to nothing, when we are impregnated by that nothing to the point of intoxication.

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5 months 4 days ago

The same polarity of the male and female principle exists in nature; not only, as is obvious in animals and plants, but in the polarity of the two fundamental functions, that of receiving and penetrating. It is the polarity of earth and rain, of the river and the ocean, of night and day, of darkness and light, of matter and spirit.

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Ch. 2
3 months 1 week ago

Withdraw into yourself, as far as you can. Associate with those who will make a better man of you. Welcome those whom you yourself can improve. The process is mutual; for men learn while they teach.

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Line 8.
6 months 3 weeks ago

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy, the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.

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"Whether it is useful to maintain the people in superstition," Treatise on Toleration, 1763
6 months 3 weeks ago

The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.

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Ch. 9: On the Notion of Cause
2 months 2 weeks ago

When we reflect, that the Inquisition, by its restrictions, and authority, would have prevented the French revolution,-it is hard to say, whether the Sovereign, who, wholly, and without reserve, gave up this instrument, would not, in reality, be doing an injury to humanity.

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p. 31
2 months 3 weeks ago

We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, self-preservation in the other.

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On slavery, in a letter to John Holmes
7 months 2 weeks ago

They do not know the penalty of unrighteousness, which is the thing they most ought to know. For it is not what they think it is scourgings and death, which they sometimes escape entirely when they have done wrong but a penalty which it is impossible to escape. Two patterns, my friend, are set up in the world, the divine, which is most blessed, and the godless, which is most wretched, and their silliness and extreme foolishness blind them to the fact that through their unrighteous acts they are made like the one and unlike the other. They therefore pay the penalty for this by living a life that conforms to the pattern they resemble.

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3 months 3 days ago

Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice.

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Letter to three students (October 1967) as translated in Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record (1970) edited by Leopold Labedz, "The Struggle Intensifies"
5 months 1 week ago

He who does not realize to what extent shifting fortune and necessity hold in subjection every human spirit, cannot regard as fellow-creatures nor love as he loves himself those whom chance separated from him by an abyss. The variety of constraints pressing upon man give rise to the illusion of several distinct species that cannot communicate.

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p. 192
5 months 3 weeks ago

Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

The art of writing books is not yet invented. But it is at the point of being invented. Fragments of this nature are literary seeds. There may be many an infertile grain among them: nevertheless, if only some come up!

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Fragment No. 114
5 months 3 weeks ago

We have a priori reasons for believing that in every sentence there is some one order of words more effective than any other; and that this order is the one which presents the elements of the proposition in the succession in which they may be most readily put together.

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Pt. I, sec. 3, "The Principle of Economy Applied to Sentences"
7 months ago

And I myself, in Rome, heard it said openly in the streets, "If there is a hell, then Rome is built on it." That is, "After the devil himself, there is no worse folk than the pope and his followers."

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Against the Roman Papacy, An Institution of the Devil

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