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6 months 2 weeks ago

And these were the dishes wherein to me, hunger-starven for thee, they served up the sun and the moon.

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III, 6
7 months 1 day ago

Therefore only an utterly senseless person can fail to know that our characters are the result of our conduct.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

Understand me: I wish to be a man from somewhere, a man among men. You see, a slave, when he passes by, weary and surly, carrying a heavy load, limping along and looking down at his feet, only at his feet to avoid falling down; he is in his town, like a leaf in greenery, like a tree in a forest, argos surrounds him, heavy and warm, full of herself; I want to be that slave, Electra, I want to pull the city around me and to roll myself up in it like a blanket. I will not leave.

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Orestes to Electra, Act 2

Ever from one who comes to-morrow Men wait their good and truth to borrow.

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Merlin's Song, II
6 months 2 weeks ago

Virtuous, worthy, wise and capable people are chosen as leaders.

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5 months 1 day ago

If they drive God from the earth, we shall shelter Him underground.

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5 months ago

The life of the wealthy is one long Sunday.

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The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other solution.

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July 1855

Let those flatter, who fear: it is not an American art.

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Summary View of the Rights of British America
4 months 3 weeks ago

When you know that every problem is only a false problem, you are dangerously close to salvation.

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6 months 2 days ago

A man's face as a rule says more, and more interesting things, than his mouth, for it is a compendium of everything his mouth will ever say, in that it is the monogram of all this man's thoughts and aspirations.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 29, § 377
2 months ago

Wars have never made peace or preserved it or fostered its ideals. To have peace you must make peace with your enemy. To make peace only with your friends is to avoid the issue, and to permit a great principle to become absurd. Far from making peace, wars invariably serve as classrooms and laboratories where men and techniques and states of mind are prepared for the next war.

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"A Statement against the War in Vietnam"
1 month 4 weeks ago

It is irreverent to the Gods to give you this demonstration, but for your sakes it shall be done.

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As quoted in The Lives of the Sophists by Eunapius
1 month 4 weeks ago

That the state is an entity and in fact the decisive entity rests upon its political character.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

He will through life be master of himself and a happy man who from day to day can have said, "I have lived: tomorrow the Father may fill the sky with black clouds or with cloudless sunshine."

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Book III, ode xxix, line 41
4 months 1 week ago

Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture.

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Ch. 2

A free people claim their rights, as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.

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2 weeks 6 days ago

"We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything."
- Emil Cioran

See biography for Emil Cioran:
https://civilsimian.com/EmilCioran

Read Emil Cioran's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/133/content

#philosophy #quotes #CivilSimian #UniversalHumanism

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3 months 3 weeks ago

It's obvious that in an intelligent educated audience such as this university, I stress this university. Who saw fit to give them accreditation? 

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At Randolph-Macon Woman's College, (23 October 2006) Broadcasted by C-SPAN2

Only through blind Instinct, in which the only possible guidance of the Imperative is awanting, does the Power in Intuition remain undetermined; where it is schematised as absolute it becomes infinite; and where it is presented in a determinate form, as a principle, it becomes at least manifold. By the above-mentioned act of Intelligising, the Power liberates itself from Instinct, to direct itself towards Unity.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

A soldier told Pelopidas, "We are fallen among the enemies." Said he, "How are we fallen among them more than they among us?"

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63 Pelopidas
4 months 3 weeks ago

The philosopher will ask himself ... if the criticism we are now suggesting is not the philosophy which presses to the limit that criticism of false gods which Christianity has introduced into our history.

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p. 47
4 months 2 weeks ago

It appears that liberty is bound up with imperfection, with a right to imperfection. Socialism leads to the same type of authoritarian state as Theocracy. ... One must choose: either Socialism or liberty of spirit, the liberty of man's conscience. ... Socialism uses a "sacred" authority and establishes a "sacred" society in which there is no place for the "lay," for the free, for choice, for the unrestrained activity of human forces.

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pp. 188-189
4 months ago

War is not a courtesy but the most horrible thing in life; and we ought to understand that, and not play at war. We ought to accept this terrible necessity sternly and seriously. It all lies in that: get rid of falsehood and let war be war and not a game. As it is now, war is the favourite pastime of the idle and frivolous.

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Bk. X, ch. 25
4 months 3 weeks ago

The great decisions of human life have as a rule far more to do with the instincts and other mysterious unconscious factors than with conscious will and well-meaning reasonableness. The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. Each of us carries his own life-form-an indeterminable form which cannot be superseded by any other.

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p. 69
4 months 1 week ago

What is Mysticism? Is it not the attempt to draw near to God, not by rites or ceremonies, but by inward disposition? Is it not merely a hard word for " The Kingdom of Heaven is within"? Heaven is neither a place nor a time. There might be a Heaven not only here but now. It is true that sometimes we must sacrifice not only health of body, but health of mind (or, peace) in the interest of God; that is, we must sacrifice Heaven. But "thou shalt be like God for thou shalt see Him as He is": this may be here and now, as well as there and then. And it may be for a time - then lost - then recovered - both here and there, both now and then.

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2 months 1 week ago

Symmetry is a vast subject, significant in art and nature. Mathematics lies at its root, and it would be hard to find a better one on which to demonstrate the working of the mathematical intellect.

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Symmetry
4 months 3 weeks ago

The mores I return to myself, the more I divest myself, under the traumatic effect of persecution , of my freedom as a constituted, wilful, imperialistic subject, the more I discover myself to be responsible' the more just I am, the more guilty I am. I am 'in myself' through others.

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The Levinas reader by Levinas, Emmanuel p. 102
6 months 1 day ago

If it be said, that an Omnipotent Creator, though under no necessity of employing contrivances such as man must use, thought fit to use them in order to leave traces that would enable man to recognize his creative hand, the answer is that this equally implies a limit to his omnipotence. For if he wanted men to know that they themselves and the world are his work, he, being omnipotent, had only to will that they should be aware of it.

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pages 177-178;Early Modern Texts page 16
2 months 2 weeks ago

Let us now enquire whether anger be in accordance with nature, and whether it be useful and worth entertaining in some measure.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

Acoustic space is totally discontinuous, like touch. It is a sphere without centers or margins.

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6 months 1 day ago

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

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Section 1, paragraph 18, lines 12-14.
2 months 3 weeks ago

To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough to make me ambitious.

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Letter to his elder sister Henriette (1841).
6 months 1 day ago

In my education, as in that of everyone, the moral influences, which are so much more important than all others, are also the most complicated, and the most difficult to specify with any approach to completeness.

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(p. 38)
4 months 2 weeks ago

Once the needs of hunger are satisfied - and they are soon satisfied - the vanity, the necessity - for it is a necessity - arises of imposing ourselves upon and surviving in others. Man habitually sacrifices his life to his purse, but he sacrifices his purse to his vanity. He boasts even of his weakness and his misfortunes, for want of anything better to boast of, and is like a child who, in order to attract attention, struts about with a bandaged finger.

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5 months 1 day ago

Russia was a slave in Europe but would be a master in Asia.

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As quoted in "Dilemmas of Empire 1850-1918: Power, Territory, Identity" by Dominic Livien in Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 34, No.2 (April 1999), pp. 180
6 months 4 days ago

And why should man, added he, pretend to an exemption from the lot of all other animals? The whole earth, believe me, PHILO, is cursed and polluted. A perpetual war is kindled amongst all living creatures. Necessity, hunger, want, stimulate the strong and courageous: Fear, anxiety, terror, agitate the weak and infirm. The first entrance into life gives anguish to the new-born infant and to its wretched parent: Weakness, impotence, distress, attend each stage of that life: and it is at last finished in agony and horror.

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Demea to Philo, Part X
5 months 2 weeks ago

And what he fears he cannot make attractive with his touch he abandons.

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Line 149 (tr. H. R. Fairclough)

You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both.

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October 1842
6 months 1 day ago

Probably in time physiologists will be able to make nerves connecting the bodies of different people; this will have the advantage that we shall be able to feel another man's tooth aching.

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Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948), p. 493
2 months 3 weeks ago

Our true Deity is Mechanism. It has subdued external Nature for us, and we think it will do all other things. We are Giants in physical power: in a deeper than metaphorical sense, we are Titans, that strive, by heaping mountain on mountain, to conquer Heaven also.

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6 months 3 days ago

For instance, if you have by a lie hindered a man who is even now planning a murder, you are legally responsible for all the consequences. But if you have strictly adhered to the truth, public justice can find no fault with you, be the unforeseen consequence what it may. It is possible that whilst you have honestly answered Yes to the murderer's question, whether his intended victim is in the house, the latter may have gone out unobserved, and so not have come in the way of the murderer, and the deed therefore have not been done; whereas, if you lied and said he was not in the house, and he had really gone out (though unknown to you) so that the murderer met him as he went, and executed his purpose on him, then you might with justice be accused as the cause of his death. For, if you had spoken the truth as well as you knew it, perhaps the murderer while seeking for his enemy in the house might have been caught by neighbours coming up and the deed been prevented.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Philosophy, in one of its functions, is the critic of cosmologies. It is its function to harmonise, refashion, and justify divergent intuitions as to the nature of things. It has to insist on the scrutiny of the ultimate ideas, and on the retention of the whole of the evidence in shaping our cosmological scheme. Its business is to render explicit, and - so far as may be - efficient, a process which otherwise is unconsciously performed without rational tests.

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Preface, pp. ix-x
4 months 3 weeks ago

A heart without music is like beauty without melancholy.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

By electricity we have not been driven out of our senses so much as our senses have been driven out of us.

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(p. 375)
4 months 1 week ago

Man should possess an infinite appetite for life. It should be self-evident to him, all the time, that life is superb, glorious, endlessly rich, infinitely desirable. At present, because he is in a midway position between the brute and the truly human, he is always getting bored, depressed, weary of life. He has become so top-heavy with civilisation that he cannot contact the springs of pure vitality. Control of the prefrontal cortex will change all of this. He will cease to cast nostalgic glances towards the womb, for he will realise that death is no escape. Man is a creature of life and the daylight; his destiny lies in total objectivity.

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pp. 317-318
6 months 1 day ago

The governors of the world believe, and have always believed, that virtue can only be taught by teaching falsehood, and that any man who knew the truth would be wicked. I disbelieve this, absolutely and entirely. I believe that love of truth is the basis of all real virtue, and that virtues based upon lies can only do harm.

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