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5 months 1 week ago

Wit is cultured insolence.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Properties perceived in nature will depend on how one looks and how one looks depends on the economic interest one has in the resources of nature. The value of profit maximization is thus linked to reductionist systems, while the value of life and the maintenance of life is linked to holistic and ecological systems.

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Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development
4 months 3 weeks ago

People travel to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars; and they pass by themselves without wondering.

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Variant: Men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty billows of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, and pass themselves by. X
4 months 1 week ago

We are delighted to find a person who values us as we value ourselves, and distinguishes us from the rest of mankind, with an attention not unlike that with which we distinguish ourselves.

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Section III, Chap. I.
1 week 1 day ago

An 'Artificial System' is one in which the 'smaller' groups (the Genera) are 'natural'; and in which the 'wider' divisions (Classes, Orders) are constructed by the 'peremptory' application of selected Characters

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2 months 3 weeks ago

We cannot think any true thought unless we want the true. Thinking is itself an aspect of practice.

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p. 45
4 months 3 weeks ago

Charity, by which God and neighbor are loved, is the most perfect friendship.

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Disputed Questions: On Charity, c. 1270
3 months 4 weeks ago

States are doomed when they are unable to distinguish good men from bad.

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§ 5
1 week 1 day ago

A 'Natural System' is one which attempts to make 'all' the divisions natural, the widest as well as the narrowest; and therefore applies 'no' characters 'peremptorily'.

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4 months 4 days ago

The aim of the book is to set a limit to thought, or rather - not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought). It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be set, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense.

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4 months 1 week ago

Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.

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The Human Condition (1958), part 3, chapter 16
4 months 1 week ago

Abbot Terrasson tells us that if the size of a book were measured not by the number of its pages but by the time required to understand it, then we could say about many books that they would be much shorter were they not so short.

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A xix
4 weeks 1 day ago

To a shower of gold most things are penetrable.

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Pt. I, Bk. III, ch. 7.
2 months 3 weeks ago

It may seem to be a long way from Blake's innocent talk of love and copulation to De Sade's need to inflict pain. And yet both are the outcome of a sexual mysticism that strives to transcend the everyday world. Simone de Beauvoir said penetratingly of De Sade's work that 'he is trying to communicate an experience whose distinguishing characteristic is, nevertheless its will to remain incommunicable'. De Sade's perversion may have sprung from his dislike of his mother or of other women, but its basis is a kind of distorted religious emotion.

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p. 90
3 weeks 2 days ago

We often want one thing and pray for another, not telling the truth even to the gods.

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5 months 6 days ago

Perception and knowledge could never be the same.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Kings and philosophers shit, and so do ladies.

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Ch. 42, English translation from Hartle, Ann (2003), Michel de Montaigne: Accidental Philosopher, Cambridge University Press.
4 weeks 1 day ago

"No man in this fashionable London of yours," friend Sauerteig would say, "speaks a plain word to me. Every man feels bound to be something more than plain; to be pungent withal, witty, ornamental. His poor fraction of sense has to be perked into some epigrammatic shape, that it may prick into me;-perhaps (this is the commonest) to be topsyturvied, left standing on its head, that I may remember it the better! Such grinning inanity is very sad to the soul of man. Human faces should not grin on one like masks; they should look on one like faces! I love honest laughter, as I do sunlight; but not dishonest: most kinds of dancing too; but the St.-Vitus kind not at all! A fashionable wit, ach Himmel, if you ask, Which, he or a Death's- head, will be the cheerier company for me? pray send not him!"

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4 months 1 week ago

...an intellectual concept abstracts from everything sensuous, it is not abstracted from sensuous things, and perhaps would be more correctly called abstracting than abstract. Intellectual concepts it is more cautious, therefore, to call pure ideas, and concepts given only empirically, abstract ideas.

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2 weeks 5 days ago

There are two great fundamental problems common to all thought: (i) the problem of world- and life-affirmation and world- and life-negation, and (2) the problem of ethics and the relations between ethics and these two forms of man's spiritual attitude to Being.

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Preface, p. vii

The general form of the total conception of ideology is being used by the analyst when he has the courage to subject not just the adversary's point of view but all points of view, including his own, to the ideological analysis.At the present stage of our understanding it is hardly possible to avoid this general formulation of the total conception of ideology, according to which the thought of all parties in all epochs is of an ideological character.

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2 months 6 days ago

The new science of communication is percept, not concept.

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(p. 259)
3 weeks 2 days ago

Valor withers without adversity.

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De Providentia (On Providence), 2.4
3 months 4 weeks ago

Often must you turn your pencil to erase, if you hope to write something worth a second reading.

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Book I, satire i, lines 72-3,
2 months 3 weeks ago

I do not believe that woman will make politics worse; nor can I believe that she could make it better. If, then, she cannot improve on man's mistakes, why perpetrate the latter?

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3 months 1 week ago

Just as when a man commits suicide ne negates the body, this rational limit of subjectivity, so when he lapses into fantastic and trascendental practice he associates himself with embodied divine and ghostly appearances, namely, he negates in practise the difference between imagination and perception.

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Part III, Section 29
4 months 1 week ago

An individual who finds that he enjoys seeing others in positions of lesser liberty understands that he has no claim whatever to this enjoyment.

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Chapter I, Section 6, pg. 31
5 months 5 days ago

Knowing whether or not one can live without appeal is all that interests me.

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3 weeks 2 days ago

A comfortable house is a great source of happiness. It ranks immediately after health and a good conscience.

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Vol. II, letter to Lord Murray (29 September 1843), p. 501
3 months 2 weeks ago

Life itself is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living: All things fall under this name. The Sun itself is but the dark simulacrum, and the light but the shadow of God.

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Ch. 4
4 months 1 week ago

Pi's face was masked, and it was understood that none could behold it and live. But piercing eyes looked out from the mask, inexorable, cold and enigmatic.

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"The Mathematician's Nightmare", Nightmares of Eminent Persons and Other Stories, 1954
4 months 1 week ago

The public is a ferocious beast: one must chain it up or flee from it.

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Letter to Mademoiselle Quinault, quoted in Charles Sainte-Beuve, "Lettres inédites de Voltaire," Causeries de Lundi (20 October 1856) ; an English translation can be found on this page:
4 months 1 week ago

In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying.

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"The Argument for the Remedying of Injustice"
4 months 1 week ago

The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space.

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B 8
3 months 4 days ago

"What is truth?" is a fundamental question. But what is it compared to "How to endure life?" And even this one pales beside the next: "How to endure oneself?" - That is the crucial question in which no one is in a position to give us an answer.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

We do not think good metaphors are anything very important, but I think that a good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on...

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E 91 Variant translation: A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on.
4 months 1 week ago

I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds. One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it.

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"The Emotional Factor"
4 months 2 weeks ago

Sir Henry Wotton used to say that critics are like brushers of noblemen's clothes.

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No. 64
3 months ago

To look at a work of art in order to see how well certain rules are observed and canons conformed to impoverished perception. But to strive to note the ways in which certain conditions are fulfilled, such as the organic means by which the media is made to express and carry definite parts, or how the problem of adequate individualization is solved, sharpens esthetic perception and enriches its content.

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p. 213
2 months 2 weeks ago

What we have is a device for producing sentences in response to sentences. But none of these sentences is at all connected to the real world. If one coupled two of these machines and let them play the Imitation Game with each other, then they would go on 'fooling' each other forever, even if the rest of the world disappeared! There is no more reason to regard the machine's talk of apples as referring to real world apples than there is to regard the ant's 'drawing' as referring to Winston Churchill.

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Chap. 1 : Brains in a vat
2 months 4 days ago

If you have a faith, it is statistically overwhelmingly likely that it is the same faith as your parents and grandparents had. No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth. The convictions that you so passionately believe would have been a completely different, and largely contradictory, set of convictions, if only you had happened to be born in a different place. Epidemiology, not evidence.

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6 days ago

Wait for the appointed hour.

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As quoted in The Lives of the Sophists by Eunapius (online exerpt)
4 months 1 week ago

Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken.

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A Fresh Look at Empiricism: 1927-42 (1996), p. 281
4 months 1 week ago

Pragmatism, on the other hand, asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?"

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Lecture VI, Pragmatism's Conception of Truth
3 months 4 weeks ago

Man is a universe in little [Microcosm].

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Freeman (1948), p. 150
5 months 5 days ago

But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.

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4 months 1 week ago

The concept of space, therefore, is a pure intuition, being a singular concept, not made up by sensations, but itself the fundamental form of all external sensation.

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3 months 1 day ago

With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible.

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19:26 (KJV)

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