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7 months 2 weeks ago

There must be a seed of every good thing in the character of men, otherwise no one can bring it out. Lacking that, analogous motives, honor, etc., are substituted. Parents are in the habit of looking out for the inclinations, for the talents and dexterity, perhaps for the disposition of their children, and not at all for their heart or character.

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Part III : Selection on Education from Kant's other Writings, Ch. I Pedagogical Fragments, # 13
7 months 1 week ago

The beauty or uncomeliness of many things, in good and ill breeding, will be better learnt, and make deeper impressions on them, in the examples of others, than from any rules or instructions can be given about them.

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Sec. 82
5 months 3 weeks ago

What appears as the positive is essentially the negative, i.e. the thing that is to be criticized.

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p. 18
7 months 1 week ago

Go where he will, the wise man is at home, His hearth the earth, his hall the azure dome.

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Wood-notes, st. 3
6 months 3 days ago

O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? how long shall I suffer you? bring him hither to me.

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17:17 (KJV)
5 months 2 weeks ago

Opinion is the companion of probability within the medieval epistemology.

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Chapter 3, Opinion, p. 28.
8 months 1 day ago

The way of Heaven and Earth may be completely declared in one sentence: They are without any doubleness, and so they produce things in a manner that is unfathomable.

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3 months 1 week ago

We have seen the highest circle of spiraling powers. We have named this circle God. We might have given it any other name we wished: Abyss, Mystery, Absolute Darkness, Absolute Light, Matter, Spirit, Ultimate Hope, Ultimate Despair, Silence. But we have named it God because only this name, for primordial reasons, can stir our hearts profoundly. And this deeply felt emotion is indispensable if we are to touch, body with body, the dread essence beyond logic. Within this gigantic circle of divinity we are in duty bound to separate and perceive clearly the small, burning arc of our epoch. Unsourced variant or paraphrase: ... We might have given it any name we wished: Abyss, Absolute Darkness, Absolute Light, Matter, Spirit, Ultimate Hope, Ultimate Despair, Silence. But never forget, it is we who give it a name.

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7 months 1 week ago

One right-thinking man thinks like all other right-thinking men of his time-that is to say, in most cases, like some wrong-thinking man of another time.

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"One and Many," p. 12
5 months 3 weeks ago

Rituals are processes of embodiment and bodily performances. In them, the valid order and values of a community are physically experienced and solidified.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

The annual produce of the land and labour of any nation can be increased in its value by no other means, but by increasing either the number of its productive labourers, or the productive powers of those labourers who had before been employed.

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Chapter III, p. 377.
7 months 3 weeks ago

You are a little soul carrying a corpse around, as Epictetus used to say.

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Fragment 26 (Oldfather translation). This fragment originates from Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, IV. 41.
7 months 2 weeks ago

Every man, as the Stoics used to say, is first and principally recommended to his own care; and every man is certainly, in every respect, fitter and abler to take care of himself than of any other person. Every man feels his own pleasures and his own pains more sensibly than those of other people. The former are the original sensations; the latter the reflected or sympathetic images of those sensations. The former may be said to be the substance; the latter the shadow.

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Section II, Chap. I.
7 months 1 day ago

One should attend to one's enemies, for they are the first persons to detect one's errors.

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§ 5
5 months 3 weeks ago

One gloomy and pessimistic writer with a powerful style affects a whole generation of writers, who in turn affect almost every educated person in the country.

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p. 79
5 months 4 weeks ago

Shall we not perhaps be told, on the other hand, that if the sinner suffers an eternal punishment, it is because he does not cease to sin? - for the damned sin without ceasing. This however is no solution to the problem, which derives all its absurdity from the fact that punishment has been conceived as vindictiveness or vengeance, not as correction, and has been conceived after the fashion of barbarous peoples. And in the same way hell has been conceived as a sort of police institution, necessary in order to put fear into the world. And the worst of it is that it no longer intimidates, and therefore will have to be shut up.

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6 months 1 day ago

It is peculiar to "ressentiment criticism" that it does not seriously desire that its demands be fulfilled. It does not want to cure the evil. The evil is merely the pretext for the criticism.

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L. Coser, trans. (1973), p. 51

A command can express no more than an ought or a shall, because it is a universal, but it does not express an 'is'; and this at once makes plain its deficiency. Against such commands Jesus sets virtue, i.e., a loving disposition, which makes the content of the command superfluous and destroys its form as a command, because that form implies an opposition between a commander and something resisting the command.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

All truth, in the long run, is only common sense clarified.

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"On the Study of Biology"
7 months 3 weeks ago

To the rational being only the irrational is unendurable, but the rational is endurable.

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Variant translation: To a reasonable creature, that alone is insupportable which is unreasonable; but everything reasonable may be supported. Book I, ch. 2,1.
6 months 1 week ago

When you get over an infatuation, to fall for someone ever again seems so inconceivable that you imagine no one, not even a bug, that is not mired in disappointment.

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6 months 1 week ago

Ethical ideas and sentiments have to be considered as parts of the phenomena of life at large. We have to deal with man as a product of evolution, with society as a product of evolution, and with moral phenomena as products of evolution.

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Ch. 1, Introductory
7 months 6 days ago

The most thought provoking thing in our thought provoking time is that we are still not thinking.

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What is Called Thinking? (1951-1952), as translated by Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray
7 months 1 week ago

The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 1, § 1
5 months 1 week ago

Success makes some crimes honorable.

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Maxim 326
5 months 2 weeks ago

Our design, not respecting arts, but philosophy, and our subject, not manual, but natural powers, we consider chiefly those things which relate to gravity, levity, elastic force, the resistance of fluids, and the like forces, whether attractive or impulsive; and therefore we offer this work as mathematical principles of philosophy; for all the difficulty of philosophy seems to consist in this - from the phenomena of motions to investigate the forces of nature, and then from these forces to demonstrate the other phenomena...

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Preface
7 months 1 week ago

I do wish I believed in the life eternal, for it makes me quite miserable to think man is merely a kind of machine endowed, unhappily for himself, with consciousness.

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Greek Exercises (1888); at the age of fifteen, Russell used to write down his reflections in this book, for fear that his people should find out what he was thinking.
7 months 1 week ago

Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.

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Fate
7 months 1 day ago

O Fortune, cruellest of heavenly powers, why make such game of this poor life of ours?

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Book II, satire viii, line 61 (trans. Conington)
7 months 1 day ago

But, when the elements have been mingled in the fashion of a man and come to the light of day, or in the fashion of the race of wild beasts or plants or birds, then men say that these come into being; and when they are separated, they call that woeful death. They call it not aright; but I too follow the custom, and call it so myself.

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fr. 9 As quoted by John Burnet, Early Greek philosophy (1908) p. 240
7 months 2 weeks ago

When profit diminishes, merchants are very apt to complain that trade decays; though the diminution of profit is the natural effect of its prosperity, or of a greater stock being employed in it than before.

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Chapter IX
7 months 1 week ago

Money is human happiness in the abstract: he, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes his heart entirely to money.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 26, § 320
3 months 3 weeks ago

But no wall can be erected against Fortune which she cannot take by storm; let us strengthen our inner defences. If the inner part be safe, man can be attacked, but never captured.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.

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Provincial Letters: Letter XVI (4 December 1656)
4 months 1 week ago

The newspaper is in all its literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct.

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What Modern Liberty Means, p. 47. Essay first published in The Atlantic (November 1919).
8 months 1 week ago

There always comes a time in history when the person who dares to say that 2+2=4 is punished by death. And the issue is not what reward or what punishment will be the outcome of that reasoning. The issue is simply whether or not 2+2=4.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

Your own philosophy condemns you and supports us.

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Salbatore Mitxelena (1958): Unamuno eta Abendats, Baiona: Darracq
7 months 1 week ago

In our monogamous part of the world, to marry means to halve one's rights and double one's duties.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 27, § 370 Variant translation: To marry is to halve your rights and double your duties.
6 months 1 week ago

One principle, that I believe is wanting in you, and all our too fervent and impetuous reformers, is the thought, that almost every institution or form of society is good in its place, and in the period of time to which it belongs. How many beautiful and admirable effects grew out of Popery and the monastic institutions, in the period, when they were in their genuine health and vigour! To them we owe almost all our logic and our literature. What excellent effects do we reap, even at this day, from the feudal system and from chivalry! In this point of view, nothing can, perhaps, be more worthy of our applause than the English constitution.

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Letter to Percy Bysshe Shelley (4 March 1812), quoted in Thomas Jefferson Hogg, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vol. II (1858), p. 86
5 months 1 day ago

However long Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians struggle to find multiple meanings in this text, the dominant seems to be this: Abraham's unquestioning willingness to heed gods command to sacrifice the thing he loved most is what qualified him to become the father of what are called still the Abrahamic faiths.

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5 months 1 week ago

The revolutionaries say: "The government organization is bad in this and that respect; it must be destroyed and replaced by this and that." But a Christian says: "I know nothing about the governmental organization, or in how far it is good or bad, and for the same reason I do not want to support it."

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Chapter IX, The Acceptance of the Christian Conception of Life will Emancipate Men from the Miseries of our Pagan Life
6 months 1 week ago

If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself without reason.

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8 months 1 week ago

The artist reconstructs the world to his plan.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Some subjects are so serious that one can only joke about them.

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As quoted in The Genius of Science: A Portrait Gallery (2000) by Abraham Pais, p. 24
7 months 1 week ago

When people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid.

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Theory of Knowledge, 1913
5 months 2 weeks ago

Actual aristocracy cannot be abolished by any law: all the law can do is decree how it is to be imparted and who is to acquire it.

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L 44
3 months 3 weeks ago

No one ever saw Cato change, no matter how often the state changed: he kept himself the same in all circumstances-in the praetorship, in defeat, under accusation, in his province, on the platform, in the army, in death.

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