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6 months 2 weeks ago

The state of health is a state of nonsensation, even of nonreality. As soon as we cease to suffer, we cease to exist.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

"Earth loves the rain, the proud sky loves to give it." The whole world loves to create futurity. I say then to the world, "I share your love." Is this not the source of the phrase, "This loves to happen"?

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X, 21
8 months 2 weeks ago

Lord Jesus Christ, the birds had nests, the foxes had dens, and you had no place where you could lay your head. You were homeless in the world-yet you yourself were a hiding place, the only place where the sinner could flee. And so even this very day you are a hiding place. When the sinner flees to you, hides himself with you, is hidden in you, he is eternally kept safe, since love hides a multitude of sins.

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8 months 1 week ago

They hate not to make use of their abilities... they do not necessarily work for their own self-interest.

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4 weeks 1 day ago

I don't know, I think this truth is mostly the exception...we're pretty hardcore these days..."Science shows no mercy!" 😁

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4 months 3 days ago

What would life be without arithmetic, but a scene of horrors?

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Vol. II, letter to Miss Lucie Austin (22 July 1835), p. 364
8 months 3 weeks ago
Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.
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8 months 2 weeks ago

Even before the bomb, one did not breathe too easily in this tortured world. Now we are given a new source of anguish; it has all the promise of being our greatest anguish ever. There can be no doubt that humanity is being offered its last chance. Perhaps this is an occasion for the newspapers to print a special edition. More likely, it should be cause for a certain amount of reflection and a great deal of silence.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

For you who no longer possess it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.

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7 months 1 week ago

And since these things are so, we must suppose that there are contained many things and of all sorts in the things that are uniting, seeds of all things, with all sorts of shapes and colours and savours.

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Frag. B 4, quoted in John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy, (1920), Chapter 6.
6 months 2 days ago

Poems are magic ceremonies of language.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

I hate the world and almost all the people in it. I hate the Labour Congress and the journalists who send men to be slaughtered, and the fathers who feel a smug pride when their sons are killed, and even the pacifists who keep saying human nature is essentially good, in spite of all the daily proofs to the contrary. I hate the planet and the human race - I am ashamed to belong to such a species.

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Letter to Colette, December 28, 1916
4 months 2 weeks ago

Never has any one been less a priest than Jesus, never a greater enemy of forms, which stifle religion under the pretext of protecting it. By this we are all his disciples and his successors; by this he has laid the eternal foundation-stone of true religion; and if religion is essential to humanity, he has by this deserved the Divine rank the world has accorded him.

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Ch. 5.
7 months 2 weeks ago

It is normal to hate what we fear, and it happens frequently, though not always, that we fear what we hate. I think it may be taken as the rule among primitive men, that they both fear and hate whatever is unfamiliar. They have their own herd, originally a very small one. And within one herd, all are friends, unless there is some special ground of enmity. Other herds are potential or actual enemies; a single member of one of them who strays by accident will be killed. An alien herd as a whole will be avoided or fought according to circumstances. It is this primitive mechanism which still controls our instinctive reaction to foreign nations. The completely untravelled person will view all foreigners as the savage regards a member of another herd. But the man who has travelled, or who has studied international politics, will have discovered that, if his herd is to prosper, it must, to some degree, become amalgamated with other herds.

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6 months 1 week ago

Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.

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(Matthew 12:31-32) (KJV)
7 months 2 weeks ago

All the great speakers were bad speakers at first.

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Power
5 months 4 weeks ago

Just as the performance of the vilest and most wicked deeds requires spirit and talent, so even the greatest demand a certain insensitivity which under other circumstances we would call stupidity.

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F 87
8 months 1 week ago

Natural justice is a symbol or expression of usefulness, to prevent one person from harming or being harmed by another.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

If we cannot "practice the presence of God," it is something to practice the absence of God, to become increasingly aware of our unawareness till we feel like man who should stand beside a great cataract and hear no noise, or like a man in a story who looks in a mirror and finds no face there, or a man in a dream who stretches his hand to visible objects and gets no sensation of touch. To know that one is dreaming is to no longer be perfectly asleep. Bur for news of the fully waking world you must go to my betters.

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"Charity"
3 months 1 week ago

The most simple picture one can form about the creation of an empirical science is along the lines of an inductive method. Individual facts are selected and grouped together such that their lawful connection becomes clearly apparent. ... The truly great advances in our understanding of nature originated in a manner almost diametrically opposed to induction. The intuitive grasp of the essentials or a large complex of facts leads the scientist to the postulation of a hypothetical basic law, or several such basic laws. From the basic laws (system of axioms) he derives his conclusions as completely as possible in a purely logically deductive manner. These conclusions, derived from the basic laws (and often only after time-consuming developments and calculations), can then be compared to experience, and in this manner provide criteria for the justification of the assumed basic law.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Youth now flees on feathered foot.

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To Will H. Low, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
8 months 1 week ago

At fifteen my heart was set on learning; at thirty I stood firm; at forty I had no more doubts; at fifty I knew the will of heaven; at sixty my ear was obedient; at seventy I could follow my heart's desire without overstepping the boundaries of what was right.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

If thou art pained by any external thing, it is not this that disturbs thee, but thy own judgment about it. And it is in thy power to wipe out this judgment now.

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VIII. 47, trans. George Long
4 months 3 weeks ago

The idea of a law of progress, or of an all but irresistible tendency to general improvement, is then merely a superstition, one of the tents of the modernist pseudo-religion of humanism. Even if such a law or tendency existed and were demonstrable, the liberal faith in progress would for Santayana be pernicious. For it leads to a corrupt habit of mind in which things are valued, not for their present excellence or perfection, but instrumentally, as leading to something better; and it insinuates into thought and feeling a sort of historical theodicy, in which past evil is justified as a means to present or future good. The idea of progress embodies a kind of time-worship (to adopt an expression used by Wyndham Lewis) in which the particularities of our world are seen and valued, not in themselves, but for what they might perhaps become, thereby leaving us destitute of the sense of the present and, at the same time, of the perspective of eternity.

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'Santayana's Alternative' (p.67-8)
7 months 3 weeks ago

It requires twenty years for a man to rise from the vegetable state in which he is within his mother's womb, and from the pure animal state which is the lot of his early childhood, to the state when the maturity of reason begins to appear. It has required thirty centuries to learn a little about his structure. It would need eternity to learn something about his soul. It takes an instant to kill him.

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"Man: General Reflection on Man", 1771
11 months 3 weeks ago

In the Critique of Cynical Reasoning, a great bestseller in Germany (Sloterdijk, 1983), Peter Sloterdijk puts forward the thesis that ideology's dominant mode of functioning is cynical which renders impossible - or, more precisely, vain - the classical critical-ideological procedure. The cynical subject is quite aware of the distance between the ideological mask and the social reality, but he none the less still insists upon the mask.

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3 months 1 week ago

Reading after a certain age diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking, just as the man who spends too much time in the theater is tempted to be content with living vicariously instead of living his own life.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

The end of the republic is to enervate and to weaken all other bodies so as to increase its own body.

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Book 2, Ch. 3 (translation by Mansfield and Tarcov)
5 months 1 week ago

There is surely no contradiction in saying that a certain section of the community may be quite competent to protect the persons and property of the rest, yet quite unfit to direct our opinions, or to superintend our private habits.

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p. 246
5 months 2 weeks ago

Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

It takes intellectual courage to kick yourself out of your emotional incredulity and persuade yourself that there is no other rational choice.

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The Intellectual and Moral Courage of Atheism
7 months 2 weeks ago

Don't say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.

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Social Aims; sometimes condensed to "What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say."
6 months 1 day ago

I believe that if an individual is not on the path to transcending his society and seeing in what way it furthers or impedes the development of human potential, he cannot enter into intimate contact with his humanity. If the tabus, restrictions, distorted values appear "natural" to him, this is a clear indication that he cannot have a real knowledge of human nature. I believe that society, while having a function both stimulating and inhibiting at the same time, has always been in conflict with humanity. Only when the purpose of society is identified with that of humanity will society cease to paralyze man and encourage his dominance.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

Even if I set out to make a film about a fillet of sole, it would be about me.

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On the autobiographical nature of his films, in The Atlantic
7 months 2 weeks ago

Nicias, do you think you can erase with good deeds the wrongs you committed against your mother? What good deed will ever reach her? Her soul is a scorching noon time, without a single breath of a breeze, nothing moves, nothing changes, nothing lives there; a great emaciated sun, an immobile sun eternally consumes her.

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King Aegistheus, Act 2
6 months 2 weeks ago

Basically-I speak of life as it is and not of abstract philosophical constructs-life is only bearable because one does not go to the end; doing something is only possible when one has particular illusions and that holds also for friendships, for everything.

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7 months 1 week ago

We assume that our own advances in objectivity are steps along a path that extends beyond them and beyond all our capacities. But even allowing unlimited time, or an unlimited number of generations, to take as many successive steps as we like, the process can never be completed. ... What is wanted is some way of making the most objective standpoint the basis of action.

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pp. 128-129.
3 months 1 week ago

Besides agreeing with the aims of vegetarianism for aesthetic and moral reasons, it is my view that a vegetarian manner of living by its purely physical effect on the human temperament would most beneficially influence a lot of mankind.

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6 months 1 week ago

The Greek word for philosopher (philosophos) connotes a distinction from sophos. It signifies the lover of wisdom (knowledge) as distinguished from him who considers himself wise in the possession of knowledge. This meaning of the word still endures: the essence of philosophy is not the possession of the truth but the search for truth. ... Philosophy means to be on the way. Its questions are more essential than its answers, and every answer becomes a new question.

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Way to Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy (1951) as translated by Ralph Mannheim, Ch. 1, What is Philosophy?, p. 12
7 months 2 weeks ago

A strict allegory is like a puzzle with a solution: a great romance is like a flower whose smell reminds you of something you can't quite place. I think the something is 'the whole quality of life as we actually experience it.'

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C. S. Lewis' Letters to Children - letter to Lucy, 9/11/1958
7 months 3 weeks ago

When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.

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7 months 1 week ago

When some one boasted that at the Pythian games he had vanquished men, Diogenes replied, "Nay, I defeat men, you defeat slaves."

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Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 33, 43
6 months 3 weeks ago

I cleave the heavens and soar to the infinite. And while I rise from my own globe to others And penetrate ever further through the eternal field, That which others saw from afar, I leave far behind me. Variant translation: While I venture out beyond this tiny globe Into reaches past the bounds of starry night I leave behind what others strain to see afar.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

From the moment when labour can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolized, i.e., from the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital, from that moment, you say individuality vanishes.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Constitutional freedom, as the right of every citizen to have to obey no other law than that to which he has given his consent or approval.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

The Age of Writing has passed. We must invent a new metaphor, restructure our thoughts and feelings.

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(p. 14)
7 months 2 weeks ago

It is, of course, clear that a country with a large foreign population must endeavour, through its schools, to assimilate the children of immigrants. It is, however, unfortunate that a large part of this process should be effected by means of a somewhat blatant nationalism.

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Ch. 10: Modern Homogeneity

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