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3 months 2 weeks ago

Without a strategic retreat into the self, without vigilant thought, human life is impossible. Call to mind all that mankind owes to certain great withdrawals into the self! It is no chance that all the great founders of religions preceded their apostolates by famous retreats. Buddha withdraws to the forest; Mahomet withdraws to his tent, and even there he withdraws from his tent by wrapping his head in his cloak; above all, Jesus goes apart into the desert for forty days.

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p. 35
5 months 1 day ago

No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that what has been written latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an improvement on what was written previously; and that every change means progress. Men who think and have correct judgment, and people who treat their subject earnestly, are all exceptions only. Vermin is the rule everywhere in the world: it is always at hand and busily engaged in trying to improve in its own way upon the mature deliberations of the thinkers.

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5 months 1 week ago

He that I am reading seems always to have the most force.

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Book II, Ch. 12. Apology for Raimond Sebond
2 months 3 weeks ago

He sleeps well who knows not that he sleeps ill.

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Maxim 77
3 months 3 weeks ago

Life is not, and death is a dream. Suffering has invented them both as self-justification. Man alone is torn between an unreality and an illusion.

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3 months 1 week ago

I have lived and slept in the same bed with English countesses and Prussian farm women... no woman has excited passions among women more than I have.

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As quoted in Parted Lips : Lesbian Love Quotes Through the Ages (2002) by Simone Rich
6 months ago

A tragedy, then, is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself; in language ... not in a narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.

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3 months 1 week ago

If the importance of science does not lie in its constituting the whole of human knowledge, even less does it lie, in my view, in its technological applications. Science at the best is a way of coming to know, and hopefully a way of acquiring some reverence for, the wonders of nature. The philosophical study of science, at the best, has always been a way of coming to understand both some of the nature and some of the limitations of human reason. These seem to me to be sufficient grounds for taking science and philosophy of science seriously; they do not justify science worship.

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"Introduction: Science as approximation to truth"
5 months 1 day ago

Virtue is debased by self-justification.

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Oedipe, act II, scene IV, 1718
4 weeks 1 day ago

Considering the general tendency to multiply offices and dependencies and to increase expense to the ultimate term of burden which the citizen can bear, it behooves us to avail ourselves of every occasion which presents itself for taking off the surcharge; that it never may be seen here that, after leaving to labor the smallest portion of its earnings on which it can subsist, Government shall itself consume the whole residue of what it was instituted to guard.

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Thomas Jefferson's First State of the Union Address
6 months ago

What is the essence of life? To serve others and to do good. Often given as a saying of Aristotle with no reference.

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2 months 1 week ago

The king who is situated anywhere immediately on the circumference of the conqueror's territory is termed the enemy.The king who is likewise situated close to the enemy, but separated from the conqueror only by the enemy, is termed the friend (of the conqueror).

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Book VI, "The Source of Sovereign States"
3 months 3 weeks ago

The little world of childhood with its familiar surroundings is a model of the greater world. The more intensively the family has stamped its character upon the child, the more it will tend to feel and see its earlier miniature world again in the bigger world of adult life. Naturally this is not a conscious, intellectual process.

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The Theory of Psychoanalysis
3 weeks 5 days 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
3 months 3 weeks ago

I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.

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Revelation 22:13
3 months 3 weeks ago

In our fear, we are victims of an aggression of the Future.

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4 months 4 days ago

When an opinion has taken root in a democracy and established itself in the minds of the majority, it afterward persists by itself, needing no effort to maintain it since no one attacks it. Those who at first rejected it as false come in the end to adopt it as accepted, and even those who still at the bottom of their hearts oppose it keep their views to themselves, taking great care to avoid a dangerous and futile contest.

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Book Three, Chapter XXI.
5 months 1 week ago

We have now completed both the spiritual and the temporal government, that is, the divine and the paternal authority and obedience. But here now we go forth from our house among our neighbors to learn how we should live with one another, every one himself toward his neighbor. Therefore God and government are not included in this commandment nor is the power to kill, which they have taken away. For God has delegated His authority to punish evil-doers to the government instead of parents, who aforetime (as we read in Moses) were required to bring their own children to judgment and sentence them to death. Therefore, what is here forbidden is forbidden to the individual in his relation to any one else, and not to the government.

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[The Large Catechism] by Martin Luther, Translated by F. Bente and W.H.T. Dau Published in: Triglot Concordia: The Symbolical Books of the Ev. Lutheran Church (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1921) pp. 565-773,
1 month 3 weeks ago

With exceptions so rare they are regarded as miracles of nature, successful democratic politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies. The decisive consideration is not whether the proposition is good but whether it is popular-not whether it will work well and prove itself but whether the active talking constituents like it immediately. Politicians rationalize this servitude by saying that in a democracy public men are the servants of the people.

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p. 27

There is no more important rule of conduct in the world than this: attach yourself as much as you can to people who are abler than you and yet not so very different that you cannot understand them.

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F 81
3 months 3 weeks ago

We live in the false as long as we have not suffered. But when we begin to suffer, we enter the truth only to regret the false.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

The fact of being within capital and sustaining capital is what defines the proletariat as a class.

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53
2 months 3 weeks ago

I would mind more if I could claim that The Selfish Gene had become severely outmoded and superseded. Unfortunately (from one point of view) I cannot. Details have changed and factual examples burgeoned mightily. But, with an exception that I shall discuss in a moment, there is little in the book that I would rush to take back now, or apologize for.

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Arthur Cain, late Professor of Zoology at Liverpool and one of my inspiring tutors at Oxford in the sixties, described The Selfish Gene in 1976 as a 'young man's book'.
4 months 4 weeks ago

Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue.

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Beauty

Death induces the sensual person to say: Let us eat and drink, because tomorrow we shall die – but this is sensuality's cowardly lust for life, that contemptible order of things where one lives in order to eat and drink instead of eating and drinking in order to live.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Interest only becomes one-sided and morbid only when it ceases to be frank, and becomes sly and furtive.

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p. 197

I am not sure but I should betake myself in extremities to the liberal divinities of Greece, rather than to my country's God. Jehovah, though with us he has acquired new attributes, is more absolute and unapproachable, but hardly more divine, than Jove. He is not so much of a gentleman, not so gracious and catholic, he does not exert so intimate and genial an influence on nature, as many a god of the Greeks.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man; also, it may be said, there is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.

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2 months 1 week ago

America is like a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair!

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In Quote: The Weekly Digest, vol. 23, no. 19 (4 May 1952) p. 16
5 months 2 weeks ago

Be not swept off your feet by the vividness of the impression, but say, "Impression, wait for me a little. Let me see what you are and what you represent. Let me try you."

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Book II, ch. 18, § 24, Reported in Bartlett's Quotations (1919) as "Be not hurried away by excitement, but say, "Semblance, wait for me a little".
3 weeks 5 days ago

When the empirical investigator glories in his refusal to go beyond the specialized observation dictated by the traditions of his discipline, be they ever so inclusive, he is making a virtue out of a defense mechanism which insures him against questioning his presuppositions.

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5 months 1 week ago

By the law is the knowledge of sin [Rom 3:20], so the word of grace comes only to those who are distressed by a sense of sin and tempted to despair.

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p. 168

Talking nonsense is man's only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms.

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5 months 3 days ago

The act of navigation is not favourable to foreign commerce, or to the growth of that opulence which can arise from it. ... As defence, however, is of much more importance than opulence, the act of navigation is, perhaps, the wisest of all the commercial regulations of England.

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Chapter II
4 months 4 weeks ago

It is easy to live for others; everybody does. I call on you to live for yourselves.

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May 3, 1845
3 months 3 weeks ago

Logical analysis applied to mental phenomenon shows that there is but one law of mind, namely that ideas tend to spread continuously and to affect certain others which stand to them in a peculiar relation of affectibility. In this spreading they lose intensity, and especially the power of affecting others, but gain generality and become welded with other ideas.

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1 month 2 weeks 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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2 months 3 weeks ago

It is often said, mainly by the 'no-contests', that although there is no positive evidence for the existence of God, nor is there evidence against his existence. So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At first sight that seems an unassailable position, at least in the weak sense of Pascal's wager. But on second thoughts it seems a cop-out, because the same could be said of Father Christmas and tooth fairies. There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?

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From speech at the Edinburgh International Science Festival, 1992-04-15.
5 months ago

Gold is now money with reference to all other commodities only because it was previously, with reference to them, a simple commodity.

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Vol. I, Ch. 1, Section 3, pg. 81.
3 months 3 weeks ago

The way in which a society organizes the life of its members ... is one "project" of realization among others. But once the project has become operative in the basic institutions and relations, it tends to become exclusive and to determine the development of the society as a whole.

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p. xlviii
4 weeks 1 day ago

The Sight cannot decompose a compound colour into simple colours, or distinguish a compound from a simple colour

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Nevertheless, the ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve the force of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself, and to keep the common understanding from levelling them off to that unintelligibility which functions in turn as a source of pseudo-problems.

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Macquarrie & Robinson translation
3 months 2 weeks ago

If a captive mind is unaware of being in prison, it is living in error. If it has recognized the fact, even for the tenth of a second, and then quickly forgotten it in order to avoid suffering, it is living in falsehood. Men of the most brilliant intelligence can be born, live and die in error and falsehood. In them, intelligence is neither a good, nor even an asset. The difference between more or less intelligent men is like the difference between criminals condemned to life imprisonment in smaller or larger cells. The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his large cell.

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p. 69
1 month 3 weeks ago

Democracy is a meaningless word unless it signifies that differences of opinion have been expressed, represented, and even satisfied in the decision.

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Ch. IV: "The Line of Least Resistance", pp. 47-48
4 months 2 weeks ago

Life's short span forbids us to enter on far reaching hopes.

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Book I, ode iv, line 15
1 month 1 week ago

It is a cliché that the modern scientific vision has desacralized the world, and the world desacralized by scientific knowledge has become one of the existential elements that make up modern man, all the more so to the degree that he is "civilized." Ever since he has been subject to compulsory education, his mind has been stuffed with "positive" scientific notions; he cannot avoid seeing in a soulless light everything that surrounds him, and therefore acts destructively. What, for example, could the symbol of the sunset of a dynasty, like the Japanese, mean to him when he knows scientifically what the sun is: merely a star, at which one can even fire missiles.

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p. 138
4 months 4 weeks ago

The Guide sang: The new age, the new art, the new ethic and thought, And fools crying, Because it has begun It will continue as it has begun! The wheel runs fast, therefore the wheel will run Faster for ever. The old age is done, We have new lights and see without the sun. (Though they lay flat the mountains and dry up the sea, Wilt thou yet change, as though God were a god?)

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Pilgrim's Regress 186-187
3 months 3 weeks ago

Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself.

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