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7 months 1 week ago

We are aware of all the inconveniences of prison, and that it is dangerous when it is not useless. And yet one cannot 'see' how to replace it. It is the detestable solution, which one seems unable to do without.

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Part Four, Complete and austere institutions
7 months 6 days ago

The organism does not have a point of view: the person or creature does.

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"Panpsychism" (1979), p. 189.
8 months 2 weeks ago

A son is a mirror in which the father sees himself reflected, and the father is a mirror in which the son sees himself as he will be in the future.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Beat a dog once and you only have to show him the whip.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Ascetic bs. Enjoy your life. Study in comfort.

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8 months 2 weeks ago
Where there is happiness, there is found pleasure in nonsense. The transformation of experience into its opposite, of the suitable into the unsuitable, the obligatory into the optional (but in such a manner that this process produces no injury and is only imagined in jest), is a pleasure; ...
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3 months 2 weeks ago

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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6 months 1 week ago

Aging people should know that their lives are not mounting and unfolding but that an inexorable inner process forces the contraction of life. For a young person it is almost a sin - and certainly a danger - to be too much occupied with himself; but for the aging person it is a duty and a necessity to give serious attention to himself.

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p. 125
6 months 1 week ago

Every moment celebrates obsequies over the virtues of its predecessor.

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Ch. XIV
7 months 2 weeks ago

This year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.

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Book I, Chapter 1, "The Law of Human Nature"
4 months 6 days ago

Those who try to include all life when trying to determine justice: Should a man be executed for killing a fly? No? The fly has a short life span? The fly is small? All these rationalizations can be applied to you, by a creature that lives longer, is bigger, etc. #philosophy 

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5 months 1 week ago

In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession.

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"Innovation is obsolete", Evergreen review, Volume 15, Issues 86-94, Grove Press, 1971, p. 64
7 months 5 days ago

He is not poor who has enough of things to use. If it is well with your belly, chest and feet, the wealth of kings can give you nothing more.

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Book I, epistle xii, line 4
7 months 1 week ago

My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.

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§ 464
7 months 2 weeks ago

I have no doubt that the present Prime Minister, for instance, is a most sincere Christian, but I should not advise any of you to go and smite him on one cheek. I think you might find that he thought this text was intended in a figurative sense.

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"The Character of Christ"
3 months 2 weeks ago

The doors of heaven and hell are adjacent and identical.

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Ch. 18
7 months 1 week ago

I am my world.

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(The microcosm.) (5.63) Original German: Ich bin meine welt (Der Mikrokosmos.)
7 months 2 weeks ago

May it not be the fact that mankind, who after all are made up of single human beings, obtain a greater sum of happiness when each pursues his own, under the rules and conditions required by the good of the rest, than when each makes the good of the rest his only object, and allows himself no personal pleasures not indispensable to the preservation of his faculties? The regimen of a blockaded town should be cheerfully submitted to when high purposes require it, but is it the ideal perfection of human existence?

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Auguste Comte and Positivism, p. 142
6 months 2 weeks ago

You may have made a Revolution, but not a Reformation. You may have subverted Monarchy, but not recover'd freedom.

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Letter to Charles-Jean-François Depont (November 1789), quoted in Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith (eds.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Volume VI: July 1789-December 1791 (1967), p. 46
8 months 2 weeks ago

She has forgotten speech and language and the restlessness of thoughts, has forgotten what is even greater restlessness, this self, has forgotten herself-she, the lost woman, who is now lost in her Savior, who, lost in him, rests at his feet-like a picture. He speaks about her; he says: Her many sins are forgiven her, because she loved much. Although she is present, it is almost as if she were absent; it is almost as if he changed her into a picture, a parable.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Our tools are extensions of our purposes, and so we find it natural to make metaphorical attributions of intentionality to them; but I take it no philosophical ice is cut by such examples.

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There is no reason why poverty should call us away from philosophy-no, nor even actual want. For when hastening after wisdom, we must endure even hunger. Men have endured hunger when their towns were besieged, and what other reward for their endurance did they obtain than that they did not fall under the conqueror's power? How much greater is the promise of the prize of everlasting liberty, and the assurance that we need fear neither God nor man! Even though we starve, we must reach that goal.

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6 months 1 week ago

The source of an emotion is very difficult to grasp, but it comes to just that. That holds for all phenomena, for faith, etc. Why did it begin, how did it develop? and so forth-only he who has the gift of divination can perceive where it really comes from. But it is not accessible to reflection.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

God huddles in a knot in every cell of flesh. When I break a fruit open, this is how every seed is revealed to me. When I speak to men, this what I discern in their thick and muddy brains. God struggles in every thing, his hands flung upward toward the light. What light? Beyond and above every thing!

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8 months 1 day ago

Since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special regard to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstance, are brought into closer connection with you.

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1:28:29 English Latin Latin: Sed cum omnibus prodesse non possis, his potissimum consulendum est, qui pro locorum et temporum vel quarumlibet rerum opportunitatibus constrictius tibi quasi quadam sorte iunguntur.
5 months 1 week ago

The patient typically finds himself impelled by some deep, inner conviction that something is true, or right, or virtuous: a conviction that doesn't seem to owe anything to evidence or reason, but which, nevertheless, he feels as totally compelling and convincing. We doctors refer to such a belief as "faith".

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business.

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The Civil War in France : "The Third Address", May 1871
7 months 2 weeks ago

The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything.

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Lecture II, What Pragmatism Means
6 months 2 weeks ago

Men who undertake considerable things, even in a regular way, ought to give us ground to presume ability.

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6 months 1 week ago

Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.

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Matthew 7:7-8 (NKJV) (Also Luke 11:9-13)
6 months 1 week ago

In theory, it matters little to me whether I live as whether I die; in practice, I am lacerated by every anxiety which opens an abyss between life and death.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

the ultimate end, with reference to and for the sake of which all other things are desirable...is an existence exempt as far as possible from pain, and as rich as possible in enjoyments...This, being, according to the utilitarian opinion, the end of human action, is necessarily also the standard of morality; which may accordingly be defined, the rules and precepts for human conduct, by the observance of which an existence such as has been described might be, to the greatest extent possible, secured to all mankind; and not to them only, but, so far as the nature of things admits, to the whole sentient creation.

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Ch. 2
6 months 1 week ago

If death had only negative aspects, dying would be an unmanageable action.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

The real pioneers in ideas, in art and in literature have remained aliens to their time, misunderstood and repudiated.

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3 months 1 week ago

To live each day as though one's last, never flustered, never apathetic, never attitudinizing - here is perfection of character.

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VII, 69
4 months 1 day ago

In the pedagogical as in certain other spheres freedom is not allowed to erupt, the power of the opposition is not allowed to put a word in edgewise: they want submissiveness. Only a formal and material training is being aimed at and only scholars come out of the menageries of the humanists, only "useful citizens" out of those of the realists, both of whom are indeed nothing but subservient people. Our good background of recalcitrancy [sic] gets strongly suppressed and with it the development of knowledge to free will. The result of school is then philistinism.

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p. 23
3 months 2 weeks ago

Man, servant and interpreter of Nature, does and understands only as much as he has observed of the order of Nature, either in reality or in mind; he neither knows nor can do more.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.

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Included as a quotation in The Great Quotations (1977) by George Seldes, p. 35
7 months 1 week ago

For a large class of cases - though not for all - in which we employ the word meaning it can be explained thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.

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§ 43, this has often been quoted as simply: The meaning of a word is its use in the language.
5 months 1 day ago

The great end of life is not knowledge but action.

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"Technical Education"
4 months 4 weeks ago

The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. To dig for treasures shows not only impatience and greed, but lack of faith. Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach - waiting for a gift from the sea.

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4 months 1 week ago

The election... on November 3 ... illustrates a lot of these clashing forces. ..That election was the most important political fight ...in my lifetime. It's important not just for the United States but... for the rest of the world, given the role that the United States has historically played in maintaining that broader liberal international order.

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20:56
6 months 1 day ago

Traditional philosophy's claim to totality, culminating in the thesis that the real is rational, is indistinguishable from apologetics.

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p. 7
8 months 1 week ago

Rhetoric, it seems, is a producer of persuasion for belief, not for instruction in the matter of right and wrong. And so the rhetorician's business is not to instruct a law court or a public meeting in matters of right and wrong, but only to make them believe.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?

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Book II, Chapter 1, "The Rival Conceptions of God"

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