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3 months 1 week ago

In his arms, my lady lay asleep, wrapped in a veil. He woke her then and trembling and obedient. She ate that burning heart out of his hand; Weeping I saw him then depart from me.

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Chapter I, First Sonnet (tr. Mark Musa)
3 weeks 5 days ago

I know-as we all do-very little of the practice and the spoken and written doctrine of former times on the subject of non-resistance to evil. I knew what had been said on the subject by the fathers of the Church-Origen, Tertullian, and others-I knew too of the existence of some so-called sects of Mennonites, Herrnhuters, and Quakers, who do not allow a Christian the use of weapons, and do not enter military service; but I knew little of what had been done by these so-called sects toward expounding the question.

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Preface
2 months 4 weeks ago

Long discourses, and philosophical readings, at best, amaze and confound, but do not instruct children. When I say, therefore, that they must be treated as rational creatures, I mean that you must make them sensible, by the mildness of your carriage, and in the composure even in the correction of them, that what you do is reasonable in you, and useful and necessary for them; and that it is not out of caprichio, passion or fancy, that you command or forbid them any thing.

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Sec. 81
1 month 3 weeks ago

For my part for one, though I make no doubt of preferring the antient Course, or almost any other to this vile chimera, and sick mans dream of Government yet I could not actively, or with a good heart, and clear conscience, go to the establishment of a monarchical despotism in the place of this system of Anarchy.

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Letter to Richard Burke (26 September 1791), quoted in Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith (eds.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Volume VI: July 1789-December 1791 (1967), p. 414
3 months 3 weeks ago

Someone in despair despairs over something. So, for a moment, it seems, but only for a moment. That same instant the true despair shows itself, or despair in its true guise. In despairing over something he was really despairing over himself, and he wants now to be rid of himself.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

It is love that leniently and mercifully says: I forgive you everything-if you are forgiven only little, then it is because you love only little. Justice severely sets the boundary and says: No further! This is the limit. For you there is no forgiveness, and there is nothing more to be said.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth - more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. It sees man, a feeble speck, surrounded by unfathomable depths of silence; yet it bears itself proudly, as unmoved as if it were lord of the universe. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.

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pp. 178-179
3 months 5 days ago

There are also Idols formed by the intercourse and association of men with each other, which I call Idols of the Market Place, on account of the commerce and consort of men there. For it is by discourse that men associate, and words are imposed according to the apprehension of the vulgar. And therefore the ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding. Nor do the definitions or explanations wherewith in some things learned men are wont to guard and defend themselves, by any means set the matter right. But words plainly force and overrule the understanding, and throw all into confusion, and lead men away into numberless empty controversies and idle fancies.

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Aphorism 43
3 months 5 days ago

But by far the greatest hindrance and aberration of the human understanding proceeds from the dullness, incompetency, and deceptions of the senses; in that things which strike the sense outweigh things which do not immediately strike it, though they be more important. Hence it is that speculation commonly ceases where sight ceases; insomuch that of things invisible there is little or no observation.

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Aphorism 50
3 months 2 weeks ago

Virtue (or the man of virtue) is not left to stand alone. He who practices it will have neighbors.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

I am to talk about Apologetics. Apologetics means of course Defence. The first question is - what do you propose to defend? Christianity, of course...

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"Christian Apologetics" (1945), p. 89
1 month 3 weeks ago

Great and enduring civilizations like those of the Hindus and the Chinese were built upon this foundation and developed from it a discipline of self-knowledge which they brought to a high pitch of refinement both in philosophy and practice.

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Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul. quoted in Hindu Culture, K. Guru Dutt, and quoted in Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.
1 month 1 week ago

A race preserves its vigour so long as it harbours a real contrast between what has been and what may be, and so long as it is nerved by the vigour to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure, civilization is in full decay.

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p. 360.
1 month 3 weeks ago

Even in childhood I watched the hours flow, independent of any reference, any action, any event, the disjunction of time from what was not itself, its autonomous existence, its special status, its empire, its tyranny. I remember quite clearly that afternoon when, for the first time, confronting the empty universe, I was no more than a passage of moments reluctant to go on playing their proper parts. Time was coming unstuck from being - at my expense.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Indeed, it is tempting to suppose that it is self evident that things should be so arranged so as to lead to the most good.

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Chapter I, Section 5, pg. 25
3 months 3 weeks ago

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

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2 months 1 week ago

For it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be.

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Frag. B 3, quoted by Plotinus, Enneads V, i.8
1 month 2 weeks ago

The vicious circle of dread of war which leads the nations to arm themselves for self-protection, with the result that bloated armaments ultimately lead to the war which they were intended to avert, can be broken in either of two conceivable ways. There might arise a unique world power, brought into being by the unification of all those now in possession of weapons, and equipped with the capacity to forbid the lesser and unarmed nations to make war. On the other hand, it may arise by the working of a fate to us still inscrutable which, out of ruin, will disclose a way towards the development of a new human being. To will the discovery of this way would be blind impotence, but those who do not wish to deceive themselves will be prepared for the possibility.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.

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Mysterium Coniunctionis, from The Collected Works of C. G. Jung
1 month 2 weeks ago

The ground of democratic ideas and practices is faith in the potentialities of individuals, faith in the capacity for positive developments if proper conditions are provided. The weakness of the philosophy originally advanced to justify the democratic movement was that it took individuality to be something given ready-made, that is, in abstraction from time, instead of as a power to develop.

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1 month 4 days ago

It was Rudolf Carnap's dream for the last three decades of his life to show that science proceeds by a formal syntactic method; today no one to my knowledge holds out any hope for that project.

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Hilary Putnam, in: James Conant, Urszula M. Zeglen (2012) Hilary Putnam: Pragmatism and Realism. p. 14
2 months 3 weeks ago

...and if you are common, you can dress up as a woman, show you behind or write poems: there's nothing offensive about a naked behind if it's everybody's; each person will be mirrored in it.

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p. 463
3 weeks 3 days ago

In Catch-22, the figure of the black market and the ground of war merge into a monster presided over by the syndicate. When war and market merge, all money transactions begin to drip blood.

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(p. 211)
3 months 3 weeks ago

It is impossible that each of the elements should be infinite. For that is body which has interval on all sides; and that is infinite which has extension without bound.

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3 months 4 weeks ago
Where there have been powerful governments, societies, religions, public opinions, in short wherever there has been tyranny, there the solitary philosopher has been hated; for philosophy offers an asylum to a man into which no tyranny can force it way, the inward cave, the labyrinth of the heart.
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1 month 5 days ago

The world you perceive is drastically simplified model of the real world.

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p. xxvi.
1 month 3 weeks ago

Evil perpetually tends to disappear.

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Part I, Ch. 2 : The Evanescence of Evil, § 2
3 months 3 weeks ago

Parmenides: If anyone, with his mind fixed on all these objections and others like them, denies the existence of ideas of things, and does not assume an idea under which each individual thing is classed, he will be quite at a loss, since he denies that the idea of each thing is always the same, and in this way he will utterly destroy the power of carrying on discussion... Then what will become of philosophy? To what can you turn, if these things are unknown?

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1 month 3 weeks ago

So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find some one to worship.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.

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Commonly attributed to Mere Christianity, where it is not found. Earliest reference seems to be an unsourced attribution to George MacDonald in an 1892 issue of the Quaker periodical The British Friend.
2 months 1 day ago

In a revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part to invent is the end.

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Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville, p. 71.
3 months 3 weeks ago

When people are friends, they have no need of justice, but when they are just, they need friendship in addition.

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2 months 1 day ago

No natural boundary seems to be set to the efforts of man; and what is not yet done is only what he has not yet attempted to do. Variant: What is not yet done is only what we have not yet attempted to do.

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Chapter XVIII.
2 months 3 weeks ago

We may well call it black diamonds. Every basket is power and civilization. For coal is a portable climate. It carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle; and it is the means of transporting itself withersoever it is wanted. Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta, and with its comfort brings its industrial power.

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Wealth
3 months 2 weeks ago

To worship to other than one's own ancestral spirits is brown-nosing. If you see what is right and fail to act on it, you lack courage. Variant: To see what is right, and not to do it, is want of courage or of principle.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Friendship, I have said, is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself..."

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2 months 2 weeks ago

No power and no treasure can outweigh the extension of our knowledge.

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Durant (1939), Ch. XVI, §II, p. 354; citing J. Owen, Evenings with the Skeptics, London, 1881, vol. 1, p. 149.
1 month 2 weeks ago

Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions. 

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As quoted in The Listener
2 months 3 weeks ago

People are not aware how entirely, in former ages, the law of superior strength was the rule of life; how publicly and openly it was avowed, I do not say cynically or shamelessly - for these words imply a feeling that there was something in it to be ashamed of, and no such notion could find a place in the faculties of any person in those ages, except a philosopher or a saint.

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Ch. 1
1 month 3 weeks ago

A great profusion of things, which are splendid or valuable in themselves, is magnificent. The starry heaven, though it occurs so very frequently to our view, never fails to excite an idea of grandeur. This cannot be owing to the stars themselves, separately considered. The number is certainly the cause. The apparent disorder augments the grandeur, for the appearance of care is highly contrary to our idea of magnificence. Besides, the stars lie in such apparent confusion, as makes it impossible on ordinary occasions to reckon them. This gives them the advantage of a sort of infinity.

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Part II Section XIII
1 month 2 weeks ago

You do not attain to knowledge by remaining on the shore and watching the foaming waves, you must make the venture and cast yourself in, you must swim, alert and with all your force, even if a moment comes when you think you are losing consciousness; in this way, and in no other, do you reach anthropological insight.

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p. 148

I have written a good number of drafts and small reflections. They are not waiting for the last touch but for the sunlight to wake them up.

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B 29
2 months 4 weeks ago

As these people are not convicted of forfeiting freedom, they have still a natural, perfect right to it; and the Governments whenever they come should, in justice set them free, and punish those who hold them in slavery.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

It was not delight, not wonder that arose among us, it was the peace of heaven. A thousand times have I said it to her and to myself: the most beautiful is also the most sacred. And such was everything in her. Like her singing, even so was her life.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

When I was a child the atmosphere in the house was one of puritan piety and austerity. There were family prayers at eight o'clock every morning. Although there were eight servants, food was always of Spartan simplicity, and even what there was, if it was at all nice, was considered too good for children. For instance, if there was apple tart and rice pudding, I was only allowed the rice pudding. Cold baths all the year round were insisted upon, and I had to practice the piano from seven-thirty to eight every morning although the fires were not yet lit. My grandmother never allowed herself to sit in an armchair until the evening. Alcohol and tobacco were viewed with disfavor although stern convention compelled them to serve a little wine to guests. Only virtue was prized, virtue at the expense of intellect, health, happiness, and every mundane good.

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p. 9
1 month 2 weeks ago

Ressentiment must therefore be strongest in a society like ours, where approximately equal rights (political and otherwise) or formal social equality, publicly recognized, go hand in hand with wide factual differences in power, property, and education.

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L. Coser, trans. (1973), p. 50
1 month 1 week ago

Power tends to reduce openness... Power tries to solidify and stabilize its position by eradicating spaces open to play, or incalculable spaces.

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I have said more than once, that I hold space to be something purely relative, as time; an order of coexistences, as time is an order of successions.

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Third letter to Samuel Clarke, February 25, 1716
2 months 3 weeks ago

God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose.

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Intellect

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