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5 months 1 day ago

The main problem for the average reader -- particularly of The Great Beast -- is that Crowley seems such an intolerable show-off that it is hard to believe anything he says.

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p. 73
6 months 2 weeks ago

If you want good laws, burn those you have and make new ones.

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"Laws", 1765
6 months 2 weeks ago

Poetry must be new as foam, and as old as the rock.

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March 1845
3 months 1 week ago

Our English careers to born genius are twofold. There is the silent or unlearned career of the Industrialisms, which are very many among us; and there is the articulate or learned career of the three professions, Medicine, Law (under which we may include Politics), and the Church. Your born genius, therefore, will first have to ask himself, Whether he can hold his tongue or cannot? True, all human talent, especially all deep talent, is a talent to do, and is intrinsically of silent nature; inaudible, like the Sphere Harmonies and Eternal Melodies, of which it is an incarnated fraction.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Every pleasure raises the tide of life; every pain lowers the tide of life.

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Ch. 6, The Biological View
5 months 1 week ago

Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge.

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p. 58
4 months 2 weeks ago

I don't think there would be many jokes, if there weren't constant frustration and fear and so forth. It's a response to bad troubles like crime.

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Interview Public Radio International
5 months 2 weeks ago

All men that are ruined, are ruined on the side of their natural propensities.

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No. 1, volume v, p. 286
5 months 1 week ago

Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them.

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Matthew 6:26 (NKJV)
6 months 2 weeks ago

In modern eyes, precious though wars may be they must not be waged solely for the sake of the ideal harvest. Only when forced upon one, is a war now thought permissible. It was not thus in ancient times. The earlier men were hunting men, and to hunt a neighboring tribe, kill the males, loot the village and possess the females, was the most profitable, as well as the most exciting, way of living. Thus were the more martial tribes selected, and in chiefs and peoples a pure pugnacity and love of glory came to mingle with the more fundamental appetite for plunder. Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to plunder; but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors. Showing war's irrationality and horror is of no effect on him. The horrors make the fascination. War is the strong life; it is life in extremis; war taxes are the only ones men never hesitate to pay, as the budgets of all nations show us.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

The other part of the true religion is our duty to man. We must love our neighbour as our selves, we must be charitable to all men for charity is the greatest of graces, greater then even faith or hope & covers a multitude of sins. We must be righteous & do to all men as we would they should do to us.

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Of Humanity
2 months 2 weeks ago

Remember that man lives only in the present, in this fleeting instant; all the rest of his life is either past and gone, or not yet revealed. Short, therefore, is man's life, and narrow is the corner of the earth wherein he dwells.

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III, 10
6 months 2 weeks ago

How can great minds be produced in a country where the test of a great mind is agreeing in the opinions of small minds?

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As quoted in Egoists: A Book of Supermen (1909) by James Huneker, p. 367
4 months 1 week ago

It may be that the public mind of India may expand under our system till it has outgrown that system; that by good government we may educate our subjects into a capacity for better government, that, having become instructed in European knowledge, they may, in some future age, demand European institutions. Whether such a day will ever come I know not. But never will I attempt to avert or to retard it. Whenever it comes, it will be the proudest day in English history.

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Speech in the House of Commons
5 months 1 week ago

Man must be free of it all, of his bad conscience and of the bad salvation from this conscience in order to become in truth the way. Now, he no longer promises others the fulfillment of his duties, but promises himself the fulfillment of man.

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p. 178
6 months 1 week ago

When Alexander the Great addressed him with greetings, and asked if he wanted anything, Diogenes replied "Yes, stand a little out of my sunshine."

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From Plutarch, Alexander, 14. Cf. Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 38, Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, v. 32
3 months 3 days ago

Other vices can be concealed and cherished in secret; anger shows itself openly and appears in the countenance, and the greater it is, the more plainly it boils forth. Do you not see how in all animals certain signs appear before they proceed to mischief, and how their entire bodies put off their usual quiet appearance and stir up their ferocity? Boars foam at the mouth and sharpen their teeth by rubbing them against trees, bulls toss their horns in the air and scatter the sand with blows of their feet

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.

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Letter to Dr. James Currie (28 January 1786) Lipscomb & Bergh 18:ii
6 months 3 weeks ago

Grief and disappointment give rise to anger, anger to envy, envy to malice, and malice to grief again, till the whole circle be completed.

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Part 1, Section 4
5 months 2 weeks ago

Without its assiduity to the ridiculous, would the human race have lasted more than a single generation?

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3 months 1 week ago

Friendship ... flourishes not so much by kindnesses as by sincerity.

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Part 3
2 months 2 weeks ago

Take things always by their smooth handle.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, sea-shores, and mountains; and thou too art wont to desire such things very much. But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men, for it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself. For nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble does a man retire than into his own soul. Variant translation: Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul.

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IV, 3.
3 months 4 weeks ago

The serpent, the king, the tiger, the stinging wasp, the small child, the dog owned by other people, and the fool: these seven ought not to be awakened from sleep.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

It is truly a marvelous thing to consider to what greatness Athens arrived in the space of one hundred years after she freed herself from the tyranny of Pisistratus; but, above all, it is even more marvelous to consider the greatness Rome reached when she freed herself from her kings. The reason is easy to understand, for it is the common good and not private gain that makes cities great. Yet, without a doubt, this common good is observed only in republics, for in them everything that promotes it is practised, and however much damage it does to this or that private individual, those who benefit from the said common good are so numerous that they are able to advance in spite of the inclination of the few citizens who are oppressed by it.

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Book 2, Chapter 2
7 months 2 weeks ago

To understand oneself in existence is the Christian principle, except that this self has received much richer and much more profound qualifications that are even more difficult to understand together with existing. The believer is a subjective thinker, and the difference, is only between the simple person and the simple wise person. Here again the oneself is not humanity in general, subjectivity in general, and other such things, whereas everything becomes easy inasmuch as the difficulty is removed and the whole matter is shifted over into the shadow play of abstraction.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Idea or Vision, in its sensuous meaning, would be something that could be perceived only by the bodily eye and not by any other sense such as taste, hearing, etc.; it would be such a thing as a rainbow, or the forms which pass before us in dreams. Idea or Vision, in its supersensuous meaning, would denote, first of all, in conformity with the sphere in which the word is to be valid, something that cannot be perceived by the body at all, but only by the mind; and then, something that cannot, as many other things can, be perceived by the dim feeling of the mind, but only by the eye of the mind, by clear perception.

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The Chief Difference Between The Germans And The Other Peoples Of Teutonic Descent p. 59
3 months 1 week ago

This [experimentation] is the custom-and properly so-in those sciences where mathematical demonstrations are applied to natural phenomena, as is seen in the case of perspective, astronomy, mechanics, music, and others where the principles, once established by well-chosen experiments, become the foundations of the entire superstructure.

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Salviati, Third Day. Change of Position
2 months 2 weeks ago

Faith is nothing else than reason grown courageous - reason raised to its highest power, expanded to its widest vision.

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"Religious Perplexities" (1922), his Hibbert Lecture.
5 months 2 weeks ago

To say that authority, whether secular or religious, supplies no ground for morality is not to deny the obvious fact that it supplies a sanction.

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"The Meaning of Life".
5 months 5 days ago

It is the furious longing to give finality to the Universe, to make it conscious and personal, that has brought us to believe in God, to wish that God may exist, to create God, in a word. To create Him, yes! This saying ought not to scandalize even the most devout theist. For to believe in God is, in a certain sense, to create Him, although He first creates us. It is He who is continually creating Himself.

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5 months 1 week ago

Instead of defining the word, let us briefly characterize or describe the phenomenon. Ressentiment is a self-poisoning of the mind which has quite definite causes and consequences. It is a lasting mental attitude, caused by the systematic repression of certain emotions and affects which, as such, are normal components of human nature. Their repression leads to the constant tendency to indulge in certain kinds of value delusions and corresponding value judgments. The emotions and affects primarily concerned are revenge, hatred, malice, envy, the impulse to detract, and spite.

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2 months 4 weeks ago

The brutality of a man purely motivated by monetary considerations ... often does not appear to him at all as a moral delinquency, since he is aware only of a rigorously logical behavior, which draws the objective consequences of the situation.

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"Domination" (1908), in On Individuality and Social Forms (1971), p. 110
5 months 2 weeks ago

"Do I look like someone who has something to do here on Earth?" - That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Tools arm the man. One can well say that man is capable of bringing forth a world; he lacks only the necessary apparatus, the corresponding armature of his sensory tools. The beginning is there. Thus the principle of a warship lies in the idea of the shipbuilder, who is able to incorporate this thought by making himself into a gigantic machine, as it were, through a mass of men and appropriate tools and materials. Thus the idea of a moment often required monstrous organs, monstrous masses of materials, and man is therefore a potential, if not an actual creator.

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Fragment No. 88
6 months 2 weeks ago

For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.

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"Sermons in Cats"
2 months 2 weeks ago

With all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow-citizens,-A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Dogmatics must be designed in this way. Above all, every science must vigorously lay hold of its own beginning and not live in complicated relations with other sciences. If dogmatics begins by wanting to explain sinfulness or by wanting to prove its actuality, no dogmatics will come out of it, but the entire existence of dogmatics will become problematic and vague.

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3 months 3 days ago

Would you know what makes men greedy for the future? It is because no one has yet found himself.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

The assertion that art may be good art and at the same time incomprehensible to a great number of people is extremely unjust, and its consequences are ruinous to art itself...it is the same as saying some kind of food is good but most people can't eat it.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Do not shorten the morning by getting up late, or waste it in unworthy occupations or in talk; look upon it as the quintessence of life, as to a certain extent sacred. Evening is like old age: we are languid, talkative, silly. Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 2: Our Relation To Ourselves
7 months 2 weeks ago

The purpose of aphorisms is to keep fools who have memorised them from having nothing to say.

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4 months 1 day ago

I ... understand why the saints were rarely married women. I am convinced it has nothing inherently to do, as I once supposed, with chastity or children. It has primarily to do with distractions ... Women's normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life or saintly life.

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Ch. 2
7 months 4 days ago

People travel to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars; and they pass by themselves without wondering.

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Variant: Men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty billows of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, and pass themselves by. X
5 months 1 week ago

Man's being is made of such strange stuff as to be partly akin to nature and partly not, at once natural and extranatural, a kind of ontological centaur, half immersed in nature, half transcending it.

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"Man has no nature"
5 months 1 week ago

To look at a work of art in order to see how well certain rules are observed and canons conformed to impoverished perception. But to strive to note the ways in which certain conditions are fulfilled, such as the organic means by which the media is made to express and carry definite parts, or how the problem of adequate individualization is solved, sharpens esthetic perception and enriches its content.

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p. 213
5 months 2 weeks ago

No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.

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