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4 months 4 weeks ago

Genius is present in every age, but the men carrying it within them remain benumbed unless extraordinary events occur to heat up and melt the mass so that it flows forth.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

A free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.

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Part IV, Prop. LXVII
4 months 1 week ago

Atheism ... in its philosophic aspect refuses allegiance not merely to a definite concept of God, but it refuses all servitude to the God idea, and opposes the theistic principle as such. Gods in their individual function are not half as pernicious as the principle of theism which represents the belief in a supernatural, or even omnipotent, power to rule the earth and man upon it. It is the absolutism of theism, its pernicious influence upon humanity, its paralyzing effect upon thought and action, which Atheism is fighting with all its power.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory, every church or temple in the world. What is it, this egg, before the seed is introduced into it? An insentient mass. And after the seed has been introduced to into it? What is it then? An insentient mass. For what is the seed itself other than a crude and inanimate fluid? How is this mass to make a transition to a different structure, to sentience, to life? Through heat. And what will produce that heat in it? Motion. "Conversation Between D'Alembert and Diderot", as quoted in Selected Writings (1966) edited by Lester G. Crocker, and The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture (2004) by Louis K Dupré, p. 30 Variant translation: See this egg. It is with this that all the schools of theology and all the temples of the earth are to be overturned.

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As quoted in Diderot, Reason and Resonance (1982) by Élisabeth de Fontenay, p. 217
5 months 2 weeks ago

We rarely find anyone who can say he has lived a happy life, and who, content with his life, can retire from the world like a satisfied guest.

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Book I, satire i, line 117
6 months 2 days ago

For as when much superfluous matter has gathered in simple bodies, nature makes repeated efforts to remove and purge it away, thereby promoting the health of these bodies, so likewise as regards that composite body the human race, when every province of the world so teems with inhabitants that they can neither subsist where they are nor remove elsewhere, every region being equally crowded and over-peopled, and when human craft and wickedness have reached their highest pitch, it must needs come about that the world will purge herself in one or another of these three ways, to the end that men, becoming few and contrite, may amend their lives and live with more convenience.

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Book 1 Ch. 5 (as translated by Ninian Hill Thomson)
1 month 3 weeks ago

Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.

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Original text:Partout où vous verrez un autel, là se trouve la civilisation. "Second Dialogue," p. 44

With Leibnitz the extent to which thoughts advance is the extent of the universe; where comprehension ceases, the universe ceases, and God begins: so that later it was even maintained that to be comprehended was derogatory to God, because He was thus degraded into finitude. In that procedure a beginning is made from the determinate, this and that are stated to be necessary; but since in the next place the unity of these moments is not comprehended, it is transferred to God. God is therefore, as it were, the waste channel into which all contradictions flow: Leibnitz's Théodicée is just a popular summing up such as this.

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Third division, Chapter I. - The Metaphysics of the Understanding Alternate translation: "God is, as it were, the sewer into which all contradictions flow."
5 months 3 weeks ago

Your crystal? That's silly. Whom do you think you are fooling? Come on, everyone knows that I threw the baby out of the window. The crystal is shattered on earth, and I do not care. I am no longer anything but a skin, and my skin does not belong to you.

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Estelle to Inès, Act 1, sc. 5
5 months 3 weeks ago

It costs a beautiful person no exertion to paint her image on our eyes; yet how splendid is that benefit! It costs no more for a wise soul to convey his quality to other men.

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Uses of Great Men
4 months 2 weeks ago

Did ye never read in the scriptures, The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner: this is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes? Therefore say I unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof. And whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken: but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder.

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21:27-42 and 44 (KJV)
4 months 3 weeks ago

We must make a very precise distinction between the official and consequently dictatorial prerogatives of society organized as a state, and of the natural influence and action of the members of a non-official, non-artificial society.

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Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

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E 65
2 months 1 week ago

Therefore, my dear Lucilius, begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

To me, in these circumstances, that of "Hero-worship" becomes a fact inexpressibly precious; the most solacing fact one sees in the world at present. There is an everlasting hope in it for the management of the world. Had all traditions, arrangements, creeds, societies that men ever instituted, sunk away, this would remain. The certainty of Heroes being sent us; our faculty, our necessity, to reverence Heroes when sent: it shines like a polestar through smoke-clouds, dust-clouds, and all manner of down-rushing and conflagration.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Look round and round the man you recommend, for yours will be the shame should he offend.

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Book I, epistle xviii, line 76 (translated by John Conington).
2 months 6 days ago

Students have powerful images of what a perfect body is and pursue it incessantly. But deprived of literary guidance, they no longer have any image of a perfect soul, and hence do not long to have one.

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p. 67.
6 months 2 weeks ago

Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Gentlemen, there is a sublime and friendly Destiny by which the human race is guided, - the race never dying, the individual never spared, - to results affecting masses and ages. Men are narrow and selfish, but the Genius or Destiny is not narrow, but beneficent. It is not discovered in their calculated and voluntary activity, but in what befalls, with or without their design. Only what is inevitable interests us, and it turns out that love and good are inevitable, and in the course of things. That Genius has infused itself into nature. It indicates itself by a small excess of good, a small balance in brute facts always favorable to the side of reason.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

I care nothing for creeds. I am not concerned with any one's religious belief. But I would have men think for themselves. If we do not, we can only abandon one superstition to take up another, and it may be a worse one. It is as bad for a man to think that he can know nothing as to think he knows all. There are things which it is given to all possessing reason to know, if they will but use that reason. And some things it may be there are, that - as was said by one whom the learning of the time sneered at, and the high priests persecuted, and polite society, speaking through the voice of those who knew not what they did, crucified - are hidden from the wise and prudent and revealed unto babes.

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Conclusion : The Moral of this Examination
3 months 3 weeks ago

You don't have to be a scientist - you don't have to play the Bunsen burner - in order to understand enough science to overtake your imagined need and fill that fancied gap. Science needs to be released from the lab into the culture.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.

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18:37, (KJV)
2 months 2 weeks ago

As we can not give a general definition of energy, the principle of the conservation of energy signifies simply that there is something which remains constant.

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2 months 6 days ago

When you tell a girl how beautiful she is, she will say, "Now isn't that just like a man! All you men think about is bodies. OK, so I'm beautiful, but I got my body from my parents and it was just luck. I prefer to be admired for myself, not my chassis." Poor little chauffeur! All she is saying is that she has lost touch with her own astonishing wisdom and ingenuity, and wants to be admired for some trivial tricks that she can perform with her conscious attention. And we are all in the same situation, having dissociated ourselves from our bodies and from the whole network of forces in which bodies can come to birth and live.

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p. 112
1 month 3 weeks ago

I deplore with you the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed, and the malignity, the vulgarity, & mendacious spirit of those who write for them: and I enclose you a recent sample, the production of a New England judge, as a proof of the abyss of degradation into which we are fallen. These ordures are rapidly depraving the public taste and lessening its relish for sound food. As vehicles of information and a curb on our functionaries, they have rendered themselves useless by forfeiting all title to belief. That this has in a great degree been produced by the violence and malignity of party spirit I agree with you...

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Letter to Walter Jones (2 January 1814)
5 months 3 weeks ago

A sound mind in a sound body, is a short but full description of a happy state in this world.

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Sec. 1
6 months 3 weeks ago

Irony is a qualification of subjectivity.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

And if he be too forward to venture upon his own strength and skill, and perplexity and trouble of a misadventure now and then, that reaches not his innocence, his health, or reputation, may not be an ill way to teach him more caution.

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Sec. 94
6 months 3 weeks ago

I can understand myself in believing, although in addition I can in a relative misunderstanding comprehend the human aspect of this life: but comprehend faith or comprehend Christ, I cannot.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Put in a nut-shell, my thesis amounts to this. The repeated attempts made by Rudolf Carnap to show that the demarcation between science and metaphysics coincides with that between sense and nonsense have failed. The reason is that the positivistic concept of 'meaning' or 'sense' (or of verifiability, or of inductive confirmability, etc.) is inappropriate for achieving this demarcation - simply because metaphysics need not be meaningless even though it is not science. In all its variations demarcation by meaninglessness has tended to be at the same time too narrow and too wide: as against all intentions and all claims, it has tended to exclude scientific theories as meaningless, while failing to exclude even that part of metaphysics which is known as 'rational theology'.

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Ch 11. "The Demarcation between Science and Metaphysics." (Summary, p. 253)
5 months 3 weeks ago

The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way.

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Ch. 4
6 months 3 weeks ago

He believes in that mummery a good deal less than I do, and I don't believe in it at all.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

If we sit and talk in a dark room, words suddenly acquire new meanings and different textures...and on the radio. Given only the sound of a play, we have to fill in all of the senses, not just the sight of the action. So much do-it-yourself, or completion and "closure" of action, develops a kind of independent isolation in the young that makes them remote and inaccessible.

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(p. 264)
4 months 3 weeks ago

To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

It is sweet and honorable to die for one's country.

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Book III, ode ii, line 13
6 months 4 days ago

The two ways of contemplation are not unlike the two ways of action commonly spoken of by the ancients: the one plain and smooth in the beginning, and in the end impassable; the other rough and troublesome in the entrance, but after a while fair and even. So it is in contemplation: If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.

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Book I, v, 8
5 months 3 weeks ago

Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.

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Ch. 5: Mathematics and the Metaphysicians
5 months 3 weeks ago

The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.

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p. 6
2 months 3 weeks ago

The regular rhythms of factory production and its clear divisions of work time and nonwork time tend to decline in the realm of immaterial labor. Think how at the high end of labor market companies like Microsoft try to make the office more like home, offering free meals and exercise programs to keep employees in the office as many of their waking hours as possible. At the low end of the labor market workers have to juggle several job to make ends meet. Such practices always existed, but today, with the passage from Fordism to post-Fordism, the increased flexibility and mobility imposed on workers, and the decline of the stable, long-term employment typical of factory work, this tends to become the norm. At both the high end and low ends or labor market the new paradigm undermines the division between work time and the time of life.

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145
2 months 3 weeks ago

Of course, not everything old is beautiful, any more than everything black, or everything white, or everything young. But the notion that old means ugly is every bit as harmful as the prejudice that black is ugly. In one way it is even more pernicious. The notion that only what is new and young is beautiful poisons our relationship to the past and to our own future. It keeps us from understanding our roots and the greatest works of our culture and other cultures. It also makes us dread what lies ahead of us and leads many to shirk reality.

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Time is an Artist (1978) Epilogue : Old is Beautiful
6 months 3 weeks ago

For anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful. Hence one must choose a master, God being out of style.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Scientists believe there is a hierarchy of facts and that among them may be made a judicious choice. They are right, since otherwise there would be no science... One need only open the eyes to see that the conquests of industry which have enriched so many practical men would never have seen the light, if these practical men alone had existed and if they had not been preceded by unselfish devotees who died poor, who never thought of utility, and yet had a guide far other than caprice.As Mach says, these devotees have spared their successors the trouble of thinking.

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Henri Poincaré, The Value of Science (1907) Author's Essay Prefatory to the Translation: "The Choice of Facts," p.4, Tr. George Bruce Halsted
4 months 3 weeks ago

Buddhism calls anger "corruption of the mind," Manicheism "root of the tree of death." I know this, but what good does it do me to know?

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5 months 3 weeks ago

This is the terrible fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again....God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from.

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Book I, Chapter 5, "We Have Cause to Be Uneasy"
5 months 3 weeks ago

The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.

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Domestic Life
4 months 1 week ago

We must needs believe with faith, whatever counsels reason may give us, that in the depths of our own bodies, in animals, in plants, in rocks, in everything that lives, in all the Universe, there is a spirit that strives to know itself, to acquire consciousness of itself, to be itself - for to be oneself is to know oneself - to be pure spirit; and since it can only achieve this by means of the body, by means of matter, it creates and makes use of matter at the same time that it remains a prisoner of it.

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