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2 months 4 weeks ago

Whenever a human being, through the commission of a crime, has become exiled from good, he needs to be reintegrated with it through suffering. The suffering should be inflicted with the aim of bringing the soul to recognize freely some day that its infliction was just. This reintegration with the good is what punishment is. Every man who is innocent, or who has finally expiated guilt, needs to be recognized as honourable to the same extent as anyone else.

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3 weeks 6 days ago

Did you ever hear my definition of marriage? It is, that it resembles a pair of shears, so joined that they can not be separated; often moving in opposite directions, yet always punishing anyone who comes between them.

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Vol. I, ch. 11, p. 415; paraphrased variant: "Marriage resembles a pair of shears, so joined that they can not be separated; often moving in opposite directions, yet always punishing anyone who comes between them."
4 months 1 week ago

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.

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As quoted in The Concise Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1989) edited by Robert Andrews, p. 114
4 months 2 days ago

There is no work so mean, but it would amply serve me to furnish me with sustenance.

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iv. 35
4 months 3 weeks ago

I consider as lovers of books not those who keep their books hidden in their store-chests and never handle them, but those who, by nightly as well as daily use thumb them, batter them, wear them out, who fill out all the margins with annotations of many kinds, and who prefer the marks of a fault they have erased to a neat copy full of faults.

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Letter to an unidentified friend (1489), as translated in Collected Works of Erasmus (1974), p. 58
1 week 4 days ago

In death too, there is always something of the rich cat that lets the mouse run before devouring it.

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Traces (1930), p. 30
1 week 5 days ago

I believe the Indian then to be in body and mind equal to the white man.

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Let us not limit the resources of nature; they are infinite, especially when reinforced by great art.

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1 week 5 days ago

Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.

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Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front in Farming: A Hand Book
4 months 3 weeks ago

This world, the whole of the planet called earth, is the common country of all who live and breathe upon it.

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3 months 5 days 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)
3 months 1 week ago

Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time.

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Aphorism 48, as translated in Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms (1968), p. 151
4 months 1 week ago

Essentially the fault lies in the fact that the democratic political process is at best regulated rivalry; it does not even in theory have the desirable properties that price theory ascribes to truly competitive markets.

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Chapter IV, Section 36, p. 226
3 months 1 week ago

Impossible for me to know whether or not I take myself seriously. The drama of detachment is that we cannot measure its progress. We advance into a desert, and we never know where we are in it.

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1 week 5 days ago

There is no act, however virtuous, for which ingenuity may not find some bad motive.

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Letter to Edward Dowse
3 months 5 days ago

An autonomous electorate, free because it is free from indoctrination and manipulation, would indeed be on a "level of articulate opinion and ideology" which is not likely to be found. Therefore, the concept has to be rejected as "unrealistic"-has to be if one accepts the factually prevailing level of opinion and ideology as prescribing the valid criteria for sociological analysis. And-if indoctrination and manipulation have reached the stage where the prevailing level of opinion has become a level of falsehood, where the actual state of affairs is no longer recognized as that which it is, then an analysis which is methodologically committed to reject transitive concepts commits itself to a false consciousness. Its very empiricism is ideological.

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p. 117
4 months ago

To one commending an orator for his skill in amplifying petty matters, Agesilaus said, "I do not think that shoemaker a good workman that makes a great shoe for a little foot."

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Of Agesilaus the Great
3 weeks 1 day ago

In the same manner therefore as we have laid it down that the Sun holds the supremacy in the Intelligible world, having round about his own being, in one species, a vast multitude of gods (supposing him to have the same in the Sensible world), all of which move along their everlasting and most felicitous course in a circle, so do we prove him to be Leader and Lord, imparting to and filling the whole heaven, as he does, with his own splendour, likewise with infinite other blessings that be invisible to us: whilst the benefits commenced by the other deities are brought to perfection by him; nay, more, before this, these gods themselves were rendered perfect through his spontaneous and divine operation.

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4 months 1 week ago

One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important, and that to take a holiday would bring all kinds of disaster. If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his work important.

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2 months 1 week ago

The bow too tensely strung is easily broken.

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Maxim 388
4 months 1 week ago

The Geschick of being: a child that plays... Why does it play, the great child of the world-play Heraclitus brought into view in the aiôn? It plays, because it plays. The "because" withers away in the play. The play is without "why." It plays since it plays. It simply remains a play: the most elevated and the most profound. But this "simply" is everything, the one, the only... The question remains whether and how we, hearing the movements of this play, play along and accommodate ourselves to the play.

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The Principle of Reason (1955-1956) as translated by Reginald Lilly
4 months 1 week ago

The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.

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July 14, 1852
2 months 2 weeks ago

It is indeed a matter of great difficulty to discover, and effectually to distinguish, the true motions of particular bodies from the apparent; because the parts of that immovable space, in which those motions are performed, do by no means come under the observation of our senses. Yet the thing is not altogether desperate; for we have some arguments to guide us, partly from the apparent motions, which are the differences of the true motions; partly from the forces, which are the causes and effects of the true motions.

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Definitions - Scholium
4 months 2 weeks ago

If you only notice human proceedings, you may observe that all who attain great power and riches, make use of either force or fraud; and what they have acquired either by deceit or violence, in order to conceal the disgraceful methods of attainment, they endeavor to sanctify with the false title of honest gains. Those who either from imprudence or want of sagacity avoid doing so, are always overwhelmed with servitude and poverty; for faithful servants are always servants, and honest men are always poor; nor do any ever escape from servitude but the bold and faithless, or from poverty, but the rapacious and fraudulent. God and nature have thrown all human fortunes into the midst of mankind; and they are thus attainable rather by rapine than by industry, by wicked actions rather than by good. Hence it is that men feed upon each other, and those who cannot defend themselves must be worried.

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Book III, Chapter 13
4 months 2 weeks ago

This I think is sufficiently evident, that children generally hate to be idle. All the care then is, that their busy humour should be constantly employ'd in something of use to them; which, if you will attain, you must make what you would have them do a recreation to them, and not a business.

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Sec. 129
4 months 2 weeks ago

By the removal of the unnecessary mouths, and by extracting from the farmer the full value of the farm, a greater surplus, or what is the same thing, the price of a greater surplus, was obtained for the proprietor...

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Chapter IV, p. 450 (On Highland Clearances).
4 months 1 week ago

I do not believe in what is often called... 'exact terminology'... [or] in definitions... [they] do not... add to exactness... I especially dislike pretentious terminology and... pseudo-exactness concerned with it.

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4 months 1 week ago

It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence whether a man be behind it or no.

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p. 261
2 months 1 week ago

An arrogant person considers himself perfect. This is the chief harm of arrogance. It interferes with a person's main task in life-becoming a better person.

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p. 110
4 months 1 week ago

Most boys or youths who have had much knowledge drilled into them, have their mental capacities not strengthened, but over-laid by it. They are crammed with mere facts, and with the opinions or phrases of other people, and these are accepted as a substitute for the power to form opinions of their own: and thus the sons of eminent fathers, who have spared no pains in their education, so often grow up mere parroters of what they have learnt, incapable of using their minds except in the furrows traced for them. Mine, however, was not an education of cram. My father never permitted anything which I learnt to degenerate into a mere exercise of memory. He strove to make the understanding not only go along with every step of the teaching, but, if possible, precede it. Anything which could be found out by thinking I never was told, until I had exhausted my efforts to find it out for myself.

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(p. 31)
1 week 5 days ago

I shall within a few days divest myself of the anxieties and the labors with which I have been oppressed, and retire with inexpressible delight to my family, my friends, my farms, and books. There I may indulge at length in that tranquillity and those pursuits from which I have been divorced by the character of the times in which I have lived, and which have forced me into the line of political life under a sense of duty and against a great and constant aversion to it.

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Letter to David Baillie Warden
2 months 4 weeks ago

It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.

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Theories and Things, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981
3 weeks 2 days ago

To recognize that some of the things our culture believes are not true imposes on us the duty of finding out which are true and which are not.

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"Western Civ," p. 22.
3 months 1 week ago

Our psychology is ... a science of mere phenomena without any metaphysical implications. [It] Treats all metaphysical claims and assertions as mental phenomena, and regards them as statements about the mind and its structure.

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Psychology and Religion: West and East (1958), p. 476, as cited in Psychotherapy East and West (1961), p. 14
3 weeks 2 days ago

Space and time are commonly regarded as the forms of existence of the real world, matter as its substance. A definite portion of matter occupies a definite part of space at a definite moment of time. It is in the composite idea of motion that these three fundamental conceptions enter into intimate relationship.

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Introduction
2 months 3 weeks ago

There certainly is self division. The man who watches a woman undressing has the red eyes of an ape; yet the man who sees two young lovers, really alone for the first time, who brings out all the pathos, the tenderness and uncertainty when he tells about it, is no brute; he is very much human. And the ape and the man exist in one body; and when the ape's desires are about to be fulfilled, he disappears and is succeeded by the man, who is disgusted with the ape's appetite.

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Chapter one, The Country of the Blind
4 months 4 weeks ago

If you believe what you like in the gospels, and reject what you don't like, it is not the gospel you believe, but yourself.

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Earliest attribution found in Who Said That?: More than 2,500 Usable Quotes and Illustrations (1995) by George Sweeting. Online sources always attribute the quote to Augustine, but never specify in which of his works it is to be found.
2 months 4 weeks ago

We never know, believe me, when we have succeeded best.

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Essays and Soliloquies
3 months 1 week ago

Having destroyed the social power of the nobility and the guildmasters, the bourgeois also destroyed their political power. Having raised itself to the actual position of first class in society, it proclaims itself to be also the dominant political class. This it does through the introduction of the representative system which rests on bourgeois equality before the law and the recognition of free competition, and in European countries takes the form of constitutional monarchy. In these constitutional monarchies, only those who possess a certain capital are voters - that is to say, only members of the bourgeoisie. These bourgeois voters choose the deputies, and these bourgeois deputies, by using their right to refuse to vote taxes, choose a bourgeois government.

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The significance of that 'absolute commandment', know thyself - whether we look at it in itself or under the historical circumstances of its first utterance - is not to promote mere self-knowledge in respect of the particular capacities, character, propensities, and foibles of the single self. The knowledge it commands means that of man's genuine reality - of what is essentially and ultimately true and real - of spirit as the true and essential being.

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5 months 1 week ago

In memory yet green, in joy still felt, The scenes of life rise sharply into view. We triumph; Life's disasters are undealt, And while all else is old, the world is new.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

For what is lacking now is not quibbles; nay, the books of the Stoics are full of quibbles.

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Book I, ch. 29, § 56
5 months 1 week ago

If the world were clear, art would not exist.

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5 months 2 weeks ago
We are, all of us, growing volcanoes that approach the hour of their eruption; but how near or distant that is, nobody knows not even God.
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2 months 3 weeks ago

I have wanted them to have this simple definition to read again and again so they know: Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.

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Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (2014), p.XII
4 months 1 week ago

He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.

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L'âge de raison (The Age of Reason)

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