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2 months 2 weeks ago

I have enough to eat till my hunger is stayed, to drink till my thirst is sated; to clothe myself withal; and out of doors not Callias there, with all his riches, is more safe than I from shivering; and when I find myself indoors, what warmer shirting do I need than my bare walls? what ampler greatcoat than the tiles above my head?

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iv. 34
2 months 5 days ago

All things are full of gods.

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As quoted in Aristotle, De Anima, 411a
1 month 2 weeks ago

When we are young, we take a certain pleasure in our infirmities. They seem so new, so rich! With age, they no longer surprise us, we know them too well. Now, without anything unexpected in them, they do not deserve to be endured.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

The guidelines for achieving wisdom consist of three leading maxims: 1) Think for yourself; 2) (in communication with other people) Put yourself in the place of the other person; 3) Always think by remaining faithful to your own self.

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Kant, Immanuel (1996), page 95
1 month 4 weeks ago

Persecution is a bad and indirect way to plant Religion.

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Section 25
3 months 3 weeks ago

I joke sometimes to the effect that when I approach a part of a book where I must explain something I don't understand, I just type faster and faster and faster. Then, when I get to the part I don't understand, sheer inertia pushes me through. That's not literally true, of course, but there's something to it psychologically.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Every commodity is compelled to chose some other commodity for its equivalent.

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Vol. I, Ch. 1, Section 3, pg. 65.
1 month 2 days ago

Even though the model referred to satisfies the theory, etc., it is 'unintended'; and we recognize that it is unintended from the description through which it is given (as in the intuitionist case). Models are not lost noumenal waifs looking for someone to name them; they are constructions within our theory itself. and they have names from birth.

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Models and Reality
1 week 3 days ago

The man-like Apes... have certain characters of structure and of distribution in common.

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Ch.1, p. 34
2 months 3 weeks ago

In all affairs - love, religion, politics, or business - it's a healthy idea, now and then, to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

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As quoted in The Reader's Digest, Vol. 37 (1940), p. 90; no specific source given.
2 months 3 weeks ago

Of course a war is entertaining. The immediate fear and suffering of the humans is a legitimate and pleasing refreshment for our myriads of toiling workers. But what permanent good does it do us unless we make use of it for bringing souls to Our Father Below? When I see the temporal suffering of humans who finally escape us, I feel as if I had been allowed to taste the first course of a rich banquet and then denied all the rest. It is worse than not to have tasted it at all. The Enemy, true to His barbarous methods of warfare, allows us to see the short misery of His favourites only to tantalize and torment us - to mock the incessant hunger, which, during this present phase of great conflict, His blockade is admittedly imposing.

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Letter V
2 months 3 weeks ago

The question of "unreality," which confronts us at this point, is a very important one. Misled by grammar, the great majority of those logicians who have dealt with this question have dealt with it on mistaken lines. They have regarded grammatical form as a surer guide in analysis than, in fact, it is. And they have not known what differences in grammatical form are important.

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Ch. 16: Descriptions
1 day ago

An old fairy tale has it that science began with the rejection of superstition. In fact it was the rejection of rationalism that gave birth to scientific inquiry. Ancient and medieval thinkers believed the world could be understood by applying first principles. Modern science begins when observation and experiment come first, and the results are accepted even when what they show seems to be impossible.

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Foreword: Two Attempts to Cheat Death (pp. 5-6)
2 months 4 weeks ago

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty or justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.

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Chapter X, Part II, p. 152.
2 months 3 weeks ago

He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.

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The Method of Nature, 1841
2 months 3 weeks ago

From another side: is Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press, not to mention the printing machine? Do not the song and saga of the muse necessarily come to an end with the printer's bar, hence do not the necessary conditions of epic poetry vanish?

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Introduction, p. 31.
1 month 1 week ago

In its solitariness the spirit asks, What, in the way of value, is the attainment of life? And it can find no such value till it has merged its individual claim with that of the objective universe.

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Religion is world-loyalty. Religion in the Making (February 1926), Lecture II: "Religion and Dogma".
2 months 3 weeks ago

One mode of emotional excitability is exceedingly important in the composition of the energetic character, from its peculiarly destructive power over inhibitions. I mean what in its lower form is mere irascibility, susceptibility to wrath, the fighting temper; and what in subtler ways manifests itself as impatience, grimness, earnestness, severity of character. Earnestness means willingness to live with energy, though energy bring pain. The pain may be pain to other people or pain to one's self - it makes little difference; for when the strenuous mood is on one, the aim is to break something, no matter whose or what. Nothing annihilates an inhibition as irresistibly as anger does it; for, as Moltke says of war, destruction pure and simple is its essence.

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1 month 1 week ago

In conclusion, I wish to say that my attitude to the whole tragic question is not dictated by my Jewish antecedents. It is motivated by my abhorrence of injustice, and man's inhumanity to man. It is because of this that I have fought all my life for anarchism which alone will do away with the horrors of the capitalist régime and place all races and peoples, including the Jews, on a free and equal basis. Until then I consider it highly inconsistent for socialists and anarchists to discriminate in any shape or form against the Jews.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

In their nomination to office they will not appoint to the exercise of authority as to a pitiful job, but as to a holy function.

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Volume iii, p. 356
2 months 2 weeks ago

If life becomes hard to bear we think of a change in our circumstances. But the most important and effective change, a change in our own attitude, hardly even occurs to us, and the resolution to take such a step is very difficult for us.

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p. 53e
1 month 3 weeks ago

Life is writing. The sole purpose of mankind is to engrave the thoughts of divinity onto the tablets of nature.

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"On Philosophy: To Dorothea," in Theory as Practice (1997), p. 420
3 weeks 1 day ago

Without an understanding of causality there can be no theory of communication. What passes as information theory today is not communication at all, but merely transportation.

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(p. 362)
2 months 2 weeks ago

What cannot be imagined cannot even be talked about.

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Journal entry (12 October 1916), p. 84e
2 months 2 weeks ago

The capacity to reason is a special sort of capacity because it can lead us to places that we did not expect to go.

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Chapter 4, Reason, p. 88
1 month 2 weeks ago

Nothing is a better proof of how far humanity has regressed than the impossibility of finding a single nation, a single tribe, among whom birth still provokes mourning and lamentations.

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3 weeks 3 days ago

Remember then: there is only one time that is important-Now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any power. The most necessary man is he with whom you are, for no man knows whether he will ever have dealings with any one else: and the most important affair is, to do him good, because for that purpose alone was man sent into this life!

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Part VII: Stories Given to Aid Persecuted Jews (1903) "Three Questions", translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude, p271.
2 months 2 weeks ago

Speciesism-the word is not an attractive one, but I can think of no better term-is a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one's own species and against those of members of other species.

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Ch. 1: All Animals Are Equal
2 months 4 weeks ago

My philosophical views approach somewhat closely those of the late Countess of Conway, and hold a middle position between Plato and Democritus, because I hold that all things take place mechanically as Democritus and Descartes contend against the views of Henry More and his followers, and hold too, nevertheless, that everything takes place according to a living principle and according to final causes - all things are full of life and consciousness, contrary to the views of the Atomists.

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Letter to Thomas Burnet (1697), as quoted in Platonism, Aristotelianism and Cabalism in the Philosophy of Leibniz (1938) by Joseph Politella, p. 18
1 month 2 weeks ago

Thou shalt do no murder, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Honour thy father and thy mother: and, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

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19:18-19 (KJV)
2 months 3 weeks ago

Marriage is for women the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

There is needed, no doubt, a body of servants (ministerium) of the invisible church, but not officials (officiales), in other words, teachers but not dignitaries, because in the rational religion of every individual there does not yet exist a church as a universal union (omnitudo collectiva).

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Book IV, Part 1, Section 1, "The Christian religion as a natural religion"
2 months 3 weeks ago

Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality.

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p. 4
1 month 1 week ago

Nothing would prove more disastrous to our ideas, we contended, than to neglect the effect of the internal upon the external, of the psychological motives and needs upon existing institutions.

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(p. 402)
2 months 3 weeks ago

In every province, the chief occupations, in order of importance, are lovemaking, malicious gossip, and talking nonsense.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.

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Conversation of 1930
1 month 2 weeks ago

Prosperity, both for individuals and for states, means possessions; and possessions mean burdens and harness and slavery; and slavery for the mind, too, because it is not only the rich man's time that is pre-empted, but his affections, his judgement, and the range of his thoughts.

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"The Irony of Liberalism"
1 month 2 weeks ago

His master was angry, and delivered him to the torturers until he should pay all that was due to him. "So My heavenly Father also will do to you if each of you, from his heart, does not forgive his brother his trespasses."

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18:34-35
2 months 4 weeks ago

Secrets in manufactures are capable of being longer kept than secrets in trade.

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Chapter VII, p. 72.
1 month 1 week ago

This in turn suggests an answer to our question: what happened between the birth of De Sade and the birth of Krafft-Ebbing? The rise of the novel taught Europe to use its imagination. And when imagination was applied to sex, the result was the rise of pornography -- and of "sexual perversion."

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p. 86
1 month 3 weeks ago

To get to know a truth properly, one must polemicize it.

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Quoted in The Viking Book of Aphorisms by Wystan Hugh Auden (1962) p. 323
1 month 2 weeks ago

Lichtenberg ... held something of the following kind: one should neither affirm the existence of God nor deny it. ... It is not that he wished to leave certain perspectives open, nor to please everyone. It is rather that he was identifying himself, for his part, with a consciousness of self, of the world, and of others that was "strange" (the word is his) in a sense which is equally well destroyed by the rival explanations.

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pp. 45-46
1 month 3 weeks ago

Now to Some it appears not at all worth while to follow out the endless divisions of Nature; and moreover a dangerous undertaking, without fruit and issue. As we can never reach, say they, the absolutely smallest grain of material bodies, never find their simplest compartments, since all magnitude loses itself, forwards and backwards, in infinitude; so likewise is it with the species of bodies and powers; here too one comes on new species, new combinations, new appearances, even to infinitude. These seem only to stop, continue they, when our diligence tires; and so it is spending precious time with idle contemplations and tedious enumerations; and this becomes at last a true delirium, a real vertigo over the horrid Deep.

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2 months 1 day ago

The Universe is one, infinite, immobile. The absolute potential is one, the act is one, the form or soul is one, the material or body is one, the thing is one, the being in one, one is the maximum and the best... It is not generated, because there is no other being it could desire or hope for, since it comprises all being. It does not grow corrupt. because there is nothing else into which it could change, given that it is itself all things. It cannot diminish or grow, since it is infinite.

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As translated by Paul Harrison
2 months 6 days ago

When a reasonable Soul forsaketh his divine nature, and becometh beast-like, it dieth. For though the substance of the Soul be incorruptible: yet, lacking the use of Reason, it is reputed dead; for it loseth the Intellective Life.

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3 months 2 days ago

He who does not give himself leisure to be thirsty cannot take pleasure in drinking.

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Ch. 42
2 months 3 weeks ago

Communism differs from all previous movements in that it overturns the basis of all earlier relations of production and intercourse, and for the first time consciously treats all natural premises as the creatures of hitherto existing men, strips them of their natural character and subjugates them to the power of the united individuals. Its organisation is, therefore, essentially economic, the material production of the conditions of this unity; it turns existing conditions into conditions of unity. The reality, which communism is creating, is precisely the true basis for rendering it impossible that anything should exist independently of individuals, insofar as reality is only a product of the preceding intercourse of individuals themselves.

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Vol. I, Part 4.

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