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4 months 2 weeks ago

When feudal lords love one another there will be no more war; when heads of houses love one another there will be no more mutual usurpation; when individuals love one another there will be no more mutual injury. When ruler and ruled love each other they will be gracious and loyal; when father and son love each other they will be affectionate and filial; when older and younger brothers love each other they will be harmonious. When all the people in the world love one another, then the strong will not overpower the weak, the many will not oppress the few, the wealthy will not mock the poor, the honoured will not disdain the humble, and the cunning will not deceive the simple. And it is all due to mutual love that calamities, strife, complaints, and hatred are prevented from arising. Therefore the benevolent exalt it.

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Book 4; Universal Love II
4 months 3 weeks ago

No man expects such exact fidelity as a traitor.

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De Ira (On Anger): Book 2, cap. 28, line 7.
4 months 1 week 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.
7 months 1 week ago

It seems that I have spent my entire time trying to make life more rational and that it was all wasted effort.

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As quoted in The Observer (17 August 1986).
7 months 3 days ago

A philosophy has no private store of knowledge or methods for attaining truth, so it has no private access to good. As it accepts knowledge and principles from those competent in science and inquiry, it accepts the goods that are diffused in human experience. It has no Mosaic or Pauline authority of revelation entrusted to it. But it has the authority of intelligence, of criticism of these common and natural goods.

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8 months 1 week 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
6 months 2 weeks ago

Probability fractions arise from our knowledge and from our ignorance.

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Chapter 14, Equipossibility, p. 132.
4 months 2 weeks ago

If every one in the world will love universally; states not attacking one another; houses not disturbing one another; thieves and robbers becoming extinct; emperor and ministers, fathers and sons, all being affectionate and filial -- if all this comes to pass the world will be orderly. Therefore, how can the wise man who has charge of governing the empire fail to restrain hate and encourage love? So, when there is universal love in the world it will be orderly, and when there is mutual hate in the world it will be disorderly.

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Book 4; Universal Love I
6 months 3 weeks ago

You', the ego, live in your left brain. When we say that man is the only creature who spends 99 per cent of his time inside his own head, we mean, in fact, inside his left cerebral hemisphere. And in the basement of the left hemisphere is the library full of filing cabinets -- the stuffy room that we mistake for reality.

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p. 9
2 months 2 weeks ago

The masses will burn it down first....or they'll just break away from the system. It won't be the techno feudalism the sadists dream of.....

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Speaking as of today, I do not consider it intellectually respectable to be a partisan in matters of religion. I see religion as I see such other basic fascinations as art and science, in which there is room for many different approaches, styles, techniques, and opinions. Thus I am not formally a committed member of any creed or sect and hold no particular religious view or doctrine as absolute. I deplore missionary zeal, and consider excessive dedication to and advocacy of any particular religion, as either the best or the only true way, an almost irreligious arrogance. Yet my work and my life are fully concerned with religion, and the mystery of being is my supreme fascination, though, as a shameless mystic, I am more interested in religion as feeling and experience than as conception and theory.

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p. 61
6 months 1 week ago

There are people in the world who desperately want not to have to believe in Darwinism.

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Chapter 9 "Puncturing Punctuationism" (p. 250)
4 months 1 week ago

At this point in history when all things which concern man and the structure and elements of history itself are suddenly revealed to us in a new light, it behooves us in our scientific thinking to become masters of the situation, for it is not inconceivable that sooner than we suspect, as has often been the case before in history, this vision may disappear, the opportunity may be lost, and the world will once again present a static, uniform, and inflexible countenance.

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7 months 1 week ago

We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.

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9 months 1 day ago

Of Every One-Hundred Men, Ten shouldn't even be there, Eighty are nothing but targets, Nine are real fighters... We are lucky to have them... They make the battle. Ah but the One, One of them is a Warrior... and He will bring the others back.

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8 months 1 week ago

Besides, we should never attempt to balance anybody's misery against somebody else's happiness.

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pp. 486-487
7 months 4 days ago

Gentile himself call his doctrine 'absolute formalism': there is no; 'matter' apart from the pure 'form' of acting. 'The only matter there is in the spiritual act is the form itself, as activity.'

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P. 407
6 months 3 weeks ago

It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.

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Ch. 13: "Requisites for Social Progress", p. 291
6 months 3 weeks ago

Einstein analyses the ideas of time-order and of simultaneity. Primarily (according to his analysis) time-order only refers to the succession of events at a given place. Accordingly each given place has its own time-order. But these time-orders are not independent in the system of nature, and their correlation is known to us by means of physical measurement. Now ultimately all physical measurement depends upon coincidence in time and place.

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p. 51
9 months 2 weeks ago
A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.
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8 months 2 weeks ago

Things are not so painful and difficult of themselves, but our weakness or cowardice makes them so.

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Ch. 14, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Carew Hazlitt, 1877
8 months 2 weeks ago

For man seeketh in society comfort, use, and protection: and they be three wisdoms of divers natures, which do often sever: wisdom of the behaviour, wisdom of business, and wisdom of state.

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Book II, xxiii
8 months 1 week ago

There is no knowledge that is not power.

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Old Age
4 months 3 weeks ago

Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now - always, and indeed then most truly when it seems most unsuitable to actual circumstances. Care for distress at home and care for distress elsewhere do but help each other if, working together, they wake men in sufficient numbers from their thoughtlessness, and call into life a new spirit of humanity.

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Ch. XI : Conclusion
7 months 1 week ago

I am sorry I can say nothing more consoling to you, for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on the stage. But active love is labour and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science. But I predict that just when you see with horror that in spite of all your efforts you are getting farther from your goal instead ofnearer to it - at that very moment I predict that you will reach it and behold clearly the miraculous power of the Lord who has been all the time loving and mysteriously guiding you.

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5 months 3 days ago

The way of learning is none other than finding the lost mind.

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6A:11, as translated by Wing-tsit Chan in A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (1963), p. 58
7 months 4 days ago

To covet truth is a very distinguished passion.

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p. 48
6 months 3 weeks ago

An ethos of freedom stops power from solidifying into domination and makes sure it remains an open game.

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8 months 1 week ago

It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.

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7 months 1 week ago

If to describe a misery were as easy to live through it!

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4 months 1 week ago

As the entire middle class, the bourgeois and petty bourgeois intelligentsia, boycotted the Soviet government for months after the October Revolution and crippled the railroad, post and telegraph, and educational and administrative apparatus, and, in this fashion, opposed the workers government, naturally all measures of pressure were exerted against it. These included the deprivation of political rights, of economic means of existence, etc., in order to break their resistance with an iron fist. It was precisely in this way that the socialist dictatorship expressed itself, for it cannot shrink from any use of force to secure or prevent certain measures involving the interests of the whole.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

A dangerous form of psychological splitting had to have taken place, and it continues to take place, in the psyches of many African Americans who can on one hand oppose racism, and then on the other hand passively absorb ways of thinking about beauty that are rooted in white supremacist thought.

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7 months 1 week ago

Thought is as much a lie as love or faith.

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8 months 1 week ago

For want of the apparatus of propositional functions, many logicians have been driven to the conclusion that there are unreal objects. It is argued, e.g., by Meinong, that we can speak about "the golden mountain," "the round square," and so on; we can make true propositions of which these are the subjects; hence they must have some kind of logical being, since otherwise the propositions in which they occur would be meaningless. In such theories, it seems to me, there is a failure of that feeling for reality which ought to be preserved even in the most abstract studies. Logic, I should maintain, must no more admit a unicorn than zoology can; for logic is concerned with the real world just as truly as zoology, though with its more abstract and general features.

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Ch. 16: Descriptions
5 months 1 week ago

In order to properly understand the big picture, everyone should fear becoming mentally clouded and obsessed with one small section of truth.

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Quoted in: Joan Klostermann-Ketels (2011) HumaniTrees, p. 96
9 months 1 day ago

The way which the superior man pursues, reaches wide and far, and yet is secret. Common men and women, however ignorant, may intermeddle with the knowledge of it; yet in its utmost reaches, there is that which even the sage does not know. Common men and women, however much below the ordinary standard of character, can carry it into practice; yet in its utmost reaches, there is that which even the sage is not able to carry into practice. Great as heaven and earth are, men still find some things in them with which to be dissatisfied. Thus it is that, were the superior man to speak of his way in all its greatness, nothing in the world would be found able to embrace it, and were he to speak of it in its minuteness, nothing in the world would be found able to split it.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

A wise man's kingdom is his own breast: or, if he ever looks farther, it will only be to the judgment of a select few, who are free from prejudices, and capable of examining his work. Nothing indeed can be a stronger presumption of falsehood than the approbation of the multitude; and Phocion, you know, always suspected himself of some blunder when he was attended with the applauses of the populace.

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Playfully ironic letter to Adam Smith regarding the positive reception of "The Theory of Moral Sentiments"
8 months 1 week ago

Cock-sure certainty is the source of much that is worst in our present world, and it is something of which the contemplation of history ought to cure us, not only or chiefly because there were wise men in the past, but because so much that was thought wisdom turned out to be folly - which suggests that much of our own supposed wisdom is no better. I do not mean to maintain that we should lapse into a lazy scepticism. We should hold our beliefs, and hold them strongly. Nothing great is achieved without passion, but underneath the passion there should always be that large impersonal survey which sets limits to actions that our passions inspire.

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History as an Art (1954), p. 9
6 months 3 weeks ago

Depression is a narcissistic malady.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

If melodiously piping flutes sprang from the olive, would you doubt that a knowledge of flute-playing resided in the olive? And what if plane trees bore harps which gave forth rhythmical sounds? Clearly you would think in the same way that the art of music was possessed by plane trees. Why, then, seeing that the universe gives birth to beings that are animate and wise, should it not be considered animate and wise itself?

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As quoted in De Natura Deorum by Cicero, ii. 8.
6 months 1 week ago

We are swiftly moving at present from an era where business was our culture into an era when culture will be our business. Between these poles stand the huge and ambiguous entertainment industries.

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(p. 384)
8 months 1 week ago

A man might say, with enough truth to justify a joke: "Science is what we know, and philosophy is what we don't know." But it should be added that philosophical speculation as to what we do not yet know has shown itself a valuable preliminary to exact scientific knowledge.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Go further, and require each of them to make a contribution: you will see how many things are still missing, and you will be obliged to get the assistance of a large number of men who belong to different classes, priceless men, but to whom the gates of the academies are nonetheless closed because of their social station. All the members of these learned societies are more than is needed for a single object of human science; all the societies together are not sufficient for a science of man in general.

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Article on Encyclopedia
7 months 4 weeks ago

You must learn all things, both the unshaken heart of persuasive truth, and the opinions of mortals in which there is no true warranty.

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Frag B 1.28-30, quoted by Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians, vii. 3
6 months 1 week ago

By all means begin your folio; even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week.

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316
8 months 2 weeks ago

Ambition is not a vice of little people.

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Book III, Ch. 10

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