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People often become scholars for the same reason they become soldiers: simply because they are unfit for any other station. Their right hand has to earn them a livelihood; one might say they lie down like bears in winter and seek sustenance from their paws.

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B 41
3 months 3 weeks ago

That body is heavier than another which, in an equal bulk, moves downward quicker.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

I do not accept any absolute formulas for living. No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in a man's life. As we live, we grow and our beliefs change. They must change. So I think we should live with this constant discovery. We should be open to this adventure in heightened awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience.

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As quoted in Martin Buber : An Intimate Portrait (1971), p. 56
3 weeks 2 days ago

Only puny secrets need protection. Big secrets are protected by public incredulity. You can actually dissipate a situation by giving it maximal coverage. As to alarming people, that's done by rumours, not by coverage.

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(p. 92)
2 months 3 weeks ago

We cannot overstate our debt to the Past, but the moment has the supreme claim. The Past is for us; but the sole terms on which it can become ours are its subordination to the Present. Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor. We must not tamper with the organic motion of the soul.

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Quotation and Originality
2 months 2 weeks ago

Philosophy hasn't made any progress?-If someone scratches where it itches, do we have to see progress? Is it not genuine scratching otherwise, or genuine itching?

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p. 98e
2 months 2 weeks ago

For a man petticoat government is the limit of insolence.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

I was still blind, but twinkling stars did dance Throughout my being's limitless expanse, Nothing had yet drawn close, only at distant stages I found myself, a mere suggestion sensed in past and future ages.

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As quoted in Romantic Vision, Ethical Context: Novalis and Artistic Autonomy (1987) by Géza von Molnár, p. 2
2 months 3 weeks ago

The present hour is always wealthiest when it is poorer than the future ones, as that is the pleasantest site which affords the pleasantest prospect.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 210
3 months 1 week ago

Remember that it is not he who gives abuse or blows who affronts, but the view we take of these things as insulting. When, therefore, any one provokes you, be assured that it is your own opinion which provokes you.

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(20).
2 months 3 weeks ago

There is no spiritual sustenance in flat equality. It is a dim recognition of this fact which makes much of our political propaganda sound so thin. We are trying to be enraptured by something which is merely the negative condition of the good life. That is why the imagination of people is so easily captured by appeals to the craving for inequality, whether in a romantic form of films about loyal courtiers or in the brutal form of Nazi ideology. The tempter always works on some real weakness in our own system of values - offers food to some need which we have starved.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

In wildness is the preservation of the world. Every tree sends its fibers forth in search of the Wild. The city imports it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

To think that so many have succeeded in dying!

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3 months 3 days ago

Faith is born and preserved in us by preaching why Christ came, what he brought and gave to us, and the benefits we obtain when we receive him. This happens when Christian liberty - which he gives to us - is rightly taught and we are told in what way as Christians we are all kings and priests and therefore lords of all.

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p. 70
2 months 4 weeks ago

I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Virtue is the same for a man and for a woman.

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§ 5
2 months 3 weeks ago

But he, with these burthens on him, planned, commenced, and completed, the History of India; and this in the course of about ten years, a shorter time than has been occupied (even by writers who had no other employment) in the production of almost any other historical work of equal bulk, and of anything approaching to the same amount of reading and research. And to this is to be added, that during the whole period, a considerable part of almost every day was employed in the instruction of his children: in the case of one of whom, myself, he exerted an amount of labour, care, and perseverance rarely, if ever, employed for a similar purpose, in endeavouring to give, according to his own conception, the highest order of intellectual education.

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(p. 4)
2 months 2 weeks ago

The principles of ethics come from our own nature as social, reasoning beings.

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Chapter 6, A New Understanding Of Ethics, p. 149
1 month 3 weeks ago

...the French business is no light or trivial thing, or such as has commonly occurd in the course of political Events. At present the whole political State of Europe hinges upon it. On the Continent there is little doubt; every thing will take is future shape and colour from the good or ill success of the Duke of Brunswick. In my opinion, it is the most important crisis that ever existed in the World. ... My poor opinion is, that these principles...cannot possibly be realized in practice in France, without an absolute certainty and that at no remote period, of overturning the whole fabrick of the British Constitution.

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Letter to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Grenville (19 September 1792), quoted in P. J. Marshall and John A. Woods (eds.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Volume VII: January 1792-August 1794 (1968), pp. 218-219
3 months 3 days ago

I know that a Christian should be humble, but against the Pope I am going to be proud and say to him: "You, Pope, I will not have you for my boss, for I am sure that my doctrine is divine."

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Chapter 2, Verse 6
3 weeks 6 days ago

So-called "realist" photography does not capture the "what is." Instead, it is preoccupied with what should not be, like the reality of suffering for example.

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3 weeks 6 days ago

When the world presents as a force field of violence, the task of nonviolence is to find ways of living and acting in that world such that violence is checked or ameliorated, or its direction turned, precisely at moments when it seems to saturate that world and offer no way out.

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p. 10
2 months 3 weeks ago

Something that is merely negative creates nothing.

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Notebook VI, The Chapter on Capital, p. 532.
3 months 1 week ago

The Heavenly City outshines Rome, beyond comparison. There, instead of victory, is truth; instead of high rank, holiness; instead of peace, felicity; instead of life, eternity.

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Book II, Chapter 29
2 months 2 weeks ago

The years as they pass plunder us of one thing after another.

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Book II, epistle ii, line 55
2 months 3 weeks ago

I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred. I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant.

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Considerations by the Way
3 weeks 5 days ago

1. Find a subject you care about.2. Do not ramble, though.3. Keep it simple.4. Have the guts to cut.5. Sound like yourself.6. Say what you mean to say.7. Pity the readers.

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As quoted in Science Fictionisms (1995), compiled by William Rotsler
2 months 3 weeks ago

The chief objection I have to Pantheism is that it says nothing. To call the world "God" is not to explain it; it is only to enrich our language with a superfluous synonym for the word "world".

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On Pantheism as quoted in Faiths of Famous Men in Their Own Words (1900) by John Kenyon Kilbourn; also in Religion: A Dialogue and Other Essays (2007), p. 40
2 months 3 weeks ago

I don't care for the applause one gets by saying what others are thinking; I want actually to change people's thoughts. Power over people's minds is the main personal desire of my life; and this sort of power is not acquired by saying popular things.

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Letter to Lucy Martin Donnelly, February 10, 1916
2 months 2 weeks ago

Philosophers get attention only when they appear to be doing something sinister-corrupting the youth, undermining the foundations of civilization, sneering at all we hold dear. The rest of the time everybody assumes that they are hard at work somewhere down in the sub-basement, keeping those foundations in good repair. Nobody much cares what brand of intellectual duct tape is being used.

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"Philosophical Convictions." The Nation, June 14, 2004.
3 weeks 3 days ago

Service of the people by sciences and arts will only exist when men live with the people and as the people live, and without presenting any claims will offer their scientific and artistic services, which the people will be free to accept or decline as they please.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

The philosopher ... subjects experience to his critical judgment, and this contains a value judgment - namely, that freedom from toil is preferable to toil, and an intelligent life is preferable to a stupid life. It so happened that philosophy was born with these values. Scientific thought had to break this union of value judgment and analysis, for it became increasingly clear that the philosophic values did not guide the organisation of society.

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p. 126
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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1 month 1 week ago

The great reformers of the world turn into the great misanthropists, if circumstances or organisation do not permit them to act. Christ, if He had been a woman, might have been nothing but a great complainer. Peace be with the misanthropists! They have made a step in progress; the next will make them great philanthropists; they are divided but by a line. The next Christ will perhaps be a female Christ. But do we see one woman who looks like a female Christ? or even like "the messenger before" her "face", to go before her and prepare the hearts and minds for her? To this will be answered that half the inmates of Bedlam begin in this way, by fancying that they are "the Christ." People talk about imitating Christ, and imitate Him in the little trifling formal things, such as washing the feet, saying His prayer, and so on; but if anyone attempts the real imitation of Him, there are no bounds to the outcry with which the presumption of that person is condemned.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.

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p. 87
2 months 3 weeks ago

For what comes is Judgment: happy are those whom it finds labouring in their vocations, whether they were merely going out to feed the pigs or laying good plans to deliver humanity a hundred years hence from some great evil. The curtain has indeed now fallen. Those pigs will never in fact be fed, the great campaign against White Slavery or Governmental Tyranny will never in fact proceed to victory. No matter; you were at your post when the Inspection came.

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3 weeks 6 days ago

Boredom is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face.

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Chapter 3
3 months 3 weeks ago

A person might fairly doubt also what in the world they mean by the absolute - this that or the other, since, as they would themselves allow, the account of the humanity is one and the same in the absolute man, and in any individual man: for so far as the individual and the absolute man are both man, they will not differ at all: and if so, then the essential good and any particular good will not differ, in so far as both are good. Nor will it do to say that the eternity of the absolute good makes it to be more good; for a white thing which has lasted white ever so long, is no whiter than that which only lasts for a day.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Psychoanalysis will be entirely discredited one of these days, no doubt about it. Which will not keep it from destroying our last vestiges of naivete. After psychoanalysis, we can never again be innocent.

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1 month 1 week ago

Psychological disorders are symptoms of a blocked story... The patient is cured the moment she narrates herself free.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

If in Nietzsche's thinking the prior tradition of Western thought is gathered and completed in a decisive respect, then the confrontation with Nietzsche becomes one with all Western thought hitherto.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

All's well that ends well; which is the epitaph I should put on my tombstone if I were the last man left alive.

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Letter to Lucy Donnely, April 22, 1906
2 months 3 weeks ago

The extreme nature of dominant-end views is often concealed by the vagueness and ambiguity of the end proposed.

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Chapter IX, Section 83, p. 554
2 months 3 weeks ago

To aspire to be superhuman is a most discreditable admission that you lack the guts, the wit, the moderating judgment to be successfully and consummately human.

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Spinoza's Worm," p. 75
1 month 3 weeks ago

I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a St. Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity.

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