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5 months 3 weeks ago

The free being with absolute freedom proposes to itself certain ends. It wills because it wills, and the willing of an object is itself the last ground of such willing. Thus we have previously determined a free being, and any other determination would destroy the conception of an Ego, or of a free being. Now, if it could be so arranged that the willing of an unlawful end would necessarily - in virtue of an always effective law - result in the very reverse of that end, then the unlawful will would always ANNIHILATE ITSELF. A person could not will that end for the very reason because he did will it; his unlawful will would become the ground of its own annihilation, as the will is indeed always its own last ground.

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p. 193
5 months 2 weeks ago

Philosophy: impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

An art that heals and protects its subject is a geography of scars.

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Damage
2 months 3 weeks ago

I allow nothing for losses by death, but, on the contrary, shall presently take credit four per cent. per annum, for their increase over and above keeping up their own numbers.

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On his profits from slavery as quoted in The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson, by Henry Wiencek, Smithsonian Magazine,
7 months 3 weeks ago

What must be remembered in any case is that secret complicity that joins the logical and the everyday to the tragic.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

As for life, it is a battle and a sojourning in a strange land; but the fame that comes after is oblivion.

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II, 17
4 months 1 week ago

There is no such thing as gratitude in international politics.

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Abridgement of Vols. 7-10 by D. C. Somervell
5 months 2 weeks ago

I know of nothing more terrible than the poor creatures who have learned too much. Instead of the sound powerful judgement which would probably have grown up if they had learned nothing, their thoughts creep timidly and hypnotically after words, principles and formulae, constantly by the same paths. What they have acquired is a spider's web of thoughts too weak to furnish sure supports, but complicated enough to provide confusion.

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On the Relative Educational Value of the Classics and the Mathematico-Physical Sciences in Colleges and High Schools, an address in (16 April 1886)
5 months 6 days ago

No man, not even a doctor, ever gives any other definition of what a nurse should be than this - "devoted and obedient." This definition would do just as well for a porter. It might even do for a horse. It would not do for a policeman.

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Notes on Nursing
3 months 2 weeks ago

In all cases, therefore, we will agree with the judicious Mrs. Glass: 'First catch your hare!' First get your man; all is got: he can learn to do all things, from making boots, to decreeing judgments, governing communities; and will do them like a man.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

The Hero as Divinity, the Hero as Prophet, are productions of old ages; not to be repeated in the new. They presuppose a certain rudeness of conception, which the progress of mere scientific knowledge puts an end to. There needs to be, as it were, a world vacant, or almost vacant of scientific forms, if men in their loving wonder are to fancy their fellow-man either a god or one speaking with the voice of a god. Divinity and Prophet are past.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

If we take a survey of ages and of countries, we shall find the women, almost - without exception - at all times and in all places, adored and oppressed. Man, who has never neglected an opportunity of exerting his power, in paying homage to their beauty, has always availed himself of their weakness He has been at once their tyrant and their slave.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.

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§ 116
7 months 3 weeks ago

Fate is not in man but around him.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Copernicus never discusses matters of religion or faith, nor does he use argument that depend in any way upon the authority of sacred writings which he might have interpreted erroneously. ... He did not ignore the Bible, but he knew very well that if his doctrine were proved, then it could not contradict the Scriptures when they were rightly understood.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

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5 months 1 week ago

Historical time knows no lasting present.

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3 months 3 days ago

It is not enough to be wrong, one must also be polite.

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As quoted in The Genius of Science: A Portrait Gallery (2000) by Abraham Pais, p. 24
3 months 2 weeks ago

I say, it is the everlasting privilege of the foolish to be governed by the wise; to be guided in the right path by those who know it better than they. This is the first "right of man;" compared with which all other rights are as nothing.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

The "kingdom of God" has become the "other world," which stands mechanically beside "this world"-an opposition unknown to the strongest periods of Christianity.

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L. Coser, trans. (1961), p. 97
5 months 3 days ago

The fact that goals may be dependent for their force on other more distant ends leads to the arrangement of these goals in a hierarchy - each level to be considered as an end relative to the levels below it and as a mean to the levels above it.

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p. 62.
6 months 3 weeks ago

The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all.

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par. 48
6 months 3 weeks ago

Philosophy seems to me on the whole a rather hopeless business.

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Letter to Gilbert Murray, December 28, 1902
5 months 3 weeks ago

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

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Volume iii, p. 274
6 months 3 weeks ago

I think modern educational theorists are inclined to attach too much importance to the negative virtue of not interfering with children, and too little to the positive merit of enjoying their company.

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Ch. 12: Education and Discipline
5 months 1 week ago

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

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The Pre-War Notebook (1933-1939), published in First and Last Notebooks (1970) edited by Richard Rees
5 months 1 week ago

Self-expression is impossible in relation with other men; their self-expression interferes with it. The greatest heights of self-expression in poetry, music, painting - are achieved by men who are supremely alone.

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Chapter Eight, The Outsider as a Visionary
4 months 1 week ago

I do not believe that civilizations have to die...Civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills.

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In "Prophet of Hope & Fear" [Review of A Study of History, Vols. 7-10] TIME (18 October 1954) p. 108
4 months 3 days ago

It is easy to romanticise, say, tigers or lions and cats. We admire their magnificent beauty, strength and agility. But we would regard their notional human counterparts as wanton psychopaths of the worst kind.

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1.10 On the Misguided Romanticisation of Feline Psychopaths
6 months 3 weeks ago

All that we call human history-money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery-the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.

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Book II, Chapter 3, "The Shocking Alternative"
7 months 2 days ago

There is a plague on Man, the opinion that he knows something.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

All the concessions we make to Eros are holes in our desire for the absolute.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

At the very high speed of living, everybody needs a new career and a new job and a totally new personality every ten years.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.

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Poetry and Imagination
5 months 1 week ago

Those who have a spark of self-respect left, prefer open defiance, prefer crime to the emaciated, degraded position of poverty.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

It is too narrow an understanding of production which confines it merely to the making of things. Production includes not merely the making of things, but the bringing of them to the consumer. The merchant or storekeeper is thus as truly a producer as is the manufacturer, or farmer, and his stock or capital is as much devoted to production as is theirs.

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Book I, Ch. 2
6 months 3 weeks ago

Truth that has been merely learned is like an artificial limb, a false tooth, a waxen nose; at best, like a nose made out of another's flesh; it adheres to us only because it is put on. But truth acquired by thinking of our own is like a natural limb; it alone really belongs to us. This is the fundamental difference between the thinker and the mere man of learning. The intellectual attainments of a man who thinks for himself resemble a fine painting, where the light and shade are correct, the tone sustained, the colour perfectly harmonised; it is true to life. On the other hand, the intellectual attainments of the mere man of learning are like a large palette, full of all sorts of colours, which at most are systematically arranged, but devoid of harmony, connection and meaning.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 22, § 261
4 months 3 days ago

A good opening and a good ending make for a good film provided they come close together.

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Recipe for a Good Film
6 months 2 weeks ago

Men have fashioned an image of Chance as an excuse for their own stupidity. For Chance rarely conflicts with intelligence, and most things in life can be set in order by an intelligent sharpsightedness.

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Freeman (1948), p. 155
6 months 2 weeks ago

Struggling to be brief I become obscure.

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Line 25
4 months 1 week ago

The WTO-related events in Seattle created the first experience of a rainbow politics-a successful pluralistic politics, without the working of a master mind, but with the currents and beauty that come out of free thinking. In the new politics, people have different ways of talking, but I feel the core will be living democracy and living economies, and that it will include both taking personal responsibility to make change and being part of national and international movements for change.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

The poem of the understanding is philosophy.

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"Logological Fragments," Philosophical Writings, M. Stolijar, trans. (Albany: 1997) #24
5 months 1 week ago

To uphold the institutions of our country-that's it-the institutions which protect and sustain a handful of people in the robbery and plunder of the masses, the institutions which drain the blood of the native as well as of the foreigner, turn it into wealth and power

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2 months 1 week ago

So, this is ooold school, like old old school. So, I think we've had it backward for a long time. I think we are entering a new era and it's time to directly say Existence>essence. Being>identity.

"being" here is referring to our contingent identity. But I think we have to face the fact we don't know what happens to the identity when we die. But we know, when the body exists, our identity persists. We can't let identity particularity subvert life. Subvert existence.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Many Britons...feel strongly about something which was once called "the alien wedge". And surely it cannot be doubted, even by those who profess allegiance to the "multicultural society", that our society, unlike America, is not of that kind, and therefore that immigration cannot be an object of merely passive contemplation on the part of the present citizenship. There is perhaps no greater sign of the strength of liberalism (a strength which issues, not from popular consensus, but from the political power of the liberal elite) than that it has made it impossible for any but the circumlocutory to argue that the English, the Scots and the Welsh have a prior claim to the benefits of the civilization that their ancestors created, which entitles them to reserve its benefits for themselves.

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The Meaning of Conservatism: Third Edition (2001), p. 62
4 months 3 weeks ago

He sleeps well who knows not that he sleeps ill.

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Maxim 77
6 months 2 weeks ago

For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules - it hasn't been taught us by means of strict rules, either.

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p. 25
7 months 1 week ago

We know, that of all living beings man is the best formed, and, as the gods belong to this number, they must have a human form. ... I do not mean to say that the gods have body and blood in them; but I say that they seem as if they had bodies with blood in them. . . , Epicurus, for whom hidden things were as tangible as if he had touched them with his finger, teaches us that gods are not generally visible, but that they are intelligible; that they are not bodies having a certain solidity . . . but that we can recognize them by their passing images; that as there are atoms enough in the infinite space to produce such images, these are produced before us . . . and make us realize what are these happy, immortal beings.

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Book I, Section 18

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