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6 months 3 weeks ago

Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind is also rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

The life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.

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On Suicide
2 months 2 weeks ago

The, diverse states of the soul are always correlative with those of the body.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

A witty saying proves nothing.

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Le dîner du comte de Boulainvilliers (1767): Deuxième Entretien
2 months 3 weeks ago

The Palætiological Sciences depend upon the Idea of Cause; but the leading conception which they involve is that of 'historical cause', not mechanical cause.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

On the more conservative side... Liberalism has been associated with... the right to own private property... one of the most fundamental individual rights that is protected in true liberal societies, and that right is... what made possible the modern economic world. As any economist would tell you, without secure property rights and contract enforcement, you don't get investment and therefore economic growth.

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13:44
7 months 2 weeks ago

The history of science is full of revolutionary advances that required small insights that anyone might have had, but that, in fact, only one person did.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

A man's face as a rule says more, and more interesting things, than his mouth, for it is a compendium of everything his mouth will ever say, in that it is the monogram of all this man's thoughts and aspirations.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 29, § 377
6 months 3 weeks ago

Manufacture was all the time sheltered by protective duties in the hoe market, by monopolies in the colonial market, and broad as much as possible by differential duties.

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ibid, pp. 183
4 months 1 week ago

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.

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p. 7
7 months 1 week ago

Come the Day of Judgment, some believe that the body will be different from our present body. This is only transient, that will be eternal. For this also there are religious arguments.

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3 months 6 days ago

A great pilot can sail even when his canvas is rent.

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Line 3.
3 months 2 weeks ago

There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and shame the devil.

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Journalism and the Higher Law, p. 13
6 months 2 weeks ago

Absurd, irreducible; nothing - not even a profound and secret delirium of nature - could explain it. Obviously I did not know everything, I had not seen the seeds sprout, or the tree grow. But faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explained by the rotation of a straight segment around one of its extremities. But neither does a circle exist. This root, on the other hand, existed in such a way that I could not explain it. Reflections on a chestnut tree root.

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5 months 3 days ago

Perhaps, if prematurely we dismiss ourselves from this world, all may even have to be suffered through again - the premature birth may not contribute to the production of another being, which must be begun again from the beginning.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

The Quaestor turned back the pages until he found himself among the Pensées. "We are not satisfied," he read, "with the life we have in ourselves and our own being; we want to live an imaginary life in other people's idea of us. Hence all our efforts are directed to seeming what we are not. We labor incessantly to preserve and embellish this imaginary being, and neglect that which is really ours." The Quaestor put down the book, ... and ruefully reflected that all his own troubles had arisen from this desire to seem what in fact he was not. To seem a man of action, when in fact he was a contemplative; to seem a politician, when nature had made him an introspective psychologist; to seem a wit, which God had intended him for a sage.

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"Variations on a Philosopher" in Themes and Variations (1943), p. 2
6 months 3 weeks ago

That which has no existence cannot be destroyed - that which cannot be destroyed cannot require anything to preserve it from destruction. Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense - nonsense upon stilts. But this rhetorical nonsense ends in the old strain of mischievous nonsense for immediately a list of these pretended natural rights is given, and those are so expressed as to present to view legal rights. And of these rights, whatever they are, there is not, it seems, any one of which any government can, upon any occasion whatever, abrogate the smallest particle. The often-quoted phrase 'nonsense upon stilts' is often modernised to 'nonsense on stilts'.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

It seems to me certain that more people are killed out of righteous stupidity than out of wickedness.

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p. 368
6 months 4 weeks ago

The reproduction of mankind is a great marvel and mystery. Had God consulted me in the matter, I should have advised him to continue the generation of the species by fashioning them of clay, in the way Adam was fashioned.

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752
5 months 3 weeks ago

Freedom and whores are the most cosmopolitan items under the sun. .

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Act IV
5 months 3 weeks ago

How many women does one need to sing the scale of love all the way up and down?

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Act I.
4 months 2 weeks ago

Without an anti-environment, all environments are invisible.

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(p. 33)
4 months 2 weeks ago

For his purposes (and mine), scientific medicine is defined as the set of practices which submit themselves to the ordeal of being tested. Alternative medicine is defined as that set of practices which cannot be tested, refuse to be tested, or consistently fail tests. If a healing technique is demonstrated to have curative properties in properly controlled double-blind trials, it ceases to be alternative. It simply, as Diamond explains, becomes medicine. Conversely, if a technique devised by the President of the Royal College of Physicians consistently fails in double-blind trials, it will cease to be a part of 'orthodox' medicine. Whether it will then become 'alternative' will depend upon whether it is adopted by a sufficiently ambitious quack (there are always sufficiently gullible patients).

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Foreword to Snake Oil and Other Preoccupations by John Diamond, Vintage, 2001.
5 months 2 weeks ago

Sex-appeal is the keynote of our whole civilization.

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Chapter IV
3 months ago

In our opinion, the task of a far-sighted policy of the Third Reich ought to have been that of seeking every possible means to obtain at least the neutrality of the western nations so as to have free hands for a devestating attack exclusively against the Soviet Union-but that would have required the shrewdness and genius of a Metternich.

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pp. 81-82
3 months 1 week ago

The pious soul,-which, if you reflect, will mean the ingenuous and ingenious, the gifted, intelligent and nobly-aspiring soul,-such a soul, in whatever rank of life it were born, had one path inviting it; a generous career, whereon, by human worth and valor, all earthly heights and Heaven itself were attainable. In the lowest stratum of social thraldom, nowhere was the noble soul doomed quite to choke, and die ignobly.

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6 months 4 weeks ago

The ceaseless labour of your life is to build the house of death.

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Book I, Ch. 20
6 months 3 weeks ago

An army of principles will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot; it will succeed where diplomatic management would fall: it is neither the Rhine, the Channel, nor the ocean that can arrest its progress: it will march on the horizon of the world, and it will conquer.

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Means by Which the Fund Is to Be Created
6 months 3 weeks ago

To Americans. That some desperate wretches should be willing to steal and enslave men by violence and murder for gain, is rather lamentable than strange. But that many civilized, nay, christianized people should approve, and be concerned in the savage practice, is surprising; and still persist, though it has been so often proved contrary to the light of nature, to every principle of Justice and Humanity, and even good policy, by a succession of eminent men, and several late publications.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Economics is on the side of humanity now.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Mathematical Analysis is... the true rational basis of the whole system of our positive knowledge.

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Bk. 1, chap. 1; as cited in: Robert Edouard Moritz. Memorabilia mathematica; or, The philomath's quotation-book, (1914), p. 224
10 months 3 weeks ago

If we merely wait for the appropriate moment we will never live to see it, because this [appropriate moment] cannot arrive without the subjective conditions of the maturity of the revolutionary force being fulfilled - it can only arrive after a series of failed attempts.

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7 months ago

For I find that even those that have sought knowledge for itself and not for benefit, or ostentation, or any practical enablement in the course of their life, have nevertheless propounded to themselves a wrong mark, namely, satisfaction, which men call truth, and not operation. For as in the courts and services of princes and states, it is a much easier matter to give satisfaction than to do the business; so in the inquiring of causes and reasons it is much easier to find out such causes as will satisfy the mind of man, and quiet objections, than such causes as will direct him and give him light to new experiences and inventions.

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Valerius Terminus: Of the Interpretation of Nature (ca. 1603), in Works, Vol. 1; The Works of Francis Bacon (1857), Vol. 3, p. 232
6 months 3 weeks ago

And why should man, added he, pretend to an exemption from the lot of all other animals? The whole earth, believe me, PHILO, is cursed and polluted. A perpetual war is kindled amongst all living creatures. Necessity, hunger, want, stimulate the strong and courageous: Fear, anxiety, terror, agitate the weak and infirm. The first entrance into life gives anguish to the new-born infant and to its wretched parent: Weakness, impotence, distress, attend each stage of that life: and it is at last finished in agony and horror.

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Demea to Philo, Part X
6 months 3 weeks ago

The first thing to realize, if you wish to become a philosopher, is that most people go through life with a whole world of beliefs that have no sort of rational justification, and that one man's world of beliefs is apt to be incompatible with another man's, so that they cannot both be right. People's opinions are mainly designed to make them feel comfortable; truth, for most people is a secondary consideration.

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"How to Become a Philosopher" (1942), in The Art of Philosophizing, and Other Essays (New York: Philosophical Library, 1968), p. 2
5 months 3 weeks ago

Well-filled and well-made are not mutually exclusive. 

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7 months 2 weeks ago

There is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not loving. All of us, today, are dying of this misfortune. For violence and hatred dry up the heart itself; the long fight for justice exhausts the love that nevertheless gave birth to it.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Everywhere we seek the Absolute, and always we find only things.

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Fragment No. 1; Variant: We seek the absolute everywhere and only ever find things.
5 months 4 days ago

Our whole civilization, our entire culture is concentrated in the mad demand for the most perfected weapons of slaughter. Ammunition! Ammunition! O, Lord, thou who rulest heaven and earth, thou God of love, of mercy and of justice, provide us with enough ammunition to destroy our enemy. Such is the prayer which is ascending daily to the Christian heaven.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

All presentation, all demonstration-and the presentation of thought is demonstration-has, according to its original determination-and this is all that matters to us-the cognitive activity of the other person as its ultimate aim.

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Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), p. 67
5 months 3 weeks ago

The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends most to the perpetuation of society itself. It makes our weakness subservient to our virtue; it grafts benevolence even upon avarice. The possession of family wealth and of the distinction which attends hereditary possessions (as most concerned in it,) are the natural securities for this transmission.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character.

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Ch. VI: "Some Necessary Iconoclasm", p. 168.
7 months 1 week ago

Into the same rivers we step and do not step, we are and are not.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

To oppose the torrent of scholastic religion by such feeble maxims as these, that it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be, that the whole is greater than a part, that two and three make five; is pretending to stop the ocean with a bullrush. Will you set up profane reason against sacred mystery? No punishment is great enough for your impiety. And the same fires, which were kindled for heretics, will serve also for the destruction of philosophers.

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Part XI - With regard to reason or absurdity
3 months 1 week ago

The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

I have often wondered how it should come to pass, that every man loving himself best, should more regard other men's opinions concerning himself than his own.

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XII, 3
7 months 6 days ago

Some of their faults people readily admit, but others not so readily.

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Book II, ch. 21, 1
4 months 1 week ago

The object of oratory alone is not truth, but persuasion.

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'On the Athenian Orators', Knight's Quarterly Magazine (August 1824), quoted in The Miscellaneous Writings of Lord Macaulay, Vol. I (1860), p. 135

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