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8 months 2 weeks ago

The superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions. James Legge translation. Variant translations: The superior man acts before he speaks, and afterwards speaks according to his actions. The greater man does not boast of himself, But does what he must do. A good man does not give orders, but leads by example.

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1 week 5 days ago

When the people who are fighting for what is best for EVERYBODY become irrational to oppose the injury of people in general, as a matter of consequence, that should be considered ethical behavior.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

Among the things held to be just by law, whatever is proved to be of advantage in men's dealings has the stamp of justice, whether or not it be the same for all; but if a man makes a law and it does not prove to be mutually advantageous, then this is no longer just. And if what is mutually advantageous varies and only for a time corresponds to our concept of justice, nevertheless for that time it is just for those who do not trouble themselves about empty words, but look simply at the facts.

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7 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
7 months 2 weeks ago

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

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§ 5
6 months 3 weeks ago

How can a past idea be present?... it can only be going, infinitesimally past, less past than any assignable past date. We are thus brought to the conclusion that the present is connected to the past by a series of real infinitesimal steps.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

All those instances to be found in history, whether real or fabulous, of a doubtful public spirit, at which morality is perplexed, reason is staggered, and from which affrighted Nature recoils, are their chosen and almost sole examples for the instruction of their youth.

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No. 1, volume v, p. 286
7 months 3 weeks ago

If a person tells me he has been to the worst places I have no reason to judge him; but if he tells me it was his superior wisdom that enabled him to go there, then I know he is a fraud.

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Conversation of 1930
5 months 4 weeks ago

"The Precession of Simulacra,"

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p. 6
8 months 3 weeks ago

We all have a weakness for beauty.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion; and to the very end of life, our location of all things in one space is due to the fact that the original extents or bignesses of all the sensations which came to our notice at once, coalesced together into one and the same space.

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Ch. 13
2 months 5 days ago

In that missed necessity or worry about potential problems is uncontrolled stress and suffering.....also, whether you understand or not MONEY can solve this issue as well without understanding......

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4 months 1 week ago

We give voice to our trivial cares, but suffer enormities in silence.

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line 607; (Phaedra)
7 months ago

The God of the Christians is a father who makes much of his apples, and very little of his children.

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No. 16
6 months 2 weeks ago

Verily I say unto you, If ye have faith, and doubt not, ye shall not only do this which is done to the fig tree, but also if ye shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; it shall be done.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Anything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed.

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Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), p. 73
7 months 3 weeks ago

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

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"Is Theology Poetry?", 1945
6 months 3 weeks ago

The Leaders have ever since gone...to propagate the principles of French Levelling and confusion, by which no house is safe from its Servants, and no Officer from his Soldiers, and no State or constitution from conspiracy and insurrection. I will not enter into the baseness and depravity of the System they adopt; but one thing I will remark, that its great Object is not, (as they pretend to delude worthy people to their Ruin) the destruction of all absolute Monarchies, but totally to root out that thing called an Aristocrate or Noblemen and Gentleman.

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Letter to Lord Fitzwilliam (21 November 1791), quoted in Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith (eds.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Volume VI: July 1789-December 1791 (1967), p. 451
8 months 3 days ago

The day of your birth is one day's advance towards the grave.

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Ch. 20. Of the Force of Imagination (tr. Cotton, rev. W. Carew Hazlitt, 1877) Cf. Dávid Baróti Szabó, Nem kímíl meg senkit halál, wr. 1786; ed. 1914
3 months 3 weeks ago

Hence the Pythagoreans in their theology called it sometimes "universe," sometimes "heaven," sometimes "all," sometimes "Fate" and "eternity," "power" and "trust" and "Necessity," "Atlas" and "unwearying," and simply "God" and "Phanes" and "sun."They called it "universe," because all things are arranged by it both in general and in particular, and because it is the most perfect boundary of number, in the sense that "decad" is, as it were, "receptacle," just as heaven is the receptacle of all things, they called it "heaven" and, among the Muses, "Ourania."

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On the Decad
6 months 1 week ago

Error is the price we pay for progress.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

The first philosophers were astronomers. The heavens remind man ... that he is destined not merely to act, but also to contemplate.

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Introduction, Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), pp. 101-102
5 months 3 weeks ago

It may be that brain hardware has co-evolved with the internal virtual worlds that it creates. This can be called hardware-software co-evolution.

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5 months 2 days ago

Might there not be a connection between the attempt to eradicate religion and the loss of freedom? It is unlikely that Mao, who launched his assault on the people and culture of Tibet with the slogan "Religion is poison," would have agreed that his atheist world-view had no bearing on his policies.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Each to each a looking-glass, Reflects his figure that doth pass. Every wayfarer he meets What himself declared repeats, What himself confessed records, Sentences him in his words; The form is his own corporal form, And his thought the penal worm. Yet shine forever virgin minds, Loved by stars and the purest winds, Which, o'er passion throned sedate, Have not hazarded their state; Disconcert the searching spy, Rendering to a curious eye The durance of a granite ledge To those who gaze from the sea's edge. It is there for benefit; It is there for purging light; There for purifying storms; And its depths reflect all forms; It cannot parley with the mean,- Pure by impure is not seen. For there's no sequestered grot, Lone mountain tarn, or isle forgot, But Justice, journeying in the sphere, Daily stoops to harbour there.

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Astræa
5 months 3 weeks ago

What worries me about religion is that it teaches people to be satisfied with not understanding the world they live in.

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Heart Of The Matter: God Under The Microscope | BBC
6 months 3 weeks ago

Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.

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5 months 2 days ago

Before Christianity suicide was not in any way troubling. Our lives were our own, and when we tired of them we were at liberty to end them. One might think that as Christianity has declined, this freedom would be reclaimed. Instead secular creeds have sprung up, in which each person's life belongs to everyone else. To hand back the gift of life because it does not please is still condemned as a kind of blasphemy, though the offended deity is now humanity instead of God.

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Sweet Morality (p. 231-2)
6 months 1 week ago

Radical black feminists have never confined their vision to just the emancipation of black women or women in general, or all black people for that matter. Rather, they are the theorists and proponents of a radical humanism committed to liberating humanity and reconstructing social relations across the board. When bell hooks says "Feminism is for everybody," she is echoing what has always been a basic assumption of black feminists. We are not talking about identity politics but a constantly developing often contested, revolutionary conversation about how all of us might envision and remake the world.

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Robin Kelley Freedom Dreams
6 months 3 weeks ago

History proves nothing because it contains everything.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

Well, what does "good" mean anyway...? As Wittgenstein suggested, "good," like "game," has a family of meanings. Prominent among them is this one: "meets the criteria or standards of assessment or evaluation."

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P. 152.
6 months 1 week ago

I agree as to the doubtful value of competitive examination. The qualities which you really want, viz., self-control, self-reliance, habits of accurate thought, integrity and what you generally call trustworthiness, are not decided by competitive examination, which test little else than the memory.

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Letter to Lord Stanley (May 17, 1857), published in Florence Nightingale on Wars and the War Office: Collected Works of Florence Nightingale. Vol. 15 (2011), edited by Lynn McDonald, p. 265.
7 months 1 week ago

A soldier told Pelopidas, "We are fallen among the enemies." Said he, "How are we fallen among them more than they among us?"

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63 Pelopidas
7 months 3 weeks ago

What are the earth and all its interests beside the deep surmise which pierces and scatters them?

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Philosophy's error is to be too endurable.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly; if they be un-inhabited, what a waste of space.

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On other stars Attributed by John Burroughs on the first page of his 1920 book Accepting The Universe
6 months 1 week ago

Gregorian chant, Romanesque architecture, the Iliad, the invention of geometry were not, for the people through whom they were brought into being and made available to us, occasions for the manifestation of personality.

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p. 55
6 months 2 weeks ago

In the form of the oeuvre, the actual circumstances are placed in another dimension where the given reality shows itself as that which it is. Thus it tells the truth about itself; its language ceases to be that of deception, ignorance, and submission. Fiction calls the facts by their name and their reign collapses; fiction subverts everyday experience and shows it to be mutilated and false.

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p. 62
7 months 3 weeks ago

Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.

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§ 6
8 months 1 week ago

Whilst in speaking of human things, we say that it is necessary to know them before we can love them...the saints on the contrary say in speaking of divine things that it is necessary to love them in order to know them, and that we only enter truth through charity.

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6 months 1 week ago

Is there not therefore rational necessity, but vital anguish that impels us to believe in God. And to believe in God - I must reiterate it yet again - is, before all and above all, to feel a hunger for God, a hunger for divinity, to be sensible to his lack and absence, to wish that God may exist. And it is the wish to save the human finality of the Universe. For one might even come to resign oneself to being absorbed by God, if it be that our consciousness is based upon Consciousness, if consciousness is the end of the Universe.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, "What's your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act." And they do calm down.

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7 months 2 days ago

Our youth we can have but to-day, We may always find time to grow old. Can Love be controlled by Advice?

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reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
3 months 3 weeks ago

Put down the banks, and if this country could not be carried through the longest war against her most powerful enemy without ever knowing the want of a dollar, without dependence on the traitorous classes of her citizens, without bearing hard on the resources of the people, or loading the public with an indefinite burden of debt, I know nothing of my countrymen. Not by any novel project, not by any charlatanerie, but by ordinary and well-experienced means; by the total prohibition of all private paper at all times, by reasonable taxes in war aided by the necessary emissions of public paper of circulating size, this bottomed on special taxes, redeemable annually as this special tax comes in, and finally within a moderate period.

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Letter to Albert Gallatin, 1815. ME 14:356
5 months 1 week ago

Life cannot exist without a certain conformity to the surrounding universe - that conformity involves a certain amount of happiness in excess of pain. In short, as we live we are paid for living.

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4 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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7 months 4 weeks ago

The virtue of frugality lies in a middle between avarice and profusion, of which the one consists in an excess, the other in a defect of the proper attention to the objects of self-interest.

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Section II, Chap. I.
6 months 3 weeks ago

What am I, other than a chance in the infinite probabilities of not having been!

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