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8 months 1 week ago

Neither did the dispensation of God vary in the times after our Saviour came into the world; for our Saviour himself did first show His power to subdue ignorance, by His conference with the priests and doctors of the law, before He showed His power to subdue nature by His miracles. And the coming of this Holy Spirit was chiefly figured and expressed in the similitude and gift of tongues, which are but vehicula scientiæ.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

While the intellectual space does contain universal ideas, definitions, those definitions are detailed a posteriori. Truth corresponds with reality at a minimum. 

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8 months ago

Tell him to live by yes and no - yes to everything good, no to everything bad.

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As quoted in The Thought and Character of William James (1935) by Ralph Barton Perry, Vol. II, ch. 91
3 months 3 weeks ago

Once we recognize that all historical knowledge is relational knowledge, and can only be formulated with reference to the position of the observer, we are faced, once more, with the task of discriminating between what is true and what is false in such knowledge.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

"Stars and blossoming fruit-trees: utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity."
- Simone Weil

See biography for Simone Weil:
https://civilsimian.com/Simone-Weil

Read Simone Weil's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/156/content

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4 months 1 week ago

Have you really looked at a seashell? There's not an aesthetic fault in it anywhere - it's absolutely perfect. Now, do you think that shells look at each other and critique each other's appearance? "Well, your markings are a little crooked and not very well spaced." Of course not, but that's what we do. Every one of us is marvellous and complicated and interesting and gorgeous just as we are. Really take a look at another person's eyes. They are jewelry beyond compare - just beautiful!

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p. 42
4 months 2 weeks ago

As the French say, there are three sexes - men, women, and clergymen.

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Vol. I, ch. 9, p. 313
4 months 2 weeks ago

I do not trust my eyes to tell me what a man is: I have a better and more trustworthy light by which I can distinguish what is true from what is false: let the mind find out what is good for the mind.

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De Vita Beata (On the Happy Life): cap. 2, line 2 Alternate translation: I do not distinguish by the eye, but by the mind, which is the proper judge of the man. (translator unknown).
9 months 1 day ago

Death induces the sensual person to say: Let us eat and drink, because tomorrow we shall die – but this is sensuality's cowardly lust for life, that contemptible order of things where one lives in order to eat and drink instead of eating and drinking in order to live.

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8 months 1 week ago

The true Gospel has it that we are justified by faith alone, without the deeds of the Law.

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Chapter 2

One is rarely an impulsive innovator after the age of sixty, but one can still be a very fine orderly and inventive thinker. One rarely procreates children at that age, but one is all the more skilled at educating those who have already been procreated, and education is procreation of another kind.

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K 51
6 months 1 week ago

The original Golden Dawn was not always as serious as it should have been. Mathers was a clown, and Yeats was just a romantic trying to deceive himself. Most of them were interested in personal power, and it ended up by destroying them. The aim of our group is the scientific exploration of the hidden powers of the human mind.

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p. 113
6 months 2 weeks ago

The more Lil' Kim distorted her natural beauty to become a cartoonlike caricature of whiteness, the larger her success.

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Dispersed as the Jews are, they still form one nation, foreign to the land they live in.

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As quoted in The Americans by Daniel Boorstin. See Truth from the "Zog Bog" by Gyeorgos Ceres Hatonn, 1993, 224 p.
6 months 3 weeks ago

Stuart was not dismayed by his sexual feelings about the boy.

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The Good Apprentice (1985), p. 247.
7 months 2 weeks ago

Pyrrhus said, "If I should overcome the Romans in another fight, I were undone."

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47 Pyrrhus
8 months 1 day ago

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

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"Psychological Observations"
6 months 3 weeks ago

God is what survives the evidence that nothing deserves to be thought.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

You do not know where death awaits you; so be ready for it everywhere.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.

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7 months 4 weeks ago

One always dies too soon - or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

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Inès, Act 1, sc. 5
3 months 3 weeks ago

Final causes or intentions are the torment of modern philosophy, which neglects nothing to get rid of them. From this, among other things, comes its great axiom: nature creates only individuals. Indeed, since all classification supposes order, this philosophy has denied classes to deny order. In order to establish this marvellous reasoning, it fixes its suspicious eyes on the differences between beings to dispense itself from turning them to their similarities. It does not want to recognize that nuances between classes and individuals constitute another order, and that diversity in resemblance supposes intention more visibly than mere resemblance.

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8 months 1 week ago

There is nothing I congratulate myself on more heartily than on never having joined a sect.

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As quoted in Thomas More and Erasmus (1965) by Ernest Edwin Reynolds, p. 248 [citation needed]

The South may keep her pine-apples, and we will be content with our strawberries, which are, as it were, pine-apples with "going a-strawberrying" stirred into them, infinitely enhancing their flavor.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries-not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.

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"Two Dogmas of Empiricism"

Bad times have a scientific value. [...] We learn geology the morning after the earthquake, on ghastly diagrams of cloven mountains, upheaved plains, and the dry bed of the sea.

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Considerations by the Way
9 months 2 days ago
Against that positivism which stops before phenomena, saying "there are only facts," I should say: no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations...
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7 months ago

Economy is a distributive virtue, and consists not in saving but selection. Parsimony requires no providence, no sagacity, no powers of combination, no comparison, no judgment.

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7 months ago

I should not be surprized at seeing a French Army conveyed by a British Navy to an attack upon this Kingdom.

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Letter to French Laurence (12 May 1797) after hearing of the mutinies in the Royal Navy, quoted in R. B. McDowell (ed.)
4 months 1 week ago

I lay it down that there is Matter, and also there are Material Species, but unless a Final Cause for them be previously assumed, we shall be, without perceiving it, introducing the doctrine of Epicurus: since if nothing be anterior to two efficient causes, a spontaneous flux and chance must have united the two together.

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8 months 1 week ago

When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Struggling to be brief I become obscure.

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Line 25
6 months 2 weeks ago

The truth is sum, ergo cogito - I am, therefore I think, although not everything that is thinks. Is not consciousness of thinking above all consciousness of being? Is pure thought possible, without consciousness of self, without personality? Can there exist pure knowledge without feeling, without that species of materiality which feelings lends to it? Do we not perhaps feel thought, and do we not feel ourselves in the act of knowing and willing? Could not the man in the stove [Descartes] have said: "I feel, therefore I am"? or "I will, therefore I am"? And to feel oneself, is it not perhaps to feel oneself imperishable?

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Whoever cultivates the golden mean avoids both the poverty of a hovel and the envy of a palace.

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Book II, ode x, line 5
5 months 4 weeks ago

The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation.

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p. 98
6 months 1 week ago

The similarity between Marxism and neoconservativism might be expressed in the following way: both perspectives say that certain injustices can't be cured under our present system of political democracy and mixed economy. The Marxist concludes that we have to overthrow the present system and the neoconservative concludes that we have to live with the injustices. But they are both wrong.

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How Not to Solve Ethical Problems
9 months 2 days ago
Unpleasant, even dangerous, qualities can be found in every nation and every individual: it is cruel to demand that the Jew be an exception. In him, these qualities may even be dangerous and revolting to an unusual degree; and perhaps the young stock-exchange Jew is altogether the most disgusting invention of mankind.
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7 months 4 days ago

I am obliged to confess that I do not regard the abolition of slavery as a means of warding off the struggle of the two races in the Southern states. The Negroes may long remain slaves without complaining; but if they are once raised to the level of freemen, they will soon revolt at being deprived of almost all their civil rights; and as they cannot become the equals of the whites, they will speedily show themselves as enemies.

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Chapter XVIII.
7 months 6 days ago

The universal Intellect is the intimate, most real, peculiar and powerful part of the soul of the world. This is the single whole which filleth the whole, illumineth the universe and directeth nature to the production of natural things, as our intellect with the congruous production of natural kinds.

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6 months 1 week ago

If we accept values as given and consistent, if we postulate an objective description of the world as it really is, and if we assume that the decision maker's computational powers are unlimited, then two important consequences follow. First, we do not need to distinguish between the real world and the decision maker's perception of it: he or she perceives the world as it really is. Second, we can predict the choices that will be made by a rational decision maker entirely from our knowledge of the real world and without a knowledge of the decision maker's perceptions or modes of calculation. (We do, of course, have to know his or her utility function.)

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When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become corrupt as in Europe.

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Letter to James Madison (20 December 1787), The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (19 Vols., 1905) edited by Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, Vol. VI, p. 392.

Men remain in their present low and primitive condition; but if they should feel the influence of the spring of springs arousing them, they would of necessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life.

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p. 49
4 months 3 weeks ago

Curious, if we will reflect on it, this of having no books. Except by what he could see for himself, or hear of by uncertain rumor of speech in the obscure Arabian Desert, he could know nothing. The wisdom that had been before him or at a distance from him in the world, was in a manner as good as not there for him. Of the great brother souls, flame-beacons through so many lands and times, no one directly communicates with this great soul. He is alone there, deep down in the bosom of the Wilderness; has to grow up so,-alone with Nature and his own Thoughts. But, from an early age, he had been remarked as a thoughtful man.

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6 months 2 days ago

One day, we shall stand up and our backsides will remain attached to our seats.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our 'fellow men', the question which comes to mind is invariably the same: how does he keep from killing himself?

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8 months 4 days ago

I have no great faith in political arithmetic, and I mean not to warrant the exactness of either of these computations.

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Chapter V, p. 577.

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