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2 months 2 weeks ago

Professional standards, the standards of ambition and selfishness, are always sliding downward toward expense, ostentation, and mediocrity. They tend always to narrow the ground of judgment. But amateur standards, the standards of love, are always straining upward toward the humble and the best. They enlarge the ground of judgment. The context of love is the world.

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The Responsibility of the Poet
4 months 1 week ago

It's been suggested that if the super-naturalists really had the powers they claim, they'd win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science. Either way, why are they wasting their talents doing party turns on television?By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Wherever Macdonald sits, there is the head of the table.

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par. 37
6 months 2 weeks ago

Corn is a necessary, silver is only a superfluity.

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Chapter XI, Part III, (First Period) p. 223.
4 months 3 weeks ago

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

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G 29
2 months 2 weeks ago

War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.

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Letter to John Sinclair
4 months 2 weeks ago

You will die - and it will all be over. You will die and find out everything - or cease asking.

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Bk. V, Ch. 1
7 months 1 week ago

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

Simplicity and nonviolence are the basis of an economy of wellbeing, and such an economy must be localised.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Modem mainstream economic theory bravely assumes that people make their decisions in such a way as to maximize their utility. Accepting this assumption enables economics to predict a great deal of behavior (correctly or incorrectly) without ever making empirical studies of human actors.

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Simon (1990) "Invariants of Human Behavior" in: Annu. Rev. Psychol. 41: p. 6.
4 months 4 weeks ago

We do not require elaborate training merely in order to refrain from embarking upon intricate trains of inference. Such abstinence is only too easy.

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Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (1927).
2 months 3 weeks ago

Self-respect is the cornerstone of all virtue.

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As quoted in A Toolbox for Humanity : More Than 9000 Years of Thought (2004) by Lloyd Albert Johnson, p. 147
4 months 2 weeks ago

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

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Cited in Rules for methodizing the Apocalypse, Rule 9, from a manuscript published in The Religion of Isaac Newton (1974) by Frank E. Manuel, p. 120
6 months 1 week ago

I am my world.

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(The microcosm.) (5.63) Original German: Ich bin meine welt (Der Mikrokosmos.)
7 months 2 weeks ago

Lord Jesus Christ, our foolish minds are weak; they are more than willing to be drawn-and there is so much that wants to draw us to itself. There is pleasure with its seductive power, the multiplicity with its bewildering distractions, the moment with its infatuating importance and the conceited laboriousness of busyness and the careless time-wasting of light-mindedness and the gloomy brooding of heavy-mindedness-all this will draw us away from ourselves to itself in order to deceive us. But you, who are truth, only you, our Savior and Redeemer, can truly draw a person to yourself, which you have promised to do-that you will draw all to yourself. Then may God grant that by repenting we may come to ourselves, so that you, according to your Word, can draw us to yourself-from on high, but through lowliness and abasement.

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6 months 1 week ago

But if you say: "How am I to know what he means, when I see nothing but the signs he gives?" then I say: "How is he to know what he means, when he has nothing but the signs either?"

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§ 504
6 months 2 weeks ago

Luxury is the opposite of the naturally necessary.

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Notebook V, The Chapter on Capital, p. 448.
5 months 2 weeks ago

But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.

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5 months 1 week ago

Opinions, yes; convictions, no. That is the point of departure for an intellectual pride.

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3 months 1 week ago

The Scientist must set in order. Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.

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Ch. IX: Hypotheses in Physics, Tr. George Bruce Halsted
6 months 2 weeks ago

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain; and there is no good theory of disease which does not at once suggest a cure.

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p. 212
5 months 1 week ago

Pure mathematics is religion.

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5 months 1 week ago

The man that does not know himself not to be at the mercy of other men, that does not feel that he is invulnerable to all the vicissitudes of fortune, is incapable of a constant and inflexible virtue.

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Book V, "Of Education"
6 months 4 days ago

Man is a universe in little.

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Freeman (1948), p. 150
3 months 5 days ago

Human virtue, if we went down to the roots of it, is not so rare. The materials of human virtue are everywhere abundant as the light of the sun: raw materials,-O woe, and loss, and scandal thrice and threefold, that they so seldom are elaborated, and built into a result! that they lie yet unelaborated, and stagnant in the souls of wide-spread dreary millions, fermenting, festering; and issue at last as energetic vice instead of strong practical virtue!

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4 months 4 weeks ago

The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.

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Ch. 2: "Mathematics as an Element in the History of Thought", p. 28
2 months 1 week ago

For it has been truly observed by a great philosopher, that truth does more easily emerge out of error than confusion.

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5 months 1 week ago

Except for music, everything is a lie, even solitude, even ecstasy. Music, in fact, is the one and the other, only better.

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3 months 5 days 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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7 months 1 week ago

Hypocrisy is a universal phenomenon. It ends with death, but not before.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.

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"A Trip to Anhwei", in With Love And Irony (1940), p. 145
6 months 2 weeks ago

Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it.

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As quoted in Life of John Stuart Mill (1954) by M. St.J. Packe, Bk. I, Ch. II
5 months 3 weeks ago

A bad feeling is a commotion of the mind repugnant to reason, and against nature.

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As quoted in Tusculanae Quaestiones by Cicero, iv. 6.
6 months 2 weeks ago

All sentiment is right; because sentiment has a reference to nothing beyond itself, and is always real, wherever a man is conscious of it. But all determinations of the understanding are not right; because they have a reference to something beyond themselves, to wit, real matter of fact; and are not always conformable to that standard.

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Part I, Essay 23: Of The Standard of Taste
2 months 1 week ago

Only to the rational animal is it given to follow voluntarily what happens; but simply to follow is a necessity imposed on all.

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X, 28
4 months 3 weeks ago

It is a question whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel, we do not fall into the error a child makes when it hits the chair it has bumped into.

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J 146
3 months 3 weeks ago

Lost time was like a run in a stocking. It always got worse.

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The Steep Ascent
5 months 1 week ago

Erosion of our being by our infirmities: the resulting void is filled by the presence of consciousness, what am I saying? - that void is consciousness itself.

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2 months 1 week ago

All grandeur, all power, all subordination to authority rests on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple and society disappears.

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"First Dialogue," p. 20
4 months 3 weeks ago

Immature love says: "I love you because I need you." Mature love says: "I need you because I love you."

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Ch. 2
5 months 1 week ago

Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.

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"On My Friendly Critics"
6 months 4 days ago

All who delight in the pleasures of the belly, exceeding all measure in eating and drinking and love, find that the pleasures are brief and last but a short while-only so long as they are eating and drinking-but the pains that come after are many and endure. The longing for the same things keeps ever returning, and whenever the objects of one's desire are realized forthwith the pleasure vanishes, and one has no further use for them. The pleasure is brief, and once more the need for the same things returns.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

For well-being and health, again, the homestead should be airy in summer, and sunny in winter. A homestead possessing these qualities would be longer than it is deep; and its main front would face the south.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

It seemed perfectly possible that, in spite of my certainty of my own genius, I might die of some illness, or perhaps even in a street accident, before I had ever glimpsed the meaning of life. My moods of happiness and self-confidence convinced me that I had a "destiny" to become a famous writer, and to be remembered as one of the most important thinkers of the century.

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p. 67

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