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2 months 1 week ago

Sit and be still until in the time of no rain you hear beneath the dry wind's commotion in the trees the sound of flowing water among the rocks, a stream unheard before, and you are where breathing is prayer.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

If we look deeply into such ways of life as Buddhism and Taoism, Vedanta and Yoga, we do not find either philosophy or religion as these are understood in the West. We find something more nearly resembling psychotherapy. ... The main resemblance between these Eastern ways of life and Western psychotherapy is in the concern of both with bringing about changes of consciousness, changes in our ways of feeling our own existence and our relation to human society and the natural world. The psychotherapist has, for the most part, been interested in changing the consciousness of peculiarly disturbed individuals. The disciplines of Buddhism and Taoism are, however, concerned with changing the consciousness of normal, socially adjusted people.

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pp. 3-4
4 months 3 weeks ago

When I read the catechism of the Council of Trent, it seems as though I had nothing in common with the religion there set forth.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

The steady drip of water causes stone to hollow and yield.

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Book I, line 313 (tr. Stallings) Variant translation: Continual dropping wears away a stone. Compare: "The soft droppes of rain pierce the hard marble; many strokes overthrow the tallest oaks", John Lyly, Euphues, 1579 (Arber's reprint), p. 81
4 months 3 days ago

McDonald: Now a lot of people find great comfort from religion. Not everybody is as you are - well-favored, handsome, wealthy, with a good job, happy family life. I mean, your life is good - not everybody's life is good, and religion brings them comfort.Dawkins: There are all sorts of things that would be comforting. I expect an injection of morphine would be comforting - it might be more comforting, for all I know. But to say that something is comforting is not to say that it's true.

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7 months 5 days ago

I don't say it was deliberate fraud. He was probably madly sincere, and sincerely mad.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Here, lads, we live by the law of the taiga. But even here people manage to live. D'you know who are the ones the camps finish off? Those who lick other men's left-overs, those who set store by the doctors, and those who peach on their mates.

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Kuziomin, in the Ralph Parker translation (1963).
4 months 2 weeks ago

Since the war began, miles of paper and oceans of ink have been used to prove the barbarity, the cruelty, the oppression of Prussian militarism. Conservatives and radicals alike are giving their support to the Allies for no other reason than to help crush that militarism, in the presence of which, they say, there can be no peace or progress in Europe. But though America grows fat on the manufacture of munitions and war loans to the Allies to help crush Prussians the same cry is now being raised in America which, if carried into national action, would build up an American militarism far more terrible than German or Prussian militarism could ever be, and that because nowhere in the world has capitalism become so brazen in its greed and nowhere is the state so ready to kneel at the feet of capital.

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5 months ago

What man shall there be among you, that shall have one sheep, and if it fall into a pit on the sabbath day, will he not lay hold on it, and lift it out? How much then is a man better than a sheep? Wherefore it is lawful to do well on the sabbath days.

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12:11-12 (KJV) Said to the Pharisees.
4 months 3 weeks ago

How are we to adjudicate among rival ontologies? Certainly the answer is not provided by the semantical formula "To be is to be the value of a variable"; this formula serves rather, conversely, in testing the conformity of a given remark or doctrine to a prior ontological standard.

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"On What There Is"
2 months 5 days ago

FACULTY PSYCHOLOGY is getting to be respectable again after centuries of hanging around with phrenologists and other dubious types. By faculty psychology I mean, roughly , the view that many fundamentally different kinds of psychological mechanisms must be postulated in order to explain the facts of mental life . Faculty psychology takes seriously the apparent heterogeneity of the mental and is impressed by such prima facie differences as between, say, sensation and perception, volition and cognition, learning and remembering, or language and thought.

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p. 1
4 months 3 days ago

Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life.

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A Gossip on Romance, printed in Longman's Magazine (November 1882).
4 months 4 weeks ago

The blessing that the market does not ask about birth is paid for in the exchange society by the fact that the possibilities conferred by birth are molded to fit the production of goods that can be bought on the market.

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E. Jephcott, trans., p. 9.
5 months 3 weeks ago

Lysander said, "Where the lion's skin will not reach, it must be pieced with the fox's."

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60 Lysander
6 months 1 week ago

Percepts and phenomena which precedes the logical use of the intellect is called appearance, while the reflex knowledge originating from several appearances compared by the intellect is called experience.

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5 months 1 week ago

We carry with us the wonders, we seek without us: There is all Africa, and her prodigies in us; we are that bold and adventurous piece of nature, which he that studies, wisely learns in a compendium, what others labour at in a divided piece and endless volume.

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Section 15
4 months 3 days ago

If it's really true, that the museum at Liberty University has dinosaur fossils which are labelled as being 3000 years old, then that is an educational disgrace. It is debauching the whole idea of a university, and I would strongly encourage any members of Liberty University who may be here...to leave and go to a proper university.

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At Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia, (23 October 2006) Broadcasted by C-SPAN2
3 months 1 day ago

In the long run my observations have convinced me that some men, reasoning preposterously, first establish some conclusion in their minds which, either because of its being their own or because of their having received it from some person who has their entire confidence, impresses them so deeply that one finds it impossible ever to get it out of their heads. Such arguments in support of their fixed idea as they hit upon themselves or hear set forth by others, no matter how simple and stupid these may be, gain their instant acceptance and applause. On the other hand whatever is brought forward against it, however ingenious and conclusive, they receive with disdain or with hot rage - if indeed it does not make them ill. Beside themselves with passion, some of them would not be backward even about scheming to suppress and silence their adversaries.

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p. 322
4 months 2 weeks 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
2 months 1 week ago

Happy in the prospect of a restoration of primitive Christianity, I must leave to younger athletes to encounter and lop off the false branches which have been engrafted into it by the mythologists of the middle and modern ages.

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Letter to Doctor Waterhouse
6 months 1 week ago

Avarice and injustice are always shortsighted, and they did not foresee how much this regulation must obstruct improvement, and thereby hurt in the long-run the real interest of the landlord.

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Chapter II, p. 426-427.
5 months 3 weeks ago

Being asked what learning is the most necessary, he replied, "How to get rid of having anything to unlearn.

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" § 7
6 months 3 days ago

The meaning of a question is the method of answering it: then what is the meaning of 'Do two men really mean the same by the word "white"?' Tell me how you are searching, and I will tell you what you are searching for.

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Philosophical Remarks (1991), Part III (27), pp.66-67
6 months 1 week ago

Much more naturally than you do: because flight is a much more natural consequence of fear than of hate. He doesn't flee men because he hates them, but because he is afraid of them. He doesn't flee them in order to harm them, but to try o escape the harm they wish to do to him. They, on the contrary, don't seek him through friendship, but through hate. They seek him and he flees from them just as in the wilderness of Africa, where there are few men and many tigers, the men flee the tigers, the men flee the tigers, and the tigers seek the men.

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Second Dialogue; translated by Judith R. Bush, Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters
2 months 3 days ago

As the entire middle class, the bourgeois and petty bourgeois intelligentsia, boycotted the Soviet government for months after the October Revolution and crippled the railroad, post and telegraph, and educational and administrative apparatus, and, in this fashion, opposed the workers government, naturally all measures of pressure were exerted against it. These included the deprivation of political rights, of economic means of existence, etc., in order to break their resistance with an iron fist. It was precisely in this way that the socialist dictatorship expressed itself, for it cannot shrink from any use of force to secure or prevent certain measures involving the interests of the whole.

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6 months 6 days ago

You take souls for vegetables.... The gardener can decide what will become of his carrots but no one can choose the good of others for them.

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Heinrich, Act 5, sc. 3
6 months 3 weeks ago

When I walk along with two others, they may serve me as my teachers. I will select their good qualities and follow them, their bad qualities and avoid them.

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4 months 5 days ago

We should provide in peace what we need in war.

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Maxim 709
5 months 3 weeks ago

Tomorrow we will be back on the vast ocean.

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The Routledge Dictionary of Latin Quotations: The Illiterati's Guide to Latin Maxims, Mottoes, Proverbs and Sayings
6 months 3 days ago

Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.

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p. 76e
4 months 2 weeks ago

The true line is not between "hard" natural science and "soft" social sciences, but between precise science limited to highly abstract and simple phenomena in the laboratory and inexact science and technology dealing with complex problems in the real world.

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p. 302.
5 months 4 weeks ago

In the beginning there were two primal spirits,Twins spontaneously active,These are the Good and the Evil, in thought, and in word, and in deed.

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Ahunuvaiti Gatha; Yasna 30, 3.
5 months 2 weeks ago

Friends share all things.

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As quoted in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, "Pythagoras", Sect. 10
7 months 5 days ago

There are degrees of justice, Elijah. When the lesser is incompatible with the greater, the lesser must give way.

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4 months 3 days ago

It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser. It is better to live and be done with it, than to die daily in the sick-room.

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315
6 months 1 week ago

He regarded it with the feelings due not to a mere mental delusion, but to a great moral evil. He looked upon it as the greatest enemy of morality: first, by setting up factitious excellencies,-belief in creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies, not connected with the good of human kind,-and causing these to be accepted as substitutes for genuine virtues: but above all, by radically vitiating the standard of morals; making it consist in doing the will of a being, on whom it lavishes indeed all the phrases of adulation, but whom in sober truth it depicts as eminently hateful.

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(p. 40)
3 months 2 weeks ago

[I]n the wake of the growth of the animal-rights movement, there has recently arisen a hitherto unfelt need to demonise and demean our non-human victims - and those who try to help them - now that our previously well-nigh unquestioned right to kill and exploit them is being challenged. Bloodsports enthusiasts, for instance, currently spend a lot of time cataloguing the alleged depredations of our victims on the environment. Recreational animal-killers go to extraordinarily lengths to avoid admitting that they themselves enjoy hunting and killing other creatures for fun. But then until a few years ago such rationalisations seemed scarcely called for. Selfish DNA had honed our intuitions so that the most agonising bloodshed seemed simply "natural". "The Post-Darwinian Transition", The Animal Rights Library, 1996

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5 months 1 week ago

Distance is a great promoter of admiration!

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As quoted in Thesaurus of Epigrams: A New Classified Collection of Witty Remarks, Bon Mots and Toasts (1942) by Edmund Fuller
4 months 5 days ago

Does the interiorization of media such as letters alter the ratio among our senses and change mental processes?

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(p. 28)
4 months 3 days ago

Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that. Revealed faith is not harmless nonsense, it can be lethally dangerous nonsense. Dangerous because it gives people unshakeable confidence in their own righteousness. Dangerous because it gives them false courage to kill themselves, which automatically removes normal barriers to killing others. Dangerous because it teaches enmity to others labelled only by a difference of inherited tradition. And dangerous because we have all bought into a weird respect, which uniquely protects religion from normal criticism. Let's now stop being so damned respectful!

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When asked how the world had changed following the September 11, 2001 attacks Has the world changed?, The Guardian
7 months 1 week ago
Whoever has overthrown an existing law of custom has hitherto always first been accounted a bad man: but when, as did happen, the law could not afterwards be reinstated and this fact was accepted, the predicate gradually changed: - history treats almost exclusively of these bad men who subsequently became good men!
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4 months 1 week ago

A king is history's slave.

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Bk. IX, ch. 1
2 months 1 week ago

Alas for him who seeks salvation in good only!Balanced on God's strong shoulders, Good and Evil flaptogether like two mighty wings and lift him high.

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Odysseus, Book VIII, line 770
2 months 6 days ago

All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development-in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver-but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology.

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5 months 1 week ago

The regime which is destroyed by a revolution is almost always an improvement on its immediate predecessor, and experience teaches that the most critical moment for bad governments is the one which witnesses their first steps toward reform.

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p. 214
4 months 1 week ago

If one has no vanity in this life of ours, there is no sufficient reason for living.

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Ch. 23. This is not, as it is often quoted, a stand-alone Tolstoy epigram, but part of the narration by the novella's jealousy-ridden protagonist Pozdnyshev.

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