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2 months 3 weeks ago

In the 'Induction of Causes' the principal maxim is, that we must be careful to possess, and to apply, with perfect clearness, the Fundamental Idea on which the Induction depends. The Induction of Substance, of Force, of Polarity, go beyond mere laws of phenomena, and may be considered as the Induction cf Causes. The Cause of certain phenomena being inferred, we are led to inquire into the Cause of this Cause, which inquiry must be conducted in the same manner as the previous one; and thus we have the Induction of Ulterior Causes.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Nearly allied to justice are the virtues of beneficence, compassion, gratitude, piety, and friendship.

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2 months 3 weeks 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 3 weeks ago

To dream of an enterprise of demolition that would spare none of the traces of the original Big Bang.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Moreover, there is a victory and defeat, the first and best of victories, the lowest and worst of defeat, which each man gains or sustains at the hands, not of another, but of himself; this shows that there is a war against ourselves going on within every one of us. Book I Sometimes paraphrased as "The first and best victory is to conquer self".

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7 months 3 weeks ago

What is the essence of life? To serve others and to do good. Often given as a saying of Aristotle with no reference.

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5 months 1 week ago

In the general tendency toward specialization, philosophy too has established itself as a specialized discipline, one purified of all specific content. In so doing, philosophy has denied its own constitutive concept: the intellectual freedom that does not obey the dictates of specialized knowledge.

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p. 6
6 months 3 weeks ago

One unscrupulous distortion of the truth tends to beget other and opposite distortions.

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Ch. 14, p. 316 [2012 reprint]
6 months 4 weeks ago

But the chief design of this paper is not to disprove it, which many have sufficiently done; but to entreat Americans to consider.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Human life. Duration: momentary. Nature: changeable. Perception: dim. Condition of Body: decaying. Soul: spinning around. Fortune: unpredictable. Lasting Fame: uncertain. Sum Up: The body and its parts are a river, the soul a dream and mist, life is warfare and a journey far from home, lasting reputation is oblivion.

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(Hays translation) II, 17
6 months 1 day ago

We are constantly railing against the passions; we ascribe to them all of man's afflictions, and we forget that they are also the source of all his pleasures ... But what provokes me is that only their adverse side is considered ... and yet only passions, and great passions, can raise the soul to great things. Without them there is no sublimity, either in morals or in creativity. Art returns to infancy, and virtue becomes small-minded.

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As translated in Diderot (1977) by Otis Fellows, p. 39
5 months 1 week ago

The people are asleep; they remain indifferent. They forge their own chains and do the bidding of their masters to crucify their Christs.

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(p. 304)
6 months 3 weeks ago

William James used to preach the "will-to-believe." For my part, I should wish to preach the "will-to-doubt." None of our beliefs are quite true; all at least have a penumbra of vagueness and error. What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.

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Ch. 12: Free Thought and Official Propaganda
4 months 3 weeks ago

Once introduced discontinuity, once challenge any of the properties of visual space, and as they flow from each other, the whole conceptual framework collapses.

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p. 43
3 months 3 weeks ago

The familial union presents as well a mixture of inconvenient ages and characters that inhibit conversation. Morality engenders a frigid atmosphere, as in all places where it reigns.

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Oeuvres completetes de Charles Fourier
7 months 3 weeks ago

For whoever has what he has from the God himself clearly has it at first hand; and he who does not have it from the God himself is not a disciple. Let us assume that it is otherwise, that the contemporary generation of disciples had received the condition from the God, and that the subsequent generations were to receive it from these contemporaries, what would follow?

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6 months 1 week ago

Above and before all things, worship GOD!

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As quoted in The Sayings of the Wise: Or, Food for Thought: A Book of Moral Wisdom, Gathered from the Ancient Philosophers (1555) by William Baldwin [1908 edition]
4 months ago

Though the framework is libertarian and laissez-faire, individual communities within it need not be, and perhaps no community within it will choose to be so. Thus, the characteristics of the framework need not pervade the individual communities. In this laissez-faire system it could turn out that though they are permitted, there are no actually functioning "capitalist" institutions; or that some communities have them and others don't or some communities have some of them, or what you will.

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Ch. 10 : A Framework for Utopia; The Framework as Utopian Common Ground, p. 320
5 months 3 weeks ago

Executions, far from being useful examples to the survivors, have, I am persuaded, a quite contrary effect, by hardening the heart they ought to terrify. Besides, the fear of an ignominious death, I believe, never deterred anyone from the commission of a crime, because in committing it the mind is roused to activity about present circumstances.

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Letter 19
6 months 4 weeks ago

The more one presupposes that his own power will suffice him to realize what he desires the more practical is that desire. When I treat a man contemptuously, I can inspire him with no practical desire to appreciate my grounds of truth. When I treat any one as worthless, I can inspire him with no desire to do right.

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Part III : Selection on Education from Kant's other Writings, Ch. I Pedagogical Fragments, # 15
6 months 3 weeks ago

I look forward to a future when acts of war shall be formally outlawed as between civilized peoples. All these beliefs of mine put me firmly into the anti-military party. But I do not believe that peace either ought to be or will be permanent on this globe, unless the states, pacifically organized, preserve some of the old elements of army-discipline. A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy. In the more or less socialistic future toward which mankind seems drifting we must still subject ourselves collectively to those severities which answer to our real position upon this only partly hospitable globe. We must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Is that to say we are against Free Trade? No, we are for Free Trade, because by Free Trade all economical laws, with their most astounding contradictions, will act upon a larger scale, upon the territory of the whole earth; and because from the uniting of all these contradictions in a single group, where they will stand face to face, will result the struggle which will itself eventuate in the emancipation of the proletariat.

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Writing in the Chartist newspaper (1847), in Marx Engels Collected Works Vol 6, pg 290.
3 months 1 week 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).
5 months 1 week ago

Whenever a human being, through the commission of a crime, has become exiled from good, he needs to be reintegrated with it through suffering. The suffering should be inflicted with the aim of bringing the soul to recognize freely some day that its infliction was just. This reintegration with the good is what punishment is. Every man who is innocent, or who has finally expiated guilt, needs to be recognized as honourable to the same extent as anyone else.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Look to the essence of a thing, whether it be a point of doctrine, of practice, or of interpretation.

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VIII, 22
2 months 3 weeks ago

The first among the sciences is that of statesmanship. That cannot be learnt in academies. No great minister, from Suger to Richelieu, ever occupied himself with physics or mathematics. The genius of the natural sciences makes impossible that other kind of genius, which is a talent unto itself.

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"Eighth Dialogue," p. 297-298
5 months 3 weeks ago

We Shall Naturally look round in vain the macrophysical world for acausal events, for the simple reason that we cannot imagine events that are connected non-causally and are capable of a non-causal explanation. But that does not mean that such events do not exist... The so-called "scientific view of the world" based on this can hardly be anything more than a psychologically biased partial view which misses out all those by no means unimportant aspects that cannot be grasped statistically.

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p. 5
2 months 3 weeks ago

Among the arts of expression one is suited to this purpose, another to that. It is hard to express movement in stone or rest in music. It is harder still to express permanence in speech.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

All things are changing; and thou thyself art in continuous mutation and in a manner in continuous destruction and the whole universe to.

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IX, 19
6 months 3 weeks ago

The best university that can be recommended to a man of ideas is the gauntlet of the mobs.

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Eloquence
4 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
5 months 3 weeks ago

You have dreamed of setting the world ablaze, and you have not even managed to communicate your fire to words, to light up a single one!

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2 months 3 weeks ago

A 'Natural System' is one which attempts to make 'all' the divisions natural, the widest as well as the narrowest; and therefore applies 'no' characters 'peremptorily'.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

The pursuit of individual happiness within those limits prescribed by social conditions, is the first requisite to the attainment of the greatest general happiness.

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Ethics (New York:1915), § 70, pp. 190-191
4 months 3 weeks ago

He dies twice who perishes by his own hand.

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Maxim 97
4 months 3 weeks ago

People usually think that progress consists in the increase of knowledge, in the improvement of life, but that isn't so. Progress consists only in the greater clarification of answers to the basic questions of life. The truth is always accessible to a man. It can't be otherwise, because a man's soul is a divine spark, the truth itself. It's only a matter of removing from this divine spark (the truth) everything that obscures it. Progress consists, not in the increase of truth, but in freeing it from its wrappings. The truth is obtained like gold, not by letting it grow bigger, but by washing off from it everything that isn't gold.

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Tolstoy's Diaries (1985) edited and translated by R. F. Christian. London: Athlone Press, Vol 2, p. 512
5 months 1 week ago

Thinking men and women the world over are beginning to realize that patriotism is too narrow and limited a conception to meet the necessities of our time.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Luther's merit in literary history is of the greatest: his dialect became the language of all writing. They are not well written, these Four-and-twenty Quartos of his; written hastily, with quite other than literary objects. But in no Books have I found a more robust, genuine, I will say noble faculty of a man than in these. A rugged honesty, homeliness, simplicity; a rugged sterling sense and strength. He dashes out illumination from him; his smiting idiomatic phrases seem to cleave into the very secret of the matter. Good humor too, nay tender affection, nobleness and depth: this man could have been a Poet too! He had to work an Epic Poem, not write one.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

The pursuit of philosophy is founded on the belief that knowledge is good, even if what is known is painful. A man imbued with the philosophic spirit, whether a professional philosopher or not, will wish his beliefs to be as true as he can make them, and will, in equal measure, love to know and hate to be in error. This principle has a wider scope than may be apparent at first sight.

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7 months ago

Now as we call every thing custom, which proceeds from a past repetition, without any new reasoning or conclusion, we may establish it as a certain truth, that all the belief, which follows upon any present impression, is deriv'd solely from that origin.

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Part 3, Section 8
2 months 3 weeks ago

But though much may be said to Excuse the Chymists when they write Darkly, and Ænigmatically, about the Preparation of their Elixir, and Some few other grand Arcana, the divulging of which they may upon Grounds Plausible enough esteem unfit; yet when they pretend to teach the General Principles of Natural Philosophers, this Equivocall Way of Writing is not to be endur'd. For in such Speculative Enquiries, where the naked Knowledge of the Truth is the thing Principally aim'd at, what does he teach me worth thanks that does not, if he can, make his Notion intelligible to me, but by Mystical Termes, and Ambiguous Phrases darkens what he should clear up; and makes me add the Trouble of guessing at the sence of what he Equivocally expresses, to that of examining the Truth of what he seems to deliver.

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6 months 1 day ago

The first promise exchanged by two beings of flesh was at the foot of a rock that was crumbling into dust; they took as witness for their constancy a sky that is not the same for a single instant; everything changed in them and around them, and they believed their hearts free of vicissitudes. O children! always children!

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Science is international but its success is based on institutions, which are owned by nations. If therefore, we wish to promote culture we have to combine and to organize institutions with our own power and means.

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11 months 2 days ago

In the electoral campaign, President Bush named as the most important person in his life Jesus. Now he has a unique chance to prove that he meant it seriously: for him, as for all Americans today, "Love thy neighbor!" means "Love the Muslims!" OR IT MEANS NOTHING AT ALL.

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7 months 4 days ago

Fame and tranquility can never be bedfellows.

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Book I, Ch. 39
6 months 3 days ago

The infinity of All ever bringing forth anew, and even as infinite space is around us, so is infinite potentiality, capacity, reception, malleability, matter.

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I 1 as translated in Giordano Bruno : His Life and Thought with annotated translation of his work On the Infinite Universe and Worlds (1950) by Dorothea Waley Singer
7 months 3 weeks ago

For it is the chief characteristic of the religion of science, that it works, and that such curses as that of Aporat's are really deadly.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

In order to remain silent Da-sein must have something to say.

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Stambaugh translation

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