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4 months 3 weeks ago

At the end of reasons comes persuasion.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Existential envy which is directed against the other person's very nature, is the strongest source of ressentiment. It is as if it whispers continually: "I can forgive everything, but not that you are- that you are what you are-that I am not what you are-indeed that I am not you." This form of envy strips the opponent of his very existence, for this existence as such is felt to be a "pressure," a "reproach," and an unbearable humiliation. In the lives of great men there are always critical periods of instability, in which they alternately envy and try to love those whose merits they cannot but esteem. Only gradually, one of these attitudes will predominate. Here lies the meaning of Goethe's reflection that "against another's great merits, there is no remedy but love."

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L. Coser, trans. (1973), pp. 52-53
1 month ago

Our Constitution, by its separation of powers and its system of checks and balances, acts as a restraint upon efficiency by denying exclusive power to any branch of government. The logic of governmental efficiency, unchecked, runs straight on, not only to dictatorship, but also to torture, assassination, and other abominations.

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4 months 6 days ago

All things are artificial, for nature is the Art of God.

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Section 16
1 month ago

Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millenium.

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Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front in Farming: A Hand Book
4 months 2 weeks ago

Do you count your birthdays with gratitude?

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Book II, epistle ii, line 210
5 months 1 day ago

Olympian bards who sung Divine ideas below, Which always find us young And always keep us so.

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Ode to Beauty, st. 2
2 months 1 week ago

Terror is not now, if it ever was, something that comes to us from outside. It is a part of the society in which we live. Both liberals and neoconservatives believe terrorism can be dealt with by removing its causes. The truth is less reassuring. Al-Qaeda has mutated into a decentralised, often locally based type of apocalyptic terrorism and, in this new guise, seems to be acquiring a formidable momentum.

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"Look out for the enemy within," The Observer
3 months 3 weeks ago

The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their life a meaning.

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1 month 1 week ago

I have suggested that behind almost all myth lies the mono-plot of the game of hide-and-seek.

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The Two Hands of God : The Myths of Polarity (1963), p. 29
3 months 2 weeks ago

Not all women, in fact, very few, have had the good fortune to live and work among women and men actively involved in the feminist movement. Many of us live in circumstances and environments where we must engage in feminist struggle alone, with only occasional support and affirmation.

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Acknowledgments.
4 months 5 days ago

It is easy to see that, even in the freedom of early youth, an American girl never quite loses control of herself; she enjoys all permitted pleasures without losing her head about any of them, and her reason never lets the reins go, though it may often seem to let them flap.

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Book Three, Chapter IX.
5 months 3 days ago

All styles are good except the boring kind.

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L'Enfant prodigue: comédie en vers dissillabes (1736), Preface
3 months 1 week ago

In its mad passion for power, the Communist State even sought to strengthen and deepen the very ideas and conceptions which the Revolution had come to destroy. It supported and encouraged all the worst antisocial qualities and systematically destroyed the already awakened conception of the new revolutionary values.The sense of justice and equality, the love of liberty and of human brotherhood - these fundamentals of the real regeneration of society - the Communist State suppressed to the point of extermination. Man's instinctive sense of equity was branded as weak sentimentality; human dignity and liberty became a bourgeois superstition; the sanctity of life, which is the very essence of social reconstruction, was condemned as unrevolutionary, almost counter-revolutionary. This fearful perversion of fundamental values bore within itself the seed of destruction.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Whoever complains about the death of anyone, is complaining that he was a man. Everyone is bound by the same terms: he who is privileged to be born, is destined to die.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

There are, in fact, people who appear to think only with the brain, or with whatever may be the specific thinking organ; while others think with all the body and all the soul, with the blood, with the marrow of the bones, with the heart, with the lungs, with the belly, with the life. And the people who think only with the brain develop into definition-mongers; they become the professionals of thought.

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4 months 6 days ago

Life itself is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living: All things fall under this name. The Sun itself is but the dark simulacrum, and the light but the shadow of God.

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Ch. 4
2 months 3 weeks ago

Reading Decline of the West I learned that in Spengler's view ours was a Faustian civilization and that we, the Jews, were Magians, the survivors and representatives of an earlier type, totally incapable of comprehending the Faustian spirit that had created the great civilization of the West. ... What Magians were to Faustians, Faustians might very well be to Americans.

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Part I, p. 26
4 months 2 weeks ago

Rest gives relish to labour.

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Of the Training of Children, 9 (Tr. Babbitt)
1 month 3 weeks ago

A further threat to liberalism has to do with the mode of cognition that we call modern natural science. The early liberals were very closely aligned with the founders of modern natural science, people like Bacon and Descartes and Newton, who believed that there was an objective world beyond our subjective consciousnesses, that we could perceive this world through the experimental method, and then come to manipulate it. Natural science gave us technology... that made the world much more habitable, by conquering disease, by inventing things that vastly increased human productivity. So... it's closely related to the wealth, and... the safety and comfort of a modern economically developed world.

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18:49
4 months 1 day ago

Spirit: Do not be deceived by sophists and half philosophers; things do not appear to thee by means of any representatives. Of the thing that exists, and that can exist, thou art conscious immediately ; thou, thyself, art that of which thou art conscious. By a fundamental law of thy being thou art thus presented to thyself, and thrown out of thyself.

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Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p. 53
4 months 1 day ago

They think of the philosopher as holding the ideal or subjective in one hand and the real or objective in the other and then have him strike the palms of his hands together so that one abrades the other. The product of this abrasion is the Absolute.

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P. 12
3 months 3 weeks ago

The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.

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5 months 2 days ago

When I was 4 years old ... I dreamt that I'd been eaten by a wolf, and to my great surprise I was in the wolf's stomach and not in heaven.

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BBC interview on "Face to Face" (1959); The Listener, Vol. 61 (1959), p. 503
5 months 1 day ago

Not without a slight shudder at the danger, I often perceive how near I had come to admitting into my mind the details of some trivial affair, - the news of the street; and I am astonished to observe how willing men are to lumber their minds with such rubbish, - to permit idle rumors and incidents of the most insignificant kind to intrude on ground which should be sacred to thought. Shall the mind be a public arena, where the affairs of the street and the gossip of the tea-table chiefly are discussed? Or shall it be a quarter of heaven itself, - an hypæthral temple, consecrated to the service of the gods? I find it so difficult to dispose of the few facts which to me are significant, that I hesitate to burden my attention with those which are insignificant, which only a divine mind could illustrate. Such is, for the most part, the news in newspapers and conversation. It is important to preserve the mind's chastity in this respect.

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pp. 491-2
2 months 3 weeks ago

The strange superstition has arisen in the Western world that we can start all over again, remaking human nature, human society, and the possibilities of happiness; as though the knowledge and experience of our ancestors were now entirely irrelevant.

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Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life
1 month 3 weeks ago

It is no longer the moral, religious, spiritual condition of the people that is our concern, but their physical, practical, economical condition, as regulated by public laws.

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5 months 1 day ago

In England women are still occasionally used instead of horses for hauling canal boats, because the labour required to produce horses and machines is an accurately known quantity, while that required to maintain the women of the surplus population is below all calculation.

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Vol. I, Ch. 15, Section 2, pg. 430.
5 months 1 week ago

Faith is born and preserved in us by preaching why Christ came, what he brought and gave to us, and the benefits we obtain when we receive him. This happens when Christian liberty - which he gives to us - is rightly taught and we are told in what way as Christians we are all kings and priests and therefore lords of all.

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p. 70
3 months 2 weeks ago

We cannot think first and act afterwards. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought.

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Ch. 12: "Religion and Science", p. 261
3 months 3 weeks ago

All that is Life in me urges me to give up God.

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Constantly and, if it be possible, on the occasion of every impression on the soul, apply to it the principles of Physic, of Ethic, and of Dialectic.

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VIII, 13
1 month 2 weeks ago

It is the safest to be moderately base - to be flexible in shame, and to be always ready for what is generous, good, and just, when anything is to be gained by virtue.

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"Catholics", published in The Edinburgh Review (1827). See The Works of the Rev. Sydney Smith. 2. 1859. p. 134.
3 months 3 weeks ago

Democracy means the belief that humanistic culture should prevail.

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Democracy and Human Nature, Freedom and Culture
1 month 2 weeks ago

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.

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Alternate translation: I shall never be ashamed to go to a bad author for a good quotation. Chapter 11, Section 8
5 months 4 days ago

Thus it may be said that not only the soul, the mirror of an indestructible universe, is indestructible, but also the animal itself, though its mechanism may often perish in part and take off or put on an organic slough.

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La monadologie (77). Sometimes paraphrased as: The soul is the mirror of an indestructible universe.
1 month 1 week ago

I want to make one thing absolutely clear. I am not a Zen Buddhist, I am not advocating Zen Buddhism, I am not trying to convert anyone to it. I have nothing to sell. I'm an entertainer. That is to say, in the same sense, that when you go to a concert and you listen to someone play Mozart, he has nothing to sell except the sound of the music. He doesn't want to convert you to anything. He doesn't want you to join an organization in favor of Mozart's music as opposed to, say, Beethoven's. And I approach you in the same spirit as a musician with his piano or a violinist with his violin. I just want you to enjoy a point of view that I enjoy.

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Alan Watts, on Zen
2 months 2 weeks ago

I say that where the public morality is concerned it may be the duty of the State to interfere with the contracts of individuals... It must then, I think, be admitted that, where health is concerned, and where morality is concerned, the State is justified in interfering with the contracts of individuals.

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Speech in the House of Commons (22 May 1846), quoted in Speeches of the Right Honourable T. B. Macaulay, M.P. (1854), p. 442
6 months 2 days ago

If the genius is an artist, then he accomplishes his work as art, but neither he nor his work of art has a telos outside him.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Hear, and understand: Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.

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15:10-11 (KJV)
3 months 3 weeks ago

To say, therefore, that thought cannot happen in an instant, but requires a time, is but another way of saying that every thought must be interpreted in another, or that all thought is in signs.

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Vol. V, par. 254
3 months 3 weeks ago

The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.

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"Dickens"
3 months 3 weeks ago

Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

To become god is merely to be free on this earth, not to serve an immortal being.

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1 month 1 week ago

The disastrous feature of our civilization is that it is far more developed materially than spiritually. Its balance is disturbed ... Now come the facts to summon us to reflect. They tell us in terribly harsh language that a civilization which develops only on its material side, and not in the sphere of the spirit ... heads for disaster.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

The idea that an aim can be reasonable for its own sake-on the basis of virtues that insight reveals it to have in itself-without reference to some kind of subjective gain or advantage, is utterly alien to subjective reason, even where it rises above the consideration of immediate utilitarian values and devotes itself to reflection about the social order as a whole.

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p. 4.
5 months 1 week ago

When you wander, as you often delight to do, you wander indeed, and give never such satisfaction as the curious time requires. This is not caused by any natural defect, but first for want of election, when you, having a large and fruitful mind, should not so much labour what to speak as to find what to leave unspoken. Rich soils are often to be weeded.

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Letter of Expostulation to Coke, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed.

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