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7 months 2 weeks ago

The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer. I am surprised, as well as delighted, when this happens, it is such a rare use he would make of me, as if he were acquainted with the tool.

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p. 484
4 months 1 week ago

"No man in this fashionable London of yours," friend Sauerteig would say, "speaks a plain word to me. Every man feels bound to be something more than plain; to be pungent withal, witty, ornamental. His poor fraction of sense has to be perked into some epigrammatic shape, that it may prick into me;-perhaps (this is the commonest) to be topsyturvied, left standing on its head, that I may remember it the better! Such grinning inanity is very sad to the soul of man. Human faces should not grin on one like masks; they should look on one like faces! I love honest laughter, as I do sunlight; but not dishonest: most kinds of dancing too; but the St.-Vitus kind not at all! A fashionable wit, ach Himmel, if you ask, Which, he or a Death's- head, will be the cheerier company for me? pray send not him!"

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6 months 6 days ago

Nothing is lost, nothing wholly passes away, for in some way or another everything is perpetuated; and everything, after passing through time, returns to eternity.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Take away your opinion, and there is taken away the complaint. Take away the complaint, and the hurt is gone.

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IV. 7, trans. George Long
7 months 1 week ago

If I knew that it was fated for me to be sick, I would even wish for it; for the foot also, if it had intelligence, would volunteer to get muddy.

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As quoted by Epictetus, Discourses, ii. 6. 10.
6 months 1 week ago

Without some affinity in human ideas art would certainly be impossible; but it can never be exactly determined how far the intentions of the poet are realized.

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Gottlob Frege (1892). On Sense and Reference.
6 months 3 days ago

It is not honourable to attack an enemy without putting yourself at risk.

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6 months 3 weeks 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
3 months 2 weeks ago

Nothing exists! Neither life nor death. I watch mind and matter hunting each other like two nonexistent erotic phantasms - merging, begetting, disappearing - and I say: "This is what I want!" I know now: I do not hope for anything. I do not fear anything, I have freed myself from both the mind and the heart, I have mounted much higher, I am free. This is what I want. I want nothing more. I have been seeking freedom.

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This passage was used for Kazantzakis' epitaph: "Δεν ελπίζω τίποτα, δε φοβούμαι τίποτα, είμαι λεύτερος." I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.
5 months 2 weeks ago

A fair exterior is a silent recommendation.

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Maxin 267
5 months 4 weeks ago

In Administrative Behavior, bounded rationality is largely characterized as a residual category - rationality is bounded when it falls short of omniscience. And the failures of omniscience are largely failures of knowing all the alternatives, uncertainty about relevant exogenous events, and inability to calculate consequences. There was needed a more positive and formal characterization of the mechanisms of choice under conditions of bounded rationality... Two concepts are central to the characterization: search and satisficing.

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p. 502; As cited in Barros (2010, p. 464-5).
7 months 2 weeks ago

Most of what happens actually is forgotten.

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Ch. 16
4 months ago

Socrates' way of life is the consequence of his recognition that we can know what it is that we do not know about the most important things and that we are by nature obliged to seek that knowledge.

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Western Civ, p. 18.
5 months 1 week ago

I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed, both here and at home, with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the oriental learning at the valuation of the orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is indeed fully admitted by those members of the committee who support the oriental plan of education.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded.

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Conversation of 1947 or 1948
7 months 3 weeks ago

The will is not free to strive toward whatever is declared good.

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Thesis 10
7 months 2 weeks ago

Lincoln is not the product of a popular revolution. This plebeian, who worked his way up from stone-breaker to Senator in Illinois, without intellectual brilliance, without a particularly outstanding character, without exceptional importance-an average person of good will, was placed at the top by the interplay of the forces of universal suffrage unaware of the great issues at stake. The new world has never achieved a greater triumph than by this demonstration that, given its political and social organisation, ordinary people of good will can accomplish feats which only heroes could accomplish in the old world!

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7 months 1 week ago

Wrongly do the Greeks suppose that aught begins or ceases to be; for nothing comes into being or is destroyed; but all is an aggregation or secretion of pre-existent things: so that all-becoming might more correctly be called becoming-mixed, and all corruption, becoming-separate.

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quoted in Heinrich Ritter, Tr. from German by Alexander James William Morrison, The History of Ancient Philosophy, Vol.1
5 months 2 days ago

I mean to lead a simple life, to choose a simple shell I can carry easily - like a hermit crab. But I do not. I find that my frame of life does not foster simplicity. My husband and five children must make their way in the world. The life I have chosen as a wife and mother entrains a whole caravan of complications.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

We are all instruments endowed with feeling and memory. Our senses are so many strings that are struck by surrounding objects and that also frequently strike themselves.

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"Conversation Between D'Alembert and Diderot"
4 months 4 days ago

You can tell the character of every man when you see how he gives and receives praise.

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Line 12.
4 months 2 weeks ago

Men accept servility in order to acquire wealth; as if they could acquire anything of their own when they cannot even assert that they belong to themselves.

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Part 3
6 months 2 weeks ago

I am a sick man... I am a wicked man. An unattractive man.

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Part 1, Chapter 1
1 month 1 week 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."
- George Santayana

See biography for George Santayana:
https://civilsimian.com/George-Santayana

Read George Santayana's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/139/content

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4 months 1 week ago

No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.

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Bk. I, ch. 4.
3 months 2 weeks ago

By speaking of space as an Idea, I intend to imply the apprehension of objects as existing in space, and of the relations of position prevailing among them, is not a consequence of experience but a result of a peculiar constitution and activity of the mind which is independent of all experience in its origin, though constantly combined with experience in its exercise.

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Part I Of Ideas, Book II The Philosophy of the Pure Sciences, Chap. 2 Of the Idea of Space
6 months 1 week ago

The man with the clear head is the man who frees himself from those fantastic "ideas" and looks life in the face, realises that everything in it is problematic, and feels himself lost. As this is the simple truth - that to live is to feel oneself lost - he who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look round for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life.

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Chapter XIV: Who Rules The World?
7 months 2 weeks ago

I strongly suspect that most of the great knowers of Suchness paid very little attention to art.... (To a person whose transfigured and transfiguring mind can see the All in every this, the first-rateness or tenth-rateness of even a religious painting will be a matter of the most sovereign indifference.) Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.

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As quoted in Values of the Wise : Humanity's Highest Aspirations (2004) by Jason Merchey, p. 63
7 months 3 weeks ago

If we allow them any influence in our conscience, they become the cloak of evil, heresies and blasphemies.

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Marthin Luther, Comment, ad Galat., 310. As cited by Rev. Msgr. Patrick F. O'Hare (1916), The Facts about Luther, p. 119. OCLC 4200594.
3 months 2 weeks ago

Doth perfect beauty stand in need of praise at all? Nay; no more than law, no more than truth, no more than loving kindness, nor than modesty.

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IV, 20
2 months 1 week ago

"We are by no means opposed to the globalization of relationships as such-in fact, as we said, the strongest forces of Leftist internationalism have effectively led this process. The enemy, rather, is a specific regime of global relations that we call Empire."
- Antonio Negri

See biography for Antonio Negri:
https://civilsimian.com/AntonioNegri

Read Antonio Negri's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/201/content

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5 months 4 weeks ago

The techniques of the practitioner are usually called 'synthetic'. He designs by organizing known principles and devices into larger systems.

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Simon (1945, p. 353); As cited in: Philosophy of Technology and Engineering Sciences (2009) p. 425.
6 months 2 weeks ago

What the Greeks sought, and what they obtained, was Equal Rights for all Citizens. In a certain sense, we might even say Equal Privileges, for there was no race favoured by the constitution more than another;-but there existed a great inequality of power, which indeed arose only by accident and not by the constitution of the State, but which nevertheless the State could not remedy;-and in so far there did not exist Equal Privileges.

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p. 186
7 months 2 weeks ago

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something - because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. - And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.

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§ 129
5 months 2 weeks 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)
5 months 2 weeks ago

Many receive advice, few profit by it.

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Maxim 149
4 months 3 weeks ago

The irony of the post-Cold War period is that the fall of communism was followed by the rise of another utopian ideology. In American and Britain, and to a lesser extent other Western countries, a type of market fundamentalism became the guiding philosophy. The collapse of American power that is underway is the predictable upshot.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Attractions take place between bodies, affinities between the particles of a body. The former may be compared to the alliances of states, the latter to the ties of family.

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4 months 1 week ago

What has philosophy got to do with measuring anything? It's the mathematicians you have to trust, and they measure the skies like we measure a field.

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Matteo in Concerning the New Star

Faith which refuses to face indisputable facts is but little faith. Truth is always gain, however hard it is to accommodate ourselves to it. To linger in any kind of untruth proves to be a departure from the straight way of faith.

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p. 290
3 months 2 weeks ago

Don't let yourself forget how many doctors have died, after furrowing their brows over how many deathbeds. How many astrologers, after pompous forecasts about others' ends. How many philosophers, after endless disquisitions on death and immortality. How many warriors, after inflicting thousands of casualties themselves. How many tyrants, after abusing the power of life and death atrociously, as if they were themselves immortal.

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(Hays translation) IV, 48
1 month 5 days ago

Well...hmmm..uhhhh....I....smh.....🤷‍♂️...I could of skipped it, but I love Jean Paul....

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6 months 5 days ago

The simultaneous existence of opposite virtues in the soul - like pincers to catch hold of God.

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p. 92
4 months 4 days ago

He who does not prevent a crime, when he can, encourages it.

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line 291; (Agamemnon)
7 months 3 weeks ago

Thus parents, by humouring and cockering them when little, corrupt the principles of nature in their children, and wonder afterwards to taste the bitter waters, when they themselves have poison'd the fountain.

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Sec. 35

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