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1 week 4 days ago

The worst is not ennui nor despair but their encounter, their collision. To be crushed between the two!

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1 month 2 weeks ago

I say, then, that belief is nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object, than what the imagination alone is ever able to attain.

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§ 4.9
1 month 2 weeks ago

Man is always separated from what he is by all the breadth of the being which he is not. He makes himself known to himself from the other side of the world and he looks from the horizon toward himself to recover his inner being.

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1 week 1 day ago

No system would have ever been framed if people had been simply interested in knowing what is true, whatever it may be. What produces systems is the interest in maintaining against all comers that some favourite or inherited idea of ours is sufficient and right.

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3 weeks 6 days ago

None can be free who is a slave to, and ruled by, his passions.

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As quoted in Florilegium, XVIII, 23, as translated in Dictionary of Quotations (1906) by Thomas Benfield Harbottle, p. 368
2 months 1 day ago

As the soul is the life of the body, so God is the life of the soul. As therefore the body perishes when the soul leaves it, so the soul dies when God departs from it.

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p. 277
3 weeks 6 days ago

It is difficult to walk at one and the same time many paths of life.

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Pythagorean Ethical Sentences From Stobæus
2 months 1 week ago

One recognizes one's course by discovering the paths that stray from it.

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2 weeks 2 days ago

He was one of those who wished for the abolition of the Slave Trade. He thought it ought to be abolished on principles of humanity and justice.

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Speech in the House of Commons (9 May 1788), quoted in The Parliamentary History of England, From the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, Vol. XXVII (1816), column 502
1 month 5 days ago

People are enticed by a desire which continually cheats them.'Nothing is enough,' they say, 'for you're only worth what you have.'

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Book I, satire i, lines 61-62, as translated by N. Rudd
2 weeks 6 days ago

Every man has his dignity. I'm willing to forget mine, but at my own discretion and not when someone else tells me to.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

The third of this kind of principles is : matter neither originates nor perishes; all the changes in the world concern form only ; a postulate which on the recommendation of common sense has spread through all philosophical schools, not because it is to be taken as having been found so, or as having been demonstrated by arguments a priori, but because if we were to admit that matter itself is fleeting and transitory, nothing at all that is stable and lasting would be left any longer to serve for the explication of phenomena according to universal and perpetual laws, and hence nothing at all would be left for the exercise of the intellect.

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1 month 1 week ago

Recalling all the erroneous things that doctors have been able to say about sex or madness does us a fat lot of good. I think that what is currently politically important is to determine the regime of verediction established at a given moment ... on the basis of which you can now recognize, for example, that doctors in the nineteenth century said so many stupid things about sex. ... It is not so much the history of the true or the history of the false as the history of verediction which has a political significance.

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Lecture 2, January 17, 1979, p. 36
2 months 5 days ago

Guide the people by law, subdue them by punishment; they may shun crime, but will be void of shame. Guide them by example, subdue them by courtesy; they will learn shame, and come to be good.

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1 week 1 day ago

And as in other things, so in men, not the seller, but the buyer determines the Price.

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The First Part, Chapter 10, p. 42
1 month 2 weeks ago

Where is the prince sufficiently educated to know that for seventeen hundred years the Christian sect has done nothing but harm?

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Letters of Voltaire and Frederick the Great (New York: Brentano's, 1927), transl. Richard Aldington, letter 160 from Voltaire to Frederick II of Prussia, 6 April 1767
1 week 6 days ago

In the present state of society it appears necessary to go back to first principles in search of the most simple truths, and to dispute with some prevailing prejudice every inch of ground. To clear my way, I must be allowed to ask some plain questions, and the answers will probably appear as unequivocal as the axioms on which reasoning is built; though, when entangled with various motives of action, they are formally contradicted either by the words or conduct of men.

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Ch. 1, opening
2 weeks 6 days ago

It has been said that love robs those who have it of their wit, and gives it to those who have none.

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Paradoxe sur le Comédien
1 month 5 days ago

Thought is something limitless and independent, and has been mixed with no thing but is alone by itself. ... What was mingled with it would have prevented it from having power over anything in the way in which it does. ... For it is the finest of all things and the purest.

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Frag. B12, in Jonathan Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy (1984), p. 190.
1 month 2 weeks ago

There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.

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"The Moral Problem"
1 month 2 weeks ago

Genius borrows nobly. When Shakespeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies: "Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life."

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Quotation and Originality
1 month 2 weeks ago

People will tell us that without the consolations of religion they would be intolerably unhappy. So far as this is true, it is a coward's argument. Nobody but a coward would consciously choose to live in a fool's paradise. When a man suspects his wife of infidelity, he is not thought the better of for shutting his eyes to the evidence. And I cannot see why ignoring evidence should be contemptible in one case and admirable in the other.

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"Is There a God?", 1952
1 month 2 weeks ago

We do not live for idle amusement. I would not run round a corner to see the world blow up.

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p. 491
1 month 2 weeks ago

I do not think the resemblance between the Christian and the merely imaginative experience is accidental. I think that all things, in their own way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least. "Reflect" is the important word. This lower life of the imagination is not a beginning of, nor a step toward, the higher life of the spirit, merely an image.

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1 month 3 days ago

When Eudæmonidas heard a philosopher arguing that only a wise man can be a good general, "This is a wonderful speech," said he; "but he that saith it never heard the sound of trumpets."

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62 Eudæmonidas
1 month 2 weeks ago

The only non-Christians who seemed to me really to know anything were the Romantics; and a good many of them were dangerously tinged with something like religion, even at times with Christianity. The upshot of it all could nearly be expressed in a perversion of Roland's great line in the Chanson: 'Christians are wrong, but all the rest are bores.'

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Faith is a living, bold trust in God's grace, so certain of God's favor that it would risk death a thousand times trusting in it. Such confidence and knowledge of God's grace makes you happy, joyful and bold in your relationship to God and all creatures. The Holy Spirit makes this happen through faith. Because of it, you freely, willingly and joyfully do good to everyone, serve everyone, suffer all kinds of things, love and praise the God who has shown you such grace.

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An Introduction to St. Paul's Letter to the Romans fromDr. Martin Luthers Vermischte Deutsche Schriften. Johann K. Irmischer, ed. Vol. 63(Erlangen: Heyder and Zimmer, 1854), pp. 124-125. (EA 63:124-125)
1 month 1 week ago

It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.

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(6.44) Variant translation: The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is. Original German: Nicht wie die Welt ist, ist das Mystische, sondern dass sie ist.
1 week 1 day ago

Man is an imagining being.

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Ch. 2, sect. 10
1 week 1 day ago

All ye shall be offended because of me this night: for it is written, I will smite the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock shall be scattered abroad. But after I am risen again, I will go before you into Galilee.

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26:31-32 (KJV)
1 week 4 days ago

How did this division of the nations come about, what was its basis? The division is in accordance with all the previous history of the nationalities in question. It is the beginning of the decision on the life or death of all these nations, large and small. All the earlier history of Austria up to the present day is proof of this and 1848 confirmed it. Among all the large and small nations of Austria, only three standard-bearers of progress took an active part in history, and still retain their vitality - the Germans, the Poles and the Magyars. Hence they are now revolutionary. All the other large and small nationalities and peoples are destined to perish before long in the revolutionary world storm. (Weltsturm). For that reason they are now counter-revolutionary.

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The Magyar Struggle in Neue Rheinische Zeitung (13 January 1849).
2 months 3 days ago

There is no order between created being and non-being, but there is between created and uncreated being.

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q. 7, art. 9, ad 8
3 weeks ago

For the world, I count it not an Inn, but a Hospital, and a place, not to live, but to die in.

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Section 11
1 month 2 weeks ago

Upstart greatness is everywhere less respected than ancient greatness.

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Chapter I, Part II, p. 773.
1 week 4 days ago

The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly. The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master's interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence. This existence is assured only to the class as a whole.

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2 weeks 2 days ago

In England ... everything becomes professional ... even the rogues of that island are pedants.

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"Selected Aphorisms from the Lyceum (1797)"
3 weeks 6 days ago

Nothing is more ancient than God, for He was never created; nothing more beautiful than the world, it is the work of that same God; nothing is more active than thought, for it flies over the whole universe; nothing is stronger than necessity, for all must submit to it.

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As quoted in Love and Live Or Kill and Die: Realities of the Destruction of Human Life (2009) by James H. Wilson, p. 72
1 month 1 week ago

Philosophy will not be able to bring about a direct change of the present state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all merely human meditations and endeavors. Only a god can still save us. I think the only possibility of salvation left to us is to prepare readiness, through thinking and poetry, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god during the decline; so that we do not, simply put, die meaningless deaths, but that when we decline, we decline in the face of the absent god.

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2 months ago

Remember that it is not he who gives abuse or blows who affronts, but the view we take of these things as insulting. When, therefore, any one provokes you, be assured that it is your own opinion which provokes you.

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(20).
1 month 2 weeks ago

Nature is satisfied with little; and if she is, I am also.

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As quoted in The Story of Philosophy (1933) by Will Durant, p. 176
1 month 2 weeks ago

There are other letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus invented.

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1 week 1 day ago

Philosophers are as jealous as women. Each wants a monopoly of praise.

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P. 30
1 month 5 days ago

No power and no treasure can outweigh the extension of our knowledge.

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Durant (1939), Ch. XVI, §II, p. 354; citing J. Owen, Evenings with the Skeptics, London, 1881, vol. 1, p. 149.
1 month 3 days ago

Being summoned by the Athenians out of Sicily to plead for his life, Alcibiades absconded, saying that that criminal was a fool who studied a defence when he might fly for it.

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51 Alcibiades
1 week 1 day ago

The office of the sovereign, be it a monarch or an assembly, consisteth in the end for which he was trusted with the sovereign power, namely the procuration of the safety of the people, to which he is obliged by the law of nature, and to render an account thereof to God, the Author of that law, and to none but Him. But by safety here is not meant a bare preservation, but also all other contentments of life, which every man by lawful industry, without danger or hurt to the Commonwealth, shall acquire to himself. And this is intended should be done, not by care applied to individuals, further than their protection from injuries when they shall complain; but by a general providence, contained in public instruction, both of doctrine and example; and in the making and executing of good laws to which individual persons may apply their own cases.

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The Second Part, Chapter 30: Of the Office of the Sovereign Representative
1 week 4 days ago

True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes.

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1 month 1 week ago

A philosopher is a man who has to cure many intellectual diseases in himself before he can arrive at the notions of common sense.

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p. 44e
1 month 2 weeks ago

A company of solemn tyrants is impervious to all seductions.

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"Tyranny", 1764

Modern science has imposed on humanity the necessity for wandering. Its progressive thought and its progressive technology make the transition through time, from generation to generation, a true migration into uncharted seas of adventure.

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Ch. 13: "Requisites for Social Progress", p. 291

In the world of action, we know that it is disastrous to treat animals or human beings as though they were stocks and stones. Why should we suppose this treatment to be any less mistaken in the world of ideas?

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p. 21.

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