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1 month 1 week ago

The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e. it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakeably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.

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2 months 1 week ago

The greatest saving one can make in the order of thought is to accept the unintelligibility of the world and to pay attention to man.

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2 months 2 weeks ago
We are, all of us, growing volcanoes that approach the hour of their eruption; but how near or distant that is, nobody knows not even God.
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2 months 2 weeks ago

For as only one thing is necessary, and as the theme of the talk is the willing of only one thing: hence the consciousness before God of one's eternal responsibility to be an individual is that one thing necessary.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Considering the optimistic turn taken by world trade AT THIS MOMENT...it is some consolation at least that the revolution has begun in Russia, for I regard the convocation of 'notables' to Petersburg as such a beginning. ... On the Continent revolution is imminent and will, moreover, instantly assume a socialist character.

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Letter to Friedrich Engels (8 October 1858), quoted in The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Volume 40. Letters 1856-59 (2010), pp. 346-347
2 days ago

"A man thinks he is dying for his country," said Anatole France, "but he is dying for a few industrialists." But even that is saying too much. What one dies for is not even so substantial and tangible as an industrialist.

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p. 224
2 weeks 3 days ago

When the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people.

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1 week 5 days ago

Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.

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2 weeks 2 days ago

But like the desire for eternal life, the desire for omniscience and absolute perfection is merely an imaginary desire; and, as history and daily experience prove, the supposed human striving for unlimited knowledge and perfection is a myth. Man has no desire to know everything; he only wants to know the things to which he is particularly drawn.

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Lecture XXX, Atheism alone a Positive View
2 months 6 days ago

To be fond of learning is to be near to knowledge. To practice with vigor is to be near to magnanimity. To possess the feeling of shame is to be near to energy.

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1 week 2 days ago

All his life he [the American] jumps into the train after it has started and jumps out before it has stopped; and he never once gets left behind, or breaks a leg.

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"Materialism and Idealism" p. 175 (Hathi Trust)
1 month 6 days ago

Perdiccas threatened to put him to death unless he came to him, "That's nothing wonderful," Diogenes said, "for a beetle or a tarantula would do the same."

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Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 44
1 month 2 weeks ago

Change is one thing, progress is another.

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1 week 6 days ago

When I happen to be busy, I never give a moment's thought to the "meaning" of anything, particularly of whatever it is I am doing. A proof that the secret of everything is in action and not abstention, that fatal cause of consciousness.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.

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Ch. 1: The Value of Scepticism
2 weeks 3 days ago

The state is therefore everyone; the rules within the state are laws which safeguard the welfare of all and which must originate from the welfare of all.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

For the purposes of poetry a convincing impossibility is preferable to an unconvincing possibility.

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2 months 2 weeks ago
We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things, metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.
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1 month 1 week ago

As long as we try to project from the relative and conditioned to the absolute and unconditioned, we shall keep the pendulum swinging between dogmatism and skepticism. The only way to stop this increasingly tiresome pendulum swing is to change our conception of what philosophy is good for. But that is not something which will be accomplished by a few neat arguments. It will be accomplished, if it ever is, by a long, slow process of cultural change - that is to say, of change in common sense, changes in the intuitions available for being pumped up by philosophical arguments.

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Introduction to Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (1998).
1 week 6 days ago

Reason alone does not suffice.

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p 98
1 month 1 week ago

Purity is for man, next to life, the greatest good that parity is procured by the Law of Mazda to him who cleanses his own self with Good Thoughts, Words, and Deeds.

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(Extracts, p. 57)
2 months 1 day ago

In a word, neither death, nor exile, nor pain, nor anything of this kind is the real cause of our doing or not doing any action, but our inward opinions and principles.

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Book I, ch. 11,33.
1 month 4 days ago

He preferred an honest man that wooed his daughter, before a rich man. "I would rather," said Themistocles, "have a man that wants money than money that wants a man."

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49 Themistocles

It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.

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

Superstition is more injurious to God than atheism.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart.

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December 10, 1824
1 month 2 weeks ago

Then I dreamed that one day there was nothing but milk for them and the jailer said as he put down the pipkin:'Our relations with the cow are not delicate-as you can easily see if you imagine eating any of her other secretions.' ... John said, 'Thank heavens! Now at last I know that you are talking nonsense. You are trying to pretend that unlike things are like. You are trying to make us think that milk is the same sort of thing as sweat or dung.' 'And pray, what difference is there except by custom?''Are you a liar or only a fool, that you see no difference between that which Nature casts out as refuse and that which she stores up as food?'

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Pilgrim's Regress 49
2 months 1 week ago

What must be remembered in any case is that secret complicity that joins the logical and the everyday to the tragic.

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2 weeks 3 days ago

Whoever finishes a revolution only halfway, digs his own grave.

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Act I.
3 weeks 2 days ago

Indeed, the drunken man while in that condition does not know the definition of drunkenness nor the scientific account of it; he has not the very least scientific knowledge of it. The sober man, on the other hand, knows the definition of drunkenness and its basis, yet he is not drunk in the very least. Again the doctor, when he is himself ill, knows the definition and causes of health and the remedies which restore it, and yet is lacking in health. Similarly there is a difference between knowing the true nature and causes and conditions of the ascetic life and actually leading such a life and forsaking the world.

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III. The Classes of Seekers, p. 47.
1 month 2 weeks ago

Philosophical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from concepts; mathematical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from the construction of concepts.

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A 713, B 741
2 months 2 weeks ago

The truth is a trap: you can not get it without it getting you; you cannot get the truth by capturing it, only by its capturing you.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

I think He made one law of that kind in order that there might be obedience. In all these other matters what you call obeying Him is but doing what seems good in your eyes also. Is love content with that? You do them, indeed, because they are His will, but not only because they are his will. Where can you taste the joy of obeying unless he bids you do something for which His bidding is the only reason?

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Democracy is the road to socialism.

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Attributed to Marx in recent years, including in Communism (2007) by Tom Lansford, p. 48
1 week 6 days ago

In a single second we do away with all seconds; God himself could not do as much.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

There is no need to worry about mere size. We do not necessarily respect a fat man more than a thin man. Sir Isaac Newton was very much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account value him less.

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"The Expanding Mental Universe", Saturday Evening Post, 7/1/1959

What the history of Philosophy shows us is a succession of noble minds, a gallery of heroes of thought, who, by the power of reason, have penetrated into the being of things, of nature and of spirit, into the Being of God, and have won for us by their labours the highest treasure, the treasure of reasoned knowledge.

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Introduction p. 1 Lectures on the history of philosophy, Translated from German by E. S. Haldane in Three Volumes (1892-96) full text

The hypostasis of the particular methods of procedure employed by natural science ... results in the view that all theoretical differences which rest on historically conditioned antagonisms of interest are to be settles by a "crucial experiment" rather than by struggle and counter-struggle. The harmonious relation of individuals to one another becomes a fact, therefore, that has even more general character than a law of nature.

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p. 148.
3 weeks 2 days ago

If man's love for himself be necessary, then his love for Him through whom, first his coming-to-be, and second, his continuance in his essential being with all his inward and outward traits, his substance and his accidents, occur must also be necessary. Whoever is so besotted by his fleshy appetites as to lack this love neglects his Lord and Creator. He possesses no authentic knowledge of Him; his gaze is limited to his cravings and to things of sense. 

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Al-Ghazali on Love, Longing, Intimacy & Contentment, Translated with an introduction and notes by Eric Ormsby. Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society (2011), p. 25.
3 weeks ago

Disturbances in society are never more fearful than when those who are stirring up the trouble can use the pretext of religion to mask their true designs.

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2 months 1 week ago

The preceding merely defines a way of thinking. But the point is to live.

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1 month 6 days ago

Those who have a well-ordered character lead also a well-ordered life.

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2 weeks 3 days ago

And now I ask, whether, with this map of misgovernment before me, I can suppose myself bound by my vote to continue, upon any principles of pretended public faith, the management of these countries in those hands? If I kept such a faith (which in reality is no better than a fides latronum) with what is called the Company, I must break the faith, the covenant, the solemn, original, indispensable oath, in which I am bound, by the eternal frame and constitution of things, to the whole human race.

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Speech in the House of Commons on India (1 December 1783), quoted in The Parliamentary Register: Or, History of the Proceedings and Debates of the House of Commons, Volume XII (1782), p. 247
1 month 2 weeks ago

The phenomenon of the will [in Epictetus ] [...] a different mental ability whose chief characteristic is that it speaks an imperative even when it commands nothing but our ability to think. The goal is to annihilate reality insofar it concerns me.

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Hannah Arendt Lecture on Thinking
1 month 6 days ago

Repentance for one's evil deeds is the safeguard of life.

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1 week 6 days ago

Impossible for me to know whether or not I take myself seriously. The drama of detachment is that we cannot measure its progress. We advance into a desert, and we never know where we are in it.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

He [Jesus] not only forbids actual uncleanness, but all irregular desires, upon pain of hell-fire; causeless divorces; swearing in conversation, as well as forswearing in judgment; revenge; retaliation; ostentation of charity, of devotion, and of fasting; repetitions in prayer, covetousness, worldly care, censoriousness: and on the other side commands loving our enemies, doing good to those that hate us, blessing those that curse us, praying for those that despitefully use us; patience and meekness under injuries, forgiveness, liberality, compassion: and closes all; his particular injunctions, with this general golden rule, Matt. VII. 12, "All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do you even so to them, for this is the law and the prophets." And to show how much He is in earnest, and expects obedience to these laws, He tells them, Luke VI. 35, That if they obey, " great shall be their reward".

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§ 116
2 months 2 weeks ago

It seems to be almost an invariable rule that as real power declines, the symbols of power multiply and intensify in compensation.

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2 weeks 2 days ago

Every cause produces more than one effect.

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On Progress: Its Law and Cause
1 month 2 weeks ago

England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating - the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia... When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch... and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.

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"The Future Results of British Rule in India," New York Daily Tribune, 08 August 1853

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