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5 months 1 week ago

Sabbath rest does not follow creation; it brings creation to completion.

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6 months 4 weeks ago

Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy.

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Social Aims
3 months 2 weeks ago

The virtues are not poured into us, they are natural. Seek, and you will find them: neglect, and you will lose them.

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Uses and Sanctions, no. 22
6 months 2 weeks ago

As it has long been and shall be, not ever, I think, will unfathomable time be emptied of either. This quote refers to Love and Strife, the fundamental opposing and ordering forces in Empedocles' model of the cosmos.

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fr. 16
5 months 3 weeks 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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6 months 4 weeks ago

To the gross senses the chair seems solid and substantial. But the gross senses and be refined by means of instruments. Closer observations are made, as the result of which we are forced to conclude that the chair is "really" a swarm of electric charges whizzing about in empty space. ... While the substantial chair is an abstraction easily made from the memories of innumerable sensations of sight and touch, the electric charge chair is a difficult and far-fetched abstraction from certain visual sensations so excessively rare (they can only come to us in the course of elaborate experiments) that not one man in a million has ever been in the position to make it for himself. The overwhelming majority of us accept the electric-charge chair on authority, as good Catholics accept transubstantiation.

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"One and Many," pp. 8-9
5 months 2 weeks ago

One of the most exquisite pleasures of human love - to serve the loved one without his knowing it - is only possible, as regards the love of God, through atheism.

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Last Notebook (1942) p. 84
3 months 3 weeks ago

Nothing is more opposed to concord than the present condition of the domestic and salaried classes. By reducing this poor multitude to a condition very like slavery, civilization, on the rebound, imposes chains upon those who seem to dominate. Thus notables do not dare to amuse themselves openly at times when the people suffer from poverty. The rich are subject to individual as well as collective servitude. A wealthy man is often the slave of his valets. However in harmony the valet himself enjoys complete independence, while the rich are served with an assiduity and a devotion of which one sees not a trace in civilization.

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Oeuvres completetes de Charles Fourier
4 months 4 weeks ago

If one has no vanity in this life of ours, there is no sufficient reason for living.

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Ch. 23. This is not, as it is often quoted, a stand-alone Tolstoy epigram, but part of the narration by the novella's jealousy-ridden protagonist Pozdnyshev.
4 months 3 weeks ago

Since Sputnik and the satellites, the planet is enclosed in a manmade environment that ends "Nature" and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed.

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Shakespeare at the Globe mentioning "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players" (As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7)
4 months 5 days ago

The idea of politics as a conservation in which the collision of opinions is moderated and accommodated, in which what is sought is not truth but peace, has been almost entirely lost, and supplanted by a legalist paradigm in which all political claims and conflicts are modelled in the jargon of rights.

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'Oakeshott as a Liberal' (p.80)
5 months 2 weeks ago

If your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault, just between the two of you. If he listens to you, you have won your brother over.

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(Matthew 18:15) (NIV)
2 months 3 weeks ago

In the constitution of that rational animal I see no virtue which is opposed to justice, but I see a virtue which is opposed to love of pleasure, and that is temperance.

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VIII, 39
3 months 6 days ago

While in the West, the insane are so many that they are put in an asylum, in China the insane are so unusual that we worship them, as anybody who has a knowledge of Chinese literature will testify.

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Ch. I : The Awakening, p. 3
7 months 2 days ago

The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.

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Chapter XI, Part III, Conclusion of the Chapter, p. 292.
4 months 3 weeks ago

The press is a group confessional form that provides communal participation. The book is a private confessional form that provides a "point of view."

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(p. 204)
5 months 1 week ago

Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.

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Ch. 4
6 months 2 weeks ago

If I had followed the multitude, I should not have studied philosophy.

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As quoted by Diogenes Laërtius, vii. 182.
2 months 3 weeks ago

As thou thyself art a component part of a social system, so let every act of thine be a component part of social life. Whatever act of thine that has no reference, either immediately or remotely, to a social end, this tears asunder thy life, and does not allow it to be one, and it is of the nature of a mutiny, just as when in a popular assembly a man acting by himself stands apart from the general agreement.

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IX, 23
6 months 4 weeks ago

Correct and accurate conclusions may be arrived at if we carefully observe the relation of the spheres of concepts, and only conclude that one sphere is contained in a third sphere, when we have clearly seen that this first sphere is contained in a second, which in its turn is contained in the third. On the other hand, the art of sophistry lies in casting only a superficial glance at the relations of the spheres of the concepts, and then manipulating these relations to suit our purposes, generally in the following way: - When the sphere of an observed concept lies partly within that of another concept, and partly within a third altogether different sphere, we treat it as if it lay entirely within the one or the other, as may suit our purpose.

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Vol. I, Ch. 10, as translated by R. B. Haldane
3 months 1 week ago

When one says, for example, that superiority and inferiority is a formation to be found in every human association, though the proposition certainly involves very profound insight into the essence of human nature and human relationship, yet the assertion is so general that it affords little knowledge of particular societary formations. In order to reach such particular knowledge we must study separate types of superiority and inferiority, and we must master the special features of their formation, which in proportion to their definiteness of course lose generality of application.

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p. 169
4 months 3 weeks ago

Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, in good spirits.

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Complete Works, vol. 26, Reflections and Remarks on Human Life, section 4.
6 months 3 weeks ago

What I see is teeming cohesion, contained dispersal.... For him, to sculpt is to take the fat off space.

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On Alberto Giacometti's work, Situations, in Braziller
5 months 4 weeks ago

The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny.

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Letter to Thomas Mercer
3 months 1 week ago

To be angry with a man is to hate him; to hate him is to wish him harm; but to wish him well, even if he has done you harm, is the mark of a great mind.

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Seneca, On Anger (De Ira) 2.34.5 (translated by John W. Basore)
5 months 4 weeks ago

They made and recorded a sort of institute and digest of anarchy, called the rights of man, in such a pedantic abuse of elementary principles as would have disgraced boys at school; but this declaration of rights was worse than trifling and pedantic in them; as by their name and authority they systematically destroyed every hold of authority by opinion, religious or civil, on the minds of the people. By this mad declaration they subverted the state; and brought on such calamities as no country, without a long war, has ever been known to suffer, and which may in the end produce such a war, and perhaps, many such.

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Speech in the House of Commons (9 February 1790), quoted in The Parliamentary History of England, From the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, Vol. XXVIII (1816), column 358
5 months 6 days ago

I think part of the appeal of mathematical logic is that the formulas look mysterious - you write backward Es!

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Putnam as quoted in: Julian Baggini, Jeremy Stangroom (2005) What Philosophers Think. p. 233
5 months 2 weeks ago

Paradoxical as it may seem, a Latin prose or a geometry problem, even though they are done wrong, may be of a great service one day, provided we devote the right kind of effort to them. Should the occasion arise, they can one day make us better able to give someone in affliction exactly the help required to save him, at the supreme moment of his need.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Living organisms had existed on earth, without ever knowing why, for over three thousand million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them. His name was Charles Darwin. To be fair, others had had inklings of the truth, but it was Darwin who first put together a coherent and tenable account of why we exist.

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Ch. 1. Why Are People?
2 months 3 weeks ago

Just that you do the right thing. The rest doesn't matter. Cold or warm. Tired or well-rested. Despised or honored. Dying . . . or busy with other assignments.

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(Hays translation) VI, 2
5 months ago

The sense in which an automatic door "understands instructions" from its photoelectric cell is not at all the sense in which I understand English.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

This is the moment when it becomes clear that the images of madness are nothing but dream and error, and that if the unfortunate sufferer who is blinded by them invokes them, it is the better to disappear with them into the annihilation for which they are destined.

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Part Two: 2. The Transcendence of Delirium
3 months 1 week ago

If you have been given a talent, exercise it freely and happily like the sun: give everyone from your splendour.

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3 months 1 week ago

They are irreverent to the gods and disobedient to our edicts, lenient as they are. For we allow none of them to be dragged to the altars unwillingly...It is therefore my pleasure to announce and publish to all the people by this edict, that they must not abet the seditions of the clergy...They may hold their meetings, if they wish, and offer prayers according to their established use...and for the future, let all people live in harmony...Men should be taught and won over by reason, not by blows, insults, and corporal punishments. I therefore most earnestly admonish the adherents of the true religion not to injure or insult the Galilaeans in any way...Those who are in the wrong in matters of supreme importance are objects of pity rather than of hate...

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Edict to the people of Bostra, reported in Henry Bettenson, Documents of the Christian Church
5 months 4 weeks ago

Show me what thou truly lovest, what thou seekest and strivest for with thy whole heart when thou hopest to attain to true en joyment of thyself-and thou hast thereby shown me thy Life. What thou lovest, in that thou livest. This very Love is thy Life, the root, the seat, the central point of thy being. All other emotions within thee have life only in so far as they are governed by this one central emotion.

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P. 3
3 months 3 weeks ago

Hitherto men have speculated vaguely on the unity of universes; it is now about to be demonstrated by reasoning from the passional world to material, guided by the analogy which exists between the two.

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L'attraction passioneé, Harmonian Man: Selected Writings of Charles Fourier, p. 54
4 months 3 weeks ago

Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the electronic world.

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(p. 30)
2 weeks 2 days ago

He said this before 1970....

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4 months 1 week ago

I have come to believe that you can get along without anyone - that is, without the close contact of any one person. That is a terrible shock to me, but I think it is true. You do need companionship, but wherever you go, in whatever new environment, you will find people who, to a large degree, take the place of those you left...The intimate companionship goes, I think, when you leave a friend, but friendship stays. It is an inherent possibility of relationship that, once admitted - well, there it is.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

For he must rule as king until God has put all enemies under his feet. And the last enemy, death, is to be brought to nothing.

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Paul of Tarsus, 1 Corinthians 15: 25-26, NWT
1 month 2 weeks ago

"For such Truth as opposeth no man's profit nor pleasure is to all men welcome."
- Thomas Hobbes

See biography for Thomas Hobbes:
https://civilsimian.com/ThomasHobbes

Read Thomas Hobbes's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/56/content

#philosophy #quotes #CivilSimian #UniversalHumanism

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3 months 1 week ago

Violence, less and less embarrassed by the limits imposed by centuries of lawfulness, is brazenly and victoriously striding across the whole world, unconcerned that its infertility has been demonstrated and proved many times in history. What is more, it is not simply crude power that triumphs abroad, but its exultant justification. The world is being inundated by the brazen conviction that power can do anything, justice nothing.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Every moment celebrates obsequies over the virtues of its predecessor.

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Ch. XIV
5 months 1 week ago

Give us back our suffering, we cry to Heaven in our hearts - suffering rather than indifferentism; for out of nothing comes nothing. But out of suffering may come the cure. Better have pain than paralysis! A hundred struggle and drown in the breakers. One discovers the new world. But rather, ten times rather, die in the surf, heralding the way to that new world, than stand idly on the shore!

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5 months 1 week ago

The Fathers of the Church can well afford to preach the gospel of Christ. It contains nothing dangerous to the regime of authority and wealth; it stands for self-denial and self-abnegation, for penance and regret, and is absolutely inert in the face of every indignity, every outrage imposed upon mankind.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Now drown care in wine.

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Book I, ode vii, line 32
4 months 3 weeks ago

Age may have one side, but assuredly Youth has the other. There is nothing more certain than that both are right, except perhaps that both are wrong. Let them agree to differ; for who knows but what agreeing to differ may not be a form of agreement rather than a form of difference?

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Crabbed Age and Youth.
5 months 4 weeks ago

You had that action and counteraction which, in the natural and in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers draws out the harmony of the universe.

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Volume iii, p. 277
5 months 3 weeks ago

The lover who kills himself for a girl has an experience which is more complete and much more profound than the hero who overturns the world.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

By the ruler's cultivation of his own character, the duties of universal obligation are set forth. By honoring men of virtue and talents, he is preserved from errors of judgment.

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