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3 months 4 days ago

A man, Mr. Scrymgeour, may fall into a thousand perplexities, but if his heart be upright and his intelligence unclouded, he will issue from them all without dishonour.

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The Rajah's Diamond, Story of the House with the Green Blinds.
2 months 3 weeks ago

Let us have "sweet girl graduates" by all means. They will be none the less sweet for a little wisdom; and the "golden hair" will not curl less gracefully outside the head by reason of there being brains within.

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Emancipation - Black and White

Without disarmament there can be no lasting peace. On the contrary, the continuation of military armaments in their present extent will with certainty lead to new catastrophies...For the creation of this public opinion in favor of disarmament every person living shares the responsibility, through ever deed and every word.

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2 months ago

If you let people follow their feelings, they will be able to do good. This is what is meant by saying that human nature is good.

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Book 6, pt. 1, v. 6
3 months 6 days ago

The TV generation is postliterate and retribalized. It seeks by violence to scrub the old private image and to merge in a new tribal identity, like any corporate executive.

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(p. 201)
4 months 1 day ago

This mutual dependencies no longer the dialectical relationship between master and servant, which has been broken in the struggle for mutual recognition, but rather a vicious circle which encloses both the master and the servant. Do the technicians rule, or is their rule that of the others, who rely on the technicians as their planners and executors?

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p. 33
4 months 4 days ago

On the frontiers of the self: "What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I."

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Remind yourself that all men assert that wisdom is the greatest good, but that there are few who strenuously seek out that greatest good.

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Pythagorean Ethical Sentences From Stobæus
3 months 3 weeks ago

Even the most insensitive hit song enthusiast cannot always escape the feeling that the child with a sweet tooth comes to know in the candy store.

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p. 290
2 months 5 days ago

Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.

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Ch. IV: "The Line of Least Resistance", p. 51
5 months 1 week ago

There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant.

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Demonology
2 months 3 weeks ago

Each such answer to the great question, invariably asserted by the followers of its propounder, if not by himself, to be complete and final, remains in high authority and esteem, it may be for one century, or it may be for twenty: but, as invariably, Time proves each reply to have been a mere approximation to the truth-tolerable chiefly on account of the ignorance of those by whom it was accepted, and wholly intolerable when tested by the larger knowledge of their successors.

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Ch.2, p. 72
4 months 3 weeks ago

Not only can logos be seen in absolutely all animals, but in many of them it has the groundwork for being perfected.

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3, 2, 4
5 months 3 weeks ago

If the room is smoky, if only moderately, I will stay; if there is too much smoke I will go. Remember this, keep a firm hold on it, the door is always open.

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Book I, ch. 25, 18.
4 months 3 weeks ago

It is indifferent to me where I am to begin, for there shall I return again.

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Frag. B 5, quoted by Proclus, Commentary on the Parmenides, 708
4 months 1 week ago

Learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.

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Volume iii, p. 335
4 months 1 day ago

To the mind of the ancients, who knew something of such matters, liberty and prosperity seemed hardly compatible, yet modern liberalism wants them together.

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"The Irony of Liberalism"
6 months 1 week ago

Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic - if it is pulled out I shall die.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

When the oak-tree is felled, the whole forest echoes with it; but a hundred acorns are planted silently by some unnoticed breeze.

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On History.
1 month 3 weeks ago

What anger is has been sufficiently explained. The difference between it and irascibility is evident: it is the same as that between a drunken man and a drunkard; between a frightened man and a coward. It is possible for an angry man not to be irascible; an irascible man may sometimes not be angry. I shall omit the other varieties of anger, which the Greeks distinguish by various names, because we have no distinctive words for them in our language, although we call men bitter and harsh, and also peevish, frantic, clamorous, surly and fierce: all of which are different forms of irascibility.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Every peasant has a lawyer inside of him, just as every lawyer, no matter how urbane he may be, carries a peasant within himself.

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Civilization is Civilism
1 month 4 weeks ago

The "imagination that shudders at the Hell of Dante," is not that the same faculty, weaker in degree, as Dante's own? No one but Shakspeare can embody, out of Saxo Grammaticus, the story of Hamlet as Shakspeare did: but every one models some kind of story out of it; every one embodies it better or worse. We need not spend time in defining. Where there is no specific difference, as between round and square, all definition must be more or less arbitrary. A man that has so much more of the poetic element developed in him as to have become noticeable, will be called Poet by his neighbors.

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4 months 1 day ago

Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, 'Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?' And then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!'

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Matthew 7:21-23 (NKJV) (Also Luke 6:24; 13:26, 27)
1 month 1 week ago

Congress itself can punish Alexandria, by repealing the law which made it a town, by discontinuing it as a port of entry or clearance, and perhaps by suppressing it's banks. But I expect all will go off with impunity. If our government ever fails, it will be from this weakness. No government can be maintained without the principle of fear as well as of duty. Good men will obey the last, but bad ones the former only.

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Letter to John Wayles Eppes (9 September 1814). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 11, pp. 425-426
6 months 5 days ago

Of all the schools of patience and lucidity, creation is the most effective. It is also the staggering evidence of man's sole dignity: the dogged revolt against his condition, perseverance in an effort considered sterile. It calls for a daily effort, self-mastery, a precise estimate of the limits of truth, measure, and strength. It constitutes an ascesis. All that "for nothing," in order to repeat and mark time. But perhaps the great work of art has less importance in itself than in the ordeal it demands of a man and the opportunity it provides him of overcoming his phantoms and approaching a little closer to his naked reality.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

A terrible thing is intelligence. It tends to death as memory tends to stability. The living, the absolutely unstable, the absolutely individual, is strictly unintelligible. Logic tends to reduce everything to identities and genera, to each representation having no more than one self-same content in whatever place, time or relation it may occur to us. And there is nothing that remains for two successive moments of its existence. My idea of God is different each time that I conceive it. Identity, which is death, is the goal of the intellect. The mind seeks what is dead, for what is living escapes it; it seeks to congeal the flowing stream in blocks of ice; it seeks to arrest it. In order to analyze a body it is necessary to extenuate or destroy it. In order to understand anything it is necessary to kill it, to lay it out rigid in the mind.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

This Burns appeared under every disadvantage: uninstructed, poor, born only to hard manual toil; and writing, when it came to that, in a rustic special dialect, known only to a small province of the country he lived in. Had he written, even what he did write, in the general language of England, I doubt not he had already become universally recognized as being, or capable to be, one of our greatest men.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

To recognize that some of the things our culture believes are not true imposes on us the duty of finding out which are true and which are not.

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"Western Civ," p. 22.
1 month 1 week ago

Beauty is merciless. You do not look at it, it looks at you and does not forgive.

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5 months 1 week ago

He that thinks diversion may not lie in hard and painful labour, forgets the early rising, hard riding, heat, cold and hunger of huntsmen, which is yet known to be the constant recreation of men of the greatest condition.

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Sec. 206
4 months 4 days ago

To have committed every crime but that of being a father.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

The texts about the future life fall into, since demonstrative scholars do not agree whether to take them in their apparent meaning or interpret them allegorically. Either is permissible. But it is inexcusable to deny the fact of a future life altogether.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

We ought so to behave to one another as to avoid making enemies of our friends, and at the same time to make friends of our enemies. 

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As quoted in Diogenes Laërtius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, "Pythagoras", Sect. 23, as translated in Dictionary of Quotations (1906) by Thomas Benfield Harbottle, p. 320
5 months 1 week ago

A just system must generate its own support.

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Chapter V, Section 41, p. 261

In limitations he first shows himself the master,And the law can only bring us freedom.

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Was Wir Bringen
4 months 4 days ago

What do you say to the elections in the factory districts? Once again the proletariat has discredited itself terribly... [I]t cannot be denied that the increase of working-class voters has brought the Tories more than their mere additional percentage and has improved their relative position.

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Letter to Karl Marx (18 November 1868), quoted in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Correspondence, 1846-1895 (1942), pp. 253-254
3 months 4 weeks ago

When shall we open our minds to the conviction that the ultimate reality of the world is neither matter nor spirit, is no definite thing, but a perspective?

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1 month 1 week ago

Never trouble another for what you can do yourself.

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4 months 4 days ago

One of the most marked features about the law of mind is that it makes time to have a definite direction of flow from past to future. ...This makes one of the great contrasts between the law of mind and the law of physical force, where there is no more distinction between the two opposite directions in time than between moving northward and moving southward.

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5 months 4 days ago

We ourselves are the entities to be analyzed.

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Macquarrie & Robinson translation
5 months 4 weeks ago

It is more shameful to distrust our friends than to be deceived by them.

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5 months 1 week ago

Hear the verbal protestations of all men: Nothing so certain as their religious tenets. Examine their lives: You will scarcely think that they repose the smallest confidence in them. The greatest and truest zeal gives us no security against hypocrisy: The most open impiety is attended with a secret dread and compunction. No theological absurdities so glaring that they have not, sometimes, been embraced by men of the greatest and most cultivated understanding. No religious precepts so rigorous that they have not been adopted by the most voluptuous and most abandoned of men.

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Part XV - General corollary
4 months 4 days ago

Haven't people learned yet that the time of superficial intellectual games is over, that agony is infinitely more important than syllogism, that a cry of despair is more revealing than the most subtle thought, and that tears always have deeper roots than smiles?

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4 months 1 day ago

Of all Discourse, governed by desire of Knowledge, there is at last an End, either by attaining, or by giving over.

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The First Part, Chapter 7, p. 30
2 months 2 weeks ago

A global transition to a cruelty-free vegan diet won't just help non-human animals. The transition will also help malnourished humans who could benefit from the grain currently fed to factory-farmed animals. For factory-farming is not just cruel; it's energy-inefficient. Let's take just one example. Over the past few decades, millions of Ethiopians have died of "food shortages" while Ethiopia grew grain to sell to the West to feed cattle. Western meat-eating habits prop up the price of grain so that poor people in the developing world can't afford to buy it. In consequence, they starve by the millions.In my work, I explore futuristic, hi-tech solutions to the problem of suffering. But anybody who seriously wants to reduce human and non-human suffering alike should adopt a cruelty-free vegan lifestyle today.

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"A World Without Suffering?", Instituto Humanitas Unisinos, Jan. 2011
5 months 1 week ago

The Christian Religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one. Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its veracity: and whoever is moved by Faith to assent to it, is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience.

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Section 10 : Of Miracles Pt. 2

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