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4 months 1 day ago

The spurious axioms of the third kind from conditions proper to the subject whence they are transferred rashly to the object are plentiful, not, as in those of the Second Class, because the only way to the intellectual concept lies through the sensuous data, but because only by aid of the latter can the concept be applied to that which is given by experience, that is, can we know whether something is contained under a certain intellectual concept or not. To this class belongs the threadbare one of the schools: whatever exists contingently does at some time not exist. This spurious principle springs from the poverty of the intellect, having insight frequently into the nominal, rarely into the real, marks of contingency or necessity.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.

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Vol. I, Ch. 31, pg. 824
1 week 1 day ago

First, the physicists in the persons of Faraday and Maxwell, proposed the "electromagnetic field" in contradistinction to matter, as a reality of a different category. Then, during the last century, the mathematicians, ... secretly undermined belief in the evidence of Euclidean Geometry. And now, in our time, there has been unloosed a cataclysm which has swept away space, time, and matter hitherto regarded as the firmest pillars of natural science, but only to make place for a view of things of wider scope and entailing a deeper vision. This revolution was promoted essentially by the thought of one man, Albert Einstein.

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Introduction
3 months 4 weeks ago

When I come to my own beliefs, I find myself quite unable to discern any purpose in the universe, and still more unable to wish to discern one.

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"Is There a God?", 1952
3 months 3 weeks 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.
Are designations congruent with things? Is language the adequate expression of all realities? It is only by means of forgetfulness that man can ever reach the point of fancying himself to possess a "truth" of the grade just indicated. If he will not be satisfied with truth in the form of tautology, that is to say, if he will not be content with empty husks, then he will always exchange truths for illusions.
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1 week 6 days ago

For sometimes it is an act of bravery even to live.

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Seneca, Ad Lucilium epistulae morales, transl. Richard M. Gummere, 1920 ed., Epistle LXXVIII, pp. 181-182
4 months ago

A testimony is sufficient when it rests on: 1st. A great number of very sensible witnesses who agree in having seen well. 2d. Who are sane, bodily and mentally. 3d. Who are impartial and disinterested. 4th. Who unanimously agree. 5th. Who solemnly certify to the fact.

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As quoted by H. P. Blavatsky in Isis Unveiled, Vol. I, p. 108, 1877
3 months 4 weeks ago

All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.

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Lecture at the Harvard Divinity School (13 March 1884); published in the The Unitarian Review and Religious Magazine as The Dilemma of Determinism

People often become scholars for the same reason they become soldiers: simply because they are unfit for any other station. Their right hand has to earn them a livelihood; one might say they lie down like bears in winter and seek sustenance from their paws.

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B 41
2 months 3 weeks ago

When animus and anima meet, the animus draws his sword of power and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction. The outcome need not always be negative, since the two are equally likely to fall in love (a special instance of love at first sight).

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Aion (1951). CW 9, Part II: P.338.30
4 months 2 weeks ago

Those who were best able to provide themselves with the means of security against their neighbors, being thus in possession of the surest guarantee, passed the most agreeable life in each other's society; and their enjoyment of the fullest intimacy was such that, if one of them died before his time, the survivors did not mourn his death as if it called for sympathy.

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2 months 4 weeks ago

It is reconciled in policy; and politics ought to be adjusted, not to human reasonings, but to human nature; of which the reason is but a part; and by no means the greatest part.

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Observations on a Late Publication on the Present State of the Nation (1769), page 78
3 weeks 1 day ago

Well, since paradoxes are at hand, let us see how it might be demonstrated that in a finite continuous extension it is not impossible for infinitely many voids to be found.

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Salviati, First Day, Stillman Drake translation
4 months 1 week ago

You can live, provided you live; that is, you can live for ever, provided you live a good life.

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229H:3:2
1 month 3 weeks ago

In all the areas of life where people have sought and found consolation through forbidding their desires-sex in particular, and taste in general-the habit of judgment is now to be stamped out.

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"Rays of Hope" (p. 106)
4 months 4 weeks ago

But it is clear there is a difference in the ends proposed: for in some cases they are activities, and in others results beyond the mere activities, and where there are certain ends beyond and beside the actions, the results are naturally superior to the activities. Now, as there are numerous kinds of actions and numerous arts and sciences, it follows that the ends are also various. Thus the end of the healing art is health, of ship-building ships, of strategy victory, of economy wealth.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

It is better to conceal ignorance than to expose it.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Even the most wretched individual of our present society could not exist and develop without the cumulative social efforts of countless generations. Thus the individual, his freedom and reason, are the products of society, and not vice versa: society is not the product of individuals comprising it; and the higher, the more fully the individual is developed, the greater his freedom - and the more he is the product of society, the more does he receive from society and the greater his debt to it.

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As quoted in The Philosophy of Bakunin (1953) edited by G. P. Maximoff, p. 158
3 months 2 weeks ago

Cicero said loud-bawling orators were driven by their weakness to noise, as lame men to take horse.

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Cicero
3 months 4 weeks ago

The State is a collection of officials, different for difference purposes, drawing comfortable incomes so long as the status quo is preserved. The only alteration they are likely to desire in the status quo is an increase of bureaucracy and the power of bureaucrats.

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Ch. 12: Free Thought and Official Propaganda
3 months 3 weeks ago

It has no sense and cannot just unless it comes to terms with death. Mine as (well as) that of the other. Between life and death, then, this is indeed the place of a sententious injunction that always feigns to speak the just.

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Exordium
3 months 4 weeks ago

The silent organ loudest chants The master's requiem.

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Dirge, st. 13
3 months 4 weeks ago

Whatever we may think or affect to think of the present age, we cannot get out of it; we must suffer with its sufferings, and enjoy with its enjoyments; we must share in its lot, and, to be either useful or at ease, we must even partake its character.

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"The Spirit of the Age, I", Examiner (9 January 1831), p. 20 Full text online
2 months 2 weeks ago

Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness.

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3:15 (KJV) Said to John the Baptist.
2 months 1 day ago

Idolatry is a more dangerous crime because it is apt by the authority of Kings & under very specious pretenses to insinuate it self into mankind. Kings being apt to enjoyn the honour of their dead ancestors: & it seeming very plausible to honour the souls of Heroes & Saints & to believe that they can heare us & help us & are mediators between God & man & reside & act principally in the temples & statues dedicated to their honour & memory? And yet this being against the principal part of religion is in scripture condemned & detested above all other crimes. The sin consists first in omitting the service of the true God.

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Of Idolatry
2 weeks 5 days ago

The Soldier is perhaps one of the most difficult things to realise; but Governments, had they not realised him, could not have existed: accordingly he is here.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

If we could sleep twenty-four hours a day, we would soon return to the primordial slime, the beatitude of that perfect torpor before Genesis-the dream of every consciousness sick of itself.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

Every human being is tried this way in the active service of expectancy. Now comes the fulfillment and relieves him, but soon he is again placed on reconnaissance for expectancy; then he is again relieved, but as long as there is any future for him, he has not yet finished his service. And while human life goes on this way in very diverse expectancy, expecting very different things according to different times and occasions and in different frames of mind, all life is again one nightwatch of expectancy.

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Are you not aware that all offerings whether great or small that are brought to the gods with piety have equal value, whereas without piety, I will not say hecatombs, but, by the gods, even the Olympian sacrifice of a thousand oxen is merely empty expenditure and nothing else?

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Oration to the Cynic Heracleios
6 days ago

Prussia had been the creation of a dynasty that had the nobility, the army and the higher bureaucracy for its backbone. The primary element was not the 'nation' or the Volk. Rather the state, more than the land or the ethnos, constituted the real foundation and unifying principle. There was none of that in Hitlerism.

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p. 37
3 months 4 weeks ago

The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible.

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The Comic
3 months 2 days ago

When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.

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Ch. 3, as quoted in Selected Writings (1966) edited by Lester G. Crocker
3 months 3 weeks ago

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.

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4 months 1 week ago

Nature, which alone is good, is wholly familiar and common.

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3 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
2 months 1 week ago

The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.

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p. 285.
3 months 3 weeks ago

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.

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p. 34e
1 week 6 days ago

Death weighs on him who is known to all, but dies unknown to himself.

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lines 401-403; (Chorus)
4 months ago

The universe is composed of matter, and, as a system, is sustained by motion. Motion is not a property of matter, and without this motion the solar system could not exist. Were motion a property of matter, that undiscovered and undiscoverable thing, called perpetual motion, would establish itself. It is because motion is not a property of matter, that perpetual motion is an impossibility in the hand of every being, but that of the Creator of motion. When the pretenders to Atheism can produce perpetual motion, and not till then, they may expect to be credited.

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A Discourse, &c. &c.
4 months 3 weeks ago

We face eternity now. We have no universe left, no outside phenomena, no emotions, no passions. Nothing but ourselves and thought. We face an eternity of introspection, when all through history we have never known what to do with ourselves on a rainy Sunday.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Good tests kill flawed theories; we remain alive to guess again.

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As quoted in My Universe : A Transcendent Reality (2011) by Alex Vary, Part II
2 months 3 weeks ago

The aim of research is the discovery of the equations which subsist between the elements of phenomena.

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p. 205; On aim of research.
4 months 2 days ago

The Hudson's Bay Company, before their misfortunes in the late war, had been much more fortunate than the Royal African Company.

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Chapter I, Part III, p. 806.
2 months 2 weeks ago

Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over the All.

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-2
4 months 2 weeks ago

What! You would convict me from my own words, and bring against me what I had said or written elsewhere. You may act in that manner with those who dispute by established rules. We live from hand to mouth, and say anything that strikes our mind with probability, so that we are the only people who are really at liberty.

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Book 5 Section 11

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