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4 months 1 week ago

Whatever limits us we call Fate.

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Fate
5 months 1 week ago

Start with a planet like the earth, with a complement of simple compounds bound to exist upon it, add the energy of a nearby sun, and you are bound to end with nucleic acids. You can't avoid it.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

I have lived and slept in the same bed with English countesses and Prussian farm women... no woman has excited passions among women more than I have.

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As quoted in Parted Lips : Lesbian Love Quotes Through the Ages (2002) by Simone Rich
2 weeks 6 days ago

We cannot ask ourselves whether 'woman' is superior or inferior to 'man' any more than we can ask ourselves whether water is superior or inferior to fire. There can be no doubt that a woman who is perfectly woman is superior to a man who is imperfectly man, just as a farmer who is faithful to his land and performs his work perfectly is superior to a king who cannot do his own work.

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Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex
3 months 2 days ago

In the presence of God himself man stands always like a solitary tree in the wilderness.

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p. 95
4 months 1 week ago

The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same. The basic fallacy, taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth.

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p. 15
2 months 1 week ago

To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer.

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Chapter 6 "Origins and Miracles" (p. 141)
3 months 4 days ago

Men looke not at the greatnesse of the evill past, but the greatnesse of the good to follow.

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The First Part, Chapter 15, p. 76 (Italics as per text)
2 months 3 weeks ago

Sovereignty, the freedom unto death, is threatening to a society that is organized around work and production.

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3 months 1 week ago

If I understand at all the true Spirit of the present contest, We are engaged in a Civil War ... I consider the Royalists of France, or, as they are (perhaps more properly) called, the Aristocrates, as of the party which we have taken in this civil war.

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Letter to Sir Gilbert Elliot (22 September 1793), quoted in P. J. Marshall and John A. Woods (eds.)
2 months 3 weeks ago

Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of human life is to grasp as much as we can out of the infinitude.

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Ch. 21, June 28, 1941.
4 months 1 week ago

One might say: art shows us the miracles of nature. It is based on the concept of the miracles of nature.

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3 weeks 1 day ago

As a rule there are in everyone all sorts of good ideas, ready like tinder. But much of this tinder catches fire, or catches it successfully, only when it meets some flame or spark from outside, i.e. from some other person. Often, too, our own light goes out, and is rekindled by some experience we go through with a fellow-man. Thus we have each of us cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flames within us.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

It is the principle of antipathy which leads us to speak of offences as deserving punishment. It is the corresponding principle of sympathy which leads us to speak of certain actions as meriting reward. This word merit can only lead to passion and error. It is effects good or bad which we ought alone to consider.

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MSS 29, 32, University College Collection
1 month 2 weeks ago

You can't satisfy everybody; especially if there are those who will be dissatisfied unless not everybody is satisfied.

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Ch. 10 : A Framework for Utopia; The Framework as Utopian Common Ground, p. 320
2 months 2 weeks ago

One can imagine a computer simulation of the action of peptides in the hypothalamus that is accurate down to the last synapse. But equally one can imagine a computer simulation of the oxidation of hydrocarbons in a car engine or the action of digestive processes in a stomach when it is digesting pizza. And the simulation is no more the real thing in the case of the brain than it is in the case of the car or the stomach. Barring miracles, you could not run your car by doing a computer simulation of the oxidation of gasoline, and you could not digest pizza by running the program that simulates such digestion. It seems obvious that a simulation of cognition will similarly not produce the effects of the neurobiology of cognition.

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"Is the Brain's Mind a Computer Program?", Scientific American (January 1990).

Without being known too well, it [India] has existed for millennia in the imagination of the Europeans as a wonderland. Its fame, which it has always had with regard to its treasures, both its natural ones, and in particular, its wisdom, has lured men there.

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Friedrich Hegel .source: Contesting the Master Narrative, Jeffrey Cox and Shelton Stromquist Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013).
3 months 3 weeks 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
1 week 5 days ago

The ultimate most holy form of theory is action. Not to look on passively while the spark leaps from generation to generation, but to leap and to burn with it!

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1 month 2 weeks ago

I may not be as unambiguously hostile to capitalism as many people are, but what I don't like about it is the commodification of personal experiences, it turns everyone into actors.

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Quoted in Will Self, "John Gray: Forget everything you know," The Independent
2 months 2 weeks ago

What we have is a device for producing sentences in response to sentences. But none of these sentences is at all connected to the real world. If one coupled two of these machines and let them play the Imitation Game with each other, then they would go on 'fooling' each other forever, even if the rest of the world disappeared! There is no more reason to regard the machine's talk of apples as referring to real world apples than there is to regard the ant's 'drawing' as referring to Winston Churchill.

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Chap. 1 : Brains in a vat
4 months 1 week ago

Just as we teach children to avoid being destroyed by motor cars if they can, so we should teach them to avoid being destroyed by cruel fanatics, and to this end we should seek to produce independence of mind, somewhat sceptical and wholly scientific, and to preserve, as far as possible, the instinctive joy of life that is natural to healthy children. This is the task of a liberal education: to give a sense of the value of things other than domination, to help create wise citizens of a free community, and through the combination of citizenship with liberty in individual creativeness to enable men to give to human life that splendour which some few have shown that it can achieve.

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Ch. 18: The Taming of Power
5 months 1 week ago

Parmenides: I was pleased with you, Socrates, because you would not discuss the doubtful question in terms of visible objects or in relation to them, but only with reference to what we conceive most entirely by the intellect and may call ideas… But if you wish to get better training, you must do something more than that; you must consider not only what happens if a particular hypothesis is true, but also what happens if it is not true.

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1 week 1 day ago

A man standing by a spring of clear, sweet water and cursing it. While the fresh water keeps on bubbling up. He can shovel mud into it, or dung, and the stream will carry it away, wash itself clean, remain unstained. (Hays translation) Suppose that men kill thee, cut thee in pieces, curse thee. What then can these things do to prevent thy mind from remaining pure, wise, sober, just? For instance, if a man should stand by a limpid pure spring, and curse it, the spring never ceases sending up potable water; and if he should cast clay into it or filth, it will speedily disperse them and wash them out, and will not be at all polluted. How then shalt thou possess a perpetual fountain? By forming thyself hourly to freedom conjoined with contentment, simplicity and modesty.

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VIII, 51
1 month 3 weeks ago

The life, the fortune, and the happiness of every one of us, and, more or less, of those who are connected with us, do depend upon our knowing something of the rules of a game infinitely more difficult and complicated than chess. It is a game which has been played for untold ages, every man and woman of us being one of the two players in a game of his or her own. The chessboard is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance. To the man who plays well, the highest stakes are paid, with that sort of overflowing generosity with which the strong shows delight in strength. And one who plays ill is checkmated - without haste, but without remorse.

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4 months 1 week ago

The reasons for legal intervention in favour of children, apply not less strongly to the case of those unfortunate slaves and victims of the most brutal part of mankind, the lower animals.

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Book V, Chapter 11, Section 9
3 months 4 days ago

Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master.

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"The British Character"
3 months 1 week ago

At the edge of life you feel that you are no longer master of the life within you, that subjectivity is an illusion, and that uncontrollable forces are seething inside you, evolving with no relation to a personal center or a definite, individual rhythm.

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essay 2 - On not wanting to live
1 month 1 week ago

An empire derives no advantage from the caresses of two turtledoves who spend a year cooing to each other in public meetings.

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Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World, J. Beecher (1986), p. 315
3 months 4 days ago

And Jesus answered and said unto her, Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things, but one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.

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10:41-42 (King James Version| KJV)
4 months 1 week ago

This is the value of the Communities; not what they have done, but the revolution which they indicate as on the way.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Even from their infancy we frame them to the sports of love: their instruction, behavior, attire, grace, learning and all their words azimuth only at love, respects only affection. Their nurses and their keepers imprint no other thing in them.

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1 week 1 day ago

Whatever happens at all happens as it should; you will find this true, if you watch narrowly.

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IV, 10
4 months 3 weeks ago

Though absent from our eyes, Christ our Head is bound to us by love. Since the whole Christ is Head and body, let us so listen to the voice of the Head that we may also hear the body speak.He no more wished to speak alone than He wished to exist alone, since He says: Behold, I am with you all days, unto the consummation of the world (Matt. 28:20). If He is with us, then He speaks in us, He speaks of us, and He speaks through us; and we too speak in Him.

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pp. 420-421
5 months 1 day ago

War is the father and king of all, and has produced some as gods and some as men, and has made some slaves and some free.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

The point is that philosophy is seen to have come full circle, and to have exhausted itself.

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Chapter 5, Nietzsche's Styles, p. 95
1 week 4 days ago

In framing scientific terms, the appropriation of old words is preferable to the invention of new ones.

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1 week 4 days ago

It is useless to try to adjudicate a long-standing animosity by asking who started it or who is the most wrong. The only sufficient answer is to give up the animosity and try forgiveness, to try to love our enemies and to talk to them and (if we pray) to pray for them. If we can't do any of that, then we must begin again by trying to imagine our enemies' children who, like our children, are in mortal danger because of enmity that they did not cause.

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1 week 4 days ago

When alterations in technical terms become necessary, it is desirable that the new term should contain in its form some memorial of the old one.

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4 months 1 week ago

Without effort and change, human life cannot remain good. It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.

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2 weeks 6 days ago

In our opinion, the task of a far-sighted policy of the Third Reich ought to have been that of seeking every possible means to obtain at least the neutrality of the western nations so as to have free hands for a devestating attack exclusively against the Soviet Union-but that would have required the shrewdness and genius of a Metternich.

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pp. 81-82
4 months 1 week ago

It is too early to love. We will buy the right to do so by shedding blood.

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Act 1
3 months 4 days ago

So watch yourselves. If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him. If he sins against you seven times in a day, and seven times comes back to you and says, 'I repent,' forgive him.

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(Luke 17:3-4) (NIV)
3 months 1 week ago

Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.

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5 months 1 week ago

Can one be a saint without God?, that's the problem, in fact the only problem, I'm up against today.

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3 months 1 week ago

Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.

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4 months 2 days ago

The problem is one of opposition between subjective and objective points of view. There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality. But often what appears to a more subjective point of view cannot be accounted for in this way. So either the objective conception of the world is incomplete, or the subjective involves illusions that should be rejected.

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"Subjective and Objective" (1979), p. 196.

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