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5 months 2 weeks ago

Nature made women mature early and had them demand gentle and polite treatment from men, so that they would find themselves imperceptibly fettered by a child due to their own magnanimity; and they would find themselves brought, if not quite to morality itself, then at least to that which cloaks it, moral behavior, which is the preparation and introduction to morality.

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Kant, Immanuel (1996), pages 219-220
1 month 3 weeks ago

It is not when he is working in the office but when he is lying idly on the sand that his soul utters, "Life is beautiful."

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Ch. I : The Awakening, p. 2
1 month 3 weeks ago

If wandering is the liberation from every given point in space, and thus the conceptional opposite to fixation at such a point, the sociological form of the "stranger" presents the unity, as it were, of these two characteristics.

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p. 402; Opening line.
4 months 1 week ago

Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place.

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Ch. VI: Nature, Mind and the Subject
5 months 2 weeks ago

Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of the representative government, cannot exist.

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Ch. XVI: Of Nationality, As Connected with Representative Government (p. 382)
5 months 2 weeks ago

I want you to read the true system of the heart, drafted by a decent man and published under another name. I do not want you to be biased against good and useful books merely because a man unworthy of reading them has the audacity to call himself the Author.

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First Dialogue; translated by Judith R. Bush, Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters
4 months 1 week ago

How did this division of the nations come about, what was its basis? The division is in accordance with all the previous history of the nationalities in question. It is the beginning of the decision on the life or death of all these nations, large and small. All the earlier history of Austria up to the present day is proof of this and 1848 confirmed it. Among all the large and small nations of Austria, only three standard-bearers of progress took an active part in history, and still retain their vitality - the Germans, the Poles and the Magyars. Hence they are now revolutionary. All the other large and small nationalities and peoples are destined to perish before long in the revolutionary world storm. (Weltsturm). For that reason they are now counter-revolutionary.

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The Magyar Struggle in Neue Rheinische Zeitung (13 January 1849).
6 months 1 week ago

A punishment that penalizes without forestalling is indeed called revenge.

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1 month 1 week ago

Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed.

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Objecting to the placing of observables at the heart of the new quantum mechanics, during Heisenberg's 1926 lecture at Berlin; related by Heisenberg, quoted in Unification of Fundamental Forces (1990) by Abdus Salam
5 months 2 weeks ago

The individual produces an object and, by consuming it, returns to himself, but returns as a productive and self reproducing individual. Consumption thus appears as a moment of production.

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Introduction, p. 14.
5 months 2 weeks ago

Fanaticism is the danger of the world, and always has been, and has done untold harm. I might almost say that I was fanatical against fanaticism.

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The Future of Science (1959), p. 79; also in BBC The Listener, Vol. 61 (1959), p. 505
5 months 2 weeks ago

I entered the Communist Party because its cause was just and I will leave it when it ceases to be just.

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Hugo to Hoederer, Act 5, sc. 3
2 months 1 week ago

All that is not thought is pure nothingness; since we can think only thought and all the words we use to speak of things can express only thoughts, to say there is something other than thought, is therefore an affirmation which can have no meaning.And yet-strange contradiction for those who believe in time-geologic history shows us that life is only a short episode between two eternities of death, and that, even in this episode, conscious thought has lasted and will last only a moment. Thought is only a gleam in the midst of a long night. But it is this gleam which is everything.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

I did not know that mankind were suffering for want of gold. I have seen a little of it. I know that it is very malleable, but not so malleable as wit. A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom.

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p. 488
4 months 1 week ago

The ordinary logic has a great deal to say about genera and species, or in our nineteeth century dialect, about classes. Now a class is a set of objects comprising all that stand to one another in a special relation of similarity. But where ordinary logic talks of classes the logic of relatives talks of systems. A system is a set of objects comprising all that stands to one another in a group of connected relations. Induction according to ordinary logic rises from the contemplation of a sample of a class to that of a whole class; but according to the logic of relatives it rises from the comtemplation of a fragment of a system to the envisagement of the complete system.

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Vol. IV, par. 5
2 months 1 week ago

The right wing version really sees community represented either by... religion, or by nation, that these are units that... get dissolved under a liberal world order, through globalization, through the movement of people, goods, ideas and trade between nations, national identity becomes diluted and that sense of national community that held people together in democratic societies appears to be lost. ...Secularism ...is perceived as a loss by people that have religious faith. They believe that there is a form of militant secularism that is not allowing them to practice their religion, and for that reason a lot of religious conservatives in places like the United States, have turned against that liberal order.

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16:18
5 months 2 weeks ago

In the same year in which I began Latin, I made my first commencement in the Greek poet with the Iliad. After I had made some progress in this, my father put Pope's translation into my hands. It was the first English verse I had cared to read, and it became one of the books in which for many years I most delighted: I think I must have read it from twenty to thirty times through. I should not have thought it worth while to mention a taste apparently so natural to boyhood, if I had not, as I think, observed that the keen enjoyment of this brilliant specimen of narrative and versification is not so universal with boys, as I should have expected both à priori and from my individual experience.

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(p. 10)
5 months 2 weeks ago

War involves in its progress such a train of unforeseen and unsupposed circumstances ... that no human wisdom can calculate the end. Prospects on the Rubicon

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London: J. Debrett, 1787
6 months 6 days ago

Against the diseases of the mind, philosophy provides sufficient antidotes. The instruments which it employs for this purpose are the virtues; the root of which, whence all the rest proceed, is prudence. This virtue comprehends the whole art of living discreetly, justly, and honorably, and is, in fact, the same thing with wisdom. It instructs men to free their understandings from the clouds of prejudice; to exercise temperance and fortitude in the government of themselves: and to practice justice towards others. Although pleasure, or happiness, which is the end of living, be superior to virtue, which is only the means, it is every one's interest to practice all the virtues; for in a happy life, pleasure can never be separated from virtue.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

The meaning of experience is typically one generation behind the experience. The content of new situations, both private and corporate, is typically the preceding situation.

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quoted in "The Prospects of Recording" by Glenn Gould, The Glenn Gould reader, 1984, p. 345
5 months 2 weeks ago

If you die, I will lie down beside you and I will stay there until the end, without eating or drinking, you will rot in my arms and I will love you as carcass: for you love nothing if you do not love everything.

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Act 10, sc. 2
5 months 3 weeks ago

But men must know that in this theater of man's life it is reserved only for God and angels to be lookers on.

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Book II, xx, 8
5 months 1 week ago

If you use a trick in logic, whom can you be tricking other than yourself?

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p. 24e
3 months 4 weeks ago

What is patriotism? Is it love of one's birthplace, the place of childhood's recollections and hopes, dreams and aspirations? Is it the place where, in childlike naïveté, we would watch the passing clouds, and wonder why we, too, could not float so swiftly? The place where we would count the milliard glittering stars, terror-stricken lest each one "an eye should be," piercing the very depths of our little souls?

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5 months 2 weeks ago

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

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Part 3, Ch. 13, § 3
5 months 2 weeks ago

To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogical and arbitrary, unless one have already worked out in advance some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with determinate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our dis-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of their possessor's body at the time.

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Lecture I, "Religion and Neurology"
5 months 2 weeks ago

Men rush to California and Australia as if the true gold were to be found in that direction; but that is to go to the very opposite extreme to where it lies. They go prospecting farther and farther away from the true lead, and are most unfortunate when they think themselves most successful.

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p. 489
4 months 3 weeks ago

Life itself is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living: All things fall under this name. The Sun itself is but the dark simulacrum, and the light but the shadow of God.

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Ch. 4
1 month 1 week ago

Love the little trade which thou hast learned, and be content therewith.

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IV, 31
5 months 2 weeks ago

The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates.

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par. 17
5 months 1 week ago

Justice is what love looks like in public.

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Brother West (2009), p. 232
5 months 2 weeks ago

Rational and kindly behavior tends to produce good results and these results remain good even when the behavior which produced them was itself produced by a pill.

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"Brave New World Revisited" (1956), in Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience (1977), p. 99
1 month 1 week ago

The things... which are proper to the understanding no other man is used to impede, for neither fire, nor iron, nor tyrant, nor abuse, touches it in any way. When it has been made a sphere, it continues a sphere.

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VIII, 41
4 months 1 week ago

A difficulty which confronts the synechistic philosophy is this. In considering personality, that philosophy is forced to accept the doctrine of a personal God; but in considering communication, it cannot but admit that if there is a personal God, we must have a direct perception of that person and indeed be in personal communication with him. Now, if that be the case, the question arises how it is possible that the existence of this being should ever have been doubted by anybody. The only answer that I can at present make is that facts that stand before our face and eyes and stare us in the face are far from being, in all cases, the ones most easily discerned. That has been remarked since time immemorial.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

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Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton (1855) by Sir David Brewster (Volume II. Ch. 27).
3 months 1 week ago

Our subjective judgment of what seems like a good bet is irrelevant to what is actually a good bet.

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Chapter 6 "Origins and Miracles" (p. 162)
6 months 2 weeks ago
Who is the most moral man? First, he who obeys the law most frequently, who ... is continually inventive in creating opportunities for obeying the law. Then, he who obeys it even in the most difficult cases. The most moral man is he who sacrifices the most to custom. ... Self-overcoming is demanded, not on account of any useful consequences it may have for the individual, but so that hegemony of custom and tradition shall be made evident.
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4 months 2 weeks ago

Of what I am, I know no more than that I am, but here no tie is necessary between subject and object. My own being is this tie, I am at once the subject knowing, and the object known of; and this reflection or return of the knowledge on itself is what I designate by the term I, if I have any determinate meaning.

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Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p. 50
3 months 2 weeks ago

I am a pattern watcher.

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(p. 311)
4 months 1 week ago

I do not accept any absolute formulas for living. No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in a man's life. As we live, we grow and our beliefs change. They must change. So I think we should live with this constant discovery. We should be open to this adventure in heightened awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience.

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As quoted in Martin Buber : An Intimate Portrait (1971), p. 56
4 months 1 week ago

Time with its continuity logically involves some other kind of continuity than its own. Time, as the universal form of change, cannot exist unless there is something to undergo change, and to undergo a change continuous in time, there must be a continuity of changeable qualities.

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4 months ago

The self-surmounter can never put up with the man who has ceased to be dissatisfied with himself.

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p. 139
1 month 2 weeks ago

That we are overdone with banking institutions which have banished the precious metals and substituted a more fluctuating and unsafe medium, that these have withdrawn capital from useful improvements and employments to nourish idleness, that the wars of the world have swollen our commerce beyond the wholesome limits of exchanging our own productions for our own wants, and that, for the emolument of a small proportion of our society who prefer these demoralizing pursuits to labors useful to the whole, the peace of the whole is endangered and all our present difficulties produced, are evils more easily to be deplored than remedied.

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Letter to Abbe Salimankis (1810) ME 12:379 The Writings of Thomas Jefferson "Memorial Edition" (20 Vols., 1903-04) edited by Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, Vol. 12, p. 379
4 months 3 weeks ago

If there is one realm in which it is essential to be sublime, it is in wickedness. You spit on a petty thief, but you can't deny a kind of respect for the great criminal.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

With what consistency, or decency they complain so loudly of attempts to enslave them, while they hold so many hundred thousands in slavery; and annually enslave many thousands more, without any pretence of authority, or claim upon them?

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it, in their inmost being still follow the Christian ideal, for hitherto neither their subtlety nor the ardor of their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of man and of virtue than the ideal given by Christ.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Out from the heart of Nature rolled The burdens of the Bible old.

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The Problem, st. 2
5 months 2 weeks ago

Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is open.

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