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3 months 3 weeks ago

The ambassador of Russia and the grandees who accompanied him were so gorgeous that all London crowded to stare at them, and so filthy that nobody dared to touch them. They came to the court balls dropping pearls and vermin.

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Vol. V, ch. 23
4 months 6 days ago

We desire nothing so much as what we ought not to have.

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Maxim 559 [Mimi et aliorum sententiae 677]
6 months 1 week ago

Those things which now most engage the attention of men, as politics and the daily routine, are, it is true, vital functions of human society, but should be unconsciously performed, like the corresponding functions of the physical body. They are infra-human, a kind of vegetation. I sometimes awake to a half-consciousness of them going on about me, as a man may become conscious of some of the processes of digestion in a morbid state, and so have the dyspepsia, as it is called.

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p. 495
6 months 1 week ago

If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.

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6 months 1 week ago

Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation.

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Lecture VI, Pragmatism's Conception of Truth
6 months 1 week ago

In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

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Quotation and Originality
4 months 2 weeks ago

To me, believing that some correspondence intrinsically just is reference (not as a result of our operational and theoretical constraints, or our intentions, but as an ultimate metaphysical fact) amounts to a magical theory of reference. Reference itself becomes what Locke called a 'substantial form' (an entity which intrinsically belongs with a certain name) on such a view. Even if one is willing to contemplate such unexplainable metaphysical facts, the epistemological problems that accompany such a metaphysical view seem insuperable. For, assuming a world of mind- independent, discourse-independent entities (this is the presupposition of the view we are discussing), there are, as we have seen, many different 'correspondences' which represent possible or candidate reference relations (infinitely many, in fact, if there are infinitely many things in the universe).

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Chap. 2 : A problem about reference
5 months 5 days ago

Sadness makes you God's prisoner.

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4 months 6 days ago

The fear of death is more to be dreaded than death itself.

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Maxim 511
7 months 6 days ago

A robot, the man had said, is logical but not reasonable.

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6 months 1 week ago

Several excuses are always less convincing than one.

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Ch. 1
5 months 1 week ago

It has been said that love robs those who have it of their wit, and gives it to those who have none.

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Paradoxe sur le Comédien
5 months 4 weeks ago

Satisfaction linked with dishonor or with harm to others is a prison for the seeker.

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Vahishto-Ishti Gatha; Yasna 53, 6.
4 months 3 weeks ago

Rituals are processes of embodiment and bodily performances. In them, the valid order and values of a community are physically experienced and solidified.

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5 months 1 week ago

Expect nothing more from philosophy than a voice, language and grammar of the instinct for Godliness that lies at its origin, and, essentially, is philosophy itself.

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"On Philosophy: To Dorothea," in Theory as Practice (1997), p. 421
5 months 2 weeks ago

Sobriety is the strength of the soul, for it preserves its reason unclouded by passion.

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As quoted in The History of Philosophy: From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Present Century (1819) by William Enfield Sobriety is the strength of the mind
6 months 1 week ago

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.

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3 months 4 days ago

The End of History was never linked to a specifically American model of social or political organisation. Following Alexandre Kojève, the Russian-French philosopher who inspired my original argument, I believe that the European Union more accurately reflects what the world will look like at the end of history than the contemporary United States. The EU's attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a "post-historical" world than the Americans' continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military.

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In "The history at the end of history", The Guardian
7 months 5 days ago

All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly. It is ready to pay up. In other words, there may be responsible persons, but there are no guilty ones, in its opinion. At very most, such a mind will consent to use past experience as a basis for its future actions.

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6 months 1 week ago

Here the institution that compels is the state, the only purpose of which is to protect individuals from one another and the whole from external enemies. Some German philosophasters of this mercenary age would like to twist it into an institution for education and edification in morality; in the background of this lurks the Jesuitical purpose of eliminating personal freedom and the individual's personal development in order to make him into a mere cog in a Chinese machine of state and religion. But this is the path by which in the past one has arrived at the inquisitions, burning of heretics, and religious wars; Frederick the Great's pledge, 'In my country, each shall be able to tend to his salvation in his own fashion', indicated that he never wanted to tread that path.

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Part III, Ch. VI, p. 184
7 months 6 days ago

The Law of conservation of energy tells us we can't get something for nothing, but we refuse to believe it.

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4 months 2 days ago

No realistic, sane person goes around Chicago without protection.

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Humboldt's Gift (1975), p. 452
6 months 1 week ago

It is the magician's bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

His concept of the anal character as one that has not reached maturity is in fact a sharp criticism of bourgeois society of the nineteenth century, in which the qualities of the anal character constituted the norm for moral behavior.

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To Have or to Be? (2005) p. 68
5 months 1 day ago

For such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; Yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves: For they see their own wit at hand, and other men's at a distance.

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The First Part, Chapter 13, p. 61
5 months 5 days ago

When I happen to be satisfied with everything, even God and myself, I immediately react like the man who, on a brilliant day, torments himself because the sun is bound to explode in a few billion years.

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4 months 2 days ago

I discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, "To hell with you."

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Quoted in "Feeling Rejected? Join Updike, Mailer, Oates..." by Barbara Bauer and Robert F. Moss, New York Times (21 July 1985), section 7, page 1, column 1
3 months 3 weeks ago

We share this planet, our home, with millions of species. Justice and sustainability both demand that we do not use more resources than we need. Restraint in resource use and living within nature's limits are preconditions for social justice. The commons are where justice and sustainability converge, where ecology and equity meet. The survival of pastures and forests as community property, or of a common good like a stable ecosystem, is only possible with social organizations with checks and controls on the use of resources built into their principles. The breakdown of a community, with the associated erosion of concepts of joint ownership and responsibility, can trigger the degradation of common resources.

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(p.50)
2 months 2 weeks ago

Living, loving, being natural or sincere-all these are spontaneous forms of behavior: they happen "of themselves" like digesting food or growing hair. As soon as they are forced they acquire that unnatural, contrived, and phony atmosphere which everyone deplores-weak and scentless like forced flowers and tasteless like forced fruit. Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. Faith-in life, in other people, and in oneself-is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time.

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p. 56
5 months 1 week ago

Spirit: Do not be deceived by sophists and half philosophers; things do not appear to thee by means of any representatives. Of the thing that exists, and that can exist, thou art conscious immediately ; thou, thyself, art that of which thou art conscious. By a fundamental law of thy being thou art thus presented to thyself, and thrown out of thyself.

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Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p. 53
3 months 4 days ago

While Trump is not going to be president, Trumpism is going to survive. ...The Democrats need to look very very carefully at those election results because ...the Republicans did well not necessarily because people love what they represent, but because they don't like what the Democrats represent... Unless they sort out what that is, they are going to continue to lose elections.

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28:52:00
5 months 1 day ago

It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power. But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.

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1:7-8 (KJV)
7 months 5 days ago

At that moment he knew what his mother was thinking, and that she loved him. But he knew, too, that to love someone means relatively little; or, rather, that love is never wrong enough to find the word befitting it.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

Truthfulness under oath is, by now, a matter of our civic religion, our relation to our fellow citizens rather than our relation to a nonhuman power.

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"John Searle on Realism and Relativism." Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (1998).
2 months 1 week ago

The rule, acknowledged or not, seems to be that if we have great power we must use it. We would use a steam shovel to pick up a dime. We have experts who can prove there is no other way to do it.

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The Loss of the Future
6 months 4 days ago

Wisdom is passionless. But faith by contrast is what Kierkegaard calls a passion.

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p. 53e
7 months 1 week ago

The truly good and wise man will bear all kinds of fortune in a seemly way, and will always act in the noblest manner that the circumstances allow.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

The same things, therefore, does the Sun communicate to things intelligible, over whom he was appointed by the Good to reign and to command: although these were created and began to exist at the same moment with himself.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

As to the objection that these rules are common in the world, that it is necessary to define every thing and to prove every thing, and that logicians themselves have placed them among their art, I would that the thing were true and that it were so well known... But so little is this the case, that, geometricians alone excepted, who are so few in number that they are a single in a whole nation and long periods of time, we see no others that know it.

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5 months 5 days ago

It is sometimes difficult to avoid the impression that there is a sort of foreknowledge of the coming series of events.

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p. 94
6 months 1 week ago

But your crime will be there, one hundred times denied, always there, dragging itself behind you. Then you will finally know that you have committed your life with one throw of the die, once and for all, and there is nothing you can do but tug our crime along until your death. Such is the law, just and unjust, of repentance. Then we will see what will become of your young pride.

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Clytemnestra to her daughter Electra, Act 1
4 months 1 week ago

If a poor person envies a rich person, he is no better than the rich person.

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p. 89
5 months 1 week ago

Do you know that ages will pass and mankind will proclaim in its wisdom and science that there is no crime and, therefore no sin, but that there are only hungry people. "Feed them first and then demand virtue of them!" - that is what they will inscribe on their banner which they will raise against you and which will destroy your temple.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Of the twenty or so civilizations known to modern Western historians, all except our own appear to be dead or moribund, and, when we diagnose each case, in extremis or post mortem, we invariably find that the cause of death has been either War or Class or some combination of the two. To date, these two plagues have been deadly enough, in partnership, to kill off nineteen out of twenty representatives of this recently evolved species of human society; but, up to now, the deadliness of these scourges has had a saving limit.

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Ch. 2: The Present Point in History
6 months 1 week ago

Capital is dead labor, that vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.

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Vol. I, Ch. 10, Section 1, p. 257.
2 months 1 week ago

Behind all appearances, I divine a struggling essence. I want to merge with it. I feel that behind appearances this struggling essence is also striving to merge with my heart. But the body stands between us and separates us. The mind stands between us and separates us.

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