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5 months 5 days ago
Art furnishes us with eyes and hands and above all the good conscience to be able to turn ourselves into such a phenomenon.
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4 months 3 days ago

In reality, the labourer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital.

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Vol. I, Ch. 23, pg. 633.
2 months 3 weeks ago

Master, we saw one casting out devils in thy name, and he followeth not us: and we forbad him, because he followeth not us. But Jesus said, Forbid him not: for there is no man which shall do a miracle in my name, that can lightly speak evil of me. For he that is not against us is on our part.

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Mark 9:38-40 (KJV)
3 months 3 days ago

If not reason, then the devil.

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4 months 1 day ago

If we must absolutely mention this state of affairs, I suggest that we call ourselves "absent", that is more proper.

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Estelle, refusing to use the word "dead", Act 1, sc. 5
1 week 6 days ago

It is almost always impossible to evaluate at the time events which you have already experienced, and to understand their meaning with the guidance of their effects. All the more unpredictable and surprising to us will be the course of future events.

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Autobiographical sketch (1970), at Nobelprize.org
3 months 4 weeks ago

Ambition is the death of thought.

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p. 77e
3 months 3 weeks ago

The different pieces of evidence did not constitute so many neutral elements, until such time as they could be gathered together into a single body of evidence that would bring the final certainty of guilt. Each piece of evidence aroused a particular degree of abomination. Guilt did not begin when all the evidence was gathered together; piece by piece, it was constituted by each of the elements that made it possible to recognize a guilty person. Thus a semi-proof did not leave the suspect innocent until such time as it was completed; it made him semi-guilty; slight evidence of a serious crime marked someone as slightly criminal. In short, penal demonstration did not obey a dualistic system: true or false; but a principle of continuous gradation; a degree reached in the demonstration already formed a degree of guilt and consequently involved a degree of punishment.

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Chapter One, The body of the condemned, pp.23
2 months 2 weeks ago

Psychoanalysis is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one's subjective needs and expectations.

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p. 109
2 months 3 weeks ago

Genuine time, if it exists as anything else except the measure of motions in space, is all one with the existence of individuals as individuals, with the creative, with the occurrence of unpredictable novelties. Everything that can be said contrary to this conclusion is but a reminder that an individual may lose his individuality, for individuals become imprisoned in routine and fall to the level of mechanisms. Genuine time then ceases to be an integral element of their being. Our behavior becomes predictable, because it is but an external rearrangement of what went before.

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2 months 4 weeks ago

Lassalle. It would be a pity about the fellow because of his great ability, but these goings-on are really too bad. He was always a man one had to keep a devilish sharp eye on and as a real Jew from the Slav border was always to exploit anyone for his own private ends on party pretexts. And then his urge to push his way into polite society, de parvenir, if only for appearance's sake, to disguise the greasy Breslau Jew with all kinds of pomade and paint was always repulsive.

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Letter to Karl Marx (7 March 1856), quoted in The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Volume 40. Letters 1856-59 (2010), p. 27
4 months 2 days ago

My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing.

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Sometimes paraphrased as "Thinking is for doing", perhaps originally by S.T. Fiske (1992) Ch. 22
2 months 2 weeks ago

The first thing that we know about ourselves is our imperfection.

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1 week 4 days ago

The visible world has, as I have said, subsisted around him from all eternity: and the Light also which surrounds the world has also its place from all eternity, not intermittently, nor in different degrees at different times, but constantly and in an equable manner. But whosoever will attempt to estimate, as far as thought goes, this external Nature, by the measure of Time, he will very easily discover respecting the Sun, Sovereign of all things, of how many blessings he is, from all eternity, the author to the world.

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1 week 4 days ago

It is not Matter itself that is here meant, but the ultimate Cause of things incorporeal, which also existed before Matter. Moreover, it is asserted by Heraclitus: "Death unto souls is but a change to liquid." This Attis, therefore, the intelligible Power, the holder together of things material below the Moon, having intercourse with the pre-ordained Cause of Matter, holds intercourse therewith, not as a male with a female, but as though flowing into it, since he is the same with it.

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Those who have taken the planets to be inanimate bodies without function, limited to traveling geometric paths, resemble idiots who would believe that the brain is inanimate because it has no visible function, or that the stomach is idle because it does no visible work as do our limbs. Civilizees have always been reproached for believing nature to be limited to known effects. If the planets were not animate creatures endowed with functions, God would then appear to be an advocate of laziness. He would have created universes furnished with large inert bodies spending eternity in purposeless meandering as do the idlers in our society.

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L'attraction passioneé
1 month 2 weeks ago

Many conflicts within Third World countries are related to the practice of exploiting resources faster than nature can renew them or diverting them away from where people need them. Dams in every society have become major sources of conflict. As water scarcity grows, neighbors, families turn against each other.

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5 months ago

A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

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To be sane in a mad time is bad for the brain, worse for the heart.

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"The Mad Farmer Manifesto: The First Amendment" in The Country of Marriage
3 weeks 3 days ago

A real man is he whose goodness is a part of himself.

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"Discipline and Character", no. 45
1 month 3 weeks ago

I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed, both here and at home, with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the oriental learning at the valuation of the orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is indeed fully admitted by those members of the committee who support the oriental plan of education.

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3 months ago

There is, properly speaking, no Misfortune in the world. Happiness and Misfortune stand in continual balance. Every Misfortune is, as it were, the obstruction of a stream, which, after overcoming this obstruction, but bursts through with the greater force.

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4 months 3 days ago

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.

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As quoted in Think, Vol. 27 (1961), p. 32
1 month 2 days ago

If it does not upset, it is not philosophy.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

It is an article of passionate faith among "politically correct" biologists and anthropologists that brain size has no connection with intelligence; that intelligence has nothing to do with genes; and that genes are probably nasty fascist things anyway.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

The actor's realm is that of the fleeting.

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5 months 3 days ago

Rhetoric is the counterpart of Dialectic. Both alike are concerned with such things as come, more or less, within the general ken of all men and belong to no definite science. Accordingly, all men make use, more or less, of both; for to a certain extent all men attempt to discuss statements and to maintain them, to defend themselves and to attack others.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.

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"The Sublime and the Good", in the Chicago Review, Vol. 13 Issue 3 (Autumn 1959) p. 51.
2 months 4 weeks ago

Is it conceivable to adhere to a religion founded by someone else?

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2 months 2 weeks ago

No art can be judged by purely aesthetic standards, although a painting or a piece of music may appear to give a purely aesthetic pleasure. Aesthetic enjoyment is an intensification of the vital response, and this response forms the basis of all value judgements. The existentialist contends that all values are connected with the problems of human existence, the stature of man, the purpose of life. These values are inherent in all works of art, in addition to their aesthetic values, and are closely connected with them.

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The Chicago Review, Volume 13, no. 2, 1959, p. 152-181
4 months 2 days ago

So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation.

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The Moral Equivalent of War

By speaking of space as an Idea, I intend to imply the apprehension of objects as existing in space, and of the relations of position prevailing among them, is not a consequence of experience but a result of a peculiar constitution and activity of the mind which is independent of all experience in its origin, though constantly combined with experience in its exercise.

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Part I Of Ideas, Book II The Philosophy of the Pure Sciences, Chap. 2 Of the Idea of Space
4 months 4 weeks ago

"In the light, the earth remains our first and our last love. Our brothers are breathing under the same sky as we; justice is a living thing. Now is born that strange joy which helps one live and die, and which we shall never again postpone to a later time."

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1 month 3 weeks ago

I finished the Iliad to-day... I never admired the old fellow so much, or was so strongly moved by him. What a privilege genius like his enjoys! I could not tear myself away. I read the last five books at a stretch during my walk to-day, and was at last forced to turn into a bypath, lest the parties of walkers should see me blubbering for imaginary beings, the creations of a ballad-maker who has been dead two thousand seven hundred years. What is the power and glory of Caesar and Alexander to that? Think what it would be to be assured that the inhabitants of Monomotapa would weep over one's writings.

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Anno Domini 4551! Letter to his niece Margaret (August 1851), quoted in George Otto Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, Volume II (1876), pp. 186-187
1 month 2 weeks ago

I kept looking at the flowers in a vase near me: lavender sweet peas, fragile winged and yet so still, so perfectly poised, apart, and complete. They are self-sufficient, a world in themselves, a whole - perfect. Is that then, perfection? Is what those sweet peas had what I have, occasionally in moments like that? But flowers always have it - poise, completion, fulfillment, perfection; I only occasionally, like that moment. For that moment I and the sweet peas had an understanding.

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3 weeks 5 days ago

Two difficulties: (1) Can we transform psychologic time, which is qualitative, into a quantitative time? (2) Can we reduce to one and the same measure facts which transpire in different worlds [of conscious beings]!

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4 months 2 days ago

I think no virtue goes with size; The reason of all cowardice Is, that men are overgrown, And, to be valiant, must come down To the titmouse dimension.

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The Titmouse, st. 5
4 months 2 days ago

All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience.

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"The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" in address to the Yale Philosophical Club, published in the International Journal of Ethics, April 1891
2 months 4 weeks ago

May some future student go over this ground again, and have the leisure to give his results to the world.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more by-path meadows, where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the grave. Idleness, which is often becoming and even wise in the bachelor, begins to wear a different aspect when you have a wife to support.

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Virginibus Puerisque, Ch. 2.
1 week 5 days ago

Mussolini is a man no less extraordinary than Lenin. He, too, is a political genius, of a greater reach than all the statesmen of the day, with the only exception of Lenin...

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As quoted in The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution: The Origins of Ideological Polarization in the 20th Century, Jacob L. Talmon, University of California Press (1981) p. 451.
4 months 1 week ago

I moreover affirm that our wisdom itself, and wisest consultations, for the most part commit themselves to the conduct of chance.

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Book III, Ch. 8. Of the Art of Conversation
4 months 4 days ago

Christianity taught only what the whole of Asia knew already long before and even better.

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quoted in Londhe, S. (2008). A tribute to Hinduism: Thoughts and wisdom spanning continents and time about India and her culture. New Delhi: Pragun Publication.

We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, self-preservation in the other.

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On slavery, in a letter to John Holmes
4 months 1 week ago

Finally, every man will become dear and pleasing to every other man; all will be beloved by all! and, what is still more desirable, beloved also by Christ; to become acceptable to whom is the highest felicity of human nature.

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5 months 3 days ago

There is no one at the Communion table who retains against you even the least of your sins, no one, unless you yourself do it. So cast them away from yourself, and the recollection of them, lest in it your retain them; and cast the recollection of your having cast your sins away, lest in it you retain them.

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2 months 1 week ago

Individual expression of undefined universality leads to the murder of innocents through misdirected personal responsibility. Life is true value and consequence true guidance.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.

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As quoted in "A View from the Asylum" in Philosophical Investigations from the Sanctity of the Press (2004), by Henry Dribble, p. 87
4 months 1 day ago

It is the same: a chosen one is a man whom God's finger crushes against the wall.

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Act 2, sc. 4

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