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4 months 2 weeks ago

Certainly the Art of Writing is the most miraculous of all things man has devised.

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11 months 4 weeks ago

I believe in clear-cut positions. I think that the most arrogant position is this apparent, multidisciplinary modesty of "what I am saying now is not unconditional, it is just a hypothesis," and so on. It really is a most arrogant position. I think that the only way to be honest and expose yourself to criticism is to state clearly and dogmatically where you are. You must take the risk and have a position.

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6 months 1 week ago

In the vast all of the Universe, must there be this unique anomaly - a consciousness that knows itself, loves itself and feels itself, joined to an organism which can only live within such and such degrees of heat, a merely transitory phenomenon? No, it is not mere curiosity that inspires the wish to know whether or not the stars are inhabited by living organisms, by consciousness akin to our own, and a profound longing enters into that dream that our souls shall pass from star to star through the vast spaces of the heavens, in an infinite series of transmigrations. The feeling of the divine makes us wish and believe that everything is animated, that consciousness, in a greater or less degree, extends through everything. We wish not only to save ourselves, but to save the world from nothingness. And therefore God. Such is his finality as we feel it.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

It occurred to him that what had appeared perfectly impossible before, namely that he had not spent his life as he should have done, might after all be true. It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false. He tried to defend all those things to himself and suddenly felt the weakness of what he was defending.

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Ch. XI
8 months 3 weeks ago

In memory yet green, in joy still felt, The scenes of life rise sharply into view. We triumph; Life's disasters are undealt, And while all else is old, the world is new.

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8 months 1 day ago

I have greater confidence in my wife and my pupils than I have in Christ.

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2397
4 months 4 days ago

As to the viciousness of the philosophers, the meaning of this complaint is succinctly expressed in the charge that the philosophers do not "hold the gods the city holds." And this accusation is most true. The quest for wisdom begins in doubt of the conventional wisdom about the highest things. The most cherished beliefs of the community, the collective hopes and fears, are centered on its gods. The unpardonable thing is to be beyond these hopes and fears, beyond the awe and shame the gods impose.

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Commerce and Culture, p. 287.
6 months 3 weeks ago

Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Our laws, language, religion, politics, & manners are so deeply laid in English foundations, that we shall never cease to consider their history as a part of ours, and to study ours in that as it's origin.

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Letter to William Duane
7 months 3 weeks 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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11 months 4 weeks ago

I already am eating from the trash can all the time. The name of this trash can is ideology. The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.

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Section 2, paragraph 63
6 months 4 weeks ago

Jews are angry and brutish people, vile and vulgar men, slaves worthy of the yoke [Talmudism] which you bear... Go, take back your books and remove yourselves from me. [ The Talmud ] taught the Jews to steal the goods of Christians, to regard them as savage beasts, to push them over the precipice... to kill them with impunity and to utter every morning the most horrible imprecations against them.

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See The Jews: A History, Second Edition, by John Efron, Steven Weitzman and Matthias Lehmann
4 months 1 week ago

It might have been supposed that the building of 30,000 miles of railways would have brought a measure of prosperity to India. But these railways were built not for India but for England; not for the benefit of the Hindu, but for the purposes of the British army and British trade... The railroads are entirely in European hands, and the Government refuse to appoint even one Hindu to the Railway Board. The railways lose money year after year, and are helped by the Government out of the revenues of the people. All the loses are borne by the people, all the gains are gathered by the trader.

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5 months 1 week 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)
3 months 3 weeks ago

If we can but prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretense of taking care of them, they must become happy.

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Letter to Thomas Cooper
1 month 4 days ago

🤷‍♂️smh

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4 months 1 week ago

To take Macaulay out of literature and society and put him in the House of Commons, is like taking the chief physician out of London during a pestilence.

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Vol. I, ch. 9, p. 315
3 months 3 weeks ago

The dyad gets its name from passing through or asunder; for the dyad is the first to have separated itself from the monad, whence also it is called "daring." For when the monad manifests unification, the dyad steals in and manifests separation.

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On the Dyad
7 months 1 week ago

Conquered Greece took captive her savage conqueror and brought her arts into rustic Latium.

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Book II, epistle i, lines 156-157
8 months 3 weeks ago

All things as subsist from nature appear to contain in themselves a principle of motion and permanency; some according to place, others according to increase and diminuation; and others according to change in quality. 

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Book II, Ch. I, p. 88.
6 months 1 week ago

In training a child to activity of thought, above all things we must beware of what I will call "inert ideas"-that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilised, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.In the history of education, the most striking phenomenon is that schools of learning, which at one epoch are alive with a ferment of genius, in a succeeding generation exhibit merely pedantry and routine. The reason is, that they are overladen with inert ideas. Education with inert ideas is not only useless: it is, above all things, harmful.

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8 months 3 weeks ago

There is more to a science fiction story than the science it contains.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

The law books abound with similar instances of the care the judges take of the public integrity, Laws, moreover, abridging the natural right of the citizen, should be restrained by rigorous constructions within their narrowest limits.

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4 months 2 days ago

Although our case is different from that of ascetics who remove themselves from the world, the situation of the latest technological civilization might offer the incentive for commitments of this kind. In a large city, in mass society, among the almost unreal swarming of faceless beings, an essential sense of isolation or of detachment often occurs naturally, perhaps even more than in the solitude of moors and mountains.

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p. 121
3 months 3 weeks ago

Enlighten the dark blood of your ancestors, shape their cries into speech, purify their will, widen their narrow, unmerciful brows. This is your second duty. For you are not only a slave. As soon as you were born, a new possibility was born with you, a free heartbeat stormed through the great sunless heart of your race.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

I am certainly interested in a tribunal in which, for having used my reason, I was deemed little less than a heretic. Who knows but men will reduce me from the profession of a philosopher to that of historian of the Inquisition! But they behave to me in order that I may become the ignoramus and the fool of Italy...

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p. 244
7 months 1 week ago

The Athenians are right to accept advice from anyone, since it is incumbent on everyone to share in that sort of excellence, or else there can be no city at all.

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As quoted in Protagoras by Plato
5 months 3 weeks ago

The images of mankind have become the most basic thing about them. And they're all software, and disembodied.

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(p. 346)
6 months 3 weeks ago

Our life is no dream, but it should and perhaps will become one.

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Fragmente I, Magische Philosophie Variant: "Our life is no dream; but it ought to become one, and perhaps will." George MacDonald, Phantastes, epigraph to Chapter XXV
6 months 2 weeks ago

If I used to ask myself, over a coffin, "what good did it do the occupant to be born?" I now put the same question about anyone alive.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

A Muslim who knows French will never be a dangerous Muslim.

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quoted in Arvidsson, Stefan (2006), Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science, translated by Sonia Wichmann, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.'(107)
4 months 1 week ago

He not only overflowed with learning but stood in the slops.

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On Macaulay; reported in Hesketh Pearson, The Smith of Smiths (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1934), p. 180
7 months 2 weeks ago

Wrongly do the Greeks suppose that aught begins or ceases to be; for nothing comes into being or is destroyed; but all is an aggregation or secretion of pre-existent things: so that all-becoming might more correctly be called becoming-mixed, and all corruption, becoming-separate.

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quoted in Heinrich Ritter, Tr. from German by Alexander James William Morrison, The History of Ancient Philosophy, Vol.1
8 months 1 day ago

When we are inclined to boast of our position [as Christians] we should remember that we are but Gentiles, while the Jews are of the lineage of Christ. We are aliens and in-laws; they are blood relatives, cousins, and brothers of our Lord. Therefore, if one is to boast of flesh and blood the Jews are actually nearer to Christ than we are.

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That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew Luther's Works, American Edition (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1962), Vol. 45, p. 201
6 months 6 days ago

books are only what we want them to be; rather, what we read into them.

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6 months 1 week ago

But now we come to the real paradox: that something as explosive as sexual excitement can nevertheless become a matter of habit, But then that applies to all our pleasures. We discover some new product in the supermarket, and become addicted to it. Then our tastebuds become accustomed to its flavour, and or interest fades. In the same way a honeymoon couple may find an excuse to hurry off to the bedroom half a dozen times a day; but after a month or so sex has taken its place among the many routines of their lives. They still enjoy it, but it no longer has quite the same power to excite the imagination. Sex, like every other pleasure, can become mechanical.

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p. 14
5 months 3 weeks ago

But it is not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions: since the Comets range over all parts of the heavens, in very eccentric orbits. For by that kind of motion they pass easily through the orbs of the Planets, and with great rapidity; and in their aphelions, where they move the slowest, and are detain'd the longest, they recede to the greatest distances from each other, and thence suffer the least disturbance from their mutual attractions.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, Thou must, The youth replies, I can.

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Voluntaries, st. 3
5 months 2 weeks ago

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.

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Truth of Intercourse.
4 months 1 week ago

Let us greedily enjoy our friends, because we do not know how long this privilege will be ours.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

But the man is a humbug - a vulgar, shallow, self-satisfied mind, absolutely inaccessible to the complexities and delicacies of the real world. He has the journalist's air of being a specialist in everything, of taking in all points of view and being always on the side of the angels: he merely annoys a reader who has the least experience of knowing things, of what knowing is like. There is not two pence worth of real thought or real nobility in him. But he isn't dull.

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Part of a diary entry dated "Wednesday-Wednesday 9-16 July", 1924, regarding Thomas Babington Macaulay
6 months 2 weeks ago

Verily I say unto you, If ye have faith, and doubt not, ye shall not only do this which is done to the fig tree, but also if ye shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; it shall be done.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

All ages before ours believed in gods in some form or other. Only an unparalleled impoverishment in symbolism could enable us to rediscover the gods as psychic factors, which is to say, as archetypes of the unconscious. No doubt this discovery is hardly credible as yet.

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p. 72

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