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5 months 4 weeks ago

We can come to look upon the deaths of our enemies with as much regret as we feel for those of our friends, namely, when we miss their existence as witnesses to our success.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 26, sect. 311a
1 month 3 weeks ago

Professional standards, the standards of ambition and selfishness, are always sliding downward toward expense, ostentation, and mediocrity. They tend always to narrow the ground of judgment. But amateur standards, the standards of love, are always straining upward toward the humble and the best. They enlarge the ground of judgment. The context of love is the world.

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The Responsibility of the Poet
3 months 2 weeks ago

I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history if I can succeed in placing before the English of the nineteenth century a true picture of the life of their ancestors.

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Vol. I, ch. 1
5 months 3 weeks ago

People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

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Worship
5 months 2 weeks ago

To have a great man for an intimate friend seems pleasant to those who have never tried it; those who have, fear it.

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Book I, epistle xviii, line 86
4 months 3 days ago

Nationality, class, race, religion, culture....subgroup identity particularity does not supersede universality and humanity.

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6 months ago

Even if there never have been actions arising from such pure sources, what is at issue here is not whether this or that happened; that, instead, reason by itself and independently of all appearances commands what ought to happen; that, accordingly, actions of which the world has perhaps so far given no example, and whose very practicability might be very much doubted by one who bases everything on experience, are still inflexibly commanded by reason ... because ... duty ... lies, prior to all experience, in the idea of a reason determing the will by means of apriori grounds.

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4 months 1 week ago

Barbusse has shown us that the Outsider is a man who cannot live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeois, accepting what he sees and touches as reality.

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Chapter one, The Country of the Blind
2 months 3 weeks ago

Love, in spite of the romantics, is not self-sustaining; it endures only when the lovers love many things together, and not merely each other.

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Ch. XIV: "Love in the Great Society", §6, pp. 308-309
4 months 2 weeks ago

Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectifications of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid.

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A Retrospective Glance at the Lifework of a Master of Books
2 months 1 week ago

Nothing becomes so offensive so quickly as grief. When fresh it finds someone to console it, but when it becomes chronic, it is ridiculed and rightly.

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Line 13.
5 months 2 weeks ago

In peace, as a wise man, he should make suitable preparation for war.

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Book II, satire ii, line 111
4 months 3 weeks ago

Life is a disease of the spirit; a working incited by Passion. Rest is peculiar to the spirit.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

The second office of the government is honorable and easy, the first is but a splendid misery.

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Letter to Elbridge Gerry
5 months 3 weeks ago

Things added to things, as statistics, civil history, are inventories. Things used as language are inexhaustibly attractive.

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Plato; or, The Philosopher
5 months 4 weeks ago

I care not how affluent some may be, provided that none be miserable in consequence of it. But it is impossible to enjoy affluence with the felicity it is capable of being enjoyed, while so much misery is mingled in the scene.

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Means by Which the Fund Is to Be Created
5 months 3 weeks ago

So far as living instruments of labour are concerned, for instance horses, their reproduction is timed by nature itself. Their average lifetime as instruments of labour is determined by the laws of nature. As soon as this term has expired they must be replaced by new ones. A horse cannot be replaced piecemeal; it must be replaced by another horse.

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Vol. II, Ch. VIII, p. 174.
5 months 3 weeks ago

It is easy to see that the existing generation are conspiring with a beneficence, which, in its working for coming generations, sacrifices the passing one, which infatuates the most selfish men to act against their private interest for the public welfare. We build railroads, we know not for what or for whom; but one thing is certain, that we who build will receive the very smallest share of benefit. Benefit will accrue; they are essential to the country, but that will be felt not until we are no longer countrymen. We do the like in all matters: - 'Man's heart the Almighty to the Future setBy secret and inviolable springs.'

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2 months 1 week ago

In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.

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As quoted in The Observer
2 months 3 weeks ago

This [experimentation] is the custom-and properly so-in those sciences where mathematical demonstrations are applied to natural phenomena, as is seen in the case of perspective, astronomy, mechanics, music, and others where the principles, once established by well-chosen experiments, become the foundations of the entire superstructure.

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Salviati, Third Day. Change of Position
2 months 5 days ago

For a parallel to the lesson of atomic theory regarding the limited applicability of such customary idealizations, we must in fact turn to quite other branches of science, such as psychology, or even to that kind of epistemological problems with which already thinkers like Buddha and Lao Tzu have been confronted, when trying to harmonize our position as spectators and actors in the great drama of existence.

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Speech on quantum theory at Celebrazione del Secondo Centenario della Nascita di Luigi Galvani, Bologna, Italy
5 months 3 weeks ago

In its beginnings, the credit system sneaks in as a modest helper of accumulation and draws by invisible threads the money resources scattered all over the surface of society into the hands of individual or associated capitalists. But soon it becomes a new and formidable weapon in the competitive struggle, and finally it transforms itself into an immense social mechanism for the centralisation of capitals.

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Vol. I, Ch. 25, Section 2, pg. 687.
2 months 5 days ago

Even the mathematical framework helps nothing, I would first like to understand how Nature avoids the contradictions.

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(1927) Quoted in Werner Heisenberg: Die Sprache der Atome (2010) by H. Rechenberg, p. 564.

Much more naturally than you do: because flight is a much more natural consequence of fear than of hate. He doesn't flee men because he hates them, but because he is afraid of them. He doesn't flee them in order to harm them, but to try o escape the harm they wish to do to him. They, on the contrary, don't seek him through friendship, but through hate. They seek him and he flees from them just as in the wilderness of Africa, where there are few men and many tigers, the men flee the tigers, the men flee the tigers, and the tigers seek the men.

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Second Dialogue; translated by Judith R. Bush, Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters
4 months 3 weeks ago

What will be the influence of communist society on the family? It will transform the relations between the sexes into a purely private matter which concerns only the persons involved and into which society has no occasion to intervene. It can do this since it does away with private property and educates children on a communal basis, and in this way removes the two bases of traditional marriage - the dependence rooted in private property, of the women on the man, and of the children on the parents.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.

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February 12, 1851; cf. the remark of John Wilkes about Samuel Johnson, "Liberty is as ridiculous in his mouth as Religion in mine" (20 March 1778), quoted in Boswell's Life of Johnson, 1791
4 months 2 weeks ago

Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness.

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3:15 (KJV) Said to John the Baptist.
4 months 4 weeks ago

There are few with whom I can communicate so freely as with Pope. But Pope cannot bear every truth. He has a timidity which hinders the full exertion of his faculties, almost as effectually as bigotry cramps those of the general herd of mankind. But whoever is a genuine follower of truth keeps his eye steady upon his guide, indifferent whither he is led, provided that she is the leader. And, my Lord, if it may be properly considered, it were infinitely better to remain possessed by the whole legion of vulgar mistakes, than to reject some, and, at the same time, to retain a fondness for others altogether as absurd and irrational. The first has at least a consistency, that makes a man, however erroneously, uniform at least; but the latter way of proceeding is such an inconsistent chimera and jumble of philosophy and vulgar prejudice, that hardly anything more ridiculous can be conceived.

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5 months 1 week ago

Again, Amyclas the Heracleotean, one of Plato's familiars, and Menæchmus, the disciple, indeed, of Eudoxus, but conversant with Plato, and his brother Dinostratus, rendered the whole of geometry as yet more perfect. But Theudius, the Magnian, appears to have excelled, as well in mathematical disciplines, as in the rest of philosophy. For he constructed elements egregiously, and rendered many particulars more universal. Besides, Cyzicinus the Athenian, flourished at the same period, and became illustrious in other mathematical disciplines, but especially in geometry. These, therefore, resorted by turns to the Academy, and employed themselves in proposing common questions.

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Ch. IV.
4 months 3 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 3 weeks ago

Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact.

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6 months 5 days ago

For the history of the centuries that have passed since the birth of Christ nowhere reveals conditions like those of the present. There has never been such building and planting in the world. There has never been such gluttonous and varied eating and drinking as now. Wearing apparel has reached its limit in costliness. Who has ever heard of such commerce as now encircles the earth? There have arisen all kinds of art and sculpture, embroidery and engraving, the like of which has not been seen during the whole Christian era. In addition men are so delving into the mysteries of things that today a boy of twenty knows more than twenty doctors formerly knew.

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Sermon for the Second Sunday in Advent, Luke 21:25-36 (1522), as translated in The Precious and Sacred Writings of Martin Luther (1905) edited by John Nicholas Lenker
1 month 3 weeks ago

Our intellectual development in the field of science has outstripped our human development in the field of character.

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BBC Radio National Lecture (1938), quoted in Unitarian Universalist Biographical Dictionary.
6 months ago

Religion should be .... successively freed from all statutes based on history, and one purely moral religion rule over all, in order that God might be all in all. The veil must fall. The leading-string of sacred tradition with all its appendices becomes by degrees useless, and at last a fetter ... The humiliating difference between laymen and clergymen must disappear, and equality spring from true liberty. All this, however, must not be expected from an exterior revolution, which acts violently, and depends upon fortune In the principle of pure moral religion, which is a sort of divine revelation constantly taking place in the soul of man, must be sought the ground for a passage to the new order of things, which will be accomplished by slow and successive reforms.

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As quoted in German Thought, From The Seven Years' War To Goethe's Death : Six Lectures (1880) by Karl Hillebrand, p. 208
5 months 4 weeks ago

Where danger shews it self, apprehension cannot, without stupidity, be wanting; where danger is, sense of danger should be; and so much fear as should keep us awake, and excite our attention, industry, and vigour; but not to disturb the calm use of our reason, nor hinder the execution of what that dictates.

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Sec. 115
6 months 6 days ago

Riches are a good handmaid, but the worst mistress.

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De Augmentis Scientiarum, Book II, "Antitheta"
5 months 3 weeks ago

What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body; - show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and the shop, the plough, and the ledger, referred to the like cause by which light undulates and poets sing; - and the world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order; there is no trifle; there is no puzzle; but one design unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench.

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par. 40
2 months 1 week ago

Bacon, Locke, Descartes, Hume, and all the others knew they were giving rights to vulgarity. But in so doing-in addition to caring for man's well-being-they were providing rights for themselves.

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"Commerce and Culture," p. 289.
4 months 4 weeks ago

Being at one is god-like and good, but human, too human, the mania Which insists there is only the One, one country, one truth, and one way.

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"The Root of All Evil" as translated by Michael Hamburger
4 months 3 weeks ago

Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.

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2 months 1 week ago

The most profound reason... why the metropolis conduces to the urge for the most individual personal existence... appears to me to be the following: the development of modern culture is characterized by the preponderance of what one may call the "objective spirit" over the "subjective spirit."

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p. 421 as cited in: Kenneth Allan (2009) Explorations in Classical Sociological Theory: Seeing the Social World. p. 212
4 months ago

Where conscious subjectivity is concerned, there is no distinction between the observation and the thing observed.

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The Rediscovery of the Mind, p. 97, MIT Press (1992) ISBN 0-262-69154-X.
5 months 4 weeks ago

To understand the actual world as it is, not as we should wish it to be, is the beginning of wisdom.

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4 months 1 week ago

The characteristic of the really great writer is the ability of his mind to to suddenly leap beyond his ordinary human values, into sudden perception of universal values.

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p. 33
4 months 2 weeks ago

In which the technical apparatus of production and distribution (with an increasing sector of automation) functions, not as the sum-total of mere instruments which can be isolated from their social and political effects, but rather as a system which determines a priori the product of the apparatus as well as the operations of servicing and extending it. In this society, the productive apparatus tends to become totalitarian to the extent to which it determines not only the socially needed occupations, skills, and attitudes, but also individual needs and aspirations. It thus obliterates the Opposition between the private and public existence, between individual and social needs.

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p. xlvii
4 months 3 weeks ago

Lack of originality, everywhere, all over the world, from time immemorial, has always been considered the foremost quality and the recommendation of the active, efficient and practical man...

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Part 3, Chapter ?

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