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5 months 2 weeks ago

Every true thinker for himself is so far like a monarch; he is absolute, and recognises nobody above him. His judgments, like the decrees of a monarch, spring from his own sovereign power and proceed directly from himself. He takes as little notice of authority as a monarch does of a command; nothing is valid unless he has himself authorised it. On the other hand, those of vulgar minds, who are swayed by all kinds of current opinions, authorities, and prejudices, are like the people which in silence obey the law and commands.

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"Thinking for Oneself," H. Dirks, trans.
5 months 1 week ago

He sees as well as you do that courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions.

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Letter XXIX
6 months 3 days ago

It pertains to all men to know themselves and to learn self-control.

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4 months 4 days ago

Some would deny any legitimate use of the word God because it has been misused so much. Certainly it is the most burdened of all human words. Precisely for that reason it is the most imperishable and unavoidable. And how much weight has all erroneous talk about God's nature and works (although there never has been nor can be any such talk that is not erroneous) compared with the one truth that all men who have addressed God really meant him? For whoever pronounces the word God and really means Thou, addresses, no matter what his delusion, the true Thou of his life that cannot be restricted by any other and to whom he stands in a relationship that includes all others.

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3 months 1 week ago

People in new environments always produce the new preceptual modality without any difficulty or awareness of change. It is later that the psychic and social realignments baffle societies.

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ARTnews annual, Volume 31, Art Foundation, 1966, p. 56
4 months 6 days ago

For I came to cause division, with a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. 36 Indeed, a man's enemies will be those of his own household.

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10:35,36, New World Translation
4 months 2 weeks ago

Pass by us, and forgive us our happiness.

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Part 4, Chapter 5
1 month 2 weeks ago

All hopes and despairs vanish in the voracious, funneling whirlwind of God. God laughs, wails, kills, sets us on fire, and then leaves us in the middle of the way, charred embers. And I rejoice to feel between my temples, in the flicker of an eyelid, the beginning and the end of the world. I condense into a lightning moment the seeding, sprouting, blossoming, fructifying, and the disappearance of every tree, animal, man, star, and god. All Earth is a seed planted in the coils of my mind. Whatever struggles for numberless years to unfold and fructify in the dark womb of matter bursts in my head like a small and silent lightning flash. Ah! let us gaze intently on this lightning flash, let us hold it for a moment, let us arrange it into human speech. Let us transfix this momentary eternity which encloses everything, past and future, but without losing in the immobility of language any of its gigantic erotic whirling.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

We are always on stage, even when we are stabbed in earnest at the end.

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Act II.
1 month 1 week ago

If I solve my dispute with my neighbor by killing him, I have certainly solved the immediate dispute. If my neighbor was a scoundrel, then the world is no doubt better for his absence. But in killing my neighbor, though he may have been a terrible man who did not deserve to live, I have made myself a killer - and the life of my next neighbor is in greater peril than the life of the last. In making myself a killer I have destroyed the possibility of neighborhood.

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A Statement against the War in Vietnam
1 month 2 weeks ago

Some are whigs, liberals, democrats, call them what you please. Others are tories, serviles, aristocrats, &c. The latter fear the people, and wish to transfer all power to the higher classes of society; the former consider the people as the safest depository of power in the last resort; they cherish them therefore, and wish to leave in them all the powers to the exercise of which they are competent.

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Letter to William Short
3 months 2 weeks ago

The great event of this period, the great trauma, is this decline of strong referentials, these death pangs of the real and of the rational that open onto an age of simulation. Whereas so many generations, and particularly the last, lived in the march of history, in the euphoric or catastrophic expectation of a revolution-today one has the impression that history has retreated, leaving behind it an indifferent nebula, traversed by currents, but emptied of references. It is into this void that the phantasms of a past history recede, the panoply of events, ideologies, retro fashions-no longer so much because people believe in them or still place some hope in them, but simply to resurrect the period when at least there was history, at least there was violence (albeit fascist), when at least life and death were at stake.

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"History: A Retro Scenario," pp. 43-44
4 months 2 weeks ago

The blood of Jesus Christ can cover a multitude of sins, it seems to me.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Divinity reveals herself in all things... everything has Divinity latent within itself. For she enfolds and imparts herself even unto the smallest beings, and from the smallest beings, according to their capacity. Without her presence nothing would have being, because she is the essence of the existence of the first unto the last being.

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As translated by Arthur Imerti
4 months 1 week ago

The lover who kills himself for a girl has an experience which is more complete and much more profound than the hero who overturns the world.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

My education, which was wholly his work, had been conducted without any regard to the possibility of its ending in this result; and I saw no use in giving him the pain of thinking that his plans had failed, when the failure was probably irremediable, and, at all events, beyond the power of his remedies. Of other friends, I had at that time none to whom I had any hope of making my condition intelligible. It was however abundantly intelligible to myself; and the more I dwelt upon it, the more hopeless it appeared.

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(p. 135)
4 months 4 days ago

You do not attain to knowledge by remaining on the shore and watching the foaming waves, you must make the venture and cast yourself in, you must swim, alert and with all your force, even if a moment comes when you think you are losing consciousness; in this way, and in no other, do you reach anthropological insight.

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p. 148
5 months 1 week ago

The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

It is quality rather than quantity that matters.

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Line 1
2 months 3 weeks ago

All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography.

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On the autobiographical nature of his films, in The Atlantic
2 months 4 weeks ago

Even in the important matter of cranial capacity, Men differ more widely from one another than they do from the Apes; while the lowest Apes differ as much, in proportion, from the highest, as the latter does from Man.

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Ch.2, p. 95
2 months 3 weeks ago

On this showing, the nature of the breakdowns of civilizations can be summed up in three points: a failure of creative power in the minority, an answering withdrawal of mimesis on the part of the majority, and a consequent loss of social unity in the society as a whole.

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Vol. 4 (1955 ), part B, p. 6
5 months 3 weeks ago

The most disadvantageous peace is better than the most just war.

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Adagia, 1508
4 months 6 days ago

And whereas many men, by accident unevitable, become unable to maintain themselves by their labour; they ought not to be left to the Charity of private persons; but to be provided for, (as far-forth as the necessities of Nature require,) by the Lawes of the Common-wealth. For as it is Unchariablenesse in any man, to neglect the impotent; so it is in the Soveraign of a Common-wealth, to expose them to the hazard of such uncertain Charity.

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The Second Part, Chapter 30, p. 181
5 months 1 week ago

Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

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Part 3, Chapter 10
4 months 1 week ago

Objection to scientific knowledge: this world doesn't deserve to be known.

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6 months 3 days ago

The Master said, "He who exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared to the north polar star, which keeps its place and all the stars turn towards it."

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Go into the London Stock Exchange - a more respectable place than many a court - and you will see representatives from all nations gathered together for the utility of men. Here Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt. Here the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist and the Anglican accepts a promise from the Quaker.

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Letters on England, letter 6, "On the Presbyterians" as quoted in Trust and Tolerance, Richard H. Dees, Routledge, London and New York, (2004) p. 92, published first in English in 1733.
6 months 3 days ago

To throw oneself into strange teachings is quite dangerous.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

It is time to be old, To take in sail: - The god of bounds, Who sets to seas a shore, Came to me in his fatal rounds, And said: 'No more!

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Terminus
5 months 1 week ago

Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?

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Discipline and Punish (1977) as translated by Alan Sheridan, p. 228
1 month 2 weeks ago

I am for freedom of religion, & against all maneuvres to bring about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another, for freedom of the press, and against all violations of the Constitution to silence by force and not by reason the complaints or criticisms, just or unjust, of our citizens against the conduct of their agents.

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Letter to Elbridge Gerry (26 January 1799); published in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial Edition 20 Vols., Washington, D.C., 1903-04, Volume 10, p. 78
4 months 2 weeks ago

Only a very bad theologian would confuse the certainty that follows revelation with the truths that are revealed. They are entirely different things.

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Apology for the Abbé de Prades
6 months 3 days ago

Since, of desires some are natural and necessary; others natural, but not necessary; and others neither natural nor necessary, but the offspring of false judgment; it must be the office of temperance to gratify the first class, as far as nature requires: to restrain the second within the bounds of moderation; and, as to the third, resolutely to oppose, and, if possible, entirely repress them.

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4 months 6 days ago

We suppose, it would seem, that concepts grow in the individual mind like leaves on a tree, and we think to discover their nature by studying their growth; we seek to define them psychologically, in terms of the human mind. But this account makes everything subjective, and if we follow it through to the end, does away with truth. What is known as the history of concepts is really a history either of our knowledge of concepts or of the meanings of words.

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Translation J. L. Austin (Oxford, 1950) as quoted by Stephen Toulmin, Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts (1972) Vol. 1, p. 56.
6 months 1 week ago

Yes, everyone sleeps at that hour, and this is reassuring, since the great longing of an unquiet heart is to possess constantly and consciously the loved one...

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1 month 1 week ago

It's not about telling people how to be, outside of supporting ideals that teach us what to avoid.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Eat not the heart.

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Symbol 30
6 months 2 weeks ago

People are scarcely aware that it is a slavery they are creating; they forget this in their zeal to make people free by overthrowing dominions. They are scarcely aware that it is slavery; how could it be possible to be a slave in relation to equals?

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3 months 1 week ago

Since Sputnik there is no Nature. Nature is an item contained in a man-made environment of satellites and information.

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1 month 1 week ago

What need is there of suspicious fear, since it is in thy power to inquire what ought to be done? And if thy seest clear, go by this way content, without turning back: but if thy dost not see clear, stop and take the best advisers. But if any other things oppose thee, go on according to thy powers with due consideration, keeping to that which appears to be just. For it is best to reach this object, and if thou dost fail, let thy failure be in attempting this. He who follows reason in all things is both tranquil and active at the same time, and also cheerful and collected.

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X, 12
3 months 4 weeks ago

If philosophy is still necessary, it is so only in the way it has been from time immemorial: as critique, as resistance to the expanding heteronomy, even if only as thought's powerless attempt to remain its own master and to convict of untruth, by their own criteria, both a fabricated mythology and a conniving, resigned acquiescence. ... It is incumbent upon philosophy ... to provide a refuge for freedom. Not that there is any hope that it could break the political tendencies that are throttling freedom throughout the world both from within and without and whose violence permeates the very fabric of philosophical argumentation.

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p. 10
1 month 4 weeks ago

It was a great deed to conquer Carthage, but a greater deed to conquer death.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear.

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Attributed to Russell in M. Kumar Dictionary of Quotations, p. 76, but actually said by Marshal Lannes, according to The London Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences (1824), p. 664
6 months 2 weeks ago

The roots of education ... are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

The English never abolish anything. They put it in cold storage.

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Ch. 36, January 19, 1945.
3 months 1 week ago

The percept takes priority of the concept.

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Letter to Edward T. Hall, 1971, Letters of Marshall McLuhan, p. 397
3 months 6 days ago

It's hard for writers to get on with their work if they are convinced that they owe a concrete debt to experience and cannot allow themselves the privilege of ranging freely through social classes and professional specialties. A certain pride in their own experience, perhaps a sense of the property rights of others in their experience, holds them back.

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Facts That Put Fancy to Flight (1962), p. 68
4 months 6 days ago

Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When her branch is yet tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is near: So ye in like manner, when ye shall see these things come to pass, know that it is nigh, even at the doors. Verily I say unto you, that this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done. Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass away. But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father. Take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is. For the Son of Man is as a man taking a far journey, who left his house, and gave authority to his servants, and to every man his work, and commanded the porter to watch. Watch ye therefore: for ye know not when the master of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cockcrowing, or in the morning: Lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping. And what I say unto you I say unto all, Watch.

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13:28-37 (KJV)
5 months 2 weeks ago

I greatly doubt whether the men who become pirate chiefs are those who are filled with retrospective terror of their fathers, or whether Napoleon, at Austerlitz, really felt that he was getting even with Madame Mère. I know nothing of the mother of Attila, but I rather suspect that she spoilt the little darling, who subsequently found the world irritating because it sometimes resisted his whims.

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Ch. 2: Leaders and Followers

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