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4 months 4 weeks ago

The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet. Where they overlap, it is in every point of the overlap.

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10 months 1 week ago

They are trying as directly as possible to sell you experiences, i.e. what you are able to do with the car, not the car as a product itself. An extreme example of this is this existing economic marketing concept, which basically evaluates the value of you as a potential consumer of your own life. Like how much are you worth, in the sense of all you will spend to buy back your own life as a certain quality life. You will spend so much in doctors, so much in beauty, so much in transcendental meditation, so much for music, and so on. What you are buying is a certain image and practice of your life. So what is your market potential, as a buyer of your own life in this sense?

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4 months 3 days ago

One of the great American tragedies is to have participated in a just war. It's been possible for politicians and movie-makers to encourage us we're always good guys. The Second World War absolutely had to be fought. I wouldn't have missed it for the world. But we never talk about the people we kill. This is never spoken of.

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Interviewed by Roger Friedman, "God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut", FoxNews.com
6 months 1 day ago

The original scriptures of most religions are poetical and unsystematic. Theology, which generally takes the form of a reasoned commentary on the parables and aphorisms of the scriptures, tends to make its appearance at a later stage of religious history. The Bhagavad-Gita occupies an intermediate position between scripture and theology; for it combines the poetical qualities of the first with the clear-cut methodicalness of the second... one of the clearest and most comprehensive summaries of the Perennial Philosophy ever to have been made. Hence its enduring value, not only for Indians, but for all mankind.

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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
3 months 4 weeks ago

Color is not so much a visual as a tactile medium.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

The Pythagoreans made kindness to beasts a training in humanity and pity.

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3, 20, 7
5 months 6 days ago

For the first time in sixty years, the priests, the old aristocracy and the people met in a common sentiment-a feeling of revenge, it is true, and not of affection; but even that is a great thing in politics, where a community of hatred is almost always the foundation of friendships.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

The lot assigned to every man is suited to him, and suits him to itself.

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III, 4
3 months 4 weeks ago

War has become the environment of our time if only because it is an accelerated form of innovation and education.

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(p. 381)
4 months 2 weeks ago

Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think it properly. The jargon takes over this task.

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p. 9
1 month 4 weeks ago

Everything harmonizes with me, which is harmonious to thee, O Universe. Nothing for me is too early or too late, which is in due time for thee. There is one light of the sun, though it is interrupted by walls, mountains and infinite other things. There is one common substance, though it is distributed among countless bodies which have their several qualities. There is one soul, though it is distributed among several natures and individual limitations. There is one intelligent soul, though it seems to be divided.

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XII, 30
5 months 6 days ago

The First thing that strikes a traveler in the United States is the innumerable multitude of those who seek to emerge from their original condition; and the second is the rarity of lofty ambition to be observed in the midst of the universally ambitious stir of society. No Americans are devoid of a yearning desire to rise, but hardly any appear to entertain hopes of great magnitude or to pursue very lofty aims. All are constantly seeking to acquire property, power, and reputation.

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Book Three, Chapter XIX.
6 months 4 weeks ago

For those of us who have been thrown into hell, mysterious melodies and the torturing images of a vanished beauty will always bring us, in the midst of crime and folly, the echo of that harmonious insurrection which bears witness, throughout the centuries, to the greatness of humanity.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

On fact, the whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices.

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Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact. Pt. III, Form; § 30: "The average modified in the direction of pleasure.", p. 125
6 months 2 days ago

Every man is a new method.

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"The Natural History of Intellect", p. 28
1 month 4 weeks ago

The span we live is small-small as the corner of the earth in which we live it. Small as even the greatest renown, passed from mouth to mouth by short-lived stick figures, ignorant alike of themselves and those long dead.

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(Hays translation) III, 10
6 months 5 days ago

The real and effectual discipline which is exercised over a workman is that of his customers. It is the fear of losing their employment which restrains his frauds and corrects his negligence.

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Chapter X, Part II.
2 months 3 weeks ago

Normal science, the puzzle-solving activity we have just examined, is a highly cumulative enterprise, eminently successful in its aim, the steady extension of the scope and precision of scientific knowledge. In all these respects it fits with great precision the most usual image of scientific work. Yet one standard product of the scientific enterprise is missing. Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none.

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p. 52
6 months 4 days ago

Truly, if the preservation of all mankind, as much as in him lies, were every one's persuasion, as indeed it is every one's duty, and the true principle to regulate our religion, politicks and morality by, the world would be much quieter, and better natur'd than it is.

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Sec. 116
5 months 2 days ago

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

But in fact there is no circle at all in the formulation of our question. Beings can be determined in their being without the explicit concept of the meaning of being having to be already available. If this were not so there could not have been as yet any ontological knowledge. And prob­ably no one would deny the factual existence of such knowledge. It is true that "being" is "presupposed" in all previous ontology, but not as an available concept-not as the sort of thing we are seeking.

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Introduction: The Exposition of the Question of the Meaning of Being (Stambaugh translation)
2 months 2 weeks ago

Men do not care how nobly they live, but only how long, although it is within the reach of every man to live nobly, but within no man's power to live long.

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Line 17.
3 months 3 weeks ago

Sanity itself is a kind of convention.

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The Hunter's Family
6 months 2 days ago

I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.

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Quoted in Library of Living Philosophers: The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, 1944
5 months 1 day ago

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts!

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Ch. 8, Humanity
4 months 2 weeks ago

The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition: content, ideological schema, the blurring of contradictions-these are repeated, but the superficial forms are varied: always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.

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Modern, in The Pleasure of the Text
2 months 2 weeks ago

The cause of anger is the belief that we are injured; this belief, therefore, should not be lightly entertained. We ought not to fly into a rage even when the injury appears to be open and distinct: for some false things bear the semblance of truth. We should always allow some time to elapse, for time discloses the truth.

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De Ira (On Anger): Book 2, cap. 22, line 2 Alternate translation: Time discovers truth. (translator unknown).
2 months 1 day ago

I have often thought that nothing would do more extensive good at small expense than the establishment of a small circulating library in every county, to consist of a few well-chosen books, to be lent to the people of the country under regulations as would secure their safe return in due time.

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Letter to John Wyche
6 months 1 day ago

How you produce volume after volume the way you do is more than I can conceive. ...But you haven't to forge every sentence in the teeth of irreducible and stubborn facts as I do. It is like walking through the densest brush wood.

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Letter to Henry James (ca. 1890) as quoted by Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (2007) p. 297.
4 months 2 weeks ago

Error is the price we pay for progress.

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6 months 1 week ago

Merit is a work for the sake of which Christ gives rewards. But no such work is to be found, for Christ gives by promise. Just as if a prince should say to me, "Come to me in my castle, and I will give you a hundred florins." I do a work, certainly, in going to the castle, but the gift is not given me as the reward of my work in going, but because the prince promised it to me.

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p. 409
2 months 2 weeks ago

Fire tries gold, misfortune tries brave men.

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De Providentia (On Providence), 5.9, translated by Aubrey Stewart Alternate translation: Fire is the test of gold; adversity, of strong men. (translator unknown).
6 months 1 day ago

Then I dreamed that one day there was nothing but milk for them and the jailer said as he put down the pipkin:'Our relations with the cow are not delicate-as you can easily see if you imagine eating any of her other secretions.' ... John said, 'Thank heavens! Now at last I know that you are talking nonsense. You are trying to pretend that unlike things are like. You are trying to make us think that milk is the same sort of thing as sweat or dung.' 'And pray, what difference is there except by custom?''Are you a liar or only a fool, that you see no difference between that which Nature casts out as refuse and that which she stores up as food?'

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Pilgrim's Regress 49
2 months 2 weeks ago

It is true that every increase of knowledge may possibly render depravity more depraved, as well as it may increase the strength of virtue. It is in itself only power; and its value depends on its application.

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"Female Education" (review of Thomas Broadhurst, Advice to Young Ladies on the Improvement of Mind, 1808), in The Edinburgh Review, No. 30 (January 1810), p. 314
6 months 4 days ago

The society adopts neither rites nor priesthood, and it will never lose sight of the resolution not to advance any thing as a society inconvenient to any sect or sects, in any time or country, and under any government. It will be seen that it is so much the more easy for the society to keep within this circle, because, that the dogmas of the Theophilanthropists are those upon which all the sects have agreed, that their moral is.that upon which there has never been the least dissent; and that the name they have taken expresses the double end of all the sects, that of leading to the adoration of God and love of man.

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Introduction
6 months 3 weeks ago

The best people renounce all for one goal, the eternal fame of mortals; but most people stuff themselves like cattle. For what sense or understanding have they? They follow minstrels and take the multitude for a teacher, not knowing that many are bad and few good. For the best men choose one thing above all immortal glory among mortals; but the masses stuff themselves like cattle.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

...to the question whether or not the motion of the Earth in space can be made perceptible in terrestrial experiments. We have already remarked... that all attempts of this nature led to a negative result. Before the theory of relativity was put forward, it was difficult to become reconciled to this negative result.

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5 months 1 week ago

To keep our eyes open longer were but to set our Antipodes. The Huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia. But who can be drowsy at that hour which freed us from everlasting sleep? or have slumbering thoughts at that time, when sleep itself must end, and as some conjecture all shall awake again?

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Ch. 5
4 months 2 weeks ago

When I'm bored, my sense of values goes to sleep. But it's not dead, only asleep. A crisis can wake it up and make the world seem infinitely important and interesting. But what I need to learn is the trick of shaking them awake myself . . . And incidentally, another name for the sense of values is intelligence. A stupid person is a person whose values are narrow.

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p. 57
5 months 3 weeks ago

The way you use the word "God" does not show whom you mean - but, rather, what you mean.

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p. 50e
6 months 2 days ago

Sphere Music - Some sounds seem to reverberate along the plain, and then settle to earth again like dust; such are Noise, Discord, Jargon. But such only as spring heavenward, and I may catch from steeples and hilltops in their upward course, which are the more refined parts of the former, are the true sphere music - pure, unmixed music - in which no wail mingles.

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August 5, 1838
4 months 4 days ago

The world is not dialectical -- it is sworn to extremes, not to equilibrium, sworn to radical antagonism, not to reconciliation or synthesis. This is also the principle of evil.

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Jean Baudrillard in: Eldon Taylor What Does That Mean?: Exploring Mind, Meaning, and Mysteries, Hay House, Inc, 15 January 2010, p. 171
3 months 4 weeks ago

Although the medium is the message, the controls go beyond programming. The restraints are always directed to the "content," which is always another medium. The content of the press is literary statement, as the content of the book is speech, and the content of the movie is the novel. So the effects of radio are quite independent of its programming.

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(p. 267)
6 months 4 weeks ago

When the imagination sleeps, words are emptied of their meaning: a deaf population absent-mindedly registers the condemnation of a man. ... there is no other solution but to speak out and show the obscenity hidden under the verbal cloak.

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