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3 months 5 days ago

I have always done things in my own way, which is at once the way that comes naturally to me, that is honest, sincere, genuine, and unforced; but also perverse, although you must remember that this word means per (through) verse (poetry), out-of-the-way and wayward, which is surely towards the way, and that to be queer-to "follow your own weird"-is wholeheartedly to accept your karma, or fate, or destiny, and thus to be odd in the service of God, "whose service," as the Anglican Book of Common Prayer declares, "is perfect freedom."

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p. xiii
4 months 3 weeks ago

It is a very hard undertaking to seek to please everybody.

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Maxim 675
6 months 3 weeks ago

A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the written words.

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Refusing the Nobel Prize, New York Times
5 months 1 week ago

From that point, my universe went on crumbling; new cracks appeared all the time. I could see that the pleasant securities of childhood, all of those warm little human emotions, all of those trivial aims and purposes that we allow to rule our lives, were an illusion. We were like sheep munching grass, unaware that the butcher's lorry is already on its way. I got used to living with a deep, underlying feeling of uncertainty that no one around me seemed to share. It was rather like living on death row.

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pp. 12-13
5 months 1 week ago

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.

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In immediate self-consciousness the simple ego is absolute object, which, however, is for us or in itself absolute mediation, and has as its essential moment substantial and solid independence. The dissolution of that simple unity is the result of the first experience; through this there is posited a pure self-consciousness, and a consciousness which is not purely for itself, but for another, i.e. as an existent consciousness, consciousness in the form and shape of thinghood. Both moments are essential, since, in the first instance, they are unlike and opposed, and their reflexion into unity has not yet come to light, they stand as two opposed forms or modes of consciousness. The one is independent whose essential nature is to be for itself, the other is dependent whose essence is life or existence for another. The former is the Master, or Lord, the latter is the Bondsman.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

The masses are our masters; and for every one who looks facts in the face his existence has become dependent on them, so that the thought of them must control his doings, his cares, and his duties. Even an articulated mass always tends to become unspiritual and inhuman. It is life without existence, superstitions without faith. It may stamp all flat; it is disinclined to tolerate independence and greatness, but prone to constrain people to become as automatic as ants.

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5 months 1 week ago

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

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Talking, in A Lover's Discourse
6 months 3 weeks ago

Of course a war is entertaining. The immediate fear and suffering of the humans is a legitimate and pleasing refreshment for our myriads of toiling workers. But what permanent good does it do us unless we make use of it for bringing souls to Our Father Below? When I see the temporal suffering of humans who finally escape us, I feel as if I had been allowed to taste the first course of a rich banquet and then denied all the rest. It is worse than not to have tasted it at all. The Enemy, true to His barbarous methods of warfare, allows us to see the short misery of His favourites only to tantalize and torment us - to mock the incessant hunger, which, during this present phase of great conflict, His blockade is admittedly imposing.

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Letter V
7 months 3 weeks ago

If, then, in the sphere of action there is some one end which we desire for its own sake, and for the sake of which we desire every thing else; and if we do not choose every thing for the sake of something else, for this would go on without limit, and our desire would be idle and futile, it is clear that this must be the supreme good, and the best thing of all.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

What is all Knowledge too but recorded Experience, and a product of History; of which, therefore, Reasoning and Belief, no less than Action and Passion, are essential materials?

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Carlyle, Essays, On History. Quote reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 419-23.
7 months 2 weeks ago

It is only he, possessed of all sagely qualities that can exist under heaven, who shows himself quick in apprehension, clear in discernment, of far-reaching intelligence, and all-embracing knowledge, fitted to exercise rule; magnanimous, generous, benign, and mild, fitted to exercise forbearance; impulsive, energetic, firm, and enduring, fitted to maintain a firm hold; self-adjusted, grave, never swerving from the Mean, and correct, fitted to command reverence; accomplished, distinctive, concentrative, and searching, fitted to exercise discrimination. All-embracing is he and vast, deep and active as a fountain, sending forth in their due season his virtues. All-embracing and vast, he is like Heaven. Deep and active as a fountain, he is like the abyss. He is seen, and the people all reverence him; he speaks, and the people all believe him; he acts, and the people all are pleased with him.

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6 months 5 days ago

The wind is blowing, adore the wind.

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Symbol 8
4 months 3 weeks ago

No one knows what he can do till he tries.

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Maxim 786
5 months 2 weeks ago

Existential envy which is directed against the other person's very nature, is the strongest source of ressentiment. It is as if it whispers continually: "I can forgive everything, but not that you are- that you are what you are-that I am not what you are-indeed that I am not you." This form of envy strips the opponent of his very existence, for this existence as such is felt to be a "pressure," a "reproach," and an unbearable humiliation. In the lives of great men there are always critical periods of instability, in which they alternately envy and try to love those whose merits they cannot but esteem. Only gradually, one of these attitudes will predominate. Here lies the meaning of Goethe's reflection that "against another's great merits, there is no remedy but love."

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L. Coser, trans. (1973), pp. 52-53
3 months 2 weeks ago

Man is a tool-using animal...Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.

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Bk. I, ch. 5.
4 months 3 weeks ago

The Quakers sent me books, from which I learnt how they had, years ago, established beyond doubt the duty for a Christian of fulfilling the command of non-resistance to evil by force, and had exposed the error of the Church's teaching in allowing war and capital punishment.

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Chapter I, The Doctrine of Non-resistance to Evil by Force has been Professed by a Minority of Men from the Very Foundation of Christianity
5 months 6 days ago

By incestuous symbiosis is meant the tendency to stay tied to the mother and to her equivalents - blood, family, tribe - to fly from the unbearable weight of responsibility, of freedom, of awareness, and to be protected and loved in a state of certainty dependence that the individual pays for with the ceasing of his own human development.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Now, that we do not really know of what sort each thing is, or is not, has often been shown.

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4 months 1 day ago

The core of the belief in progress is that human values and goals converge in parallel with our increasing knowledge. The twentieth century shows the contrary. Human beings use the power of scientific knowledge to assert and defend the values and goals they already have. New technologies can be used to alleviate suffering and enhance freedom. They can, and will, also be used to wage war and strengthen tyranny. Science made possible the technologies that powered the industrial revolution. In the twentieth century, these technologies were used to implement state terror and genocide on an unprecedented scale. Ethics and politics do not advance in line with the growth of knowledge - not even in the long run.

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"Joseph Conrad, Our Contemporary," from Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions
6 months 2 weeks ago

Religion is, as it were, the calm bottom of the sea at its deepest point, which remains calm however high the waves on the surface may be.

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p. 53e
5 months 2 days ago

The physicist who states a law of nature with the aid of a mathematical formula is abstracting a real feature of a real material world, even if he has to speak of numbers, vectors, tensors, state-functions, or whatever to make the abstraction.

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"What is Mathematical Truth?"
7 months 2 days ago

Religion is not 'doctrinal knowledge,' but wisdom born of personal experience.

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Holborn, Hajo; A HISTORY OF MODERN GERMANY: The Reformation; 1959/1982 Princeton university Press
7 months 1 week ago

If you reject absolutely any single sensation without stopping to discriminate with respect to that which awaits confirmation between matter of opinion and that which is already present, whether in sensation or in feelings or in any immediate perception of the mind, you will throw into confusion even the rest of your sensations by your groundless belief and so you will be rejecting the standard of truth altogether. If in your ideas based upon opinion you hastily affirm as true all that awaits confirmation as well as that which does not, you will not escape error, as you will be maintaining complete ambiguity whenever it is a case of judging between right and wrong opinion.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

That is what is meant, I think by the allegation that it is good simply to be alive, even if one is undergoing terrible experiences. The situation is roughly this: There are elements which, if added to one's experience, make life better; there are other elements which, if added to one's experience, make life worse. But what remains when these are set aside is not merely neutral: it is emphatically positive. Therefore life is worth living even when the bad elements of experience are plentiful, and the good ones too meager to outweigh the bad ones on their own. The additional positive weight is supplied by experience itself, rather than by any of its contents.

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"Death", p. 2. This passage not present in the 1970 version (Nous, IV, no. 1), but present in the 1979 version.
3 months 2 weeks ago

The groups are not unified under any single authority but rather relate to each other in a network structure. Social forums, affinity groups, and other forms of democratic decision-making are the basis of the movements, and they manage to act together based on what they have in common. ... These globalization protest movements are obviously limited in many regards. First of all, although their vision and desire is global in scope, they have thus far only involved significant numbers in North America and Europe. Second, so long, as they remain merely protests movements, traveling from one summit meeting to the next, they will be incapable of becoming a foundational struggle and of articulating an alternative to social relations. These limitations may only be temporary obstacles, and the movements may discover ways to overcome them.

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86-87
5 months 4 weeks ago

I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all.

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Book Three, Chapter XXI.
6 months 3 weeks ago

What we really need the poet's and orator's help to keep alive in us is not, then, the common and gregarious courage which Robert Shaw showed when he marched with you, men of the Seventh Regiment. It is that more lonely courage which he showed when he dropped his warm commission in the glorious Second to head your dubious fortunes, negroes of the Fifty-fourth. That lonely kind of courage (civic courage as we call it in times of peace) is the kind of valor to which the monuments of nations should most of all be reared.

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Robert Gould Shaw: Oration upon the Unveiling of the Shaw Monument, 31 May 1897
4 months 1 day ago

There is no more consensus on what justice means than there is on the character of the good. If anything, there is less. Among the virtues, justice is one of the most shaped by convention. For that reason it is among the most changeable.

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'Modus Vivendi' (p.34)
5 months 1 week ago

Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labelled Utopian.

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"Socialism: Caught in the Political Trap", a lecture (c. 1912), published in Red Emma Speaks, Part 1 (1972) edited by Alix Kates Shulman

Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.

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C 33
4 months 3 weeks ago

People never remember but the computer never forgets.

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(p. 69)
6 months 3 weeks ago

This world is but canvas to our imaginations.

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2 weeks 4 days ago

Sometimes I just want to show that these guys are normal people. These quotes might seem boring, but they serve a contextual purpose. Bringing these guys down to eye level creates a practical, attainable context for philosophy. Maybe Elbert here is already at eye level...😁

See biography for Elbert Hubbard:
https://civilsimian.com/Elbert-Hubbard

Read Elbert Hubbard's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/295/content

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Religion, which should most distinguish us from the beasts, and ought most particularly elevate us, as rational creatures, above brutes, is that wherein men often appear most irrational, and more senseless than beasts.

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Book IV, Ch. 18
6 months 3 weeks ago

Thus, because Christian morals leave animals out of consideration ... therefore in philosophical morals they are of course at once outlawed; they are merely "things," simply means to ends of any sort; and so they are good for vivisection, for deer-stalking, bull-fights, horse-races, etc., and they may be whipped to death as they struggle along with heavy quarry carts. Shame on such a morality ... which fails to recognize the Eternal Reality immanent in everything that has life, and shining forth with inscrutable significance from all eyes that see the sun!

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Part II, Ch. VI, pp. 94-95
5 months 3 weeks ago

There is but one law for all, namely, that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity - the law of nature, and of nations.

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28 May 1794
3 months 5 days ago

Everyone has a religion, whether admitted or not, because it is impossible to be human without having some basic assumptions (or intuitions) about existence and the good life.

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p. 123
3 months 2 days ago

In a superior civilization, as, for example, that of the Indo-Aryans, the being who is without a characteristic form or caste (in the original meaning of the word), not even that of servant or shudra, would emerge as a pariah. In this respect America is a society of pariahs. There is a role for pariahs. It is to be subjected to beings whose form and internal laws are precisely defined. Instead the modern pariahs seek to become dominant themselves and to exercise their dominion over the entire world.

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American "Civilization"
2 months 3 weeks ago

What is my ruling faculty now to me? and of what nature am I now making it? and for what purpose am I now using it? is it void of understanding? is it loosed and rent asunder from social life? is it melted and mixed with the poor flesh so as to move together with it?

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X, 24
2 months 3 weeks ago

The human mind loves the bondage of words and is apt, when freed from one form of their tyranny, to set up another more oppressive than the last. The highest function of philosophy is to enforce the attitude of meditation and therewithal restrain the excessive volubility of the tongue. To us it seems that the reflective thinker wins his greatest victories when by what he says he compels us to recognise the relative insignificance of anything he can say. His task is not to capture Reality, but to free it from captivity.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

The great man is the one who does not lose his child's heart.

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Book 4, pt. 2, v. 12
6 months 2 weeks ago

Hear first the four roots of all things: shining Zeus, life-bringing Hera, Aidoneus, and Nestis, who wets with tears the mortal wellspring.

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fr. 6
7 months 3 weeks ago

A fire eater must eat fire even if he has to kindle it himself.

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7 months 1 week ago

It would be better if they [rulers] compelled the Jews to work for their living, as they do in parts of Italy, than that, living without occupation, they can grow rich only by usury .

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art. 2
4 months 2 weeks ago

Reading Decline of the West I learned that in Spengler's view ours was a Faustian civilization and that we, the Jews, were Magians, the survivors and representatives of an earlier type, totally incapable of comprehending the Faustian spirit that had created the great civilization of the West. ... What Magians were to Faustians, Faustians might very well be to Americans.

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Part I, p. 26
4 months 3 weeks ago

Although it is commonly supposed that war making is the specific activity of nations, the blind rage that motivates war destroys the very social bonds that make nations possible. Of course, it can fortify the nationalism of a nation, producing a provisional coherence bolstered by war and enmity, but it also erodes the social relations that make politics possible. The power of destruction unleashed by war breaks social ties and produces anger, revenge, and distrust ("embitterment") such that it becomes unclear whether reparation is possible, undermining not only those relations that may have been built in the past, but also the future possibility of peaceful coexistence.

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p. 154
7 months 3 weeks ago

I was brought up in the Christian religion, and although I can scarcely sanction all the improper attempts to gain the emancipation of woman, all paganlike reminiscences also seem foolish to me. My brief and simple opinion is that woman is certainly as good as man-period. Any more discursive elaboration of the difference between the sexes or deliberation on which sex is superior is an idle intellectual occupation for loafers and bachelors.

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