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7 months 2 weeks ago

History is mere Empiricism; it has only facts to communicate, and all its proofs are founded upon facts alone. To attempt to rise to Primeval History on this foundation of fact, or to argue by this means how such or such a thing might have been, and then to take for granted that it has been so in reality,is to stray beyond the limits of History, and produce an a priori History; just as the Philosophy of Nature, referred to in our preceding lecture, endeavoured to find an a priori Science of Physics.

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p. 140
4 months 3 weeks ago

All men and women have passions, natural desires and noble ambitions, and also a conscience; they have sex, hunger, fear, anger, and are subject to sickness, pain, suffering and death. Culture consists in bringing about the expression of these passions and desires in harmony.

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p. 20
7 months 1 week ago

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.

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As quoted in Quote, Unquote‎ (1989) by Jonathan Williams, p. 136
7 months 2 weeks ago

But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the press. It is, therefore, the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions.

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Letter to Judge John Tyler (June 28, 1804); in: The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial Edition (ME) (Lipscomb and Bergh, editors), 20 Vols., Washington, D.C., 1903-04, Volume 11, page 33
4 months 5 days ago

As an eminent pioneer in the realm of high frequency currents... I congratulate you on the great successes of your life's work.

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5 months 1 week ago

What is objective must be common to many minds and consequently transmissible from one to the other, and as this transmission can only come about by... discourse... we are even forced to conclude: no discourse no objectivity.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

"Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality," says one of my favorite Byzantine mystics. I did this when a child; I do it now as well in the most creative moments of my life.

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"The Son", Ch. 4, p. 45
6 months 4 weeks ago

Some will ask, what about weak natures, must they not be protected? Yes, but to be able to do that, it will be necessary to realize that education of children is not synonymous with herdlike drilling and training. If education should really mean anything at all, it must insist upon the free growth and development of the innate forces and tendencies of the child. In this way alone can we hope for the free individual and eventually also for a free community, which shall make interference and coercion of human growth impossible.

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8 months 1 week ago

The meaning of a question is the method of answering it: then what is the meaning of 'Do two men really mean the same by the word "white"?' Tell me how you are searching, and I will tell you what you are searching for.

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Philosophical Remarks (1991), Part III (27), pp.66-67
3 weeks ago

This is an important supporting quote. He constantly refers to this idea with his quotes and understanding this is the difference between half understanding what he's talking about and fully understanding.

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9 months ago

By protracting life, we do not deduct one jot from the duration of death.

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Book III, lines 1087-1088 (tr. Rouse)
5 months 1 week ago

The so-called communism of capital, that is, its drive toward an ever more extensive socialization of labor, points ambiguously toward the communism of the multitude.

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9 months 2 weeks ago

What the age needs is not a genius - it has had geniuses enough, but a martyr, who in order to teach men to obey would himself be obedient unto death. What the age needs is awakening. And therefore someday, not only my writings but my whole life, all the intriguing mystery of the machine will be studied and studied. I never forget how God helps me and it is therefore my last wish that everything may be to his honour.

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7 months 2 days ago

But if ether is nothing but an hypothesis explanatory of light, air on the other hand, is a thing that is directly felt; and even if it did not enable us to explain the phenomenon of sound, we should nevertheless always be directly aware of it, and above all, of the lack of it in moments of suffocation or air-hunger. And in the same way God Himself, not the idea of God, may become a reality that is immediately felt; and even though the idea of God does not enable us to explain either the existence or essence of the Universe, we have at times the direct feeling of God, above all in moments of spiritual suffocation. And the feeling, mark it well, for all that is tragic in it and the whole tragic sense of life is founded upon this - this feeling is a feeling of hunger for God, of the lack of God. To believe in God is, in the first instance... to wish that there may be a God, to be unable to live without Him.

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8 months 2 weeks 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 6 days ago

Man is not the creature and product of Mechanism; but, in a far truer sense, its creator and producer: it is the noble People that makes the noble Government; rather than conversely.

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4 months 1 week ago

Hence the Pythagoreans in their theology called it sometimes "universe," sometimes "heaven," sometimes "all," sometimes "Fate" and "eternity," "power" and "trust" and "Necessity," "Atlas" and "unwearying," and simply "God" and "Phanes" and "sun."They called it "universe," because all things are arranged by it both in general and in particular, and because it is the most perfect boundary of number, in the sense that "decad" is, as it were, "receptacle," just as heaven is the receptacle of all things, they called it "heaven" and, among the Muses, "Ourania."

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On the Decad
7 months 1 week ago

Fate and temperament are the names of a concept.

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As quoted in Demian (1972) by Hermann Hesse, trans. W.J. Strachan
6 months 1 week ago

The space of early Greek cosmology was structured by logos - resonant utterance or word.

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p. 35
6 months 2 weeks ago

Where questions of style and exposition are concerned I try to follow a simple maxim: if you can't say it clearly you don't understand it yourself.

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P. x.
7 months 1 week ago

The judgment that human life is worth living, or rather can and ought to be made worth living, ... underlies all intellectual effort; it is the a priori of social theory, and its rejection (which is perfectly logical) rejects theory itself.

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p. xliii
7 months 1 week ago

This new philosophy, however, was far from giving the temporal an inherent position and function in the constitution of things. Change was acting on the side of man but only because of fixed laws which governed the changes that take place. There was hope in change just because the laws that govern it do not change.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

No fixed capital can yield any revenue but by means of a circulating capital.

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Chapter I, p. 311.
8 months 2 weeks ago

If in this book harsh words are spoken about some of the greatest among the intellectual leaders of mankind, my motive is not, I hope, the wish to belittle them. It springs rather from my conviction that, if our civilization is to survive, we must break with the habit of deference to great men. Great men may make great mistakes; and as the book tries to show, some of the greatest leaders of the past supported the perennial attack on freedom and reason. Their influence, too rarely challenged, continues to mislead those on whose defence civilization depends, and to divide them. The responsibility of this tragic and possibly fatal division becomes ours if we hesitate to be outspoken in our criticism of what admittedly is a part of our intellectual heritage. By reluctance to criticize some of it, we may help to destroy it all.

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Preface to the First Edition
8 months 5 days ago

Anger is a momentary madness so control your passion or it will control you.

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Book I, epistle ii, line 62
6 months 2 weeks ago

Precisely by inculcating a critical attitude, the "canon" served to demythologize the conventional pieties of the American bourgeoisie and provided the student with a perspective from which to critically analyze American culture and institutions. Ironically, the same tradition is now regarded as oppressive. The texts once served an unmasking function; now we are told that it is the texts which must be unmasked.

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"The Storm Over the University", The New York Review of Books, December 6, 1990
7 months 1 week ago

Reality is a creation of our excesses.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Pursue Virtue virtuously.

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These words also appear in Christian Morals, Part I, Section I
8 months 2 weeks ago

I shall keep it [the manuscript] by me until the end of May for purposes of revision, and of adding malicious foot-notes.

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Letter to W. W. Norton, 17 February, 1931
9 months ago

Tentative efforts lead to tentative outcomes. Therefore, give yourself fully to your endeavors. Decide to construct your character through excellent actions, and determine to pay the price for a worthy goal. The trials you encounter will introduce you to your strengths. Remain steadfast... and one day you will build something that endures, something worthy of your potential.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

The slaving Poor are incapable of any Principles: Gentlemen may be converted to true Principles, by Time and Experience. The middling Rank of Men have Curiosity and Knowledge enough to form Principles, but not enough to form true ones, or correct any Prejudices that they may have imbib'd: And 'tis among the middling Rank, that Tory Principles do at present prevail most in England.

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Part I, Essay 9: Of The Parties of Great Britain; final lines of this essay in the 1741 and 1742 editions of Essays, Moral and Political, they were not included in later editions.
1 month 1 week ago

A fun aesthetic to counter Emil's persistently suicidal thought process...☠️🤷‍♂️

"The skepticism which fails to contribute to the ruin of our health is merely an intellectual exercise."
- Emil Cioran

See biography for Emil Cioran:
https://civilsimian.com/Emil-Cioran

Read Emil Cioran's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/133/content

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7 months 2 weeks ago

That I should by necessity be either wise and good, or foolish or vicious, without having in one case or the other merit or fault - this it was that filled me with aversion and horror.The determination of my actions by a cause out of myself, whose manifestations were again determined by other causes - this it was from which I so violently revolted.The freedom which was not mine, but that of a foreign power, and, in that, only a conditional, half freedom - this it was with which I could not rest satisfied. I myself - that which in this system only appears as the manifestation of a higher existence, I will be independent, - will be something, not by another or through another, but of myself.

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Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p. 21
8 months 2 weeks ago

When I found myself regarded as respectable, I began to wonder what sins I had committed. I must be very wicked, I thought. I began to engage in the most uncomfortable introspection. Interview with Irwin Ross, September 1957;If there were a God, I think it very unlikely that he would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt his existence.

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Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell (2005), p. 385
9 months 2 weeks ago

In an age as agitated as ours, it no longer suffices just to be advertised in the newspaper. To be advertised in this way is the same thing as being consigned to oblivion. If one is to be noticed, once must as least appear on the first page under a hand that points to and, as it were, announces or advertises the advertisement.

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7 months 1 week ago

All natures, all formed things, all creatures exist in and with one another and will again be resolved into their own roots, because the nature of matter is dissolved into the roots of its nature alone. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

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9 months 1 day ago

The superfluities of the rich are the necessaries of the poor. They who possess superfluities, possess the goods of others.

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Patrologia Latina, vol. 37, p. 1922
8 months 3 weeks ago

Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside equally desperate to get out.

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Book III, Ch. 5
4 months 2 weeks ago

That one hundred and fifty lawyers should do business together ought not to be expected.

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On the U.S. Congress, in his Autobiography, 6 January 1821
7 months 2 weeks ago

The Divine Existence (Daseyn),-his Existence, I say, which, according to the distinction already laid down, is his (Manifestation and Revelation of himself-is absolute- only through itself, and of necessity, LIGHT:-namely, y the inward and spiritual Light. This Light, left to itself, separates and divides itself into an infinite multiplicity of individual rays; and in this way, in these individual rays, becomes estranged from itself and its | original source. But this same Light may also again concentrate itself from out this separation, and conceive and comprehend itself as One, as that which it is in itself,-the Existence and Revelation of God; remaining indeed, even in this conception, that which it is in its form,-Light; but yet in this condition, and even by means of this very condition, announcing it-to self as having no real Being in itself, but as only the, Existence and Self-Manifestation of God.

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p. 78
7 months 1 week ago

Peace be with you. Receive my peace unto yourselves. Beware that no one lead you astray saying Lo here or lo there! For the Son of Man is within you. Follow after Him! Those who seek Him will find Him. Go then and preach the gospel of the Kingdom. Do not lay down any rules beyond what I appointed you, and do not give a law like the lawgiver lest you be constrained by it.

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Chapter 4. tion.
8 months 1 week ago

As medium for reaching understanding, speech acts serve: a) to establish and renew interpersonal relations, whereby the speaker takes up a relation to something in the world of legitimate social orders; b) to represent states and events, whereby the speaker takes up a relation to something in the world of existing states of affairs; c) to manifest experiences that is, to represent oneself- whereby the speaker takes up a relation to something in the subjective world to which he has privileged access.

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p. 308
7 months 1 week ago

As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and aesthetic ideals? It's all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?

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7 months 6 days ago

The great man, whether we comprehend him in the most intense activity of his work or in the restful equipoise of his forces, is powerful, involuntarily and composedly powerful, but he is not avid for power. What he is avid for is the realization of what he has in mind, the incarnation of the spirit.

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p. 151
7 months 2 weeks ago

Cast your eyes on the journals of parliament. It is for fear of losing the inestimable treasure we have, that I do not venture to game it out of my hands for the vain hope of improving it. I look with filial reverence on the constitution of my country, and never will cut it in pieces, and put it into the kettle of any magician, in order to boil it, with the puddle of their compounds, into youth and vigour. On the contrary, I will drive away such pretenders; I will nurse its venerable age, and with lenient arts extend a parent's breath.

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Speech in the House of Commons against William Pitt's motion for parliamentary reform (7 May 1782), quoted in The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke ...: Miscellaneous speeches, letters, and fragments, Vol. VI (1890), p. 153
8 months 2 weeks ago

Tis evident, that sympathy, or the communication of passions, takes place among animals, no less than among men. Fear, anger, courage and other affections are frequently communicated from one animal to another [...] And 'tis remarkable, that tho' almost all animals use in play the same member, and nearly the same action as in fighting; a lion, a tyger, a cat their paws; an ox his homs; a dog his teeth; a horse his heels: Yet they most carefully avoid harming their companion, even tho' they have nothing to fear from his resentment; which is an evident proof of the sense brutes have of each other's pain and pleasure.

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Part 2, Section 12
5 months 6 days ago

Examine the man who lives in misery because he does not shine above other men; who goes about producing himself, pruriently anxious about his gifts and claims; struggling to force everybody, as it were begging everybody for God's sake, to acknowledge him a great man, and set him over the heads of men! Such a creature is among the wretchedest sights seen under this sun. A great man? A poor morbid prurient empty man; fitter for the ward of a hospital, than for a throne among men. I advise you to keep out of his way. He cannot walk on quiet paths; unless you will look at him, wonder at him, write paragraphs about him, he cannot live. It is the emptiness of the man, not his greatness. Because there is nothing in himself, he hungers and thirsts that you would find something in him. In good truth, I believe no great man, not so much as a genuine man who had health and real substance in him of whatever magnitude, was ever much tormented in this way.

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