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2 months 3 weeks ago

The function of objective thinking is to reduce all phenomena which bear witness to the union of subject and world, putting in their place the clear idea of the object as in itself and of the subject as pure consciousness. It therefore severs the links which unite the thing and the embodied subject, leaving only sensible qualities to make up our world (to the exclusion of the modes of appearance which we have described), and preferably visual qualities, because these give the impression of being autonomous, and because they are less directly linked to our body and present us with an object rather than introducing us into an atmosphere. But in reality all things are concretions of a setting, and any explicit perception of a thing survives in virtue of a previous communication with a certain atmosphere.

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p. 374
3 months 3 weeks ago

The particularity (Jeweiligkeit) of the places and their manifoldness are grounded in space, and the particularity of the time points is grounded in time. That basic characteristic of the thing, that essential determination of the thingness of the thing to be this one (je dieses), is grounded in the essence of space and time. Our question "What is a thing?" includes, therefore, the questions "What is space?" and "What is time?" It is customary The particularity (Jeweiligkeit) os the places.

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p. 16
2 months 1 week ago

Pure justice emerges from symmetry applied human life, and human beings as ends in themselves.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

What an incitation to hilarity, hearing the word goal while following a funeral procession!

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3 months 2 weeks ago

And when the physician said, "Sir, you are an old man," "That happens," replied Pausanias, "because you never were my doctor."

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Of Pausanias the Son of Phistoanax
4 months 3 days 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
4 months 1 week ago

The logic now in use serves rather to fix and give stability to the errors which have their foundation in commonly received notions than to help the search for truth. So it does more harm than good.

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Aphorism 7
2 months 2 weeks ago

Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.

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p. 102.
2 months 2 weeks ago

There is nothing truly real, save that which feels, suffers, pities, loves and desires, save consciousness. And we need God in order to save consciousness; not in order to think existence, but in order to live it; not in order to know the why and how of it, but in order to feel the wherefore of it.

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1 week 2 days ago

Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.

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As quoted in Pearls of Wisdom: A Harvest of Quotations From All Ages (1987) by Jerome Agel and Walter D. Glanze, p. 46.
4 months 4 days ago

This species works intentionally on its own destruction (by war). This, however, does not keep the rational creatures of such a constantly advancing culture, even in the midst of war, from promising to mankind in coming centuries an unequivocal prospect of bliss which will never end.

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Kant, Immanuel (1996), page 185
4 months 3 days ago

The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture for wild beasts to fight in.

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Letter addressed to "un premier commis" [name unknown] (20 June 1733), from Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire: Correspondance [Garnier frères, Paris, 1880], vol. I, letter # 343 (p. 354)
3 months 1 week ago

Neither will the horse be adjudged to be generous, that is sumptuously adorned, but the horse whose nature is illustrious; nor is the man worthy who possesses great wealth, but he whose soul is generous.

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Pythagorean Ethical Sentences From Stobæus
3 months 1 week ago

I can cure the gout or stone in some, sooner than Divinity, Pride, or Avarice in others.

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Section 9
1 week 4 days ago

All the future of socialism resides in the autonomous development of workers' syndicates.

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As quoted in Essays in Political Philosophy, Vidya Dhar Mahajan, Doaba House, Lahore, 1943 p. 41
2 months 3 weeks ago

And because the condition of Man, (as hath been declared in the precedent Chapter) is a condition of Warre of every one against everyone; in which case every one is governed by his own Reason; and there is nothing he can make use of, that may not be a help unto him, in preserving his life against his enemyes; It followeth, that in such a condition, every man has a Right to every thing; even to one anothers body.

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The First Part, Chapter 14, p. 64

I wanted for the moments in my life to follow each other and order themselves like those of a life remembered. It would be just as well to try to catch time by the tail.

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2 months 1 day ago

And see, a kind, refined lady will devour the carcasses of these animals with full assurance that she is doing right, at the same time asserting two contradictory propositions: First, that she is, as her doctor assures her, so delicate that she cannot be sustained by vegetable food alone, and that for her feeble organism flesh is indispensable; and, secondly, that she is so sensitive that she is unable, not only herself to inflict suffering on animals, but even to bear the sight of suffering. Whereas the poor lady is weak precisely because she has been taught to live upon food unnatural to man; and she cannot avoid causing suffering to animals - for she eats them.

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Ch. IX
1 week 2 days ago

Warrior spirit is characterised by direct, clear and loyal relations, based on fidelity and honour and a sound instinct for the various dignities, which it can well distinguish: it opposes everything which is impersonal and trivial.

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p. 117
2 months 2 weeks ago

Nothing would prove more disastrous to our ideas, we contended, than to neglect the effect of the internal upon the external, of the psychological motives and needs upon existing institutions.

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(p. 402)

Blest is that nation whose silent course of happiness furnishes nothing for history to say.

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Letter to Count Diodati

As pure a son of liberty as I have ever known.

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Statement about Tadeusz Kościuszko, in a letter to Horatio Gates
1 month 4 weeks ago

What is left when honor is lost?

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Maxim 265
4 months 1 week ago

T is one and the same Nature that rolls on her course, and whoever has sufficiently considered the present state of things might certainly conclude as to both the future and the past.

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Book II, Ch. 12. Apology for Raimond Sebond
4 months 1 day ago

Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.

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Considerations by the Way

I learn with great satisfaction that you are about committing to the press the valuable historical and State papers you have been so long collecting. Time and accident are committing daily havoc on the originals deposited in our public offices. The late war has done the work of centuries in this business. The last cannot be recovered, but let us save what remains; not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.

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Letter to Mr. Hazard

The religion-builders have so distorted and deformed the doctrines of Jesus, so muffled them in mysticisms, fancies and falsehoods, have caricatured them into forms so monstrous and inconceivable, as to shock reasonable thinkers, to revolt them against the whole, and drive them rashly to pronounce its founder an impostor.

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Letter to w:Timothy Pickering, Esq., 27 February 1821
4 months 3 days ago

"You're a bitter man," said Candide. "That's because I've lived," said Martin.

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4 months 1 week ago

A constant element of enjoyment must be mingled with our studies, so that we think of learning as a game rather than a form of drudgery, for no activity can be continued for long if it does not to some extent afford pleasure to the participant.

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Letter to Christian Northoff (1497), as translated in Collected Works of Erasmus (1974), p. 114
3 months 3 weeks ago

Most of the texts... preserved from this period come from writers... either... affiliated with the aristocratic party, or... distrustful of democratic or radically democratic institutions.

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3 weeks 1 day ago

But I liken common languid Times, with their unbelief, distress, perplexity, with their languid doubting characters and embarrassed circumstances, impotently crumbling down into ever worse distress towards final ruin;-all this I liken to dry dead fuel, waiting for the lightning out of Heaven that shall kindle it. The great man, with his free force direct out of God's own hand, is the lightning. His word is the wise healing word which all can believe in. All blazes round him now, when he has once struck on it, into fire like his own.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

The idealist tradition, including contemporary phenomenology, has of course admitted subjective points of view as basic and has gone to the opposite length of denying an irreducible objective reality. ... I find the idealist solution unacceptable ...: objective reality cannot be analyzed or shut out of existence any more than subjective reality can. Even if not everything is something from no point of view, some things are.The deep source of both idealism and its objectifying opposite is the same: a conviction that a single world cannot contain both irreducible points of view and irreducible objective reality - that one of them must be what there really is and the other somehow reducible or dependent on it. This is a very powerful idea. To deny it is in a sense to deny that there is a single world.

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"Subjective and Objective" (1979), p. 212.
1 month 1 week ago

With other beliefs crumbling, many seek to return to what they piously describe as "Enlightenment values". But these values were not as unambiguously benign as is nowadays commonly supposed.

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2015

The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind.

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Letter to William Hunter
3 months 3 weeks ago

Animals come when their names are called. Just like human beings.

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p. 67e
4 months 5 days ago

This endeavour to do a thing or leave it undone, solely in order to please men, we call ambition, especially when we so eagerly endeavour to please the vulgar, that we do or omit certain things to our own or another's hurt : in other cases it is generally called kindliness.

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Part III, Prop. XXIX
1 month 4 weeks ago

There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew.

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Statement in 1965, in reference to Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963) by Buckminster Fuller
2 months 4 weeks ago

We do not know whether Hitler is going to found a new Islam. (He is already on the way; he is like Mohammed. The emotion in Germany is Islamic; warlike and Islamic. They are all drunk with a wild god.)

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The Symbolic Life - in The Collected Works: The Symbolic Life. Miscellaneous Writings (1977), p. 281
2 months 2 weeks ago

Indeed much of the literature written about black folks in the post-civil rights era emphasized the need for jobs. Material advancement was deemed the pressing agenda. Mental health concerns were not a high priority.

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4 months 2 days ago

There is more of good nature than of good sense at the bottom of most marriages.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 170
2 months 3 weeks ago

Antiquity believed that the forces of love in the universe were limited. Therefore they were to be used sparingly,and everyone was to be loved only according to his value.

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L. Coser, trans. (1961), p. 94
4 months 1 week ago

The world's a bubble, and the life of man Less than a span.

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5 months 2 days ago

The two guides call out to a man early and late. And yet, no, for when remorse calls to a man it is always late. The call to find the way again by seeking out God in the confession of sins is always at the eleventh hour. Whether you are young or old, whether you have sinned much or little, whether you have offended much or neglected much, the guilt makes this call come at the eleventh hour. The inner agitation of the heart understands what remorse insists upon, that the eleventh hour has come. For in the sense of time, the old man's age is the eleventh hour; and the instant of death, the final moment in the eleventh hour. The indolent youth speaks of a long life that lies before him. The indolent old man hopes that his death is still a long way off. But repentance and remorse belong to the eternal in a man.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

The key to understanding Crowley is the same as the key to understanding the Marquis de Sade. Both wasted an immense amount of energy screaming defiance at the authority they resented so much, and lacked the insight to see that they were shaking their fists at an abstraction.

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p. 29
4 months 4 weeks ago

It built itself up endlessly, like a chess game, and the telemetrists began to use a computer to program the computer that designed the program for the computer that programmed the robot-controlling computer.

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3 weeks 4 days ago

To this end they make a shield of their hypocritical zeal for religion. They go about invoking the Bible, which they would have minister to their deceitful purposes. Contrary to the sense of the Bible and the intention of the holy Fathers, if I am not mistaken, they would extend such authorities until even in purely physical matters - where faith is not involved - they would have us altogether abandon reason and the evidence of our senses in favor of some biblical passage, though under the surface meaning of its words this passage may contain a different sense.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Being asked where in Greece he saw good men, he replied, "Good men nowhere, but good boys at Sparta."

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Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 27
3 weeks 1 day ago

All the gifted souls, of every rank, who are born to you in this generation. These are appointed, by the true eternal "divine right" which will never become obsolete, to be your governors and administrators; and precisely as you employ them, or neglect to employ them, will your State be favored of Heaven or disfavored. This noble young soul, you can have him on either of two conditions; and on one of them, since he is here in the world, you must have him. As your ally and coadjutor; or failing that, as your natural enemy: which shall it be? I consider that every Government convicts itself of infatuation and futility, or absolves and justifies itself before God and man, according as it answers this question.

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