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6 months 1 week ago

I am not bothered by the fact that I am not understood. I am bothered when I do not know others.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Truth and clarity are complementary.

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As quoted in Quantum Theory and the Flight from Realism : Philosophical Responses to Quantum Mechanics (2000) by Christopher Norris, p. 234
4 months 1 week ago

Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the Enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.

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John Cumming trans., p. 7.
5 months 3 weeks ago

Physicians have this advantage: the sun lights their success and the earth covers their failures.

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Ch. 37
1 month 4 weeks ago

By the gods I do not want the Galileans to be killed or beaten unjustly nor to suffer any other ill. I do, however, state that the god-fearing (theosebeis) should be preferred to them ... honour should go to the gods and to the men and cities that worship them.

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As quoted in Julian the Apostate (1978), by G. W. Bowersock, Ch. 8 : The Puritanical Pagan, p, 83
5 months 2 weeks ago

Everything in the universe goes by indirection. There are no straight lines.

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Works and Days
6 months 4 days ago

We are members of this Head, and this body cannot be decapitated. If the Head is in glory forever, so too are the members in glory forever, that Christ may be undivided forever.

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p.433
6 months 2 weeks ago

Self-preservation has frequently knuckled under to that tremendous yearning to get even.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

That there is a common cause, an that it is either what we call material progress or something closely connected with material progress, becomes more than an inference when it is noted that the phenomena we class together and speak of as industrial depression are but intensifications of phenomena which always accompany material progress, and which show themselves more clearly and strongly as material progress goes on. Where the conditions to which material progress everywhere tends are the most fully realized-that is to say, where population is densest, wealth greatest, and the machinery of production and exchange most highly developed - we find the deepest poverty, the sharpest struggle for existence, and the most of enforced idleness.

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Introductory : The Problem
4 months 5 days ago

Myth deprives the object of which it speaks of all history. In it, history evaporates.

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p. 151
4 months 3 days ago

Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge.

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6 months 4 days ago

For it still seemed to me that it is not we who sin, but some other nature sinned in us. And it gratified my pride to be beyond blame, and when I did anything wrong not to have to confess that I had done wrong. I loved to excuse my soul and to accuse something else inside me (I knew not what) but which was not I. But, assuredly, it was I, and it was my impiety that had divided me against myself. That sin then was all the more incurable because I did not deem myself a sinner.

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A. Outler, trans. (Dover: 2002), Book 5, Chapter 10, p. 77
3 months 2 weeks ago

Survival machines that can simulate the future are one jump ahead of survival machines that who can only learn of the basis of trial and error. The trouble with overt trial is that it takes time and energy. The trouble with overt error is that it is often fatal. ...The evolution of the capacity to simulate seems to have culminated in subjective consciousness. Why this should have happened is, to me, the most profound mystery facing modern biology.

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Ch. 4. The Gene machine
9 months 2 weeks ago

I think we all understand why this image is absurd. Whether modern Christians want to believe it or not, Jesus was liberal minded. He taught a message of universality and aversion to greed. That being said, it's really hard to know exactly what has been added into the Christian bible as a matter of political council and what has truly been said by the characters.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

To fight on "the path of God" has been characterized as "medieval" fanaticism; conversely, it has been characterized as a most sacred cause to fight for "patriotic" and "nationalistic" ideals and for other myths that in our contemporary era have eventually been unmasked and shown to be the instruments of irrational, materialistic, and destructive forces... Soldiers went to the front to experience war as something else, namely, as a crisis that all too often did not turn out to be an authentic and heroic transfiguration of the personality, but rather the regression of the individual to a plane of savage instincts, "reflexes," and reactions that retain very little of the human...

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3 months 2 weeks ago

The devil, depend upon it, can sometimes do a very gentlemanly thing.

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The Suicide Club, Story of the Young Man with the Cream Tarts.
4 months 2 weeks ago

That by any series of changes a protozoon should ever become a mammal, seems to those who are not familiar with zoology, and who have not seen how clear becomes the relationship between the simplest and the most complex forms when intermediate forms are examined, a very grotesque notion. Habitually, looking at things rather in their statical aspect than in their dynamical aspect, they never realize the fact that, by small increments of modification, any amount of modification may in time be generated.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

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p. 326
4 months 2 weeks ago

It's not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.

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§ 133
6 months 2 weeks ago

It is not necessary to ask whether soul and body are one, just as it is not necessary to ask whether the wax and its shape are one, nor generally whether the matter of each thing and that of which it is the matter are one. For even if one and being are spoken of in several ways, what is properly so spoken of is the actuality.

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3 months 4 days ago

I do not advocate burning your ship to get rid of the cockroaches.

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Said in reference to those who wished to abolish all religious teaching, rather than freeing state education from Church controls, in Critiques and Addresses (1873) p. 90
5 months 2 weeks ago

It was the period of my mental progress which I have now reached that I formed the friendship which has been the honour and chief blessing of my existence, as well as the source of a great part of all that I have attempted to do, or hope to effect hereafter, for human improvement. My first introduction to the lady who, after a friendship of twenty years, consented to become my wife, was in 1830, when I was in my twenty-fifth and she in her twenty-third year.

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(p. 184)
6 months 3 weeks ago
He who thinks a great deal is not suited to be a party man: he thinks his way through the party and out the other side too soon.
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5 months 2 days ago

There are two sides to every question.

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As quoted in Lives of Eminent Philosophers, by Diogenes Laërtius, Book IX, Sec. 51
5 months 1 week ago

Then take, good sir, your pleasure while you may; With life so short 'twere wrong to lose a day.

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Book II, satire viii, line 96 (trans. Conington)
5 months 2 weeks ago

Society is undergoing a silent revolution, which must be submitted to, and which takes no more notice of the human existences it breaks down than an earthquake regards the houses it subverts. The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way. But can there be anything more puerile, more short-sighted, than the views of those Economists who believe in all earnest that this woeful transitory state means nothing but adapting society to the acquisitive propensities of capitalists, both landlords and money-lords?

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"Forced Emigration," New York Daily Tribune, 22 March 1853.
4 months 5 days ago

If a young girl is being forced into a brothel she will not talk about her rights. In such a situation the word would sound ludicrously inadequate.

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p. 63
3 months 2 weeks ago

All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live on the frontier, you have no identity. You're a nobody.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

The most thought provoking thing in our thought provoking time is that we are still not thinking.

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What is Called Thinking? (1951-1952), as translated by Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray
6 months 2 weeks ago

Of these not right forms of government, monarchy, when bound by good written rules, which we call laws, is the best of all the six; but without law it is hard and most oppressive to live with. The government of the few must be considered intermediate, both in good and in evil. The government of the multitude is weak in all respects and able to do nothing great, either good or bad, when compared with the other forms of government, therefore of all these governments when they are lawful, this is the worst, and when they are all lawless it is the best.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy. p. 330

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6 months 2 weeks ago

The person who is going to preach ought to live in the Christian thoughts and ideas: they ought to be his daily life. If so, this is the view of Christianity, then you, too, will have eloquence enough and precisely that which is needed when you speak extemporaneously without specific preparation. However, it is fallacious eloquence if someone, without otherwise occupying himself with, without living in these thoughts, once in a while sits down and laboriously collects such thoughts, perhaps in the field of literature, and then works them into a well-composed discourse, which is then committed to memory and delivered superbly, with respect both to voice and diction and gestures.

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4 months 6 days ago

And love, above all when it struggles against destiny, overwhelms us with the feeling of the vanity of this world of appearances and gives us a glimpse of another world, in which destiny is overcome and liberty is law.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.

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(p. 9)
2 months 4 days ago

That man, I declare, is happy whom nothing makes less strong than he is; he keeps to the heights, leaning upon none but himself; for one who sustains himself by any prop may fall.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Only an atheist can be a good Christian.

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Atheismus im Christentum 1968, english translation: Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom 1972
3 months 3 weeks ago

Being>identity. Existence>essence.

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2 months 1 week ago

It is all work and forgotten work, this peopled, clothed, articulate-speaking, high-towered, wide-acred World. The hands of forgotten brave men have made it a World for us; they,- honour to them; they, in spite of the idle and the dastard. This English Land, here and now, is the summary of what was found of wise, and noble, and accordant with God's Truth, in all the generations of English Men. Our English Speech is speakable because there were Hero-Poets of our blood and lineage; speakable in proportion to the number of these. This Land of England has its conquerors, possessors, which change from epoch to epoch, from day to day; but its real conquerors, creators, and eternal proprietors are these following, and their representatives if you can find them: All the Heroic Souls that ever were in England, each in their degree; all the men that ever cut a thistle, drained a puddle out of England, contrived a wise scheme in England, did or said a true and valiant thing in England.

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4 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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5 months 3 weeks ago

All our knowledge falls with the bounds of experience.

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A 146, B 185
5 months 2 weeks ago

What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God's eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

The civilized pagan recognizes life not in himself alone, but in societies of men-in the tribe, the clan, the family, the kingdom -and sacrifices his personal good for these societies. The motive power of his life is glory. His religion consists in the exaltation of the glory of those who are allied to him-the founders of his family, his ancestors, his rulers-and in worshiping gods who are exclusively protectors of his clan, his family, his nation, his government.

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Chapter IV, Christianity Misunderstood by Men of Science
4 months 2 weeks ago

Though I myself am an atheist, I openly profess religion in the sense just mentioned, that is, a nature religion. I hate the idealism that wrenches man out of nature; I am not ashamed of my dependency on nature; I openly confess that the workings of nature affect not only my surface, my skin, my body, but also my core, my innermost being, that the air I breathe in bright weather has a salutary effect not only on my lungs but also on my mind, that the light of the sun illumines not only my eyes but also my spirit and my heart. And I do not, like a Christian, believe that such dependency is contrary to my true being or hope to be delivered from it. I know further that I am a finite moral being, that I shall one day cease to be. But I find this very natural and am therefore perfectly reconciled to the thought.

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Lecture V, R. Manheim, trans. (1967), pp. 35-36
3 months 4 weeks ago

Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason. From this we can see how useful it is to employ reason in seeking out the laws of taste.

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E 69
5 months 3 weeks ago

M. Desargues puts me under obligations on account of the pains that it has pleased him to have in me, in that he shows that he is sorry that I do not wish to study more in geometry, but I have resolved to quit only abstract geometry, that is to say, the consideration of questions which serve only to exercise the mind, and this, in order to study another kind of geometry, which has for its object the explanation of the phenomena of nature... You know that all my physics is nothing else than geometry.

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Letter to Marin Mersenne (July 27, 1638) as quoted by Florian Cajori, A History of Mathematics (1893) letter dated in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Vol. 3, The Correspondence (1991) ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch
4 months 3 weeks ago

The errors of Communism must be rectified; but there is no necessity for giving up the name, which is a simple assertion of the paramount importance of Social Feeling. However, now that we have happily passed from monarchy to republicanism, the name of Communist is no longer indispensable; the word Republican expresses the meaning as well, and without the same danger. Positivism, then, has nothing to fear from Communism; on the contrary, it will probably be accepted by most Communists among the working classes, especially in France where abstractions have but little influence on minds thoroughly emancipated from theology. The people will gradually find that the solution of the great social problem which Positivism offers is better than the Communistic solution.

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p. 169

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