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2 months 1 week ago

It is perhaps typical of very creative minds that they hit very large nails not quite on the head.

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Kenneth Boulding in McLuhan: Hot & Cool (1967) p. 68
2 months 1 week ago

The loss which is unknown is no loss at all.

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Maxim 38
3 months 2 weeks ago

To ruminate upon evils, to make critical notes upon injuries, and be too acute in their apprehensions, is to add unto our own tortures, to feather the arrows of our enemies, to lash ourselves with the scorpions of our foes, and to resolve to sleep no more.

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Part III, Section XII
2 months 3 weeks ago

Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn't trust the evidence of one's eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice.

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"Preface (2003)"
3 months 1 week ago

Every archetype is capable of endless development and differentiation. It is therefore possible for it to be more developed or less. In an outward form of religion where all the emphasis is on the outward figure (hence where we are dealing with a more or less complete projection) the archetype is identical with externalized ideas but remains unconscious as a psychic factor. When an unconscious content is replaced by a projected image to that extent, it is cut off from all participation in an influence on the conscious mind. Hence it largely forfeits its own life, because prevented from exerting the formative influence on consciousness natural to it; what is more, it remains in its original form - unchanged, for nothing changes in the unconscious.

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1 month 4 days ago

Does the harmony the human intelligence thinks it discovers in nature exist outside of this intelligence? No, beyond doubt, a reality completely independent of the mind which conceives it, sees or feels it, is an impossibility. A world as exterior as that, even if it existed, would for us be forever inaccessible.

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1 week ago

The spiritual men of India, a great and watchful multitude whose spiritual status is unattainable, are many of them catholics in a deeper sense than we of the West have yet given to the word ....

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In his book, Two Letters, 1934
4 months 2 weeks ago

My Lord St. Albans said that Nature did never put her precious jewels into a garret four stories high, and therefore that exceeding tall men had ever very empty heads.

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No. 17
3 months 2 weeks ago

Mathematical Analysis is... the true rational basis of the whole system of our positive knowledge.

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Bk. 1, chap. 1; as cited in: Robert Edouard Moritz. Memorabilia mathematica; or, The philomath's quotation-book, (1914), p. 224
5 months 1 week ago

The slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown. He must dominate in his turn.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

I too have a growing inner certainty that there is a deposit of pure gold in me which ought to be passed on. The trouble is that I am more and more convinced by my experience and observation of my contemporaries that there is no one to receive it.

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2 months 1 week ago

It is an article of passionate faith among "politically correct" biologists and anthropologists that brain size has no connection with intelligence; that intelligence has nothing to do with genes; and that genes are probably nasty fascist things anyway.

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5 months 1 week ago

Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.

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3 months 3 days ago

Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man which sowed good seed in his field: But while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way. But when the blade was sprung up, and brought forth fruit, then appeared the tares also. So the servants of the householder came and said unto him, Sir, didst not thou sow good seed in thy field? from whence then hath it tares? He said unto them, An enemy hath done this. The servants said unto him, Wilt thou then that we go and gather them up? But he said, Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn.

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13:24-30 (KJV)
4 months 1 week ago

I am ashamed of belonging to the species Homo Sapiens...You & I may be thankful to have lived in happier times - you more than I, because you have no children.

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Letter to Lucy Donnelly, 6/23/1946
3 months 1 week ago

Paper, they say, does not blush, but I assure you it's not true and that it's blushing just as I am now, all over.

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4 months 1 week ago

Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits ... A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.

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Ch. 9
3 months 2 weeks ago

Distance is a great promoter of admiration!

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As quoted in Thesaurus of Epigrams: A New Classified Collection of Witty Remarks, Bon Mots and Toasts (1942) by Edmund Fuller
2 months 1 week ago

If nonviolence is to make sense as an ethical and political position, it cannot simply repress aggression or do away with its reality; rather, nonviolence emerges as a meaningful concept precisely when destruction is most likely or seems most certain.

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p. 39
4 months 1 week ago

Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one.

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4 months 1 week ago

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

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3 months 6 days ago

The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.

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The only progress I can see is progress in the organization. The ordinary human being does not live long enough to draw any substantial benefit from his own experience. And no one, it seems, can benefit by the experiences of others. Being both a father and teacher, I know we can teach our children nothing. We can transmit to them neither our knowledge of life nor of mathematics. Each must learn its lesson anew.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

I believe that man is in the last resort so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested.

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L 98
3 months 3 days ago

Art can speak its own language only as long as the images are alive which refuse and refute the established order.

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p. 62
4 months 1 week ago

That persons have opposing interests and seek to advance their own conception of the good is not at all the same thing as their being moved by envy and jealousy.

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Chapter IX, Section 81, p. 540
4 months ago

Seek after the good, and with much toil shall ye find it; the evil turns up of itself without your seeking it.

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4 months 1 week ago

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
5 months 1 week ago

This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.

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2 months 1 week ago

The vicomte was a nice-looking young man with soft features and polished manners, who evidently considered himself a celebrity but out of politeness modestly placed himself at the disposal of the circle in which he found himself. Anna Pávlovna was obviously serving him up as a treat to her guests. As a clever maître d'hôtel serves up as a specially choice delicacy a piece of meat that no one who had seen it in the kitchen would have cared to eat, so Anna Pávlovna served up to her guests, first the vicomte and then the abbé, as peculiarly choice morsels. The group about Mortemart immediately began discussing the murder of the Duc d'Enghien. The vicomte said that the Duc d'Enghien had perished by his own magnanimity, and that there were particular reasons for Buonaparte's hatred of him.

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Bk. I, Ch. III
2 months 3 weeks ago

Temperament refers to the mode of reaction and is constitutional and not changeable; character is essentially formed by a person's experiences, especially of those in early life, and changeable, to some extent, by insights and new kinds of experiences. If a person has a choleric temperament, for instance, his mode of reaction is "quick and strong." But what he is quick or strong about depends on his kind of relatedness, his character. If he is a productive, just, loving person he will react quickly and strongly when he loves, when he is enraged by injustice, and when he is impressed by a new idea. If he is a destructive or sadistic character, he will be quick and strong in his destructiveness or in his cruelty. The confusion between temperament and character has had serious consequences for ethical theory. Preferences with regard to differences in temperament are mere matters of subjective taste. But differences in character are ethically of the most fundamental importance.

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Ch. 3
4 months 1 week ago

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison... the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor.

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1 month ago

Both Stoicism and Epicureanism - the apathetic acceptance of defeat, and the effort to forget defeat in the arms of pleasure - were theories as to how one might yet be happy though subjugated or enslaved; precisely as the stoicism of Schopenhauer and the despondent epicureanism of Renan were in the nineteenth century the symbols of a shattered revolution and a broken France.

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3 months 3 days ago

The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field: Which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof.

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13:31-32 (KJV)
1 week 3 days ago

Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.

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Letter to his Italian friend, Philip Mazzei

Respect the faculty that forms thy judgments.

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III, 9
2 months 1 week ago

Patience is a remedy for every sorrow.

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Maxim 170
2 months 6 days ago

I regard you with an indifference closely bordering on aversion.

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The Rajah's Diamond, Story of the House with the Green Blinds.
4 months 2 weeks ago

Custom, then, is the great guide of human life. It is that principle alone which renders our experience useful to us, and makes us expect, for the future, a similar train of events with those which have appeared in the past. Without the influence of custom, we should be entirely ignorant of every matter of fact beyond what is immediately present to the memory and senses. We should never know how to adjust means to ends, or to employ our natural powers in the production of any effect. There would be an end at once of all action, as well as of the chief part of speculation. Variant (perhaps a paraphrase of this passage): It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom.

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4 months 1 week ago

The notion that truths external to the mind may be known by intuition or consciousness, independently of observation and experience, is, I am persuaded, in these times, the great intellectual support of false doctrines and bad institutions. By the aid of this theory, every inveterate belief and every intense feeling, of which the origin is not remembered, is enabled to dispense with the obligation of justifying itself by reason, and is erected into its own all-sufficient voucher and justification. There never was such an instrument devised for consecrating all deep-seated prejudices.

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(pp. 225-226)
3 months 3 days ago

To know how just a cause we have for grieving is already a consolation.

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Ch. IV.: Music
3 months 2 days ago

By freedom he meant a condition in which men were not prevented from choosing both the object and the manner of their worship. For him only a society in which this condition was realised could be called fully human. Its realisation was an ideal which Mill regarded as more precious than life itself.

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3 weeks ago

Proletarian violence, carried on as a pure and simple manifestation of the sentiment of class struggle, appears thus as a very fine and heroic thing; it is at the service of the immemorial interests of civilization; it is not perhaps the most appropriate method of obtaining immediate material advantages, but it may save the world from barbarism.

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p. 85
5 months 1 week ago

As for the life of money-making, it is one of constraint, and wealth is manifestly not the good of which we are in search, for it is only useful as a means to something else, and for this reason there is less to be said for it than for the ends mentioned before, which are, at any rate, desired for their own sakes.

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3 months 3 days ago

We return to our analysis of qualities. Something preserves itself throughout this flux, something that passes into other things, but also stands against them as a being for itself. This something can exist only as the product of a process through which it integrates its otherness with its own proper being. Hegel says that its existence comes about through 'the negation of the negation.' The first negation is the otherness in which it turns, and the second is the incorporation of this other into its own self. Such a process presupposes that things possess a certain power over their movement, that they exist in a certain self-relation that enables them to 'mediate' their existential conditions.

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P. 132-133
4 months 1 week ago

A single part of physics occupies the lives of many men, and often leaves them dying in uncertainty.

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"A Madame la Marquise du Châtelet, Avant-Propos," Eléments de Philosophie de Newton, 1738
4 months 1 week ago

For Genet, Beauty will be the offensive weapon that will enable him to beat the just on their own ground: that of value.

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p. 405
1 month 1 day ago

History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.

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1 week ago

Is not every man familiar with situations in his own life, when the needs of self-expression cannot be satisfied by saying any thing whatsoever times and occasions when, to make his fellows understand what he means, he must straight way do something, or be something, and perhaps hold his tongue the while? And can we deny that the same holds good of the Universe?

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3 months 1 week ago

France had for some time been guilty of a continued series of hostile acts against this country, both external and internal: first, she directed her pursuits to universal empire, under the name of fraternity, in order to overturn the fabric of our laws and government.

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Speech in the House of Commons (12 February 1793)

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