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2 months 2 weeks ago

The will to the "true world" in the sense of Plato and Christianity ... is in truth a no-saying to our present world, precisely the one in which art is at home.

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p. 74
1 month 2 weeks ago

The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value counts. On it centers the rationality of the status quo, and all alien rationality is bent to It.

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p. 57
2 months 3 weeks ago

There can be no difference anywhere that doesn't make a difference elsewhere - no difference in abstract truth that doesn't express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere and somewhen.

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Lecture II, What Pragmatism Means
1 week 3 days ago

Within the last fifty years, the extraordinary growth of every department of physical science has spread among us mental food of so nutritious and stimulating a character that a new ecdysis seems imminent.

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Ch.2, p. 73
3 weeks 3 days ago

To be good and lead a good life means to give to others more than one takes from them.

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Ch. VII
1 month 1 week ago

It appears that liberty is bound up with imperfection, with a right to imperfection. Socialism leads to the same type of authoritarian state as Theocracy. ... One must choose: either Socialism or liberty of spirit, the liberty of man's conscience. ... Socialism uses a "sacred" authority and establishes a "sacred" society in which there is no place for the "lay," for the free, for choice, for the unrestrained activity of human forces.

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pp. 188-189
1 month 1 week ago

There is in Shaw, as in Gurdjieff and Nietzsche, a recognition of the immense effort of Will that is necessary to express even a little freedom, that places them beside Pascal and St. Augustine as religious thinkers. Their view is saved from pessimism only by its mystical recognition of the possibilities of pure Will, freed from the entanglements of automatism.

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p. 292
1 month 3 days ago

The true line is not between "hard" natural science and "soft" social sciences, but between precise science limited to highly abstract and simple phenomena in the laboratory and inexact science and technology dealing with complex problems in the real world.

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p. 302.
2 months 1 week ago

Lysander said, "Where the lion's skin will not reach, it must be pieced with the fox's."

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60 Lysander
2 months 3 weeks ago

Even the death of Friends will inspire us as much as their lives. They will leave consolation to the mourners, as the rich leave money to defray the expenses of their funerals, and their memories will be incrusted over with sublime and pleasing thoughts, as monuments of other men are overgrown with moss; for our Friends have no place in the graveyard.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Economy is a distributive virtue, and consists not in saving but selection. Parsimony requires no providence, no sagacity, no powers of combination, no comparison, no judgment.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

I think of the course of human history as a long, swelling, increasingly polyphonic poem - a poem that leads up to nothing save itself. When the species is extinct, "human nature's total message" will not be a set of propositions, but a set of vocabularies - the more, and the more various, the better.

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Response to Hartshorne in 'Rorty and Pragmatism, The Philosopher Responds to his Critics', p. 33
1 month 3 weeks ago

Men must be governed by those laws which they love. Where thirty millions are to be governed by a few thousand men, the government must be established by consent, and must be congenial to the feelings and to the habits of the people. That which creates tyranny is the imposition of a form of government contrary to the will of the governed: and even a free and equal plan of government, would be considered as despotic by those who desired to have their old laws and their ancient system.

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Speech in the House of Commons on India (27 June 1781), quoted in The Parliamentary Register: Or, History of the Proceedings and Debates of the House of Commons, Volume III (1782), pp. 666-667
1 month 1 week ago

It is impossible to feel equal respect for things that are in fact unequal unless the respect is given to something that is identical in all of them. Men are unequal in all their relations with the things of this world, without exception. The only thing that is identical in all men is the presence of a link with the reality outside the world. All human beings are absolutely identical in so far as they can be thought of as consisting of a centre, which is an unquenchable desire for good, surrounded by an accretion of psychical and bodily matter.

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1 month 1 week ago

I do not understand these men who tell me that the prospect of the yonder side of death has never tormented them, that the thought of their own annihilation never disquiets them. For my part I do not wish to make peace between my heart and my head, between my faith and my reason - I wish rather that there should be war between them.

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3 weeks 6 days ago

One might expect that a consideration of grievability pertains only to those who are dead, but my contention is that grievability is already operative in life, and that it is a characteristic attributed to living creatures, marking their value within a differential scheme of values and bearing directly on the question of whether or not they are treated equally and in a just way. To be grievable is to be interpellated in such a way that you know your life matters; that the loss of your life would matter; that your body is treated as one that should be able to live and thrive, whose precarity should be minimized, for which provisions for flourishing should be available. The presumption of equal grievability would be not only a conviction or attitude with which another person greets you, but a principle that organizes the social organization of health, food, shelter, employment, sexual life, and civic life.

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p. 59
1 month 3 weeks ago

Yes - you, you alone must pay for everything because you turned up like this, because I'm a scoundrel, because I'm the nastiest, most ridiculous, pettiest, stupidest, and most envious worm of all those living on earth who're no better than me in any way, but who, the devil knows why, never get embarrassed, while all my life I have to endure insults from every louse - that's my fate. What do I care that you do not understand any of this?

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Part 2, Chapter 9
2 months 6 days ago

Time is the wisest of all things that are; for it brings everything to light.

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As quoted in Diogenes Laërtius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, I, 35
2 months 6 days ago

Despise all those things which when liberated from the body you will not want; invoke the Gods to become your helpers.

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Pythagorean Ethical Sentences From Stobæus
1 month 1 week ago

The main problem for the average reader -- particularly of The Great Beast -- is that Crowley seems such an intolerable show-off that it is hard to believe anything he says.

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p. 73
1 month 1 week ago

In France there are three kinds of professions: the church, the sword, and the long robe. Each hath a sovereign contempt for the other two. For example, a man who ought to be despised only for being a fool is often so because he is a lawyer.

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No. 44 (Usbek writing to Rhedi)
2 months 2 weeks ago

Ethics is inescapable.

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Preface, p. xv
1 month 3 weeks ago

Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

A jealous lover of human liberty, deeming it the absolute condition of all that we admire and respect in humanity, I reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that, if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him. Ch. II; Variants or variant translations of this statement have also been attributed to Bakunin: The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth. A boss in Heaven is the best excuse for a boss on earth, therefore If God did exist, he would have to be abolished.

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1 month 6 days ago

I believe that the man choosing progress can find a new unity through the full development of all his human forces, which are produced in three orientations. These can be presented separately or together: biophilia, love for humanity and nature, and independence and freedom.

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3 months 2 days ago

So it is with minds. Unless you keep them busy with some definite subject that will bridle and control them, they throw themselves in disorder hither and yon in the vague field of imagination. ..And there is no mad or idle fancy that they do no bring forth in the agitation.

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3 months 2 days ago

A prudent man should always follow in the path trodden by great men and imitate those who are most excellent.

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The Prince (1513), Ch. 6; translated by Luigi Ricci
3 months 3 weeks ago

"I conclude that all is well," says Oedipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.

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3 weeks 1 day ago

Mysticism is just tomorrow's science dreamed today.

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3 months 2 days ago

Death, they say, acquits us of all obligations.

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Book I, Ch. 7
3 months 2 days ago

Justice is a temporary thing that must at last come to an end; but the conscience is eternal and will never die.

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On Marriage
2 months 3 weeks ago

Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end, in all cases, that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came.

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Means by Which the Fund Is to Be Created
1 month 1 week ago

No matter how honest scientists think they are, they are still influenced by various unconscious assumptions that prevent them from attaining true objectivity. Expressed in a sentence, Fort's principle goes something like this: People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels.

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p. 125
1 month 3 weeks ago

No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

The cup of life is not so shallow

That we have drained the best 

That all the wine at once we swallow 

And lees make all the rest.

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1827
3 months 1 week ago

I have read in Plato and Cicero sayings that are very wise and very beautiful; but I never read in either of them, "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden."

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p. 62
3 months 3 weeks ago

All things as subsist from nature appear to contain in themselves a principle of motion and permanency; some according to place, others according to increase and diminuation; and others according to change in quality. 

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Book II, Ch. I, p. 88.
3 months 3 weeks ago

Maman used to say that you can always find something to be happy about.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

I have always thought that clarity is a form of courtesy that the philosopher owes; moreover, this discipline of ours considers it more truly a matter of honor today than ever before to be open to all minds ... This is different from the individual sciences which increasingly [interpose] between the treasure of their discoveries and the curiosity of the profane the tremendous dragon of their closed terminology.

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p. 19
2 months 3 weeks ago

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.

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1 month 1 week ago

Because the book became a freak 'bestseller', because I found myself bracketed with the 'Angry Young Men' of the period, I found myself carried to 'fame' on a wave of publicity -- only to discover that this kind of fame is one of the subtlest forms of obscurity. Everybody knew who I was, and nobody knew what I stood for. The public image meant that nobody was interested in what I had to say, for everyone was convinced that they already knew. I could talk until I was blue in the face about my attempt to revise the pessimistic existentialism of Heidegger, Camus and Sartre; as far as most people were concerned, I was an autodidact who was angry about something or other.

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p. 188, George Bernard Shaw: A personal view
2 months 1 week ago

It is indifferent to me where I am to begin, for there shall I return again.

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Frag. B 5, quoted by Proclus, Commentary on the Parmenides, 708
3 months 4 days ago

I consider as lovers of books not those who keep their books hidden in their store-chests and never handle them, but those who, by nightly as well as daily use thumb them, batter them, wear them out, who fill out all the margins with annotations of many kinds, and who prefer the marks of a fault they have erased to a neat copy full of faults.

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Letter to an unidentified friend (1489), as translated in Collected Works of Erasmus (1974), p. 58
3 weeks 3 days ago

Feelings, the most diverse, very strong and very weak, very significant and very worthless, very bad and very good, if only they infect the reader, the spectator, the listener, constitute the subject of art.

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1 month 1 week ago

And He is the God of the humble, for in the words of the Apostle, God chose the foolish things of the world to confound the wise and the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty (I Cor. i. 27) And God is in each of us in the measure in which one feels Him and loves Him. "If of two men," says Kierkegaard, "one prays to the true God without sincerity of heart, and the other prays to the an idol with all the passion of an infinite yearning, it is the first who really prays to the idol, while the second really prays to God." It would be better to say that the true God is He to whom man truly prays and whom man truly desires. And there may even be a truer revelation in superstition itself than in theology.

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3 weeks 1 day ago

The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.

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3 months 1 week ago

If man of himself could in a perfect manner know all things visible and invisible, it would indeed be foolish to believe what he does not see. But our manner of knowing is so weak that no philosopher could perfectly investigate the nature of even one little fly.

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Prologue (trans. Joseph B. Collins)

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