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3 months 1 week ago

Nothing prints more lively in our minds than something we wish to forget.

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Book II, Ch. 12
1 month 1 day ago

Without an anti-environment, all environments are invisible.

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(p. 33)
3 months 4 days ago

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.

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Ch. 3, P. 57
3 months 2 days ago

Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.

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Act 10, sc. 2
3 months 3 days ago

The practical consequence of such a[n individualistic] philosophy is the well-known democratic respect for the sacredness of individuality,-is, at any rate, the outward tolerance of whatever is not itself intolerant. These phrases are so familiar that they sound now rather dead in our ears. Once they had a passionate inner meaning. Such a passionate inner meaning they may easily acquire again if the pretension of our nation to inflict its own inner ideals and institutions vi et armis upon Orientals should meet with a resistance as obdurate as so far it has been gallant and spirited. Religiously and philosophically, our ancient national doctrine of live and let live may prove to have a far deeper meaning than our people now seem to imagine it to possess.

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"Preface"
1 month 2 weeks ago

Shall we not perhaps be told, on the other hand, that if the sinner suffers an eternal punishment, it is because he does not cease to sin? - for the damned sin without ceasing. This however is no solution to the problem, which derives all its absurdity from the fact that punishment has been conceived as vindictiveness or vengeance, not as correction, and has been conceived after the fashion of barbarous peoples. And in the same way hell has been conceived as a sort of police institution, necessary in order to put fear into the world. And the worst of it is that it no longer intimidates, and therefore will have to be shut up.

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3 months 2 days ago

Some men are born committed to action: they do not have a choice, they have been thrown on a path, at the end of that path, an act awaits them, their act.

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Act 1
1 month 3 weeks ago

Do not judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous judgment.

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(John 7:24) (NASB) Variant translation: Stop judging by mere appearances, and make a right judgment. (NIV)
3 months 1 week ago

There are some defeats more triumphant than victories.

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Ch. 30. Of Cannibals, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Hazlitt, 1842
1 month 4 weeks ago

How is it possible that the poorer classes can remain healthy and have a reasonable expectation of life under such conditions? What can one expect but that they should suffer from continual outbreaks of epidemics and an excessively low expectation of life? The physical condition of the workers shows a progressive deterioration.

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It is more easy to get a favor from Fortune than to keep it.

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Maxim 282
2 months ago

Perfectibility is one of the most unequivocal characteristics of the human species.

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Vol. 1, bk. 1 : Of the Powers of Man Considered in his Social Capacity, ch. 2
1 month 4 weeks ago

Irons and the unbreathable air of this world strip us of everything, except the freedom to kill ourselves; and this freedom grants us a strength and pride to triumph over the loads which overwhelm us.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

The criticism of the reformers was directed not so much at the weakness or cruelty of those in authority, as at a bad economy of power.

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Chapter Two, pp.. 79
3 months 1 day ago

They are in bad faith - they are afraid - and fear, bad faith have an aroma that the gods find delicious. Yes, the gods like that, the pitiful souls.

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Act 1
3 months 3 days ago

He is great who is what he is from Nature, and who never reminds us of others.

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Uses of Great Men
1 month 3 weeks ago

All art is the struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.

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The Black Prince (1973); 2003, p. 181.
3 months 3 weeks ago

Sobriety, as opposed to inebriety and gluttony, is of admirable use in teaching men that nature is satisfied with a little, and enabling them to content themselves with simple and frugal fare.

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3 months 3 days ago

I saw a moving sight the other morning before breakfast in a little hotel where I slept in the dusty fields. The young man of the house shot a little wolf called coyote in the early morning. The little heroic animal lay on the ground, with his big furry ears, and his clean white teeth, and his little cheerful body, but his little brave life was gone. It made me think how brave all living things are. Here little coyote was, without any clothes or house or books or anything, with nothing to pay his way with, and risking his life so cheerfully - and losing it - just to see if he could pick up a meal near the hotel. He was doing his coyote-business like a hero, and you must do your boy-business, and I my man-business bravely, too, or else we won't be worth as much as a little coyote.

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28-Aug-89
1 month 3 weeks ago

So that in the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of Power after power, that ceaseth only in Death. And the cause of this is not always that a man hopes for a more intensive delight than he has already attained to, or that he cannot be content with a moderate power: but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more.

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The First Part, Chapter 11, p. 47
3 months 3 days ago

A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain, or but a very insignificant one; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighboring palace rises in equal or even in greater measure, the occupant of the relatively little house will always find himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls.

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Wage Labour and Capital (December 1847), in Marx Engels Selected Works, Volume I, p. 163.
1 week 3 days ago

In ancient Europe, Stoics asserted that a slave could be freer than a master who suffers from self-division. In China, Daoists imagined a type of sage who responded to the flow of events without weighing alternatives. Disciples of monotheistic faiths have believed something similar: freedom, they say, is obeying God's will. What those who follow these traditions want most is not any kind of freedom of choice. Instead, what they long for is freedom from choice.

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The Faith of Puppets: The Freedom of the Marionette (p. 6-7)
3 months 3 days ago

What strikes one here above all is the crudely empirical conception of profit derived from the outlook of the ordinary capitalist, which wholly contradicts the better esoteric understanding of Adam Smith.

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Vol. II, Ch. X, p. 202.
1 month 3 weeks ago

Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions. 

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As quoted in The Listener
3 months 3 days ago

Poetry - No definition of poetry is adequate unless it be poetry itself. The most accurate analysis by the rarest wisdom is yet insufficient, and the poet will instantly prove it false by setting aside its requisitions. It is indeed all that we do not know. The poet does not need to see how meadows are something else than earth, grass, and water, but how they are thus much. He does not need discover that potato blows are as beautiful as violets, as the farmer thinks, but only how good potato blows are. The poem is drawn out from under the feet of the poet, his whole weight has rested on this ground. It has a logic more severe than the logician's. You might as well think to go in pursuit of the rainbow, and embrace it on the next hill, as to embrace the whole of poetry even in thought.

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January 26, 1840
3 months 3 days ago

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

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Ch. 22
1 month 3 weeks ago

Those, no doubt, are in some way fortunate who have brought themselves, or have been brought by others, to obey some ultimate principle before the bar of which all problems can be brought. Single-minded monists, ruthless fanatics, men possessed by an all-embracing coherent vision do not know the doubts and agonies of those who cannot wholly blind themselves to reality.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Can the children of the bridechamber mourn, as long as the bridegroom is with them? but the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken from them, and then shall they fast. No man putteth a piece of new cloth unto an old garment, for that which is put in to fill it up taketh from the garment, and the rent is made worse. Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved.

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9:15-17 (KJV)
1 month 2 weeks ago

Obviously, Anarchism, or any other social theory, making man a conscious social unit, will act as a leaven for rebellion.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for the sky is red. And in the morning, It will be foul weather to day: for the sky is red and lowring. O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times? A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given unto it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas.

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16:2-4 (KJV)
2 months 1 week ago

He who seeks freedom for anything but freedom's self is made to be a slave.

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p. 204
3 months 1 week ago

Above all, every relation must be considered as suspicious, which depends in any degree upon religion, as the prodigies of Livy: And no less so, everything that is to be found in the writers of natural magic or alchemy, or such authors, who seem, all of them, to have an unconquerable appetite for falsehood and fable.

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Aphorism 29
1 week 3 days ago

The result of toppling tyranny in divided countries is usually civil war and ethnic cleansing.

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The death of this crackpot creed is nothing to mourn, The Guardian
3 months 4 days ago

Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery.

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Ch. 6: Machines and the Emotions
1 month 3 weeks ago

Then are the children free. Notwithstanding, lest we should offend them, go thou to the sea, and cast an hook, and take up the fish that first cometh up; and when thou hast opened his mouth, thou shalt find a piece of money: that take, and give unto them for me and thee.

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17:26-27 (KJV)
1 month 4 weeks ago

Refinement is a sign of a deficient vitality, in art, in love, and in everything.

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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
1 month 4 weeks ago

Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable. We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits: the excesses provoked by the goddess Reason, by the concept of nation, class, or race are akin to those of the Inquisition or of the Reformation.

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3 months 3 days ago

There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant.

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Demonology
1 month 4 weeks ago

In the torments of the intellect, there is a certain bearing which is to be sought in vain among those of the heart. Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety.

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3 months 3 days ago

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

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Civilization
3 months 3 weeks ago

To no one but the Son of Heaven does it belong to order ceremonies, to fix the measures, and to determine the written characters.

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4 months 3 days ago

It is impossible that each of the elements should be infinite. For that is body which has interval on all sides; and that is infinite which has extension without bound.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Even then [at the time of Peter's speech in Acts 2] it was the last days; how much more so now, when there must still be as much time till the end of the world as has passed since the ascension of the Lord! We do not know the end of the world, because it is not for us to know the times or the seasons that the Father has set in his power; but we know that, like the apostles, we live in the last times, in the last days, in the last hour. Those who lived after the apostles and before us were more in what we call the last times, and we ourselves are in them even more than they; those who will come after us will be so much more, till one gets to those who will be, if one may say so, the last of the last, and finally till that day, the very last, of which the Lord means to speak when he said, "And I will raise him up on the last day". How far are we from that day? That is an impenetrable secret.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

It is only natural that I should constantly have revolved in my mind the question of the relationship of the symbolism of the unconscious to Christianity as well as to other religions. Not only do I leave the door open for the Christian message, but I consider it of central importance for Western man. It needs, however, to be seen in a new light, in accordance with the changes wrought by the contemporary spirit.

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3 months 3 days ago

The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

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April 3, 1852
3 months 2 days ago

The Value of myth is that it takes all the things you know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity.

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p. 90
1 month 2 weeks ago

Perhaps power is never free from a feeling of lack.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Order thyself so, that thy Soul may always be in good estate; whatsoever become of thy body.

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