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3 months 1 week ago

Scientific theories are distinguished from myths... in being criticizable, and... open to modifications... They can be neither verified nor probabilified.

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3 months 1 week ago

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

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Section 1, paragraph 18, lines 12-14.
3 months 1 week ago

It is, of course, clear that a country with a large foreign population must endeavour, through its schools, to assimilate the children of immigrants. It is, however, unfortunate that a large part of this process should be effected by means of a somewhat blatant nationalism.

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Ch. 10: Modern Homogeneity
3 months 1 week ago

The emotions I feel are no more meant to be shown in their unadulterated state than the inner organs by which we live.

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pp. 31-32
3 months 2 weeks ago

Inuring children gently to suffer some degrees of pain without shrinking, is a way to gain firmness to their minds, and lay a foundation for courage and resolution in the future part of their lives.

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Sec. 115
1 month 1 week ago

Logos is the formal cause of the kosmos and all things, responsible for their nature and configuration.

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p. 37
3 months 1 week ago

Who is to determine what the perfect is? It could only be those who are themselves perfect and who therefore know what it means. Here yawns the abyss of that circularity in which the whole of human Dasein moves. What health is, only the healthy can say. Yet healthfulness is measured according to the essential starting point of health. What truth is, only one who is truthful can discern; but the one who is truthful is determined according to the essential starting point of truth.

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p. 127
2 months 2 weeks ago

I could never divide myself from any man upon the difference of an opinion, or be angry with his judgement for not agreeing with me in that, from which perhaps within a few days I should dissent myself.

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Section 6
2 months 1 week ago

A word, once dissected, no longer signifies anything, is nothing. Like a body that, after an autopsy, is less than a corpse.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

I was taught in the sixth grade that we had a standing army of just over a hundred thousand men and that the generals had nothing to say about what was done in Washington. I was taught to be proud of that and to pity Europe for having more than a million men under arms and spending all their money on airplanes and tanks. I simply never unlearned junior civics. I still believe in it. I got a very good grade.

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As quoted by James Lundquist in Kurt Vonnegut
3 months 1 week ago

Her absence is no more emphatic in those places than anywhere else. It's not local at all. I suppose if one were forbidden all salt one wouldn't notice it much more in any one food more than another. Eating in general would be different, every day, at every meal. It is like that. The act of living is different all through. Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

To the rational being only the irrational is unendurable, but the rational is endurable.

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Variant translation: To a reasonable creature, that alone is insupportable which is unreasonable; but everything reasonable may be supported. Book I, ch. 2,1.
3 months 1 week ago

Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.

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"On Violence"

Again, and again, we say, the great, the creative and enduring is ever a secret to itself; only the small, the barren and transient is otherwise.

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Characteristics.
4 months 2 weeks ago
To what extent can truth endure incorporation? That is the question; that is the experiment.
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2 months 2 weeks ago

But man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing Nativities and Deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting Ceremonies of Bravery, in the infamy of his nature. Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us.

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Chapter V
1 month 2 weeks ago

What I am saying, then, is that elements of what we call "language" or "mind" penetrate so deeply into what we call "reality" that the very project of representing ourselves as being "mappers" of something "language-independent" is fatally compromised from the very start. Like Relativism, but in a different way, Realism is an impossible attempt to view the world from Nowhere. In this situation it is a temptation to say, "So we make the world," or "our language makes up the world," or "our culture makes up the world"; but this is just another form of the same mistake. If we succumb, once again we view the world-the only world we know-as a product. One kind of philosopher views it as a product from a raw material: Unconceptualized Reality. The other views it as a creation ex nihilo. But the world isn't a product. It's just the world.

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"Realism with a Human Face"
3 weeks 4 days ago

I find I am shedding hypocrisy in human relationships. What a rest that will be! The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere. That is why so much of social life is exhausting; one is wearing a mask. I have shed my mask.

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Ch. 2; part of this statement has often been paraphrased: "The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere."
1 month 3 weeks ago

What is beginning to emerge, then, is a theory about psychic sensitivity. It runs as follows. When I relax deeply, it is as if someone opened up the partition between the two compartments of my brain, turning them into a single large room. I experience a sense of mental freedom as if I can suddenly breathe more deeply, and a feeling of contact with things. Everyone has had the experience of being in a state of hurry or excitement, and failing to notice that they have bruised or scratched themselves -- until the excitement evaporates and the pain makes itself known. Hurry and tension raise our sensitivity threshold, and at the same time, erect a glass wall between us and reality. In the "unicameral" state, this wall vanishes, and everything seems more real.

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p. 51
3 months 2 weeks ago

The sham cause in physical influence consists in rashly assuming that the commerce of substance and transitive forces is sufficiently knowable from their mere existence. Hence it is not so much a system as rather the neglect of all philosophical system as a superfluity in the argument. Freeing the concept from this defect, we shall have a species of commerce alone deserving to be called real, and from which the whole constituting the world merits being called real, and not ideal or imaginary.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Days of absence,

sad and dreary, 

Clothed in sorrow's dark array,

Days of absence, I am weary: She I love is far away.

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Day of Absence, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
2 months 3 days ago

Man must not only make himself: the weightiest thing he has to do is to determine what he is going to be. He is causa sui to the second power.

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As quoted in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, p. 155
4 months 1 week ago

This was her finest role and the hardest one to play. Choosing between heaven and a ridiculous fidelity, preferring oneself to eternity or losing oneself in God is the age-old tragedy in which each must play his part.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Have patience awhile; slanders are not long-lived. Truth is the child of time; erelong she shall appear to vindicate thee.

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As quoted in Gems of Thought (1888) edited by Charles Northend
3 months 1 week ago

But your crime will be there, one hundred times denied, always there, dragging itself behind you. Then you will finally know that you have committed your life with one throw of the die, once and for all, and there is nothing you can do but tug our crime along until your death. Such is the law, just and unjust, of repentance. Then we will see what will become of your young pride.

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Clytemnestra to her daughter Electra, Act 1
2 months 1 week ago

Wherever ideas come together they tend to weld into general ideas; and whenever they are generally connected, general ideas govern the connection; and these general ideas are living feelings spread out.

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4 months 1 week ago

Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

What is really disturbing about The Name of the Rose, however, is the underlying belief in the liberating, anti-totalitarain force of laughter, of ironic distance. Our thesis here is almost the exact opposite of the underlying premise of Eco's novel: in contemporary socities, democratic or totalitarian, that cynical distance, laughter, irony, are so to speak, part of the game. The ruling ideology is not meant to be taken seriously or literally. Perhaps the greatest danger for totalitarianism is people who take ideology seriously.

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2 months 4 days ago

Few new truths have ever won their way against the resistance of established ideas save by being overstated. 

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As quoted in Communications and History : Theories of Knowledge, Media and Civilization (1988) by Paul Heyer, p. 125

The destiny of the spiritual World, and, - since this is the substantial World, while the physical remains subordinate to it, or, in the language of speculation, has no truth as against the spiritual, - the final cause of the World at large, we allege to be the consciousness of its own freedom on the part of Spirit, and ipso facto, the reality of that freedom.

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1 month 6 days ago

All the measures now proposed are only a compromise with the errors of the present systems; but as these errors now almost universally exist, and must be overcome solely by the force of reason; and as reason, to effect the most beneficial purposes, makes her advance by slow degrees, and progressively substantiates one truth of high import after another, it will be evident, to minds of comprehensive and accurate thought, that by these and similar compromises alone can success be rationally expected in practice. For such compromises bring truth and error before the public; and whenever they are fairly exhibited together, truth must ultimately prevail.

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2 months 5 days ago

It is more blessed to give than to receive.

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Acts 20:35b
3 months 3 weeks ago

Whatever you would make habitual, practice it; and if you would not make a thing habitual, do not practice it, but accustom yourself to something else.

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Book II, ch. 18, 4.
3 months 1 week ago

What do I care about Jupiter? Justice is a human issue, and I do not need a god to teach it to me.

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Orestes, Act 2
3 months 3 weeks ago

If they have entered into the spirit if these rules, and if the rules have made sufficient impression on them to become rooted and established in their minds, they will feel how much difference there is between what is said here and what a few logicians may perhaps have written by chance approximating to it in a few passages of their works.

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2 months 1 week ago

The poem of the understanding is philosophy.

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"Logological Fragments," Philosophical Writings, M. Stolijar, trans. (Albany: 1997) #24
3 months 3 days ago

The core of ethics runs deep in our species and is common to human beings everywhere. It survives the most appalling hardships and the most ruthless attempts to deprive human beings of their humanity. Nevertheless, some people resist the idea that his core has a biological basis which we have inherited from our pre-human ancestors.

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Chapter 2, The Biological Basis Of Ethics, p. 27
1 month 3 weeks ago

Decision making processes are aimed at finding courses of action that are feasible or satisfactory in the light of multiple goals and constraints.

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p. 274.
3 months 1 week ago

I should say that the universe is just there, and that is all.

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BBC Radio Debate on the Existence of God, Bertrand Russell v. Frederick Copleston, 1948
3 months 1 week ago

I saw men go up and down, In the country and the town, With this tablet on their neck,- 'Judgement and a judge we seek.' Not to monarchs they repair, Nor to learned jurist's chair; But they hurry to their peers, To their kinsfolk and their dears; Louder than with speech they pray,- 'What am I? companion, say.'

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Astræa
2 months 4 days ago

Thought is led, by the situation of its objects, to measure their truth in terms of another logic, another universe of discourse. And this logic projects another mode of existence: the realization of the truth in the words and deeds of man. And inasmuch as this project involves man as societal animal," the polis, the movement of thought has a political content. Thus, the Socratic discourse is political discourse inasmuch as it contradicts the established political institutions. The search for the correct definition, for the "concept" of virtue, justice, piety, and knowledge becomes a subversive undertaking, for the concept intends a new polis.

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pp. 133-134
3 months 2 weeks ago

The evil that has resulted from the error of the schools in teaching natural philosophy as an accomplishment only has been that of generating in the pupils a species of atheism. Instead of looking through the works of creation to the Creator Himself, they stop short and employ the knowledge they acquire to create doubts of His existence. They labor with studied ingenuity to ascribe everything they behold to innate properties of matter and jump over all the rest by saying that matter is eternal.

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A Discourse, &c. &c.
2 months 2 weeks ago

Nothing seems at first sight less important than the outward form of human actions, yet there is nothing upon which men set more store: they grow used to everything except to living in a society which has not their own manners.

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Book Three, Chapter XIV.
3 months 1 week ago

The possession and the exercise of political, and among others of electoral, rights, is one of the chief instruments both of moral and of intellectual training for the popular mind; and all governments must be regarded as extremely imperfect, until every one who is required to obey the laws, has a voice, or the prospect of a voice, in their enactment and administration.

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Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform (1859), p. 22
1 month 1 week ago

We do not go to cowards for tender dealing; there is nothing so cruel as panic; the man who has least fear for his own carcase, has most time to consider others.

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314
3 months 2 weeks ago

A whole from necessary substances is impossible. The whole, therefore, of substances is a whole of contingent things, and the world consists essentially of only contingent things.

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2 months 4 days ago

Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate, for all things are plain in the sight of Heaven. For nothing hidden will not become manifest, and nothing covered will remain without being uncovered.

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2 months 1 week ago

Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other. Which is what I do every day. An apparently ineffectual operation, since I must begin all over again the next day.

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