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2 months 1 day ago

In my work, I have always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful. In a conversation with Freeman Dyson.

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Quoted in Chandrasekhar, S. (2010-12-01) . "Beauty and the quest for beauty in science". Physics Today 63 (12): 57-62. ISSN 0031-9228. DOI:10.1063/1.3529003.
5 months 3 weeks ago

There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

But capitalist production begets,with the inexorability of a law of Nature,its own negation. It is the negation of negation.

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Vol. I, Ch. 32, p. 837.
6 months 2 weeks ago

Books ... hold within them the gathered wisdom of humanity, the collected knowledge of the world's thinkers, the amusement and excitement built up by the imaginations of brilliant people. Books contain humor, beauty, wit, emotion, thought, and, indeed, all of life. Life without books is empty.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

When any work seems to have required immense force and labor to affect it, the idea is grand. Stonehenge, neither for disposition nor ornament, has anything admirable; but those huge rude masses of stone, set on end, and piled each on other, turn the mind on the immense force necessary for such a work. Nay, the rudeness of the work increases this cause of grandeur, as it excludes the idea of art and contrivance; for dexterity produces another sort of effect, which is different enough from this.

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Part II Section XII
5 months 3 weeks ago

Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.

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Unverified attribution noted in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1993), ed. Suzy Platt, Library of Congress, p. 39;
4 months 1 week ago

The complexity of the connection between the world of perception and the world of physics does not preclude that such a connection can be shown to exist at any time.

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p. 133.
4 months 1 week ago

The assurance that we have no means of answering final questions is no valid excuse for callousness towards them. The more deeply should we feel, down to the roots of our being, their pressure and their sting. Whose hunger has ever been sated with the knowledge that he could not eat?

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p. 15
5 months 1 week ago

There are two sentences inscribed upon the Delphic oracle, hugely accommodated to the usages of man's life: "Know thyself," and "Nothing too much;" and upon these all other precepts depend.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Although meaningless in a tribal context, numbers and statistics assume mythic and magical qualities of infallibility in literate societies.

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(p. 114)
4 months 4 days ago

The effects of mescalin or LSD can be, in some respects, far more satisfying than those of alcohol. To begin with, they last longer; they also leave behind no hangover, and leave the mental faculties clear and unimpaired. They stimulate the faculties and produce the ideal ground for a peak experience.

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p. 88
2 months 1 day ago

I am now even more persuaded of the urgent need to study why Socrates was accused. The dislike of philosophy is perennial, and the seeds of the condemnation of Socrates are present at all times, not in the bosoms of pleasure-seekers, who don't give a damn, but in those of high-minded and idealistic persons who do not want to submit their aspirations to examination.

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Western Civ, p. 19.
4 months 1 week ago

Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, 'Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?' And then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!'

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Matthew 7:21-23 (NKJV) (Also Luke 6:24; 13:26, 27)
2 months 1 day ago

To recognize that some of the things our culture believes are not true imposes on us the duty of finding out which are true and which are not.

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"Western Civ," p. 22.
4 months 2 weeks ago

Three conceptions are perpetually turning up at every point in every theory of logic, and in the most rounded systems they occur in connection with one another. They are conceptions so very broad and consequently indefinite that they are hard to seize and may be easily overlooked. I call them the conceptions of First, Second, Third. First is the conception of being or existing independent of anything else. Second is the conception of being relative to, the conception of reaction with, something else. Third is the conception of mediation, whereby a first and second are brought into relation.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Tis evident, that sympathy, or the communication of passions, takes place among animals, no less than among men. Fear, anger, courage and other affections are frequently communicated from one animal to another [...] And 'tis remarkable, that tho' almost all animals use in play the same member, and nearly the same action as in fighting; a lion, a tyger, a cat their paws; an ox his homs; a dog his teeth; a horse his heels: Yet they most carefully avoid harming their companion, even tho' they have nothing to fear from his resentment; which is an evident proof of the sense brutes have of each other's pain and pleasure.

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Part 2, Section 12
4 months 1 week ago

And yet Catholicism does not abandon ethics. No! No modern religion can leave ethics on one side. But our religion - although its doctors may protest against this - is fundamentally and for the most part a compromise between eschatology and ethics; it is eschatology pressed into the service of ethics. What else but this is that atrocity of the eternal pains of hell, which agrees so ill with the Pauline apocatastasis? Let us bear in mind these words which the Theologica Germanica, the manual of mysticism that Luther read, puts into the mouth of God: "If I must recompense your evil, I must recompense it with good, for I am and have no other." And Christ said: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," and there is no man who perhaps knows what he does.

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3 months 3 days ago

A life which does not go into action is a failure.

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Vol. 10
5 months 2 weeks ago

There is no information about the thingness of the thing without knowledge of the kind of truth in which the thing stands. But there is no information about this truth of the thing without knowledge of the thingness of the thing whose truth is in question. Where are we to get a foothold? The ground slips away under us. Perhaps we are already close to falling into the well. At any rate the housemaids are already laughing.

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p. 27
5 months 3 weeks ago

When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others. It is much more nearly certain that we are assembled here tonight than it is that this or that political party is in the right. Certainly there are degrees of certainty, and one should be very careful to emphasize that fact, because otherwise one is landed in an utter skepticism, and complete skepticism would, of course, be totally barren and completely useless.

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"Skepticism"
5 months 2 weeks ago

Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.

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"Note on Dogma"
4 months 2 weeks ago

Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all. Like the majority of men who are born to a given belief, they demand the most rigorous proof of any adverse belief, but assume that their own needs none.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Someday, someday, this crazy world will have to end, And our God will take things back that He to us did lend. And if, on that sad day, you want to scold our God, Why go right ahead and scold Him. He'll just smile and nod.

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2 months 5 days ago

A sword by itself does not slay; it is merely the weapon used by the slayer.

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Line 30 Seneca is here describing arguments used by 'certain men,' not stating his own opinion.
2 months 6 days ago

Inflation is an increase in the quantity of money without a corresponding increase in the demand for money, i.e., for cash holdings.

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The Free Market and Its Enemies, speech to the Foundation for Economic Education
4 months 3 weeks ago

To a body of infinite size there can be ascribed neither centre nor boundary... Thus the Earth no more than any other world is at the centre.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Morality must be the heart of our existence, if it is to be what it wants to be for us. ... The highest form of philosophy is ethics. Thus all philosophy begins with "I am." The highest statement of cognition must be an expression of that fact which is the means and ground for all cognition, namely, the goal of the I.

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Fichte Studies § 556
1 month 2 weeks ago

I shall within a few days divest myself of the anxieties and the labors with which I have been oppressed, and retire with inexpressible delight to my family, my friends, my farms, and books. There I may indulge at length in that tranquillity and those pursuits from which I have been divorced by the character of the times in which I have lived, and which have forced me into the line of political life under a sense of duty and against a great and constant aversion to it.

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Letter to David Baillie Warden
5 months 2 weeks ago

Kant stated defensively that he had "found it necessary to deny knowledge. . . to make room for faith," but he had not made room for faith; he had made room for thought, and he had not "denied knowledge" but separated knowledge from thinking.

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p. 14
4 months 3 weeks ago

I am a sick man... I am a wicked man. An unattractive man.

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Part 1, Chapter 1
5 months 2 weeks ago

My sympathies are, of course, with the Government side, especially the Anarchists; for Anarchism seems to me more likely to lead to desirable social change than highly centralized, dictatorial Communism.

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Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War (1937) edited by Nancy Cunard and publisehd by the Left Review
5 months 3 weeks ago

What good would it be to possess the whole universe if one were its only survivor?

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A Lasting Peace Through the Federation of Europe, 1756
5 months 3 weeks ago

The entire history of social improvement has been a series of transitions, by which one custom or institution after another, from being a supposed primary necessity of social existence, has passed into the rank of an universally stigmatized injustice and tyranny. So it has been with the distinctions of slaves and freemen, nobles and serfs, patricians and plebeians; and so it will be, and in part already is, with the aristocracies of colour, race, and sex.

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Ch. 5
4 months 1 week ago

It is more blessed to give than to receive.

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Acts 20:35b
4 months 3 weeks ago

By adverting to the dignity of this high calling our ancestors have turned a savage wilderness into a glorious empire: and have made the most extensive, and the only honorable conquests, not by destroying, but by promoting the wealth, the number, the happiness of the human race.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.

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Beauty
6 months ago

For a man to love again where he is loved, it is the charity of publicans contracted by mutual profit and good offices; but to love a man's enemies is one of the cunningest points of the law of Christ, and an imitation of the divine nature.

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Of The Exaltation of Charity
4 months 3 weeks ago

Be charitable before Wealth makes thee covetous.

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4 months 1 week ago

Pragmatism, in trying to turn experimental physics into a prototype of all science and to model all spheres of intellectual life after the techniques of the laboratory, is the counterpart of modern industrialism, for which the factory is the prototype of human existence, and which models all branches of culture after production on the conveyor belt.

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p. 50.
4 months 4 days ago

In a book called Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect, Whitehead points out that perception is usually a matter of symbols, just like language; I say I see a book when I actually see a red oblong. The Transactionists (who have been influenced by Whitehead rather than Husserl) take this one stage further, and point out that when I 'perceive' something, I am actually making a bet with myself that what I perceive is what I think it is. In order to act and live at all, I have to make these bets; I cannot afford to make absolutely certain that things are what I think they are. But this means that we should not take our perceptions at face value, any more than Nietzsche was willing to take philosophy at its face value; we must allow for prejudice and distortion.

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p. 66
4 months 6 days ago

To desire friendship is a great fault. Friendship should be a gratuitous joy like those afforded by art or life. We must refuse it so that we may be worthy to receive it; it is of the order of grace.

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p. 274
4 months 2 weeks ago

Tyranny is just what one can develop a taste for, since it so happens that man prefers to wallow in fear rather than to face the anguish of being himself.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

We reason deeply, when we forcibly feel.

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Letter 19
5 months 3 weeks ago

And O! how the mind is here washed clean of all its early ingrafted Jewish superstition ! It is the most profitable and elevating reading which is possible in the world. It has been the solace of my life, and will be the solace of my death.

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About the Upanishads. Arthur Schopenhauer, quoted in Europe Looks At India by Mukherhi, D.P.
2 months 5 days ago

No easy way leads from the earth to heaven..

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line 437; (Megara).
4 months 1 week ago

The wretched consciousness shrinks from it own annihilation, and just as an animal spirit newly severed from the womb of the world, finds itself confronted with the world and knows itself distinct from it, so consciousness must needs desire to possess another life than that of the world itself.

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4 months 1 week 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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1 month 2 weeks ago

Love the little trade which thou hast learned, and be content therewith.

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IV, 31

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