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5 months 1 week ago

I am endeavouring to live every day as if it were a complete life.

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8 months 3 weeks ago

Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.

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Ch. 1: Introductory
8 months ago

Go further, and require each of them to make a contribution: you will see how many things are still missing, and you will be obliged to get the assistance of a large number of men who belong to different classes, priceless men, but to whom the gates of the academies are nonetheless closed because of their social station. All the members of these learned societies are more than is needed for a single object of human science; all the societies together are not sufficient for a science of man in general.

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Article on Encyclopedia
8 months 2 weeks ago

Fortune is lavish with her favors, but not to be depended on. Nature on the other hand is self-sufficing, and therefore with her feebler but trustworthy [resources] she wins the greater [meed] of hope.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

What happens to one man may happen to all.

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Maxim 171
5 months 3 weeks ago

Man's power appears to have increased out of all proportion to his wisdom. He has never been in a better position to build a healthy, happy, and productive world; yet things have perhaps never seemed so black.

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Science and Human Behavior
8 months 3 weeks ago

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.

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5 months 4 days ago

While in the West, the insane are so many that they are put in an asylum, in China the insane are so unusual that we worship them, as anybody who has a knowledge of Chinese literature will testify.

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Ch. I : The Awakening, p. 3
9 months 3 weeks ago

I make no secret about being Jewish ... I just think it's more important to be human and to have a human heritage; and I think it is wrong for anyone to feel that there is anything special about any one heritage of whatever kind. It is delightful to have the human heritage exist in a thousand varieties, for it makes for greater interest, but as soon as one variety is thought to be more important than another, the groundwork is laid for destroying them all.

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7 months 1 week ago

To know something is to make this something that I know myself; but to avail myself of it, to dominate it, it has to remain distinct from myself.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

The right-minded man, ever inclined to righteous and lawful deeds, is joyous day and night, and strong, and free from care. But if a man take no heed of the right, and leave undone the things he ought to do, then will the recollection of no one of all his transgressions bring him any joy, but only anxiety and self-reproaching.

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6 months 3 days ago

Liberals tend to regard being subjects of the Queen as an insult to their dignity. But at least the archaic structures by which we are ruled do not force us to define ourselves by blood, soil or faith, and we are protected from the poisonous politics of identity.

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"Monarchy is the key to our liberty,", The Observer
9 months ago

There is no art which one government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people.

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Chapter II, Part II, Appendix to Articles I and II.
6 months 3 weeks ago

The appreciation of the merits of art (of the emotions it conveys) depends upon an understanding of the meaning of life, what is seen as good and evil. Good and evil are defined by religions.

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Opinion considers the opposition of what is true and false quite rigid, and, confronted with a philosophical system, it expects agreement or contradiction. And in an explanation of such a system, opinion still expects to find one or the other.

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Preface, § 2
7 months 2 weeks ago

The application of scientific formulations of the principle of probability statistically determined is thus a logical corollary of the principle already stated, that the subject matter of scientific findings is relational, not individual. It is for this reason that it is safe to predict the ultimate triumph of the statistical doctrine.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Self-pity is not as sterile as we suppose. Once we feel its mere onset, we assume a thinker's attitude, and come to think of it, we come to think!

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6 months 3 weeks ago

The happiness of men consists in life. And life is in labor.

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What Is To Be Done? (1886) Chap. XXXVIII
7 months 1 week ago

Rousseau has said in his Emile (book iv.): "Even though philosophers should be in a position to discover the truth, which of them would take any interest in it? Each one knows well that his system is not better founded than the others, but he supports it because it is his. ...The essential thing is to think differently from others. With believers he is an atheist; with atheists he is a believer." How much substantial truth there is in these gloomy confessions of this man of painful sincerity.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

It is necessary that every man be surpassingly temperate. That person would most of all be a man of this sort if he were superior to money, which is what corrupts all men, and if, without caring about his life, he bestowed his pains on things that are just and pursued virtue.

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p. 149
9 months 1 week ago

When you close your doors, and make darkness within, remember never to say that you are alone, for you are not alone; nay, God is within, and your genius is within. And what need have they of light to see what you are doing?

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Book I, ch. 14, 13, 14.
3 weeks 2 days ago

We do these things to condition our reality to produce a reality where human flourishing is the most likely result.

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8 months 3 weeks ago

You could attach prices to thoughts. Some cost a lot, some a little. And how does one pay for thoughts? The answer, I think, is: with courage.

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p. 52e
8 months 3 weeks ago

The even larger difference between rich and poor makes the latter even worse off, and this violates the principle of mutual advantage.

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Chapter II, Section 13, pg. 79
8 months 3 weeks ago

A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life: he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days.

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Works and Days
4 months 3 weeks ago

Government is a true religion: it has its dogmas, its mysteries, and its ministers. To annihilate it or submit it to the discussion of each individual is the same thing; it lives only through national reason, that is to say through political faith, which is a creed.

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p. 87
7 months 2 weeks ago

The present stage redefines the possibilities of man and nature in accordance with the new means available for their realization.

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p. 65
9 months 1 week ago

Practice yourself, for heaven's sake, in little things; and thence proceed to greater.

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Book I, ch. 18, 18.
7 months 1 week ago

It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense.

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ch. 15.
5 months 2 weeks ago

To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves; let us be above such transparent egotism. If you can't say good and encouraging things, say nothing. Nothing is often a good thing to do, and always a clever thing to say.

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We Have a Right To Be Happy Today, commencement address at the Webb School of Claremont, California
9 months 4 days ago

The believing man hath the Holy Ghost; and where the Holy Ghost dwelleth, He will not suffer a man to be idle, butstirreth him up to all exercises of piety and godliness, and of true religion, to the love of God, to the patient suffering of afflictions, to prayer, to thanksgiving, and the exercise of charity towards all men.

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p. 320
9 months 3 weeks ago

The Bible and science agree in being unable to say anything certainly about what happened before the beginning. There is this difference. The Bible will never be able to tell us. It has reached its final form, and it simply doesn't say. Science, on the other hand, is still developing, and the time may come when it can answer questions that, at present, it cannot.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Reading after a certain age diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking, just as the man who spends too much time in the theater is tempted to be content with living vicariously instead of living his own life.

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8 months 4 weeks ago

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their unison can knowledge arise.

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A 51, B 75
8 months 3 weeks ago

In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying.

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"The Argument for the Remedying of Injustice"
4 months 3 weeks ago

At this point in history when all things which concern man and the structure and elements of history itself are suddenly revealed to us in a new light, it behooves us in our scientific thinking to become masters of the situation, for it is not inconceivable that sooner than we suspect, as has often been the case before in history, this vision may disappear, the opportunity may be lost, and the world will once again present a static, uniform, and inflexible countenance.

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9 months 3 weeks ago

There is less trouble and trauma involved in writing a new piece than in trying to salvage an unsatisfactory old one.

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8 months 4 weeks ago

Clever tyrants are never punished.

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Mérope, act V, scene V, 1743
5 months 2 weeks ago

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.

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Notebooks (1830).
6 months 3 weeks ago

No man is happy who does not think himself so.

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Maxim 584
7 months 3 weeks ago

Women becoming, consequently weaker, in mind and body, than they ought to be...have not sufficient strength to discharge the first duty of a mother; and sacrificing to lasciviousness the parental affection...either destroy the embryo in the womb, or cast if off when born. Nature in every thing demands respect, and those who violate her laws seldom violate them with impunity.

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Ch. 8
4 months 2 weeks ago

There are certain occupations, even in modern society, which entail living in isolation and do not require great physical or intellectual effort. Such occupations as the service of lighthouses and lightships come to mind. Would it not be possible to place young people who wish to think about scientific problems, especially of a mathematical or philosophical nature, in such occupations? Very few young people with such ambitions have, even during the most productive period of their lives, the opportunity to devote themselves undisturbed for any length of time to problems of a scientific nature.

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2 months 6 days ago

What's crazy is...through willing agents, ideas cause physical reality the way physics alone causes in reality. So, ideas cause...and through agency are like objects?

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7 months 2 weeks ago

This idea is that laws which purport to be statements of what actually occurs are statistical in character as distinct from so-called dynamic laws that are abstract and mathematical, and disguised definitions. Recognition of the statistical nature of physical laws was first effected in the case of gases when it became evident that generalizations regarding the behavior of swarms of molecules were not descriptions or predictions of the behavior of any individual particle. A single molecule is not and cannot be a gas. It is consequently absurd to suppose that a scientific law is about the elementary constituents of a gas. It is a statement of what happens when a large number of such constituents interact with one another under certain conditions.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Professional standards, the standards of ambition and selfishness, are always sliding downward toward expense, ostentation, and mediocrity. They tend always to narrow the ground of judgment. But amateur standards, the standards of love, are always straining upward toward the humble and the best. They enlarge the ground of judgment. The context of love is the world.

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The Responsibility of the Poet

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