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5 months 3 weeks ago

Soul, indeed, is a certain medium between an impartible essence, and an essence which is divisible about bodies. But intellect is an impartible essence alone. And qualities and material forms are divisible about bodies. Not everything which acts on another, effects that which it does effect by approximation and contact; but those natures which effect any thing by approximation and contact, use approximation accidentally.

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7 months 1 day ago

When you have faults, do not fear to abandon them.

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6 months 1 week ago

Men are what their mothers made them.

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Fate
6 months 1 week ago

It is the duty of all who care for their country or for civilisation to point out that we cannot further any of our ideals by participation in the next war, and that we ought therefore to resist all measures based upon the assumption that we shall take part in it. In the late war it was arguable that victory, being possible, might do some good. With the modern technique of gas attack, no belligerent can hope for victory. Absolute pacifism, therefore, in every country, in which it is politically possible, is the only sane policy both for Governments and individuals.

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Letter to The New Statesman and Nation (10 August 1935), quoted in Yours Faithfully, Bertrand Russell
2 months 1 week ago

Louisiana, as ceded by France to the United States, is made a part of the United States; its white inhabitants shall be citizens, and stand, as to their rights and obligations, on the same footing with other citizens of the United States, in analogous situations.

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Draft of proposed Amendment to the Constitution by Jefferson, who thought an amendment would be necessary to authorize the Louisiana Purchase to be incorporated into the United States
6 months 1 week ago

The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape?

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Space and time are commonly regarded as the forms of existence of the real world, matter as its substance. A definite portion of matter occupies a definite part of space at a definite moment of time. It is in the composite idea of motion that these three fundamental conceptions enter into intimate relationship.

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Introduction
6 months 2 weeks ago

The demands of a free populace, too, are very seldom harmful to liberty, for they are due either to the populace being oppressed or to the suspicious that it is going to be oppressed... and, should these impressions be false, a remedy is provided in the public platform on which some man of standing can get up, appeal to the crowd, and show that it is mistaken. And though, as Tully remarks, the populace may be ignorant, it is capable of grasping the truth and readily yields when a man, worthy of confidence, lays the truth before it.

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Book 1, Ch. 4 (as translated by LJ Walker and B Crick)
6 months 3 weeks ago

Let each look to his own heart: let him not keep hatred against his brother for any hard word; on account of earthly contention let him not become earth.

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First Homily, Paragraph 11, as translated by H. Browne, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 7 (1888)
6 months 1 week ago

There is no spiritual sustenance in flat equality. It is a dim recognition of this fact which makes much of our political propaganda sound so thin. We are trying to be enraptured by something which is merely the negative condition of the good life. That is why the imagination of people is so easily captured by appeals to the craving for inequality, whether in a romantic form of films about loyal courtiers or in the brutal form of Nazi ideology. The tempter always works on some real weakness in our own system of values - offers food to some need which we have starved.

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2 months 1 week ago

The " Five Words," 'genus', 'species', 'difference', 'property', 'accident', were used by the Aristotelians, in order to express the subordination of kinds, and to describe the nature of definitions and propositions. In modern times, these technical expressions have been more referred to by Natural Historians than by Metaphysicians.

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6 months 1 week 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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2 months 3 weeks ago

What maintains the marriage and what is it? Only the knowledge of the hearts, that is its beginning and end.

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3 months 3 days ago

It has ever been held the highest wisdom for a man not merely to submit to Necessity,-Necessity will make him submit,-but to know and believe well that the stern thing which Necessity had ordered was the wisest, the best, the thing wanted there. To cease his frantic pretension of scanning this great God's-World in his small fraction of a brain; to know that it had verily, though deep beyond his soundings, a Just Law, that the soul of it was Good;-that his part in it was to conform to the Law of the Whole, and in devout silence follow that; not questioning it, obeying it as unquestionable.

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5 months 1 week ago

We must make a very precise distinction between the official and consequently dictatorial prerogatives of society organized as a state, and of the natural influence and action of the members of a non-official, non-artificial society.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Don't think money does everything or you are going to end up doing everything for money.

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2 months 1 week ago

All pain is a punishment, and every punishment is inflicted for love as much as for justice.

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"Fifth Dialogue," p. 149
4 months 3 weeks ago

The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime. The wholesale mechanisation of modern life has increased uniformity a thousandfold. It is everywhere present, in habits, tastes, dress, thoughts and ideas. Its most concentrated dullness is "public opinion." Few have the courage to stand out against it. He who refuses to submit is at once labelled "queer," "different," and decried as a disturbing element in the comfortable stagnancy of modern life.

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2 months 1 week ago

And so no force however great can stretch a cord however fine into an horizontal line which is accurately straight.

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Elementary Treatise on Mechanics, The Equilibrium of Forces on a Point, 1819
3 months 2 weeks ago

As the Genesis story teaches, knowledge cannot save us from ourselves. If we know more than before, it means only that we have greater scope to enact our fantasies. But - as the Genesis myth also teaches - there is no way we can rid ourselves of what we know. If we try to regain a state of innocence, the result can only be a worse madness. The message of Genesis is that in the most vital areas of human life there can be no progress, only an unending struggle with our own nature.

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An Old Chaos: Humanism and Flying Saucers (pp. 79-80)
6 months 1 week ago

The wraith of Sigmund said. "You know what this is, I suppose. Religious melancholia. Stop while there is time. If you dive, you dive into insanity."

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Pilgrim's Regress 168
4 months 3 weeks ago

Once the good man was dead, one wore his hat and another his sword as he had worn them, a third had himself barbered as he had, a fourth walked as he did, but the honest man that he was - nobody any longer wanted to be that.

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C 36
7 months 1 day ago

Speaking with sense we must fortify ourselves in the common sense of all, as a city is fortified by its law, and even more forcefully. For all human laws are nourished by the one divine law. For it prevails as far as it will and suffices for all and is superabundant.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Those who are wise won't be busy, and those who are too busy can't be wise.

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p. 150
6 months 1 week ago

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

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December 20, 1822

It is because the method of physics does not satisfy the comprehension that we have to go on further.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Religion has two principal enemies, fanaticism and infidelity, or that which is called atheism. The first requires to be combated by reason and morality, the other by natural philosophy.

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A Discourse, &c. &c.
5 months 4 weeks ago

A prating barber asked Archelaus how he would be trimmed. He answered, "In silence."

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33 Archelaus
5 months 3 weeks ago

None but a Craftsman can judge of a craft.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

"Optimism," said Cacambo, "What is that?" "Alas!" replied Candide, "It is the obstinacy of maintaining that everything is best when it is worst!

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5 months 4 days ago

Ye fools, did not he that made that which is without make that which is within also?

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11:40 (KJV)
6 months 1 week ago

To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy.

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Ch. 18: The Taming of Power
2 months 3 weeks ago

But he has no fear; unconquered he looks down from a lofty height upon his sufferings.

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4 months 1 week ago

The imagination loves to trifle with what is not.

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The Sea Fogs
6 months 3 weeks ago

Custom renders love attractive; for that which is struck by oft-repeated blows however lightly, yet after long course of time is overpowered and gives way. See you not too that drops of water falling on rocks after long course of time scoop a hole through these rocks?

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Book IV, lines 1283-1287 (tr. Munro)
4 months 2 weeks ago

Well, he wasn't a relativist. There's a long and complicated story of the rise of a desire for scientific relativism. Part of it may well be simply sort of rage against reason, the fear of the sciences and a kind of total dislike of the arrogance of a great many scientists who say we're finding out the truth about everything-and here [with Kuhn] there was a way to undermine that arrogance.

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Ian Hacking, in Gary Stix, "A Q&A with Ian Hacking on Thomas Kuhn's Legacy as "The Paradigm Shift" Turns 50"
6 months 1 week ago

The aggregate capital appears as the capital stock of all individual capitalists combined. This joint stock company has in common with many other stock companies that everyone knows what he puts in, but not what he will get out of it.

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Vol. II, Ch. XX, p. 437.
2 months 1 week ago

Keep this thought handy when you feel a bit of rage coming on - it isn't manly to be enraged. Rather, gentleness and civility are more human, and therefore manlier. A real person doesn't give way to anger and discontent, and such a person has strength, courage, and endurance - unlike the angry and complaining. The nearer a man comes to a calm mind, the closer he is to strength.

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XI 11.18.5b:41
5 months 2 weeks ago

There is hardly a pioneer's hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin.

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Book One, Chapter XIII.
3 months 1 week ago

In morals, truth is but little prized when it is a mere sentiment, and only attains its full value when realized in the world as fact.

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Ch. 5.
4 months 4 weeks ago

To be honest, from what I've seen, pure justice is better viewed stripped away from historical context to a certain extent. Too much history and time and we spin off into infinite circling. Not enough history and we fail to get the balance right. So many want the former to justify grievance retribution.

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5 months 4 days ago

But this priviledge, is allayed by another; and that is, by the priviledge of Absurdity; to which no living creature is subject, but man only.

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The First Part, Chapter 5, p. 20
6 months 1 week ago

No man can have society upon his own terms. If he seeks it, he must serve it too.

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1833
6 months 3 weeks ago

No man is free who is not master of himself.

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Fragment 35 (Oldfather translation)
7 months 2 weeks ago
Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept. For something is possible in the realm of these schemata which could never be achieved with the vivid first impressions: the construction of a pyramidal order according to castes and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, and clearly marked boundaries, a new world, one which now confronts that other vivid world of first impressions as more solid, more universal, better known, and more human than the immediately perceived world, and thus as the regulative and imperative world.
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7 months 1 week ago

Concerning the generation of animals akin to them, as hornets and wasps, the facts in all cases are similar to a certain extent, but are devoid of the extraordinary features which characterize bees; this we should expect, for they have nothing divine about them as the bees have.

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2 months 1 week ago

Necessity, as well as patriotism and confidence, will make us all eager to receive treasury notes, if founded on specific taxes. Congress may borrow of the public, and without interest, all the money they may want, to the amount of a competent circulation, by merely issuing their own promissory notes, of proper denominations for the larger purposes of circulation, but not for the small. Leave that door open for the entrance of metallic money.

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Letter to Thomas Cooper, 1814. ME 14:189
6 months 1 week ago

Far or forgot to me is near; Shadow and sunlight are the same; The vanished gods to me appear; And one to me are shame and fame.

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Brahma, st. 2

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