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6 months 1 week ago

If you are well-to-do and can maintain your household, love your wife in your home according to good custom...Make her happy while you are alive, for she is land profitable to her lord.

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Maxim no. 21.
2 months 4 weeks ago

Myths are not descriptions of things, but expressions of a determination to act... A myth cannot be refuted since it is, at bottom, identical with the convictions of a group, being the expression of these convictions in the language of movement.

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p. 28-29 (Letter to Daniel Halevy)
5 months 2 weeks ago

Skepticism is an exercise in defascination.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Virtue by premeditation isn't worth much.

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H 13
6 months 2 weeks ago

Good bye, proud world! I'm going home; Thou art not my friend; I am not thine.

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Good-bye, st. 1
6 months 1 week ago

Pay attention to your enemies, for they are the first to discover your mistakes.

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§ 12
3 months 1 week ago

In all human affairs, and especially in those that relate to war, ...leave always some room to fortune, and to accidents which cannot be foreseen.

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The General History, Book II, Ch. 4 (trans. by Hampton)
3 months 1 week ago

Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better.

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Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.
3 months 1 week ago

Wisdom, if it were young, would cherish love, nursing it with devotion, deepening it with sacrifice, vitalizing with parentage, making all things subordinate to it till the end. Even though it consumes us in its service and overwhelms us with tragedy, even though it breaks us down with separations, let it be first. How can it matter what price we pay for love?

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Ch. 2 : On Youth
2 months 2 weeks ago

Never have nations been civilized, except by religion.

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XXXIII, p. 99
6 months 3 weeks ago

Malice sucks up the greatest part of its own venom, and poisons itself.

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Of Repentance, Book III, Ch. 2
5 months 1 week ago

What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude: the aims of friendship, religion, science, and art.

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Ch. V: Democracy
5 months 1 week ago

The concept of freedom, as the Philosophy of Right has shown, follows the pattern of free ownership. As a result, the history of the world that Hegel looks out upon exalts and enshrines the history of the middle-class, which based itself on this pattern. There is a stark truth in Hegel's strangely certain announcement that history has reached its end. But it announces the funeral of a class, not of history.

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P. 227
4 months 2 weeks ago

They say cowardice is infectious; but then argument is, on the other hand, a great emboldener.

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Ch. 4, The Sea Chest.
5 months 4 weeks ago

Happiness is a good flow of life. 

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As quoted by Stobaeus, ii. 77.
5 months 1 week ago

Whit Meynell was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.

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The Philosopher's Pupil (1983) p. 165.
3 months 3 weeks ago

Like nonhuman animals in human factory farms, free-living nonhumans who are starving - or being disembowelled, asphyxiated or eaten alive - cannot console themselves by chanting the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism. The moral case for helping other sentient beings, regardless or race or species, does not rest on the distress their plight does (or doesn't) cause spectators.

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Reply to Meet the people who want to turn predators into herbivores, TreeHugger, 2 Apr. 2015
6 months 1 week ago

The distance between oneself and other persons and other species can fall anywhere on a continuum. Even for other persons the understanding of what it is like to be them is only partial, and when one moves to species very different from oneself, a lesser degree of partial understanding may still be available. The imagination is remarkably flexible. My point, however, is not that we cannot know what it is like to be a bat. I am not raising that epistemological problem. My point is rather that even to form a conception of what it is like to be a bat and a fortiori to know what it is like to be a bat, one must take up the bat's point of view.

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p. 172, note 8.
4 months 3 weeks ago

If an angel were ever to tell us anything of his philosophy I believe many propositions would sound like 2 times 2 equals 13.

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B 44
6 months 1 week ago

'Tis well to restrain the wicked, and in any case not to join him in his wrong-doing.

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3 months 3 days ago

Mercy often means giving death, not life.

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line 329
2 months 4 weeks ago

To the question whether I am a pessimist or an optimist, I answer that my knowledge is pessimistic, but my willing and hoping are optimistic.

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Epilogue, p. 242
6 months 2 weeks ago

I think they do it to pass the time, nothing more. But time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.

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Diary entry of Friday (2 February), concerning a card game
6 months 2 weeks ago

Better red than dead.

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Bertrand Russell, attributes this phrase to 'West German friends of peace' but adopted this slogan for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament he helped found William Safire, Safire's Political Dictionary, (2008) p. 49-50
5 months 1 week ago

Once the first radical attack on private property has been launched, the proletariat will find itself forced to go ever further, to concentrate increasingly in the hands of the state all capital, all agriculture, all transport, all trade. All the foregoing measures are directed to this end; and they will become practicable and feasible, capable of producing their centralizing effects to precisely the degree that the proletariat, through its labor, multiplies the country's productive forces.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Newton... (after having remarked that geometry only requires two of the mechanical actions which it postulates, namely, to describe a straight line and a circle) says: geometry is proud of being able to achieve so much while taking so little from extraneous sources. One might say of metaphysics, on the other hand: it stands astonished, that with so much offered it by pure mathematics it can effect so little. In the meantime, this little is something which mathematics indispensably requires in its application to natural science, which, inasmuch as it must here necessarily borrow from metaphysics, need not be ashamed to allow itself to be seen in company with the latter.

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Preface, Tr. Bax (1883) citing Isaac Newton's Principia
7 months 2 weeks ago

He could almost wish he were superstitious. He could then console himself with the thought that the casual meaningless meeting had really been directed by a knowing and purposeful Fate.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

It makes no sense to say that death is the goal of life, but what else is there to say?

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Can the "word" be pinned down to either one period or one church? All churches are, of course, only more or less unsuccessful attempts to represent the unseen to the mind.

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Letter quoted in Florence Nightingale in Rome : Letters Written by Florence Nightingale in Rome in the Winter of 1847-1848 (1981)
6 months 2 weeks ago

It is because we are predominantly purposeful beings that we are perpetually correcting our immediate sensations. But men are free not to be utilitarianly purposeful. They can sometime be artists, for example. In which case they may like to accept the immediate sensation uncorrected, because it happens to be beautiful.

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"One and Many," p. 11
5 months 1 week ago

The concept of God was for a long time the place where the idea was kept alive that there are other norms besides those to which nature and society give expression in their operation.

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"Thoughts on Religion," Critical Theory: Selected Essays (1995), p. 129.
2 months 2 weeks ago

Concentrate every minute like a Roman-like a man-on doing what's in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions.

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(Hays translation) II, 5
6 months 2 weeks ago

The best university that can be recommended to a man of ideas is the gauntlet of the mobs.

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Eloquence
4 months 2 weeks ago

Aesthetic theories arose one hundred fifty years ago among the wealthy classes of the Christian European world. ...And notwithstanding its obvious insolidity, nobody else's theory so pleased the cultured crowd or was accepted so readily and with such absence of criticism. It so suited the people of the upper classes that to this day, notwithstanding its entirely fantastic character and the arbitrary nature of its assertions, it is repeated by the educated and uneducated as though it were something indubitable and self-evident.

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5 months 1 week ago

This heaven will pass away, and the one above it will pass away. The dead are not alive, and the living will not die. In the days when you consumed what is dead, you made it what is alive. When you come to dwell in the light, what will you do? On the day when you were one you became two. But when you become two, what will you do?

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2 months 4 weeks ago

Proverbs about truth are well-loved in Russian. They give steady and sometimes striking expression to the not inconsiderable harsh national experience: ONE WORD OF TRUTH SHALL OUTWEIGH THE WHOLE WORLD. And it is here, on an imaginary fantasy, a breach of the principle of the conservation of mass and energy, that I base both my own activity and my appeal to the writers of the whole world.

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3 months 1 week ago

Normal science, the puzzle-solving activity we have just examined, is a highly cumulative enterprise, eminently successful in its aim, the steady extension of the scope and precision of scientific knowledge. In all these respects it fits with great precision the most usual image of scientific work. Yet one standard product of the scientific enterprise is missing. Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none.

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p. 52
5 months 3 weeks ago

They (the emperors) frequently abused their power arbitrarily to deprive their subjects of property or of life: their tyranny was extremely onerous to the few, but it did not reach the greater number; .. But it would seem that if despotism were to be established amongst the democratic nations of our days it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and more mild, it would degrade men without tormenting them.

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Book Four, Chapter VI.
3 months 1 week ago

No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offense.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it.

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Lectures XIV and XV, "The Value of Saintliness"
2 months 4 weeks ago

The world is in an extremely dangerous situation, and serious diseases often require the risk of a dangerous cure - like the Pasteur serum for rabies.

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Inside Information p. 4
6 months 2 weeks ago

Consider the Koran... this wretched book was sufficient to start a world-religion, to satisfy the metaphysical need of countless millions for twelve hundred years, to become the basis of their morality and of a remarkable contempt for death, and also to inspire them to bloody wars and the most extensive conquests. In this book we find the saddest and poorest form of theism. Much may be lost in translation, but I have not been able to discover in it one single idea of value.

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E. Payne, trans., Vol. II, Ch. XVII: On Man's Need for Metaphysics
5 months 1 day ago

Capitalism lacks narrativity.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

The functional regions of the brain which subserve physical agony, the "pain centres", and the mainly limbic substrates of emotion, appear in phylogenetic terms to be remarkably constant in the vertebrate line. The neural pathways involving serotonin, the periaquaductal grey matter, bradykinin, dynorphin, ATP receptors, the major opioid families, substance P etc all existed long before hominids walked the earth. Not merely is the biochemistry of suffering disturbingly similar where not effectively type-identical across a wide spectrum of vertebrate (and even some invertebrate) species. It is at least possible that members of any species whose members have more pain cells exhibiting greater synaptic density than humans sometimes suffer more atrociously than we do, whatever their notional "intelligence".

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1.9 The Taste of Depravity
5 months 1 day ago

Forty years ago Germany proclaimed the slogan: "Germany above everything. Germany for the Germans, first, last and always. We want peace; therefore we must prepare for war. Only a well armed and thoroughly prepared nation can maintain peace, can command respect, can be sure of its national integrity." And Germany continued to prepare, thereby forcing the other nations to do the same. The terrible European war is only the culminating fruition of the hydra-headed gospel, military preparedness.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

I think these things firearms were invented by Satan himself, for they can't be defended against with (ordinary) weapons and fists. All human strength vanishes when confronted with firearms. A man is dead before he sees what's coming.

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