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6 months 1 week ago

For man holds his ground only by surpassing himself, in the same sense in which it is said that one ceases to love if one does not love increasingly everyday.

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p. 238
6 months 3 weeks ago

The unassisted hand and the understanding left to itself possess but little power. Effects are produced by the means of instruments and helps, which the understanding requires no less than the hand; and as instruments either promote or regulate the motion of the hand, so those that are applied to the mind prompt or protect the understanding.

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Aphorism 2
6 months 1 week ago

I focus on popular culture because I focus on those areas where black humanity is most powerfully expressed, where black people have been able to articulate their sense of the world in a profound manner. And I see this primarily in popular culture. Why not in highbrow culture? Because the access has been so difficult. Why not in more academic forms? Because academic exclusion has been the rule for so long for large numbers of black people that black culture, for me, becomes a search for where black people have left their imprint and fundamentally made a difference in terms of how certain art forms are understood. This is currently in popular culture. And it has been primarily in music, religion, visual arts and fashion.

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"Cornel West interviewed by bell hooks" in Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life
6 months 2 weeks ago

The offender never forgives.

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Émile et Sophie, ou Les Solitaires, "Lettre Première", 1781
6 months 4 weeks ago

Since love grows within you, so beauty grows. For love is the beauty of the soul.

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6 months 1 week ago

The violence of love is as much to be dreaded as that of hate. When it is durable, it is serene and equable. Even its famous pains begin only with the ebb of love, for few are indeed lovers, though all would fain be.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 158
6 months 1 week ago

If the many, the specialists, gain the day, it will be the end of science as we know it - of great science. It will be a spiritual catastrophe comparable in its consequences to nuclear armament.

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K. Popper, The Myth of the Framework, London: Routledge. As quoted in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Popper (2016) by J. Shearmur, G. Stokes
2 months 3 weeks ago

It must be obvious... that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

A fundamental economic reconstruction, bringing with it very far-reaching changes in ways of thinking and feeling, in philosophy and art and private relations, seems absolutely necessary if industrialism is to become the servant of man instead of his master. In all this, I am at one with the Bolsheviks; politically, I criticize them only when their methods seem to involve a departure from their own ideals.

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Preface

I will not say that the more or less poetical and unphilosophical doctrines that I am about to set forth are those which make me live; but I will venture to say that it is my longing to live and to live for ever that inspires these doctrines within me. And if by means of them I succeed in strengthening and sustaining this same longing in another, perhaps when it is all but dead, then I shall have performed a man's work, and above all, I shall have lived. In a word, be it with reason or without reason or against reason, I am resolved not to die. And if, when at last I die out, I die altogether, then I shall not have died out of myself - that is, I shall not have yielded myself to death, but my human destiny shall have killed me. Unless I come to lose my head, or rather my heart, I will not abdicate from life - life will be wrested from me.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

The word of man is the most durable of all material.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 25, sect. 298
5 months 2 weeks ago

The one infinite is perfect, in simplicity, of itself, absolutely, nor can aught be greater or better, This is the one Whole, God, universal Nature, occupying all space, of whom naught but infinity can give the perfect image or semblance.

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II 12 as translated by Dorothea Waley Singer
2 months 3 weeks ago

The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.

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Inside Information
6 months 2 weeks ago

For wherever violence is used, and injury done, though by hands appointed to administer Justice, it is still violence and injury, however colour'd with the Name, Pretences, or Forms of Law, the end whereof being to protect and redress the innocent, by an unbiassed application of it, to all who are under it; wherever that is not bona fide done, War is made upon the Sufferers, who having no appeal on Earth to right them, they are left to the only remedy in such Cases, an appeal to Heaven.

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Two Treatises of Government. The Second Treatise. Chapter 3: The State of War, §20 p. 281 books.google
6 months 2 weeks ago

When I was a child the atmosphere in the house was one of puritan piety and austerity. There were family prayers at eight o'clock every morning. Although there were eight servants, food was always of Spartan simplicity, and even what there was, if it was at all nice, was considered too good for children. For instance, if there was apple tart and rice pudding, I was only allowed the rice pudding. Cold baths all the year round were insisted upon, and I had to practice the piano from seven-thirty to eight every morning although the fires were not yet lit. My grandmother never allowed herself to sit in an armchair until the evening. Alcohol and tobacco were viewed with disfavor although stern convention compelled them to serve a little wine to guests. Only virtue was prized, virtue at the expense of intellect, health, happiness, and every mundane good.

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p. 9
5 months 3 days ago

Once the philosophical foundation of democracy has collapsed, the statement that dictatorship is bad is rationally valid only for those who are not its beneficiaries, and there is no theoretical obstacle to the transformation of this statement into its opposite.

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p. 29.
3 months 4 days ago

Love is ever the beginning of Knowledge as fire is of light.

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Essays, Death of Goethe.
7 months 1 week ago

There is more to a science fiction story than the science it contains.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

When the qualification to vote is regulated by years, it is placed on the firmest possible ground, because the qualification is such as nothing but dying before the time can take away; and the equality of Rights, as a principle, is recognized in the act of regulating the exercise. But when Rights are placed upon, or made dependent upon property, they are on the most precarious of all tenures. "Riches make themselves wings, and fly away," and the rights fly with them ; and thus they become lost to the man when they would be of most value.

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4 months 1 week ago

Even when the wound is healed, the scar remains.

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Maxim 236
5 months 5 days ago

Our mass media have little difficulty in selling particular interests as those of all sensible men. The political needs of society become individual needs and aspirations, their satisfaction promotes business and the commonweal, and the whole appeals to be the very embodiment of Reason.

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p. xli
5 months 2 weeks ago

Furthermore, when citizens are all almost equal, it becomes difficult for them to defend their independence against the aggressions of power.

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Chapter III.
6 months 2 weeks ago

Only a male intellect clouded by the sexual drive could call the stunted, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped and short-legged sex the fair sex.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 27, § 369
5 months 1 week ago

Say what we will, death is the best thing nature has found to please everyone. With each of us, everything vanishes, everything stops forever. What an advantage, what an abuse! Without the least effort on our part, we own the universe, we drag it into our own disappearance. No doubt about it, dying is immoral...

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5 months 1 week ago

Of escape there are but three methods - two chimerical and a third real. The first two are the dram-shop and the church, debauchery of the body or debauchery of the mind; the third is social revolution.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

A person who already displays ... cruelty to animals is also no less hardened towards men. We can already know the human heart, even in regard to animals.

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Part II, p. 212

I think it would be better to call it subjective and particular rather than artificial.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

It must be recognized that man in his limited and relative earthly life is capable of bringing about the beautiful and the valuable only when he believes in another life, unlimited, absolute, eternal. That is a law of his being. A contact with this mortal life exclusive of any other ends in the wearing-away of effective energy and a self-satisfaction that makes one useless and superficial. Only the spiritual man, striking his roots deep in infinite and eternal life, can be a true creator. But Humanism denied the spiritual man, handed over the eternal to the temporal, and took its stand by the natural man within the limited confines of the earth.

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p. 34
6 months 3 days ago

One should emulate works and deeds of virtue, not arguments about it.

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6 months 1 week ago

I find men victims of illusion in all parts of life. Children, youths, adults, and old men, all are led by one bawble or another. Yoganidra, the goddess of illusion, Proteus, or Momus, or Gylfi's Mocking, - for the Power has many names, - is stronger than the Titans, stronger than Apollo.

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Illusions
3 months 4 weeks ago

M. Comte's philosophy, in practice, might be compendiously described as Catholicism minus Christianity.

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On the Physical Basis of Life
6 months 1 week ago

The way for a person to develop a [writing] style is (a) to know exactly what he wants to say, and (b) to be sure he is saying exactly that. The reader, we must remember, does not start by knowing what we mean. If our words are ambiguous, our meaning will escape him. I sometimes think that writing is like driving sheep down a road. If there is any gate open to the left or the right the readers will most certainly go into it.

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As quoted in part 2 of Sherwood Eliot Wirt in "The Final Interview of C. S. Lewis", 1963
5 months 1 week ago

For lack of empirical data I have neither knowledge nor understanding of such forms of being, which are commonly called spiritual. ...Nevertheless, we have good reason to suppose that behind this veil there exists the uncomprehended absolute object which affects and influences us-and to suppose it even, or particularly, in the case of psychic phenomena about which no verifiable statements can be made.

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p.351
6 months 1 week ago

An intuitionist conception of justice is, one might say, but half a conception.

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Chapter I, Section 8, pg. 41
4 months 1 week ago

Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.

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An Apology for Idlers.
3 months 3 weeks ago

I've learned from the Bhagavad Gita and other teachings of our culture to detach myself from the results of what I do, because those are not in my hands. The context is not in your control, but your commitment is yours to make, and you can make the deepest commitment with a total detachment about where it will take you. You want it to lead to a better world, and you shape your actions and take full responsibility for them, but then you have detachment. And that combination of deep passion and deep detachment allows me always to take on the next challenge because I don't cripple myself, I don't tie myself in knots. I function like a free being. I think getting that freedom is a social duty because I think we owe it to each other not to burden each other with prescription and demands. I think what we owe each other is a celebration of life and to replace fear and hopelessness with fearlessness and joy.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Those least responsible for climate change are worst affected by it.

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Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis
6 months 1 week ago

Lincoln's place in the history of the United States and of mankind will, nevertheless, be next to that of Washington!

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6 months 1 week ago

For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms, and did my duty faithfully, though I never received one cent for it.

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After February 22, 1846
4 months 3 weeks ago

The criterion of efficiency dictates that choice of alternatives which produces the largest result for the given application of resources.

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Simon (1945, p. 179); As cited in: Harry M. Johnson (1966) Sociology: A Systematic Introduction. p. 287.
6 months 3 weeks ago

It is an unsufferable blasphemy to reject the public ministry or to say that people can become holy without sermons and Church. This involves a destruction of the Church and rebellion against ecclesiastical order; such upheavals must be warded off and punished like all other revolts.

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In Luther, Hartmann Grisar, 1915, London, Kegan Paul, Trench, vol. 4, p. 126,
2 months 1 week ago

Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education & free discussion are the antidotes of both.

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Letter to John Adams
4 months 3 weeks ago

We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.

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H 4
7 months 3 days ago

To be fond of learning is to be near to knowledge. To practice with vigor is to be near to magnanimity. To possess the feeling of shame is to be near to energy.

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7 months ago

What! You would convict me from my own words, and bring against me what I had said or written elsewhere. You may act in that manner with those who dispute by established rules. We live from hand to mouth, and say anything that strikes our mind with probability, so that we are the only people who are really at liberty.

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Book 5 Section 11
6 months 2 weeks ago

It is difficult for the isolated individual to work himself out of the immaturity which has become almost natural for him. He has even become fond of it and for the time being is incapable of employing his own intelligence, because he has never been allowed to make the attempt. Statutes and formulas, these mechanical tools of a serviceable use, or rather misuse, of his natural faculties, are the ankle-chains of a continuous immaturity. Whoever threw it off would make an uncertain jump over the smallest trench because he is not accustomed to such free movement. Therefore there are only a few who have pursued a firm path and have succeeded in escaping from immaturity by their own cultivation of the mind.

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6 months ago

Thrasyllus the Cynic begged a drachm of Antigonus. "That," said he, "is too little for a king to give." "Why, then," said the other, "give me a talent." "And that," said he, "is too much for a Cynic (or, for a dog) to receive."

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45 Antigonus I
4 months 6 days ago

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting - the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

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Ch. 6
5 months 1 week ago

But, braggart demons, we postpone our end: how could we renounce the display of our freedom, the show of our pride?

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