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3 months 6 days ago

If A is success in life, then A = x + y + z. Work is x, play is y and z is keeping your mouth shut.

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8 months 6 days ago

There are only the wise of the highest class, and the stupid of the lowest class, who cannot be changed.

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6 months 1 week ago

Egos appear by setting themselves apart from other egos.

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6 months 4 weeks ago

Place is the greatest thing, as it contains all things.

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As quoted in Diogenes Laërtius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, I, 35
6 months 1 week ago

What I know wreaks havoc upon what I want.

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6 months 4 weeks ago

Without Justice, no realm may prosper.

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7 months 1 week ago

Athuroglossos is characterized by..: (1) When you have "a mouth like a running spring," you cannot distinguish those occasions when you should speak from those when you should remain silent; or that which must be said from that which must remain unsaid; or the circumstances and situations where speech is required from those where one ought to remain silent. (2) As Plutarch notes... you have no regard for the value of logos, for rational discourse as a means of gaining access to truth.

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6 months 2 days ago

I too have a growing inner certainty that there is a deposit of pure gold in me which ought to be passed on. The trouble is that I am more and more convinced by my experience and observation of my contemporaries that there is no one to receive it.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

The question of the principle of the form of the intelligible world turns, therefore, upon making apparent in what manner it is possible for several substances to be in mutual commerce, and for this reason to pertain to the same whole, which is called world. We do not here consider the world, let it be understood, as to matter, that is, as to the nature of the substances of which it consists, whether they be material or immaterial, but as to form, that is to say, how among several things taken separately a connection, and among them all, totality can have place.

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4 months 1 day ago

It is a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness.

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Line 13
3 months 1 week ago

Use these rules then, and trouble thyself about nothing else.

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X, 2
5 months 2 days ago

So far from a gradual progress towards perfection forming any necessary part of the Darwinian creed, it appears to us that it is perfectly consistent with indefinite persistence in one state, or with a gradual retrogression.

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7 months 2 weeks 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
11 months 3 weeks ago

The analysis achieves its end when the patient is able to recognize, in the Real of his symptom, the only support of his being. That is how we must read Freud's 'wo we war, soll ich werden:' you, the subject, must identify yourself with the place where your symptom already was; in its pathological particularity you must recognize the element which gives consistency to your being.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Like a dropsical man calling out for water, water, our deluded citizens are clamoring for more banks, more banks. The American mind is now in that state of fever which the world has so often seen in the history of other nations. We are under the bank bubble, as England was under the South Sea bubble, France under the Mississippi bubble, and as every nation is liable to be, under whatever bubble, design, or delusion may puff up in moments when off their guard. We are now taught to believe that legerdemain tricks upon paper can produce as solid wealth as hard labor in the earth. It is vain for common sense to urge that nothing can produce nothing; that it is an idle dream to believe in a philosopher's stone which is to turn everything into gold, and to redeem man from the original sentence of his Maker, "in the sweat of his brow shall he eat his bread.

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Letter to Colonel Charles Yancey (6 January 1816) ME 14:384
5 months 4 weeks ago

In contrast to festivals, events do not create community.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

I think He made one law of that kind in order that there might be obedience. In all these other matters what you call obeying Him is but doing what seems good in your eyes also. Is love content with that? You do them, indeed, because they are His will, but not only because they are his will. Where can you taste the joy of obeying unless he bids you do something for which His bidding is the only reason?

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5 months 1 week ago

Democracies owe their existence to national loyalties - the loyalties that are supposedly shared by government and opposition, by all political parties, and by the electorate as a whole. Wherever the experience of nationality is weak or non-existent, democracy has failed to take root. For without national loyalty, opposition is a threat to government, and political disagreements create no common ground.

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4 months 1 week ago

In the whole world, that day, there was not a more entirely unimportant-looking pair of people than this Miner and his Wife. And yet what were all Emperors, Popes and Potentates, in comparison? There was born here, once more, a Mighty Man; whose light was to flame as the beacon over long centuries and epochs of the world; the whole world and its history was waiting for this man. It is strange, it is great.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Pass by us, and forgive us our happiness.

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Part 4, Chapter 5
5 months 1 week ago

Liberty is not the same thing as equality, and that those who call themselves liberals are far more interested in equalizing than in liberating their fellows.

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The Limits of Liberty, The American Spectator
6 months 2 weeks ago

...for stones, plants, and animals there is no God, but only for man.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Every technology contrived and "outered" by man has the power to numb human awareness during the period of its first interiorization.

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(p. 174)
7 months 2 weeks ago

The Theophilanthropists do not call themselves the disciples of such or such a man. They avail themselves of the wise precepts that have been transmitted by writers of all countries and in all ages.

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Introduction
5 months 2 weeks ago

All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information.

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(p. 178-179)
3 months 2 weeks ago

As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun. While this gives a moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise, and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body, and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be the constant companion of your walks. Never think of taking a book with you.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

All men are stuck in a kind of fog. They're surrounded by a wall of fog. They think this is perfectly normal, but it's not. It means that since they can't see much beyond their own little situation, they tend to vegetate. They need some immediate stimulus to keep them alert.

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p. 20
7 months 1 week ago

One can say that the author is an ideological product, since we represent him as the opposite of his historically real function. (When a historically given function is represented in a figure that inverts it, one has an ideological production.) The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.

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What is an author?
6 months 1 week ago

If the flesh came into being because of spirit, it is a wonder. But if spirit came into being because of the body, it is a wonder of wonders. Indeed, I am amazed at how this great wealth has made its home in this poverty.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

I like to think of criticism as the highest intellectual effort that mankind is capable of, and above all, I like to think of self-criticism as the most difficult attainment of an educated man.

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"The Function of Criticism at the Present Time", in The China Critic, Vol. III, no. 4 (23 January 1930), p. 81
4 months 1 week ago

Let us honor all honest human power of contrivance in its degree. The beaver intellect, so long as it steadfastly refuses to be vulpine, and answers the tempter pointing out short routes to it with an honest "No, no," is truly respectable to me; and many a highflying speaker and singer whom I have known, has appeared to me much less of a developed man than certain of my mill-owning, agricultural, commercial, mechanical, or otherwise industrial friends, who have held their peace all their days and gone on in the silent state. If a man can keep his intellect silent, and make it even into honest beaverism, several very manful moralities, in danger of wreck on other courses, may comport well with that, and give it a genuine and partly human character; and I will tell him, in these days he may do far worse with himself and his intellect than change it into beaverism, and make honest money with it.

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4 months 6 days ago

As we find a place in the economic world the rebellion of youth subsides; we disapprove of earthquakes when our feet are on the earth. We forget then the radicalism then in a gentle liberalism - which is radicalism softened with the consciousness of a bank account.

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Ch. 3 : On Middle Age
6 months 1 week ago

The bigger the crowd, the more negligible the individual.

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p 14
6 months 4 weeks ago

You will know that wretched men are the cause of their own suffering, who neither see nor hear the good that is near them, and few are the ones who know how to secure release from their troubles. Such is the fate that harms their minds; like pebbles they are tossed about from one thing to another with cares unceasing. For the dread companion Strife harms them unawares, whom one must not walk behind, but withdraw from and flee.

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As quoted in Divine Harmony: The Life and Teachings of Pythagoras by John Strohmeier and Peter Westbrook
5 months 5 days ago

I say that where the public morality is concerned it may be the duty of the State to interfere with the contracts of individuals... It must then, I think, be admitted that, where health is concerned, and where morality is concerned, the State is justified in interfering with the contracts of individuals.

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Speech in the House of Commons (22 May 1846), quoted in Speeches of the Right Honourable T. B. Macaulay, M.P. (1854), p. 442
8 months 2 weeks ago

Probably, the most-often-repeated lesson in history is that foreigners who are called in to help one side in a civil war take over for themselves. It is a lesson that seems never to be learned despite endless repetition.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.

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Page 191
2 months ago

Eh...Affinity's liquify tool...we'll get some cool stuff going. I know stuff like this makes things tough to read...we'll see...

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6 months 1 week ago

When we assume God to be a guiding principle-well, sure enough, a god is usually characteristic of a certain system of thought or morality. For instance, take the Christian God, the summum bonum: God is love, love being the highest moral principle; and God is spirit, the spirit being the supreme idea of meaning. All our Christian moral concepts derive from such assumptions, and the supreme essence of all of them is what we call God.

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Nietzsche's Zarathustra (1988), p. 40
7 months 6 days ago

You may drive out Nature with a pitchfork, yet she still will hurry back.

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Book I, epistle x, line 24
6 months 2 weeks ago

On the whole, Borne, Heine, Feuerbach, and such authors are the individualities who have great interest for someone who is composing an imaginary construction. They frequently are well informed about the religious-that is, they know definitely that they do not want to have anything to do with it. This is a great advantage over the systematicians, who without knowing where the religious really is located take it upon themselves to explain it-sometimes obsequiously, sometimes superciliously, but always unsuccessfully.

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Soren Kierkegaard, Stages on Life's Way, 1845, Hong 1988 p. 452
7 months 2 weeks ago

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business.

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p. 485
4 months 1 week ago

On the left you had a different aspect of individual autonomy that was pushed to an extreme, which really had to do with the autonomy that individuals have to create their own lifestyles. ...The basic concept of liberal autonomy has to do with your ability to make moral choices, but as time went on the emphasis came to be not on making the right moral choices within an existing moral framework, but rather to be able to make up that framework on your own, that that was the ultimate expression of individual human freedom, and it has obvious problems for a society because all societies have to be based on shared norms that allow people to coordinate their actions, to communicate, and the like... If you believe that the rules can be... set by anybody and that transgressing existing rules is automatically a good thing, you're not going to have... a stable society.

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15:05
6 months 2 weeks ago

What is the use of all knowledge, if one does not act in accordance with it? This remark implies that knowledge is regarded as a means to action, and the latter as the real end. One could put the question the other way round and ask: How can we possibly act well without knowing what the Good is? This way of expressing it would regard knowledge as conditioning action. But both expressions are one-sided, and the truth is that both, knowledge as well as action, are in the same way inseparable elements of rational life.

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Consequences of the Difference p. 75

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