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7 months 2 weeks ago

When Darius offered him ten thousand talents, and to divide Asia equally with him, "I would accept it," said Parmenio, "were I Alexander." "And so truly would I," said Alexander, "if I were Parmenio." But he answered Darius that the earth could not bear two suns, nor Asia two kings.

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42 Alexander
3 weeks 4 days ago

Daily reminder: As long as religion respects 2 rules:

1) Respect reality.
2) Respect universal human rights.

...the rest of the non-religious world are reserving a space for you....

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4 months 3 days ago

"Fire is the first and final mask of my God. We dance and weep between two enormous pyres." Our thoughts and our bodies flash and glitter with reflected light. Between the two pyres I stand serenely, my brain unshaken amid the vertigo, and I say: "Time is most short and space most narrow between these two pyres, the rhythm of this life is most sluggish, and I have no time, nor a place to dance in. I cannot wait." Then all at once the rhythm of the earth becomes a vertigo, time disappears, the moment whirls, becomes eternity, and every point in space - insect or star or idea - turns into dance.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

The capitalist call workers to the factory, for example, directing them to collaborate and communicate in production and giving them the means to do so. In the paradigm of immaterial production, in contrast, labor itself tends to produce the means of interaction, communication, and cooperation for production directly. Affective labor always directly constructs a relationship.

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147
4 months 3 days ago

Considering the general tendency to multiply offices and dependencies and to increase expense to the ultimate term of burden which the citizen can bear, it behooves us to avail ourselves of every occasion which presents itself for taking off the surcharge; that it never may be seen here that, after leaving to labor the smallest portion of its earnings on which it can subsist, Government shall itself consume the whole residue of what it was instituted to guard.

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Thomas Jefferson's First State of the Union Address
6 months 4 weeks ago

I'd rather offer my life as a sacrifice than be necessary to anything.

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8 months 1 week ago

The logic now in use serves rather to fix and give stability to the errors which have their foundation in commonly received notions than to help the search for truth. So it does more harm than good.

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Aphorism 7
4 months 3 weeks ago

Our English careers to born genius are twofold. There is the silent or unlearned career of the Industrialisms, which are very many among us; and there is the articulate or learned career of the three professions, Medicine, Law (under which we may include Politics), and the Church. Your born genius, therefore, will first have to ask himself, Whether he can hold his tongue or cannot? True, all human talent, especially all deep talent, is a talent to do, and is intrinsically of silent nature; inaudible, like the Sphere Harmonies and Eternal Melodies, of which it is an incarnated fraction.

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6 months 2 days ago

Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait.

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Bk. X, ch. 16
3 months 4 weeks ago

It's not about telling people how to be, outside of supporting ideals that teach us what to avoid.

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8 months 3 days ago

A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the State with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated by it as enemies.

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6 months 4 weeks ago

Every change in the social order, every revolution in property relations, is the necessary consequence of the creation of new forces of production which no longer fit into the old property relations. Private property has not always existed. When, towards the end of the Middle Ages, there arose a new mode of production which could not be carried on under the then existing feudal and guild forms of property, this manufacture, which had outgrown the old property relations, created a new property form, private property. And for manufacture and the earliest stage of development of big industry, private property was the only possible property form; the social order based on it was the only possible social order.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Unjust dominion cannot be eternal.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Friend!-Will the ballot-box raise the Noblest to the chief place; does any sane man deliberately believe such a thing?

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8 months 1 week ago

Not because Socrates said so,... I look upon all men as my compatriots.

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Book III, Ch. 9. Of Vanity
8 months 2 days ago

It is the same thing: killing, dying, it is the same thing: one is just as alone in each. He is lucky, he will only die once. As for me, for ten days I have been killing him at every minute. Hugo to Jessica, on his plans to kill.

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Hoederer, Act 5, sc. 2
2 weeks 4 days ago

"What was was ever, and ever shall be. For, if it had come into being, it needs must have been nothing before it came into being. Now, if it were nothing, in no wise could anything have arisen out of nothing."
- Melissus of Samos

See biography for Melissus of Samos:
https://civilsimian.com/Melissus-of-Samos

Read Melissus of Samos' work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/250/content

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6 months 4 weeks ago

This whole creation is essentially subjective, and the dream is the theater where the dreamer is at once scene, actor, prompter, stage manager, author, audience, and critic.

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General Aspects of Dream Psychology
1 month 3 weeks ago

Gimp gradient, Affinity Liquify. I would like to enjoy the romantic nature of these quotes about "God", but, unfortunately religion has ruined the Truth about "God" so we can't even responsibly talk about it romantically. It's too dangerous to safety and peace. I'm not going to kill you guys with color...lol...I just get bored...

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5 months 1 week ago

To say that all philosophy is writing is, minimally, to say that it is never the transparent expression of thought.

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Chapter 3, Deconstruction and Criticism, p. 46
9 months 4 days ago

This is approximately the way Christendom relates to the essentially Christian, the unconditioned. After seventeen, eighteen detours and running all around someone finally has his finite existence assured, and then we receive a sermon about Seek first the kingdom of God. Is this sobriety or is this intoxication?

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6 months 2 weeks ago

The Catholic solution of our problem, of our unique vital problem, the problem of the immortality and eternal salvation of the soul, satisfies the will, and therefore satisfies life; but the attempt to rationalize it by means of a dogmatic theology fails to satisfy the reason. And reason has its exigencies as imperious as those of life. It is no use seeking to force ourselves to consider as super-rational what clearly appears to us to be contra-rational... Infallibility, a notion of Hellenic origin, is in its essence a rationalistic category.

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4 months 2 days ago

The poem is important, but not more than the people whose survival it serves...

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In A Motel Parking Lot, Thinking Of Dr. Williams
7 months 3 days ago

It was not delight, not wonder that arose among us, it was the peace of heaven. A thousand times have I said it to her and to myself: the most beautiful is also the most sacred. And such was everything in her. Like her singing, even so was her life.

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6 months 4 weeks ago

The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.

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8 months 3 days ago

Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

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p. 375
7 months 3 days ago

You can never plan the future by the past.

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Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791), Volume IV, p. 55.

Too many French scholars were the principal authors of the Revolution, too many approved and gave their support so long as the Revolution, like Tarquinius' sceptre, struck down only the tallest heads. Like so many others, they said, It is impossible to make a great revolution without incurring misfortunes. But when a philosopher justifies evil by the end in view, when he says in his heart, Let there be a hundred thousand murders, provided we are free, and Providence replies, I accept your offer, but you must be included in the number, where is the injustice?

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Chapter II, pp. 9-10
4 months 3 weeks ago

Power dements even more than it corrupts, lowering the guard of foresight and raising the haste of action.

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Ch. IV : The Convention: September 21, 1792 - October 26, 1795, Part V : The Reign of Terror: September 17, 1793 - July 28, 1794, § 4 : The Revolution Eats Its Children
8 months 2 days ago

The original scriptures of most religions are poetical and unsystematic. Theology, which generally takes the form of a reasoned commentary on the parables and aphorisms of the scriptures, tends to make its appearance at a later stage of religious history. The Bhagavad-Gita occupies an intermediate position between scripture and theology; for it combines the poetical qualities of the first with the clear-cut methodicalness of the second... one of the clearest and most comprehensive summaries of the Perennial Philosophy ever to have been made. Hence its enduring value, not only for Indians, but for all mankind.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Scientists, animated by the purpose of proving they are purposeless, constitute an interesting subject for study.

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4 months 3 days ago

The ultimate most holy form of theory is action. Not to look on passively while the spark leaps from generation to generation, but to leap and to burn with it!

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4 months 1 week ago

I feel awe of the gods, I love, I revere, I venerate them, and in short have precisely the same feelings towards them as one would have towards kind masters or teachers or fathers or guardians or any beings of that sort.

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Oration to the Cynic Heracleios
9 months 3 days ago

Rhetoric is the counterpart of Dialectic. Both alike are concerned with such things as come, more or less, within the general ken of all men and belong to no definite science. Accordingly, all men make use, more or less, of both; for to a certain extent all men attempt to discuss statements and to maintain them, to defend themselves and to attack others.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

What is it that distinguishes man from animals? It is not his upright posture. That was present in the apes long before the brain began to develop. Nor is it the use of tools. It is something altogether new, a previously unknown quality: self-awareness. Animals, too, have awareness. They are aware of objects; they know this is one thing and that another. But when the human being as such was born he had a new and different consciousness, a consciousness of himself; he knew that he existed and that he was something different, something apart from nature, apart from other people, too. He experienced himself. He was aware that he thought and felt. As far as we know, there is nothing analogous to this anywhere in the animal kingdom. That is the specific quality that makes human beings human.

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Affluence and Ennui in Our Society in For the Love of Life (1986) translated by Robert and Rita Kimber
8 months 1 week 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
5 months 2 weeks ago

My convictions, positive and negative, on all the matters of which you speak, are of long and slow growth and are firmly rooted. But the great blow which fell on me seemed to stir them to their foundation, and had I lived a couple of centuries earlier I could have fancied a devil scoffing at me and them - and asking me what profit it was to have stripped myself of the hopes and consolations of the mass of mankind? To which my only reply was and is - Oh devil! Truth is better than much profit. I have searched over the grounds of my belief, and if wife and child and name and fame were all to be lost to me one after the other as the penalty, still I will not lie.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

The encouragement of light-mindedness about traditional philosophical topics serves the same purposes as does the encouragement of light-mindedness about traditional theological topics. Like the rise of large market economies, the increase in literacy, the proliferation of artistic genres, and the insouciant pluralism of contemporary culture, such philosophical superficiality and light-mindedness helps along the disenchantment of the world. It helps make the world's inhabitants more pragmatic, more tolerant, more liberal, more receptive to the appeal of instrumental rationality.

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4 months 3 days ago

A slave's soul has no worth, my brothers; it lacks strengthto tread on this great earth with gallantry and freedom.I pity the poor slaves, they're nought but airy mist,a light breeze scatters them, a fragrance knocks them down;it's only just they crawl on the earth on hands and knees.Today I'll write a hymn to God and pray for this great grace.

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Egyptian high priest, Book X, line 90
8 months 2 days ago

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

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"Is Theology Poetry?", 1945
5 months 3 weeks ago

To preserve permanent good health, the state of mind must be taken into consideration.

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3rd Part
7 months 3 days ago

Volumes might be written upon the impiety of the pious.

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Pt. I, The Unknowable; Ch. V, The Reconciliation
9 months ago

There is nothing so eternally adhesive as the memory of power.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Having given up autonomy, reason has become an instrument.

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p. 21.

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