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3 months 2 days ago

All things living are in search of a better world.

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Preface
3 months 4 days ago

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!

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Section 4, paragraph 11 (last paragraph) Variant translation: Workers of the world, unite!
2 months 3 weeks ago

Human beings are social animals. We were social before we were human.

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Chapter 1, The Origins Of Altruism, p. 3
4 months 1 day ago

To the rest of the Galaxy, if they are aware of us at all, Earth is but a pebble in the sky. To us it is home, and all the home we know.

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4 months 1 day ago

Of all the books I have ever worked on, I think Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare gave me the most pleasure, day in, day out. For months and months I lived and thought Shakespeare, and I don't see how there can be any greater pleasure in the world, any pleasure, that is, that one can indulge in for as much as ten hours without pause, day after day indefinitely.

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3 months 2 days ago

... in such a matter he would never have been guided by his first thoughts (which would probably have been right) nor even by his twenty-first (which would have at least been explicable). Beyond doubt he would have prolonged deliberation till his hundred-and-first; and they would be infallibly and invincibly wrong. This is what always happens to the deliberations of a simple man who thinks he is a subtle one.

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3 months 4 days ago

I don't like the spirit of socialism - I think freedom is the basis of everything.

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Letter to Constance Malleson (Colette), September 29, 1916
3 months 5 days ago

As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value to you than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself; because only through ordering what you know by comparing every truth with every other truth can you take complete possession of your knowledge and get it into your power. You can think about only what you know, so you ought to learn something; on the other hand, you can know only what you have thought about.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 22, § 257 "On Thinking for Yourself" as translated in Essays and Aphorisms(1970) as translated by R. J. Hollingdale
3 months 4 days ago

From another side: is Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press, not to mention the printing machine? Do not the song and saga of the muse necessarily come to an end with the printer's bar, hence do not the necessary conditions of epic poetry vanish?

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Introduction, p. 31.
3 months 4 days ago

The fact that all Mathematics is Symbolic Logic is one of the greatest discoveries of our age; and when this fact has been established, the remainder of the principles of mathematics consists in the analysis of Symbolic Logic itself.

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Principles of Mathematics (1903), Ch. I: Definition of Pure Mathematics, p. 5
3 months 6 days ago

The means employed by Nature to bring about the development of all the capacities of men is their antagonism in society, so far as this is, in the end, the cause of a lawful order among men.

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Fourth Thesis
1 month 2 weeks ago

The Spirit of the Laws became the nobleman's Bible all over Europe.

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Catherine Behrens, The Ancien Régime (1967), p. 78
3 months 1 week ago

But men must know that in this theater of man's life it is reserved only for God and angels to be lookers on.

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Book II, xx, 8
3 months 5 days ago

Truth that has been merely learned is like an artificial limb, a false tooth, a waxen nose; at best, like a nose made out of another's flesh; it adheres to us only because it is put on. But truth acquired by thinking of our own is like a natural limb; it alone really belongs to us. This is the fundamental difference between the thinker and the mere man of learning. The intellectual attainments of a man who thinks for himself resemble a fine painting, where the light and shade are correct, the tone sustained, the colour perfectly harmonised; it is true to life. On the other hand, the intellectual attainments of the mere man of learning are like a large palette, full of all sorts of colours, which at most are systematically arranged, but devoid of harmony, connection and meaning.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 22, § 261
4 months 6 days ago
It is not enough to prove something, one has also to seduce or elevate people to it. That is why the man of knowledge should learn how to speak his wisdom: and often in such a way that it sounds like folly!
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3 months 5 days ago

If the slavery of the parents be unjust, much more is their children's; if the parents were justly slaves, yet the children are born free; this is the natural, perfect right of all mankind; they are nothing but a just recompense to those who bring them up: And as much less is commonly spent on them than others, they have a right, in justice, to be proportionably sooner free.

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3 months 1 week ago

Tis the sharpness of our mind that gives the edge to our pains and pleasures.

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Book I, Ch. 14
3 months 5 days ago

I cannot imagine how the clockwork of the universe can exist without a clockmaker.

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As attributed in More Random Walks in Science : An Anthology (1982) by Robert L. Weber, p. 65
1 month 2 weeks ago

Faith feels itself secure neither with universal consent, nor with tradition, nor with authority. It seeks support of its enemy, reason.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

The essence of education is that it be religious. Pray, what is religious education? A religious education is an education which inculcates duty and reverence. Duty arises from our potential control over the course of events. Where attainable knowledge could have changed the issue, ignorance has the guilt of vice. And the foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity.

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3 months 1 week ago

Now as we call every thing custom, which proceeds from a past repetition, without any new reasoning or conclusion, we may establish it as a certain truth, that all the belief, which follows upon any present impression, is deriv'd solely from that origin.

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Part 3, Section 8
1 month 3 weeks ago

You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men. You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.

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Matthew 5:13-16 (NIV) (See also: Mark 9:50; Luke 14:34, 35)
1 month 3 days ago

The more is given the less the people will work for themselves, and the less they work the more their poverty will increase.

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Help for the Starving, Pt. III
1 month 2 weeks ago

A race preserves its vigour so long as it harbours a real contrast between what has been and what may be, and so long as it is nerved by the vigour to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure, civilization is in full decay.

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p. 360.
3 months 1 week ago

Look round this universe. What an immense profusion of beings, animated and organised, sensible and active! You admire this prodigious variety and fecundity. But inspect a little more narrowly these living existences, the only beings worth regarding. How hostile and destructive to each other! How insufficient all of them for their own happiness! How contemptible or odious to the spectator! The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind Nature, impregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children!

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Philo to Cleanthes, Part XI
1 week 3 days ago

Progress in civilization seems possible only in interludes when history is idling.

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An Old Chaos: The Emperor's Tomb (p. 35)
1 month 2 weeks ago

Physiology does not teach us how to digest, nor logic how to discourse, nor esthetics how to feel beauty or express it, nor ethics how to be good. And indeed it is well if they do not teach us how to be hypocrites; for pedantry, whether it be pedantry of logic, or of esthetics, or of ethics, is at bottom nothing but hypocrisy.

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3 months 4 days ago

A pupil from whom nothing is ever demanded which he cannot do never does all he can.

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(p. 32)
3 months 2 days ago

The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best.

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Act 6, sc. 2
3 months 3 weeks ago

Much learning does not teach understanding.

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3 months 4 days ago

Aeschylus had a clear eye for the commonest things. His genius was only an enlarged common sense. He adverts with chaste severity to all natural facts. His sublimity is Greek sincerity and simpleness, naked wonder which mythology had not helped to explain... Whatever the common eye sees at all and expresses as best it may, he sees uncommonly and describes with rare completeness. The multitude that thronged the theatre could no doubt go along with him to the end... The social condition of genius is the same in all ages. Aeschylus was undoubtedly alone and without sympathy in his simple reverence for the mystery of the universe.

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January 29, 1840
3 months 3 weeks ago

If a man has no humaneness what can his propriety be like? If a man has no humaneness what can his happiness be like?

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1 month 2 weeks ago

I believe that one can and must hope for a sane society that furthers man's capacity to love his fellow men, to work and create, to develop his reason and his objectivity of a sense of himself that is based on the experience of his productive energy. I believe that one can and must hope for the collective regaining of a mental health that is characterized by the capacity to love and to create...

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3 weeks 6 days ago

The will of man has no power whatever over his opinions; he must, and ever did, and ever will, believe what has been, is, or may be impressed on his mind by his predecessors, and the circumstances which surround him.

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2 months 3 days ago

The breath of an aristocrat is the death rattle of freedom.

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Act I.
2 months 4 days ago

Fathers and teachers, I ponder, "What is hell?" I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.

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Book VI, Chapter 3 (trans. Constance Garnett)
3 months 4 days ago

I should like to believe my people's religion, which was just what I could wish, but alas, it is impossible. I have really no religion, for my God, being a spirit shown merely by reason to exist, his properties utterly unknown, is no help to my life. I have not the parson's comfortable doctrine that every good action has its reward, and every sin is forgiven. My whole religion is this: do every duty, and expect no reward for it, either here or hereafter.

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Greek Exercises (1888), written two days after his sixteenth birthday.
2 months 3 weeks ago

To one commending an orator for his skill in amplifying petty matters, Agesilaus said, "I do not think that shoemaker a good workman that makes a great shoe for a little foot."

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Of Agesilaus the Great
3 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
1 month 2 weeks ago

That knowledge which adds greatness to character is knowledge so handled as to transform every phase of immediate experience.

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2 months 4 days ago

Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel.

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4 months 4 days ago

A white spot is on the horizon. There it is. A terrible storm is brewing. But no one sees the white spot or has any inkling of what it might mean. But no (this would not be the most terrible situation either), no, there is one person who sees it and knows what it means-but he is a passenger. He has no authority on the ship, can take no action. ... The fact that in Christendom there is visible on the horizon a white speck which means that a storm is threatening-this I knew; but, alas, I was an am only a passenger.

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2 months 4 days ago

India is pre-eminently distinguished for the many traits of original grandeur of thought and of the wonderful remains of immediate knowledge.

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quoted in Londhe, S. (2008). A tribute to Hinduism: Thoughts and wisdom spanning continents and time about India and her culture. New Delhi: Pragun Publication.
3 months 2 days ago

But the man is a humbug - a vulgar, shallow, self-satisfied mind, absolutely inaccessible to the complexities and delicacies of the real world. He has the journalist's air of being a specialist in everything, of taking in all points of view and being always on the side of the angels: he merely annoys a reader who has the least experience of knowing things, of what knowing is like. There is not two pence worth of real thought or real nobility in him. But he isn't dull.

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Part of a diary entry dated "Wednesday-Wednesday 9-16 July", 1924, regarding Thomas Babington Macaulay
3 months 3 days ago

All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience.

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"The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" in address to the Yale Philosophical Club, published in the International Journal of Ethics, April 1891
3 months 2 days ago

Looking for God-or Heaven-by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare's plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters or Stratford as one of the places. Shakespeare is in one sense present at every moment in every play.

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"The Seeing Eye", in Christian Reflections (1967), p. 167
7 months 1 week ago

In the electoral campaign, President Bush named as the most important person in his life Jesus. Now he has a unique chance to prove that he meant it seriously: for him, as for all Americans today, "Love thy neighbor!" means "Love the Muslims!" OR IT MEANS NOTHING AT ALL.

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