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7 months 5 days ago

A regret understood by no one: the regret to be a pessimist. It's not easy to be on the wrong foot with life

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8 months 1 week ago

The For-itself, in fact, is nothing but the pure nihilation of the In-itself; it is like a hole of being at the heart of Being.

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9 months 1 week ago

It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. Human understanding has vulgarly occupied itself with nothing but understanding, but if it would only take the trouble to understand itself at the same time it would simply have to posit the paradox.

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8 months 1 week ago

Suso has even left a diagrammatic picture of the relations subsisting between Godhead, triune God and creatures. In this very curious and interesting drawing a chain of manifestation connects the mysterious symbol of the Divine Ground with the three Persons of the Trinity, and the Trinity in turn is connected in a descending scale with angels and human beings. These last, as the drawing vividly shows, may make one of two choices. They can either live the life of the outer man, the life of the separative selfhood; in which case they are lost (for, in the words of the Theologia Germanica, "nothing burns in hell but the self"). Or else they can identify themselves with the inner man, in which case it becomes possible for them, as Suso shows, to ascend again, through unitive knowledge, to the Trinity and even, beyond the Trinity, to the ultimate Unity of the Divine Ground.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

No tyranny is more cruel than the one practiced in the shadow of the laws and under color of justice - when, so to speak, one proceeds to drown the unfortunate on the very plank by which they had saved themselves.

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See Chap. XIV of Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence. Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline (1734), p. 89.
9 months 6 days ago

There is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not loving. All of us, today, are dying of this misfortune. For violence and hatred dry up the heart itself; the long fight for justice exhausts the love that nevertheless gave birth to it.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

To understand a science it is necessary to know its history.

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A Course of Positive Philosophy (1832 - 1842) [Six volumes]
6 months 1 week ago

Success makes some crimes honorable.

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Maxim 326
6 months 5 days ago

I don't believe you until you tell me, do you really believe, for example, if they say they are Catholic, "Do you really believe that when a priest blesses a wafer, it turns into the body of Christ? Are you seriously telling me you believe that? Are you seriously saying that wine turns into blood?" Mock them. Ridicule them. In public. Don't fall for the convention that we're all too polite to talk about religion. Religion is not off the table. Religion is not off limits. Religion makes specific claims about the universe which need to be substantiated and need to be challenged and, if necessary, need to be ridiculed with contempt.

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Reason Rally, National Mall, Washington, DC, 2012-03-24 Richard Dawkins and his Foundation at the Reason Rally, YouTube, 7 April 2012
6 months 3 days ago

Happily for poor traduced and degraded human nature, the principle for which we now content will speedily divest it of all the ridiculous and absurd mystery with which it has been hitherto enveloped by the ignorance of preceding times: and all the ''complicated'' and ''counteracting'' motives for good conduct, which have been multiplied almost to infinity, will be reduced to ''one single principle of action'', which, by its evident operation and sufficiency, shall render this intricate system ''unnecessary'', and ultimately supersede it in all parts of the earth. That principle is THE HAPPINESS OF SELF CLEARLY UNDERSTOOD AND UNIFORMLY PRACTICED; WHICH CAN ONLY BE ATTAINED BY CONDUCT THAT MUST PROMOTE THE HAPPINESS OF THE COMMUNITY.

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Essay First, The Formation of Human Character.
7 months 1 day ago

Stuart was not dismayed by his sexual feelings about the boy.

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The Good Apprentice (1985), p. 247.
7 months 1 week ago

To be in love is not the same as loving. You can be in love with a woman and still hate her.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Popular presentation today is all too often that which puts the mob in a position to talk about something without understanding it.

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G 32
4 months 4 weeks ago

This, evidently was not a minor civilization, produced by inferior people. It ranks with the highest civilizations of history, and some, like Keyserling, would place it at the head and summit of all. The British conquest of India was the invasion and destruction of a high civilization by a trading company utterly without scruple or principle, careless of art, greedy of gain, overrunning with fire and sword a country temporarily disordered and helpless, bribing and murdering, annexing and stealing, and beginning that career of illegal and "legal" plunder which has now gone on ruthlessly for one hundred and seventy-three years, and goes on at this moment while in our secure comfort we write and read. Those who have seen the unspeakable poverty and physiological weakness of the Hindus today will hardly believe that it was the wealth of eighteenth century India which attracted the commercial pirates of England and France.

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8 months 1 week ago

Free in this world as the birds in the air, disengaged from every kind of chains, those who have practiced the Yoga gather in Brahmin the certain fruit of their works. Depend upon it; rude and careless as I am, I would fain practice the yoga faithfully. This Yogi, absorbed in contemplation, contributes in his degree to creation; he breathes a divine perfume, he heard wonderful things. Divine forms traverse him without tearing him and he goes, he acts as animating original matter. To some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a Yogi.

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Letter to H. G. O. Blake, November 20, 1849
7 months 3 weeks ago

The most momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or to evil.

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As quoted in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, as translated by Robert Drew Hicks (1925)
10 months 1 week ago

Caring about others....all you need to know....

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7 months 6 days ago

A mother-complex is not got rid of by blindly reducing the mother to human proportions. Besides that we run the risk of dissolving the experience "Mother" into atoms, thus destroying something supremely valuable and throwing away the golden key which a good fairy laid in our cradle. That is why mankind has always instinctively added the pre-existent divine pair to the personal parents-the "god"father and "god"-mother of the newborn child-so that, from sheer unconsciousness or shortsighted rationalism, he should never forget himself so far as to invest his own parents with divinity.

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"Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype" (1939) In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious P.172
8 months 1 week ago

The more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be. Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth.

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Ch. 25
8 months 1 week ago

Out of my experience, such as it is (and it is limited enough) one fixed conclusion dogmatically emerges, and that is this, that we with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves. ... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom. Just so there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir.

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"Confidences of a 'Psychical Researcher'", in The American Magazine, Vol. 68 (1909), p. 589
8 months 4 weeks ago

The superior man, extensively studying all learning, and keeping himself under the restraint of the rules of propriety, may thus likewise not overstep what is right.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

The cannibalistic nature of life is actually really disturbing....

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2 weeks 1 day ago

This is an important supporting quote. He constantly refers to this idea with his quotes and understanding this is the difference between half understanding what he's talking about and fully understanding.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think. The widespread mental indolence, so prevalent in society, proves this to be only too true. Rather than to go to the bottom of any given idea, to examine into its origin and meaning, most people will either condemn it altogether, or rely on some superficial or prejudicial definition of non-essentials.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Men and women meet now to be idle. Is it extraordinary that they do not know each other, and that, in their mutual ignorance, they form no surer friendships? Did they meet to do something together, then indeed they might form some real tie. But, as it is, they are not there, it is only a mask which is there - a mouth-piece of ready-made sentences about the "topics of the day"; and then people rail against men for choosing a woman "for her face" - why, what else do they see?

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7 months 3 weeks ago

And when the physician said, "Sir, you are an old man," "That happens," replied Pausanias, "because you never were my doctor."

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Of Pausanias the Son of Phistoanax
8 months 1 week ago

We do not, however, reckon that trade disadvantageous which consists in the exchange of the hard-ware of England for the wines of France;and yet hard-ware is a very durable commodity, and were it not for this continual exportation, might too be accumulated for ages together, to the incredible augmentation of the pots and pans of the country. But it readily occurs that the number of such utensils is in every country necessarily limited by the use which there is for them;that it would be absurd to have more pots and pans than were necessary for cooking the victuals usually consumed there;and that if the quantity of victuals were to increase, the number of pots and pans would readily increase along with it, apart of the increased quantity of victuals being employed in purchasing them, or in maintaining an additional number of workman whose business it was to make them.

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Chapter I, p. 471.
4 months 2 weeks ago

Prussia had been the creation of a dynasty that had the nobility, the army and the higher bureaucracy for its backbone. The primary element was not the 'nation' or the Volk. Rather the state, more than the land or the ethnos, constituted the real foundation and unifying principle. There was none of that in Hitlerism.

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p. 37
8 months 1 week ago

If a man makes the press utter atrocious things he becomes as answerable for them as if he had uttered them by word of mouth. Mr. Jefferson has said in his inaugural speech, that "error of opinion might be tolerated, when reason was left free to combat it." This is sound philosophy in cases of error. But there is a difference between error and licentiousness.

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Liberty of the Press, 1806
7 months 5 days ago

Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our 'fellow men', the question which comes to mind is invariably the same: how does he keep from killing himself?

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7 months ago

It is questionable whether there does not exist in man an obscure and blind will to make war; an impulse towards change, towards emergence from the familiarities of everyday life and from the stabilities of well-known conditions - something like a will to death as a will to annihilation and self-sacrifice, a vague enthusiasm for the upbuilding of a new world.

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To imagine that Caesar aspired to do something in the way Alexander did it - and this is what almost all historians have believed - is definitely to give up trying to understand him. Caesar is very nearly the opposite of Alexander. ...[I]t is not merely a universal kingdom that Caesar has in view. His purpose is a deeper one. He wants a Roman empire which does not live on Rome, but on the periphery, on the provinces, and this implies the complete supersession of the City-State. It implies a State in which the most diverse peoples collaborate, in regard to which all feel solidarity.

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Chapter XIV: Who Rules The World?
4 months 3 weeks ago

He that owns himself has lost nothing. But how few men are blessed with ownership of self!

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8 months 3 weeks ago

Custom renders love attractive; for that which is struck by oft-repeated blows however lightly, yet after long course of time is overpowered and gives way. See you not too that drops of water falling on rocks after long course of time scoop a hole through these rocks?

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Book IV, lines 1283-1287 (tr. Munro)
8 months 4 days ago

When I say that this phase is necessary, the word phase is perhaps not the most rigorous one. It is not a question of a chronological phase, a given moment, or a page that one day simply will be turned, in order to go on to other things. The necessity of this phase is structural; it is the necessity of an interminable analysis: the hierarchy of dual oppositions always reestablishes itself. Unlike those authors whose death does not await their demise, the time for overturning is never a dead letter.

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p. 41-42
7 months 6 days ago

As the animus is partial to argument, he can best be seen at work in disputes where both parties know they are right. Men can argue in a very womanish way, too, when they are anima-possessed and have thus been transformed into the animus of their own anima.

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Aion (1951). CW 9, Part II: P.29
7 months 2 days ago

The distinction between true and false consciousness, real and immediate interest still is meaningful. But this distinction itself must be validated. Men must come to see it and to find their way from false to true consciousness, from their immediate to their real interest. They can do so only if they live in need of changing their way of life, of denying the positive, of refusing. It is precisely this need which the established society manages to repress to the degree to which it is capable of "delivering the goods" on an increasingly large scale, and using the scientific conquest of nature for the scientific conquest of man.

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pp. xlv-xlvi
4 months 6 days ago

Our intellectual development in the field of science has outstripped our human development in the field of character.

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BBC Radio National Lecture (1938), quoted in Unitarian Universalist Biographical Dictionary.
6 months 2 weeks ago

Affectation is a very good word when someone does not wish to confess to what he would none the less like to believe of himself.

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F 149
8 months 1 week ago

A thing, moderately good, is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper, is always a virtue; but moderation in principle, is a species of vice.

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9 months 1 week ago

It is love that leniently and mercifully says: I forgive you everything-if you are forgiven only little, then it is because you love only little. Justice severely sets the boundary and says: No further! This is the limit. For you there is no forgiveness, and there is nothing more to be said.

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7 months 1 week ago

We are always on stage, even when we are stabbed in earnest at the end.

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Act II.
8 months 1 week ago

Pleasure is in itself a good; nay, even setting aside immunity from pain, the only good: pain is in itself an evil; and, indeed, without exception, the only evil; or else the words good and evil have no meaning. And this is alike true of every sort of pain, and of every sort of pleasure.

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Ch. 10: Of Motives
1 month 1 week ago

The more an ideology (religion) avoids reality or adds its own context the more masturbatory and opportunistic it becomes. Spend one minute to discipline yourself and you'll come up with basic justice every time. That basic justice transcends identity particulars (religion).

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8 months 1 week ago

The emotions I feel are no more meant to be shown in their unadulterated state than the inner organs by which we live.

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pp. 31-32

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