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2 months 3 weeks ago

I lie on the beach like a crocodile and let myself be roasted by the sun. I never see a newspaper and don't give a damn for what is called the world.

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Letter to Max Born, 1918, from The Born-Einstein Letters: Friendship, Politics and Physics in Uncertain Times, Macmillan (2005 edition), pg 7.
3 months 2 days ago

The result of your fifty or sixty years of religious reading in the four words: 'Be just and good,' is that in which all our enquiries must end.

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Letter to John Adams
7 months 2 days ago

Men are what their mothers made them.

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Fate
7 months 2 days ago

Not from a vain or shallow thought His awful Jove young Phidias brought.

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The Problem, st. 2
5 months 2 days ago

Error is the force that welds men together; truth is communicated to men only by deeds of truth. Only deeds of truth, by introducing light into the conscience of each individual, can dissolve the cohesion of error, and detach men one by one from the mass united together by the cohesion of error.

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My Religion (1884), Ch. 12
4 months 1 week ago

It's not that there are no differences between human and non-human animals, any more than there are no differences between black people and white people, freeborn citizens and slaves, men and women, Jews and gentiles, gays or heterosexuals. The question is rather: are they morally relevant differences? This matters because morally catastrophic consequences can ensue when we latch on to a real but morally irrelevant difference between sentient beings.

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"The Abolitionist Project", Talks given at the FHI (Oxford University) and the Charity International Happiness Conference, 2007
2 weeks 4 days ago

I'm not religious, but, I'm sure when he refers to morality he means justice and fairness...humanistic justice and fairness. He's not talking about loyalty and following orders.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

However intimate we may be with the operations of the mind, we cannot think more than two or three minutes a day; - unless, by taste or by profession, we practice, for hours on end, brutalizing words in order to extract ideas from them. The intellectual represents the major disgrace, the culminating failure of Homo sapiens.

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7 months 4 days ago

Life is a business that does not cover the costs.

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Vol II "On the Vanity and Suffering of Life"
8 months 3 days ago

As for the life of money-making, it is one of constraint, and wealth is manifestly not the good of which we are in search, for it is only useful as a means to something else, and for this reason there is less to be said for it than for the ends mentioned before, which are, at any rate, desired for their own sakes.

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3 months 1 week ago

The three great American vices seem to be efficiency, punctuality, and the desire for achievement and success. They are the things that make the Americans so unhappy and so nervous.

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p. 162
8 months ago

Titles are an important part of a story and I take considerable care in choosing one. In fact, I cannot start a story until I have chosen a title.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

But this priviledge, is allayed by another; and that is, by the priviledge of Absurdity; to which no living creature is subject, but man only.

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The First Part, Chapter 5, p. 20
8 months 3 days ago

For legislators make the citizens good by forming habits in them, and this is the wish of every legislator, and those who do not effect it miss their mark, and it is in this that a good constitution differs from a bad one.

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7 months 1 day ago

It is, in fact, far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.

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The Human Condition
7 months 2 days ago

The effectiveness of political and religious propaganda depends upon the methods employed, not upon the doctrines taught. These doctrines may be true or false, wholesome or pernicious-it makes little or no difference.

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Chapter 7 (p. 63)
6 months 4 weeks ago

Someone who knows too much finds it hard not to lie.

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p. 64e
8 months 5 days ago
The objective of all human arrangements is through distracting one's thoughts to cease to be aware of life.
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7 months 6 days ago

Truth is a standard both of itself and of falsity.

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Part II, Prop. XLIII, Scholium
6 months 4 weeks ago

There are two godheads: the world and my independent I. I am either happy or unhappy, that is all. It can be said: good or evil do not exist. A man who is happy must have no fear. Not even in the face of death. Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy.

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Journal entry (8 July 1916), p. 74e
4 months 3 weeks 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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5 months 4 weeks ago

Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.

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7 months 3 days ago

I remember the very place in Hyde Park where, in my fourteenth year, on the eve of leaving my father's house for a long absence, he told me that I should find, as I got acquainted with new people, that I had been taught many things which youths of my age did not commonly know; and that many persons would be disposed to talk to me of this, and to compliment me upon it. What other things he said on this topic I remember very imperfectly; but he wound up by saying, that whatever I knew more than others, could not be ascribed to any merit in me, but to the very unusual advantage which had fallen to my lot.

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(p. 34)
7 months 1 week ago

When we are inclined to boast of our position [as Christians] we should remember that we are but Gentiles, while the Jews are of the lineage of Christ. We are aliens and in-laws; they are blood relatives, cousins, and brothers of our Lord. Therefore, if one is to boast of flesh and blood the Jews are actually nearer to Christ than we are.

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That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew Luther's Works, American Edition (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1962), Vol. 45, p. 201
5 months 3 weeks ago

It is the sphere farthest removed from the concreteness of society which may show most clearly the extent of the conquest of thought by society.

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p. 104
7 months 3 weeks ago

He who is not satisfied with a little, is satisfied with nothing.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Go thy way; and as thou hast believed, so be it done unto thee.

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8:13 (KJV) Said to the officer.
3 months 1 week ago

However, what is really required to defend 'the West' against the sudden rise of these barbaric and elemental forces is the strengthening, to an extent perhaps still unknown to Western man, of a heroic vision of life. Apart from the military-technical apparatus the world of the 'Westerners' has at its disposal only a limp and shapeless substance - and the cult of the skin, the myth of 'safety' and of 'war on war', and the ideal of the long, comfortable guaranteed, 'democratic' existence, which is preferred to the ideal of the fulfilment which can be grasped only on the frontiers between life and death in the meeting of the essence of living with the extreme of danger.

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p. 152
8 months 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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5 months 2 weeks ago

Not without reason did he who had the right to do so speak of the foolishness of the cross. Foolishness, without a doubt, foolishness. And the American humorist, Oliver Wendell Holmes, was not altogether wide of the mark in making one of the characters in his ingenious conversations say that he thought better of those who were confined in a lunatic asylum on account of religious mania than of those who, while professing the same religious principles, kept their wits and appeared to enjoy life very well outside the asylums. But those who are at large, are they not really, thanks to God, mad too? Are there not mild madnesses, which not only permit us to mix with our neighbors without danger to society, but which rather enable us to do so, for by means of them we are able to attribute a meaning and finality to life and society?

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5 months 3 weeks ago

And having said this, Jesus smote his face with both his hands, and then smote the ground with his head. And having raised his head, he said: "Cursed be every one who shall insert into my sayings that I am the son of God." At these words the disciples fell down as dead, whereupon Jesus lifted them up, saying: 'Let us fear God now, if we would not be affrighted in that day.'

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Ch. 53
4 months 3 weeks ago

As a scholar [Allan Bloom] intends to enlighten us, and as a writer he has learned from Aristophanes and other models that enlightenment should also be enjoyable. To me, this is not the book of a professor, but that of a thinker who is willing to take the risks more frequently taken by writers. It is risky in a book of ideas to speak in one's own voice, but it reminds us that the sources of the truest truths are inevitably profoundly personal. ... Academics, even those describing themselves as existentialists, very seldom offer themselves publicly and frankly as individuals, as persons.

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p. 12
5 months 3 weeks ago

The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, prophane, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame, or blame...

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The First Part, Chapter 8, p. 34
6 months 3 weeks ago

... our maturation has consisted in the gradual realization that, if we can rely on one another, we need not rely on anything else. In religious terms, this is the Feuerbachian thesis that God is just a projection of the best, and sometimes the worst, of humanity. In philosophical terms, it is the thesis that anything that talk of objectivity can do to make our practices intelligible can be done equally well by talk of intersubjectivity.

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"John Searle on Realism and Relativism." Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (1998).
2 months 4 weeks ago

The Christian Scholastics... might have shown that God Himself said that He had "imprinted an active principle in the elements of matter (Gen. i; Is. lxvi).

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Ch. V Concerning the Moving Force of Matter
7 months 3 days ago

Most boys or youths who have had much knowledge drilled into them, have their mental capacities not strengthened, but over-laid by it. They are crammed with mere facts, and with the opinions or phrases of other people, and these are accepted as a substitute for the power to form opinions of their own: and thus the sons of eminent fathers, who have spared no pains in their education, so often grow up mere parroters of what they have learnt, incapable of using their minds except in the furrows traced for them. Mine, however, was not an education of cram. My father never permitted anything which I learnt to degenerate into a mere exercise of memory. He strove to make the understanding not only go along with every step of the teaching, but, if possible, precede it. Anything which could be found out by thinking I never was told, until I had exhausted my efforts to find it out for myself.

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(p. 31)

It is certainly not a matter of indifference whether I learn something without effort or finally arrive at it myself through my system of thought. In the latter case everything has roots, in the former it is merely superficial.

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F154
4 months 4 weeks ago

I am often accused of expressing contempt and despising religious people. I don't despise religious people, I despise what they stand for. I like to quote the British journalist Johann Hari who said, "I have so much respect for you, that I cannot respect your ridiculous ideas."

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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 1 week ago

Knowledge that is not Infallible is not certain knowledge.

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I. Introduction, p. 7.
7 months 2 days ago

Several excuses are always less convincing than one.

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Ch. 1
2 months 4 weeks ago

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.

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VII, 8 (Penguin Classics edition of Meditations, translated by Maxwell Staniforth)
3 months 2 weeks ago

Virtue runs no risk of becoming contemptible by being exposed to view, and it is better to be despised for simplicity than to be tormented by continual hypocrisy.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

I may become a poor man; I shall then be one among many. I may be exiled; I shall then regard myself as born in the place to which I shall be sent. They may put me in chains. What then? Am I free from bonds now? Behold this clogging burden of a body, to which nature has fettered me! "I shall die," you say; you mean to say "I shall cease to run the risk of sickness; I shall cease to run the risk of imprisonment; I shall cease to run the risk of death."

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Many evils, no doubt, were produced by the civil war. They were the price of our liberty.

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p. 39
7 months 2 days ago

The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all.

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par. 48
3 months 1 week ago

We do not have a complete and satisfying knowledge of the world. We are reduced to the simple conclusion that everywhere in the world there is life like ourselves and that all life is shrouded in mystery. A true acquaintance with the world consists in being filled with a sense of the mystery of existence and life. This mystery becomes only more mysterious with every advance in scientific research. To be filled with the mystery of life is like that which is called in the language of mysticism the "wise ignorance," an ignorance which is nonetheless knowledge of the essential.

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p. 304
5 months 4 weeks ago

The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws. But before this can be accepted it must show itself capable of explaining the tridimensionality of space, the laws of motion, and the general characteristics of the universe, with mathematical clearness and precision ; for no less should be demanded of every Philosophy.

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3 months 1 week ago

I go into the Upanishads to ask questions.

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As quoted in God Is Not One : The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World and Why Their Differences Matter (2010), by Stephen Prothero, Ch, 4 : Hinduism : The Way of Devotion, p. 144
3 months 2 days ago

Never trouble another for what you can do yourself.

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