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7 months 2 weeks ago
We have seen how it is originally language which works on the construction of concepts, a labor taken over in later ages by science. Just as the bee simultaneously constructs cells and fills them with honey, so science works unceasingly on this great columbarium of concepts, the graveyard of perceptions.
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5 months 2 weeks ago

Well, which is the most rational theory about these ten millions of species? Is it most likely that there have been ten millions of special creations? or is it most likely that, by continual modifications due to change of circumstances, ten millions of varieties have been produced, as varieties are being produced still?

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6 months 2 weeks ago

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.

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Ch. 1: Introductory
6 months 2 weeks ago

Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Grey Life.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

Power is not opposed to freedom. It is precisely freedom that distinguishes power from violence or coercion.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Power may be defined as the production of intended effects.

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Ch. 3: The Forms of Power
6 months 2 weeks ago

We never have a full demonstration, although there is always an underlying reason for the truth, even if it is only perfectly understood by God, who alone penetrated the infinite series in one stroke of the mind.

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The Shorter Leibniz Texts (2006) edited by Lloyd H. Strickland, p. 111
3 months 1 week ago

Learning proceeds until death and only then does it stop. ... Its purpose cannot be given up for even a moment. To pursue it is to be human, to give it up to be a beast.

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Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy (2001), p. 258
7 months 1 week ago

In the world of today can there be peace anywhere until there is peace everywhere?

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6 months 4 weeks ago

Several particular maxims... are as powerful, although false, in carrying away belief, as those the most true.

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7 months 1 week ago

It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the "why" arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.

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6 months 1 week ago

A good guide will take you through the more important streets more often than he takes you down side streets; a bad guide will do the opposite. In philosophy I'm a rather bad guide.

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As quoted in Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Information (2008) edited by Alois Pichler and Herbert Hrachovec, p. 140
5 months 1 day ago

Nobody is bound to have an optimistic outlook on the future: that is not a precept of the Christian religion. ... It is a matter of immense importance that illusions should be dispelled and man come face to face with positive realities.

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p. 131
4 months 4 weeks ago

The process begins with the individual woman's acceptance that American women, without exception, are socialized to be racist, classist and sexist, in varying degrees, and that labeling ourselves feminists does not change the fact that we must consciously work to rid ourselves of the legacy of negative socialization.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Bacon, Locke, Descartes, Hume, and all the others knew they were giving rights to vulgarity. But in so doing-in addition to caring for man's well-being-they were providing rights for themselves.

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"Commerce and Culture," p. 289.
2 months 3 weeks ago

Running away from fear is fear; fighting pain is pain; trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

But why,' (some ask), 'why, if you have a serious comment to make on the real life of men, must you do it by talking about a phantasmagoric never-never land of your own?' Because, I take it, one of the main things the author wants to say is that the real life of men is of that mythical and heroic quality. One can see the principle at work in his characterization. Much that in a realistic work would be done by 'character delineation' is here done simply by making the character an elf, a dwarf, or a hobbit. The imagined beings have their insides on the outside; they are visible souls. And Man as a whole, Man pitted against the universe, have we seen him at all till we see that he is like a hero in a fairy tale?

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p. 89
3 months 6 days ago

In a valiant suffering for others, not in a slothful making others suffer for us, did nobleness ever lie.

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4 months 1 week ago

By electricity we have not been driven out of our senses so much as our senses have been driven out of us.

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(p. 375)
4 months 4 weeks ago

Society creates the victims that it afterwards vainly attempts to get rid of.

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6 months 1 week ago

The world and life are one.

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(5.621) Original German: Die Welt und das Leben sind Eins.
6 months 2 weeks ago

All happiness or unhappiness solely depends upon the quality of the object to which we are attached by love.

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I, 9; translation by W. Hale White (Revised by Amelia Hutchison Stirling)
5 months 2 weeks ago

So many of my thoughts and feelings are shared by the English that England has turned into a second native land of the mind for me.

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Journeys to England and Ireland, 1835.
6 months 2 weeks ago

It is the nature and intention of a constitution to prevent governing by party, by establishing a common principle that shall limit and control the power and impulse of party, and that says to all parties, thus far shalt thou go and no further. But in the absence of a constitution, men look entirely to party; and instead of principle governing party, party governs principle.

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4 months 1 week ago

A wise man rules his passions, a fool obeys them.

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Maxim 49
2 months 2 weeks ago

I envy no quality of the mind or intellect in others; not genius, power, wit, nor fancy; but, if I could choose what would be most delightful, and, I believe, most useful to me, I should prefer a firm religious belief to every other blessing.

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In Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 241
7 months 1 week ago

Printing will tell you such useful things and such interesting things that not being able to read would be as bad as not being able to see.

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5 months 2 days ago

These terrible sociologists, who are the astrologers and alchemists of our twentieth century.

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Fanatical Skepticism
6 months 2 weeks ago

As to [General Douglas] Macarthur, I don't feel in a position to have clear opinions about anyone I know only from newspapers. You see, whenever they deal with anyone (or anything) I know myself, I find they're always a mass of lies & misunderstandings: so I conclude they're no better in the places where I don't know.

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Letter to Mrs. Mary Van Deusen, April 30, 1951. Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, vol. 3, "Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy", 1950-1963. p. 114.
6 months 3 weeks ago

He who would teach men to die would teach them to live.

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Ch. 20. Of the Force of Imagination (tr. Donald M. Frame)
5 months 1 week ago

When you get over an infatuation, to fall for someone ever again seems so inconceivable that you imagine no one, not even a bug, that is not mired in disappointment.

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5 months 1 week ago

What do you say to the elections in the factory districts? Once again the proletariat has discredited itself terribly... [I]t cannot be denied that the increase of working-class voters has brought the Tories more than their mere additional percentage and has improved their relative position.

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Letter to Karl Marx (18 November 1868), quoted in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Correspondence, 1846-1895 (1942), pp. 253-254
6 months 2 weeks ago

How you produce volume after volume the way you do is more than I can conceive. ...But you haven't to forge every sentence in the teeth of irreducible and stubborn facts as I do. It is like walking through the densest brush wood.

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Letter to Henry James (ca. 1890) as quoted by Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (2007) p. 297.
5 months 6 days ago

At the parting of ways in the life-order, where the question is between the new creation or decay, that man will be decisive for new creation who is able on his own initiative to seize the helm and steer a course of his own choosing - even if that course be opposed to the will of the masses. Should the emergence of such persons become impossible a lamentable shipwreck will be inevitable.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space.

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B 8
4 months 3 weeks ago

You believe that I run after the strange because I do not know the beautiful; no, it is because you do not know the beautiful that I seek the strange.

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F160
3 months 6 days ago

In the lowest broad strata of the population, equally as in the highest and narrowest, are produced men of every kind of genius; man for man, your chance of genius is as good among the millions as among the units;-and class for class, what must it be! From all classes, not from certain hundreds now but from several millions, whatsoever man the gods had gifted with intellect and nobleness, and power to help his country, could be chosen: O Heavens, could,-if not by Tenpound Constituencies and the force of beer, then by a Reforming Premier with eyes in his head, who I think might do it quite infinitely better. Infinitely better. For ignobleness cannot, by the nature of it, choose the noble: no, there needs a seeing man who is himself noble, cognizant by internal experience of the symptoms of nobleness.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

As the State formerly played a most important part in the revolutions that abolished the old economic systems, so it must again be the State that should abolish capitalism.

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p. 170
6 months 2 weeks ago

Pragmatism, on the other hand, asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?"

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Lecture VI, Pragmatism's Conception of Truth
4 months 3 weeks ago

It is in the gift for employing all the vicissitudes of life to one's own advantage and to that of one's craft that a large part of genius consists.

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K 48
6 months 2 weeks ago

I need Christ, not something that resembles Him.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Money expresses all qualitative differences of things in terms of "how much?" Money, with all its colorlessness and indifference, becomes the common denominator of all values; irreparably it hollows out the core of things, their individuality, their specific value, and their incomparability. All things float with equal specific gravity in the constantly moving stream of money. All things lie on the same level and differ from one another only in the size of the area which they cover.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

You have theories enough concerning the Rights of Men. It may not be amiss to add a small degree of attention to their Nature and disposition.

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Letter to Charles-Jean-François Depont (November 1789), quoted in Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith (eds.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Volume VI: July 1789-December 1791 (1967), p. 46
5 months 1 week ago

The intellect is at home in that which is fixed only because it is done and over with, for intellect is itself just as much a deposit of past life as is the matter to which it is congenial. Intuition alone articulates in the forward thrust of life and alone lays hold of reality.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Out of special hatred for our faith, the devil has sent some whores here to destroy our poor young men . . . such a syphilitic whore can poison ten, twenty, thirty or more of the children of good people, and thus is to be considered a murderer, or worse, as a poisoner.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

There is not a truth existing which I fear or would wish unknown to the whole world.

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Letter to Henry Lee

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