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1 month 1 week ago

There can be no safer deposit on earth than the Treasury of the United States.

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Letter to Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette (1825) ME 19:281
1 month 1 week ago

When a series of progressive numbers is given as the result of observation, it may generally be reduced to law by combinations of arithmetical and geometrical progressions. A true formula for a progressive series of numbers cannot commonly be obtained from a narrow range of observations.

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1 month 6 days ago

I need not tell you, what complaints the more candid and judicious of the Chymists themselves are wont to make of those boasters, that confidently pretend, that they have extracted the salt or sulphur of quicksilver, when they have disguised it by additaments, wherewith it resembles the concretes, whose names are given it; whereas by a skilful and rigid examen, it may be easily enough stripped of its disguises, and made to appear again in the pristine form of running mercury. The pretended salts and sulphurs being so far from being elementary parts extracted out of the body of mercury, that they are rather... de-compound bodies, made up of the whole metal and the menstruum, or other additaments employed to disguise it.

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3 months 4 days ago

This "knowing what to do"... is a matter of having the right purpose, the purpose appropriate to the situation in hand... The one who "knows what to do" is the one on whom you can rely to make the best shot at success, whenever success is possible.

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"Knowledge and Feeling" (p. 35)
5 months 1 week ago

""You do not love the mind of your race, nor the body. Any kind of creature will please you if only it is begotten by your kind as they now are. It seems to me, Thick One, what you really love is no completed creature but the very seed itself: for that is all that is left".

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Oyarsa
5 months 2 weeks ago

Nature has pointed out a mixed kind of life as most suitable to the human race, and secretly admonished them to allow none of these biases to draw too much, so as to incapacitate them for other occupations and entertainments. Indulge your passion for science, says she, but let your science be human, and such as may have a direct reference to action and society. Abstruse thought and profound researches I prohibit, and will severely punish, by the pensive melancholy which they introduce, by the endless uncertainty in which they involve you, and by the cold reception which your pretended discoveries shall meet with, when communicated. Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.

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Section 1 : Of The Different Species of Philosophy
3 months 3 weeks ago

I do not regard the late Carl Sagan as any kind of authority. On the contrary, as this book will show, I regard him in many ways as a dubious publicity seeker and careerist, more concerned to maintain his reputation as the brilliant and sceptical representative of hard-headed science than to look squarely and honestly at the facts.

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In short, a bit of a crook. pp. xix-xx
4 months 1 week ago

...the relatively unconscious man driven by his natural impulses because, imprisoned in his familiar world, he clings to the commonplace, the obvious, the probable, the collectively valid, using for his motto: 'Thinking is difficult. Therefore, let the herd pronounce judgement.'

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Frequently misquoted as "Thinking is difficult, that's why most people judge" and close variants. Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky. (1959), C.G. Jung, R.F.C. Hull (translator) (Princeton Press, 1979, ISBN 9780691018225
4 months 1 day ago

If the subjectivist view hold true, thinking cannot be of any help in determining the desirability of any goal in itself. The acceptability of ideals, the criteria for our actions and beliefs, the leading principles of ethics and politics, all our ultimate decisions are made to depend upon factors other than reason. They are supposed to be matters of choice and predilection, and it has become meaningless to speak of truth in making practical, moral or esthetic decisions.

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pp. 7-8.
3 months 1 week ago

It is often better for a person to recognize a sin than to do a good deed. Recognizing a sin makes a person humble. Doing a good deed often can feed a person's pride.

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p. 108
5 months 1 week ago

Money is the password, and all doors, which are closed to the man of lesser means, fly open to those whom Plutus favors. The invention of money, which has no other usefulness (or at least it should not have any) except for the commercial exchange of the products of man's industry, now serves all that is physically good among men. Especially after money was represented by metal, it has produced avarice which, finally, without indulgence, but by its mere possession, and even with the resolution (of the stingy) not to spend it, still contains a power which people believe can sufficiently compensate for the lack of any other power.

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Kant, Immanuel (1996), pages 181-182
3 months 1 week ago

I can't be sure God does not exist... On a scale of seven, where one means I know he exists, and seven I know he doesn't, I call myself a six... That doesn't mean I'm absolutely confident, that I absolutely know, because I don't.

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Dawkins on The Telegraph, 2012-02-24.
1 month 1 week ago

Often injustice lies in what you aren't doing, not only in what you are doing.

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IX. 5:223
5 months 1 week ago

They should always be heard, and fairly and kindly answer'd, when they ask after any thing they would know, and desire to be informed about. Curiosity should be as carefully cherish'd in children, as other appetites suppress'd.

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Sec. 108
1 month 3 weeks ago

Man's position in the world is defined by the fact that in every dimension of his being and behavior he finds himself at every moment between two boundaries. This condition appears as the formal structure of our existence, filled always with different contents in life's diverse provinces, activities, and destinies. We feel that the content and value of every hour stands between a higher and a lower; every thought between a wiser and a more foolish; every possession between a more extended and a more limited; every deed between a greater and a lesser measure of meaning, adequacy, and morality.

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p. 1. Opening line of first essay "Life as Transcendence"
5 months ago

My cares and my inquiries are for decency and truth, and in this I am wholly occupied.

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Book I, epistle i, line 11
1 month 3 weeks ago

I have twice gone fishing with rod and line just because other boys asked me to, but this sport was soon made impossible for me by the treatment of the worms that were put on the hook for bait, and the wrenching of the mouths of the fishes that were caught. I gave it up, and even found courage enough to dissuade other boys from going.

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5 months 1 week ago

Ha! to forget. How childish! I feel you in my bones. Your silence screams in my ears. You may nail your mouth shut, you may cut out your tongue, can you keep yourself from existing? Will you stop your thoughts.

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Inès reiterating to Garcin that they cannot ignore one another, Act 1, sc. 5
3 months 3 days ago

Once you had read the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, you knew that everyday life was psychopathology.

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Humboldt's Gift (1975) [Penguin Classics, 1996, ISBN 0-140-18944-0], p. 5
4 months 1 day ago

The would-be climber must be able to make himself liked ... please his superiors - avoid showing independence except in those matters wherein independence is expected of him by his chiefs... the winners in the race have qualities which disincline them to allow others to be their true selves. Hence the winners snub all those who aim at adequate self-expression, speaking of them as pretentious, eccentric, biased, unpractical, and measuring their achievements by insincere standards.

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5 months 1 week ago

Space is employed as the type even of the concept of time itself, representing it by a line, and its limits - moments - by points. Time, on the other had, approaches more to a universal and rational concept, comprising under its relations all things whatsoever, to wit, space itself, and besides, those accidents which are not comprehended in the relations of space, such as the thoughts of the soul. Again, time, besides this, though it certainly does not dictate the laws of reason, yet constitutes the principal conditions tinder favor of which the mind compares its notions according to the laws of reason. Thus, I cannot judge what is impossible except by predicating a and not-a of the same subject at the same time.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Knighthood, instead, appeared as a superterritorial and supernational community in which its members, who were consecrated to military priesthood, no longer had a homeland and thus were bound by faithfulness not to people but, on the one hand, to an ethics that had as its fundamental values honor, truth, courage, and loyalty and, on the other hand, to a spiritual authority of a universal type, which was essentially that of the Empire.

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5 months 1 week ago

No man who believes that all is for the best in this suffering world can keep his ethical values unimpaired, since he is always having to find excuses for pain and misery.

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The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell: A fresh look at empiricism, 1927-42 (G. Allen & Unwin, 1996), p. 217
1 month 1 week ago

The governing principles of chemical affinity are, that it is elective ; that it is definite ; that it determines the properties of the compound; and that analysis is possible.

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5 months ago

If one choose the goods of the soul, he chooses the diviner portion; if the goods of the body, the merely mortal.

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6 months 1 week ago

An observer studying the Solar system dispassionately, and finding himself capable of bringing the four giant planets to his notice, could reasonably say that the Solar system consisted of one star, four planets, and some traces of debris.

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5 months 1 week 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
6 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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5 months 1 week ago

People say law but they mean wealth.

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1841
5 months 2 weeks ago

Men are most apt to believe what they least understand.

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Book III, Ch. 11. Of Cripples
4 months 2 days ago

Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance - these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Now, justification in this life is given to us according to these three things: first by the laver of regeneration by which all sins are forgiven; then, by a struggle with the faults from whose guilt we have been absolved; the third, when our prayer is heard, in which we say: Forgive us our debts, because however bravely we fight against our faults, we are men; but the grace of God so aids as we fight in this corruptible body that there is reason for His hearing us as we ask forgiveness.

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Against Julian, Book II, ch. 8, 22. In The Fathers of the Church, Matthew A. Schumacher, tr., 1957, ISBN 0813214009 ISBN 9780813214009 pp. 83-84.
6 months ago

When you have faults, do not fear to abandon them.

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5 months 1 week ago

One of the ideas I had discussed in The Poverty of Historicism was the influence of a prediction upon the event predicted. I had called this the "Oedipus effect", because the oracle played a most important role in the sequence of events which led to the fulfilment of its prophecy. ... For a time I thought that the existence of the Oedipus effect distinguished the social from the natural sciences. But in biology, too-even in molecular biology-expectations often play a role in bringing about what has been expected.

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Page 29
4 months 1 week ago

That higher and "complete" man is begotten by the "unknown" father and born from Wisdom, and it is he who, in the figure of the puer aeternus-"vultu mutabilis albus et ater"-represents our totality, which transcends consciousness. It was this boy into whom Faust had to change, abandoning his inflated onesidedness which saw the devil only outside. Christ's "Except ye become as little children" is a prefiguration of this, for in them the opposites lie close together; but what is meant is the boy who is born from the maturity of the adult man, and not the unconscious child we would like to remain.

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Answer to Job, R. Hull, trans. (1984), pp. 157-158
6 months 1 week ago

There was no denying that he would always be conscious of the fact that an Earthman was an Earthman. He couldn't help that. That was the result of a childhood immersed in an atmosphere of bigotry so complete that it was almost invisible, so entire that you accepted its axioms as second nature. Then you left it and saw it for what it was when you looked back.

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2 months 1 day ago

To all men it is evident that the social interests of one hundred and fifty Millions of us depend on the mysterious industry there carried on; and likewise that the dissatisfaction with it is great, universal, and continually increasing in intensity,-in fact, mounting, we might say, to the pitch of settled despair.

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1 month 1 week ago

Love the little trade which thou hast learned, and be content therewith.

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IV, 31
2 months 1 day ago

For is not a Symbol ever, to him who has eyes for it, some dimmer or clearer revelation of the God-like? B

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k. III, ch. 3.
5 months 1 week ago

Through laziness and cowardice a large part of mankind, even after nature has freed them from alien guidance, gladly remain immature. It is because of laziness and cowardice that it is so easy for others to usurp the role of guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor!

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5 months 1 week ago

It is for the sake of order that I seduced Clytemnestra, for the sake of order that I killed my king. I wanted for order to rule and that it rule through me. I have lived without desire, without love, without hope: I made order. Oh! terrible and divine passion!

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Aegistheus, Act 2
4 months 1 day ago

You do not attain to knowledge by remaining on the shore and watching the foaming waves, you must make the venture and cast yourself in, you must swim, alert and with all your force, even if a moment comes when you think you are losing consciousness; in this way, and in no other, do you reach anthropological insight.

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p. 148
6 months 1 week ago

The best way to describe anyone is to give an example of the kind of thing he would do.

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5 months 1 week ago

As long as this deliberate refusal to understand things from above, even where such understanding is possible, continues, it is idle to talk of any final victory over materialism.

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4 months 1 week ago

Under the natural course of things each citizen tends towards his fittest function. Those who are competent to the kind of work they undertake, succeed, and, in the average of cases, are advanced in proportion to their efficiency; while the incompetent, society soon finds out, ceases to employ, forces to try something easier, and eventually turns to use.

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Vol. 3, Ch. VII, Over-Legislation
1 month 1 week ago

It is impossible to care for each other more or differently than we care for the earth. This last statement becomes obvious enough when it is considered that the earth is what we all have in common, that it is what we are made of and what we live from, and that we therefore cannot damage it without damaging those with whom we share it. But I believe it goes farther and deeper than that. There is an uncanny resemblance between our behavior toward each other and our behavior toward the earth. Between our relation to our own sexuality and our relation to the reproductivity of the earth, for instance, the resemblance is plain and strong. By some connection we do not recognize, the willingness to exploit one becomes the willingness to exploit the other.

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The Unsettling of America (1977), Chapter Seven : The Body and the Earth
6 months ago

In archery we have something like the way of the superior man. When the archer misses the center of the target, he turns round and seeks for the cause of his failure in himself.

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5 months 1 week ago

The violence of love is as much to be dreaded as that of hate. When it is durable, it is serene and equable. Even its famous pains begin only with the ebb of love, for few are indeed lovers, though all would fain be.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 158
5 months 2 weeks ago

When profit diminishes, merchants are very apt to complain that trade decays; though the diminution of profit is the natural effect of its prosperity, or of a greater stock being employed in it than before.

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Chapter IX
4 months 1 week ago

Think of something finite molded into the infinite, and you think of man.

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"Selected Ideas (1799-1800)", Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, trans. (1968) #98

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