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4 months 1 week ago

In memory yet green, in joy still felt, The scenes of life rise sharply into view. We triumph; Life's disasters are undealt, And while all else is old, the world is new.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

To say that the cross emblazoned with the papal coat of arms, and set up by the indulgence preachers, is equal in worth to the cross of Christ is blasphemy.

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Thesis 79
3 months 2 weeks ago

So that it will be found that the fundamental fault in the character of women is that they have no "sense of justice ." This arises from their deficiency in the power of reasoning already referred to, and reflection, but is also partly due to the fact that Nature has not destined them, as the weaker sex, to be dependent on strength but on cunning; this is why they are instinctively crafty, and have an ineradicable tendency to lie.

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On Women
3 months 1 week ago

Of course, the aim of a constitutional democracy is to safeguard the rights of the minority and avoid the tyranny of the majority. Yet the concrete practice of the US legal system from 1883 to 1964 promoted a tyranny of the white majority much more than a safeguarding of the rights of black Americans.

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(p. 102-3)
3 months 1 week ago

Earth laughs in flowers to see her boastful boys Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs; Who steer the plough, but can not steer their feet Clear of the grave.

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Hamatreya
3 months 3 days ago

When you wish to instruct, be brief; that men's minds may take in quickly what you say, learn its lesson, and retain it faithfully. Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind.

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Lines 335-337; Edward Charles Wickham translation
3 months 2 weeks ago

I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.

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Book 1, Ch. 3, sec. 3 Variant: The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.
3 months 2 weeks ago

Capital is money: Capital is commodities. [...] For the movement, in the course of which it adds surplus-value, is its own movement, its expansion, therefore, is automatic expansion. Because it is value, it has acquired the occult quality of being able to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.

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Vol. I, Ch. 2, pg. 171.
4 weeks 1 day ago

Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.

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A favourite comment, inscribed on his memorial at Ealing, quoted in Nature Vol. XLVI (30 October 1902), p. 658
3 months 2 weeks ago

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 177

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

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3 months 2 weeks ago

We are apt to imagine that this hubbub of Philosophy, Literature, and Religion, which is heard in pulpits, lyceums, and parlors, vibrates through the universe, and is as catholic a sound as the creaking of the earth's axle. But if a man sleeps soundly, he will forget it all between sunset and dawn.

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January 6, 1842
2 months 5 days ago

The only satisfied rationalists today are blinkered scientists or Marxists.

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Ch. 7, p. 113
1 month 1 week ago

For man to be able to live he must either not see the infinite, or have such an explanation of the meaning of life as will connect the finite with the infinite.

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Ch. 9
1 week 1 day ago

While Trump is not going to be president, Trumpism is going to survive. ...The Democrats need to look very very carefully at those election results because ...the Republicans did well not necessarily because people love what they represent, but because they don't like what the Democrats represent... Unless they sort out what that is, they are going to continue to lose elections.

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28:52:00
1 month 3 weeks ago

These are the visionary, mystical moments, when a man 'completes his partial mind'. His everyday conscious self is only a small part of the mind, like the final crescent of the moon. In moments of crisis, the full moon suddenly appears.

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p. 156
3 months 1 week ago

The domination of the public way in which things have been interpreted has already decided upon even the possibilities of being attuned, that is, about the basic way in which Da-sein lets itself be affected by the world. The they prescribes that attunement, it determines what and how one "sees."

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Stambaugh translation
2 months 6 days ago

Without some affinity in human ideas art would certainly be impossible; but it can never be exactly determined how far the intentions of the poet are realized.

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Gottlob Frege (1892). On Sense and Reference.

Money is miraculous. What miraculous facilities has it yielded, will it yield us; but also what never-imagined confusions, obscurations has it brought in; down almost to total extinction of the moral-sense in large masses of mankind!

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3 months 1 week ago

I suppose you imagined I was so insanely in love with you that I could commit any folly. When will you women understand that one isn't insanely in love? All one asks for is a quiet life, which you won't allow one to have. I don't know what the devil ever induced me to marry you. It was all a damned stupid, practical joke. And now you go about saying I'm a murderer. I won't stand it.

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The Gioconda smile, in Mortal Coils, 1921
2 months 1 week ago

Poets and priests were one in the beginning, and they only separated in later times. But the real poet is always a priest, just as the real priest always remains a poet.

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Fragment No. 71
1 month 6 days ago

All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.

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As quoted in "Dailer's Choice" by Harriet Van Horne, in New York Magazine Vol. 10, No. 13 (28 March 1977), p. 80
3 months 2 weeks ago

The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Being at one is god-like and good, but human, too human, the mania Which insists there is only the One, one country, one truth, and one way.

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"The Root of All Evil" as translated by Michael Hamburger
1 month 1 week ago

A good conscience is eight parts of courage.

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Catriona, ch. XI (1893).
4 months 1 week ago

Metaphysical rebellion is a claim, motivated by the concept of a complete unity, against the suffering of life and death and a protest against the human condition both for its incompleteness, thanks to death, and its wastefulness, thanks to evil.

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4 months 2 weeks ago
A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.
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3 months 1 week ago

We inherit the warlike type; and for most of the capacities of heroism that the human race is full of we have to thank this cruel history. Dead men tell no tales, and if there were any tribes of other type than this they have left no survivors. Our ancestors have bred pugnacity into our bone and marrow, and thousands of years of peace won't breed it out of us. The popular imagination fairly fattens on the thought of wars. Let public opinion once reach a certain fighting pitch, and no ruler can withstand it. In the Boer war both governments began with bluff, but they couldn't stay there; the military tension was too much for them.

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2 months 6 days ago

Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age.

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p. 61
2 months 3 weeks ago

Patience cometh by the grace of the Soul.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

In wildness is the preservation of the world. Every tree sends its fibers forth in search of the Wild. The city imports it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind.

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3 months 1 week ago

For the Supernatural, entering a human soul, opens to it new possibilities both of good and evil. From that point the road branches: one way to sanctity, love, humility, the other to spiritual pride, self-righteousness, persecuting zeal. And no way back to the mere humdrum virtues and vices of the unawakened soul. If the Divine call does not make us better, it will make us very much worse. Of all bad men religious bad men are the worst. Of all created beings the wickedest is one who originally stood in the immediate presence of God.

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Reflections on the Psalms (1958), p. 32
1 week 3 days ago

We have come to see that Huxley was right when he said that "a man's worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as he likes." The evidences of these greater difficulties lie all about us: in the brave and brilliant atheists who have defied the Methodist God, and have become very nervous; in the women who have emancipated themselves from the tyranny of fathers, husbands, and homes, and with the intermittent but expensive help of a psychoanalyst, are now enduring liberty as interior decorators; in the young men and women who are world-weary at twenty-two; in the multitudes who drug themselves with pleasure; in the crowds enfranchised by the blood of heroes who cannot be persuaded to take an interest in their destiny; in the millions, at last free to think without fear of priest or policeman, who have made the moving pictures and the popular newspapers what they are.

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Preface
4 months 1 week ago

The absurd ... is an experience to be lived through, a point of departure, the equivalent, in existence of Descartes' methodical doubt. Absurdism, like methodical doubt, has wiped the slate clean. It leaves us in a blind alley. But, like methodical doubt, it can, by returning upon itself, open up a new field of investigation, and in the process of reasoning then pursues the same course. I proclaim that I believe in nothing and that everything is absurd, but I cannot doubt the validity of my proclamation and I must at least believe in my protest. The first and only evidence that is supplied me, within the terms of the absurdist experience, is rebellion ... Rebellion is born of the spectacle of irrationality, confronted with an unjust and incomprehensible condition.

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1 month 6 days ago

In an age of enormities, the emotions are naturally weakened. We are continually called upon to have feelings - about genocide, for instance, or about famine or the blowing up of passenger planes - and we are all aware that we are incapable of reacting appropriately. A guilty consciousness of emotional inadequacy or impotence makes people doubt their own human weight.

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"The Distracted Public" (1990), p. 156
1 month 6 days ago

Schopenhauer argues that the empirical world exists only as a representation: 'every object, whatever its origin, is, as object, already conditioned by the subject, and thus is essentially only the subject's representation.' A representation is a subjective state that has been ordered according to space, time and causality - the primary forms of sensibility and understanding. So long as we turn our thoughts towards the natural world, and search for the thing-in-itself behind the representation is futile. Every argument and every experience leads only to the same end: the system of representations, standing like a veil between the subject and the thing-in-itself. No scientific investigation can penetrate the veil; and yet it is only a veil, Schopenhauer affirms, a tissue of illusions which we can, if we choose, penetrate by other means. The way to penetrate the veil was stumbled upon by Kant.

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A Short History of Modern Philosophy (1981; 2nd ed. 1995), p. 177
1 month 3 weeks ago

Regardless of the present trend toward the strong-armed man, the totalitarian states, or the dictatorship from the left, my ideas have remained unshaken. In fact, they have been strengthened by my personal experience and the world events through the years. I see no reason to change, as I do not believe that the tendency of dictatorship can ever successfully solve our social problems. As in the past, so I do now insist that freedom is the soul of progress and essential to every phase of life. I consider this as near a law of social evolution as anything we can postulate. My faith is in the individual and in the capacity of free individuals for united endeavor.

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3 months 1 week ago

The hazards of the generalized prisoner's dilemma are removed by the match between the right and the good.

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Chapter IX, Section 86, p. 577
3 months 1 week ago

Kierkegaard writes: If Christianity were so easy and cozy, why should God in his Scriptures have set Heaven and Earth in motion and threatened eternal punishments? - Question: But then in that case why is this Scriptures so unclear?

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p. 31e
3 months 2 weeks ago

Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible. Even if all are miserable, all will believe themselves happy, because the government will tell them that they are so.

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3 months 1 week ago

As for 'taking sides' - the choice, it seems to me, is no longer between two users of violence, two systems of dictatorship. Violence and dictatorship cannot produce peace and liberty; they can only produce the results of violence and dictatorship, results with which history has made us only too sickeningly familiar. The choice now is between militarism and pacifism. To me, the necessity of pacifism seems absolutely clear.

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Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War (1937) edited by Nancy Cunard and published by the Left Review
1 month 1 week ago

The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes.

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Ch. 1. Why Are People?
3 months 1 week ago

The proper study of mankind is books.

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Ch. XXVIII
2 months 3 weeks ago

Reason not with him, that will deny the principal truths!

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3 months 4 weeks ago

For what is a child? Ignorance. What is a child? Want of instruction. For where a child has knowledge, he is no worse than we are.

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Book II, ch. 1, 16
3 months 2 weeks ago

There are but few points in which the English, as a people, are entitled to the moral pre-eminence with which they are accustomed to compliment themselves at the expense of other nations: but, of these points, perhaps the one of greatest importance is, that the higher classes do not lie, and the lower, though mostly habitual liars, are ashamed of lying. To run any risk of weakening this feeling, a difficult one to create, or, when once gone, to restore, would be a permanent evil too great to be incurred for so very temporary a benefit as the ballot would confer, even on the most exaggerated estimate necessity.

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Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform (1859), pp. 48-49
3 months 2 weeks ago

It is a want of feeling to talk of priests and bells while so many infants are perishing in the hospitals, and aged and infirm poor in the streets, from the want of necessaries.

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Worship and Church Bells, 1797
2 months 1 week ago

I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.

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