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5 months 1 week ago

I pre-suppose, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself.

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Author's prefaces to the First Edition.
4 months 3 days ago

I react like everyone else, even like those I most despise; but I make up for it by deploring every action I commit, good or bad.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

In this initial illimitableness of possibilities that characterizes one who has no nature there stands out only one fixed, pre-established, and given line by which he may chart his course, only one limit: the past.

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"Man has no nature"
4 months 3 days ago

By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness. . . . I resign from movement, and from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole glory. . . . Let "desire" be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

Instruction, that mysterious communing of Wisdom with Ignorance, is no longer an indefinable tentative process, requiring a study of individual aptitudes, and a perpetual variation of means and methods, to attain the same end; but a secure, universal, straightforward business, to be conducted in the gross, by proper mechanism.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Labour not after riches first, and think thou afterwards wilt enjoy them. He who neglecteth the present moment, throweth away all that he hath. As the arrow passeth through the heart, while the warrior knew not that it was coming; so shall his life be taken away before he knoweth that he hath it.

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1 month 6 days ago

Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.

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Letter to Dr. James Currie (28 January 1786) Lipscomb & Bergh 18:ii
5 months 1 week ago

Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over influence.

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par. 19
4 months 3 weeks ago

Life's short span forbids us to enter on far reaching hopes.

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Book I, ode iv, line 15
3 months 1 week ago

The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is already reproduced, the hyper-real.

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Simulations (1983), New York: Semiotext, p. 146
3 months 2 days ago

We do not go to cowards for tender dealing; there is nothing so cruel as panic; the man who has least fear for his own carcase, has most time to consider others.

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314
5 months 3 weeks ago

Thus the sum of things is ever being renewed, and mortal creatures live dependent one upon another. Some species increase, others diminish, and in a short space the generations of living creatures are changed and, like runners, pass on the torch of life.

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Book II, line 75 (tr. Rouse)
5 months 3 weeks ago

We must consider both the ultimate end and all clear sensory evidence, to which we refer our opinions; for otherwise everything will be full of uncertainty and confusion.

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4 months 1 week ago

...out of the tomb of the murdered Monarchy in France, has arisen a vast, tremendous, unformed spectre, in a far more terrific guise than any which ever yet have overpowered the imagination and subdued the fortitude of man.

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p. 7
4 months 1 week ago

It is the dissimilarities and inequalities among men which give rise to the notion of honor; as such differences become less, it grows feeble; and when they disappear, it will vanish too.

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Book Three, Chapter XVIII.
2 months 1 day ago

Some years ago, as Your Serene Highness well knows, I discovered in the heavens many things that had not been seen before our own age. The novelty of these things, as well as some consequences which followed from them in contradiction to the physical notions commonly held among academic philosophers, stirred up against me no small number of professors - as if I had placed these things in the sky with my own hands in order to upset nature and overturn the sciences. They seemed to forget that the increase of known truths stimulates the investigation, establishment, and growth of the arts; not their diminution or destruction.

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5 months 5 days ago

Appealing to his [Einstein's] way of expressing himself in theological terms, I said: If God had wanted to put everything into the universe from the beginning, He would have created a universe without change, without organisms and evolution, and without man and man's experience of change. But he seems to have thought that a live universe with events unexpected even by Himself would be more interesting than a dead one.

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As quoted in Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes by Charles Hartshorne
4 months 1 week ago

Happy are they that go to bed with grave music like Pythagoras.

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5 months 2 days ago

The purely corporeal can be uncanny. Compare the way angels and devils are portrayed. So-called "miracles" must be connected with this. A miracle must be, as it were, a sacred gesture.

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p. 50e
3 months 2 weeks ago

The Outsider has his proper place in the Order of Society, as the impractical dreamer.

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Chapter Three, The Romantic Outsider
4 months 1 week ago

Romantic poetry ... recognizes as its first commandment that the will of the poet can tolerate no law above itself.

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Philosophical Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991) § 116
5 months 1 week ago

It is a waste of energy to be angry with a man who behaves badly, just as it is to be angry with a car that won't go. The difference is that you can compel your car to go to a garage, but you cannot compel Hitler to go to a psychiatrist.

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A Fresh Look at Empiricism: 1927-42 (1996), p. 544
6 months 1 week ago

Again, it is possible to fail in many ways (for evil belongs to the class of the unlimited ... and good to that of the limited), while to succeed is possible only in one way (for which reason also one is easy and the other difficult—to miss the mark easy, to hit it difficult); for these reasons also, then, excess and defect are characteristic of vice, and the mean of virtue; For men are good in but one way, but bad in many.

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5 months 1 week ago

It requires twenty years for a man to rise from the vegetable state in which he is within his mother's womb, and from the pure animal state which is the lot of his early childhood, to the state when the maturity of reason begins to appear. It has required thirty centuries to learn a little about his structure. It would need eternity to learn something about his soul. It takes an instant to kill him.

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"Man: General Reflection on Man", 1771
4 months 2 weeks ago

Love is a God, who cooperates in securing the safety of the city.

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As quoted in Deipnosophists by Athenaeus, xiii. 561c.
4 months 3 days ago

The first character of a general idea so resulting is that it is living feeling. A continuum of this feeling, infinitesimal in duration, but still embracing innumerable parts, and also, though infinitesimal, entirely unlimited, is immediately present. And in its absence of boundedness a vague possibility of more than is present is directly felt.

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1 month 3 days ago

If mind is common to us, then also the reason, whereby we are reasoning beings, is common. If this be so, then also the reason which enjoins what is to be done or left undone is common. If this be so, law also is common; if this be so, we are citizens; if this be so, we are partakers in one constitution; if this be so, the Universe is a kind of Commonwealth.

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IV, 4 (as translated by ASL Farquharson)
5 months 1 week ago

But capitalist production begets,with the inexorability of a law of Nature,its own negation. It is the negation of negation.

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Vol. I, Ch. 32, p. 837.
5 months 1 week ago

The more one presupposes that his own power will suffice him to realize what he desires the more practical is that desire. When I treat a man contemptuously, I can inspire him with no practical desire to appreciate my grounds of truth. When I treat any one as worthless, I can inspire him with no desire to do right.

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Part III : Selection on Education from Kant's other Writings, Ch. I Pedagogical Fragments, # 15
2 months 4 weeks ago

Nationality is not the only kind of social membership, nor is it an exclusive tie. However, it is the only form of membership that has so far shown itself able to sustain a democratic process and a liberal rule of law.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Time is the soul of this world.

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As quoted in Wisdom (2002) by Desmond MacHale
5 months 2 weeks ago

The art of persuasion consists as much in that of pleasing as in that of convincing, so much more are men governed by caprice than by reason!

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1 month 1 week ago

Your first duty, in completing your service to your race, is to feel within you all your ancestors. Your second duty is to throw light on their onrush and to continue their work. Your third duty is to pass on to your son the great mandate to surpass you.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.

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K 72
3 months 6 days ago

Having acknowledged the measure of the good to be pleasure, i.e., beauty, the European upper classes went back in their comprehension of art to the gross conception of the primitive Greeks which Plato had already condemned. And with this understanding of life, a theory of art was formulated.

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1 month 3 days ago

It is somewhat strange to me, that neither the Spagyrists themselves, nor yet their Adversaries, should have taken notice that Chymists have rather supposed than evinced, that the Analysis of bodies by fire, or even that at least some Analysis is the onely instrument of investigating what Ingredients mixt bodies are made up of, since in divers cases That may be discovered by Composition as well as by Resolution; as it may appear, that Vitriol consists of metalline parts (whether Martial, or Venereal, or both) associated by Coagulation with acid ones, one may, I say, discover this as well by making true Vitriol with Spirit (improperly called Oil) of Sulphur, or that of Salt, as by distilling or Resolving Vitriol by the fire.

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4 months 3 days ago

We are fulfilled only when we aspire to nothing, when we are impregnated by that nothing to the point of intoxication.

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5 months 1 week ago

Extreme pride or dejection indicates extreme ignorance of self.

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Part IV, Prop. LV
5 months 1 week ago

Covetousness, and the desire of having in our possession, and under our dominion, more than we have need of, being the root of all evil, should be early and carefully weeded out, and the contrary quality of a readiness to impart to others, implanted. This should be encourag'd by great commendation and credit, and constantly taking care that he loses nothing by his liberality.

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Sec. 110
4 months 2 days ago

The mores I return to myself, the more I divest myself, under the traumatic effect of persecution , of my freedom as a constituted, wilful, imperialistic subject, the more I discover myself to be responsible' the more just I am, the more guilty I am. I am 'in myself' through others.

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The Levinas reader by Levinas, Emmanuel p. 102
1 month 4 weeks ago

The only method of learning to bear with dignity the vicissitudes of fortune is to recall the catastrophes of others.

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Polybius. The Histories of Polybius, trans. Evelyn S. Shuckburgh. London, New York: Macmillan and Co., 1889. Book I, Chapter 1
1 month 3 weeks ago

I love men too, not merely individuals, but every one. But I love them with the consciousness of egoism; I love them because love makes me happy, I love because loving is natural to me, because it pleases me. I know no 'commandment of love'.

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Cambridge 1995, p. 258
1 month 1 week ago

Where are we going? Do not ask! Ascend, descend. There is no beginning and no end. Only this present moment exists, full of bitterness, full of sweetness, and I rejoice in it all.

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6 months 1 week ago

Since the science of nature is conversant with magnitudes, motion, and time, each of which must necessarily be either infinite or finite...we should speculate the infinite, and consider whether it is or not; and if it is what it is. ...All those who appear to have touched on a philosophy of this kind... consider it as a certain principle of beings. Some, indeed, as the Pythagoreans and Plato, consider it, per se, not as being an accident to any thing else, but as having an essential subsistence... the Pythagoreans... consider the infinite as subsisting in sensibles; for they do not make number to be separate; and they assert that what is beyond the heavens is infinite; but Plato says that beyond the heavens there is not any body, nor ideas, because these are no where: he affirms, however, that the infinite is both in sensibles, and in ideas. ...Plato establishes two infinities, viz. the great and the small.

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5 months 5 days ago

...and if you are common, you can dress up as a woman, show you behind or write poems: there's nothing offensive about a naked behind if it's everybody's; each person will be mirrored in it.

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p. 463
5 months 1 week ago

[E]xperience has taught me that those who give their time to the absorbing claims of what is called society, not having leisure to keep up a large acquaintance with the organs of opinion, remain much more ignorant of the general state either of the public mind, or of the active and instructed part of it, than a recluse who reads the newspapers need be.

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(p. 262)
6 months 1 week ago
Every word instantly becomes a concept precisely insofar as it is not supposed to serve as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual original experience to which it owes its origin; but rather, a word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept "leaf" is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects.
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1 month 4 days ago

If the potential of every number is in the monad, then the monad would be intelligible number in the strict sense, since it is not yet manifesting anything actual, but everything conceptually together in it.

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On the Monad

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