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3 months 3 weeks ago

The simple-minded positivism that believes it has found a firm ground of certainty if it only excludes all mental phenomena from consideration and holds fast to observable facts.

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p. 39
4 months 3 weeks ago

If, as I maintain and firmly believe, there is no objective definition of intelligence, and what we call intelligence is only a creation of cultural fashion and subjective prejudice, what the devil is it we test when we make use of an intelligence test?

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3 months 1 day ago
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Attributed to Bruno in episode 1 of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014). Earliest use of this phrase appears to be in Your God is Too Small (1961) by English priest John Bertram Phillips.
2 months 3 weeks ago

Difficulty is a severe instructor, set over us by the supreme ordinance of a parental Guardian and Legislator, who knows us better than we know ourselves, as he loves us better too. Pater ipse colendi haud facilem esse viam voluit. He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.

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Volume iii, p. 453
1 week 2 days ago

Anger, as we have said, is eager to punish; and that such a desire should exist in man's peaceful breast is least of all according to his nature; for human life is founded on benefits and harmony and is bound together into an alliance for the common help of all, not by terror, but by love towards one another.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.

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Beauty
3 months 3 weeks ago

I respect orders but I respect myself too and I do not obey foolish rules made especially to humiliate me.

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Hugo to Slick and Georges, Act 3, sc. 2
3 months 2 weeks ago

It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how the music should be played.

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p. 96
1 month 3 weeks ago

War has become the environment of our time if only because it is an accelerated form of innovation and education.

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(p. 381)
6 days ago

I have always done things in my own way, which is at once the way that comes naturally to me, that is honest, sincere, genuine, and unforced; but also perverse, although you must remember that this word means per (through) verse (poetry), out-of-the-way and wayward, which is surely towards the way, and that to be queer-to "follow your own weird"-is wholeheartedly to accept your karma, or fate, or destiny, and thus to be odd in the service of God, "whose service," as the Anglican Book of Common Prayer declares, "is perfect freedom."

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p. xiii
2 weeks 2 days ago

In that strange island Iceland,-burst up, the geologists say, by fire from the bottom of the sea; a wild land of barrenness and lava; swallowed many months of every year in black tempests, yet with a wild gleaming beauty in summertime; towering up there, stern and grim, in the North Ocean with its snow jokuls, roaring geysers, sulphur-pools and horrid volcanic chasms, like the waste chaotic battle-field of Frost and Fire;-where of all places we least looked for Literature or written memorials, the record of these things was written down.

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1 week 3 days ago

The habit of the religious way of thinking has biased our mind so grievously that we are - terrified at ourselves in our nakedness and naturalness; it has degraded us so that we deem ourselves depraved by nature, born devils.

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Dover 2005, p. 162
3 months 3 weeks ago

In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin. It is a blessing that we do not know what is really going to happen. Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners, condemned, not to death, but to life, and as yet all unconscious of what their sentence means.

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"On the Sufferings of the World"

If the immediate creator of the universe be he who is proclaimed by Moses, then we hold nobler beliefs concerning him, inasmuch as we consider him to be the master of all things in general, but that there are besides national gods who are subordinate to him and are like viceroys of a king, each administering separately his own province; and, moreover, we do not make him the sectional rival of the gods whose station is subordinate to his. But if Moses first pays honour to a sectional god, and then makes the lordship of the whole universe contrast with his power, then it is better to believe as we do, and to recognise the God of the All, though not without apprehending also the God of Moses; this is better, I say, than to honour one who has been assigned the lordship over a very small portion, instead of the creator of all things.

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4 months 1 week ago

The essence of the good is a certain kind of moral purpose, and that of the evil is a certain kind of moral purpose.

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Book I, ch. 29, 1
2 months 2 weeks ago

Some Machians were sufficiently impressed by Einstein's interpretations of Brownian movement to accept atomism. Mach himself brushed such objections aside, and also emphatically rejected Einstein's relativity theory.

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W. W. Bartley III, "Philosophy of biology versus philosphy of physics" (2004) p. 412, Karl Popper: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, Vol. III: Philosophy of Science 2.
3 months 3 weeks ago

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.

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Vol. I, Part 1.
2 months 3 weeks ago

In the interval between his campaigns Agricola was employed in the great labours of peace. He knew that the general must be perfected by the legislator; and that the conquest is neither permanent nor honourable, which is only an introduction to tyranny... In short, he subdued the Britons by civilizing them; and made them exchange a savage liberty for a polite and easy subjection. His conduct is the most perfect model for those employed in the unhappy, but sometimes necessary, task of subduing a rude and free people.

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An Essay towards an Abridgment of English History (1757-c. 1763)
3 months 2 weeks ago

'Tis well to restrain the wicked, and in any case not to join him in his wrong-doing.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

The next thing you can learn from the woman who was a sinner, something she herself understood, is that with regard to finding forgiveness she is able to do nothing at all.

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1 week 3 days ago

The only certain fact about Russian affairs under the Soviet regime with regard to which all people agree is: that the standard of living of the Russian masses is much lower than ... the paragon of capitalism, the United States of America. If we were to regard the Soviet regime as an experiment, we would have to say that the experiment has clearly demonstrated the superiority of capitalism and the inferiority of socialism.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

We are all of us in error, the humorists excepted. They alone have discerned, as though in jest, the inanity of all that is serious and even of all that is frivolous.

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2 weeks ago

She is a woman now, and not an idle girl, not a domestic ornament or a sexual convenience anymore.

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On the maturation of women, Ch. 4 : On Old Age
1 month 3 days ago

I think television has betrayed the meaning of democratic speech, adding visual chaos to the confusion of voices. What role does silence have in all this noise?

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"Television"
2 months 3 weeks ago

It depends only on the weakness of our organs and of our self-excitement (Selbstberuhrung), that we do not see ourselves in a Fairy-world. All Fabulous Tales (Mahrchen) are merely dreams of that home world, which is everywhere and nowhere. The higher powers in us, which one day as Genies, shall fulfil our will, are, for the present, Muses, which refresh us on our toilsome course with sweet remembrances.

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1 month 1 week ago

As if to demonstrate, by a striking example, the impossibility of erecting any cerebral barrier between man and the apes, Nature has provided us, in the latter animals, with an almost complete series of gradations from brains little higher than that of a Rodent, to brains little lower than that of Man.

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Ch.2, p. 115
3 months 2 weeks ago

One day, observing a child drinking out of his hands, he cast away the cup from his wallet with the words, "A child has beaten me in plainness of living."

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Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 37

Philosophy is by its nature something esoteric, neither made for the mob nor capable of being prepared for the mob.

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Introduction to the Critical Journal of Philosophy, cited in W. Kaufmann, Hegel (1966), p. 56
4 months 3 weeks ago
The modern scientific counterpart to belief in God is the belief in the universe as an organism: this disgusts me. This is to make what is quite rare and extremely derivative, the organic, which we perceive only on the surface of the earth, into something essential, universal, and eternal! This is still an anthropomorphizing of nature!
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4 months 3 weeks ago

Nothing is harder to understand than a symbolic work. A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

And how does the God's existence emerge from the proof? Does it follow straightway, without any breach of continuity? Or have we not here an analogy to the behavior of the little Cartesian dolls? As soon as I let go of the doll it stands on its head. As soon as I let it go, I must therefore let it go. So also with the proof. As long as I keep my hold on the proof, i.e., continue to demonstrate, the existence does not come out, if for no other reason than that I am engaged in proving it; but when I let the proof go, the existence is there. But this act of letting go is surely also something; it is indeed a contribution of mine. Must not this also be taken into the account, this little moment, brief as it may be – it need not be long, for it is a leap. However brief this moment, if only an instantaneous now, this "now" must be included in the reckoning.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

And seeing every man is presumed to do all things in order to his own benefit, no man is a fit Arbitrator in his own cause.

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The First Part, Chapter 15, p. 78
2 months 1 week ago

A clash of doctrines is not a disaster - it is an opportunity.

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Ch. 12: "Religion and Science", p. 259
3 months 3 weeks ago

What does not exist must be something, or it would be meaningless to deny its existence; and hence we need the concept of being, as that which belongs even to the non-existent.

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Principles of Mathematics (1903), p. 450
1 month 3 weeks ago

Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.

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Ch. II
2 months 3 weeks ago

The normal present connects the past and the future through limitation. Contiguity results, crystallization by means of solidification. There also exists, however, a spiritual present that identifies past and future through dissolution, and this mixture is the element, the atmosphere of the poet.

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Fragment No. 109
3 months 3 weeks ago

The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

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Worship

On the stage on which we are observing it, - Universal History - Spirit displays itself in its most concrete reality.

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4 months 1 week ago

Music is associated not only with speculation but with morality. When rhythms and modes reach an intellect through the ear, they doubtless affect and reshape that mind according to their particular character.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.

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2 weeks 2 days ago

Men, I say, never did believe idle songs, never risked their soul's life on allegories: men in all times, especially in early earnest times, have had an instinct for detecting quacks, for detesting quacks.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly. The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master's interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence. This existence is assured only to the class as a whole.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Modesty is an unnatural attitude, and one which is only with difficulty taught to children.

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The divergent scales of values scream in discordance, they dazzle and daze us, and in order that it might not be painful we steer clear of all other values, as though from insanity, as though from illusion, and we confidently judge the whole world according to our own home values. Which is why we take for the greater, more painful and less bearable disaster not that which is in fact greater, more painful and less bearable, but that which lies closest to us. Everything which is further away, which does not threaten this very day to invade our threshold - with all its groans, its stifled cries, its destroyed lives, even if it involves millions of victims - this we consider on the whole to be perfectly bearable and of tolerable proportions.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

We have unmistakable proof that throughout all past time, there has been a ceaseless devouring of the weak by the strong.

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Vol. I, Part III, Ch. 2 General Aspects of the Special-Creation-Hypothesis

Many politicians of our time are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim. If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed have to wait forever.

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p. 42
3 months 6 days ago

It is requisite to choose the most excellent life; for custom will make it pleasant. Wealth is an infirm anchor, glory is still more infirm; and in a similar manner, the body, dominion, and honour. For all these are imbecile and powerless. What then are powerful anchors. Prudence, magnanimity, fortitude. These no tempest can shake. This is the Law of God, that virtue is the only thing that is strong; and that every thing else is a trifle.

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Pythagorean Ethical Sentences From Stobæus
1 month 3 weeks ago

Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons.

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p. 97

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