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6 months 3 weeks ago

To regiment artists, to make them servants of some particular cause does violence to the very springs of artistic creation. But it does more than that. It betrays the very cause of a better future it would serve, for in its subjugation of the individuality of the artist it annihilates the source of that which is genuinely new. Where the regimentation is successful, it would cause the future to be but a rearrangement of the past.

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7 months 1 week ago

It is difficult to walk at one and the same time many paths of life.

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Pythagorean Ethical Sentences From Stobæus
8 months 1 week ago

I consider as lovers of books not those who keep their books hidden in their store-chests and never handle them, but those who, by nightly as well as daily use thumb them, batter them, wear them out, who fill out all the margins with annotations of many kinds, and who prefer the marks of a fault they have erased to a neat copy full of faults.

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Letter to an unidentified friend (1489), as translated in Collected Works of Erasmus (1974), p. 58
7 months 3 weeks ago

The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor.

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p. 27
6 months 2 weeks ago

It is beyond dispute that the state exercises very great power over human life and it always shows a tendency to go beyond the limits laid down for it.

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Slavery and Freedom (1939), p. 145
2 months 2 weeks ago

"He was a man who looked at what ought to be done, not to the reputation which is got by a man's acts."
- Marcus Aurelius

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6 months 2 days ago

It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours: The desert of the real itself.

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"The Precession of Simulacra," p. 1
4 months 2 weeks ago

Treat your inferiors as you would be treated by your betters.

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Line 11 This can be related to other expressions on the ethics of reciprocity, often referred to as the variants of the Golden Rule.
7 months 2 weeks ago

Into the middle things.

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Line 148
8 months 2 weeks ago

Tentative efforts lead to tentative outcomes. Therefore, give yourself fully to your endeavors. Decide to construct your character through excellent actions, and determine to pay the price for a worthy goal. The trials you encounter will introduce you to your strengths. Remain steadfast... and one day you will build something that endures, something worthy of your potential.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

The seat of faith, however, is not consciousness but spontaneous religious experience, which brings the individual's faith into immediate relation with God. Here we must ask: Have I any religious experience and immediate relation to God, and hence that certainty which will keep me, as an individual, from dissolving in the crowd?

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p 85
4 months 1 week ago

Never for a moment do we lay aside our mistrust of the ideals established by society, and of the convictions which are kept by it in circulation. We always know that society is full of folly and will deceive us in the matter of humanity. ... humanity meaning consideration for the existence and the happiness of individual human beings.

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Chapter 26

I remember the very place in Hyde Park where, in my fourteenth year, on the eve of leaving my father's house for a long absence, he told me that I should find, as I got acquainted with new people, that I had been taught many things which youths of my age did not commonly know; and that many persons would be disposed to talk to me of this, and to compliment me upon it. What other things he said on this topic I remember very imperfectly; but he wound up by saying, that whatever I knew more than others, could not be ascribed to any merit in me, but to the very unusual advantage which had fallen to my lot.

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(p. 34)
7 months 2 weeks ago

Self-taught poverty is a help toward philosophy, for the things which philosophy attempts to teach by reasoning, poverty forces us to practice.

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Stobaeus, iv. 32a. 11
7 months 5 days ago

That some have never dreamed is as improbable as that some have never laughed.

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The first intellectual operation in which I arrived at any proficiency, was dissecting a bad argument, and finding in what part the fallacy lay: and though whatever capacity of this sort I attained was due to the fact that it was an intellectual exercise in which I was most perseveringly drilled by my father, yet it is also true that the school logic, and the mental habits acquired in studying it, were among the principal instruments of this drilling. I am persuaded that nothing, in modern education, tends so much, when properly used, to form exact thinkers, who attach a precise meaning to words and propositions, and are not imposed on by vague, loose, or ambiguous terms. The boasted influence of mathematical studies is nothing to it; for in mathematical processes, none of the real difficulties of correct ratiocination occur.

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(p. 19)
8 months 2 weeks ago

Opposition brings concord. Out of discord comes the fairest harmony.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

When we have no further desire to show ourselves, we take refuge in music, the Providence of the abulic.

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8 months 2 days ago

If you punish him for what he sees you practise yourself, he... will be apt to interpret it the peevishness and arbitrary imperiousness of a father, who, without any ground for it, would deny his son the liberty and pleasure he takes himself.

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Sec. 71
7 months 4 weeks ago

The difference principle, for example, requires that the higher expectations of the more advantaged contribute to the prospects of the least advantaged.

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Chapter II, Section 16, pg. 95
5 months 3 weeks ago

No one should be judge in his own cause.

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Maxim 545
6 months 2 weeks ago

If anyone possesses this faculty, then his attention is in reality directed beyond the world, whether he is aware of it or not. The link which attaches the human being to the reality outside the world is, like the reality itself, beyond the reach of human faculties. The respect that it makes us feel as soon as it is recognized cannot be shown to us by evidence or testimony.

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4 months 1 week ago

This is a recent interest of mine. Ask yourself the question: Why is it not justice to kill a man that kills a mouse? Then, apply that answer to a hypothetical being that stands over humanity with humanity as the mouse.

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6 months 1 week ago

Even if we consider not words by themselves but rules deciding what words may appropriately be produced in certain contexts - even if we consider, in computer jargon, programs for using words - unless those programs themselves refer to something extra-linguistic there is still no determinate reference that those words possess. This will be a crucial step in the process of reaching the conclusion that the Brain-in-a-Vat Worlders cannot refer to anything external at all (and hence cannot say that they are Brain-in-a-Vat Worlders).

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Chap. 1 : Brains in a vat
6 months 3 weeks ago

To have committed every crime but that of being a father.

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When the husk gets separated from the kernel, almost all men run after the husk and pay their respects to that. It is only the husk of Christianity that is so bruited and wide spread in this world; the kernel is still the very least and rarest of all things. There is not a single church founded on it.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Imagination is the soul, since it plays all the roles of the soul.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Here is a fulfillment of long centuries of civilization and culture; here, in romantic love, more than the triumph of thought or the victories of power is the topmost reach of human beings.

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Ch. 2 : On Youth
5 months 3 weeks ago

Human beings can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.

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Him with His Foot in His Mouth, from Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories (1984) [Penguin Classics, 1998, ISBN 0-141-18023-4], p. 11
6 months 3 weeks ago

Man has ever expressed some symbolical Philosophy of his Being in his Works and Conduct; he announces himself and his Gospel of Nature; he is the Messiah of Nature.

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7 months 5 days ago

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

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7 months 4 weeks ago

If we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories. In this way it is only too easy to obtain what appears to be overwhelming evidence in favor of a theory which, if approached critically, would have been refuted.

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The Poverty of Historicism (1957) Ch. 29 The Unity of Method
7 months 5 days ago

I could never divide myself from any man upon the difference of an opinion, or be angry with his judgement for not agreeing with me in that, from which perhaps within a few days I should dissent myself.

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Section 6
3 months 3 weeks ago

It is only after prolonged, and often painful, self-examination that any of us can realise the extent to which our minds are in bondage to words, to phrases, to formulae. We are the children of an age which spends the best energies of its life in the discussion of life, in an atmosphere of deferred fulfillment, continually postponing the act of living to the work of mentally preparing to live. Preoccupied with these preparations, we become skeptical as to all that lies beyond; and if for a moment we pass the boundary which separates the area of discussion from the fact discussed, our minds become troubled and amazed, and we conclude, strangely enough, that we are in a land of moonshine and of dreams.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it.

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§ 124
4 months 2 weeks ago

A great fortune is a great slavery.

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From Ad Polybium De Consolatione (Of Consolation, To Polybius), chap. VI, line 5
8 months 1 day ago

Our moral virtues benefit mainly other people; intellectual virtues, on the other hand, benefit primarily ourselves; therefore the former make us universally popular, the latter unpopular.

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6 months 1 week ago

Males learn to lie as a way of obtaining power, and females not only do the same but they also lie to pretend powerlessness.

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Chapter 3, pg. 59
6 months 2 weeks ago

In philosophical anthropology, ... where the subject is man in his wholeness, the investigator cannot content himself, as in anthropology as an individual science, with considering man as another part of nature and with ignoring the fact that he, the investigator, is himself a man and experiences this humanity in his inner experience in a way that he simply cannot experience any part of nature.

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p. 147
7 months 2 weeks ago

Commit no lustfulness, so that harm and regret may not reach thee from thine own actions.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted. We need not care whether they could prove the forty-seventh proposition; they do a better thing than that, they practically demonstrate the great Theorem of the Liveableness of Life.

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An Apology for Idlers.
3 months 4 weeks ago

We are firmly convinced, and we act on that conviction, that with nations, as with individuals, our interests, soundly calculated, will ever be found inseparable from our moral duties; and history bears witness to the fact that a just nation is taken on its word, when recourse is had to armaments and wars to bridle others.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things.

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(5). (Enchiridion 5)
6 months 3 weeks ago

I find that all my thoughts circle around God like the planets around the sun, and are as irresistibly attracted by Him. I would feel it to be the grossest sin if I were to oppose any resistance to this force.

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Sources: David John Tacey (2007)
5 months 3 weeks ago

Amid a multitude of projects, no plan is devised.

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Maxim 319
7 months 4 weeks ago

We may suppose that everyone has in himself the whole form of a moral conception.

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Chapter I, Section 9, pg. 50
5 months 4 weeks ago

Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly. It is the one thing we are interested in here.

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Book IV, Ch. 11

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