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1 month 1 week ago

The soul of man is divided into three parts, intelligence, reason, and passion. Intelligence and passion are possessed by other animals, but reason by man alone.

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As reported by Alexander Polyhistor, and Diogenes Laërtius in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, "Pythagoras", Sect. 30, in the translation of C. D. Yonge

If by motivation we mean whatever it is that causes someone to follow a particular course of action, then every action is motivated - by definition. But in most human behavior the relation between motives and action is not simple; it is mediated by a whole chain of events and surrounding conditions. We observe a man scratching his arm. His motive (or goal)? To relieve an itch.

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p. 265.
2 months 4 days ago

We must learn how to imitate Cicero from Cicero himself. Let us imitate him as he imitated others.

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in The Erasmus Reader (1990), p. 130.
2 months 3 weeks ago

Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their secrets.

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1 month 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
1 month 3 weeks ago

Such arguments ill become us, since the time of reformation came, under Gospel light. All distinctions of nations, and privileges of one above others, are ceased; Christians are taught to account all men their neighbours; and love their neighbours as themselves; and do to all men as they would be done by; to do good to all men; and Man-stealing is ranked with enormous crimes. Is the barbarous enslaving our inoffensive neighbours, and treating them like wild beasts subdued by force, reconcilable with all these Divine precepts? Is this doing to them as we would desire they should do to us? If they could carry off and enslave some thousands of us, would we think it just?-One would almost wish they could for once; it might convince more than Reason, or the Bible.

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So many of my thoughts and feelings are shared by the English that England has turned into a second native land of the mind for me.

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Journeys to England and Ireland, 1835.
1 month 4 weeks ago

During such calm sunshine of the mind, these spectres of false divinity never make their appearance.

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Part XIV - Bad influence of popular religions on morality
1 month 3 weeks ago

A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.

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Book III, Chapter 8, "The Great Sin"
2 months 3 days ago

A wise man never loses anything, if he has himself.

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Ch. 38. Of Solitude, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Hazlitt, 1842
2 months 2 weeks ago

A scholar who loves comfort is not worthy of the name.

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3 weeks 5 days ago

Nor is prescription of government formed upon blind unmeaning prejudices-for man is a most unwise, and a most wise, being. The individual is foolish. The multitude, for the moment, is foolish, when they act without deliberation; but the species is wise, and when time is given to it, as a species it almost always acts right.

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Speech in the House of Commons against William Pitt's motion for parliamentary reform (7 May 1782)
1 month 3 weeks ago

Thus, because Christian morals leave animals out of consideration ... therefore in philosophical morals they are of course at once outlawed; they are merely "things," simply means to ends of any sort; and so they are good for vivisection, for deer-stalking, bull-fights, horse-races, etc., and they may be whipped to death as they struggle along with heavy quarry carts. Shame on such a morality ... which fails to recognize the Eternal Reality immanent in everything that has life, and shining forth with inscrutable significance from all eyes that see the sun!

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Part II, Ch. VI, pp. 94-95
3 weeks 5 days ago

...he always firmly believed that they were purely on the defensive in that rebellion. He considered the Americans as standing at that time, and in that controversy, in the same relation to England, as England did to king James the Second, in 1688.

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p. 396
2 weeks 4 days ago

It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation.

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Ch. IV: The Aristocratic Ideal
2 months 3 weeks ago

Christ speaks of two debtors, one of whom owed much and the other little, and who both found forgiveness. He asks: Which of these two ought to love more? The answer: The one who has forgiven much. When you love much, you are forgiven much-and when you are forgiven much, you love much. See here the blessed recurrence of salvation in love!

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2 months 2 weeks ago

This is the ideal world, a perfect world of equality, fraternity, harmony, welfare, and justice.

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3 weeks 5 days ago

All the time that this horrid scene was acting or avenging, as well as for some time before, and ever since, the wicked instigators of this unhappy multitude, guilty, with every aggravation, of all their crimes, and screened in a cowardly darkness from their punishment, continued without interruption, pity, or remorse, to blow up the blind rage of the populace, with a continued blast of pestilential libels, which infected and poisoned the very air we breathed in.

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Speech at Bristol Previous to the Election, referring to the Gordon Riots (6 September 1780), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II (1855), pp. 158-159
1 month 3 weeks ago

In spite of Death, the mark and seal of the parental control, Man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticise, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life.

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2 weeks 3 days ago

When there is genuine artistry in scientific inquiry and philosophic speculation, a thinker proceeds neither by rule nor yet blindly, but by means of meaning that exist immediately as feelings having qualitative color.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

There is but one indefectibly certain truth, and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic scepticism itself leaves standing, - the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists.

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The Will to Believe, 1897
1 week 2 days ago

While it is in no way racist for any author to write a book exclusively about white women, it is fundamentally racist for books to be published that focus solely on the American white woman's experience in which that experience is assumed to be the American woman's experience.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation. So it is not necessary to use force to constrain the convict to good behavior, the madman to calm, the worker to work, the schoolboy to application, the patient to the observation of the regulations.

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Part Four, Complete and austere institutions
1 month 3 weeks ago

It is, in fact, far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.

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The Human Condition
2 months 2 weeks ago

Virtuous, worthy, wise and capable people are chosen as leaders.

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2 weeks 4 days ago

Be ye therefore ready also: for the Son of man cometh at an hour when ye think not.

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12:40
1 month 3 weeks ago

It is sublime as night and a breathless ocean. It contains every religious sentiment, all the grand ethics, which visit in turn each noble poetic mind .... It is of no use to put away the book if I trust myself in the woods or in a boat upon the pond. Nature makes a Brahmin of me presently: eternal compensation, unfathomable power, unbroken silence .... This is her creed. Peace, she saith to me, and purity and absolute abandonment - these panaceas expiate all sin and bring you to the beatitude of the Eight Gods.

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Quoted in Nani Ardeshir Palkhivala, India's Priceless Heritage, 1st ed. (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1980) pp. 9-24
2 months 3 weeks ago

The vicious lover is the follower of earthly Love who desires the body rather than the soul; his heart is set on what is mutable and must therefore be inconstant. And as soon as the body he loves begins to pass the first flower of its beauty, he "spreads his wings and flies away," giving the lie to all his pretty speeches and dishonoring his vows, whereas the lover whose heart is touched by moral beauties is constant all his life, for he has become one with what will never fade.

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2 months 3 days ago

There is no man so good, who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the laws, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.

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Book III, Ch. 9. Of Vanity
1 week 2 days ago

My own book Women, Race and Class was one of many that were published during that era, including, to name only a few, This Bridge Called My Back, edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherrie Moraga, the work of bell hooks and Michelle Wallace, and the anthology All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies. So behind this concept of intersectionality is a rich history of struggle. A history of conversations among activists within movement formations, and with and among academics as well.

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Angela Davis Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (2015) p 19
1 month 4 weeks ago

Good roads, canals, and navigable rivers, by diminishing the expence of carriage, put the remote parts of the country more nearly upon a level with those of the neighbourhood of the town. They are upon that the greatest of all improvements.

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Chapter XI, Part I, p. 174.
1 week 1 day ago

If things are deprived of memory, they become information or commodities. They are pushed into a time-free, ahistorical place.

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2 months 1 week ago

So far as it goes, a small thing may give an analogy of great things, and show the tracks of knowledge.

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Book II, lines 123-124 (tr. Rouse)
2 weeks 4 days ago

Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that conditions called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man.

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The First Part, Chapter 13, p. 62
1 month 4 weeks ago

Oatmeal indeed supplies the common people of Scotland with the greatest and best part of their food, which is in general much inferior to that of their neighbours of the same rank in England.

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Chapter VIII, p. 91 (Oatmeal in England makes for great horses, in Scotland Great Men).

It is we who are the measure of what is strange and miraculous: if we sought a universal measure the strange and miraculous would not occur and all things would be equal.

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A 26
1 month 1 week ago

Alcibiades had a very handsome dog, that cost him seven thousand drachmas; and he cut off his tail, "that," said he, "the Athenians may have this story to tell of me, and may concern themselves no further with me."

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50 Alcibiades
3 weeks ago

The reasons for persisting in Being seem less and less well founded, and our successors will find it easier than we to be rid of such obstinacy.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

"They have an engine called the Press whereby the people are deceived."

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Ch. 13 : They Have Pulled Down Deep Heaven on Their Heads
1 week 5 days ago

I have read descriptions of Paradise that would make any sensible person stop wanting to go there.

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No. 125. (Usbek writing to Rhedi)
1 week ago

To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

We must have kings, and we must have nobles. Nature provides such in every society, - only let us have the real instead of the titular. Let us have our leading and our inspiration from the best. In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise. Let the powers be well directed, directed by love, and they would everywhere be greeted with joy and honor.

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1 week 1 day ago

I had never doubted my own abilities, but I was quite prepared to believe that "the world" would decline to recognize them.

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p. 3
3 weeks ago

The ideal being? An angel ravaged by humor.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

There are men who astonish and delight, men who instruct and guide. Some men's words I remember so well that I must often use them to express my thought. Yes, because I perceive that we have heard the same truth, but they have heard it better.

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Character
3 weeks ago

Only those are happy who never think or, rather, who only think about life's bare necessities, and to think about such things means not to think at all. True thinking resembles a demon who muddies the spring of life or a sickness which corrupts its roots. To think all the time, to raise questions, to doubt your own destiny, to feel the weariness of living, to be worn out to the point of exhaustion by thoughts and life, to leave behind you, as symbols of your life's drama, a trail of smoke and blood - all this means you are so unhappy that reflection and thinking appear as a curse causing a violent revulsion in you.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

If you are tired of the real landscape, look at it in a mirror. By putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves. This book applies the treatment not only to bread or apple but to good and evil, to our endless perils, our anguish, and our joys. By dipping them in myth we see them more clearly.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

The more we learn about the world, and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific, and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance. For this, indeed, is the main source of our ignorance - the fact that our knowledge can be only finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite. Variant translation: The more we learn about the world, and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, clear, and well-defined will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance. The main source of our ignorance lies in the fact that our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.

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Ideas too are a life and a world.

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F 70

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