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2 weeks 6 days ago

Notwithstanding I have a few things against thee, because thou sufferest that woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess, to teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication, and to eat things sacrificed unto idols. And I gave her space to repent of her fornication; and she repented not. Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation, except they repent of their deeds. And I will kill her children with death; and all the churches shall know that I am he which searcheth the reins and hearts: and I will give unto every one of you according to your works.

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Revelation
1 week 2 days ago

Society triumphs over many. They wish to regenerate the world with their institutions, with their moral philosophy, with their love. Then they sink to living from breakfast till dinner, from dinner till tea, with a little worsted work, and to looking forward to nothing but bed. When shall we see a life full of steady enthusiasm, walking straight to its aim, flying home, as that bird is now, against the wind - with the calmness and the confidence of one who knows the laws of God and can apply them?

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1 month 3 weeks ago

By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world. The foe long since in silence slept; Alike the conqueror silent sleeps; And Time the ruined bridge has swept Down the dark stream which seaward creeps. On this green bank, by this soft stream, We set to-day a votive stone; That memory may their deed redeem, When, like our sires, our sons are gone. Spirit, that made those heroes dare, To die, and leave their children free, Bid Time and Nature gently spare The shaft we raise to them and thee.

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Concord Hymn, 1837
1 month 4 days ago

The Universe is one, infinite, immobile. The absolute potential is one, the act is one, the form or soul is one, the material or body is one, the thing is one, the being in one, one is the maximum and the best... It is not generated, because there is no other being it could desire or hope for, since it comprises all being. It does not grow corrupt. because there is nothing else into which it could change, given that it is itself all things. It cannot diminish or grow, since it is infinite.

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As translated by Paul Harrison
1 week 3 days ago

The pathos of it all is that the America which is to be protected by a huge military force is not the America of the people, but that of the privileged class; the class which robs and exploits the masses, and controls their lives from the cradle to the grave. No less pathetic is it that so few people realize that preparedness never leads to peace, but that it is indeed the road to universal slaughter.

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3 weeks 2 days ago

The mind advances only when it has the patience to go in circles, in other words, to deepen.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Her face seems ravaged by both lightning and hail. But on yours there is something like the promise of a storm: one day passion will burn it to the bone.

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Act 1
2 months 2 weeks ago

Only after Winter comes do we know that the pine and the cypress are the last to fade.

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3 weeks 2 days ago

Every utopia about to be realized resembles a cynical dream.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

The heavens are as deep as our aspirations are high.

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Quoted in Maturin M. Ballou (ed.) Pearls of Thought (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1881) p. 21
1 month 3 weeks ago

Kant [...] stated that he had "found it necessary to deny knowledge [...] to make room for faith," but all he had "denied" was knowledge of things that are unknowable, and he had not made room for faith but for thought.

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p. 63
3 weeks 2 days ago

To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.

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3 weeks 2 days ago

What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and that we consent to exist.

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1 week 6 days ago

Underlying the concept of positivity is the conviction that the positive is intrinsically positive in itself, without anyone pausing to ask what is to be regarded as positive. ... It is significant and really quite interesting that the term 'positive' actually contains this ambivalence. On the one hand, 'positive' means what is given, is postulated, is there-as when we speak of positivism as the philosophy that sticks to the facts. But, equally, 'positive' also refers to the good, the approvable, in a certain sense, the ideal. And I imagine that this semantic constellation expresses with precision what countless people actually feel to be the case.

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p. 18
1 month 4 weeks ago

Pi's face was masked, and it was understood that none could behold it and live. But piercing eyes looked out from the mask, inexorable, cold and enigmatic.

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"The Mathematician's Nightmare", Nightmares of Eminent Persons and Other Stories, 1954
3 weeks 2 days ago

In the torments of the intellect, there is a certain bearing which is to be sought in vain among those of the heart. Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

Every poet has trembled on the verge of science.

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July 18, 1852
1 month 3 weeks ago

At the point at which the concept of différance, and the chain attached to it, intervenes, all the conceptual oppositions of metaphysics (signifier/signified; sensible/intelligible; writing/speech; passivity/activity; etc.)- to the extent that they ultimately refer to the presence of something present (for example, in the form of the identity of the subject who is present for all his operations, present beneath every accident or event, self-present in its "living speech," in its enunciations, in the present objects and acts of its language, etc.)- become non pertinent. They all amount, at one moment or another, to a subordination of the movement of différance in favor of the presence of a value or a meaning supposedly antecedent to différance, more original than it, exceeding and governing it in the last analysis. This is still the presence of what we called above the "transcendental signified.

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p. 29
1 week 5 days ago

The theme of Cosmology, which is the basis of all religions, is the story of the dynamic effort of the World passing into everlasting unity, and of the static majesty of God's vision, accomplishing its purpose of completion by absorption of the World's multiplicity of effort.

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Pt. V, ch. II, sec. V.
3 weeks 2 days ago

All my life, I have lived with the feeling that I have been kept from my true place. If the expression "metaphysical exile" had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one.

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1 week 6 days ago

School children and students who love God should never say: "For my part I like mathematics"; "I like French"; "I like Greek." They should learn to like all these subjects, because all of them develop that faculty of attention which, directed toward God, is the very substance of prayer.

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1 month 1 week 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.
2 months 3 weeks ago

Let us be understood. If the Japanese surrender after the destruction of Hiroshima, having been intimidated, we will rejoice. But we refuse to see anything in such grave news other than the need to argue more energetically in favor of a true international society, in which the great powers will not have superior rights over small and middle-sized nations, where such an ultimate weapon will be controlled by human intelligence rather than by the appetites and doctrines of various states. Before the terrifying prospects now available to humanity, we see even more clearly that peace is the only goal worth struggling for. This is no longer a prayer but a demand to be made by all peoples to their governments a demand to choose definitively between hell and reason.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.

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3 weeks 2 days ago

Existing is plagiarism.

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2 weeks 4 days ago

As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually 'thinking' it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics-the model of all neo-positivistic thinking-lies in just this 'intellectual economy.' Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. ... Reason ... becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced.

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p. 23.
1 month 3 weeks ago

The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded.

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Conversation of 1947 or 1948
2 weeks 4 days ago

With the disintegration of all that Nietzsche had revered, existence, to him, had become a desert in which only one thing remained, namely that which had relentlessly forced him into this path: truthfulness that knows no limits and is not subject to any condition.

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p. 45
2 months 1 day ago

It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual, consequence of a certain propensity in human nature which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.

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Chapter II

Everything in me that conspires to break the unity and continuity of my life conspires to destroy me and consequently to destroy itself. Every individual in a people who conspires to break the spiritual unity and continuity of that people tends to destroy it and to destroy himself as a part of that people.

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2 weeks 4 days ago

Every morning I shall concern myself anew about the boundary Between the love-deed-Yes and the power-deed-No And pressing forward honor reality. We cannot avoid Using power, Cannot escape the compulsion To afflict the world, So let us, cautious in diction And mighty in contradiction, Love powerfully.

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"Power and Love"
1 month 3 weeks ago

If the only alternative to fascism we produce is a corporate-driven, milquetoast, neoliberal Democratic Party, fascism will come to America. Let us be very clear. It's like a Weimar America.

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Speaking to Chris Hedges on The Real News Network, Cornel West's presidential candidacy is 'for the least of these'. June 16, 2023.
2 weeks 6 days ago

O ye of little faith, why reason ye among yourselves, because ye have brought no bread? Do ye not yet understand, neither remember the five loaves of the five thousand, and how many baskets ye took up? Neither the seven loaves of the four thousand, and how many baskets ye took up? How is it that ye do not understand that I spake it not to you concerning bread, that ye should beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees?

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16:8-11 (KJV)
1 week 3 days ago

He alone is aware of the truth, and if all men were aware of it, there would be an end of life. In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. But his kingship is kingship over nothing. It brings no powers and privileges, only loss of faith and exhaustion of the power to act. Its world is a world without values.

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Chapter one, The Country of the Blind, referencing a quote by Desiderius Erasmus.
4 weeks ago

Gentlemen, the melancholy event of yesterday reads to us an awful lesson against being too much troubled about any of the objects of ordinary ambition. The worthy gentleman, who has been snatched from us at the moment of the election, and in the middle of contest, whilst his desires were as warm, and his hopes as eager as ours, has feelingly told us, what shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue.

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Speech at Bristol on declining the poll, referring to a Mr. Richard Coombe (9 September 1780), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II (1855), p. 171
2 months 6 days ago

Since my logic aims to teach and instruct the understanding, not that it may with the slender tendrils of the mind snatch at and lay hold of abstract notions (as the common logic does), but that it may in very truth dissect nature, and discover the virtues and actions of bodies, with their laws as determined in matter; so that this science flows not merely from the nature of the mind, but also from the nature of things.

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Aphorism 52
1 month 2 weeks ago

Wrongly do the Greeks suppose that aught begins or ceases to be; for nothing comes into being or is destroyed; but all is an aggregation or secretion of pre-existent things: so that all-becoming might more correctly be called becoming-mixed, and all corruption, becoming-separate.

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quoted in Heinrich Ritter, Tr. from German by Alexander James William Morrison, The History of Ancient Philosophy, Vol.1
2 months 4 weeks ago

That body is heavier than another which, in an equal bulk, moves downward quicker.

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Let us go on committing suicide by working among our people, and let them dream life just as the lake dreams the sky.

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2 months ago

Constitutional freedom, as the right of every citizen to have to obey no other law than that to which he has given his consent or approval.

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1 week 3 days ago

Often what is absent has more power than what is present.

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1 week 3 days ago

The fundamental tenet of Steiner's teaching is that if we take the trouble to recognize the independent existence of the inner worlds of thought, and keep the mind turned in that direction, we shall soon become increasingly conscious of their reality. We are not, as Sartre believed, stranded in the universe of matter like a whale on a beach. That inner world is our natural home. Moreover, once we grasp this truth, we can also recognize that we ourselves possess an "essential ego," a "true self," a fundamental identity that goes far beyond our usual feeble sense of being "me."

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p. 26
2 months 3 weeks ago

"My field," said Goethe, "is time." That is indeed the absurd speech. What, in fact, is the Absurd Man? He who, without negating it, does nothing for the eternal. Not that nostalgia is foreign to him. But he prefers his courage and his reasoning. The first teaches him to live without appeal and to get along with what he has; the second informs him of his limits. Assured of his temporally limited freedom, of his revolt devoid of future, and of his mortal consciousness, he lives out his adventure within the span of his lifetime.

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1 week 2 days ago

Neurosis can be understood best as the battle between tendencies within an individual; deep character analysis leads, if successful, to the progressive solution.

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p. 264
1 month 3 weeks 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

The real sin - perhaps it is a sin against the Holy Ghost for which there is no remission - is the sin of heresy, the sin of thinking for oneself. The saying has been heard before now, here in Spain, that to be a liberal - that is, a heretic - is worse than being an assassin, a thief, or an adulterer. The gravest sin is not to obey the Church, whose infallibility protects us from reason.

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The vanity of the passing world and love are the two fundamental and heart-penetrating notes of true poetry. And they are two notes of which neither can be sounded without causing the other to vibrate. The feeling of the vanity of the passing world kindles love in us, the only thing that triumphs over the vain and transitory, the only thing that fills life again and eternalizes it.

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