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6 months 3 weeks ago

It is the highest service to submit the evil impulse to God through the power of love.

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p. 45
6 months 4 weeks ago

The true Poet is all-knowing; he is an actual world in miniature.

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7 months 1 day ago

I am a sick man... I am a wicked man. An unattractive man.

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Part 1, Chapter 1
6 months 3 weeks ago

Of all that makes us suffer, nothing - so much as disappointment - gives us the sensation of at last touching Truth.

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8 months 1 day ago

In our monogamous part of the world, to marry means to halve one's rights and double one's duties.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 27, § 370 Variant translation: To marry is to halve your rights and double your duties.
3 months 3 weeks ago

The nature of the universe is the nature of things that are. Now, things that are have kinship with things that are from the beginning. Further, this nature is styled Truth; and it is the first cause of all that is true.

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IX, 1
5 months 4 weeks ago

Effects are perceived, whereas causes are conceived. Effects always preceed causes in the actual developmental order.

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(p. 303)
6 months 1 week ago

As man loses touch with his 'inner being', his instinctive depths, he finds himself trapped in the world of consciousness, that is to say, in the world of other people. Any poet knows this truth; when other people sicken him, he turns to hidden resources of power inside himself, and he knows then that other people don't matter a damn. He knows the 'secret life' inside him is the reality; other people are mere shadows in comparison. but the 'shadows' themselves cling to one another. 'Man is a political animal', said Aristotle, telling one of the greatest lies in human history. Man has more in common with the hills, or with the stars, than with other men.

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p. 170
5 months 4 weeks ago

Have courage, or cunning, when you deal with an enemy.

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Maxim 156
8 months 1 day ago

Every time a man is begotten and born, the clock of human life is wound up anew to repeat once more its same old tune that has already been played innumerable times, movement by movement and measure by measure, with insignificant variations.

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Vol. I, Ch. 4, The World As Will: Second Aspect, as translated by Eric F. J. Payne (1958) p. 322
3 months 3 weeks ago

To be like the rock that the waves keep crashing over. It stands unmoved and the raging of the sea falls still around it.

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IV, 49
5 months 1 week ago

Whoever imposes severe punishment becomes repulsive to the people; while he who awards mild punishment becomes contemptible. But whoever imposes punishment as deserved becomes respectable. For punishment when awarded with due consideration, makes the people devoted to righteousness and to works productive of wealth and enjoyment; while punishment, when ill-awarded under the influence of greed and anger or owing to ignorance, excites fury even among hermits and ascetics dwelling in forests, not to speak of householders.

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Book I : "Concerning Discipline" Chapter 4 "Determination of the Place of Varta and of Dandaniti"
5 months 3 weeks ago

It seems as if marriage were the royal road through life, and realised, on the instant, what we have all dreamed on summer Sundays when the bells ring, or at night when we cannot sleep for the desire of living. They think it will sober and change them. Like those who join a brotherhood, they fancy it needs but an act to be out of the coil and clamour for ever. But this is a wile of the devil's. To the end, spring winds will sow disquietude, passing faces leave a regret behind them, and the whole world keep calling and calling in their ears. For marriage is like life in this - that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.

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Virginibus Puerisque, Ch. 1.
5 months 4 weeks ago

All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical.

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(p. 26)
4 months 1 week ago

This is the real secret of life-to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.

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The Essence of Alan Watts
9 months 1 day ago

Those who assert that the mathematical sciences say nothing of the beautiful or the good are in error. For these sciences say and prove a great deal about them; if they do not expressly mention them, but prove attributes which are their results or definitions, it is not true that they tell us nothing about them. The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

Even where Marx did not soften his main drive to a "revolutionary development," it was still aimed at capitalism alone (a relatively young and derivative cancer) and not equally at the age-old, lasting core of all enslavement, cruelty and exploitation: at militarism, feudalism and the supremacist world at large.

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p. 38
6 months 2 weeks ago

But the truth is that my work - I was going to say my mission - is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention in faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself; it is to war against all those who submit, whether it be to Catholicism, or to rationalism, or to agnosticism; it is to make all men live the life of inquietude and passionate desire.

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6 months 1 week ago

The contention that a standing army and navy is the best security of peace is about as logical as the claim that the most peaceful citizen is he who goes about heavily armed. The experience of every-day life fully proves that the armed individual is invariably anxious to try his strength. The same is historically true of governments. Really peaceful countries do not waste life and energy in war preparations, with the result that peace is maintained.

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All is in a man's hands and he lets it all slip from cowardice, that's an axiom. It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what they fear most. Variant translation: "Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most."

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6 months 3 weeks ago

In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity. What will be the course of this revolution? Above all, it will establish a democratic constitution, and through this, the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat.

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4 months ago

When a series of progressive numbers is given as the result of observation, it may generally be reduced to law by combinations of arithmetical and geometrical progressions. A true formula for a progressive series of numbers cannot commonly be obtained from a narrow range of observations.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Follow your desire as long as you live and do not perform more than is ordered; do not lessen the time of following desire, for the wasting of time is an abomination to the spirit... When riches are gained, follow desire, for riches will not profit if one is sluggish.

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Maxim no. 11.
8 months ago

The South has conquered nothing - but a graveyard.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses.

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q. 2, art. 3, arg. 19 This is known as the Peripatetic axiom.
3 weeks ago

Common sense gets you to universality...I think we really overlook the obvious....

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7 months 1 day ago

All those countless battles-those endless, and... for the greater part, useless wars, of which... fills up for so many thousand years... are but little atoms compared with the great whole of human destiny.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Use these rules then, and trouble thyself about nothing else.

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X, 2
6 months 3 weeks ago

Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil.

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8 months 2 days ago

"You're a bitter man," said Candide. "That's because I've lived," said Martin.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

The vocation of every man and woman is to serve other people.

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What Is To Be Done? (1886) Chap. XL
3 months 3 weeks ago

No thefts of free will reported.

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(Hays translation) XI, 36

The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead.

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24 June 1813

There are extraordinary situations which require extraordinary interposition. An exasperated people, who feel that they possess power, are not easily restrained within limits strictly regular.

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7 months 1 week ago

After it hath been seen how the obstinate and the ignorant of evil disposition are accustomed to dispute, it will further be shewn how disputes are wont to conclude; although others are so wary that without losing their composure, but with a sneer, a smile, a certain discreet malice, that which they have not succeeded in proving by argument - nor indeed can it be understood by themselves - nevertheless by these tricks of courteous disdain they pretend to have proven, endeavouring not only to conceal their own patently obvious ignorance but to cast it on to the back of their adversary. For they dispute not in order to find or even to seek Truth, but for victory, and to appear the more learned and strenuous upholders of a contrary opinion. Such persons should be avoided by all who have not a good breastplate of patience.

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"Introductory Epistle : Argument of the Third Dialogue"
4 months 3 weeks ago

We do not have and cannot have any means of discovering whether or not we are carried along in a uniform motion of translation.

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L'état actuel et l'avenir de la physique mathematique
5 months 3 weeks ago

Of course, there are those - Sandel, Walzer and Dworkin, for example - who propose "communitarian" ways of thinking, as a further move in the direction which a sophisticated liberalism requires. But none of them is prepared to accept the real price of community: which is sanctity, intolerance, exclusion, and a sense that life's meaning depends upon obedience, and also on vigilance against the enemy.

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'In Defence of the Nation', The Philosopher on Dover Beach (1990), p. 310
2 months 1 day ago

It sounds so cool the way he says it....but no matter how magical it sounds, it's utter insanity....

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6 months 3 weeks ago

I have cast fire upon the world, and see, I am guarding it until it blazes.

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Ideas too are a life and a world.

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F 70
5 months 4 weeks ago

Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes.

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(p. 36)

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.

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Letter to Abigail Smith Adams from Paris while a Minister to France (22 February 1787), referring to Shay's Rebellion. "Jefferson's Service to the New Nation," Library of Congress
6 months 3 weeks ago

Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.

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George Santayana, as quoted in Quotations for Our Time (1977) edited by Laurence J. Peter
4 months 1 day ago

Descend you weary-laden, descend in the dark earth,help me to finish swiftly my dread master's shroud,let each hem hold my pain, each corner hide a crow,a lean, voracious crow to peck his heart out bit by bit.

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Slave's prayer, Book XI, line 708
4 months 3 weeks ago

In the Thirty Years' War... a third of the population of central Europe were killed in a bloody struggle between different Christian religious sects, and the pragmatic part of liberalism was to take final ends [defined by religions] out of political discussion... and to lower the sights of politics to defend life itself, and not "the good life"... as defined by a particular sect of a particular religion.

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8:28

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