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3 months 2 weeks ago

A magical portal opened inside my mind and conducted me into an astonishing world. ... Before this moment I had divined but had never known with such positiveness that the world is extremely large and that suffering and toil are the companions and fellow warriors not only of Cretan, but of every man. ... that by means of poetry all this suffering and effort could be transformed into dream; no matter how much of the ephemeral existed, poetry could immortalize it by turning it into song.

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Naxos, Ch. 11, p. 96
6 months 1 week ago

In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world

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4 months 1 week ago

If you are in a strait, a very good indication as to choice-perhaps the best you could get-is a book you have a great curiosity about. You are then in the readiest and best of all possible conditions to improve by that book.

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3 months 6 days ago

May they not forget to keep pure the great heritage that puts them ahead of the West: the artistic configuration of life, the simplicity and modesty of personal needs, and the purity and serenity of the Japanese soul.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

I say, then, that belief is nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object, than what the imagination alone is ever able to attain.

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§ 4.9
6 months 2 days ago

Myth is depoliticized speech.

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p. 145
6 months 1 week ago

The source of an emotion is very difficult to grasp, but it comes to just that. That holds for all phenomena, for faith, etc. Why did it begin, how did it develop? and so forth-only he who has the gift of divination can perceive where it really comes from. But it is not accessible to reflection.

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4 months 1 day ago

But the wise man is fortified against all inroads; he is alert; he will not retreat before the attack of poverty, or of sorrow, or of disgrace, or of pain. He will walk undaunted both against them and among them.

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6 months 4 weeks ago

Hear gladly!

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery.

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Ch. 6: Machines and the Emotions
3 months 6 days ago

When a man after long years of searching chances on a thought which discloses something of the beauty of this mysterious universe, he should not therefore be personally celebrated. He is already sufficiently paid by his experience of seeking and finding. In science, moreover, the work of the individual is so bound up with that of his scientific predecessors and contemporaries that it appears almost as an impersonal product of his generation.

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6 months 1 week ago

The methods of logical procedure are very different in ancient and modem logic, but behind all difference is the construction of a universally valid order of thought, neutral with respect to material content. Long before technological man and technological nature emerged as the objects of rational control and calculation, the mind was made susceptible to abstract generalization. Terms which could be organized into a coherent logical system, free from contradiction or with manageable contradiction, were separated from those which could not. Distinction was made between the universal, calculable, "objective" and the particular, incalculable, subjective dimension of thought.

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pp. 137-138

🤷‍♂️....not really?

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4 months 1 day ago

Of war men ask the outcome, not the cause.

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line 407; (Lycus).
3 months 2 weeks ago

The 'Diagnosis', or Scheme of the Characters, comes, in the order of philosophy, after the Classification. The characters do not 'make' the classes, they only enable us to 'recognize' them. The Diagnosis is an Artificial Key to a Natural System.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Those who are most to be considered, those for whose help the struggle must be made, if labor is to be enfranchised, and social justice won, are those least able to help or struggle for themselves, those who have no advantage of property or skill or intelligence, - the men and women who are at the very bottom of the social scale. In securing the equal rights of these we shall secure the equal rights of all. Hence it is, as Mazzini said, that it is around the standard of duty rather than around the standard of self-interest that men must rally to win the rights of man. And herein may we see the deep philosophy of Him who bade men love their neighbors as themselves. In that spirit, and in no other, is the power to solve social problems and carry civilization onward.

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Ch. 21 : Conclusion
6 months 2 weeks ago

Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

If there is a devil in human history, that devil is the principle of command. It alone, sustained by the ignorance and stupidity of the masses, without which it could not exist, is the source of all the catastrophes, all the crimes, and all the infamies of history.

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On the Program of the Alliance (1871), in Bakunin on Anarchy (1971), translated and edited by Sam Dolgoff Variant translation: If there is a devil in history, it is the power principle.
3 months 3 weeks ago

The words of malicious slander should not be allowed to enter the ear. A defensive voice should not be allowed to come out of the mouth. The want to gravely injure people should not be allowed to exist in the heart. If this is accomplished, though there be people who cynically expose others, they would be without people who would align with them.

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Book 1; Self-culfivation
8 months 5 days ago

Thus, where'er the drift of hazardSeems most unrestrained to flow,Chance herself is reined and bitted,And the curb of law doth know.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

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Worship
7 months 2 weeks ago

One must look into hell before one has any right to speak of heaven.

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Letter to Colette O'Niel, October 23, 1916; published in The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell: The Public Years, 1914-1970, p. 87
8 months 2 weeks ago

Straightforward preaching spoils the effectiveness of a story. If you can't resist the impulse to improve your fellow human beings, do it subtly.

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6 months 1 week ago

It is the most advanced industrial society which feels most directly threatened by the rebellion, because it is here that the social necessity of repression and alienation, of servitude and heteronomy is most transparently unnecessary, and unproductive in terms of human progress. Therefore the cruelty and violence mobilized in the struggle against the threat, therefore the monotonous regularity with which the people are made familiar with, and accustomed to inhuman attitudes and behavior-to wholesale killing as patriotic act.

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1 month 2 days ago

I could take a pile of words and drop them into a word container. Then I could reach in and grab a clump of words and line them up. Then I capitalize the first letter and put a period at the end.

An observer would read it and say “It’s just a bunch of random words that look like a sentence, but it doesn’t make any sense.”

Then I say: “It only has a message for those who believe.”

Then, if they are a "believer" they will start the process of piecing words together, extracting meaning, coming to conclusions.

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6 months 2 days ago

Traditional philosophy's claim to totality, culminating in the thesis that the real is rational, is indistinguishable from apologetics.

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p. 7
6 months 1 week ago

Sadness makes you God's prisoner.

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7 months 1 week ago

One thing underpins, makes consistent, and gives meaning to all our other activities on behalf of animals. This one thing is that we take responsibility for our own lives, and make them as free of cruelty as we can. The first step is that we cease to eat animals. Many people who are opposed to cruelty to animals draw the line at becoming a vegetarian. It was of such people that Oliver Goldsmith, the eighteenth-century humanitarian essayist, wrote: "They pity, and they eat the objects of their compassion."

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Ch. 4: Becoming a Vegetarian
6 months 2 weeks ago

A good man with a good conscience doesn't walk so fast.

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Scene X.
3 months 3 weeks ago

Time! Time! Time! - we must not impugn the Scripture Chronology, but we must interpret it in accordance with whatever shall appear on fair enquiry to be the truth for there cannot be two truths. And really there is scope enough: for the lives of the Patriarchs may as reasonably be extended to 5000 or 50000 years apiece as the days of Creation to as many thousand millions of years.

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Letter to Charles Lyell after being inspired by his Principles of Geology
3 months 3 weeks ago

Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but rather as the development of methods of ordering and surveying human experience. In this respect our task must be to account for such experience in a manner independent of individual subjective judgement and therefore objective in the sense that it can be unambiguously communicated in ordinary human language.

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The Unity of Human Knowledge
8 months 2 weeks ago

Everything that depends on the action of nature is by nature as good as it can be, and similarly everything that depends on art or any rational cause, and especially if it depends on the best of all causes. To entrust to chance what is greatest and most noble would be a very defective arrangement.

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6 months 1 day ago

Every human being is the natural guardian of his own importance.

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Ch. 9: "Science and Philosophy", p. 195
7 months 2 weeks ago

When I endeavour to examine my own conduct, when I endeavour to pass sentence upon it, and either to approve or condemn it, it is evident that, in all such cases, I divide myself, as it were, into two persons; and that I, the examiner and judge, represent a different character from that other I, the person whose conduct is examined into and judged of.

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Chap. I.
3 months 3 weeks ago

Thus proletarian violence has become an essential factor in Marxism. Let us add once more that, if properly conducted, it will have the result of suppressing parliamentary socialism, which will no longer be able to pose as the leader of the working classes and as the guardian of order.

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p. 79
7 months 1 week ago

From whence are these "rights of individuals" derived, and why should we care? Unless we presume the existence of some greater power that determines what is good, isn't it arbitrary to posit that human survival is more important than private property rights, an equally artificially construed concept? Isn't it arbitrary to assume that some sort of equality is preferable to a system where, say, the poor are assumed to have bad karma? If these 'rights of individuals' are derived only from shared humanity, then do 'individuals' (a thoroughly meaningless term, by the way), begin to lose them when they act inhumanely? And isn't it totally arbitrary to grant rights to humans rather than other creatures anyway?

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Lecture in New Haven, On Constructed Rights
6 months 3 weeks ago

To attempt the destruction of our passions is the height of folly. What a noble aim is that of the zealot who tortures himself like a madman in order to desire nothing, love nothing, feel nothing, and who, if he succeeded, would end up a complete monster!

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Ch. 5, as quoted in Selected Writings (1966) edited by Lester G. Crocker
7 months 3 weeks ago

I have never seen a greater monster or miracle in the world than myself.

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Book III, Ch. 11. Of Cripples
3 months 1 week ago

It seems not absurd to conceive, that at first production of mixt bodies, the universal matter, whereof they among other parts of the universe consisted, was actually divided, into little particles, of several sizes and shapes, variously moved.

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Proposition I
7 months 2 weeks ago

Justice is happiness according to virtue.

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Chapter V, Section 48, p. 310
6 months 4 weeks ago

Assist a man in raising a burden; but do not assist him in laying it down.

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Symbol 11
5 months 4 weeks ago

Those who have a spark of self-respect left, prefer open defiance, prefer crime to the emaciated, degraded position of poverty.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

There are things I can't force. I must adjust. There are times when the greatest change needed is a change of my viewpoint.

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As quoted in Cracking the Code of Our Physical Universe : The Key to a Whole New World of Enlightenment and Enrichment (2006) by Matthew M Radmanesh, p. 91

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