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7 months 4 weeks ago

Old age realizes the dreams of youth: look at Dean Swift; in his youth he built an asylum for the insane, in his old age he was himself an inmate.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Maybe this world is another planet's Hell.

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As quoted in Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time (1979) by Laurence J. Peter, p. 239 Point Counter Point (New York: The Modern Library, 1928), Chapter XVII, p. 263
6 months 3 weeks ago

Wherever Macdonald sits, there is the head of the table.

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par. 37
3 months 1 week ago

Is it for this purpose that we are strong-that we may have light burdens to bear?

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6 months 3 weeks ago

A third illusion haunts us, that a long duration, as a year, a decade, a century, is valuable. But an old French sentence says, "God works in moments," - "En peu d'heure Dieu labeure." We ask for long life, but 't is deep life, or grand moments, that signify. Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical. Life is unnecessarily long. Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance, - what ample borrowers of eternity they are! Life culminates and concentrates; and Homer said, "The Gods ever give to mortals their appointed share of reason only on one day."

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Works and Days
3 months 1 week ago

A man with two trades to his credit can easily learn another ten.

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5 months ago

There are clear cases in which "understanding" literally applies and clear cases in which it does not apply; and these two sorts of cases are all I need for this argument.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

The manufacturing worker almost always lives in the countryside and in a more or less patriarchal relation to his landlord or employer; the proletarian lives, for the most part, in the city and his relation to his employer is purely a cash relation. The manufacturing worker is torn out of his patriarchal relation by big industry, loses whatever property he still has, and in this way becomes a proletarian.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

The mere word 'design' by itself has no consequences and explains nothing. It is the barrenest of principles. The old question of whether there is design is idle. The real question is what is the world, whether or not it have a designer - and that can be revealed only by the study of all nature's particulars.

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Lecture III, Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered
7 months 4 weeks ago

The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.

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3 months 1 week ago

In the presence of the total reality upon which our conduct is founded, our knowledge is characterized by peculiar limitations and aberrations. We cannot say in principle that "error is life and knowledge is death," because a being involved in persistent errors would continually act wide of the purpose, and would thus inevitably perish.

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p. 444
Good prose is written only face to face with poetry.
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5 months 4 weeks ago

"War," says Machiavel, "ought to be the only study of a prince;" and by a prince he means every sort of state, however constituted. "He ought," says this great political doctor, "to consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes ability to execute military plans." A meditation on the conduct of political societies made old Hobbes imagine that war was the state of nature.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

When you love someone, you hope - the more closely to be attached - that a catastrophe will strike your beloved.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Equally there is no rhythm when variations are not placed. There is a wealth of suggestions in the phrase "takes place". The change not only comes but it belongs; it had its definite place in a larger whole.

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p. 160
4 months 4 days ago

Near-ubiquitous technological monitoring is a consequence of the decline of cohesive societies that has occurred alongside the rising demand for individual freedom.

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In the Puppet Theatre: An Iron Mountain and a Shifting Spectacle (p. 121)
3 months 2 weeks ago

Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Normal science often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments.

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p. 5
5 months 1 week ago

Sabbath rest does not follow creation; it brings creation to completion.

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6 months 2 days ago

Distance is a great promoter of admiration!

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As quoted in Thesaurus of Epigrams: A New Classified Collection of Witty Remarks, Bon Mots and Toasts (1942) by Edmund Fuller
4 months 6 days ago

Today, empathetic intelligence entails sharing the sorrows of other sentient beings. In our posthuman future, will empathy consist entirely in sharing each other's joys?

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"What Is Empathetic Superintelligence?" presentation, 29 Jan. 2011
5 months 1 week ago

The jingoes and war speculators are filling the air with the sentimental slogan of hypocritical nationalism, "America for Americans," "America first, last, and all the time."

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Christian Apocalyptic offers us no such hope. It does not even foretell, (which would be more tolerable to our habits of thought) a gradual decay. It foretells a sudden, violent end imposed from without; an extinguisher popped onto the candle, a brick flung at the gramophone, a curtain rung down on the play - "Halt!"

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6 months 1 week ago

Do not even think of doing what ought not to be done.

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Pythagorean Ethical Sentences From Stobæus
5 months 3 weeks ago

Feuerbach is saying: No, wait a minute - if you are going to be allowed to go on living as you are living, then you also have to admit that you are not Christians. Feuerbach has understood the requirements but cannot force himself to submit to them - ergo, he prefers to renounce being a Christian. And now, no matter how great a responsibility he must bear, he takes a position that is not unsound, that is, it is wrong of established Christendom to say that Feuerbach is attacking Christianity; it is not true, he is attacking the Christians by demonstrating that their lives do not correspond to the teachings of Christianity.

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Soren Kierkegaard, Journals X2A 163
5 months 2 weeks ago

You have heard that it was said to those of old, 'You shall not commit adultery.' But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell.

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Exodus 20:14, Seventh Commandment Matthew 5:27-30 (NKJV)
7 months 6 days ago

Finally, every man will become dear and pleasing to every other man; all will be beloved by all! and, what is still more desirable, beloved also by Christ; to become acceptable to whom is the highest felicity of human nature.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

"And I say also this. I do not think the forest would be so bright, nor the water so warm, nor love so sweet, if there were no danger in the lakes."

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Hyoi, p. 76
2 months 3 weeks ago

Art thy not content that thou hast done something conformable to thy nature, and dost thou seek to be paid for it? Just as if the eye demanded recompense for seeing, or the feet for walking. For as these members are formed for a particular purpose... so also is man formed by nature to acts of benevolence.

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IX, 42
6 months 2 weeks ago

The goal of maximizing the welfare of all may be better achieved by an ethic that accepts our inclinations and harnesses them so that, taken as a whole, the system works to everyone's advantage.

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Chapter 6, A New Understanding Of Ethics, p. 157
7 months 5 days ago

I speak the truth, not my fill of it, but as much as I dare speak; and I dare to do so a little more as I grow old.

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Ch. 2
We have seen how it is originally language which works on the construction of concepts, a labor taken over in later ages by science. Just as the bee simultaneously constructs cells and fills them with honey, so science works unceasingly on this great columbarium of concepts, the graveyard of perceptions.
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4 months 3 weeks ago

Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.

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Ch. II
5 months 2 weeks ago

The guiding question of Marx's analysis was, How does capitalist society supply its members with the necessary use-values? And the answer disclosed a process of blind necessity, chance, anarchy and frustration. The introduction of the category of use-value was the introduction of a forgotten factor, forgotten, that is, by the classical political economy which was occupied only with the phenomenon of exchange value. In the Marxian theory, this factor becomes an instrument that cuts through the mystifying reification of the commodity world.

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P. 304
3 months 1 week ago

And yet life, Lucilius, is really a battle.

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5 months 1 week ago

Fertilisation of the soul is the reason for the necessity of art.

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Ch. 13: "Requisites for Social Progress", p. 283
5 months 1 week ago

The central fact for me is, I think, that the [role of the] intellectual ... cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d'être is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug. Representation of the Intellectual

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1994
2 months 3 weeks ago

The whole contains nothing which is not or its advantage; and all natures indeed have this common principle, but the nature of the universe has this principle besides, that it cannot be compelled even by any external cause to generate anything harmful to itself.

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X, 6
5 months 2 weeks ago

We suppose, it would seem, that concepts grow in the individual mind like leaves on a tree, and we think to discover their nature by studying their growth; we seek to define them psychologically, in terms of the human mind. But this account makes everything subjective, and if we follow it through to the end, does away with truth. What is known as the history of concepts is really a history either of our knowledge of concepts or of the meanings of words.

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Translation J. L. Austin (Oxford, 1950) as quoted by Stephen Toulmin, Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts (1972) Vol. 1, p. 56.
5 months 1 week ago

I was aggressively nonpolitical. I believed that people who make a fuss about politics do so because their heads are too empty to think about more important things. So I felt nothing but impatient contempt for Osborne's Jimmy Porter and the rest of the heroes of social protest.

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p. 2
6 months 3 weeks ago

At the present day, civilized opinion is a curious mental mixture. The military instincts and ideals are as strong as ever, but they are confronted by reflective criticisms which sorely curb their ancient freedom. Innumerable writers are showing up the bestial side of military service. Pure loot and mastery seem no longer morally allowable motives, and pretexts must be found for attributing them solely to the enemy.

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6 months 4 weeks ago

Love is better than hate, because it brings harmony instead of conflict into the desires of the persons concerned. Two people between whom there is love succeed or fail together, but when two people hate each other the success of either is the failure of the other.

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3 months 6 days ago

I lay it down that there is Matter, and also there are Material Species, but unless a Final Cause for them be previously assumed, we shall be, without perceiving it, introducing the doctrine of Epicurus: since if nothing be anterior to two efficient causes, a spontaneous flux and chance must have united the two together.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

If life is a test, what do you have to defend what you stood for? Your actions in a tumultuous confusing world? If life is a test, you're going to want to have developed your own philosophy to point to.

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3 months 1 week 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
6 months 3 weeks ago

Bold ideas, unjustified anticipations, and speculative thought, are our only means for interpreting nature: our only organon, our only instrument, for grasping her. And we must hazard them to win our prize. Those among us who are unwilling to expose their ideas to the hazard of refutation do not take part in the scientific game.

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Ch. 10 "Corroboration, or How a Theory Stands up to Tests", section 85: The Path of Science, p. 280.
4 months 3 weeks ago

It takes a long time to bring excellence to maturity.

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Maxim 780

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