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1 month 2 weeks ago

The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.

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As quoted in Meditations for Parents Who Do Too Much (1993) by Jonathon Lazear and Wendy Lazear, p. 5
1 month 3 weeks ago

Whatever the practical origins of aesthetic discernment may have been, it has been used to create great works of art. When the very loftiest human creations are seen to derive from humble origins and functions, what needs revision is not our esteem for these creations but our notion of nobility.

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The Nature of Rationality (1993), Ch. V : Instrumental Rationality and Its Limits; Rationality's Imagination, p. 181
2 months 6 days ago

The consciousness of brutes would appear to be related to the mechanism of their body simply as a collateral product of its working, and to be as completely without any power of modifying that working as the steam-whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine is without influence upon its machinery. Their volition, if they have any, is an emotion indicative of physical changes, not a cause of such changes.

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1 month 1 day ago

Buddhism ... is not a culture but a critique of culture, an enduring nonviolent revolution or "loyal opposition" to the culture in which it is involved.

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p. 7
3 months 2 days ago

Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.

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Ch. 4 "Problems of Humanistic Ethics"
3 months 2 weeks ago

Man has many wishes that he does not really wish to fulfil, and it would be a misunderstanding to suppose the contrary. He wants them to remain wishes, they have value only in his imagination; their fulfilment would be a bitter disappointment to him. Such a desire is the desire for eternal life. If it were fulfilled, man would become thoroughly sick of living eternally, and yearn for death. In reality man wishes merely to avoid a premature, violent or gruesome death. Everything has its measure, says a pagan philosopher; in the end we weary of everything, even of life; a time comes when man desires death. Consequently there is nothing frightening about a normal, natural death, the death of a man who has fulfilled himself and lived out his life.

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Lecture XXX, Atheism alone a Positive View
4 months 3 weeks ago

A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish.

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Introduction, p. 31.
2 weeks 6 days ago

But though an old man, I am but a young gardener.

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Letter to Charles Willson Peale
3 months 2 weeks ago

Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship. But man seeks to worship what is established beyond dispute, so that all men would agree at once to worship it. For these pitiful creatures are concerned not only to find what one or the other can worship, but to find community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and of all humanity from the beginning of time. For the sake of common worship they've slain each other with the sword. They have set up gods and challenged one another, 'Put away your gods and come and worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods!' And so it will be to the end of the world, even when gods disappear from the earth; they will fall down before idols just the same.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

The heroes in paganism correspond exactly to the saints in popery, and holy dervises in MAHOMETANISM. The place of, HERCULES, THESEUS, HECTOR, ROMULUS, is now supplied by DOMINIC, FRANCIS, ANTHONY, and BENEDICT. Instead of the destruction of monsters, the subduing of tyrants, the defence of our native country; whippings and fastings, cowardice and humility, abject submission and slavish obedience, are become the means of obtaining celestial honours among mankind.

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Part X - With regard to courage or abasement
3 months 2 weeks ago

I would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

The only thing we are naturally afraid of is pain, or loss of pleasure. And because these are not annexed to any shape, colour, or size of visible objects, we are frighted of none of them, till either we have felt pain from them, or have notions put into us that they will do us harm.

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Sec. 115
5 months 3 weeks ago

People are scarcely aware that it is a slavery they are creating; they forget this in their zeal to make people free by overthrowing dominions. They are scarcely aware that it is slavery; how could it be possible to be a slave in relation to equals?

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1 month 5 days ago

You remember Thurlow's answer to some one complaining of the injustice of a company. "Why, you never expected justice from a company, did you? they have neither a soul to lose, nor a body to kick."

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Vol. I, ch. 11, p. 428
4 months 3 weeks ago

There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 254
3 months 3 weeks ago

Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.

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Letter to M. de Menonville
2 weeks 3 days ago

The universe is flux, life is opinion. The universe is (constant) change, life is (mere) presumption.

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(Analogous translation) The universe is transformation: life is opinion. (Translation by George Long)
4 months 3 weeks ago

For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible.

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The Art of Literature
2 weeks 3 days ago

Live with the gods.

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V, 27
5 months 3 weeks ago
One may certainly admire man as a mighty genius of construction, who succeeds in piling an infinitely complicated dome of concepts upon an unstable foundation, and, as it were, on running water. Of course, in order to be supported by such a foundation, his construction must be like one constructed of spiders' webs: delicate enough to be carried along by the waves, strong enough not to be blown apart by every wind.
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4 weeks ago

A political, economic, and social order created merely for the sake of temporal life is exclusively characteristic of the modern world, that is, of the antitraditional world.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

The law of nature teaches me to speak in my own defence: With respect to this charge of bribery I am as innocent as any man born on St. Innocents Day. I never had a bribe or reward in my eye or thought when pronouncing judgment or order. I am ready to make an oblation of myself to the King.

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(17 April 1621) Quoted by Baron John Campbell (1818), J. Murray in "The Lives of the Lord Chancellors and Keepers of the Great Seal of England"
3 months 1 week ago

Religions are not true or false, but better or worse.

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This statement is presented in quotes in The Philosophy of Religion and Advaita Vedanta (2008) by Arvind Sharma, p. 216
2 months 6 days ago

The mediaeval university looked backwards: it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge... The modern university looks forward: it is a factory of new knowledge.

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Letter to E. Ray Lankester (11 April 1892) Huxley Papers, Imperial College: 30.448
2 weeks 5 days ago

Trade has ever been the extinguisher of war, the eradicator of prejudice, the diffuser of knowledge.

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Ch. 6
4 months 4 weeks ago

In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king.

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Adagia (first published 1500, with numerous expanded editions through 1536), III, IV, 96
3 months 3 weeks ago

The debates of that great assembly are frequently vague and perplexed, seeming to be dragged rather than to march, to the intended goal. Something of this sort must, I think, always happen in public democratic assemblies.

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Book One, Chapter XXI.
4 months 4 weeks 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
4 months 2 weeks ago

If belief consists in an emotional reaction of the entire man on an object, how can we believe at will? We cannot control our emotions.... But gradually our will can lead us to the same results by a very simple method: we need only in cold blood act as if the thing in question were real, and keep acting as if it were real, and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real. It will become so knit with habit and emotion that our interests in it will be those which characterize belief.

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Ch. 21
1 month 1 week ago

The way of learning is none other than finding the lost mind.

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6A:11, as translated by Wing-tsit Chan in A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (1963), p. 58
3 months 3 days ago

A young delicate tree, that is being clipped and cut by the gardener in order to give it an artificial form, will never reach the majestic height and the beauty as when allowed to grow in nature and freedom.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

He who is bent on doing evil can never want occasion.

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Maxim 459
1 month 2 weeks ago

Contemporary capitalist production is characterized by a series of passages that name different faces of the same shift: from the hegemony of industrial labor to that of immaterial labor, from Fordism to post-Fordism, and from the modern to the postmodern.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Human nature is evil, and goodness is caused by intentional activity.

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Quoted in: Fayek S. Hourani (2012) Daily Bread for Your Mind and Soul, p. 336
4 months 3 weeks ago

Wherever Law ends, Tyranny begins.

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Second Treatise of Government, Sec. 202
2 weeks 6 days ago

'Intuitive' is opposed to 'discursive' reason. In intuition, we obtain our conclusions by dwelling upon 'one' aspect of the fundamental Idea; in discursive reasoning, we combine several aspects of the Idea

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3 months 1 week ago

Facts, facts, facts,' cries the scientist if he wants to emphasize the necessity of a firm foundation for science. What is a fact? A fact is a thought that is true. But the scientist will surely not recognize something which depends on men's varying states of mind to be the firm foundation of science.

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Gottlob Frege (1956). "The thought: A logical inquiry" in: Peter Ludlow (1997) Readings in the Philosophy of Language. p. 27
3 months 6 days ago

It is difficult to fit the work of Nikolai Berdyaev into any neat category. The label that was used most frequently to characterize him was that of an "existential Christian philosopher" but ... his voice is equally relevant to psychology and psychoanalysis and it also constitutes a uniquely original commentary on the very nature of the person in our postmodern world especially in relation to spirituality.

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Renos K. Papadopoulos, in C.G. Jung and Nikolai Berdyaev: Individuation and the Person (2011) by Georg Nicolaus, Foreword, p. xiii
4 months 3 weeks ago

It is an uphill race, and a race against time, for if the American form of democracy overtakes us first, the majority will no more relax their despotism than a single despot would. But our only chance is to come forward as Liberals, carrying out the democratic idea, not as Conservatives, resisting it.

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Letter to Henry Fawcett (5 February 1860), quoted in Michael St. John Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill (1954), p. 418
4 weeks ago

However far the phenomena transcend the scope of classical physical explanation, the account of all evidence must be expressed in classical terms. The argument is that simply by the word "experiment" we refer to a situation where we can tell others what we have done and what we have learned and that, therefore, the account of the experimental arrangement and of the results of the observations must be expressed in unambiguous language with suitable application of the terminology of classical physics.

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Niels Bohr, "Discussions with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics," in Paul Arthur Schilpp, Albert Einstein: Philosopher Scientist (1949) pp. 199-241.
2 months 3 weeks ago

We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.

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"The Implosion of Meaning in the Media," p. 79
2 weeks 4 days ago

I don't know what the life of a rascal is like since I have never been one, but that of an honest man is abominable. How few men are there whose passage on this stupid planet has been marked by really good and useful acts! I prostrate myself before the one of which one can say: pertransivit bene faciendo; the one who had been able to instruct, console, and relieve his fellows; the one who made great sacrifices for charity; these heroes of silent charity who hide themselves and expect nothing in this world. But what is the ordinary man? And how many are there in a thousand who can ask themselves without terror: what have I done in this world? In what way have I advanced the common good and what will remain of me of good or evil?

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Letter to chevalier de Saint-Réal, 21 December 1816, Œuvre critique, xiv, p. 10
5 months 3 weeks ago

Knowledge can in part be set aside, and one can then go further in order to collect new; the natural scientist can set aside insects and flowers and then go further, but if the existing person sets aside the decision in existence, it is eo ipso lost, and he is changed.

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1 month 5 days ago

Our minds must have relaxation: rested, they will rise up better and keener. Just as we must not force fertile fields (for uninterrupted production will quickly exhaust them), so continual labor will break the power of our minds. They will recover their strength, however, after they have had a little freedom and relaxation.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

...the prisoner's dreams is the guard's spirituality.

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p. 400

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