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5 months 2 weeks ago

God looks at the clean hands, not the full ones.

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Maxim 715
5 months 2 weeks ago

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep. 

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John Bercow, 2016.To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account (1976), p. 127 Compare: It's a point so blindingly obvious that only an extraordinarily clever and sophisticated person could fail to grasp it.
7 months 3 weeks ago

A poem is one undivided unimpeded expression fallen ripe into literature, and it is undividedly and unimpededly received by those for whom it was matured.

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4 months 1 week ago

Out-of-date theories are not in principle unscientific because they have been discarded. That choice, however, makes it difficult to see scientific development as a process of accretion.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

The poverty of the incapable, the distresses that come upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so many "in shallows and in miseries," are the decrees of a large, far-seeing benevolence.

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Pt. III, Ch. 25 : Poor-Laws
4 months 1 week ago

When we leave you and assemble together by ourselves, we talk freely about his sayings and doings, treating them with the respect which they deserve: in your presence deep silence is observed about him, and thus you lose that greatest of pleasures, the hearing the praises of your son, which I doubt not you would be willing to hand down to all future ages, had you the means of so doing, even at the cost of your own life.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Now, to-day, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last for ever. We must take it or leave it.

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Book II, Chapter 5, "The Practical Conclusion"
8 months 3 weeks ago

The similarity between Christ and Socrates consists essentially in their dissimilarity. Just as philosophy begins with doubt, so also a life that may be called human begins with irony.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how the music should be played.

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p. 96
6 months 2 weeks ago

But if one Subject giveth Counsell to another, to do anything contrary to the Lawes, whether that Counsell proceed from evil intention, or from ignorance onely, it is punishable by the Common-wealth; because ignorance of the Law, is no good excuse, where every man is bound to take notice of the Lawes to which he is subject.

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The Second Part, Chapter 25, p. 132
5 months 3 weeks ago

You need to know enough of the natural sciences so that you are not a stranger in the world.

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7 months 1 week ago

Mind is infinite and self-ruled, and is mixed with nothing, but is alone itself by itself.

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Frag. B 12, quoted in John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy, (1920), Chapter 6.
7 months 3 weeks ago

The conviction that it is important to believe this or that, even if a free inquiry would not support the belief, is one which is common to almost all religions and which inspires all systems of state education. The consequence is that the minds of the young are stunted and are filled with fanatical hostility both to those who have other fanaticisms, and, even more virulently, to those who object to all fanaticisms.

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preface xxiii
3 months 2 weeks ago

It may possibly be true that, to continue to live on and to act in a world like ours, it is vitally necessary to seek a way out of this uncertainty of multiple alternatives; and accordingly people may be led to embrace some immediate goal as if it were absolute, by which they hope to make their problems appear concrete and real. But it is not primarily the man of action who seeks the absolute and immutable, but rather it is he who wishes to induce others to hold on to the status quo because he feels comfortable and smug under conditions as they are.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

There are some remedies worse than the disease.

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Maxim 301
4 months 2 weeks ago

The concept of original sin gives us a penetrating insight into human destiny.

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On the Dilemmas of the Christian Legacy
7 months 3 weeks ago

Most men would feel insulted, if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.

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p. 485
5 months 2 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 4 days ago

I struggle with this too, as it is necessary for me to call the Board of Word Creation and make an appeal to add to the word "Universality" so it can fit the role I've assigned to it....creating new words won't work when current words fill specific spaces.....

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5 months 2 weeks ago

How do we account for the current paranormal vogue in the popular media? Perhaps it has something to do with the millennium - in which case it's depressing to realise that the millennium is still three years away.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.

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§ 133
6 months 1 week ago

I have always observed that to succeed in the world one should appear like a fool but be wise.

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6 months 4 days ago

Optimism is an alienated form of faith, pessimism an alienated form of despair. If one truly responds to man and his future, ie, concernedly and "responsibly." one can respond only by faith or by despair. Rational faith as well as rational despair are based on the most thorough, critical knowledge of all the factors that are relevant for the survival of man.

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p. 483
5 months 3 weeks ago

This realistic image, however, does not catch at all what really is, but what should not be - death and misery - what should not exist, from our moral and humanistic point of view. And at the same time making an aesthetic and commercial, perfectly immoral use and abuse of this misery. Images that actually testify, behind their pretended "objectivity", of a deep denial of the real, and of an equal denial of the image - assigned to present what does not even want to be represented, assigned to the rape of the real by burglary.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.

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6 months 4 days ago

I believe that if an individual is not on the path to transcending his society and seeing in what way it furthers or impedes the development of human potential, he cannot enter into intimate contact with his humanity. If the tabus, restrictions, distorted values appear "natural" to him, this is a clear indication that he cannot have a real knowledge of human nature. I believe that society, while having a function both stimulating and inhibiting at the same time, has always been in conflict with humanity. Only when the purpose of society is identified with that of humanity will society cease to paralyze man and encourage his dominance.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Knowledge is not so precise a concept as is commonly thought. Instead of saying "I know this," we ought to say "I more or less know something more or less like this." It is true that this proviso is hardly necessary as regards the multiplication table, but knowledge in practical affairs has not the certainty or the precision of arithmetic. Suppose I say "democracy is a good thing": I must admit, first, that I am less sure of this than I am that two and two are four, and secondly, that "democracy" is a somewhat vague term which I cannot define precisely. We ought to say, therefore: "I am fairly certain that it is a good thing if a government has something of the characteristics that are common to the British and American Constitutions," or something of this sort. And one of the aims of education ought to be to make such a statement more effective from a platform than the usual type of political slogan.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

The fact is that I've never called myself a genius, and I think the term has been cheapened by overuse into meaninglessness. If other people want to call me that, that's their problem.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

The measure of action is the sentiment from which it proceeds. The greatest action may easily be one of the most private circumstance.

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Goethe; or, The Writer
3 months 3 weeks ago

I shall within a few days divest myself of the anxieties and the labors with which I have been oppressed, and retire with inexpressible delight to my family, my friends, my farms, and books. There I may indulge at length in that tranquillity and those pursuits from which I have been divorced by the character of the times in which I have lived, and which have forced me into the line of political life under a sense of duty and against a great and constant aversion to it.

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Letter to David Baillie Warden
7 months 3 weeks ago

The question of the principle of the form of the intelligible world turns, therefore, upon making apparent in what manner it is possible for several substances to be in mutual commerce, and for this reason to pertain to the same whole, which is called world. We do not here consider the world, let it be understood, as to matter, that is, as to the nature of the substances of which it consists, whether they be material or immaterial, but as to form, that is to say, how among several things taken separately a connection, and among them all, totality can have place.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

We no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems: Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man?

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Ch. 1. Why Are People?
6 months 2 weeks ago

Not wise does it seem to attempt comprehending and understanding a Human World without full perfected Humanity. No talent must sleep; and if all are not alike active, all must be alert, and not oppressed and enervated. As we see a future Painter in the boy who fills every wall with sketches and variedly adds colour to figure; so we see a future Philosopher in him who restlessly traces and questions all natural things, pays heed to all, brings together whatever is remarkable, and rejoices when he has become master and possessor of a new phenomenon, of a new power and piece of knowledge.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

The foremost, or indeed the sole condition which is required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community, is to love equality, or to get men to believe you love it. Thus the science of despotism, which was once so complex, is simplified, and reduced as it were to a single principle.

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Book Four, Chapter IV.
3 months 3 weeks ago

Religion is a subject on which I have ever been most scrupulously reserved. I have considered it as a matter between every man and his Maker in which no other, and far less the public, had a right to intermeddle.

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Letter to Richard Rush
5 months 5 days ago

One can never pay in gratitude; one can only pay "in kind" somewhere else in life.

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North to the Orient (1935) Ch. 19
6 months 2 weeks ago

Morality must be the heart of our existence, if it is to be what it wants to be for us. ... The highest form of philosophy is ethics. Thus all philosophy begins with "I am." The highest statement of cognition must be an expression of that fact which is the means and ground for all cognition, namely, the goal of the I.

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Fichte Studies § 556
8 months 5 days ago

The best books are those, which those who read them believe they themselves could have written.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

The most thought provoking thing in our thought provoking time is that we are still not thinking.

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What is Called Thinking? (1951-1952), as translated by Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray
6 months 2 weeks ago

Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.

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As quoted without citation in Discovering Evolutionary Ecology: Bringing Together Ecology And Evolution (2006) by Peter J. Mayhew, p. 24
7 months 3 weeks ago

None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear.

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Attributed to Russell in M. Kumar Dictionary of Quotations, p. 76, but actually said by Marshal Lannes, according to The London Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences (1824), p. 664
7 months 3 weeks ago

In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin. It is a blessing that we do not know what is really going to happen. Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners, condemned, not to death, but to life, and as yet all unconscious of what their sentence means.

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"On the Sufferings of the World"
7 months 3 weeks ago

The doctrine that there is as much science in a subject as... mathematics in it, or as much... measurement or 'precision' in it, rests upon... misunderstanding.

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1 month 1 week ago

Buddhists know this....

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2 months 3 weeks ago

If you're looking for good men.....best I can do is, not terrible.

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4 months 1 week ago

Man with the great M is only an ideal, the species only something thought of.

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Dover 2005, p. 182
6 months 4 weeks ago

Since I have spread my wings to purpose high, The more beneath my feet the clouds I see, The more I give the winds my pinions free, Spurning the earth and soaring to the sky.

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As quoted in "Giordano Bruno" by Thomas Davidson, in The Index Vol. VI. No. 36 (4 March 1886), p. 429

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