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2 months 4 days ago

We seek not what God could have done but what He has done.... God could have caused birds to fly with bones of solid gold, with veins full of quicksilver, with flesh heavier than lead and very small and heavy wings, so as to better show His power ... but He wanted to make their bones, flesh and feathers very light ... to teach us that He likes simplicity and ease.

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Notes in a copy of Jean-Baptiste Morin's "Famous and ancient problems of the earth's motion or rest, yet to be solved" (published 1631).
4 months ago

The Thou encounters me by grace - it cannot be found by seeking. But that I speak the basic word to it is a deed of my whole being, is my essential deed.

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5 months 1 week ago

The pursuit of philosophy is founded on the belief that knowledge is good, even if what is known is painful. A man imbued with the philosophic spirit, whether a professional philosopher or not, will wish his beliefs to be as true as he can make them, and will, in equal measure, love to know and hate to be in error. This principle has a wider scope than may be apparent at first sight.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

These actions are not essentially difficult; it is we ourselves that are soft and flabby.

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5 months 1 week 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
5 months 1 week ago

A criminal who, having renounced reason ... hath, by the unjust violence and slaughter he hath committed upon one, declared war against all mankind, and therefore may be destroyed as a lion or tyger, one of those wild savage beasts with whom men can have no society nor security. And upon this is grounded the great law of Nature, "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed."

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Second Treatise of Civil Government, Ch. II, sec. 11
5 months 1 week ago

Since sounds have no natural connection with our ideas ... the doubtfulness and uncertainty of their signification ... has its cause more in the ideas they stand for than in any incapacity there is in one sound more than another to signify any idea.

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Book III, Ch. 9, sec. 4
5 months 1 week ago

Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.

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Ch. 1: Introductory
5 months 1 week ago

It is the privilege of true genius, and certainly of the genius that opens a new road, to make without punishment great mistakes.

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"Siècle de Louis XIV," ch. 32 (1751), qtd. in Arthur Schopenhauer, "The World as Will and Representation," Criticism of the Kantian philosophy, 1818
5 months 1 week ago

Intellect is invisible to the man who has none.

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Our Relation to Others, § 23
3 months 2 weeks ago

To err is human also in so far as animals seldom or never err, or at least only the cleverest of them do so.

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G 30
6 months 6 days ago

There is not love of life without despair about life.

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3 months 1 week ago

The end of history is, alas, also the end of the dustbins of history. There are no longer any dustbins for disposing of old ideologies, old regimes, old values. Where are we going to throw Marxism, which actually invented the dustbins of history? (Yet there is some justice here since the very people who invented them have fallen in.) Conclusion: if there are no more dustbins of history, this is because History itself has become a dustbin. It has become its own dustbin, just as the planet itself is becoming its own dustbin.

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The Illusion of the End (1992) (L'Illision de la Fin) Tr. Chris Turner, 1994, Stanford University Press, ISBN 0804725012, p. 26, "The Event Strike"
3 months 3 weeks ago

There is no such thing as data-driven thinking.

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5 months 1 week ago

Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, and no force of character can make any stand against good wit.

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The Comic
5 months 3 weeks ago

Beauty is indeed a good gift of God; but that the good may not think it a great good, God dispenses it even to the wicked.

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XV, 22
1 month 2 weeks ago

A vague uncritical idealism always lends itself to ridicule and too much of it might be a danger to mankind, leading it round in a futile wild-goose chase for imaginary ideals.

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Ch. I : The Awakening, p. 4
2 months 3 weeks ago

I have endeavoured to show that no absolute structural line of demarcation, wider than that between the animals which immediately succeed us in the scale, can be drawn between the animal world and ourselves; and I may add the expression of my belief that the attempt to draw a physical distinction is equally futile, and that even the highest faculties of feeling and of intellect begin to germinate in lower forms of life.

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Ch.2, p. 129
3 months 3 weeks ago

The state of conformity is an imitation of grace. By a strange mystery - which is connected with the power of the social element - a profession can confer on quite ordinary men in their exercise of it, virtues which, if they were extended to all circumstances of life, would make of them heroes or saints. But the power of the social element makes these virtues natural.

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Accordingly they need a compensation. p. 124
1 month 3 weeks ago

No man can suffer both severely and for a long time; Nature, who loves us most tenderly, has so constituted us as to make pain either endurable or short.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

There are two sides to every question.

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As quoted in Lives of Eminent Philosophers, by Diogenes Laërtius, Book IX, Sec. 51
5 months 2 weeks ago

In England, success in the profession of the law leads to some very great objects of ambition; and yet how few men, born to easy fortunes, have ever in this country been eminent in that profession?

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Chapter I, Part III, p. 824.
4 months 6 days ago

The skeptic is the least mysterious man in the world, and yet, starting from a certain moment, he no longer belongs to this world.

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6 months 1 week ago

Knowledge is the food of the soul; and we must take care, my friend, that the Sophist does not deceive us when he praises what he sells, like the dealers wholesale or retail who sell the food of the body; for they praise indiscriminately all their goods, without knowing what are really beneficial or hurtful.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Direct action, having proven effective along economic lines, is equally potent in the environment of the individual. There a hundred forces encroach upon his being, and only persistent resistance to them will finally set him free. Direct action against the authority in the shop, direct action against the authority of the law, direct action against the invasive, meddlesome authority of our moral code, is the logical, consistent method of Anarchism. Will it not lead to a revolution? Indeed, it will. No real social change has ever come about without a revolution. People are either not familiar with their history, or they have not yet learned that revolution is but thought carried into action.

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1 month 1 week ago

The naturalists, you know, distribute the history of nature into three kingdoms or departments: zoology, botany, mineralogy. Ideology, or mind, however, occupies so much space in the field of science, that we might perhaps erect it into a fourth kingdom or department. But inasmuch as it makes a part of the animal construction only, it would be more proper to subdivide zoology into physical and moral.

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Thomas Jefferson, Letter (24 Mar 1824) to Mr. Woodward. Collected in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Correspondence (1854), 339.
5 months 1 week ago

The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.

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Volume I; Part 1; "Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook"; Section A, "Idealism and Materialism".
3 months 1 week ago

1. Find a subject you care about.2. Do not ramble, though.3. Keep it simple.4. Have the guts to cut.5. Sound like yourself.6. Say what you mean to say.7. Pity the readers.

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As quoted in Science Fictionisms (1995), compiled by William Rotsler
4 months 6 days ago

I'd rather offer my life as a sacrifice than be necessary to anything.

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5 months 1 week ago

A reproach can only hurt if it hits the mark. Whoever knows that he does not deserve a reproach can treat it with contempt.

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5 months 1 week ago

God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love.

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1 month 1 week ago

How can you reach the womb of the Abyss to make it fruitful? This cannot be expressed, cannot be narrowed into words, cannot be subjected to laws; every man is completely free and has his own special liberation. No form of instruction exists, no Savior exists to open up the road. No road exists to be opened.

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4 months 2 days ago

To those who hold abstractly to Hegel's political philosophy, Hobhouse replies that the very fact of class society, the patent influence of class interests on the state, renders it impossible to designate the state as expressive of the real will of individuals as a whole. 'Wherever a community is governed by one class or one race, the remaining class or race is permanently in the position of having to take what it can get.'

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P. 396
1 month 1 week ago

There is perhaps nothing more interesting than to listen to a superior man talk of what he does not know. He advances slowly, and scarcely puts his foot down without knowing if the ground is solid; he looks for plausible analogies; he tries to attach his ideas to higher and incontestable principles; he always has the tone of looking, never that of teaching; and it often happens that, even if he is mistaken, he leaves a great enough idea of his mental honesty.

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p. 43
5 months 1 week ago

All traditional logic habitually assumes that precise symbols are being employed. It is therefore not applicable to this terrestial life but only to an imagined celestial existence... logic takes us nearer to heaven than other studies.

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Vagueness', first published in The Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy, 1 June, 1923
4 months 1 week ago

Nor is there any embarrassment in the fact that we're ridiculous, isn't it true? For it's actually so, we are ridiculous, light-minded, with bad habits, we're bored, we don't know how to look, how to understand, we're all like that, all, you, and I, and they! Now, you're not offended when I tell you to your face that you're ridiculous? And if so, aren't you material? You know, in my opinion it's sometimes even good to be ridiculous, if not better: we can the sooner forgive each other, the sooner humble ourselves; we can't understand everything at once, we can't start right out with perfection! To achieve perfection, one must first begin by not understanding many things! And if we understand too quickly, we may not understand well. This I tell you, you, who have already been able to understand. .. and not understand ... so much. I'm not afraid for you now.

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Part 4, Chapter ?
3 months 1 week ago

Materialism ends up denying the existence of any irreducible subjective qualitative states of sentience or awareness.

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Consciousness and Language (2002) p. 47.
5 months 1 week ago

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

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Section 1, paragraph 19
5 months 2 weeks ago

At present they philosophers seem to be in a very lamentable condition, and such as the poets have given us but a faint notion of in their descriptions of the punishment of Sisyphus and Tantalus. For what can be imagin'd more tormenting, than to seek with eagerness, what for ever flies us; and seek for it in a place, where 'tis impossible it can ever exist?

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Part 4, Section 3
3 months 2 weeks ago

Computers were within my sphere of attention, but only computers used as number crunchers. In spite of the "giant brain" metaphor, there is little suggestion in this 1950 talk that the most important application of computers might lie in imitating intelligence symbolically, not numerically.

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p. 199.
3 months 1 week ago

Another theme of the Wake that helps in the understanding of the paradoxical shift from cliché to archetype is "pastimes are past times". The dominant technologies of one age become the games and pastimes of a later age. In the twentieth century the number of past times that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of doubleness and interplay since this kind of hendiadys-dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy.

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(p.99)
5 months 2 weeks ago

Let us not flutter too high, but remain by the manger and the swaddling clothes of Christ, in whom dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.

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50
1 month 1 week ago

The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.

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VI, 6
4 months 6 days ago

Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.

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5 months 1 week ago

If the Communists conquered the world, it would be very unpleasant for a while, but not forever. But if the human race is wiped out, that is the end.

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Television interview on March 24, 1958, as quoted in The United States in World Affairs (1959), p. 12
5 months 2 weeks ago

For a man to love again where he is loved, it is the charity of publicans contracted by mutual profit and good offices; but to love a man's enemies is one of the cunningest points of the law of Christ, and an imitation of the divine nature.

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Of The Exaltation of Charity
1 month 2 weeks ago

In the new order a Locke was free-with almost no danger of being interfered with-to think his sublime thoughts, to seek the first causes of all things, to understand the nature of things. He could talk with his friends and teach the young. And there was money enough. The academies and universities satisfied Socrates' demand to be fed in the prytaneum.

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Commerce and Culture, p. 289.

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