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4 weeks ago

Go - take the mother's soul, and learn three truths: Learn What dwells in man, What is not given to man, and What men live by. When thou hast learnt these things, thou shalt return to heaven.

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Ch. IV
1 month 2 weeks ago

Like monarchy, monotheism had a martial origin. "It is only on the march and it time of war," says Robertson Smith in The Prophets of Israel, "that a nomad people feels any urgent need of a central authority, and so it came about that in the first beginnings of national organization, centering in the sanctuary of the ark, Israel was thought of mainly as a host of Jehovah. the very name of Israel is martial, and means 'God (El) fighteth,' and Jehovah in the Old Testament is Iahwé Cebāôth - the Jehovah of the armies of Israel. It was on the battlefield that Jehovah's presence was most clearly realized; but in primitive nations the leader in time of war is also the natural judge in time of peace."

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3 months 6 days ago

Since the law is good, the will, which is hostile to it, cannot be good.

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Thesis 87

There is only one cure for the evils which newly acquired freedom produces, and that cure is freedom.

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p. 41
1 month 2 weeks ago

And if it is grievous to be doomed one day to cease to be, perhaps it would be more grievous still to go on being always oneself, and no more than oneself, without being able to be at the same time other, without being able to be at the same time everything else, without being able to be all.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's that "a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." At the same time, when Bacon penned that sage epigram... he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them.

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Ch. I
1 month 2 weeks ago

In this initial illimitableness of possibilities that characterizes one who has no nature there stands out only one fixed, pre-established, and given line by which he may chart his course, only one limit: the past.

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"Man has no nature"
3 weeks ago

All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.

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As quoted in "Dailer's Choice" by Harriet Van Horne, in New York Magazine Vol. 10, No. 13 (28 March 1977), p. 80
2 months 3 weeks ago

What cannot be imagined cannot even be talked about.

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Journal entry (12 October 1916), p. 84e
1 month 3 weeks ago

To the mind of the ancients, who knew something of such matters, liberty and prosperity seemed hardly compatible, yet modern liberalism wants them together.

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"The Irony of Liberalism"
1 month 3 weeks ago

Long before physics or psychology were born, pain disintegrated matter, and affliction the soul.

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1 month 1 week ago

The fierce willingness to repudiate domination in a holistic manner is the starting point for progressive cultural revolution.

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Women, Art, and Society: Fourth Edition (2007) by Whitney Chadwick ISBN 0-500-20393-8
3 months 2 days ago

The annual produce of the land and labour of any nation can be increased in its value by no other means, but by increasing either the number of its productive labourers, or the productive powers of those labourers who had before been employed.

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Chapter III, p. 377.
1 month 1 week ago

The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.

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ch. 1.
3 months 3 weeks ago

With rebellion, awareness is born.

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2 months 1 week ago

All things are full of gods.

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As quoted in Aristotle, De Anima, 411a
3 months 6 days ago

A prince who is not wise himself will never take good advice.

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The Prince (1513), Ch. 23; translated by W. K. Marriot
2 months 3 days ago

Only a very bad theologian would confuse the certainty that follows revelation with the truths that are revealed. They are entirely different things.

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Apology for the Abbé de Prades
3 months 6 days ago

I am further of opinion that it would be better for us to have [no laws] at all than to have them in so prodigious numbers as we have.

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Book III, Ch. 13. Of Experience
2 months 3 weeks ago

I have known only one person in my life who claimed to have seen a ghost. It was a woman; and the interesting thing is that she disbelieved in the immortality of the soul before seeing the ghost and still disbelieves after having seen it. She thinks it was a hallucination. In other words, seeing is not believing. This is the first thing to get clear in talking about miracles.

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"Miracles" (1942), p. 25
1 month 1 week ago

In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

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Simon, H. A. (1971) "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World" in: Martin Greenberger, Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, Baltimore. MD: The Johns Hopkins Press. pp. 40-41.
3 months 3 weeks ago

To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them.

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2 months 4 weeks ago

Capital is dead labor, that vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.

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Vol. I, Ch. 10, Section 1, p. 257.
3 months ago

A company of solemn tyrants is impervious to all seductions.

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"Tyranny", 1764
1 month 2 weeks ago

At present, when the prevailing forms of society have become hindrances to the free expression of human powers, it is precisely the abstract branches of science, mathematics and theoretical physics, which ... offer a less distorted form of knowledge than other branches of science which are interwoven with the pattern of daily life, and the practicality of which seemingly testifies to their realistic character.

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p. 133.
3 months 3 weeks ago

Existence is illusory and it is eternal.

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7 months 4 days ago

They are trying as directly as possible to sell you experiences, i.e. what you are able to do with the car, not the car as a product itself. An extreme example of this is this existing economic marketing concept, which basically evaluates the value of you as a potential consumer of your own life. Like how much are you worth, in the sense of all you will spend to buy back your own life as a certain quality life. You will spend so much in doctors, so much in beauty, so much in transcendental meditation, so much for music, and so on. What you are buying is a certain image and practice of your life. So what is your market potential, as a buyer of your own life in this sense?

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3 months 2 days ago

The Union was a measure from which infinite Good has been derived to this country.

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Letter to William Strahan (4 April 1760), quoted in Adam Smith, The Correspondence of Adam Smith, eds. E. C. Mossner and I. S. Ross (1987), p. 68
3 weeks 5 days ago

Bless advertising art for its pictorial vitality and verbal creativity.

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(p. 18)
4 weeks ago

When a person inflates his own importance, he does not see his own sins; and his sins get bigger right along with him.

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p. 108
7 months 4 days ago

Tibetan prayer wheels: you write a prayer on a paper, put the rolled paper on a wheel, and turn it automatically, without thinking. In this way, the wheel itself is praying for me, instead of me - or more precisely, I myself am praying through the medium of the wheel. The beauty of it all is that in my psychological inferiority I can think about whatever I want, I can yield to the most dirty and obscene fantasies, and it does not matter because - to use a good old Stalinist expression - 'whatever I am thinking, objectively I am praying.'

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1 week 4 days ago

These immense cities lie basking on the beaches of the continent like whales that have taken to the land again. What do these great, sleek, well-fed creatures live on so sumptuously?

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12. The Elusive Continent (on the six state capitals of Australia)
1 month 3 weeks ago

To suffer is the great modality of taking the world seriously.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

It's easier for a Russian to become an atheist than for anyone else in the world.

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Part 4, Chapter 7
1 month 3 weeks ago

There never comes a point where a theory can be said to be true. The most that one can claim for any theory is that it has shared the successes of all its rivals and that it has passed at least one test which they have failed.

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Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (1982) p. 133.
1 month 2 weeks ago

I feel that I have within me a medieval soul, and I believe that the soul of my country is medieval, that it has perforce passed through the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Revolution - learning from them, yes, but without allowing them to touch the soul, preserving the spiritual inheritance which has come down from what are called the Dark Ages. And Quixotism is simply the most desperate phase of the struggle between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which was the offering of the Middle Ages.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

The tendency to regard continuity, in the sense in which I shall define it, as an idea of prime importance in philosophy conveniently may be be termed synechism. The present paper is intended chiefly to show what synechism is, and what it leads to.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Criminals together. We're in hell, my little friend, and there's never any mistake there. People are not damned for nothing. Act 1, sc. 5 Variant translation: Among murderers. We are in hell, my dear, there is never a mistake and people are not damned for nothing.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Bear in mind, that if through toil you accomplish a good deed, that toil will quickly pass from you, the good deed will not leave you so long as you live; but if through pleasure you do anything dishonourable, the pleasure will quickly pass away, that dishonourable act will remain with you for ever.

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In the speech which he delivered ('At Numantia to the Knights'); quoted by Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights, XVI, i, 4 John C. Rolfe, ed. The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius, Vol. 3, LCL 212 (1928), p. 131
2 months 3 weeks ago

Religion is, as it were, the calm bottom of the sea at its deepest point, which remains calm however high the waves on the surface may be.

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p. 53e
3 months 1 day ago

A young man before he leaves the shelter of his father's house, and the guard of a tutor, should be fortify'd with resolution, and made acquainted with men, to secure his virtues, lest he should be led into some ruinous course, or fatal precipice, before he is sufficiently acquainted with the dangers of conversation, and his steadiness enough not to yield to every temptation.

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Sec. 70
3 months 2 days ago

The great end of all human industry, is the attainment of happiness. For this were arts invented, sciences cultivated, laws ordained, and societies modelled, by the most profound wisdom of patriots and legislators.

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Part I, Essay 16: The Stoic
3 months 3 weeks ago

It seemed to him [Euphemius] it would be a brilliant notion to call in an outside force to fight on his behalf. This same brilliant notion has occurred to participants in civil wars uncounted times in history and it has ended in catastrophe just about every time, since those called in invariably take over for themselves. Of all history's lessons, this seems to be the plainest, and the most frequently ignored.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

And now I ask, whether, with this map of misgovernment before me, I can suppose myself bound by my vote to continue, upon any principles of pretended public faith, the management of these countries in those hands? If I kept such a faith (which in reality is no better than a fides latronum) with what is called the Company, I must break the faith, the covenant, the solemn, original, indispensable oath, in which I am bound, by the eternal frame and constitution of things, to the whole human race.

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Speech in the House of Commons on India (1 December 1783), quoted in The Parliamentary Register: Or, History of the Proceedings and Debates of the House of Commons, Volume XII (1782), p. 247
1 month 3 weeks ago

I have taken pains to make my distinction of icons, indices, and tokens clear, in order to enunciate this proposition: in a perfect system of logical notation signs of these several kinds must all be employed. Without tokens there would be no generality in the statements, for they are the only general signs; and generality is essential to reasoning. ... But tokens alone do not state what is the subject of discourse ; and this can, in fact, not be described in general terms ; it can only be indicated. The actual world cannot be distinguished from a world of imagination by any description. Hence the need of pronoun and indices, and the more complicated the subject the greater the need of them.

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3 months 2 days ago

We must therefore glean up our experiments in this science from a cautious observation of human life, and take them as they appear in the common course of the world, by men's behaviour in company, in affairs, and in their pleasures. Where experiments of this kind are judiciously collected and compared, we may hope to establish on them a science, which will not be inferior in certainty, and will be much superior in utility to any other of human comprehension.

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Introduction
1 month 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

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