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2 months 3 weeks ago

That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim.

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D 58 The proof that man is the noblest of all creatures is that no other creature has ever denied it.
3 months 2 weeks ago

I posit myself as rational, that is, as free. In doing so I have the representation of freedom. In the same undivided act I posit other free beings. Hence, I describe through my power of imagination a sphere of freedom, which these many separate beings divide amongst themselves. I do not ascribe to myself all the freedom which I have posited, because I must also posit other free beings, and must ascribe part of it to them. Thus, in appropriating freedom to myself, I at the same time restrict myself, by leaving freedom to others.

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P. 7-8
3 weeks 1 day ago

Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.

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As quoted in Values of the Wise : Humanity's Highest Aspirations (2004) by Jason Merchey, p. 63
4 months 2 weeks ago

I am at heart more of a United-States-man than an Englishman.

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Letter to Andrew Jackson (14 June 1830), quoted in Correspondence of Andrew Jackson, Volume 4, ed. David Maydole Matteson (1929), p. 146
4 months 2 weeks ago

The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.

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1 month 1 week ago

There was very little that prevented the vandalism of 1793 from suddenly producing a second revolution as marvelous as the first was horrible. The whole human race was approaching its release; the civilized, barbarian, and savage order would have disappeared forever if the Convention, which trampled down all prejudices, had not bowed down before the only one that had to be destroyed, the institution of marriage.

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Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World, J. Beecher (1986), p. 304-5
4 months 1 week ago

It was mathematics, the non-empirical science par excellence, wherein the mind appears to play only with itself, that turned out to be the science of sciences, delivering the key to those laws of nature and the universe that are concealed by appearances.

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p. 7
4 months 2 weeks ago

If human nature were unchangeable, as ignorant people still suppose it to be, the situation would indeed be hopeless.

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Ch. 17: Some Prospects: Cheerful and Otherwise
5 months 1 week ago

The orators and the despots have the least power in their cities since they do nothing that they wish to do, practically speaking, though they do whatever they think to be best.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one... It's this in-between that I'm calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one - which is really the realm of the artist.

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Every Time We Say Goodbye in Sight and Sound [London]
2 months 1 week ago

In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner.

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(p. 4)
2 months 3 weeks 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 weeks 1 day ago

Where are we going? Do not ask! Ascend, descend. There is no beginning and no end. Only this present moment exists, full of bitterness, full of sweetness, and I rejoice in it all.

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4 months 1 week ago

Between the fine point of the brush and the steely gaze, the scene is about to yield up its volume.

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Las Meninas
3 months 1 week ago

Nothing can be of more importance than to separate prejudice and mistake on the one hand from reason and demonstration on the other.

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Book III, Ch.1
3 months 1 week ago

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy. Variant translation: We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth.

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Conclusion, p. 628
1 week 4 days ago

The human mind loves the bondage of words and is apt, when freed from one form of their tyranny, to set up another more oppressive than the last. The highest function of philosophy is to enforce the attitude of meditation and therewithal restrain the excessive volubility of the tongue. To us it seems that the reflective thinker wins his greatest victories when by what he says he compels us to recognise the relative insignificance of anything he can say. His task is not to capture Reality, but to free it from captivity.

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Objectification is above all exteriorization, the alienation of spirit from itself.

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p. 63
3 months 1 week ago

Fact be vertuous, or vicious, as Fortune pleaseth.

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The Second Part, Chapter 27, p. 153
3 months 2 weeks ago

Show me what thou truly lovest, what thou seekest and strivest for with thy whole heart when thou hopest to attain to true en joyment of thyself-and thou hast thereby shown me thy Life. What thou lovest, in that thou livest. This very Love is thy Life, the root, the seat, the central point of thy being. All other emotions within thee have life only in so far as they are governed by this one central emotion.

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P. 3
2 months 3 weeks ago

Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason. From this we can see how useful it is to employ reason in seeking out the laws of taste.

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E 69
2 months 1 week ago

Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.

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American scholar, Volume 35, 1965, p. 200

Berdyaev has been categorized as a Christian existentialist and a mystical philosopher. He never avoided the label of "mystic" since he felt it was the mystics of the world who came closest to understanding the role of spirit. Many of the philosophers he quoted were mystics - Meister Eckhart, Angelus Silesius and especially Jacob Boehme. The influence of Dostoevsky was central to his thought. Nevertheless, Berdyaev is not a naively irrational thinker; he brings an enormous fund of philosophical knowledge combined with the profundity of his own thought to support his view of existence. There are no dogmas in his writings to offend one's intellectual conscience.

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Richard Schain, in In Love with Eternity : Philosophical Essays and Fragments (2005), Ch. 7 : Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev - A Champion of the Spirit, p. 47
3 months ago

The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition: content, ideological schema, the blurring of contradictions-these are repeated, but the superficial forms are varied: always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.

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Modern, in The Pleasure of the Text
4 months 2 weeks ago

I cannot believe - and I say this with all the emphasis of which I am capable - that there can ever be any good excuse for refusing to face the evidence in favour of something unwelcome. It is not by delusion, however exalted, that mankind can prosper, but only by unswerving courage in the pursuit of truth.

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"The Pursuit of Truth" in The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, 1993
2 months 2 weeks ago

Generally speaking, espionage offers each spy an opportunity to go crazy in a way he finds irresistible.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Yet sometimes vegetables and animals are, by certain epithets or circumstances, extended to other significations; as a Tree, when called the tree of life or of knowledge; and a Beast, when called the old serpent, or worshiped. When a Beast or Man is put for a kingdom, his parts and qualities are put for the analogous parts and qualities of the kingdom; as the head of a Beast, for the great men who precede and govern; the tail for the inferior people, who follow and are governed; the heads, if more than one, for the number of capital parts, or dynasties, or dominions in the kingdom, whether collateral or successive, with respect to the civil government; the horns on any head, for the number of kingdoms in that head, with respect to military power...

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Vol. I, Ch. 2: Of the Prophetic Language
4 months 3 weeks ago

Those who read and rightly understand my teaching will not start an insurrection; they have not learned that from me.

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p. 65
4 weeks 1 day ago

"He is a slave." His soul, however, may be that of a freeman. "He is a slave." But shall that stand in his way? Show me a man who is not a slave; one is a slave to lust, another to greed, another to ambition, and all men are slaves to fear.

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3 months 5 days ago

Hardness and softness, roughness and smoothness, moonlight and sunlight present themselves in our recollection not preeminently as sensory contents but as certain kinds of symbioses, certain ways outside has of invading us and certain ways we have of meets this invasion...

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p. 317
4 months 1 week ago

And then one babbles - 'if only I could bear it, or the worst of it, or any of it, instead of her.' But one can't tell how serious that bid is, for nothing is staked on it. If it suddenly became a real possibility, then, for the first time, we should discover how seriously we had meant it. But is it ever allowed? It was allowed to One, we are told, and I find I can now believe again, that He has done vicariously whatever can be done. He replies to our babble, 'you cannot and dare not. I could and dared.'

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2 weeks 1 day ago

"Fire is the first and final mask of my God. We dance and weep between two enormous pyres." Our thoughts and our bodies flash and glitter with reflected light. Between the two pyres I stand serenely, my brain unshaken amid the vertigo, and I say: "Time is most short and space most narrow between these two pyres, the rhythm of this life is most sluggish, and I have no time, nor a place to dance in. I cannot wait." Then all at once the rhythm of the earth becomes a vertigo, time disappears, the moment whirls, becomes eternity, and every point in space - insect or star or idea - turns into dance.

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3 weeks 1 day ago

A mellow understanding of life and of human nature is, and always has been, the Chinese ideal of character, and from that understanding other qualities are derived, such as pacifism, contentment, calm and strength of endurance which distinguish the Chinese character.

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p. 43
4 months 2 weeks ago

I have been quoted as saying captious things about travel; but I mean to do justice. I think, there is a restlessness in our people, which argues want of character. All educated Americans, first or last, go to Europe; - perhaps, because it is their mental home, as the invalid habits of this country might suggest. An eminent teacher of girls said, "the idea of a girl's education, is, whatever qualifies them for going to Europe." Can we never extract this tape-worm of Europe from the brain of our countrymen?

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Culture
4 months 1 week ago

The task of universal pragmatics is to identify and reconstruct universal conditions of possible mutual understanding.

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p. 21
3 months 1 week ago

Hegel's philosophy was an integral part of the culture which authoritarianism had to overcome. It is therefore no accident that the National Socialist assault on Hegel begins with the repudiation of his political theory.

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P. 411
3 months 2 weeks ago

Yes - you, you alone must pay for everything because you turned up like this, because I'm a scoundrel, because I'm the nastiest, most ridiculous, pettiest, stupidest, and most envious worm of all those living on earth who're no better than me in any way, but who, the devil knows why, never get embarrassed, while all my life I have to endure insults from every louse - that's my fate. What do I care that you do not understand any of this?

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Part 2, Chapter 9
4 months 1 week ago

No one deserves his greater natural capacity nor merits a more favorable starting place in society.

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Chapter II, Section 17, pg. 102
1 month 1 week ago

The ones who are preoccupied by logic are above all; to read their works, one is tempted to believe they have advanced only step by step, after the manner of a Vauban who pushes on his trenches against the place besieged, leaving nothing to chance. The others are guided by intuition and, at the first stroke, make quick but sometimes precarious conquests, like bold cavalrymen of the advance guard.

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quoted in Jacques Hadamard, An essay on the psychology of invention in the mathematical field (1954), pp. 106.
4 months 2 weeks ago

A good symbol is the best argument and is a missionary to persuade thousands.

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Poetry and Imagination
4 months 2 weeks ago

Take the question whether other people exist. ...It is plain that it makes for happiness to believe that they exist - for even the greatest misanthropist would not wish to be deprived of the objects of his hate. Hence the belief that other people exist is, pragmatically, a true belief. But if I am troubled by solipsism, the discovery that a belief in the existence of others is 'true' in the pragmatist's sense is not enough to allay my sense of loneliness: the perception that I should profit by rejecting solipsism is not alone sufficient to make me reject it. For what I desire is not that the belief in solipsism should be false in the pragmatic sense, but that other people should in fact exist. And with the pragmatist's meaning of truth, these two do not necessarily go together. The belief in solipsism might be false even if I were the only person or thing in the universe.

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"William James's Conception of Truth" , published in Philosophical Essays, London, 1910
3 months 4 days ago

The more the concept of reason becomes emasculated, the more easily it lends itself to ideological manipulation and to propagation of even the most blatant lies. ... Subjective reason conforms to anything.

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pp. 24-25.
2 months 3 weeks ago

I have tried to show how religion, the backbone of civilisation, hardens into a Church that is unacceptable to Outsiders, and the Outsiders - the men who strive to become visionaries - become the Rebels. In our case, the scientific progress that has brought us closer than ever before to conquering the problems of civilisation, has also robbed us of spiritual drive; and the Outsider is doubly a rebel: a rebel against the Established Church , a rebel against the unestablished church of materialism. Yet for all this, he is the real spiritual heir of the prophets, of Jesus and St. Peter, of St. Augustine and Peter Waldo. The purest religion of any age lies in the hands of its spiritual rebels. The twentieth century is no exception.

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p. 320
2 months 1 week ago

So long as we love we serve; so long as we are loved by others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.

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"Lay Morals" Ch. 4, in Lay Morals and Other Essays (1911).
3 months 1 week ago

Big industry, competition and generally the individualistic organization of production have become a fetter which it must and will shatter.

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3 months 4 days ago

No criticism can be brought against a branch of technical science from outside; no thought fitted out with the knowledge of a period and setting its course by definite historical aims could have anything to say to the specialist. Such thought and the critical, dialectical element it communicates to the process of cognition, thereby maintaining conscious connection between that process and historical life, do not exist for empiricism; nor do the associated categories, such as the distinction between essence and appearance, identity in change, and rationality of ends, indeed, the concept of man, of personality, even of society and class taken in the sense that presupposes specific viewpoints and directions of interest.

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p. 145.
1 month 1 week ago

Democracy is a meaningless word unless it signifies that differences of opinion have been expressed, represented, and even satisfied in the decision.

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Ch. IV: "The Line of Least Resistance", pp. 47-48
4 months 3 weeks ago

The things that we can see with our physical eyes are mere shadows of reality. If they appear ugly and ill formed, then what must be the ugliness of the soul in sin, deprived of all light? The soul, like the body, can undergo transformation in appearance. In sin it appears as completely ugly to the beholder. In virtue it shines resplendently before God.

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