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1 week 2 days ago

That which I am now entering upon being the Consideration of the things themselves whereinto Spagyrists resolve mixt Bodies by the Fire, If I can shew that these are not of an Elementary Nature, it will be no great matter what names these or those Chymists have been pleased to give them. And I question not that to a Wise man, and consequently to Eleutherius, it will be lesse considerable to know, what Men Have thought of Things, then what they Should have thought.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

With what consistency, or decency they complain so loudly of attempts to enslave them, while they hold so many hundred thousands in slavery; and annually enslave many thousands more, without any pretence of authority, or claim upon them?

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1 week 3 days ago

If it is not right, do not do it, if it is not true, do not say it. For let thy efforts be -

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XII, 17
3 months 5 days ago

Being is continuous becoming.

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P. 136
3 weeks ago

On the whole, the enjoyment of leisure is something which decidedly costs less than the enjoyment of luxury. All it requires is an artistic temperament which is bent on seeking a perfectly useless afternoon spent in a perfectly useless manner.

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p. 153. Often quoted as: "If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live."
2 months 1 week ago

Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

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Chapter 1 "Explaining the Very Improbable" (p. 6)
3 months 5 days ago

Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword. Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and he shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then shall the scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind and within the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realized; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.

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Ch. 12: "Religion and Science", pp. 267-268
3 weeks 6 days ago

It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do little.

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Lecture XIX : On the Conduct of the Understanding, Part II
1 month 3 weeks ago

The way out of this violent cycle is to deepen democracy-to bring decisions that directly affect people's lives as close as possible to where people are and to where they can take responsibility.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

The life, the fortune, and the happiness of every one of us, and, more or less, of those who are connected with us, do depend upon our knowing something of the rules of a game infinitely more difficult and complicated than chess. It is a game which has been played for untold ages, every man and woman of us being one of the two players in a game of his or her own. The chessboard is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance. To the man who plays well, the highest stakes are paid, with that sort of overflowing generosity with which the strong shows delight in strength. And one who plays ill is checkmated - without haste, but without remorse.

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3 months 1 week ago

The way in which the vast mass of the poor are treated by modern society is truly scandalous. They are herded into great cities where they breathe a fouler air than in the countryside which they have left.

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Who profits by a sin has done the sin.

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3 months 5 days ago

Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age.

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p. 61
3 months 3 days ago

All names of God remain hallowed because they have been used not only to speak of God but also to speak to him.

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3 months 1 week ago

What I know wreaks havoc upon what I want.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

If you act externally with men in conformity with your rank, you should recognize, by a more secret but truer thought, that you have nothing naturally superior to them.

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1 month 4 days ago

"No man in this fashionable London of yours," friend Sauerteig would say, "speaks a plain word to me. Every man feels bound to be something more than plain; to be pungent withal, witty, ornamental. His poor fraction of sense has to be perked into some epigrammatic shape, that it may prick into me;-perhaps (this is the commonest) to be topsyturvied, left standing on its head, that I may remember it the better! Such grinning inanity is very sad to the soul of man. Human faces should not grin on one like masks; they should look on one like faces! I love honest laughter, as I do sunlight; but not dishonest: most kinds of dancing too; but the St.-Vitus kind not at all! A fashionable wit, ach Himmel, if you ask, Which, he or a Death's- head, will be the cheerier company for me? pray send not him!"

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4 months 2 weeks ago

The governors of the world believe, and have always believed, that virtue can only be taught by teaching falsehood, and that any man who knew the truth would be wicked. I disbelieve this, absolutely and entirely. I believe that love of truth is the basis of all real virtue, and that virtues based upon lies can only do harm.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

No man is liberated from fear who dare not see his place in the world as it is; no man can achieve the greatness of which he is capable until he has allowed himself to see his own littleness.

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Dreams and Facts, 1919
3 months 1 week ago

The ideal of Morality has no more dangerous rival than the ideal of highest Strength, of most powerful life; which also has been named (very falsely as it was there meant) the ideal of poetic greatness. It is the maximum of the savage; and has, in these times, gained, precisely among the greatest weaklings, very many proselytes. By this ideal, man becomes a Beast-Spirit, a Mixture; whose brutal wit has, for weaklings, a brutal power of attraction.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

I think all the great religions of the world - Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and Communism - both untrue and harmful. It is evident as a matter of logic that, since they disagree, not more than one of them can be true. With very few exception, the religions which a man accepts is that of the community in which he lives, which makes it obvious that the influence of environment is what has led him to accept the religion in question.

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Preface, 1957
3 months 2 weeks ago

Useful undertakings which require sustained attention and vigorous precision in order to succeed often end up by being abandoned, for, in America, as elsewhere, the people move forward by sudden impulses and short-lived efforts.

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Chapter V
4 months 2 weeks ago

I resolved from the beginning of my quest that I would not be misled by sentiment and desire into beliefs for which there was no good evidence.

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Fact and Fiction (1961), Part I, Ch. 6: "The Pursuit of Truth", p. 37
1 week 3 days ago

Philosophy has been called the search for the Permanent amid the changing. With this account of philosophy there is no need to quarrel. But having accepted it, a distinction remains to be observed, a distinction of capital importance, which we are in constant danger of forgetting. It is one thing to find the Permanent; it is another thing to find a form of words in which the Permanent shall stand permanently expressed. It is one thing to experience something fixed and changeless; it is another thing to fix this something by a changeless definition. The first may be possible, while the second remains impossible for ever.

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3 months 5 days ago

Our dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand. The whole world is doing things.

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p. 199
3 months 1 week ago

It is no longer a question anywhere of inventing interconnections from out of our brains, but of discovering them in the facts.

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Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy
3 months 3 weeks ago

Wisdom thoroughly learned, will never be forgotten. Science is got by diligence; but Discretion and Wisdom cometh of GOD.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

The Indians, whom we call barbarous, observe much more decency and civility in their discourses and conversation, giving one another a fair silent hearing till they have quite done; and then answering them calmly, and without noise or passion. And if it be not so in this civiliz'd part of the world, we must impute it to a neglect in education, which has not yet reform'd this antient piece of barbarity amongst us.

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Sec. 145
4 months 1 week ago

'Our kingdom go' is the necessary and unavoidable corollary of 'Thy kingdom come.' For the more there is of self, the less there is of God.

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Chapter VI - Mortification, Non-Attachment, Right Livelihood
1 week 3 days ago

Each of us lives only now, this brief instant.

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(Hays translation) III, 10
4 months 1 week ago

Can anybody remember when the times were not hard and money not scarce?

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Works and Days

Faith feels itself secure neither with universal consent, nor with tradition, nor with authority. It seeks support of its enemy, reason.

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1 month 4 days ago

Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Normal science often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments.

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p. 5
4 months 3 weeks ago

I do myself a greater injury in lying than I do him of whom I tell a lie.

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Book II, Ch. 17
3 weeks 6 days ago

Correspondences are like small clothes before the invention of suspenders; it is impossible to keep them up.

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Vol. II, letter to Catherine Crowe (31 January 1841), pp. 441-442
5 months 1 week ago

Believe me, there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory...Everything is forgotten, even great love.

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2 months 4 weeks ago

Our patriotism comes straight from the Romans. This is why French children are encouraged to seek inspiration for it in Corneille. It is a pagan virtue, if these two words are compatible. The word pagan, when applied to Rome, early possesses the significance charged with horror which the early Christian controversialists gave it. The Romans really were an atheistic and idolatrous people; not idolatrous with regard to images made of stone or bronze, but idolatrous with regard to themselves. It is this idolatry of self which they have bequeathed to us in the form of patriotism.

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p. 220, also in The Need for Roots : prelude towards a declaration of duties towards mankind
2 months 1 week ago

Literate man, civilized man, tends to restrict and to separate functions, whereas tribal man has freely extended the form of his body to include the universe.

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(p. 117)
5 months 2 weeks ago
The various languages placed side by side show that with words it is never a question of truth, never a question of adequate expression; otherwise, there would not be so many languages. The "thing in itself" (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for. This creator only designates the relations of things to men, and for expressing these relations he lays hold of the boldest metaphors.' To begin with, a nerve stimulus is transferred into an image: first metaphor. The image, in turn, is imitated in a sound: second metaphor. And each time there is a complete overleaping of one sphere, right into the middle of an entirely new and different one.
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3 months 2 weeks ago

The people reign over the American political world as God rules over the universe. It is the cause and the end of all things; everything rises out of it and is absorbed back into it.

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Chapter IV, Part I.
3 months 1 week ago

Whatever is supreme in a state, ought to have, as much as possible, its judicial authority so constituted as not only not to depend upon it, but in some sort to balance it. It ought to give a security to its justice against its power. It ought to make its judicature, as it were, something exterior to the state.

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4 months 3 days ago

Complaints about the social irresponsibility of the intellectual typically concern the intellectual's tendency to marginalize herself, to move out from one community by interior identification of herself with some other community-for example, another country or historical period. ... It is not clear that those who thus marginalize themselves can be criticized for social irresponsibility. One cannot be irresponsible toward a community of which one does not think of oneself as a member. Otherwise runaway slaves and tunnelers under the Berlin Wall would be irresponsible.

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"Postmodernist bourgeois liberalism," Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (Cambridge: 1991), p. 197
4 months 3 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"
4 months 1 week ago

But petitional prayer is only one department of prayer; and if we take the word in the wider sense as meaning every kind of inward communion or conversation with the power recognized as divine, we can easily see that scientific criticism leaves it untouched. Prayer in this wide sense is the very soul and essence of religion.

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Lecture XIX, "Other Characteristics"
3 months 2 weeks ago

When we consider the being and substance of that universe in which we are immutably set, we shall discover that neither we ourselves nor any substance doth suffer death; for nothing is in fact diminished in its substance, but all things, wandering through infinite space, undergo change of aspect.

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Introductory Epistle
4 months 1 week ago

Enjoyment of the work consists in participation in the creative state of the artist.

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p. 117

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