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1 week 2 days ago

Death,-a stopping of impressions through the senses, and of the pulling of the cords of motion, and of the ways of thought, and of service to the flesh.

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VI, 28

If historical experience could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization.

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Chapter XV. The Market, § 4 The Scope and Method of Catallactics
3 months 1 week ago

It appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist, or that this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow, should only be organised dust - ready to fly abroad the moment the spring snaps, or the spark goes out which kept it together. Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable, and life is more than a dream.

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1 week 5 days ago

The government of the United States have no idea of paying their debt in a depreciated medium, and... in the final liquidation of the payments which shall have been made, due regard will be had to an equitable allowance for the circumstance of depreciation.

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Letter to Jean Baptiste de Ternant, 1791. ME 8:247
3 months 1 week ago

I would rather sleep in the southern corner of a little country churchyard, than in the tombs of the Capulets.

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Letter to Matthew Smith
4 months 1 week ago

The process of philosophizing, to my mind, consists mainly in passing from those obvious, vague, ambiguous things, that we feel quite sure of, to something precise, clear, definite, which by reflection and analysis we find is involved in the vague thing that we start from, and is, so to speak, the real truth of which that vague thing is a sort of shadow.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

The most successful tempters and thus the most dangerous are the deluded deluders.

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F 120
4 months 1 week ago

If you are describing any occurrence... make two or more distinct reports at different times... We discriminate at first only a few features, and we need to reconsider our experience from many points of view and in various moods in order to perceive the whole.

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March 24, 1857
2 months 6 days ago

The Institution has been devised to afford the means of receiving your children at an early age, almost as soon as they can walk. By this means many of you, mothers and families, will be able to earn a better maintenance or support for your children; you will have less care and anxiety about them, while the children will be prevented from acquiring any bad habits. and gradually prepared to learn the best.

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1 week 2 days ago

Our intellectual development in the field of science has outstripped our human development in the field of character.

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BBC Radio National Lecture (1938), quoted in Unitarian Universalist Biographical Dictionary.
4 months 1 week ago

The Indian teaching, through its clouds of legends, has yet a simple and grand religion, like a queenly countenance seen through a rich veil. It teaches to speak truth, love others, and to dispose trifles. The East is grand - and makes Europe appear the land of trifles .... all is soul and the soul is Vishnu ... cheerful and noble is the genius of this cosmogony. Hari is always gentle and serene - he translates to heaven the hunter who has accidentally shot him in his human form, he pursues his sport with boors and milkmaids at the cow pens; all his games are benevolent and he enters into flesh to relieve the burdens of the world.

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Quoted in S. Londhe, A Tribute to Hinduism, New Delhi: Pragun Publication, 2008
4 months 3 weeks ago

To the rational being only the irrational is unendurable, but the rational is endurable.

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Variant translation: To a reasonable creature, that alone is insupportable which is unreasonable; but everything reasonable may be supported. Book I, ch. 2,1.
2 months 1 week ago

America is 100% 18th Century. The 18th century had chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy - the basic fact that as A is to B so is C to D. AB:CD. It can see AB relations. But relations in four terms are still verboten. This amounts to deep occultation of nearly all human thought for the USA.

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Letter to Ezra Pound
2 months 1 week ago

But one no longer wonders when one realizes that in the higher classes there is an unerring instinct of what tends to maintain and of what tends to destroy the organization by virtue of which they enjoy their privileges. The fashionable lady had certainly not reasoned out that if there were no capitalists and no army to defend them, her husband would have no fortune, and she could not have her entertainments and her ball-dresses. And the artist certainly does not argue that he needs the capitalists and the troops to defend them, so that they may buy his pictures. But instinct, replacing reason in this instance, guides them unerringly. And it is precisely this instinct which leads all men, with few exceptions, to support all the religious, political, and economic institutions which are to their advantage.

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Chapter XII, Conclusion-Repent Ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at Hand
5 months 1 week ago

The most elementary form of rebellion, paradoxically, expresses an aspiration for order.

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5 months 2 days ago

The end of living, or the ultimate good, which is to be sought for its own sake, according to the universal opinion of mankind, is happiness; yet men, for the most part, fail in the pursuit of this end, either because they do not form a right idea of the nature of happiness, or because they do not make use of proper means to attain it.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

What a hell of an economic system! Some are replete with everything while others, whose stomachs are no less demanding, whose hunger is just as recurrent, have nothing to bite on. The worst of it is the constrained posture need puts you in. The needy man does not walk like the rest; he skips, slithers, twists, crawls.

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4 months 1 week ago

Men resign themselves to their position should it ever occur to them to question it; and since all may view themselves as assigned their vocation, everyone is held to be equally fated and equally noble in the eyes of providence.

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Chapter IX, Section 82, p. 547
1 week 2 days ago

Consider thyself to be dead, and to have completed thy life up to the present time; and live according to nature the remainder which is allowed thee. Variant: Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now, take what's left and live it properly.

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VII, 56
3 weeks 6 days ago

Why should I not regard this as desirable-not because the fire, burns me, but because it does not overcome me?

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5 months 2 weeks ago
The objective of all human arrangements is through distracting one's thoughts to cease to be aware of life.
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4 months 2 weeks ago

Malice sucks up the greatest part of its own venom, and poisons itself.

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Of Repentance, Book III, Ch. 2
5 months 1 week ago

I make no secret about being Jewish ... I just think it's more important to be human and to have a human heritage; and I think it is wrong for anyone to feel that there is anything special about any one heritage of whatever kind. It is delightful to have the human heritage exist in a thousand varieties, for it makes for greater interest, but as soon as one variety is thought to be more important than another, the groundwork is laid for destroying them all.

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5 months 2 weeks ago
We have seen how it is originally language which works on the construction of concepts, a labor taken over in later ages by science. Just as the bee simultaneously constructs cells and fills them with honey, so science works unceasingly on this great columbarium of concepts, the graveyard of perceptions.
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2 months 2 weeks ago

The similarity between Marxism and neoconservativism might be expressed in the following way: both perspectives say that certain injustices can't be cured under our present system of political democracy and mixed economy. The Marxist concludes that we have to overthrow the present system and the neoconservative concludes that we have to live with the injustices. But they are both wrong.

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How Not to Solve Ethical Problems
4 months 1 week ago

I find that the whiter my hair becomes the more ready people are to believe what I say.

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Bertrand Russell Speaks His Mind (1960), p. 80
1 week 5 days ago

No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free no one ever will.

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Letter to George Washington (9 September 1792) The word "censor" in this context means one who censures or an adverse critic not an official who decides what can be published.
3 months 2 weeks ago

Be charitable before Wealth makes thee covetous.

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4 months 1 week ago

Since property here exists in the form of stock, its movement and transfer become purely a result of gambling on the stock exchange, where the little fish are swallowed by the sharks and the lambs by the stock exchange wolves.

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Vol. III, Ch. XXVII, The Role of Credit, p. 440.
2 months 1 week ago

Ivan Ilych saw that he was dying, and he was in continual despair. In the depth of his heart he knew he was dying, but not only was he not accustomed to the thought, he simply did not and could not grasp it. The syllogism he had learnt from Kiesewetter's Logic: "Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal," had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. That Caius - man in the abstract - was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others.

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Ch. VI
4 months 3 weeks ago

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.

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Book II, xxi, 9
4 months 3 weeks ago

As to the people; in all these countries the greater part of the people certainly detest war, and most devoutly wish for peace. A very few of them, indeed, whose unnatural happiness depends upon the public misery, may wish for war; but be it yours to decide, whether it is equitable or not, that the unprincipled selfishness of such wretches should have more weight than the anxious wishes of all good men united.

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4 months 1 week ago

Even the death of Friends will inspire us as much as their lives. They will leave consolation to the mourners, as the rich leave money to defray the expenses of their funerals, and their memories will be incrusted over with sublime and pleasing thoughts, as monuments of other men are overgrown with moss; for our Friends have no place in the graveyard.

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3 months 1 week ago

A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood.

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Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (3 April 1777); as published in The Works of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (1899), vol. 2, p. 206
4 months 1 week ago

Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'here are our monsters', without immediately turning the monsters into pets.

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Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and other small Seismisms, The States of Theory, ed. David Carroll, New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
3 weeks 6 days ago

Of course, however, the living voice and the intimacy of a common life will help you more than the written word. You must go to the scene of action, first, because men put more faith in their eyes than in their ears, and second, because the way is long if one follows precepts, but short and helpful, if one follows patterns.

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Line 5. Alternate translation: Teaching by precept is a long road, but short and beneficial is the way by example.
3 months 1 week ago

When he entered into the Whig party, he did not conceive that they pretended to any discoveries. They did not affect to be better Whigs, than those were who lived in the days in which principle was put to the test. Some of the Whigs of those days were then living. They were what the Whigs had been at the Revolution; what they had been during the reign of queen Anne; what they had been at the accession of the present royal family.

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p. 409
4 months 1 week ago

Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.

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Ch. 5: Mathematics and the Metaphysicians
3 months 1 week ago

Every other art,-as poetry, music, painting,-may be practised without the process showing forth the rules according to which it is conducted ;-but in the self-cognizant art of the philosopher, no step can be taken without declaring the grounds upon which it proceeds.

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p. 14
3 weeks 2 days ago

It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes. It may even lie on the surface; but we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones.

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Peace and Violence

If I was not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music. ... I cannot tell if I would have done any creative work of importance in music, but I do know that I get most joy in life out of my violin.

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3 months 1 week ago

Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.

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1 week 2 days ago

No matter what anyone says or does, my task is to be good.

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(Hays translation) VII, 15
3 months 1 week ago

The irony of world history turns everything upside down. We, the "revolutionaries," the "rebels"-we are thriving far better on legal methods than on illegal methods and revolt. The parties of order, as they call themselves, are perishing under the legal conditions created by themselves. They cry despairingly with Odilon Barrot: la légalité notes tue, legality is the death of us; whereas we, under this legality, get firm muscles and rosy cheeks and look like eternal life.

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Introduction (1895) to Marx's The Class Struggles in France (1848-50), p. 27
4 months 1 week ago

The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco.

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1859
3 months 1 week ago

If there was a God of sorrow, he would grow black heavy wings, to soar not for the skies, but for inferno.

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1 month 1 week ago

Philosophy is not the owl of Minerva that takes flight after history has been realized in order to celebrate its happy ending; rather, philosophy is subjective proposition, desire, and praxis that are applied to the event.

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