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6 months 1 week ago

People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.

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De l'Art de persuader ["On the Art of Persuasion"], written 1658; published posthumously.
4 months 3 weeks ago

Never unreal, Pain is a challenge to the universal fiction. What luck to be the only sensation granted a content, if not a meaning!

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business.

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The Civil War in France : "The Third Address", May 1871
5 months 3 weeks ago

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

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Ch. 9
5 months 3 weeks ago

Since labour is motion, time is its natural measure.

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Notebook I, The Chapter on Money, p. 125.
1 month 3 weeks ago

The world is nothing but change. Our life is only perception.

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(Hays translation) IV, 4
4 months 2 weeks ago

Even the most elevated psychological understanding is not a loving understanding.

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6 months 6 days ago

As Christ had recommended peace during the whole of his life, mark with what anxiety he enforces it at the approach of his dissolution. Love one another, says he; as I have loved you, so love one another; and again, my peace I give unto you, my peace I leave you. Do you observe the legacy he leaves to those whom he loves? Is it a pompous retinue, a large estate, or empire? Nothing of this kind. What is it then? Peace he giveth, his peace he leaveth; peace, not only with our near connections, but with enemies and strangers!

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4 months 3 weeks ago

But as to our country and our race, as long as the well compacted structure of our church and state, the sanctuary, the holy of holies of that ancient law, defended by reverence, defended by power, a fortress at once and a temple, shall stand inviolate on the brow of the British Sion-as long as the British Monarchy, not more limited than fenced by the orders of the State, shall, like the proud Keep of Windsor, rising in the majesty of proportion, and girt with the double belt of its kindred and coeval towers, as long as this awful structure shall oversee and guard the subjected land-so long as the mounds and dykes of the low, fat, Bedford level will have nothing to fear from all the pickaxes of all the levellers of France.

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pp. 52-53
5 months 2 days ago

That Vulcan gave arrows unto Apollo and Diana the fourth day after their Nativities, according to Gentile Theology, may pass for no blind apprehension of the Creation of the Sun and Moon, in the work of the fourth day.

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Opening lines of Ch. 1
5 months 3 weeks ago

In short, competition has to shoulder the responsibility of explaining all the meaningless ideas of the economists, whereas it should rather be the economists who explain competition.

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Vol. III, Ch. L, Illusions Created by Competition, p. 866.
4 months 2 weeks ago

I write to thee on this subject, friend, because I am angry at a book which I have just left, which is so large, that it seems to contain universal science, but it hath almost split my head, without teaching me anything.

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No. 66.
5 months 4 weeks ago

I've got a one-dimensional mind.

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Said to Rupert Crawshay-Williams; Russell Remembered (1970), p. 31
2 months 5 days ago

How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.

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As quoted in Niels Bohr : The Man, His Science, & the World They Changed (1966) by Ruth Moore, p. 196
2 months 1 week ago

What anger is has been sufficiently explained. The difference between it and irascibility is evident: it is the same as that between a drunken man and a drunkard; between a frightened man and a coward. It is possible for an angry man not to be irascible; an irascible man may sometimes not be angry. I shall omit the other varieties of anger, which the Greeks distinguish by various names, because we have no distinctive words for them in our language, although we call men bitter and harsh, and also peevish, frantic, clamorous, surly and fierce: all of which are different forms of irascibility.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Long hours of labour seem to be the secret of the rational and healthful processes, which are to raise the condition of the labourer by an improvement of his mental and moral powers and to make a rational consumer out of him.

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Vol. II, Ch. XXI, p. 520.
5 months 3 weeks ago

Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

The work of charity, of the love of God, is to endeavor to to liberate God from brute matter, to endeavor to give consciousness to everything, to spiritualize or universalize everything; it is to dream that the very rocks may find a voice and work in accordance with the spirit of this dream; it is to dream that everything that exists may become conscious, that the Word may become life.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Democracy can hardly be expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized. But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralization of power.

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Chapter 3 (p. 19)
4 months 3 weeks ago

...all of the philosophers put together are not worth a single saint.

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2 months 1 week ago

Death weighs on him who is known to all, but dies unknown to himself.

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lines 401-403; (Chorus)
2 months 1 week ago

Can a man who's warm understand one who's freezing?

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4 months 1 week ago

Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world.

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As quoted in The New York Times
5 months 3 weeks ago

The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the social worker-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behavior, his aptitudes, his achievements.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

The criterion which we use to test the genuineness of apparent statements of fact is the criterion of verifiability. We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express - that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as being true, or reject it as being false.

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p. 16.
1 month 4 weeks ago

Being doesn't know.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Technically speaking, since our complex societies are highly susceptible to interferences and accidents,they certainly offer ideal opportunities for a prompt disruption of normal activities. These disruptions can, with minimum expense, have considerably destructive consequences. Global terrorism is extreme both in its lack of realistic goals and in its cynical exploitation of the vulnerability of complex systems.

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Habermas (2004) in: Giovanna Borradori (2004) Philosophy in a Time of Terror: : Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. p. 34
5 months 3 weeks ago

Again, defenders of utility often find themselves called upon to reply to such objections as this-that there is not time, previous to action, for calculating and weighing the effects of any line of conduct on the general happiness. This is exactly as if any one were to say that it is impossible to guide our conduct by Christianity, because there is not time, on every occasion on which anything has to be done, to read through the Old and New Testaments. The answer to the objection is, that there has been ample time, namely, the whole past duration of the human species. During all that time mankind have been learning by experience the tendencies of actions.

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Ch. 2
1 month 3 weeks ago

At every moment of crisis an array of men risk their lives in the front ranks as standard-bearers of God to fight and take upon themselves the whole responsibility of the battle. Once long ago it was the priests, the kings, the noblemen, or the burghers who created civilizations and set divinity free. Today God is the common worker made savage by toil and rage and hunger

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4 months 2 weeks ago

And be sure of this: I am with you always, even to the end of the age.

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Jesus in Matthew 28:20
6 months 2 weeks ago

All teems with symbol; the wise man is the man who in any one thing can read another.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

To be overwise is to ossify; and the scruple-monger ends by standing stockstill.

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314
6 months 2 weeks ago

Reason in man is rather like God in the world.

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Opuscule II, De Regno On Kingship, c. 1267
4 months 1 week ago

The consequences of a plethora of half-digested theoretical knowledge are deplorable.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to the good.

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Speech in opening the impeachment of Warren Hastings (18 February 1788), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Volume the Tenth (1899), p. 48
3 months 3 weeks ago

By simply moving information and brushing information against information, any medium whatever creates vast wealth.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

The cucumber is bitter? Then throw it out. There are brambles in the path? Then go around them. That's all you need to know.

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(Hays translation) VIII, 50
5 months 1 day ago

I have often seen an actor laugh off the stage, but I don't remember ever having seen one weep.

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"Paradox on Acting" (1830), as quoted in Selected Writings (1966) edited by Lester G. Crocker
6 months 6 days ago

The worst evil is hardness of heart. Those who do not repent, who deliberately remain in their habits of sin, have the most to fear.

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p. 146
2 months 2 weeks ago

Should I not be proud, when for twenty years I have had to admit to myself that the great Newton and all the mathematicians and noble calculators along with him were involved in a decisive error with respect to the doctrine of color, and that I among millions was the only one who knew what was right in this great subject of nature?

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Letter to Eckermann
2 weeks 1 day ago

So much of Ancient Greek philosophy is like this. The form of the idea is a work of art from thousands of years ago. We can appreciate it from that perspective.

See biography for Socrates:
https://civilsimian.com/Socrates

Read Socrates's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/408/content

#philosophy #quotes #CivilSimian #UniversalHumanism

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2 months 1 week ago

It is especially important for Westerners to understand that high lamas, Zen masters, and Hindu gurus in the discipline of yoga are human beings, not supermen. We must not put them, as we have put Jesus Christ, on pedestals of reverence so high that we automatically exclude ourselves from their states of consciousness.

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Foreward to The Secret Oral Teachings in the Tibetan Buddhist Sects (1964)], by Alexandra David Neel
3 months 1 week ago

We have always thought that Mr. Darwin has unnecessarily hampered himself by adhering so strictly to his favourite "Natura non facit saltum." We greatly suspect that she does make considerable jumps in the way of variation now and then, and that these saltations give rise to some of the gaps which appear to exist in the series of known forms.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

There is thus a certain plausibility to Nietzsche's doctrine, though it is dynamite. He maintains in effect that the gulf separating Plato from the average man is greater than the cleft between the average man and a chimpanzee.

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p. 151
5 months 2 weeks ago

Truth is best (of all that is) good. As desired, what is being desired is truth for him who (represents) the best truth.

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Ahunuvaiti Gatha; Yasna 27, 14.
3 months 2 weeks ago

Many politicians of our time are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim. If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed have to wait forever.

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p. 42

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