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2 weeks 1 day ago

Maybe the absolute particular you, which is a teeny tiny part of what you are....but...your name is a label, does that negate you...Søøøren....

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8 months 4 weeks ago

He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love — first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

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8 months 3 days ago

The rich man... is always sold to the institution which makes him rich.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

It is only through science and art that civilization is of value. Some have wondered at the formula: science for its own sake; an yet it is as good as life for its own sake, if life is only misery; and even as happiness for its own sake, if we do not believe that all pleasures are of the same quality...Every act should have an aim. We must suffer, we must work, we must pay for our place at the game, but this is for seeing's sake; or at the very least that others may one day see.

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8 months 1 day ago

Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind.

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Existentialism and Human Emotions
7 months 1 week 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
8 months 2 weeks ago

Remember that it is not he who gives abuse or blows who affronts, but the view we take of these things as insulting. When, therefore, any one provokes you, be assured that it is your own opinion which provokes you.

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(20).
7 months 1 week ago

The world is the house of the strong. I shall not know until the end what I have lost or won in this place, in this vast gambling den where I have spent more than sixty years, dicebox in hand, shaking the dice.

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Conclusion
7 months 3 weeks ago

Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.

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p. 166.
8 months 3 days ago

Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.

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p. 33
6 months 4 weeks ago

Self-knowledge - the bitterest knowledge of all and also the kind we cultivate least: what is the use of catching ourselves out, morning to night, in the act of illusion, pitilessly tracing each act back to its root, and losing case after case before our own tribunal?

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6 months 4 weeks ago

The conscious mind allows itself to be trained like a parrot, but the unconscious does not - which is why St. Augustine thanked God for not making him responsible for his dreams.

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par. 51 p.46
4 months 2 weeks ago

No easy way leads from the earth to heaven..

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line 437; (Megara).
7 months 3 weeks ago

To resist him that is set in authority is evil. .

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Maxim no. 31
8 months 6 days ago

A very poor man may be said in some sense to have a demand for a coach and six; he might like to have it; but his demand is not an effectual demand, as the commodity can never be brought to market in order to satisfy it.

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Chapter VII, p. 67.
7 months 1 week ago

For no one's authority ought to rank so high as to set a value on his words and terms even though nothing clear and determinate lies behind them.

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Paragraph 1
4 months 4 weeks ago

The legacy of modernity is a legacy of fratricidal wars, devastating "development," cruel "civilization," and previously unimagined violence. Erich Auerbach once wrote that tragedy is the only genre that can properly claim realism in Western literature, and perhaps this is true precisely because of the tragedy Western modernity has imposed on the world.

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46
6 months 3 weeks ago

One of the scribes came to Jesus and asked him, "Which is the first of all commandments?" Jesus replied,"The first is this: Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is Lord alone! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second is like: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these."

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Mark 12:28-34
9 months ago

The best way to describe anyone is to give an example of the kind of thing he would do.

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8 months 1 week ago

Adam was created righteous, acceptable, and without sin. He had no need from his labor in the garden to be made righteous and acceptable to God. Rather, the Lord gave Adam work in order to cultivate and protect the garden. This would have been the freest of all works because they were done simply to please God and not to obtain righteousness. ... The works of the person who trusts God are to be understood in a similar manner. Through faith we are restored to paradise and created anew. We have no need of works in order to be righteous; however, in order to avoid idleness and so that the body might be cared for an disciplined, works are done freely to please God.

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pp. 73-74

I saw the Emperor-this world-soul-riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.

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Hegel to Niethammer, October 13, 1806, in Hegel: the Letters (1998) translated by Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler, p. 114. Hegel: the Letters
8 months 1 day ago

I respect orders but I respect myself too and I do not obey foolish rules made especially to humiliate me.

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Hugo to Slick and Georges, Act 3, sc. 2
4 months 3 days ago

I heard the bells from the future churches, the children playing and laughing in the schoolyards ... and here was an almond tree in bloom before me: I must reach out and cut a flowering branch. For, by believing passionately in something which still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired, whatever we have not irrigated with our blood to such a degree that it becomes strong enough to stride across the somber threshold of nonexistence.

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p. 434; in a few publications since 2008 part of this has been misattributed to Franz Kafka: "By believing passionately in something which still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired."
7 months 3 weeks ago

From whence are these "rights of individuals" derived, and why should we care? Unless we presume the existence of some greater power that determines what is good, isn't it arbitrary to posit that human survival is more important than private property rights, an equally artificially construed concept? Isn't it arbitrary to assume that some sort of equality is preferable to a system where, say, the poor are assumed to have bad karma? If these 'rights of individuals' are derived only from shared humanity, then do 'individuals' (a thoroughly meaningless term, by the way), begin to lose them when they act inhumanely? And isn't it totally arbitrary to grant rights to humans rather than other creatures anyway?

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Lecture in New Haven, On Constructed Rights
5 months 2 weeks ago

If Man be separated by no greater structural barrier from the brutes than they are from one another-then it seems to follow that if any process of physical causation can be discovered by which the genera and families of ordinary animals have been produced, that process of causation is amply sufficient to account for the origin of Man.

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Ch.2, p. 125
7 months 3 weeks ago

Even if I could by gradual degrees be transformed into a bat, nothing in my present constitution enables me to imagine what the experiences of such a future stage of myself thus metamorphosed would be like. The best evidence would come from the experience of bats, if we only knew what they were like.

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p. 169.
8 months 3 weeks ago

Speaking with sense we must fortify ourselves in the common sense of all, as a city is fortified by its law, and even more forcefully. For all human laws are nourished by the one divine law. For it prevails as far as it will and suffices for all and is superabundant.

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4 months 3 days ago

One day our Sodom and Gomorrah would be trampled by some all-powerful foot, and this world which laughed, reveled, and forgot God would be transformed, in its turn, into a Dead Sea. At the end of every period God's foot comes along in this way and tramples the cities of the overindulged belly, the overdeveloped mind. I felt afraid (Sometimes it seems to me that this world is another Sodom and Gomorrah just before God's passage above it. I think the terrible foot can already be heard approaching).

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Jerusalem, Ch. 20, p. 249
3 months 4 weeks ago

Conflicting intellectual positions may actually come to supplement one another. It is imperative in the present transitional period to make use of the intellectual twilight which dominates our epoch and in which all values and points of view appear in their genuine relativity. We must realize once and for all that the meanings which make up our world are simply an historically determined and continuously developing structure in which man develops, and are in no sense absolute.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

As Gandhi taught, freedom can be reclaimed only by refusing to cooperate with unjust, immoral laws. The fight for truth-employing the principles of civil disobedience, nonviolence, and noncooperation-is not just our right as free citizens of free societies. It is our duty as citizens of the earth.

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(p184)
6 months 3 weeks ago

Life cannot wait until the sciences may have explained the universe scientifically. We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness: it is always urgent, "here and now" without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank. And culture, which is but its interpretation, cannot wait any more than can life itself.

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Mission of the University [Misión de la Universidad (PDF)] (1930; translation © 1944, first published 1946), p. 73 [p. 15 in Spanish PDF], translated by Howard Lee Nostrand. ISBN 978-1-56000-560-5
5 months 4 weeks ago

Each generation is a filter, a sieve; good genes tend to fall through the sieve into the next generation; bad genes tend to end up in bodies that die young or without reproducing.

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8 months 1 day ago

The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing - to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from - my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.

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Psyche
8 months 3 days ago

Truth never turns to rebuke falsehood; her own straightforwardness is the severest correction.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 264
6 months 2 weeks ago

Passion is like suffering, and like suffering it creates its object. It is easier for the fire to find something to burn than for something combustible to find the fire.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

I finished the Iliad to-day... I never admired the old fellow so much, or was so strongly moved by him. What a privilege genius like his enjoys! I could not tear myself away. I read the last five books at a stretch during my walk to-day, and was at last forced to turn into a bypath, lest the parties of walkers should see me blubbering for imaginary beings, the creations of a ballad-maker who has been dead two thousand seven hundred years. What is the power and glory of Caesar and Alexander to that? Think what it would be to be assured that the inhabitants of Monomotapa would weep over one's writings.

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Anno Domini 4551! Letter to his niece Margaret (August 1851), quoted in George Otto Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, Volume II (1876), pp. 186-187
4 months 2 weeks ago

Who is everywhere is nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends.

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Line 2.
9 months 3 days ago

Now men seem, not unreasonably, to form their notions of the supreme good and of happiness from the lives of men.

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2 weeks 1 day ago

Saw something about this discussed in the framing of the free will debate. Roughly, insistence on historical is punitive and focus on the future is progressive. BALANCE is what is needed.

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6 months 4 weeks ago

I am enraptured by Hindu philosophy, whose essential endeavor is to surmount the self; and everything I do, everything I think is only myself and the selfs humiliations.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

It may seem to be a long way from Blake's innocent talk of love and copulation to De Sade's need to inflict pain. And yet both are the outcome of a sexual mysticism that strives to transcend the everyday world. Simone de Beauvoir said penetratingly of De Sade's work that 'he is trying to communicate an experience whose distinguishing characteristic is, nevertheless its will to remain incommunicable'. De Sade's perversion may have sprung from his dislike of his mother or of other women, but its basis is a kind of distorted religious emotion.

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p. 90
3 weeks 3 days ago

A fun aesthetic to counter Emil's persistently suicidal thought process...☠️🤷‍♂️

"The skepticism which fails to contribute to the ruin of our health is merely an intellectual exercise."
- Emil Cioran

See biography for Emil Cioran:
https://civilsimian.com/Emil-Cioran

Read Emil Cioran's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/133/content

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8 months 1 week ago

When I play with my cat, who knows whether I do not make her more sport than she makes me?

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Book II, Ch. 12. Apology for Raimond Sebond

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