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1 month 2 weeks ago

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness. The symbol of art is seen again in the magic flute of the Great God Pan which makes the young goats frisk at the edge of the grove. All modern art begins to appear comprehensible and in a way great when it is interpreted as an attempt to instill youthfulness into an ancient world.

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"Art a Thing of No Consequence"
2 months 3 weeks ago

It is, in fact, far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.

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The Human Condition
1 month 4 weeks ago

After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the government then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence: it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

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Book Four, Chapter VI.
1 month 2 weeks ago

Ressentiment is always to some degree a determinant of the romantic type of mind. At least this is so when the romantic nostalgia for some past era (Hellas, the Middle Ages, etc.) is not primarily based on the values of that period, but on the wish to escape from the present. Then all praise of the "past" has the implied purpose of downgrading present-day reality.

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L. Coser, trans. (1973), p. 68
1 month 2 weeks ago

The capitalists soon had everything in their hands and nothing remained to the workers.

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3 weeks 2 days ago

The space of early Greek cosmology was structured by logos - resonant utterance or word.

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p. 35
1 month 2 weeks ago

The complexity of the connection between the world of perception and the world of physics does not preclude that such a connection can be shown to exist at any time.

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p. 133.
3 weeks 1 day ago

Audacity augments courage; hesitation, fear.

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Maxim 63 Variant translation: "Valour grows by daring, fear by holding back."
2 months 3 weeks ago

And because it may be too great a temptation to human frailty, apt to grasp at power, for the same persons, who have the power of making laws, to have also in their hands the power to execute them, whereby they may exempt themselves from obedience to the laws they make, and suit the law, both in its making, and execution, to their own private advantage...

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Second Treatise of Civil Government, Ch. XII, sec. 143
7 months ago

The general reference of the philosophical discussion is usually the triangle world: world-language-subject, the relation of the subject to the world of objects, mediated through language.

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3 weeks 4 days ago

The strongest of all warriors are these two - Time and Patience.

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Bk. X, ch. 16
1 month 1 week ago

Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith; and in this sense atheism is a purification. I have to be an atheist with that part of myself which is not made for God. Among those in whom the supernatural part of themselves has not been awakened, the atheists are right and the believers wrong.

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"Faiths of Meditation; Contemplation of the divine" as translated in The Simone Weil Reader (1957) edited by George A. Panichas, p. 417
2 weeks 4 days ago

Conservatives believe that our identities and values are formed through our relations with other people, and not through our relation with the state. The state is not an end but a means. Civil society is the end, and the state is the means to protect it. The social world emerges through free association, rooted in friendship and community life. And the customs and institutions that we cherish have grown from below, by the 'invisible hand' of co-operation. They have rarely been imposed from above by the work of politics, the role of which, for a conservative, is to reconcile our many aims, and not to dictate or control them.

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"Stand up for the real meaning of freedom," The Spectator
2 months 3 weeks ago

We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count.

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Old Age
2 months 3 weeks ago

All the entertainment and talk of history is nothing almost but fighting and killing: and the honour and renown that is bestowed on conquerers (who for the most part are but the great butchers of mankind) farther mislead growing youth, who by this means come to think slaughter the laudible business of mankind, and the most heroick of virtues. By these steps unnatural cruelty is planted in us; and what humanity abhors, custom reconciles and recommends to us, by laying it in the way to honour. Thus, by fashioning and opinion, that comes to be a pleasure, which in itself neither is, nor can be any.

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Sec. 116
3 months 2 days ago

Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know.

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Ch. 31. Of Divine Ordinances, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Hazlitt, 1842
2 months 3 weeks ago

Aeschylus had a clear eye for the commonest things. His genius was only an enlarged common sense. He adverts with chaste severity to all natural facts. His sublimity is Greek sincerity and simpleness, naked wonder which mythology had not helped to explain... Whatever the common eye sees at all and expresses as best it may, he sees uncommonly and describes with rare completeness. The multitude that thronged the theatre could no doubt go along with him to the end... The social condition of genius is the same in all ages. Aeschylus was undoubtedly alone and without sympathy in his simple reverence for the mystery of the universe.

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January 29, 1840
2 months 3 weeks ago

Our sadness is not sad, but our cheap joys.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 231
2 months 2 weeks ago

It is true: Man is the microcosm: I am my world.

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Journal entry (12 October 1916), p. 84e
2 months 3 weeks ago

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

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 264
2 months 3 weeks ago

Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Commit no slander; so that infamy and wickedness may not happen unto thee.

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(p. 59)
2 months 4 weeks ago

Christianity possesses the great advantage over Judaism of being represented as coming from the mouth of the first Teacher not as a statutory but as a moral religion, and as thus entering into the closest relation with reason so that, through reason, it was able of itself, without historical learning, to be spread at all times and among all peoples with the greatest trustworthiness.

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Book IV, Part 1, Section 1, "The Christian religion as a learned religion"
2 months 3 weeks ago

If you are tired of the real landscape, look at it in a mirror. By putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves. This book applies the treatment not only to bread or apple but to good and evil, to our endless perils, our anguish, and our joys. By dipping them in myth we see them more clearly.

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Most of what we strive for in our modern life uses the apparatus of goal seeking that was originally set up to seek goals in the state of nature.

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4 weeks ago

I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called a hypothesis, and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy.

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Letter to Robert Hooke (15 February 1676) [5 February 1676 (O.S.)]
2 months 3 weeks ago

We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.

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Ch. 12: Free Thought and Official Propaganda
2 months 3 weeks ago

A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short.

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Authority and the Individual, 1949
1 month 3 weeks ago

"Do I look like someone who has something to do here on Earth?" - That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.

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1 month 1 week ago

Humility consists of knowing that in this world the whole soul, not only what we term the ego in its totality, but also the supernatural part of the soul, which is God present in it, is subject to time and to the vicissitudes of change. There must be absolutely acceptance of the possibility that everything material in us should be destroyed. But we must simultaneously accept and repudiate the possibility that the supernatural part of the soul should disappear.

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"Concerning the Our Father" in Waiting on God (1972), Routledge & Kegan Paul edition, p. 153
2 months 2 weeks ago

Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.

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§ 18

Youth is wholly experimental.

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Letter to a Young Gentleman Scribner's Magazine (September 1888).
1 month 1 week ago

Heaven knows what seeming nonsense may not to-morrow be demonstrated truth.

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Ch. 7: "Relativity", p. 161
3 weeks 2 days ago

Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes.

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(p. 36)
1 month 3 weeks ago

I know now that I shall. But all Actual Knowledge brings with it, by its formal nature, its schematised apposition; - although I now know of the Schema of God, yet I am not yet immediately this Schema, but I am only a Schema of the Schema. The required Being is not yet realised. I shall be. Who is this I? Evidently that which is, - the Ego gives in Intuition, the Individual. This shall be. What does its Being signify? It is given as a Principle in the World of Sense. Blind Instinct is indeed annihilated, and in its place there now stands the clearly perceived Shall. But the Power that at first set this Instinct in motion remains, in order that the Shall my now set it (the Power) in motion, and become its higher determining Principle. By means of this Power, I shall therefore, within its sphere, - the World of Sense, - produce and make manifest that which I recognise as my true Being in the Supersensuous World.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

What is the essence of life? To serve others and to do good. Often given as a saying of Aristotle with no reference.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

In a shared fish, there are no bones.

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Freeman (1948), p. 157
2 months 3 weeks ago

Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: Every man I meet is my master at some point, and in that, I learn of him.

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Greatness
2 months 3 weeks ago

A circuit performed by a capital and meant to be a periodical process, not an individual act, is called its turnover. The duration of this turnover is determined by the sum of its time of production and its time of circulation.

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Volume II, Ch. VII, p. 158.
4 months 3 weeks ago

Caring about others....all you need to know....

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Orb webs in real life do their business largely in two dimensions. If the mesh is too coarse, flies pass straight through. If the mesh is too fine, rival spiders will achieve nearly the same result at less cost in silk, and will therefore leave behind more progeny to carry on their economically more prudent genes. Natural selection finds the efficient compromise.

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Chapter 2, "Silken Fetters" (p. 58)
2 months 3 weeks ago

Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.

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Unverified attribution noted in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1993), ed. Suzy Platt, Library of Congress, p. 39;

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.
2 months 3 weeks ago

Friends are not primarily absorbed in each other. It is when we are doing things together that friendship springs up - painting, sailing ships, praying, philosophizing, fighting shoulder to shoulder. Friends look in the same direction. Lovers look at each other - that is, in opposite directions. To transfer bodily all that belongs to one relationship into the other is blundering.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

History tells us of innumerable retrogressions, of decadences and degenerations. But nothing tells us that there is no possibility of much more basic retrogressions than any so far known, including the most radical of all: the total disappearance of man as man and his silent return to the animal scale, to complete and definitive alteration. The fate of culture, the destiny of man, depends upon our maintaining this dramatic consciousness ever alive in our inmost being, and upon our being well aware, as of a murmuring counterpoint in our entrails, that we can only be sure of insecurity.

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p. 26
2 months 4 weeks ago

Look round the world: contemplate the whole and every part of it: You will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines, which again admit of subdivisions, to a degree beyond what human senses and faculties can trace and explain. All these various machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy, which ravishes into admiration all men, who have ever contemplated them. The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles exactly, though it much exceeds, the productions of human contrivance; of human design, thought, wisdom, and intelligence.

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Philo to Cleanthes, Part II

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