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2 months 3 weeks ago

Seeing therefore they are both [heat and pain] immediately perceived at the same time, and the fire affects you only with one simple, or uncompounded idea, it follows that this same simple idea is both the intense heat immediately perceived, and the pain; and consequently, that the intense heat immediately perceived, is nothing distinct from a particular sort of pain.

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Philonous to Hylas
3 months 4 weeks ago

The things that we can see with our physical eyes are mere shadows of reality. If they appear ugly and ill formed, then what must be the ugliness of the soul in sin, deprived of all light? The soul, like the body, can undergo transformation in appearance. In sin it appears as completely ugly to the beholder. In virtue it shines resplendently before God.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way.

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Ch. 4
2 months 2 days ago

Once we can see how this question of freedom of the will has been vitiated by post-romantic philosophy, with its inbuilt tendency to laziness and boredom, we can also see how it came about that existentialism found itself in a hole of its own digging, and how the philosophical developments since then have amounted to walking in circles round that hole.

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p. 214
3 months 3 weeks ago

Men being, as has been said, by nature, all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent.

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Second Treatise of Government, Ch. VIII, sec. 95
4 months 2 weeks ago

If the very essence of knowledge changes, at the moment of the change to another essence of knowledge there would be no knowledge, and if it is always changing, there will always be no knowledge, and by this reasoning there will be neither anyone to know nor anything to be known. But if there is always that which knows and that which is known if the beautiful, the good, and all the other verities exist I do not see how there is any likeness between these conditions of which I am now speaking and flux or motion.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

The institution of religion exists only to keep mankind in order, and to make men merit the goodness of God by their virtue. Everything in a religion which does not tend towards this goal must be considered foreign or dangerous.

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"The Ecclesiastical Ministry"
3 months 2 weeks ago

I entered the [Communist] Party because its cause was just and I will leave it when it ceases to be just.

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Hugo to Hoederer, Act 5, sc. 3
3 weeks 5 days ago

Tyranny offers relief from the burden of sanity and a licence to enact forbidden impulses of hatred and violence. By acting on these impulses and releasing them in their subjects tyrants give people a kind of happiness, which as individuals they may be incapable of achieving.

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An Old Chaos: What a Tyrant Can Do For You (p. 57)
1 month 3 weeks ago

The best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be, first to enquire diligently into the properties of things, and to establish these properties by experiment, and then to proceed more slowly to hypothesis for the explanation of them. For hypotheses should be employed only in explaining the properties of things, but not assumed in determining them, unless so far as they may furnish experiments.

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Letter to Ignatius Pardies (1672) Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (Feb. 1671/2) as quoted by William L. Harper
1 month 2 weeks ago

And therefore just as a brigand caught in broad daylight in the act cannot persuade us that he did not lift his knife in order to rob his victim of his purse, and had no thought of killing him, we too, it would seem, cannot persuade ourselves or others that the soldiers and policemen around us are not to guard us, but only for defense against foreign foes, and to regulate traffic and fetes and reviews; we cannot persuade ourselves and others that we do not know that the men do not like dying of hunger, bereft of the right to gain their subsistence from the earth on which they live; that they do not like working underground, in the water, or in the stifling heat, for ten to fourteen hours a day, at night in factories to manufacture objects for our pleasure. One would imagine it impossible to deny what is so obvious. Yet it is denied.

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Chapter XII, Conclusion-Repent Ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at Hand
1 month 2 weeks ago

It may be that brain hardware has co-evolved with the internal virtual worlds that it creates. This can be called hardware-software co-evolution.

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1 week 3 days ago

A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.

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Article on Biography.
2 months 1 week ago

The world is nothing but 'world-as-meaning.'

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p. xi
4 months 1 day 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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Putin told the Financial Times that liberalism has become an "obsolete" doctrine. While it may be under attack from many quarters today, it is in fact more necessary than ever. It is more necessary because it is fundamentally a means of governing over diversity, and the world is more diverse than it ever has been. Democracy disconnected from liberalism will not protect diversity, because majorities will use their power to repress minorities.

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Emphasis in original.
4 months 2 weeks ago

Art is the activity that exalts and denies simultaneously. "No artist tolerates reality," says Nietzsche.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Out of my experience, such as it is (and it is limited enough) one fixed conclusion dogmatically emerges, and that is this, that we with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves. ... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom. Just so there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir.

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"Confidences of a 'Psychical Researcher'", in The American Magazine, Vol. 68 (1909), p. 589
3 months 2 weeks ago

I don't deserve a share in governing a hen-roost, much less a nation. Nor do most people - all the people who believe advertisements, and think in catchwords and spread rumors. The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Tell me how you want to die, and I'll tell you who you are.

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2 months 2 days ago

Rituals are processes of embodiment and bodily performances. In them, the valid order and values of a community are physically experienced and solidified.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Today we experience, in reverse, what pre-literate man faced with the advent of writing.

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p. 273
2 months 1 week ago

There are two kinds of means. One kind is external to that which is accomplished; the other kind is taken up into the consequences and remains immanent in them. There are ends which are merely welcome cessations and there are ends that are fulfillments of what went before. The toil of the laborer is too often an antecedent to the wage he receives, as consumption of gasoline is merely a means to transportation. The means cease to act when the "end" is reached; one would be glad, as a rule, to get the result without having to employ the means. They are but the scaffolding.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Indeed, it may well be argued that one reason for the decline in science, art, and literature was the increasing absorption of the better minds into a new sort of intellectual pursuit, theology.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Capacity for the nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but by the mere want of sustenance; and in the majority of young persons it speedily dies away if the occupations to which their position in life has devoted them, and the society into which it has thrown them, are not favourable to keeping that higher capacity in existence.

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Ch. 2
1 month 2 weeks ago

Human perception is literally incarnation.

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"Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters", in Christian Humanism in Letters, The McAuley Lectures (1954), p. 49-67
2 months 3 weeks ago

The created World is but a small Parenthesis in Eternity.

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Part III, Section XXIX
2 months 2 weeks ago

Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

There are degrees of justice, Elijah. When the lesser is incompatible with the greater, the lesser must give way.

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8 months 1 week ago
A common goal...
Issue:

Because of subgrouping, physical separation, different types of genetics and other cultural factors, as well as limited isolation people subjectively deviate from their universal human necessity. They become aware of it when they are exposed to difference regularly.

Solution:

With controlled information delivery, as well as a clear ideological goal like universality, we can clear away the noise of chaos to understand deterministic goals directly.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

The best is the enemy of the good.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Every rebellion implies some kind of unity.

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2 months 2 days ago

Emptiness is not a denial of the proper but an affirmation of it.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Few men have been admired by their own domestics.

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Book iii. Chap 2. Of Repentance
4 days ago

Now why, if freedom is striven after for love of the I after all - why not choose the I himself as beginning, middle, and end?

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Dover 2005, p. 163
4 months 1 day ago

Love hath so long possessed me for his ownAnd made his lordship so familiar.

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Chapter XXIV
2 months 1 week ago

In all ranges of experience, externality of means defines the mechanical.

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p. 206
3 months 4 weeks ago

I have turned my entire attention to Greek. The first thing I shall do, as soon as the money arrives, is to buy some Greek authors; after that, I shall buy clothes.

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Letter to Jacob Batt (12 April 1500); Collected Works of Erasmus Vol 1 (1974)
1 week 3 days ago

Not the external and physical alone is now managed by machinery, but the internal and spiritual also. Here too nothing follows its spontaneous course, nothing is left to be accomplished by old natural methods. Everything has its cunningly devised implements, its preestablished apparatus; it is not done by hand, but by machinery.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

I pre-suppose, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself.

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Author's prefaces to the First Edition.
3 months 2 weeks ago

What can be said can and should always be said more and more simply and clearly.

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2 months 1 week ago

Liberalism - it is well to recall this today-is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence it is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet. It announces the determination to share existence with the enemy; more than that, with an enemy which is weak. It was incredible that the human species should have arrived at so noble an attitude, so paradoxical, so refined, so acrobatic, so anti-natural. Hence, it is not to be wondered at that this same humanity should soon appear anxious to get rid of it. It is a discipline too difficult and complex to take firm root on earth.

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Chap. VIII: The Masses Intervene In Everything, And Why Their Intervention Is Solely By Violence
2 months 2 weeks ago

It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men; nay, it is vain to expect that strength of natural affection which would make them good wives and mothers. Whilst they are absolutely dependent on their husbands they will be cunning, mean, and selfish.

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Ch. 9
2 months 1 week ago

In philosophical anthropology, ... where the subject is man in his wholeness, the investigator cannot content himself, as in anthropology as an individual science, with considering man as another part of nature and with ignoring the fact that he, the investigator, is himself a man and experiences this humanity in his inner experience in a way that he simply cannot experience any part of nature.

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p. 147
2 months 1 day ago

Society triumphs over many. They wish to regenerate the world with their institutions, with their moral philosophy, with their love. Then they sink to living from breakfast till dinner, from dinner till tea, with a little worsted work, and to looking forward to nothing but bed. When shall we see a life full of steady enthusiasm, walking straight to its aim, flying home, as that bird is now, against the wind - with the calmness and the confidence of one who knows the laws of God and can apply them?

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2 months 2 weeks ago

The universal view melts things into a blur.

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2 weeks 1 day ago

The man who says that the world is a machine has really advanced no further than to say that he is so well satisfied with the analogy that he is through with searching any further.

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Ch. VI: "The Drama of Destiny", §5, p. 130.
3 months ago

He is worst of all, that is malicious against his friends.

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