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5 months 2 days ago

Sadness makes you God's prisoner.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Now, justification in this life is given to us according to these three things: first by the laver of regeneration by which all sins are forgiven; then, by a struggle with the faults from whose guilt we have been absolved; the third, when our prayer is heard, in which we say: Forgive us our debts, because however bravely we fight against our faults, we are men; but the grace of God so aids as we fight in this corruptible body that there is reason for His hearing us as we ask forgiveness.

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Against Julian, Book II, ch. 8, 22. In The Fathers of the Church, Matthew A. Schumacher, tr., 1957, ISBN 0813214009 ISBN 9780813214009 pp. 83-84.
5 months 4 days ago

If the world is a precipitation of human nature, so to speak, then the divine world is a sublimation of the same. Both occur in one act. No precipitation without sublimation. What goes lost there in agility, is won here.

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Fragment No. 96
4 months 1 week ago

Whatever is referred to must exist. Let us call this the axiom of existence.

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P. 77.
2 months 6 days ago

The Ambassador answered us that it was founded on the laws of their Prophet; that it was written in their Koran; that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners; that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners; and that every Mussulman who was slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise. He said, also, that the man who was the first to board a vessel had one slave over and above his share, and that when they sprang to the deck of an enemy's ship, every sailor held a dagger in each hand and a third in his mouth; which usually struck such terror into the foe that they cried out for quarter at once. That it was a law that the first who boarded an Enemy's Vessell should have one slave.

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Concerning an interview in London with the ambassador from Tripoli, Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja.
6 months 6 days ago

As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird's life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings.

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Ch. 9
6 months 1 week ago

There is needed, no doubt, a body of servants (ministerium) of the invisible church, but not officials (officiales), in other words, teachers but not dignitaries, because in the rational religion of every individual there does not yet exist a church as a universal union (omnitudo collectiva).

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Book IV, Part 1, Section 1, "The Christian religion as a natural religion"
6 months 1 week ago

Clever tyrants are never punished.

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Mérope, act V, scene V, 1743
5 months 3 weeks ago

Bear no improper envy, so that thy life may not become tasteless.

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6 months 5 days ago

Properly understood, then, the desire to act justly derives in part from the desire to express most fully what we are or can be, namely free and equal rational beings with the liberty to choose.

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Chapter IV, Section 40, p. 256
3 months 3 weeks ago

Scientific men get an awkward habit - no, I won't call it that, for it is a valuable habit - of believing nothing unless there is evidence for it; and they have a way of looking upon belief which is not based upon evidence, not only as illogical, but as immoral.

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Thomas Henry Huxley. "Lectures on Evolution Title: This is Essay# 3 from" Science and Hebrew Tradition." (1882); as cited in: William Trufant Foster, (1908) Argumentation and debating, p. 55
7 months 1 week ago

There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys; they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked out the sum for themselves.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Man with the great M is only an ideal, the species only something thought of.

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Dover 2005, p. 182
6 months 1 week ago

You need only look around you, replied PHILO, to satisfy yourself with regard to this question. A tree bestows order and organisation on that tree which springs from it, without knowing the order; an animal in the same manner on its offspring; a bird on its nest; and instances of this kind are even more frequent in the world than those of order, which arise from reason and contrivance. To say, that all this order in animals and vegetables proceeds ultimately from design, is begging the question; nor can that great point be ascertained otherwise than by proving, a priori, both that order is, from its nature, inseparably attached to thought; and that it can never of itself, or from original unknown principles, belong to matter.

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Philo to Demea, Part VII
2 months 2 weeks ago

The visible world has, as I have said, subsisted around him from all eternity: and the Light also which surrounds the world has also its place from all eternity, not intermittently, nor in different degrees at different times, but constantly and in an equable manner. But whosoever will attempt to estimate, as far as thought goes, this external Nature, by the measure of Time, he will very easily discover respecting the Sun, Sovereign of all things, of how many blessings he is, from all eternity, the author to the world.

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6 months 5 days ago

Ideally a just constitution would be a just procedure arranged to insure a just outcome.

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Chapter IV, Section 31, pg. 197
4 months 2 weeks ago

The Outsider may be an artist, but the artist is not necessarily an Outsider.

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Chapter one, The Country of the Blind
2 months 2 weeks ago

Existing social conditions favour the production of an infinite number of acts of violence and there has been no hesitation in urging the workers not to refrain from brutality when this might do them service.

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p. 183
2 months 3 weeks ago

Men do reverence men. Men do worship in that 'one temple of the world,' as Novalis calls it, the Presence of a Man! Hero-worship, true and blessed, or else mistaken, false and accursed, goes on everywhere and everywhen. In this world there is one godlike thing, the essence of all that was or ever will be of godlike in this world: the veneration done to Human Worth by the hearts of men. Hero-worship, in the souls of the heroic, of the clear and wise,-it is the perpetual presence of Heaven in our poor Earth: when it is not there, Heaven is veiled from us; and all is under Heaven's ban and interdict, and there is no worship, or worthship, or worth or blessedness in the Earth any more!-

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Do not despair: one thief was saved. Do not presume: one thief was damned.

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Attributed to St. Augustine in The Repentance of Robert Greene, Master of Arts (1592) by Robert Greene.
4 months 4 days ago

What began as a "Romantic reaction" towards organic wholeness may or may not have hastened the discovery of electro-magnetic waves. But certainly the electro-magnetic discoveries have recreated the simultaneous "field" in all human affairs so that the human family now exists under conditions of a "global village." We live in a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums. So that concern with the "primitive" today is as banal as nineteenth-century concern with "progress," and as irrelevant to our problems. The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

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(p. 36)
7 months 1 week ago

It is well said, then, that it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would have even a prospect of becoming good. But most people do not do these, but take refuge in theory and think they are being philosophers and will become good in this way, behaving somewhat like patients who listen attentively to their doctors, but do none of the things they are ordered to do.

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5 months 3 days ago

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn the literature of the whole world-all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls. Thus the soul has gradually been turned into a Nazareth from which nothing good can come.

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CW 12, par. 126 (p 99)
7 months 1 week ago

There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing and be nothing.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Thus he had a double thought: the one by which he acted as king, the other by which he recognized his true state, and that it was accident alone that had placed him in his present condition.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

The success of most things depends upon knowing how long it will take to succeed.

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4 months 3 days ago

More generally it is completely unrealistic to claim, as Gould and many others do, that religion keeps itself away from science's turf, restricting itself to morals and values. A universe with a supernatural presence would be a fundamentally and qualitatively different kind of universe from one without. The difference is, inescapably, a scientific difference. Religions make existence claims, and this means scientific claims.

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When Religion Steps on Science's Turf, Free Inquiry
4 months 4 days ago

It takes a long time to bring excellence to maturity.

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Maxim 780
2 months 6 days ago

There is no act, however virtuous, for which ingenuity may not find some bad motive.

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Letter to Edward Dowse
6 months 1 week ago

France has done more for even English history than England has.

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John Stuart Mill. Michelet.On the writing of English history. Complete Works Vol 20. Page 221.
2 months 6 days ago

Like a dropsical man calling out for water, water, our deluded citizens are clamoring for more banks, more banks. The American mind is now in that state of fever which the world has so often seen in the history of other nations. We are under the bank bubble, as England was under the South Sea bubble, France under the Mississippi bubble, and as every nation is liable to be, under whatever bubble, design, or delusion may puff up in moments when off their guard. We are now taught to believe that legerdemain tricks upon paper can produce as solid wealth as hard labor in the earth. It is vain for common sense to urge that nothing can produce nothing; that it is an idle dream to believe in a philosopher's stone which is to turn everything into gold, and to redeem man from the original sentence of his Maker, "in the sweat of his brow shall he eat his bread.

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Letter to Colonel Charles Yancey (6 January 1816) ME 14:384
6 months 5 days ago

Generally speaking there is no irreducible taste or inclination. They all represent a certain appropriative choice of being. It is up to existential psychoanalysis to compare and classify them. Ontology abandons us here; it has merely enabled us to determine the ultimate ends of human reality, its fundamental possibilities, and the value which haunts it.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

What I would like to show is that there is a vital dimension of their writing, which I call performative reflexivity, which if ignored or misunderstood will impede an adequate response to it.

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Chapter 8, Performative Reflexivity, p. 134
5 months 6 days ago

The state is therefore everyone; the rules within the state are laws which safeguard the welfare of all and which must originate from the welfare of all.

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5 months 4 days ago

Blood will stream over Europe until the nations become aware of the frightful madness which drives them in circles. And then, struck by celestial music and made gentle, they approach their former altars all together, hear about the works of peace, and hold a great celebration of peace with fervent tears before the smoking altars.

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As quoted in the Fourth Leaflet of the White Rose
5 months 1 week ago

They think of the philosopher as holding the ideal or subjective in one hand and the real or objective in the other and then have him strike the palms of his hands together so that one abrades the other. The product of this abrasion is the Absolute.

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P. 12
2 months 4 weeks ago

Bukharin, like Lenin, regarded the system of basing economic life on mass terror not as a transient necessity but as a permanent principle of socialist organization. He did not shrink from justifying all means of coercion and held, like Trotsky at the same period, that the new system called essentially for the militarization of labour - i.e. the use of police and military force to compel the whole population to work in such places and conditions as the state might arbitrarily decree. Indeed, once the market is abolished there is no longer any free sale of labour or competition between workers, and police coercion is therefore the only means of allocating "human resources". If hired labour is eliminated, only compulsory labour remains. In other words, socialism - as conceived by both Trotsky and Bukharin at this time - is a permanent, nation-wide labour camp.

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(pg. 28-9)
2 months 6 days ago

In the Ancient Period of Science, Technical Terms were formed in three different ways:-by appropriating common words and fixing their meaning;-by constructing terms containing a description;-by constructing terms containing reference to a theory.

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7 months 3 days ago

What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

One day, observing a child drinking out of his hands, he cast away the cup from his wallet with the words, "A child has beaten me in plainness of living."

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Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 37
4 months 4 weeks ago

By freedom he meant a condition in which men were not prevented from choosing both the object and the manner of their worship. For him only a society in which this condition was realised could be called fully human. Its realisation was an ideal which Mill regarded as more precious than life itself.

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5 months 2 days ago

The most interesting aspect of suffering is the sufferer's belief in its absoluteness. He believes he has a monopoly on suffering. I think that I alone suffer, that I alone have the right to suffer, although I also realize that there are modalities of suffering more terrible than mine, pieces of flesh falling from the bones, the body crumbling under one's very eyes, monstrous, criminal , shameful sufferings. One asks oneself, How can this be, and if it be, how can one still speak of finality and other such old wives' tales? Suffering moves me so much that I lose all my courage. I lose heart because I do not understand why there is suffering in the world.

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in essay: the monopoly of suffering
6 months 2 weeks ago

All that is under heaven, says the sage, runs one law and one fortune.

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Ch. 12, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Carew Hazlitt, 1877
2 months 1 day ago

It's not about telling people how to be, outside of supporting ideals that teach us what to avoid.

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5 months 1 week ago

The proximity between the counterfeit and the good coin does not make the good coin counterfeit nor the counterfeit good. In the same way the proximity between truth and falsehood does not make truth falsehood nor falsehood truth.

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III. The Classes of Seekers, p. 33.
3 months 3 days ago

Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others.

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Ch. IV: "The Golden Rule and After", p. 110.
6 months 3 weeks ago

It is only the individual possessed of the most entire sincerity that can exist under Heaven, who can adjust the great invariable relations of mankind, establish the great fundamental virtues of humanity, and know the transforming and nurturing operations of Heaven and Earth; shall this individual have any being or anything beyond himself on which he depends? Call him man in his ideal, how earnest is he! Call him an abyss, how deep is he! Call him Heaven, how vast is he! Who can know him, but he who is indeed quick in apprehension, clear in discernment, of far-reaching intelligence, and all-embracing knowledge, possessing all Heavenly virtue?

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