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2 months 4 weeks ago

Ignorant as regards the unity of man with himself, the world is still more ignorant in respect to the two other unities - unity of man with God and the universe.

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6 months 2 days ago

If a given science accidentally reached its goal, this would by no means stop the workers in the field, who would be driven past their goal by the sheer momentum of the illusion of unlimited progress.

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p. 55
2 months 3 days ago

Delay is preferable to error.

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Letter to George Washington
6 months 1 week ago

It seldom happens, however, that a great proprietor is a great improver.

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Chapter IV, p. 420.
6 months 5 days ago

I have lived an honest and useful life to mankind; my time has been spend in doing good and I die in perfect composure and resignation to the will of my Creator, God.

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Last will (1809), as quoted in The Fortnightly Review, vol. 31, pp. 398-399
2 months 3 days ago

When public opinion changes, it is with the rapidity of thought.

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Letter to Colonel Charles Yancey (6 January 1816) ME 14:384
6 months 2 days ago

If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.

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Interview (1960), Quoted in Susan Sontag's introduction to Barthes: Selected Writings, "Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes,"
1 month 3 weeks ago

So, this is ooold school, like old old school. So, I think we've had it backward for a long time. I think we are entering a new era and it's time to directly say Existence>essence. Being>identity.

"being" here is referring to our contingent identity. But I think we have to face the fact we don't know what happens to the identity when we die. But we know, when the body exists, our identity persists. We can't let identity particularity subvert life. Subvert existence.

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The first among the sciences is that of statesmanship. That cannot be learnt in academies. No great minister, from Suger to Richelieu, ever occupied himself with physics or mathematics. The genius of the natural sciences makes impossible that other kind of genius, which is a talent unto itself.

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"Eighth Dialogue," p. 297-298
4 months 4 weeks ago

In the case of colors, there is a tridimensional spread of feelings. Originally all feelings may have been connected in the same way, and the presumption is that the number of dimensions was endless. For development essentially involves a limitation of possibilities. But given a number of dimensions of feeling, all possible varieties are obtainable by varying the intensities of the different elements.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

It is the fate of 'little faiths' of truth that they, true followers of Peter, whether they be Roman or the Protestant observance, cry out and sink in the sea of ideas, where the followers of Paul, believing in the Spirit, walk secure and undismayed.

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p. 32
2 months ago

The controlling Intelligence understands its own nature, and what it does, and whereon it works.

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VI, 5
6 months 2 days ago

Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man's resources?

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4 months 4 weeks ago

It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition.

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4 months 1 day ago

Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.

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(p. 48)
6 months 1 week ago

How many we know who have fled the sweetness of a tranquil life in their homes, among their friends, to seek the horror of uninhabitable deserts; who have flung themselves into humiliation, degradation, and the contempt of the world, and have enjoyed these and even sought them out.

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Ch. 14 (tr. Donald M. Frame)
4 months 4 weeks ago

That fear which gives birth to thoughts, and the fear of thoughts...

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1 month 3 weeks ago

As a child, I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Feeling does not succeed in converting consolation into truth, nor does reason succeed in converting truth into consolation.

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7 months 3 days ago

For the things we have to learn before we can do, we learn by doing.

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2 months 1 week ago

The individual who is subordinate to an objective law feels himself determined by it, while he, in turn, in no way determines the law, and has no possibility of reacting to it in a manner which could influence it-quite in contrast to even the most miserable slave, who, in some fashion at last, can still in this sense react to his master.

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"Domination" (1908), in On Individuality and Social Forms (1971), pp. 113-114
6 months 3 days ago

Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognise him.

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Ch.10
5 months 1 week ago

Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Subjects who reciprocally recognize each other as such, must consider each other as identical, insofar as they both take up the position of subject; they must at all times subsume themselves and the other under the same category. At the same time, the relation of reciprocity of recognition demands the non-identity of one and the other, both must also maintain their absolute difference, for to be a subject implies the claim of individuation.

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Habermas (1972) "Sprachspiel, intention und Bedeutung. Zu Motiven bei Sellars und Wittgenstein". In R.W. Wiggerhaus (Ed.) Sprachanalyse and Soziologie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp). p. 334 This is called the paradoxical achievement of intersubjectivity
6 months 3 days ago

Talk of mysteries! - Think of our life in nature, - daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, - rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?

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The Maine Woods (1848)
4 months 2 weeks ago

The main importance of Francis Bacon's influence does not lie in any peculiar theory of inductive reasoning which he happened to express, but in the revolt against second-hand information of which he was a leader.

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5 months 1 week ago

Jews are angry and brutish people, vile and vulgar men, slaves worthy of the yoke [Talmudism] which you bear... Go, take back your books and remove yourselves from me. [ The Talmud ] taught the Jews to steal the goods of Christians, to regard them as savage beasts, to push them over the precipice... to kill them with impunity and to utter every morning the most horrible imprecations against them.

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See The Jews: A History, Second Edition, by John Efron, Steven Weitzman and Matthias Lehmann
7 months 4 days ago

If it were so, as conceited sagacity, proud of not being deceived, thinks, that we should believe nothing that we cannot see with our physical eyes, then we first and foremost ought to give up believing in love. ... We can be deceived by believing what is untrue, but we certainly are also deceived by not believing what is true. ... Which deception is more dangerous?

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6 months 2 days ago

The hatefulness of a hated person is "real"-in hatred you see men as they are; you are disillusioned; but the loveliness of a loved person is merely a subjective haze concealing a "real" core of sexual appetite or economic association. Wars and poverty are "really" horrible; peace and plenty are mere physical facts about which men happen to have certain sentiments.

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Letter XXX
6 months 1 week ago

The cause and root of nearly all evils in the sciences is this - that while we falsely admire and extol the powers of the human mind we neglect to seek for its true helps.

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Aphorism 9
2 months 3 days ago

The mother principle is that governments are republican only in proportion as they embody the will of their people, and execute it.

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7 months 5 days ago
Perhaps no philosopher is more correct than the cynic. The happiness of the animal, that thorough cynic, is the living proof of cynicism.
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4 months 3 weeks ago

And, being assembled together with them, commanded them that they should not depart from Jerusalem, but wait for the promise of the Father, which, saith he, ye have heard of me. For John truly baptized with water; but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days hence.

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1:4-5 (KJV)
6 months 1 week ago

To say that the cross emblazoned with the papal coat of arms, and set up by the indulgence preachers, is equal in worth to the cross of Christ is blasphemy.

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Thesis 79
4 months 3 weeks ago

It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.

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4:4 (KJV) Said to Satan. The reference is to Deuteronomy 8:3, "... that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man live." (KJV)
6 months 4 days ago

Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.

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6 months 2 days ago

Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of-throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.

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Book IV, Chapter 9, "Counting the Cost"
2 months 2 weeks ago

There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Out-of-date theories are not in principle unscientific because they have been discarded. That choice, however, makes it difficult to see scientific development as a process of accretion.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

The mind must not be forced; artificial and constrained manners fill it with foolish presumption, through unnatural elevation and vain and ridiculous inflation, instead of solid and vigorous nutriment.

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2 months 1 week ago

Prussia had been the creation of a dynasty that had the nobility, the army and the higher bureaucracy for its backbone. The primary element was not the 'nation' or the Volk. Rather the state, more than the land or the ethnos, constituted the real foundation and unifying principle. There was none of that in Hitlerism.

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p. 37
5 months 4 weeks ago

The purely corporeal can be uncanny. Compare the way angels and devils are portrayed. So-called "miracles" must be connected with this. A miracle must be, as it were, a sacred gesture.

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p. 50e
6 months 1 week ago

For I find that even those that have sought knowledge for itself and not for benefit, or ostentation, or any practical enablement in the course of their life, have nevertheless propounded to themselves a wrong mark, namely, satisfaction, which men call truth, and not operation. For as in the courts and services of princes and states, it is a much easier matter to give satisfaction than to do the business; so in the inquiring of causes and reasons it is much easier to find out such causes as will satisfy the mind of man, and quiet objections, than such causes as will direct him and give him light to new experiences and inventions.

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Valerius Terminus: Of the Interpretation of Nature (ca. 1603), in Works, Vol. 1; The Works of Francis Bacon (1857), Vol. 3, p. 232
2 months 3 weeks ago

The true Church of England, at this moment, lies in the Editors of its Newspapers. These preach to the people daily, weekly; admonishing kings themselves; advising peace or war, with an authority which only the first Reformers, and a long-past class of Popes, were possessed of; inflicting moral censure; imparting moral encouragement, consolation, edification; in all ways diligently "administering the Discipline of the Church."

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7 months ago

476 ... is usually taken as the date of the "fall of the Roman Empire." The date, however, is a false one. No one at this period of time considered that the Roman Empire had "fallen." Indeed, it still existed and was the most powerful realm in Europe. Its capital was at Constantinople and the Emperor was Zeno. It is only because we ourselves are culturally descended from the Roman west, that we tend to ignore the continued existence of the Roman Empire in the east.

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4 months 5 days ago

To say that a life is grievable is to claim that a life, even before it is lost, is, or will be, worthy of being grieved on the occasion of its loss; the life has value in relation to mortality. One treats a person differently if one brings the sense of the grievability of the other to one's ethical bearing toward the other. If an other's loss would register as a loss, would be marked and mourned, and if the prospect of loss is feared, and precautions are thus taken to safeguard that life from harm or destruction, then our very ability to value and safeguard a life depends upon an ongoing sense of its grievability-the conjectured future of a life as an indefinite potential that would be mourned were it cut short or lost.

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p. 75
4 months 3 weeks ago

For the Lawes of Nature (as Justice, Equity, Modesty, Mercy, and (in summe)doing to others, as wee would be done to,) of themselves, without the terrour of some Power, to cause them to be observed, are contrary to our naturall Passions, that carry us to Partiality, Pride, Revenge, and the like. And Covenants, without the Sword, are but Words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.

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The Second Part, Chapter 17, p. 85

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