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2 months 3 weeks ago

Students have powerful images of what a perfect body is and pursue it incessantly. But deprived of literary guidance, they no longer have any image of a perfect soul, and hence do not long to have one.

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p. 67.
5 months 2 weeks ago

The divine origin of man, as taught by Vedanta, IS continually inculcated, to stimulate his efforts to return, to animate him in the struggle, and incite him to consider a reunion and reincorporation with Divinity as the one primary object of every action and reaction. Even the loftiest philosophy of the European, the idealism of reason as it is set forth by the Greek philosophers, appears in comparison with the abundant light and vigor of Oriental idealism like a feeble Promethean spark in the full flood of heavenly glory of the noonday sun, faltering and feeble and ever ready to be extinguished.

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quoted in Londhe, S. (2008). A tribute to Hinduism: Thoughts and wisdom spanning continents and time about India and her culture. New Delhi: Pragun Publication.
3 months 3 weeks ago

The difference between a Humanist and a lunatic is in fact one of degree.

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Vol. 9
6 months 2 weeks ago

Every poet has trembled on the verge of science.

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July 18, 1852
5 months 1 week ago

What man calls Absolute Being, his God, is his own being. The power of the object over him is therefore the power of his own being. Thus, the power of the object of feeling is the power of feeling itself; the power of the object of reason is the power of reason itself; and the power of the object of will is the power of will itself.

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Introduction, Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), p. 102
6 months 3 weeks ago

God never sends evils.

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Ch. 12
6 months 3 weeks ago

All who say the same things do not possess them in the same manner; and hence the incomparable author of the Art of Conversation pauses with so much care to make it understood that we must not judge of the capacity of a man by the excellence of a happy remark that we heard him make. ...let us penetrate, says he, the mind from which it proceeds... it will oftenest be seen that he will be made to disavow it on the spot, and will be drawn very far from this better thought in which he does not believe, to plunge himself into another, quite base and ridiculous.

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Montaigne, Essais, liv. III, chap. viii.-Faugère
6 months 1 week ago

I do not think the resemblance between the Christian and the merely imaginative experience is accidental. I think that all things, in their own way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least. "Reflect" is the important word. This lower life of the imagination is not a beginning of, nor a step toward, the higher life of the spirit, merely an image.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

The people are asleep; they remain indifferent. They forge their own chains and do the bidding of their masters to crucify their Christs.

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(p. 304)
3 months 1 week ago

Whether or not birth control is eugenic, hygienic, and economic, it is the most revolutionary practice in the history of sexual morals.

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Ch. XIV: "Love in the Great Society", §4, p. 291
6 months 1 week ago

To talk about religion except in terms of human psychology is an irrelevance.

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"One and Many," p. 3
4 months 3 weeks ago

The kind of relatedness to the world may be noble or trivial, but even being related to the basest kind of pattern is immensely preferable to being alone.

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Ch. 1
3 months 4 days ago

For the Scepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things.

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4 months 2 days ago

The highest proof of virtue is to possess boundless power without abusing it.

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The Life and Writings of Addison', The Edinburgh Review (July 1843), quoted in T. B. Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to The Edinburgh Review: A New Edition (1852), p. 706
5 months 6 days ago

The mind celebrates a little triumph whenever it can formulate a truth, however unwelcome to the flesh, or discover an actual force, however unfavourable to given interests.

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Ch. IV.: Music
1 month 4 days ago

"We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything."
- Emil Cioran

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

Read Emil Cioran's work:
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#philosophy #quotes #CivilSimian #UniversalHumanism

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6 months 1 week ago

One can say that the author is an ideological product, since we represent him as the opposite of his historically real function. (When a historically given function is represented in a figure that inverts it, one has an ideological production.) The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.

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What is an author?
2 months 1 week ago

The problem is that rural America has been a colony, certainly throughout my lifetime. I don't think anybody's paid attention to rural America since about 1945 or '50. Certainly not since 1952, when Eisenhower's Secretary of Agriculture said to the farmers: "Get big or get out." They've just abandoned rural America to corporations and technologies.

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5 months 6 days ago

And whereas many men, by accident unevitable, become unable to maintain themselves by their labour; they ought not to be left to the Charity of private persons; but to be provided for, (as far-forth as the necessities of Nature require,) by the Lawes of the Common-wealth. For as it is Unchariablenesse in any man, to neglect the impotent; so it is in the Soveraign of a Common-wealth, to expose them to the hazard of such uncertain Charity.

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The Second Part, Chapter 30, p. 181
3 months 2 weeks ago

Liberals tend to regard being subjects of the Queen as an insult to their dignity. But at least the archaic structures by which we are ruled do not force us to define ourselves by blood, soil or faith, and we are protected from the poisonous politics of identity.

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"Monarchy is the key to our liberty,", The Observer
6 months 2 weeks ago

On the other hand one must not entertain any fantastic illusions on the productive power of the credit system, so far as it supplies or sets in motion money-capital.

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Vol. II, Ch. XVII, p. 351.
2 months 3 weeks ago

The presence of a proletarian aspect in Nazism is undeniable, as in the figure of Hitler himself, who had none of the traits of a 'gentleman,' of an aristocratic type di razza. This proletarian aspect and even vulgarity of National Socialism was often noticed, especially in Austria after its annexation to the Reich and after the phase of a rash 'national' infatuation of Austrians for 'Greater Germany.'

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p. 43
7 months 1 week ago

Scientific theories can always be improved and are improved. That is one of the glories of science. It is the authoritarian view of the Universe that is frozen in stone and cannot be changed, so that once it is wrong, it is wrong forever.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Look round this universe. What an immense profusion of beings, animated and organised, sensible and active! You admire this prodigious variety and fecundity. But inspect a little more narrowly these living existences, the only beings worth regarding. How hostile and destructive to each other! How insufficient all of them for their own happiness! How contemptible or odious to the spectator! The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind Nature, impregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children!

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Philo to Cleanthes, Part XI
5 months 2 weeks ago

When shall we see poets born? After a time of disasters and great misfortunes, when harrowed nations begin to breathe again. And then, shaken by the terror of such spectacles, imaginations will paint things entirely strange to those who have not witnessed them.

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3 months 1 week ago

Well, since paradoxes are at hand, let us see how it might be demonstrated that in a finite continuous extension it is not impossible for infinitely many voids to be found.

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Salviati, First Day, Stillman Drake translation
3 months 4 days ago

All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books.

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4 months 1 week ago

In this book we turn to the study of new patterns of energy arising from man's physical and psychic artifacts and social organizations. The only method for perceiving process and pattern is by inventory of effects obtained by the comparison and contrast of developing situations.

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(p. 8)
6 months 1 week ago

Blessed are those who have no talent!

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February 1850
2 months 1 week ago

The fundamental terms of a system of Nomenclature may "be conveniently borrowed from casual or arbitrary circumstances.

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6 months 1 week ago

In these downbeat times, we need as much hope and courage as we do vision and analysis; we must accent the best of each other even as we point out the vicious effects of our racial divide and pernicious consequences of our maldistribution of wealth and power. We simply cannot enter the twenty-first century at each other's throats, even as we acknowledge the weighty forces of racism, patriarchy, economic inequality, homophobia, and ecological abuse on our necks. We are at a crucial crossroad in the history of this nation--and we either hang together by combating these forces that divide and degrade us or we hang separately. Do we have the intelligence, humor, imagination, courage, tolerance, love, respect, and will to meet the challenge? Time will tell. None of us alone can save the nation or world. But each of us can make a positive difference if we commit ourselves to do so.

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(p 109)
6 months 2 weeks ago

The first characteristic of the human species is man's ability, as a rational being, to establish character for himself, as well as for the society into which nature has placed him. This ability, however, presupposes an already favorable natural predisposition and an inclination to the good in man, because the evil is really without character (since it is at odds with itself, and since it does not tolerate any lasting principle within itself)

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Kant, Immanuel (1996), page 246
6 months 2 weeks ago

Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality. 

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"Don't Be Too Certain!"
6 months 4 weeks ago

Love all men, even your enemies; love them, not because they are your brothers, but that they may become your brothers. Thus you will ever burn with fraternal love, both for him who is already your brother and for your enemy, that he may by loving become your brother. Even he that does not as yet believe in Christ, love him, and love him with fraternal love. He is not yet thy brother, but love him precisely that he may be thy brother.

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p.436
5 months 2 weeks ago

In no other country in the world is the love of property keener or more alert than in the United States, and nowhere else does the majority display less inclination toward doctrines which in any way threaten the way property is owned.

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Book Three, Chapter XXI.
2 months 4 weeks ago

Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything.

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Lecture IX : On the Conduct of the Understanding
2 months 3 weeks ago

If we should classify one by one all those who hate others and injure others, should we find them to be universal in love or partial? Of course we should say they are partial. Now, since partiality against one another is the cause of the major calamities in the empire, then partiality is wrong.

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Book 4; Universal Love III
6 months 1 week ago

We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves. 

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Introduction
6 months 1 week ago

Nicias, do you think you can erase with good deeds the wrongs you committed against your mother? What good deed will ever reach her? Her soul is a scorching noon time, without a single breath of a breeze, nothing moves, nothing changes, nothing lives there; a great emaciated sun, an immobile sun eternally consumes her.

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King Aegistheus, Act 2
3 months 3 weeks ago

Assume, provisionally at any rate, a utilitarian ethic. The abolitionist project follows naturally, in "our" parochial corner of Hilbert space at least. On its completion, if not before, we should aim to develop superintelligence to maximise the well-being of the fragment of the cosmos accessible to beneficent intervention. And when we are sure - absolutely sure - that we have done literally everything we can do to eradicate suffering elsewhere, perhaps we should forget about its very existence.

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Quantum Ethics? Suffering in the Multiverse, BLTC Research, 2008

One needs only eyes to see the necessary influence of old age on reason.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.

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E 19
6 months 3 weeks ago

Throughout your treatment you forget that you said that 'free-will' can do nothing without grace, and you prove that 'free-will' can do all things without grace! Your inferences and analogies "For if man has lost his freedom, and is forced to serve sin, and cannot will good, what conclusion can more justly be drawn concerning him, than that he sins and wills evil necessarily?

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p. 149
5 months 1 week ago

Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?

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5 months 1 week ago

If someone incessantly drops the word "life," you know he's a sick man.

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5 months 6 days ago

Man is an imagining being.

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Ch. 2, sect. 10

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