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5 months 3 weeks ago

My doubt goes like this: How could the Loving One have the heart to let human beings become so guilty that they got his murder on their consciences?

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5 months 3 weeks ago

I do not know, my listener, what your crime, your guilt, your sins are, but surely we are all more or less of the guilt of loving only little. Take comfort, then, in these words just as I take comfort in them.

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3 weeks 1 day ago

Men gather the clouds, and then they complain of the tempests that follow.

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Chapter III, p. 30
5 months 3 days ago

For we have in Latin only a few small streams and muddy puddles, while they have pure springs and rivers flowing in gold. I see that it is utter madness even to touch with the little finger that branch of theology that deals chiefly with the divine mysteries, unless one is also provided with the equipment of Greek.

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As quoted in Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World (2017) by By Eric Metaxas, p. 85
3 months 1 week ago

The struggle to end sexist oppression that focuses on destroying the cultural basis for such domination strengthens other liberation struggles. Individuals who fight for the eradication of sexism without struggles to end racism or classism undermine their own efforts. Individuals who fight for the eradication of racism or classism while supporting sexist oppression are helping to maintain the cultural basis of all forms of group oppression.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

I react like everyone else, even like those I most despise; but I make up for it by deploring every action I commit, good or bad.

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2 months 1 day ago

The basis of science is the empirical method, which uses the senses to build up a picture of the world; but science tells us that our senses have evolved to help us get by, not to show us the world as it is. Science is only a systematic examination of our impressions, and in the end all each of us has left are our own sensations ... The end-result of the empirical method, then, is that each individual is left alone with their own experiences. We can escape this solitude, Balfour suggested, only if we accept that there is a divine mind.

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Cross-correspondences (p. 69-70)
1 month 2 weeks ago

Happiness is the free play of the instincts, and so is youth.

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Ch. 2 : On Youth
3 months 1 week ago

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

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5 months 1 week ago

But if one should guide his life by true principles, man's greatest riches is to live on a little with contented mind; for a little is never lacking.

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Book V, lines 1117-1119 (tr. Rouse)
3 months 3 weeks ago

Dying people often become childish.

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Act II.
3 months 3 days ago

Definition of design = Everyone designs who devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. The intellectual activity that produces material artifacts is no different fundamentally from the one that prescribes remedies for a sick patient or the one that devises a new sales plan for a company or a social welfare policy for a state.

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p. 130.
2 months 3 weeks ago

Pornography and obscenity...work by specialism and fragmentation. They deal with a figure without a ground -- situations in which the human factor is suppressed in favor of sensations and kicks.

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Letter to Clare Westcott, November 26 1975. Letters of Marshall McLuhan, p. 514
3 weeks 4 days ago

God is imperiled. He is not almighty, that we may cross our hands, waiting for certain victory. He is not all-holy, that we may wait trustingly for him to pity and to save us. Within the province of our ephemeral flesh all of God is imperiled. He cannot be saved unless we save him with our own struggles; nor can we be saved unless he is saved. We are one. From the blind worm in the depths of the ocean to the endless arena of the Galaxy, only one person struggles and is imperiled: You. And within your small and earthen breast only one thing struggles and is imperiled: the Universe.

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5 months 2 days ago

All seed except Mary was vitiated [by original sin].

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Weimar edition of Martin Luther's Works, English translation edited by J. Pelikan [Concordia: St. Louis], Vol. 11, WA, 39, II:107
4 months 3 weeks ago

Natural science is throughout either a pure or an applied doctrine of motion.

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Preface, Tr. Bax, 1883
1 month 3 days ago

In whatever state of knowledge we may conceive man to be placed, his progress towards a yet higher state need never fear a check, but must continue till the last existence of society.

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Ch. 6 Of the Causes of the actual rapid Advance of the Physical Sciences compared with their Progress at an earlier Period
1 month 2 weeks ago

As for civilization, from which at last we are about to escape, so far from being the social destiny of man, it is only a transient stage - a state of temporary evil with which globes are afflicted during the first ages of their career; it is for the human race a disease of infancy, like teething; but it is a disease which has been prolonged in our globe at least twenty centuries beyond its natural term, owing to the neglect on the part of the ancient philosophy to study association and passional attraction.

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1 month 1 week ago

The fact is that in order to do any thing in this world worth doing, we must not stand shivering on the bank thinking of the cold and the danger, but jump in and scramble through as well as we can.

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Lecture IX : On the Conduct of the Understanding

Here take back the stuff that I am, nature, knead it back into the dough of being, make of me a bush, a cloud, whatever you will, even a man, only no longer make me me.

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B 37 "Speech of a suicide composed shortly before the act."
3 months 2 weeks ago

Scientists believe there is a hierarchy of facts and that among them may be made a judicious choice. They are right, since otherwise there would be no science... One need only open the eyes to see that the conquests of industry which have enriched so many practical men would never have seen the light, if these practical men alone had existed and if they had not been preceded by unselfish devotees who died poor, who never thought of utility, and yet had a guide far other than caprice.As Mach says, these devotees have spared their successors the trouble of thinking.

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Henri Poincaré, The Value of Science (1907) Author's Essay Prefatory to the Translation: "The Choice of Facts," p.4, Tr. George Bruce Halsted
3 months 2 weeks ago

Reason is like an open secret that can become known to anyone at any time; it is the quiet space into which everyone can enter through his own thought.

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As quoted in Philosophy for a Time of Crisis : An Interpretation, with Key Writings by Fifteen Great Modern Thinkers (1959) by Adrienne Koch, Ch. 18, "Karl Jaspers : A New Humanism"

It is not enough for a wise man to study nature and truth; he should dare state truth for the benefit of the few who are willing and able to think.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Of this Shakspeare of ours, perhaps the opinion one sometimes hears a little idolatrously expressed is, in fact, the right one; I think the best judgement not of this country only, but of Europe at large, is slowly pointing to the conclusion, That Shakspeare is the chief of all Poets hitherto; the greatest intellect who, in our recorded world, has left record of himself in the way of Literature. On the whole, I know not such a power of vision, such a faculty of thought, if we take all the characters of it, in any other man. Such a calmness of depth; placid joyous strength; all things imaged in that great soul of his so true and clear, as in a tranquil unfathomable sea!

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4 months 2 weeks ago

As long as we try to project from the relative and conditioned to the absolute and unconditioned, we shall keep the pendulum swinging between dogmatism and skepticism. The only way to stop this increasingly tiresome pendulum swing is to change our conception of what philosophy is good for. But that is not something which will be accomplished by a few neat arguments. It will be accomplished, if it ever is, by a long, slow process of cultural change - that is to say, of change in common sense, changes in the intuitions available for being pumped up by philosophical arguments.

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Introduction to Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (1998).
2 months 3 days ago

The educated man is the man who does not live in immediate intuition, but in his recollection so that little is new to him any longer.

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Chapter 4, Philosophy As Writing: The Case Of Hegel, p. 74
4 months 3 weeks ago

Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs; and lucky it is if the passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

To spendthrifts money is so living and actual-it is such a thin veil between them and their pleasures! There is only one limit to their fortune-that of time; and a spendthrift with only a few crowns is the Emperor of Rome until they are spent. For such a person to lose his money is to suffer the most shocking reverse, and fall from heaven to hell, from all to nothing, in a breath.

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A Lodging for the Night.
3 months 2 weeks ago

My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly the contrary of a mission.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

And some others that I have seen, were perhaps among the first. There is no third rising. Time sweeps all away with it so fast at this epoch. The Scottish Church has been short-lived, and was late in reaching thither.

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5 months 1 day ago

There are some defeats more triumphant than victories.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

I have been quoted as saying captious things about travel; but I mean to do justice. I think, there is a restlessness in our people, which argues want of character. All educated Americans, first or last, go to Europe; - perhaps, because it is their mental home, as the invalid habits of this country might suggest. An eminent teacher of girls said, "the idea of a girl's education, is, whatever qualifies them for going to Europe." Can we never extract this tape-worm of Europe from the brain of our countrymen?

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Culture
3 months 6 days ago

Perhaps it is not true to speak of God as a judge at all, or of his judgements. There does not seem to be really any evidence that His worlds are places of trial but rather schools, place of training, or that He is a judge but rather a Teacher, a Trainer, not in the imperfect sense in which men are teachers, but in the sense of His contriving and adapting His whole universe for one purpose of training every intelligent being to be perfect. ... I think God would not be the Almighty, the All-Wise, the All-Good, if he were the judge, in the sense that the evangelical and Roman Catholic Christians impute judgement to him. ... Our business is, I think, to understand, not to judge. What He does, as far as we know, to rule by law down to the most infinitesimally small portion of His universe, not to judge.

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As quoted in Florence Nightingale's Theology: Collected Works of Florence Nightingale (2002) by Lynn McDonald, pps. 177-179
3 months 1 week ago

Any physical object which by its influence deteriorates its environment, commits suicide.

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Ch. 6: "The Nineteenth Century", p. 155
5 months 2 days ago

By the law is the knowledge of sin [Rom 3:20], so the word of grace comes only to those who are distressed by a sense of sin and tempted to despair.

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p. 168
5 months 3 weeks ago

And thus Christianity is played in, Christendom. Artists in dramatic costumes make their appearance in artistic buildings-there really is no danger at all, anything but that: the teacher is a royal functionary, steadily promoted, making a career-and how he dramatically plays Christianity, in short, he plays comedy. He lectures about renunciation, but he himself is being steadily promoted; he teaches all that about despising worldly titles and rank, but he himself is making a career.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Let any one try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.

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Ch. 15
3 months 1 week ago

Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn't trust the evidence of one's eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice.

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"Preface (2003)"
5 months 1 week ago

The Catholic faith, I now realized could be maintained without presumption. This was especially true after I had heard one or two parts of the Old Testament explained allegorically, whereas before this, when I had interpreted them literally, they had killed me spiritually.

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A. Outler, trans. (Dover: 2002), Book 5, Chapter 14, p. 81.
1 month 2 weeks ago

Carnap made a detailed analysis of Heidegger's statement, "Nothing nihilates," in order to show that it is purely verbal, devoid of empirical meaning. (Incidentally, this is the only sentence from existentialist philosophy the majority of contemporary positivists appear familiar with.)

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Chapter Eight, Logical Empiricism, p. 187
3 months 3 weeks ago

Mankind will never be, in an eminent degree, virtuous and happy till each man shall possess that portion of distinction and no more, to which he is entitled by his personal merits. The dissolution of aristocracy is equally the interest of the oppressor and the oppressed. The one will be delivered from the listlessness of tyranny, and the other from the brutalizing operation of servitude.

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Book V, Chapter 11, "Moral Effects of Aristocracy"
1 month 2 days ago

Some subjects are so serious that one can only joke about them.

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As quoted in The Genius of Science: A Portrait Gallery (2000) by Abraham Pais, p. 24
3 months 3 weeks ago

In England ... everything becomes professional ... even the rogues of that island are pedants.

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"Selected Aphorisms from the Lyceum (1797)"
2 months 2 weeks ago

The picture of modern philosophy as centered in epistemology and driven by the desire to ground our representations is so tenacious that some philosophers are prepared to bite the bullet and declare the effort simply wasted. Rorty, for example, finds it easier to reject modern philosophy altogether than to reject the standard accounts of its history. His narrative is more polemical than most, but it's a polemical version of the story told in most philosophy departments in the second half of the twentieth century. The story is one of tortuously decreasing interest. Philosophy, like some people, was prepared to accept boredom in exchange for certainty as it grew to middle age.

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3 months 1 week ago

More and more it is becoming evident that what the West can most readily give to the East is its science and its scientific outlook. This is transferable from country to country, and from race to race, wherever there is a rational society.

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Ch. 1: "The Origins of Modern Science", p. 4
3 months 1 week ago

In all philosophic theory there is an ultimate which is actual in virtue of its accidents. It is only then capable of characterization through its accidental embodiments, and apart from these accidents is devoid of actuality. In the philosophy of organism this ultimate is termed creativity; and [[God] is its primordial, non-temporal accident. In monistic philosophies, Spinoza's or absolute idealism, this ultimate is God, who is also equivalently termed The Absolute. In such monistic schemes, the ultimate is illegitimately allowed a final, eminent reality, beyond that ascribed to any of its accidents. In this general position the philosophy of organism seems to approximate more to some strains of Indian, or Chinese, thought, than to western Asiatic, or European, thought. One side makes process ultimate; the other side makes fact ultimate.

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Pt. I, ch. 1, sec. 2.

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