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4 months 3 weeks ago

Barbusse has shown us that the Outsider is a man who cannot live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeois, accepting what he sees and touches as reality.

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

Certainly it is true that Christians, so far as they themselves are concerned, are subject neither to law nor sword, and have need of neither. But take heed and first fill the world with real Christians before you attempt to rule it in a Christian and evangelical manner. This you will never accomplish; for the world and the masses are and always will be un-Christian, even if they are all baptized and Christian in name.

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p. 91
2 months 5 days ago

Remember that what pulls the strings is the force hidden within; there lies the power to persuade, there the life,-there, if one must speak out, the real man.

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X, 38
4 months 3 weeks ago

We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They transforming being at home to being in the world. They turn the world into a reliable place. They are to time what a home is to space. They render time habitable.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

As Christ had recommended peace during the whole of his life, mark with what anxiety he enforces it at the approach of his dissolution. Love one another, says he; as I have loved you, so love one another; and again, my peace I give unto you, my peace I leave you. Do you observe the legacy he leaves to those whom he loves? Is it a pompous retinue, a large estate, or empire? Nothing of this kind. What is it then? Peace he giveth, his peace he leaveth; peace, not only with our near connections, but with enemies and strangers!

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6 months 1 week ago

The adjective is the enemy of the substantive.

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Variants: The adjective is the enemy of the noun. Quote attributed in Arthur Schopenhauer (translated by Mrs Rudolf Dircks), Essays of Schopenhauer (2004), Kessinger Publishing, p. 31
7 months 6 days 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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2 months 1 week ago

Discovery depends upon the previous cultivation or natural clearness of the appropriate Idea, and therefore no discovery is the work of accident.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Zen Buddhism is inspired by a basic trust in the Here, a basic trust in the world.

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6 months 1 week ago

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs 'pass,' so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.

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Lecture VI, Pragmatism's Conception of Truth
6 months 1 week ago

The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.

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6 months 4 days ago

Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.

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p. 39e
4 months 4 days ago

But the more he is alone with nature, the greater man and his doings bulk in the consideration of his fellow-men.

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Toils And Pleasures.
4 months 1 day ago

Our media make crisis chatter out of news and fill our minds with anxious phantoms of the real thing - a summit in Helsinki, a treaty in Egypt, a constitutional crisis in India, a vote in the U.N., the financial collapse of New York. We can't avoid being politicized (a word as murky as the condition which it describes) because it is necessary after all to know what is going on. Worse yet, what is going on will not let us alone. Neither the facts nor the deformations, the insidious platitudes of the media (tormenting because the underlying realities are so large and so terrible), can be screened out. The study of literature itself is heavily "politicized."

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To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account (1976) [Viking/Penguin, 1998, ISBN 0-141-18075-7], p. 21
4 months 3 weeks ago

I do not think discursively. It is not so much that I arrive at truth as that I take my start from it.

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Introduction
2 months 3 weeks ago

My idea of heaven is, eating pâté de foie gras to the sound of trumpets.

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View ascribed by Smith to his friend Henry Luttrell; reported in Hesketh Pearson, The Smith of Smiths (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1934), p. 236
5 months 1 week ago

The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other; and with them this conviction does not spring from that barren traditionary faith which seems to vegetate in the soul rather than to live.

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Chapter XVII.
4 months 2 weeks ago

What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment.

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L 49
6 months 1 week ago

The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.

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Volume I; Part 1; "Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook"; Section A, "Idealism and Materialism".
6 months 1 week ago

The intolerant can be viewed as free-riders, as persons who seek the advantages of just institutions while not doing their share to uphold them.

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Chapter VI, Section 59, pg. 388
5 months 5 days ago

Every step closer to my soul excites the scornful laughter of my devils, those cowardly ear-whisperers and poison-mixers. It was easy for them to laugh, since I had to do strange things.

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P. 234
6 months 3 days ago

Nevertheless, among all the temptations I will have to resist today. There would be the temptation of memory: to recount what was for me, and for those of my generation who shared it during a whole lifetime. The experience of Marxism. The quasi-paternal figure of Marx, the way it fought in us with other filiations, the reading of texts and the interpretation of a world in which the Marxist inheritance was-and still remains, and so it will remain-absolutely and thoroughly determinate. One need not be a Marxist or a communist in order to accept this obvious fact. We all live in a world, some would say a culture, that still bears, at an incalculable depth, the mark of this inheritance, whether in a directly visible fashion or not.

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Injunctions of Marx
6 months 1 week ago

We invite this Congress, and through it the scientists of the world and the general public, to subscribe to the following resolution: "In view of the fact that in any future world war nuclear weapons will certainly be employed, and that such weapons threaten the continued existence of mankind, we urge the governments of the world to realize, and to acknowledge publicly, that their purpose cannot be furthered by a world war, and we urge them, consequently, to find peaceful means for the settlement of all matters of dispute between them".

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Few men think; yet all have opinions.

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Philonous to Hylas. The Second Dialogue. This appears in a passage first added in the third edition
6 months 4 days ago

The world is all that is the case.

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(1) Original German: Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.
2 months 2 weeks ago

This dogma had first to be shattered before men could once more go out in quest of the historical Jesus, before they could even grasp the thought of His existence. That the historic Jesus is something different from the Jesus Christ of the doctrine of the Two Natures seems to us now self-evident. We can, at the present day, scarcely imagine the long agony in which the historical view of the life of Jesus came to birth. And even when He was once more recalled to life. He was still, like Lazarus of old, bound hand and foot with grave-clothes - the grave-clothes of the dogma of the Dual Nature.

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p. 3
6 months 3 weeks ago

Cease therefore to be dismayed by the mere novelty and so to reject reason from your mind with loathing: weigh the questions rather with keen judgment and if they seem to you to be true, surrender, or if the thing is false, gird yourself to the encounter.

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Book II, lines 1040-1043 (tr. Munro)
4 months 4 days ago

The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes.

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Ch. 1. Why Are People?
4 months 3 weeks ago

School children and students who love God should never say: "For my part I like mathematics"; "I like French"; "I like Greek." They should learn to like all these subjects, because all of them develop that faculty of attention which, directed toward God, is the very substance of prayer.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

It is odd that the last twenty-five years which have witnessed the greatest progress ever made in physical science-the greatest victories ever achieved by mind over matter-should have produced hardly a volume that will be remembered in 1900.

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Journal entry (9 March 1850), quoted in Thomas Macaulay, The Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay: Volume 5, January 1849-December 1855, ed. Thomas Pinney (1981), p. 99
6 months 1 week ago

Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 20, § 242
2 months 4 weeks ago

Middle age begins with marriage; for then work and responsibility replace carefree play, passion surrenders to the limitations of social order, and poetry yields to prose.

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Ch. 3 : On Middle Age
4 months 3 weeks ago

What is so remarkable about Crowley the 'magician' is that he remains Crowley the scientist, and always applies the same probing intellectual curiosity to every field he surveys. This is ultimately the most impressive quality about his mind, and the one that might -- if he had concentrated on developing it to the full -- have brought him the fame that he craved. Crowley's tragedy was that he never concentrated long enough to develop anything to the full.

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p. 150
6 months 1 week ago

Art may make a suit of clothes; but nature must produce a man.

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Part I, Essay 15: The Epicurean
2 months 3 weeks ago

In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? Or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue? What does the world yet owe to American physicians or surgeons? What new substances have their chemists discovered? Or what old ones have they advanced? What new constellations have been discovered by the telescopes of Americans? Who drinks out of American glasses? Or eats from American plates? Or wears American coats or gowns? or sleeps in American blankets? Finally, under which of the old tyrannical governments of Europe is every sixth man a slave, whom his fellow-creatures may buy and sell and torture?

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Referring to the lack of established culture and the established institution of slavery in the United States, in "Review of Seybert's Annals of the United States", The Edinburgh Review (1820), pp. 79-80
4 months 4 weeks ago

No criticism can be brought against a branch of technical science from outside; no thought fitted out with the knowledge of a period and setting its course by definite historical aims could have anything to say to the specialist. Such thought and the critical, dialectical element it communicates to the process of cognition, thereby maintaining conscious connection between that process and historical life, do not exist for empiricism; nor do the associated categories, such as the distinction between essence and appearance, identity in change, and rationality of ends, indeed, the concept of man, of personality, even of society and class taken in the sense that presupposes specific viewpoints and directions of interest.

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p. 145.
6 months 1 week ago

Pure Mathematics is the class of all propositions of the form "p implies q," where p and q are propositions containing one or more variables, the same in the two propositions, and neither p nor q contains any constants except logical constants. And logical constants are all notions definable in terms of the following: Implication, the relation of a term to a class of which it is a member, the notion of such that, the notion of relation, and such further notions as may be involved in the general notion of propositions of the above form. In addition to these, mathematics uses a notion which is not a constituent of the propositions which it considers, namely the notion of truth.

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Principles of Mathematics (1903), Ch. I: Definition of Pure Mathematics, p. 3
4 months 3 weeks ago

There are pretenses which are very sincere, and marriage is their school.

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Tres novelas ejemplares y un prólogo [Three Exemplary Novels and a Prologue] (1920); Two Mothers
2 months 4 weeks ago

"Detect quacks"? Yes do, for Heaven's sake; but know withal the men that are to be trusted! Till we know that, what is all our knowledge; how shall we even so much as "detect"? For the vulpine sharpness, which considers itself to be knowledge, and "detects" in that fashion, is far mistaken. Dupes indeed are many: but, of all dupes, there is none so fatally situated as he who lives in undue terror of being duped.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

He said they that were serious in ridiculous matters would be ridiculous in serious affairs.

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Cato the Elder
7 months 5 days ago

At my age one's got to be sincere. Lying's too much effort.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

Fortunate is he who has acquired a wealth of divine understanding, but wretched the one whose interest lies in shadowy conjectures about divinities.

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fr. 132
6 months 3 weeks ago

Nothing is ever gotten out of nothing by divine power.

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Book I, line 150 (tr. Munro)
2 months 4 weeks ago

The highest ensign that men ever met and embraced under, the Cross itself, had no meaning save an accidental extrinsic one.

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Bk. III, ch. 3.
2 months 1 week ago

A slave's soul has no worth, my brothers; it lacks strengthto tread on this great earth with gallantry and freedom.I pity the poor slaves, they're nought but airy mist,a light breeze scatters them, a fragrance knocks them down;it's only just they crawl on the earth on hands and knees.Today I'll write a hymn to God and pray for this great grace.

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Egyptian high priest, Book X, line 90
2 months 3 weeks ago

In us there is the Light of Nature, and that Light is God.

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6 months 3 days ago

Without some redistribution of wealth and power, downward mobility and debilitating poverty will continue to drive people into desperate channels. And without principled opposition to xenophobias from above and below, these desperate channels will produce a cold-hearted and mean-spirited America no longer worth fighting for or living in.

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(p79)

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