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7 months 1 week ago

To become sober is: to come to oneself in self-knowledge and before God as nothing before him, yet infinitely, unconditionally engaged.

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3 months ago

Not only was Thebes built by the music of an Orpheus; but without the music of some inspired Orpheus was no city ever built, no work that man glories-in ever done.

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Bk. III, ch. 8.
5 months 5 days ago

Education will enable young people quickly to familiarize themselves with the whole system of production and to pass from one branch of production to another in response to the needs of society or their own inclinations. It will, therefore, free them from the one-sided character which the present-day division of labor impresses upon every individual. Communist society will, in this way, make it possible for its members to put their comprehensively developed faculties to full use. But, when this happens, classes will necessarily disappear. It follows that society organized on a communist basis is incompatible with the existence of classes on the one hand, and that the very building of such a society provides the means of abolishing class differences on the other.

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5 months 1 week ago

We have repeatedly observed that while any whole is evolving, there is always going on an evolution of the parts into which it divides itself; but we have not observed that this equally holds of the totality of things, which is made up of parts within parts from the greatest down to the smallest.

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Pt. II, The Knowable; Ch. XV, The Law of Evolution (continued)
2 months 3 weeks ago

Belief and work, knowledge and action are one and the same thing.

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4 months 6 days ago

Ignorance, to a scientist, is an itch that begs to be pleasurably scratched. Ignorance, if you are a theologian, is something to be washed away by shamelessly making something up.

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The Intellectual and Moral Courage of Atheism
2 months 6 days ago

The spirit of fellowship, with its attendant cheerfulness, is in the air. It is comparatively easy to love one's neighbor when we realize that he and we are common servants and common sufferers in the same cause. A deep breath of that spirit has passed into the life of England. No doubt the same thing has happened elsewhere.

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The Peacefulness of Being at War. in The New Republic (11 September 1915), p. 152.
6 months 1 week ago

The woman wants to dominate, the man wants to be dominated.

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Kant, Immanuel (1996), page 220
6 months 1 week ago

The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.

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Ch. 2
4 months 1 week ago

But one no longer wonders when one realizes that in the higher classes there is an unerring instinct of what tends to maintain and of what tends to destroy the organization by virtue of which they enjoy their privileges. The fashionable lady had certainly not reasoned out that if there were no capitalists and no army to defend them, her husband would have no fortune, and she could not have her entertainments and her ball-dresses. And the artist certainly does not argue that he needs the capitalists and the troops to defend them, so that they may buy his pictures. But instinct, replacing reason in this instance, guides them unerringly. And it is precisely this instinct which leads all men, with few exceptions, to support all the religious, political, and economic institutions which are to their advantage.

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Chapter XII, Conclusion-Repent Ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at Hand
3 months 4 days ago

In a liberal society you're not going to agree on the deepest... moral frameworks, but you are going to agree on factual information, and... if you can't agree on factual information it's very hard to deliberate in common... on what needs to be done in the future, and that's the situation we now face.

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23:00
5 months 1 week ago

The proper method for hastening the decay of error is not by brute force, or by regulation which is one of the classes of force, to endeavour to reduce men to intellectual uniformity; but on the contrary by teaching every man to think for himself.

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Vol. 2, bk. 8, ch. 6
5 months 2 days ago

The transition from philosophy to the domain of state and society had been an intrinsic part of Hegel's system.

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P. 251
6 months 4 weeks ago

The happiness which belongs to man, is that state in which he enjoys as many of the good things, and suffers as few of the evils incident to human nature as possible; passing his days in a smooth course of permanent tranquility. A wise man, though deprived of sight or hearing, may experience happiness in the enjoyment of the good things which yet remain; and when suffering torture, or laboring under some painful disease, can mitigate the anguish by patience, and can enjoy, in his afflictions, the consciousness of his own constancy.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Every love to which there clings but the smallest speck of obligation is an unselfish love, and, so far as this speck reaches, a possessedness. He who believes that he owes the object of his love anything loves romantically or religiously.

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Cambridge 1995, p. 260
7 months 1 week ago

Forgetting when God does it in relation to sin, is the opposite of creating, since to create is to bring forth from nothing and to forget is to take back into nothing. What is hidden from my eyes, that I have never seen; but what is hidden behind my back, that I have seen. The one who loves forgives in this way; he forgives, he forgets, he blots out the sin, in love he turns toward the one he forgives; but when he turns toward him, he of course, cannot see what is lying behind his back.

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Whatever the virtue may be, from whatever source it may come, it is worthy of esteem... Mind, beauty, wealth, nobility, although the children of chance, all have their own value, as skill, learning and virtue have theirs.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

He was as great as a man can be without morality.

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Said of Napoleon (1842)
5 months 2 days ago

To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic.

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p. 51
4 months 1 week ago

What is now happening to the people of the East as of the West is like what happens to every individual when he passes from childhood to adolescence and from youth to manhood. He loses what had hitherto guided his life and lives without direction, not having found a new standard suitable to his age, and so he invents all sorts of occupations, cares, distractions, and stupefactions to divert his attention from the misery and senselessness of his life. Such a condition may last a long time.

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VI
6 months 1 week ago

I saw men go up and down, In the country and the town, With this tablet on their neck,- 'Judgement and a judge we seek.' Not to monarchs they repair, Nor to learned jurist's chair; But they hurry to their peers, To their kinsfolk and their dears; Louder than with speech they pray,- 'What am I? companion, say.'

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Astræa
4 months 3 weeks ago

To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime.

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6 months 1 week ago

Moral Teleology supplies the deficiency in physical Teleology, and first establishes a Theology; because the latter, if it did not borrow from the former without being observed, but were to proceed consistently, could only found a Demonology, which is incapable of any definite concept.

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Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Judgment (1892) Tr. J.H. Bernard
5 months 5 days ago

Vague a l'ame - melancholy yearning for the end of the world.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

Without disarmament there can be no lasting peace. On the contrary, the continuation of military armaments in their present extent will with certainty lead to new catastrophies...For the creation of this public opinion in favor of disarmament every person living shares the responsibility, through ever deed and every word.

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writing for the 1932 Disarmament Conference, included in The Nation 1865-1990: Selections From the Independent Magazine of Politics and Culture (1990)
3 months ago

A poet without love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility.

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Burns (1828).
3 months 2 weeks ago

Many city-dwellers have a romanticized conception of the living world. From another perspective, some "conservation biologists" favour e.g. "Pleistocene rewilding". By contrast, I think any truly compassionate person should be horrified at the terrible suffering of Nature "red in tooth and claw". Why not aim for a cruelty-free world instead?

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"Interview with Pensata Animal", Pensata Animal, 25 Oct. 2009
2 months 1 week ago

The good old Dominion, the blessed mother of us all.

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"Thoughts on Lotteries", 1826
4 months 1 week ago

The fall or scrapping of a cultural world puts us all into the same archetypal cesspool, engendering nostalgia for earlier conditions.

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p. 103

This is just really saying we do SOMETHING before we understand what we are doing, that doesn't make it relative....

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6 months 1 week ago

Arithmetic must be discovered in just the same sense in which Columbus discovered the West Indies, and we no more create numbers than he created the Indians.

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Principles of Mathematics (1903), p. 451
6 months 1 week ago

If you say that this is absurd, that we cannot be in love with everyone at once, I merely point out to you that, as a matter of fact, certain persons do exist with an enormous capacity for friendship and for taking delight in other people's lives; and that such person know more of truth than if their hearts were not so big. The vice of ordinary Jack and Jill affection is not its intensity, but its exclusions and its jealousies. Leave those out, and you see that the ideal I am holding up before you, however impracticable to-day, yet contains nothing intrinsically absurd.

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"What Makes a Life Significant?"
2 months 6 days ago

If the gods care not for me and for my children, There is a reason for it.

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VII, 41
4 months 2 weeks ago

The criterion of efficiency dictates that choice of alternatives which produces the largest result for the given application of resources.

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Simon (1945, p. 179); As cited in: Harry M. Johnson (1966) Sociology: A Systematic Introduction. p. 287.
4 months 3 weeks ago

The concept of positivity in itself, in abstracto, has become part and parcel of the ideology today. ... Critique has started to become suspect, regardless of its content.

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p. 23
5 months 5 days ago

A harmonious being cannot believe in God. Saints, criminals, and paupers have launched him, making him available to all unhappy people.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Religious men are and must be heretics now - for we must not pray, except in a "form" of words, made beforehand - or think of God but with a prearranged idea.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

I see myself immersed in the depths of human existence and standing in the face of the ineffable mystery of the world and of all that is. And in that situation, I am made poignantly and burningly aware that the world cannot be self-sufficient, that there is hidden in some still greater depth a mysterious, transcendent meaning. This meaning is called God. Men have not been able to find a loftier name, although they have abused it to the extent of making it almost unutterable. God can be denied only on the surface; but he cannot be denied where human experience reaches down beneath the surface of flat, vapid, commonplace existence.

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As translated in In Love with Eternity : Philosophical Essays and Fragments (2005) by Richard Schain, p. 47
4 months 1 week ago

There are only a few images that are not forced to provide meaning, or have to go through the filter of a specific idea.

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2 months 1 week ago

Do not think me gentle because I speak in praise of gentleness, or elegant because I honor the grace that keeps this world. I am a man crude as any, gross of speech, intolerant, stubborn, angry, full of fits and furies. That I may have spoken well at times, is not natural. A wonder is what it is.

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A Warning To My Readers
3 months 4 days ago

One of the problems... both on the left and the right is that the... individual autonomy protected by liberalism tends to take more and more extreme versions... and... becomes self-undermining.

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13:24
2 months 3 weeks ago

It makes a big difference whether you give something back or pay it off... The framers of the laws instituted festivals, in order that men should be publicly compelled to gaiety, as a necessary temperance for labors; We remember the great orator Pollio Asinius, who was not detained by anything beyond the tenth hour: he did not even need letters for an hour after that, so that no new concern arose, but he put the fatigue of the whole day in those two hours. Some joined in the middle of the day and put off some lighter work in the afternoon hours. Our elders also forbade a new report to be made in the senate after ten o'clock. The army divided the vigils, and the night was safe from the return of the expedition.

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6 months 1 week ago

We live to improve, or we live in vain.

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Address and Declaration at a Select Meeting of the Friends of Universal Peace and Liberty (August 20, 1791) p. 5
2 months 1 week ago

How can anyone see the only way the world can be saved and not be forced to weep?

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6 months 4 weeks ago

Gentleness, as opposed to an irascible temper, greatly contributes to the tranquility and happiness of life, by preserving the mind from perturbation, and arming it against the assaults of calumny and malice.

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6 months 1 week ago

Why? Surely they can find other men. Russell's reply when asked "if it wasn't unkind of him to love and leave so many women";

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as quoted in My Father - Bertrand Russell (1975) by Katharine Tait, p. 106
6 months 1 week ago

I care not how affluent some may be, provided that none be miserable in consequence of it. But it is impossible to enjoy affluence with the felicity it is capable of being enjoyed, while so much misery is mingled in the scene.

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Means by Which the Fund Is to Be Created

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