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4 months 2 weeks ago

The present is always invisible because it's environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.

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Mademoiselle: the magazine for the smart young woman, Volume 64, 1966, p. 114
6 months 2 weeks ago

The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport, and back-biting; the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither.

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Book III, Chapter 5, "Sexual Morality"
5 months ago

What is beginning to emerge, then, is a theory about psychic sensitivity. It runs as follows. When I relax deeply, it is as if someone opened up the partition between the two compartments of my brain, turning them into a single large room. I experience a sense of mental freedom as if I can suddenly breathe more deeply, and a feeling of contact with things. Everyone has had the experience of being in a state of hurry or excitement, and failing to notice that they have bruised or scratched themselves -- until the excitement evaporates and the pain makes itself known. Hurry and tension raise our sensitivity threshold, and at the same time, erect a glass wall between us and reality. In the "unicameral" state, this wall vanishes, and everything seems more real.

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p. 51
7 months 6 days ago

Sincerity is that whereby self-completion is effected, and its way is that by which man must direct himself.

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5 months 2 days ago

The aim is to replace economic oligarchies by the State, which has a will-to-power of its own and is quite as little concerned with the public good; and a will-to-power, moreover, which is not economic but military and therefore much more dangerous to any good folk who have a taste for staying alive. And on the bourgeois side what on earth is the sense of objecting to State control in economic affairs if one accepts private monopolies which have all the economic and technical disadvantages of State monopolies and possibly some others as well?

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p. 230
2 months 2 weeks ago

Man... whatever the origin of his soul, if it is pure, noble, and lofty, it is a beautiful soul which dignifies the man endowed with it.

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7 months 2 weeks ago
Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches - he has made music sick.
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5 months 2 days ago

The metaphysical apologia at least betrayed the injustice of the established order through the incongruence of concept and reality. The impartiality of scientific language deprived what was powerless of the strength to make itself heard and merely provided the existing order with a neutral sign for itself. Such neutrality is more metaphysical than metaphysics.

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E. Jephcott, trans., p. 17
5 months 3 weeks ago

The whole life of an American is passed like a game of chance, a revolutionary crisis, or a battle.

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Chapter XVIII.
6 months 2 weeks ago

With regard to politics and the character of princes and great men, I think I am very moderate. My views of things are more conformable to Whig principles; my representation of persons to Tory prejudices. Nothing can so much prove that men commonly regard more persons than things, as to find that I am commonly numbered among the Tories.

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E. C. Mossner, Life of David Hume (Clarendon Press, 2001), p. 311.
2 months 4 weeks ago

If rational thought thinks itself out to a conclusion, it arrives at something non-rational which, nevertheless, is a necessity of thought. This is the paradox which dominates our spiritual life. If we try to get on without this non-rational element, there result views of the world and of life which have neither vitality nor value.

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2 months 1 week ago

He that dies in extreme old age will be reduced to the same state with him that is cut down untimely.

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IX, 33
2 months 2 weeks ago

Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains. In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. It is easier to acquire them, and to effect this, they have perverted the best religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer engine for their purposes. With the lawyers it is a new thing. They have, in the mother country, been generally the primest supporters of the free principles of their constitution. But there, too, they have changed.

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Letter to Horatio G. Spafford
6 months 2 weeks ago

Freedom of Men under Government is, to have a standing Rule to live by, common to every one of that Society, and made by the Legislative Power erected in it; a Liberty to follow my own Will in all things, where the Rule prescribes not; and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, Arbitrary Will of another Man: as Freedom of Nature is, to be under no other restraint but the Law of Nature.

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Second Treatise of Civil Government, Ch. IV, sec. 21
5 months 1 week ago

The world is nothing but 'world-as-meaning.'

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p. xi
6 months 2 weeks ago

The game of science is, in principle, without end. He who decides one day that scientific statements do not call for any further test, and that they can be regarded as finally verified, retires from the game.

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Ch. 2 "On the Problem of a Theory of Scientific Method", Section 11: Methodological Rules as Conventions, p. 32.
5 months 2 weeks ago

Arms are not yet taken up; but virtually, you are in a civil war. You are not people of differing opinions in a public council;-you are enemies, that must subdue or be subdued, on the one side or the other. If your hands are not on your swords, their knives will be at your throats. There is no medium,-there is no temperament,-there is no compromise with Jacobinism.

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Letter to William Windham (30 December 1794), quoted in R. B. McDowell (ed.)
3 months 1 day ago

One crime has to be concealed by another.

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7 months 1 week ago

To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them.

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6 months 1 week ago

Anytime two human beings find genuine pleasure, joy, and love, the stars smile and the universe is enriched. Yet as long as that pleasure, joy, and love is still predicated on myths of black sexuality, the more fundamental challenge of humane interaction remains unmet.

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(p85)
4 months 2 days ago

The great tragedy of Science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

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Presidential Address at the British Association, "Biogenesis and abiogenesis" (1870); later published in Collected Essays, Vol. 8, p. 229
3 months 1 week ago

Philosophy complains that Custom has hoodwinked us, from the first; that we do everything by Custom, even Believe by it; that our very Axioms, let us boast of Free-thinking as we may, are oftenest simply such Beliefs as we have never heard questioned. Nay, what is Philosophy throughout but a continual battle against Custom; an ever-renewed effort to transcend the sphere of blind Custom, and so become Transcendental?

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Bk. III, ch. 8.
7 months 1 day ago

It is unlikely that the good of a snail should reside in its shell: so is it likely that the good of a man should?

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Book I, ch. 20, 17.
1 week 5 days ago

"Instructors can impart only a fraction of the teaching. It is through your own devoted practice that the mysteries of the Art of Peace are brought to life."
- Morihei Ueshiba

See biography for Morihei Ueshiba:
https://civilsimian.com/Morihei-Ueshiba

Read Morihei Ueshiba's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/376/content

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6 months 2 weeks ago

All exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man.

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The Scientific Outlook (1931), Part I, chapter II, "Characteristics of the Scientific Method"
6 months 2 weeks ago

The necessity of speaking, the predicament of having nothing to say, and the desire for tact are three things that can turn the greatest man into a laughingstock.

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6 months 1 week ago

How far down the evolutionary scale shall we go? Shall we eat fish? What about shrimps? Oysters? To answer these questions we must bear in mind the central principle on which our concern for other beings is based. As I said ... the only legitimate boundary to our concern for the interests of other beings is the point at which it is no longer accurate to say that the other being has interests. To have interests, in a strict, nonmetaphorical sense, a being must be capable of suffering or experiencing pleasure. If a being suffers, there can be no moral justification for disregarding that suffering, or for refusing to count it equally with the like suffering of any other being. But the converse of this is also true. If a being is not capable of suffering, or of enjoyment, there is nothing to take into account.

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Ch. 4: Becoming a Vegetarian
5 months 1 week ago

Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.

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6 months 1 week ago

When asked why people give to beggars but not to philosophers, he replied, 'Because they expect they may become lame and blind, but never that they will become philosophers.'

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Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 56, as reported in Diogenes the Cynic: Sayings and Anecdotes as translated by Robin Hard (Oxford: 2012), p. 18
6 months 2 weeks ago

I was looking at my furniture, not as the utilitarian who has to sit on chairs, to write at desks and tables, and not as the cameraman or scientific recorder, but as the pure aesthete whose concern is only with forms and their relationships within the field of vision or the picture space. But as I looked, this purely aesthetic, Cubist's-eye view gave place to what I can only describe as the sacramental vision of reality. I was back where I had been when I was looking at the flowers-back in a world where everything shone with the Inner Light, and was infinite in its significance.

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describing his experiment with mescaline, p. 22
6 months 2 weeks ago

... happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination, resting on merely empirical grounds…

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4:418-19, p.29
5 months 4 weeks ago

None but a Craftsman can judge of a craft.

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6 months 1 week ago

The circle of day and night is the law of the classical world: the most restricted but most demanding of the necessities of the world, the most inevitable but the simplest of the legislations of nature.This was a law that excluded all dialectics and all reconciliation, consequently laying the foundations for the smooth unity of knowledge as well as the uncompromising division of tragic existence. It reigns on a world without darkness, which knows neither effusiveness nor the gentle charms of lyricism. All is waking or dreams, truth or error, the light of being or the nothingness of shadow.

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Part Two: 2. The Transcendence of Delirium
5 months 4 weeks ago

Without Justice, no realm may prosper.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Once we have tasted the sweetness of what is spiritual, the pleasures of the world will have no attraction for us. If we disregard the shadows of things, then we will penetrate their inner substance.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.

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J 77
6 months 2 weeks ago

Scientists try to eliminate their false theories, they try to let them die in their stead. The believer-whether animal or man-perishes with his false beliefs.

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Epistemology Without A Knowing Subject
4 months 2 weeks ago

Understand then all of you, especially the young, that to want to impose an imaginary state of government on others by violence is not only a vulgar superstition, but even a criminal work. Understand that this work, far from assuring the well-being of humanity is only a lie, a more or less unconscious hypocrisy, camouflaging the lowest passions we possess.

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Passage written for for The Law of Love and the Law of Violence (1908), released in 1917
4 months 3 weeks ago

A leftist government doesn't exist because being on the left has nothing to do with governments.

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from L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze: G comme Gauche ("Gilles Deleuze's Alphabet Book: Left-wing Politics"), 1988-1989.
5 months 1 week ago

Third, these general ideas are not mere words, nor do they consist in this, that certain concrete facts will every time happen under certain descriptions of conditions; but they are just as much, or rather far more, living realities than the feelings themselves out of which they are concreted. And to say that mental phenomenon are governed by law does not mean merely that they are describable by a general formula; but that there is a living idea, a conscious continuum of feeling which pervades them, and to which they are docile.

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4 months 2 days ago

The mediaeval university looked backwards: it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge... The modern university looks forward: it is a factory of new knowledge.

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Letter to E. Ray Lankester (11 April 1892) Huxley Papers, Imperial College: 30.448
4 months 2 weeks ago

The poor man is ruined as soon as he begins to ape the rich.

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Maxim 941
3 months 1 week ago

Innumerable are the illusions and legerdemain-tricks of Custom: but of all these, perhaps the cleverest is her knack of persuading us that the Miraculous, by simple repetition, ceases to be Miraculous.

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Bk. III, ch. 8.
6 months 2 weeks ago

Another thing wherein they shew their love of dominion, is, their desire to have things to be theirs: They would have propriety and possession, pleasing themselves with the power which that seems to give, and the right that they thereby have, to dispose of them as they please. He that has not observ's these two humours working very betimes in children, has taken little notice of their actions: And he who thinks that these two roots of almost all the injustice and contention that so disturb human life, are not early to be weeded out, and contrary habits introduc'd, neglects the proper season to lay the foundations of a good and worthy man.

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Sec. 105
6 months 2 weeks ago

The Upanishads and the Vedas haunt me. In them I have found eternal compensation, unfathomable power, unbroken peace.

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Quoted in S. Londhe, A Tribute to Hinduism, 2008
5 months 1 week ago

Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate.

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Ch. IV: The Aristocratic Ideal
3 months 2 days ago

The state is God, deifies arms and prisons. The worship of the state is the worship of force. There is no more dangerous menace to civilization than a government of incompetent, corrupt, or vile men. The worst evils which mankind ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments. The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.

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Chapter III: Etatism
6 months 2 weeks ago

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.

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November 8, 1838

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