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3 months 1 week ago

I would take to be quite a fool any man who would make a book full of laws and statutes for an apple tree telling it how to bear apples and not thorns, when the tree is able by its own nature to do this better than the man with all his books can describe and demand.

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p. 89
1 week 1 day ago

The biology of suffering in intelligent agents is a deep underlying source of existential risk - and one that can potentially be overcome.

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"Unsorted Postings", pre-2014
1 month 1 week ago

But Zarathustra made it clear in which direction the answer lay; it is towards the artist-psychologist, the intuitional thinker. There are very few such men in the world's literature; the great artists are not thinkers, the great thinkers are seldom artists.

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p. 158
3 weeks 5 days ago

A good reputation is more valuable than money.

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Maxim 108
2 months 4 days 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.
3 weeks 5 days ago

A noble spirit finds a cure for injustice in forgetting it.

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Maxim 441
1 month 3 weeks ago

The theory of transparency was set up in reaction to the theory of mental images, of an inner tableu which the perception of an object would leave in us. In imagination our gaze always goes outward, but imagination modifies and neutralizes the gaze: the real world appears in it as it were between parenthesis or quote marks.

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The Levinas reader by Levinas, Emmanuel p. 134
2 months 4 weeks ago

In the days before machinery men and women who wanted to amuse themselves were compelled, in their humble way, to be artists. Now they sit still and permit professionals to entertain them by the aid of machinery. It is difficult to believe that general artistic culture can flourish in this atmosphere of passivity.

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3 months 1 day ago

As to the having and possessing of things, teach them to part with what they have, easily and freely to their friends, and let them find by experience that the most liberal has always the most plenty, with esteem and commendation to boot, and they will quickly learn to practise it.

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Sec. 110
1 month 1 day ago

Quite apart from assiduous efforts to restrict the use of violence as means rather than an end, the actualization of violence as a means can inadvertently become its own end, producing new violence, producing violence anew, reiterating the license, and licensing further violence. Violence does not exhaust itself in the realization of a just end; rather, it renews itself in directions that exceed both deliberate intention and instrumental schemes. In other words, by acting as if the use of violence can be a means to achieve a nonviolent end, one imagines that the practice of violence does not in the act posit violence as its own end. The technē is undermined by the praxis, and the use of violence only makes the world into a more violent place, by bringing more violence into the world.

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p. 20
1 month 3 weeks ago

It is ...easy to be certain. One has only to be sufficiently vague.

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Vol. IV, par. 237
1 month 3 weeks ago

Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.

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A Retrospective Glance at the Lifework of a Master of Books
2 months 4 weeks ago

Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over influence.

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par. 19
1 month 2 weeks ago

The difference between the artificial and the artful in the artistic lies on the surface in the former there is a split between what is overly done and what is intended. The appearance is one of cordiality; the intent is that of gaining favor. Whenever this split between what is done and its purpose exists, there is insincerity, a trick, a simulation of an act that intrinsically has another effect. When the natural and the cultivated blend into one, acts of social intercourse are works of art. The animating impulsion of genial friendship and the deed performed completely coincide without intrusion of ulterior motive. Awkwardness may prevent adequacy of expression.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

If God had looked into our minds he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of.

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Pt II, p. 217
2 months 3 weeks ago

"Everything is already there in...." How does it come about that [an] arrow points? Doesn't it seem to carry in it something besides itself? - "No, not the dead line on paper; only the psychical thing, the meaning, can do that." - That is both true and false. The arrow points only in the application that a living being makes of it.

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§ 454

First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.

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Ch. 1: In Praise of Idleness
3 months 1 day ago

It is sad that often, to be a good patriot, one must be the enemy of the rest of mankind.

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"Country"
2 months 4 weeks ago

How can I, who was not able to retain my own past, hope to save that of another?

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Artistic creation is a demand for unity and a rejection of the world.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

A human being possessed by a belief and not eager to pass it on to others is a phenomenon alien to the earth, where our mania for salvation makes life unbreathable.

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Yes, if you happen to be interested in philosophy and good at it, but not otherwise - but so does bricklaying. Anything you're good at contributes to happiness. When asked "Does philosophy contribute to happiness?"

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(SHM 76), as quoted in The quotable Bertrand Russell (1993), p. 149
2 months 4 weeks ago

What can be said can and should always be said more and more simply and clearly.

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3 weeks 4 days ago

By all means begin your folio; even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week.

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316
3 months 1 week ago

Man is forming thousands of ridiculous relations between himself and God.

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Ch. 12
1 month 3 weeks ago

The discussion of the sexual problem is only a somewhat crude prelude to a far deeper question, and that is the question of the psychological relationship between the sexes. In comparison with this the other pales into insignificance, and with it we enter the real domain of woman. Woman's psychology is founded on the principle of Eros, the great binder and loosener, whereas from ancient times the ruling principle ascribed to man is Logos.

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P.254
1 month 2 weeks ago

The whole economic system of Capitalism is an offshoot of a devouring and overwhelming lust, of a kind that can hold sway only in a society that has deliberately renounced the Christian asceticism and turned away from Heaven to give itself over exclusively to earthly gratifications. ... It is the result of a secularization of economic life, and by it the hierarchical subordination of the material to the spiritual is inverted. The autonomy of economics has ended in their dominating the whole life of human societies: the worship of Mammon has become the determining force of the age. And the worst of it is that this undisguised "mammonism" is regarded as a very good thing, an attainment to the knowledge of truth and a release from illusions. Economic materialism formulates this to perfection when it brands the whole spiritual life of man as a deception and a dream.

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p. 92
1 month 1 week ago

It has been said of old, all roads lead to Rome. In paraphrased application to the tendencies of our day, it may truly be said that all roads lead to the great social reconstruction. The economic awakening of the workingman, and his realization of the necessity for concerted industrial action; the tendencies of modern education, especially in their application to the free development of the child; the spirit of growing unrest expressed through, and cultivated by, art and literature, all pave the way to the Open Road.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

To the question what wine he found pleasant to drink, he replied, "That for which other people pay."

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Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 54
1 month 2 weeks ago

Rome is the Great Beast of atheism and materialism, adoring nothing but itself. Israel is the Great Beast of religion. Neither one nor the other is likable. The Great Beast is always repulsive.

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p. 123
3 months 3 days ago

People who invented the word charity, and used it in a good sense, inculcated more clearly, and much more efficaciously, the precept, Be charitable, than any pretended legislator or prophet, who should insert such a maxim in his writings.

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Part I, Essay 22: Of the Standard of Taste
2 months 4 weeks ago

He begins to think for himself and meets Nineteenth-century Rationalism Which can explain away religion by any number of methods.

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Pilgrim's Regress 19-20
3 months 3 weeks ago

There is less trouble and trauma involved in writing a new piece than in trying to salvage an unsatisfactory old one.

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2 months 4 weeks ago

The Christian is in a different position from other people who are trying to be good. They hope, by being good, to please God if there is one; or-if they think there is not-at least they hope to deserve approval from good men. But the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us; just as the roof of a greenhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes bright because the sun shines on it.

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Book II, Chapter 5, "The Practical Conclusion"
4 weeks 1 day ago

Despite the fact that the doctors treated him, bled him, and gave him medicines to drink, he recovered.

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[sometimes quoted as "Though the doctors treated him, let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he nevertheless recovered."] Bk. XV, ch. 12
2 months 2 weeks ago

Make thyself pure, 0 righteous man! Anyone in the world here below can win purity for himself, namely, when he cleanses himself with Good Thoughts, Good Words, and Good Deeds.

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1 month 1 week ago

Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and success in the enterprise of interpretation. If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography.

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Pt. I, ch. 1, sec. 6.

A person can perhaps succeed in hiding his sins from the world, he can perhaps be foolishly happy that he succeeds, or yet, a little more honest, admit that it is a deplorable weakness and cowardliness that he does not have the courage to become open-but a person cannot hide his sins from himself.

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1 month 1 week 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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4 months 2 days ago
This is the mistake which I seem to make eternally, that I imagine the sufferings of others as far greater than they really are. Ever since my childhood, the proposition, my greatest dangers lie in pity, has been confirmed again and again.
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3 months 2 days ago

There is needed, no doubt, a body of servants (ministerium) of the invisible church, but not officials (officiales), in other words, teachers but not dignitaries, because in the rational religion of every individual there does not yet exist a church as a universal union (omnitudo collectiva).

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Book IV, Part 1, Section 1, "The Christian religion as a natural religion"
2 months 3 weeks ago

In Nietzsche's view nihilism is not a Weltanschauung that occurs at some time and place or another; it is rather the basic character of what happens in Occidental history.

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p. 26
3 months 2 days ago

The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space.

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B 8
2 months 2 weeks ago

Perhaps there is one chain [of inference] leading from the mental and the physical to a common source. It is conceivable in the abstract that if mental phenomena derive from the properties of matter at all, these may be identical at some level with nonphysical properties from which physical phenomena also derive. ...If there were such properties, they would be discoverable only by explanatory inference from both mental and physical phenomena. ... There would be properties of matter that were not physical from which the mental properties of organic systems were derived. This could still be called panpsychism.

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"Panpsychism" (1979), pp. 184-185.
2 months 4 weeks ago

There have been men before ... who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God himself... as if the good Lord had nothing to do but to exist. There have been some who were so preoccupied with spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ.

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Ch. 9
2 weeks 1 day ago

The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, to add something to the extent and the solidity of our possessions.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

The general co-operation of all members of society for the purpose of planned exploitation of the forces of production, the expansion of production to the point where it will satisfy the needs of all, the abolition of a situation in which the needs of some are satisfied at the expense of the needs of others, the complete liquidation of classes and their conflicts, the rounded development of the capacities of all members of society through the elimination of the present division of labor, through industrial education, through engaging in varying activities, through the participation by all in the enjoyments produced by all, through the combination of city and country - these are the main consequences of the abolition of private property.

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