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8 months 6 days ago

Apollo said that every one's true worship was that which he found in use in the place where he chanced to be.

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Book II, Ch. 12. Apology for Raimond Sebond
6 months 4 weeks ago

All government - indeed, every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act - is founded on compromise and barter.

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7 months 4 weeks ago

So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.

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Ch. 10
8 months 4 weeks ago

I have never worked as hard as now. I go for a brief walk in the morning. Then I come home and sit in my room without interruption until about three o'clock. My eyes can barely see. Then with my walking stick in hand I sneak off to the restaurant, but am so weak that I believe that if somebody were to call out my name, I would keel over and die. Then I go home and begin again. In my indolence during the past months I had pumped up a veritable shower bath, and now I have pulled the string and the ideas are cascading down upon me: healthy, happy, merry, gay, blessed children born with ease and yet all of them with the birthmark of my personality.

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6 months 1 week ago

We need to augment and amend the existing body of classical and neoclassical economic theory to achieve a more realistic picture of economic process.

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Herbert A. Simon (1986) in Preface to: Gilad & Kaish (eds.), Handbook of Behavioral Economics, p. xvi.
6 months 3 weeks ago

Now I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.

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Last words
4 months 2 weeks ago

If the press was to be free, nothing would be so important as precisely its liberation from every coercion that could be put on it in the name of a law. And, that it might come to that, I my own self should have to have absolved myself from obedience to the law.

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Cambridge 1995, p. 249
6 months 1 week ago

The jingoes and war speculators are filling the air with the sentimental slogan of hypocritical nationalism, "America for Americans," "America first, last, and all the time."

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5 months 2 days ago

It goes without saying that any persons may attempt to unite kindred spirits, but, whatever their hopes and longings, none have the right to impose their vision of unity upon the rest.

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Ch. 10 : A Framework for Utopia; The Framework as Utopian Common Ground, p. 325

The History of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom; a progress whose development according to the necessity of its nature, it is our business to investigate. 

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Part III. Philosophic History; § 21, as translated by John Sibree; p. 19, (1900 edition) Variant translated by Robert S. Hartman, in Reason In History, A General Introduction to the Philosophy of History (1953) , 3/1/2007
6 months 2 weeks ago

Seek, therefore, thyself! But in finding oneself, does not one find one's own nothingness? ...Carlyle answers (Past and Present, book iii, chap. xi.). "The latest Gospel in the world is, Know thy work and do it. Know thyself: long enough has that poor self of thine tormented thee; thou wilt never get to know it, I believe! Think it thy business, this of knowing thyself; thou art an unknowable individual: know what thou canst work at; and work at it, like Hercules. That will be thine better plan." ...and what is my work? - without thinking about myself, is to love God. ...And on the other hand, in loving God in myself, am I not loving myself more than God, am I not loving myself in God?

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6 months 4 weeks ago

How it could come to pass I do not know, but I remember it clearly. The dream embraced thousands of years and left in me only a sense of the whole. I only know that I was the cause of their sin and downfall. Like a vile trichina, like a germ of the plague infecting whole kingdoms, so I contaminated all this earth, so happy and sinless before my coming. They learnt to lie, grew fond of lying, and discovered the charm of falsehood.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

When the objective gaze is turned on human beings and other experiencing creatures, who are undeniably parts of the world, it can reveal only what they are like in themselves. And if the way things are for these subjects is not part of the way things are in themselves, an objective account, whatever it shows, will omit something. So reality is not just objective reality, and the pursuit of objectivity is not an equally effective method of reaching the truth about everything.

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"Subjective and Objective" (1979), pp. 212-213.
4 months 2 weeks ago

An intellectual dapperling of these times boasts chiefly of his irresistible perspicacity, his "dwelling in the daylight of truth," and so forth; which, on examination, turns out to be a dwelling in the rush-light of "closet logic," and a deep unconsciousness that there is any other light to dwell in or any other objects to survey with it.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

And hereby it comes to passe, that Intemperance, is naturally punished with Diseases; Rashness, with Mischance; Injustice; with Violence of Enemies; Pride, with Ruine; Cowardice, with Oppression; Negligent government of Princes, with Rebellion; and Rebellion with Slaughter.

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The Second Part, Chapter 31, p. 194
4 months 1 week ago

We should become angels and not devils, that's why we have been created and born into the world. Therefore be and stick to what God has chosen you for.

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7 months 4 weeks ago

In a logically perfect language, there will be one word and no more for every simple object, and everything that is not simple will be expressed by a combination of words, by a combination derived, of course, from the words for the simple things that enter in, one word for each simple component.

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7 months 4 weeks ago

Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Universality is the highest principle....

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Nothing is more opposed to concord than the present condition of the domestic and salaried classes. By reducing this poor multitude to a condition very like slavery, civilization, on the rebound, imposes chains upon those who seem to dominate. Thus notables do not dare to amuse themselves openly at times when the people suffer from poverty. The rich are subject to individual as well as collective servitude. A wealthy man is often the slave of his valets. However in harmony the valet himself enjoys complete independence, while the rich are served with an assiduity and a devotion of which one sees not a trace in civilization.

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Oeuvres completetes de Charles Fourier
4 months 1 week ago

So the wise man will develop virtue, if he may, in the midst of wealth, or, if not, in poverty; if possible, in his own country-if not, in exile; if possible, as a commander-if not, as a common soldier; if possible, in sound health-if not, enfeebled. Whatever fortune he finds, he will accomplish therefrom something noteworthy.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

To her who gives and takes back all, to nature, the man who is instructed and modest says, Give what thou wilt; take back what thou wilt. And he says this not proudly, but obediently and well pleased with her.

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X, 14
7 months 4 weeks ago

It is also a study peculiarly adapted to an early stage in the education of philosophical students, since it does not presuppose the slow process of acquiring, by experience and reflection, valuable thoughts of their own.

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(pp. 19-20)
6 months 2 weeks ago

Life cannot wait until the sciences may have explained the universe scientifically. We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness: it is always urgent, "here and now" without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank. And culture, which is but its interpretation, cannot wait any more than can life itself.

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Mission of the University [Misión de la Universidad (PDF)] (1930; translation © 1944, first published 1946), p. 73 [p. 15 in Spanish PDF], translated by Howard Lee Nostrand. ISBN 978-1-56000-560-5
6 months 2 weeks ago

I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with my activity. Political liberty in this sense is simply the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others. If I am prevented by others from doing what I could otherwise do, I am to that degree unfree; and if this area is contracted by other men beyond a certain minimum, I can be described as being coerced, or, it may be, enslaved. Coercion is not, however, a term that covers every form of inability. If I say that I am unable to jump more than ten feet in the air, or cannot read because I am blind, or cannot understand the darker pages of Hegel, it would be eccentric to say that I am to that degree enslaved or coerced. Coercion implies the deliberate interference of other human beings within the area in which I could otherwise act.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

To be ignorant of the past is to remain a child.

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Cicero

Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficulty: elephants and poodles find many things obscure.

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E 36
5 months 3 weeks ago

Violence is the effort to maintain and restore a weakened psyche.

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(p. 377)
3 months 4 weeks ago

The highest point a man can obtain is not Knowledge, or Virtue, or Goodness, or Victory, but something even greater, more heroic and more despairing: Sacred Awe!

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Ch. 24
6 months 3 weeks ago

For Appetite with an opinion of attaining, is called HOPE.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

It is worth observing, how we feel ourselves affected in reading the characters of Cæsar, and Cato, as they are so finely drawn and contrasted in Salust. In one, the ignoscendo, largiundo; in the other, nil largiundo. In one, the miseris perfugium; in the other, malis perniciem. In the latter we have much to admire, much to reverence, and perhaps something to fear; we respect him, but we respect him at a distance. The former makes us familiar with him; we love him, and he leads us whither he pleases.

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Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (2nd ed. 1759), pp. 206-207
9 months 1 day ago
The advantage of a bad memory is that one can enjoy the same good things for the first time several times.
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4 months 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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7 months 3 weeks ago

Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality.

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p. 4
6 months 1 week ago

Today's fashion magazines may carry an article about the dangers of anorexia while bombarding its readers with images of emaciated young bodies representing the height of beauty and desirability.

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As quoted in Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (2014), p.34
7 months 2 weeks ago

When people laughed at him because he walked backward beneath the portico, he said to them: "Aren't you ashamed, you who walk backward along the whole path of existence, and blame me for walking backward along the path of the promenade?"

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Stobaeus, iii. 4. 83
6 months 4 weeks ago

Architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry, may truly be called the efflorescence of civilised life.

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Education: What Knowledge Is of Most Worth?
6 months 4 weeks ago

Nothing is so fatal to Religion as indifference which is, at least, half Infidelity.

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Letter to William Smith, Member of the Irish Parliament (29 January 1795), quoted in R. B. McDowell (ed.)
3 months 3 weeks ago

You don't love yourself enough. Or you'd love your nature too, and what it demands of you. People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash or eat. Do you have less respect for your own nature than the engraver does for engraving, the dancer for the dance, the miser for money or the social climber for status? When they're really possessed by what they do, they'd rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practicing their arts. Is helping others less valuable to you? Not worth your effort?

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(Hays translation) V, 1
5 months 3 weeks ago

Confession of our faults is the next thing to innocence.

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Maxim 1060
6 months 1 week ago

The kind of relatedness to the world may be noble or trivial, but even being related to the basest kind of pattern is immensely preferable to being alone.

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Ch. 1
6 months 2 weeks ago

Any madness in us gains from being expressed, because in this way one gives a human form to what separates us from humanity.

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p. 76

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