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5 months 1 day ago

Those who purge the soul believe that the soul can receive no benefit from any teachings offered to it until someone by cross-questioning reduces him who is cross-questioned to an attitude of modesty, by removing the opinions that obstruct the teachings, and thus purges him and makes him think that he knows only what he knows, and no more.

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4 months 1 week ago

Even in the games of children there are things to interest the greatest mathematician.

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1688-1690
4 months 2 weeks ago

On Ps 60:3: To Thee have I cried from the ends of the earth.

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4 months 1 week ago

Whatever can be done another day can be done today.

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Ch. 20. Of the Force of Imagination (tr. Donald M. Frame)
3 weeks 5 days ago

I think there's a certain amount of luck necessary to become rich. So fate is the right word in this sense. But it's interesting, this quote makes me want to react in a sense that nobody is fated better inherently.

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3 months ago

This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this and I do not. Everything is unique - and insignificant.

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3 months ago

Psychoanalysis will be entirely discredited one of these days, no doubt about it. Which will not keep it from destroying our last vestiges of naivete. After psychoanalysis, we can never again be innocent.

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2 months 1 day ago

There is a real, living unity in our time, as in any other, but it lies submerged under a superficial hubbub of sensation.

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Letter to Harold Adam Innis (14 March 1951), published in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p. 223
3 months 4 days ago

When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don't care if they are shot themselves.

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"Patriotism", p. 126
4 months 3 days ago

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

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Book II, Chapter 3, "The Shocking Alternative"
2 months 2 weeks ago

In a sense, all explanation must end in an ultimate arbitrariness.

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Ch. 5: "The Romantic Reaction", p. 130
2 months 3 weeks ago

Greatness by nature includes a power, but not a will to power.

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p. 150
2 months 2 weeks ago

The aim of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. 'Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,' the eunuchlike sound of the jazz band both mocks and proclaims, 'and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite.

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Perennial Fashion - Jazz (1978), Prisms, p. 129, as translated by Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber
3 months ago

I know every numbskull will babble on about "black man," "maneater," "chance," and "retrospective interpretation," in order to banish something terribly inconvenient that might sully the familiar picture of childhood innocence. Ah, these good, efficient, healthy-minded people, they always remind me of those optimistic tadpoles who bask in a puddle in the sun, in the shallowest of waters, crowding together and amiably wriggling their tails, totally unaware that the next morning the puddle will have dried up and left them stranded. On a phallic dream he had as a young child.

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p. 14
1 week 5 days ago

Truth and clarity are complementary.

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As quoted in Quantum Theory and the Flight from Realism : Philosophical Responses to Quantum Mechanics (2000) by Christopher Norris, p. 234
4 months 6 days ago

Let us cultivate our garden.

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2 months 6 days ago

In the performance of an illocutionary act in the literal utterance of a sentence, the speaker intends to produce a certain effect by means of getting the hearer to recognize his intention to produce that effect; and furthermore, if he is using the words literally, he intends this recognition to be achieved in virtue of the fact that the rules for using the expressions he utters associate the expression with the production of that effect.

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P. 45.
2 months 3 days ago

No longer able to believe in the Church religion, whose falsehood they had detected, and incapable of accepting true Christian teaching, which denounced their whole manner of life, these rich and powerful people, stranded without any religious conception of life, involuntarily returned to that pagan view of things which places life's meaning in personal enjoyment. And then among the upper classes what is called the "Renaissance of science and art" took place, which was really not only a denial of every religion, but also an assertion that religion was unnecessary.

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4 months 4 days ago

You will hear every day the maxims of a low prudence. You will hear, that the first duty is to get land and money, place and name. "What is this Truth you seek? What is this Beauty?" men will ask, with derision. If, nevertheless, God have called any of you to explore truth and beauty, be bold, be firm, be true. When you shall say, "As others do, so will I. I renounce, I am sorry for it, my early visions; I must eat the good of the land, and let learning and romantic expectations go, until a more convenient season." - then dies the man in you; then once more perish the buds of art, and poetry, and science, as they have died already in a thousand thousand men. The hour of that choice is the crisis of your history; and see that you hold yourself fast by the intellect. ... Bend to the persuasion which is flowing to you from every object in Nature, to be its tongue to the heart of man, and to show the besotted world how passing fair is wisdom.

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1 month ago

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

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"New methods and new aims in teaching", in New Scientist, 22(392) (21 May 1964), pp.483-4
3 months 4 weeks ago

In the darkest region of the political field the condemned man represents the symmetrical, inverted figure of the king.

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4 weeks 1 day ago

The pragmatic justification is that liberalism is... a political doctrine that seeks to enable societies to govern themselves over diversity. It arose in the minds of thinkers like Thomas Hobbes or John Locke or Samuel Pufendorf... as a result of the European wars of religion following the Protestant Reformation.

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8:02
3 months 4 weeks ago

In its most general form, confinement was explained, or at least justified, by a will to avoid scandal. It thereby signalled an important change in the consciousness of evil. The Renaissance had let unreason in all its forms come out into the light of day, as public exposure gave evil the chance to redeem itself and to serve as an exemplum.

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Part One: 5. The Insane
4 months 1 week ago

Men are most apt to believe what they least understand.

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Book III, Ch. 11. Of Cripples
4 months 2 weeks ago

By faithfulness we are collected and wound up into unity within ourselves, whereas we had been scattered abroad in multiplicity.

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As quoted in Footprints in Time : Fulfilling God's Destiny for Your Life (2007) by Jeff O'Leary, p. 223
3 months ago

For two thousand years, Jesus has revenged himself on us for not having died on a sofa.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

All liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude, and the emergence of this consciousness is always hampered by the predominance of needs and satisfactions which, to a great extent, have become the individual's own.

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p. 7
2 months 2 weeks ago

Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity. Each actual occasion contributes to the circumstances of its origin additional formative elements deepening its own peculiar individuality. Consciousness is only the last and greatest of such elements by which the selective character of the individual obscures the external totality from which it originates and which it embodies. An actual individual, of such higher grade, has truck with the totality of things by reason of its sheer actuality; but it has attained its individual depth of being by a selective emphasis limited to its own purposes. The task of philosophy is to recover the totality obscured by the selection.

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Pt. I, ch. 1, sec. 6.
3 months 3 weeks ago

The covetous man is ever in want.

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Book I, epistle ii, line 56
4 months 1 week ago

In England, success in the profession of the law leads to some very great objects of ambition; and yet how few men, born to easy fortunes, have ever in this country been eminent in that profession?

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Chapter I, Part III, p. 824.
4 weeks 1 day ago

A further threat to liberalism has to do with the mode of cognition that we call modern natural science. The early liberals were very closely aligned with the founders of modern natural science, people like Bacon and Descartes and Newton, who believed that there was an objective world beyond our subjective consciousnesses, that we could perceive this world through the experimental method, and then come to manipulate it. Natural science gave us technology... that made the world much more habitable, by conquering disease, by inventing things that vastly increased human productivity. So... it's closely related to the wealth, and... the safety and comfort of a modern economically developed world.

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18:49
3 weeks 4 days ago

Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapting means to ends. Nothing is now done directly, or by hand; all is by rule and calculated contrivance. For the simplest operation, some helps and accompaniments, some cunning abbreviating process is in readiness. Our old modes of exertion are all discredited, and thrown aside. On every hand, the living artisan is driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier, inanimate one. The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver, and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster.

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1 week 5 days ago

Within a nominally Christian world, chivalry upheld without any substantial alterations an Aryan ethics in the following things: (1) upholding the ideal of the hero rather than the saint, and of the conqueror rather than of the martyr; (2) regarding faithfulness and honor, rather than caritas and humbleness, as the highest virtues; (3) regarding cowardice and dishonor, rather than sin, as the worst possible evil; (4) ignoring or hardly putting into practice the evangelical precepts of not opposing evil and not retaliating against offenses, but rather, methodically punishing unfairness and evil; (5) excluding from its ranks those who followed the Christian precept 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' to the letter; and (6) refusing to love one's enemy and instead fighting him and being magnanimous only after defeating him.

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4 months 4 days ago

I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living. All great enterprises are self-supporting. The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his poetry, as a steam planing-mill feeds its boilers with the shavings it makes. You must get your living by loving.

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pp. 486-7

Very similar were the views expressed by Raymundus of Sabunde or Sabeyde, a Spaniard of the fifteenth century, and professor at Toulouse about the year 1437. In his theologia natural is, which he handled in a speculative spirit, he dealt with the Nature of things, and with the revelation of God in Nature and in the history of the God-man. He sought to prove to unbelievers the Being, the trinity, the incarnation, the life, and the revelation of God in Nature, and in the history of the God-man, basing his arguments on Reason. From the contemplation of Nature he rises to God; and in the same way he reaches morality from; observation of man's inner nature. This purer and simpler style must be set off against the other, if we are to do justice to the Scholastic theologians in their turn.

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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History Vol 3 1837 translated by ES Haldane and Francis H. Simson) first translated 1896 P. 91-92
2 months 3 days ago

As soon as men live entirely in accord with the law of love natural to their hearts and now revealed to them, which excludes all resistance by violence, and therefore hold aloof from all participation in violence - as soon as this happens, not only will hundreds be unable to enslave millions, but not even millions will be able to enslave a single individual.

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V
2 months 2 weeks ago

Care and responsibility are constituent elements of love, but without respect for and knowledge of the beloved person, love deteriorates into domination and possessiveness. Respect is not fear and awe; it denotes, in accordance with the root of the word (respicere = to look at), the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his individuality and uniqueness. To respect a person is not possible without knowing him; care and responsibility would be blind if they were not guided by the knowledge of the person's individuality.

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Ch. 3; in Ch. 2 of his later work The Art of Loving (1956) a similar statement is made :
2 months 3 weeks ago

To be honest, from what I've seen, pure justice is better viewed stripped away from historical context to a certain extent. Too much history and time and we spin off into infinite circling. Not enough history and we fail to get the balance right. So many want the former to justify grievance retribution.

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4 months 1 week ago

Character means that the person derives his rules of conduct from himself and from the dignity of humanity. Character is the common ruling principle in man in the use of his talents and attributes. Thus it is the nature of his will, and is good or bad. A man who acts without settled principles, with no uniformity, has no character. A man may have a good heart and yet no character, because he is dependent upon impulses and does not act according to maxims. Firmness and unity of principle are essential to character.

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Part III : Selection on Education from Kant's other Writings, Ch. I Pedagogical Fragments, # 14
3 months ago

To have grazed every form of failure, including success.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

To understand this for sense it is not required that a man should be a geometrician or a logician, but that he should be mad. On the proposition that the volume generated by revolving the region under 1/x from 1 to infinity has finite volume.

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Quoted in Mathematical Maxims and Minims by N. Rose
3 months 3 weeks ago

To have a great man for an intimate friend seems pleasant to those who have never tried it; those who have, fear it.

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Book I, epistle xviii, line 86

I have ever deemed it more honorable and profitable, too, to set a good example than to follow a bad one.

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As quoted in The Life and Writings of Thomas Jefferson : Including All of His Important Utterances on Public Questions (1900) by Samuel E. Forman, p. 429
5 months 4 days ago

If the genius is an artist, then he accomplishes his work as art, but neither he nor his work of art has a telos outside him.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

I regard you with an indifference closely bordering on aversion.

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The Rajah's Diamond, Story of the House with the Green Blinds.
4 months 4 days ago

In the vaunted works of Art The master stroke is Nature's part.

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Art
4 months 1 week ago

Tis certainly a kind of indignity to philosophy, whose sovereign authority ought every where to be acknowledg'd, to oblige her on every occasion to make apologies for her conclusions, and justify herself to every particular art and science, which may be offended at her.

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Part 4, Section 5
2 months 3 weeks ago

When shall we open our minds to the conviction that the ultimate reality of the world is neither matter nor spirit, is no definite thing, but a perspective?

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Thought without language, says Lavelle, would not be a purer thought; it would be no more than the intention to think. And his last book offers a theory of expressiveness which makes of expression not "a faithful image of an already realized interior being, but the very means by which it is realized."

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p. 8

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