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6 months 2 weeks ago

Let us not flutter too high, but remain by the manger and the swaddling clothes of Christ, in whom dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.

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50
6 months 1 week ago

Since labour is motion, time is its natural measure.

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Notebook I, The Chapter on Money, p. 125.
5 months 2 weeks ago

The foremost, or indeed the sole condition which is required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community, is to love equality, or to get men to believe you love it. Thus the science of despotism, which was once so complex, is simplified, and reduced as it were to a single principle.

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Book Four, Chapter IV.
6 months 1 week ago

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

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"Words and Behaviour", The Olive Tree, 1936
7 months 1 week ago
The liar is a person who uses the valid designations, the words, in order to make something which is unreal appear to be real. He says, for example, "I am rich," when the proper designation for his condition would be "poor." He misuses fixed conventions by means of arbitrary substitutions or even reversals of names. If he does this in a selfish and moreover harmful manner, society will cease to trust him and will thereby exclude him. What men avoid by excluding the liar is not so much being defrauded as it is being harmed by means of fraud. Thus, even at this stage, what they hate is basically not deception itself, but rather the unpleasant, hated consequences of certain sorts of deception. It is in a similarly restricted sense that man now wants nothing but truth: he desires the pleasant, life-preserving consequences of truth. He is indifferent toward pure knowledge which has no consequences; toward those truths which are possibly harmful and destructive he is even hostilely inclined.
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2 months 3 weeks ago

What matters the party to me? I shall find enough anyhow who unite with me without swearing allegiance to my flag.

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Dover 2005, p. 236
5 months 2 days ago

He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.

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8:7 (King James Version)
2 months 2 weeks ago

Know all ye mortals who have entered this contest, that according to our laws and decrees the victor is allowed to exult but the vanquished must not complain. Depart then wherever you please, and in future live every one of you under the guidance of the gods. Let every man choose his own guardian and guide.

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7 months 1 week ago
May I really say it! All truths are bloody truths to me, take a look at my previous writings.
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2 months 1 week ago

There's nothing under the ground that's worthmore than the little layer of topsoil sitting on top of it.

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6 months 1 week ago

I resolved from the beginning of my quest that I would not be misled by sentiment and desire into beliefs for which there was no good evidence.

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Fact and Fiction (1961), Part I, Ch. 6: "The Pursuit of Truth", p. 37
5 months 5 days ago

There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.

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4 months 2 days ago

In an age of enormities, the emotions are naturally weakened. We are continually called upon to have feelings - about genocide, for instance, or about famine or the blowing up of passenger planes - and we are all aware that we are incapable of reacting appropriately. A guilty consciousness of emotional inadequacy or impotence makes people doubt their own human weight.

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"The Distracted Public" (1990), p. 156
6 months 1 week ago

This I know, that between finite and infinite there is no comparison; so that the difference between God and the greatest and most excellent created thing is no less than the difference between God and the least created thing.

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Letter to Hugo Boxel (October 1674) The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza (1891) Tr. R. H. M. Elwes, Vol. 2, Letter 58 (54).
4 months 3 weeks ago

But the truth is that my work - I was going to say my mission - is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention in faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself; it is to war against all those who submit, whether it be to Catholicism, or to rationalism, or to agnosticism; it is to make all men live the life of inquietude and passionate desire.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Everything of this sort is not anger, but the semblance of anger, like that of boys who want to beat the ground when they have fallen upon it, and who often do not even know why they are angry, but are merely angry without any reason or having received any injury, yet not without some semblance of injury received, or without some wish to exact a penalty for it.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Wyman's overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes.

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"On What There Is", p. 4. a humorous comment on the idea "unactualized possible".
4 months 1 week 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

The Christian Scholastics... might have shown that God Himself said that He had "imprinted an active principle in the elements of matter (Gen. i; Is. lxvi).

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Ch. V Concerning the Moving Force of Matter
4 months 3 weeks ago

To be sure, exchange-value exerts its power in a special way in the realm of cultural goods. For in the world of commodities this realm appears to be exempted from the power of exchange, to be in an immediate relationship with the goods, and it is this appearance in turn which alone gives cultural goods their exchange-value. But they nevertheless simultaneously fall completely into the world of commodities, are produced for the market, and are aimed at the market.

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p. 279
4 months 1 week ago

Fortune is like glass-the brighter the glitter, the more easily broken.

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Maxim 280
3 months 3 weeks ago

I've had letters from Chinese scientists at the peak of the SARS epidemic who said the problem is a hybridization between the viruses planted into GMO feed, which is then fed to animals, then the virus jumped from the animals to humans. We're going to see more and more of these kinds of risks. I think the whole issue of the H1N1 virus was the fact that it had genes for three influenza types--human, chicken, pig. All of these crossings are becoming possible because of the crossing of genes across species barriers.

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On the SARS epidemic, as quoted in "A Visit to My Kitchen: Vandana Shiva", The Huffington Post
4 months 3 weeks ago

My conduct must be the best proof, the moral proof, of my supreme desire; and if I do not end by convincing myself, within the bounds of the ultimate and irremediable uncertainty of the truth of what I hope for, it is because my conduct is not sufficiently pure. Virtue, therefore, is not based upon dogma, but dogma upon virtue, and it is not faith that creates martyrs but martyrs who create faith. There is no security or repose - so far as security and repose are obtainable in this life, so essentially insecure and unreposeful - save in conduct that is passionately good.

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7 months 1 week ago

The best way to describe anyone is to give an example of the kind of thing he would do.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

This, I feel, is missing a vital point: that the sceptic is often a totally honest person who, for perfectly good, sound reasons, simply cannot see a case for belief. In fact many -- like Courty Bryan -- admit that they would like to be convinced, but find it impossible.

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p. 77
2 months 1 week ago

The Pythagoreans called the monad "intellect" because they thought that intellect was akin to the One; for among the virtues, they likened the monad to moral wisdom; for what is correct is one. And they called it "being," "cause of truth," "simple," "paradigm," "order," "concord," "what is equal among the greater and the lesser," "the mean between intensity and slackness," "moderation in plurality," "the instant now in time," and moreover they call it "ship," "chariot," "friend," "life," "happiness."

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On the Monad
4 months 1 week ago

Is attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas, which is a non-canonical early Christian text

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3 months 2 weeks ago

I discovered that what's really important for a creator isn't what we vaguely define as inspiration or even what it is we want to say, recall, regret, or rebel against. No, what's important is the way we say it. Art is all about craftsmanship. Others can interpret craftsmanship as style if they wish. Style is what unites memory or recollection, ideology, sentiment, nostalgia, presentiment, to the way we express all that. It's not what we say but how we say it that matters.

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Craftsmanship
6 months 1 week ago

"Ah, Psyche," I said, "have I made you so little happy as that?"

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Orual
6 months 1 week ago

I observe that a very large portion of the human race does not believe in God and suffers no visible punishment in consequence. And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that he would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt his existence.

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Bertrand Russell's Best: Silhouettes in Satire (1958), "On Religion".
5 months 6 days ago

Modern man may assert that he can dispense with them, and he may bolster his opinion by insisting that there is no scientific evidence of their truth. But since we are dealing with invisible and unknowable things (for God is beyond human understanding, and there is no mean of proving immortality), why should we bother with evidence?

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p. 75-76
5 months 5 days ago

Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God; thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved.

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6 months 1 week ago

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.

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Ch. 4
7 months 1 week ago
Pardon me, my friends, I have ventured to paint my happiness on the wall.
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2 months 3 weeks ago

Virtue runs no risk of becoming contemptible by being exposed to view, and it is better to be despised for simplicity than to be tormented by continual hypocrisy.

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4 months 1 week ago

To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction; or, the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts.

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Laws of Motion, III
6 months 4 days ago

What is important is that sex was not only a question of sensation and pleasure, of law and interdiction, but also of the true and the false.

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Vol. I, p. 76
2 months 6 days ago

Always take the short cut; and that is the rational one. Therefore say and do everything according to soundest reason.

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IV, 51
4 months 3 weeks ago

The "passion for incredulity" can produce as much self-deception as the uncritical will to believe.

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p. 209
1 week 6 days ago

That's because believing in "God" or not doesn't determine goodness....universality does that...understanding each individual is an end in themselves.....

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The possession of self-conscious reason, which belongs to us of the present world, did not arise suddenly, nor did it grow only from the soil of the present. This possession must be regarded as previously present, as an inheritance, and as the result of labour - the labour of all past generations of men.

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Introduction p. 2 Ibid
1 month 4 weeks ago

When a man after long years of searching chances on a thought which discloses something of the beauty of this mysterious universe, he should not therefore be personally celebrated. He is already sufficiently paid by his experience of seeking and finding. In science, moreover, the work of the individual is so bound up with that of his scientific predecessors and contemporaries that it appears almost as an impersonal product of his generation.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Once the needs of hunger are satisfied - and they are soon satisfied - the vanity, the necessity - for it is a necessity - arises of imposing ourselves upon and surviving in others. Man habitually sacrifices his life to his purse, but he sacrifices his purse to his vanity. He boasts even of his weakness and his misfortunes, for want of anything better to boast of, and is like a child who, in order to attract attention, struts about with a bandaged finger.

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What was man before the invention of words and the knowledge of language? An animal..

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4 months 1 week ago

Paradox is the technique for seizing the conflicting aspects of any problem. Paradox coalesces or telescopes various facets of a complex process in a single instant.

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(p. 106)
4 months 1 week ago

Government is violence, Christianity is meekness, non-resistance, love. And, therefore, government cannot be Christian, and a man who wishes to be a Christian must not serve government.

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Letter to Dr. Eugen Heinrich Schmitt (October 12, 1896), translated by Nathan Haskell Dole
2 months 2 weeks ago

[Successful meditation brings about realizations:] That we are no longer this poor little stranger and afraid in a world it never made. But that you are this universe and you are creating it in every moment... Because you see it starts now, it didn't begin in the past, there was no past. See, if the universe began in the past when that happened it was now; see, but it's still now - and the universe is still beginning now, and it's trailing off like the wake of a ship from now, and that wake fades out so does the past. You can look back there to explain things, but the explanation disappears. You'll never find it there. ... Things are not explained by the past, they are explained by what Happens Now. That Creates the past, and it begins here... That's the birth of responsibility.

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On deep meditation and enlightenment that transcends temporal experiences and most notions of selfhoody
3 months 2 weeks ago

Genes and culture have co-evolved. But crudely, natural selection "designed" male human primates to hunt nonhumans and build coalitions of other male human primates in order to wage territorial wars of aggression. Nature didn't design us to become a scientific community and collaborate to overcome aging. It's difficult to imagine that any human enemy could inflict such gruesome damage on the victims as growing old. The ravages of aging strike down combatants and civilians alike. So the trillions of dollars that humans currently spend on ways to harm and kill each other ("defence") would be more fruitfully spent on defeating our common enemy. We should work together to build a "Triple S" civilisation of superlongevity, superhappiness and superintelligence.

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Transhumanism 2017: Towards a 'Triple S' civilisation of Superlongevity, Superintelligence and Superhappiness, Timeship Buddha

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