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2 months 2 days ago

Modern transcendental idealism, Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let God evaporate into abstract Ideality. Not a deity in concreto, not a superhuman person, but the immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the universe, is the object of the transcendentalist cult. In that address of the graduating class at Divinity College in 1838 which made Emerson famous, the frank expression of this worship of mere abstract laws was what made the scandal of the performance.

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Lecture II, "Circumscription of the Topic"
4 weeks ago

I'd rather offer my life as a sacrifice than be necessary to anything.

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2 weeks 4 days ago

When I speak of 'negative dialectics' not the least important reason for doing so is my desire to dissociate myself from this fetishization of the positive.

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p. 18
2 months 1 day ago

That is precisely what we should have expected, since Genet wants to live simultaneously creation, destruction, the impossibility of destroying and the impossibility of creating, since he wants both to show his rejection of the divine creation and to manifest, in the absolute, human impotence as man's reproval of God and as the testimony of his grandeur.

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p. 424
2 months 2 days ago

We inherit the warlike type; and for most of the capacities of heroism that the human race is full of we have to thank this cruel history. Dead men tell no tales, and if there were any tribes of other type than this they have left no survivors. Our ancestors have bred pugnacity into our bone and marrow, and thousands of years of peace won't breed it out of us. The popular imagination fairly fattens on the thought of wars. Let public opinion once reach a certain fighting pitch, and no ruler can withstand it. In the Boer war both governments began with bluff, but they couldn't stay there; the military tension was too much for them.

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3 months ago

For man to become successful, for man to establish himself as the ruler of the planet, it was necessary for him to use his brain as something more than a device to make the daily routine of getting food and evading enemies a little more efficient. Man had to learn to control his environment.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

This market way of life promotes addictions to stimulation and obsessions with comfort and convenience.

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(p29)
1 month 1 week ago

We are sleeping on a volcano... A wind of revolution blows, the storm is on the horizon.

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Speaking in the Chamber of Deputies just prior to to outbreak of revolution in Europe (1848).

The abolition of private property has become not only possible but absolutely necessary. ... The outcome can only be the victory of the proletariat.

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2 months 1 week ago

My trade and my art is living.

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Ch. 6 (tr. Donald M. Frame)
1 month 2 weeks ago

A blow from your friend is better than a kiss from your enemy.

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As quoted in Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists‎ (2007) by James Geary, p. 118
3 weeks 4 days ago

All the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and in time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death.

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Creative Evolution (1907), Chapter III. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911, p. 271
6 months 1 week ago

I believe in clear-cut positions. I think that the most arrogant position is this apparent, multidisciplinary modesty of "what I am saying now is not unconditional, it is just a hypothesis," and so on. It really is a most arrogant position. I think that the only way to be honest and expose yourself to criticism is to state clearly and dogmatically where you are. You must take the risk and have a position.

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2 weeks 5 days ago

People here argue about religion interminably, but it appears that they are competing at the same time to see who can be the least devout.

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No. 46. (Usbek writing to Rhedi)
2 weeks 4 days ago

Marriage as a community of interests unfailingly means the degradation of the interested parties, and it is the perfidy of the world's arrangements that no one, even if aware of it, can escape such degradation. The idea might therefore be entertained that marriage without ignominy is a possibility reserved for those spared the pursuit of interests, for the rich. But the possibility is purely formal, for the privileged are precisely those in whom the pursuit of interests has become second-nature-they would not otherwise uphold privilege.

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E. Jephcott, trans. (1974), § 10
4 weeks ago

There is nothing to say about anything. So there can be no limit to the number of books.

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2 months 1 day ago

We will not go to Heaven,Goetz, and even if we both entered it, we would not have eyes to see each other, nor hands to touch each other. Up there, God gets all the attention.... We can only love on this earth and against God.

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Acts 8 & 9
2 months 3 days ago

It is strange that men will talk of miracles, revelations, inspiration, and the like, as things past, while love remains.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 163

The business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but a direct participation in an experience. The whole tendency of modern communication...is towards participation in a process, rather than apprehension of concepts.

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Letter to Harold Adam Innis (14 March 1951), published in Essential McLuhan (1995), edited by Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, p. 73
4 weeks ago

There was a time when time did not yet exist. ... The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.

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2 months 1 week ago

For what is life but a play in which everyone acts a part until the curtain comes down?

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3 months ago

It is important to remember that the viciousness and wrongs of life stick out very plainly but that even at the worst times there is a great deal of goodness, kindness, and day-to-day decency that goes unnoticed and makes no headlines.

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2 months 6 days ago

It is a great mortification to the vanity of man, that his utmost art and industry can never equal the meanest of nature's productions, either for beauty or value. Art is only the under-workman, and is employed to give a few strokes of embellishment to those pieces, which come from the hand of the master.

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Part I, Essay 15: The Epicurean
1 month 2 weeks ago

Perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little.

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Sertorius 16 (Tr. Dryden and Clough)
1 month 3 weeks ago

The sight of both eyes becomes one.

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fr. 88
3 weeks 2 days ago

Man is a substantial emigrant on a pilgrimage of being, and it is accordingly meaningless to set limits to what he is capable of being.

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"Man has no nature"
3 months 3 days ago

It is impossible that each of the elements should be infinite. For that is body which has interval on all sides; and that is infinite which has extension without bound.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

These five rules [above] form all that is necessary to render proofs convincing, immutable, and to say all, geometrical; and the eight rules together render them even more perfect.

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2 months 4 days ago

One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests.

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Worship and Church Bells, 1797
2 weeks 5 days ago

Not to be loved is a misfortune, but it is an insult to be loved no longer.

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No. 3. (Zachi writing to Usbek)
2 weeks 1 day ago

The vitality of the ordinary members of society is dependent on its Outsiders.

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Chapter Three, The Romantic Outsider

A cock has great influence on his own dunghill.

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Maxim 357
2 months 2 weeks ago

It is no advantage to be near the light if the eyes are closed.

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p. 607
2 days ago

Those attacks upon language and religion in Poland, the Baltic provinces, Alsace, Bohemia, upon the Jews in Russia, in every place that such acts of violence occur-in what name have they been, and are they, perpetrated? In none other than the name of that patriotism which you defend. Ask our savage Russifiers of Poland and the Baltic provinces, ask the persecutors of the Jews, why they act thus. They will tell you it is in defence of their native religion and language; they will tell you that if they do not act thus, their religion and language will suffer-the Russians will be Polonised, Teutonised, Judaised.

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A Reply to Criticisms
4 weeks 1 day ago

The little world of childhood with its familiar surroundings is a model of the greater world. The more intensively the family has stamped its character upon the child, the more it will tend to feel and see its earlier miniature world again in the bigger world of adult life. Naturally this is not a conscious, intellectual process.

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The Theory of Psychoanalysis
2 months 3 days ago

Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the labourer.

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Vol. I, Ch. 15 (last sentence), pg. 556.
2 weeks 4 days ago

The first thing that we know about ourselves is our imperfection.

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2 weeks 1 day ago

If love does not know how to give and take without restrictions, it is not love, but a transaction that never fails to lay stress on a plus and a minus.

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3 weeks 2 days ago

Calvin's theocentric irrationalism eventually revealed itself as the cunning to technocratic reason which had to shape its human material. Misery and the poor laws did not suffice to drive men into the workshops of the early capitalistic era. The new spirit helped to supplement external pressures with a concern for wife and child to which the moral autonomy of the introverted subject in reality was tantamount.

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p. 34.
2 months 3 days ago

The average man's opinions are much less foolish than they would be if he thought for himself: in science, at least, his respect for authority is on the whole beneficial.

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On Education, Especially in Early Childhood (1926), Ch. 2: The Aims of Education, p. 63
2 months 3 days ago

A man fits out a ship at a great expense and sends it to the West Indies with a crew of men and boys, and after six months or a year, it comes back with a load of pine-apples; now, if no more gets accomplished than the speculator commonly aims at, if it simply turns out what is called a successful venture, I am less interested in this expedition than in some child's first excursions a-huckleberrying, in which it is introduced into a new world, experiences a new development, though it brings home only a gill of berries in its basket.

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2 months 1 week ago

Religion is not 'doctrinal knowledge,' but wisdom born of personal experience.

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Holborn, Hajo; A HISTORY OF MODERN GERMANY: The Reformation; 1959/1982 Princeton university Press
1 month 2 weeks ago

Eat not the heart.

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Symbol 30
1 month 3 weeks ago

I regard Peter as one of the great moralists, because I suspect that more than anyone he has helped to change the attitudes of very many people to the sufferings of animals. Peter is a utilitarian in normative ethics, and a humane attitude to animals is a natural corollary of utilitarianism. Utilitarian concern for animals goes back to Bentham, who, presumably alluding to the Kantians, said that the question was not whether animals can reason, but whether they can suffer.

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J. J. C. Smart, Reply to Singer, in Philip Pettit, Richard Sylvan and Jean Norman (eds.), Metaphysics and Morality: Essays in Honour of J. J. C. Smart, Oxford, 1987, p. 192
3 weeks 4 days ago

As first a man cannot lay down the right of resisting them, that assault him by force, to take away his life; because he cannot be understood to ayme thereby, at any Good to himself.

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The First Part, Chapter 14, p. 66

Tension weakens the bow; the want of it, the mind.

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Maxim 59
1 month 1 week ago

Nothing is quite so wretchedly corrupt as an aristocracy which has lost its power but kept its wealth and which still has endless leisure to devote to nothing but banal enjoyments. All its great thoughts and passionate energy are things of the past, and nothing but a host of petty, gnawing vices now cling to it like worms to a corpse.

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Book Three, Chapter XI.
2 months 3 days ago

Power, like vanity, is insatiable. Nothing short of omnipotence could satisfy it completely. And as it is especially the vice of energetic men, the causal efficacy of love of power is out of all proportion to its frequency. It is, indeed, by far the strongest motive in the lives of important men. Love of power is greatly increased by the experience of power, and this applies to petty power as well as to that of potentates.

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We begin again to structure the primordial feelings...from which 3000 years of literacy divorced us. We begin again to live a myth.

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(p. 17)
2 weeks 5 days ago

Jesus said that God was not the God of the dead, but of the living. And the other life is not, in fact, thinkable to us except under the same forms as those of this earthly and transitory life.

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