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3 weeks 6 days ago

The principle of bounded rationality [is] the capacity of the human mind for formulating and solving complex problems is very small compared with the size of the problems whose solution is required for objectively rational behavior in the real world - or even for a reasonable approximation to such objective rationality.

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p. 198.
2 months 1 week ago

Repentance for one's evil deeds is the safeguard of life.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Whatever we may think or affect to think of the present age, we cannot get out of it; we must suffer with its sufferings, and enjoy with its enjoyments; we must share in its lot, and, to be either useful or at ease, we must even partake its character.

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"The Spirit of the Age, I", Examiner (9 January 1831), p. 20 Full text online
1 month 4 days ago

The importance of the culture industry in the spiritual constitution of the masses is no dispensation for reflection on its objective legitimation, its essential being, least of all by a science which thinks itself pragmatic.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

The love of power is a part of human nature, but power-philosophies are, in a certain precise sense, insane. The existence of the external world, both that of matter and of other human beings, is a datum, which may be humiliating to a certain kind of pride, but can only be denied by a madman. Men who allow their love of power to give them a distorted view of the world are to be found in every asylum: one man will think he is Governor of the Bank of England, another will think he is the King, and yet another will think he is God. Highly similar delusions, if expressed by educated men in obscure language, lead to professorships in philosophy; and if expressed by emotional men in eloquent language, lead to dictatorships. Certified lunatics are shut up because of the proneness to violence when their pretensions are questioned; the uncertified variety are given control of powerful armies, and can inflict death and disaster upon all sane men within their reach.

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Ch. 16: Power philosophies
2 months 1 week ago

Fame and wealth without wisdom are unsafe possessions.

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1 month 5 days ago

One must give one power a ballast, so to speak, to put it in a position to resist another.

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Book V, Chapter 14.
1 month 2 weeks ago

We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.

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1 month 1 week ago

Oblivious of Democritus, the unwilling materialists of our day have generally been awkwardly intellectual and quite incapable of laughter. If they have felt anything, they have felt melancholy. Their allegiance and affection were still fixed on those mythical sentimental worlds which they saw to be illusory. The mechanical world they believed in could not please them, in spite of its extent and fertility. Giving rhetorical vent to their spleen and prejudice, they exaggerated nature's meagreness and mathematical dryness. When their imagination was chilled they spoke of nature, most unwarrantably, as dead, and when their judgment was heated they took the next step and called it unreal.

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Ch. 3 "Mechanism"

So dazzling was the spread of constellations that it had the impact of a vision, of some hidden insight. I drove home saying to myself: The dead, too, are like this, blazing within us - invisibly.

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As quoted in No More Words : A Journal of My Mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh (2001) by Reeve Lindbergh, p. 41
2 months 1 week ago

For a large class of cases - though not for all - in which we employ the word meaning it can be explained thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.

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§ 43, this has often been quoted as simply: The meaning of a word is its use in the language.
1 month 2 weeks ago

There never was a bad man that had ability for good service.

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Speech in opening the impeachment of Warren Hastings (18 February 1788), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Volume the Tenth (1899), p. 59
3 months 2 weeks ago

An authorship that began with Either/Or and advanced step by step seeks here its decisive place of rest, at the foot of the altar, where the author, personally most aware of his own imperfections and guilt, certainly does not call himself a truth-witness but only a singular kind of poet and thinker who, without authority, has had nothing new to bring but “has wanted once again to read through, if possible in a more inward way, the original text handed down from the fathers.

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1 month 5 days ago

I can assure you that no kingdom has ever had as many civil wars as the kingdom of Christ.

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No. 29. (Rica writing to Ibben)
1 month 2 weeks ago

People talk sometimes of a bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that's all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

When at first thought we think of a creator our ideas appear to us undefined and confused; but if we reason philosophically, those ideas can be easily arranged and simplified. It is a Being, whose power is equal to his will.

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A Discourse, &c. &c.
1 month 2 weeks ago

I would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night.

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2 months 1 week ago

Unto Thee, O Lord, the Soul of Creation cried: "For whom didst Thou create me, and who so fashioned me? Feuds and fury, violence and the insolence of might have oppressed me; None have I to protect me save Thee; Command for me then the blessings of a settled, peaceful life."

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Ahunuvaiti Gatha; Yasna 29, 1.
2 months 2 weeks ago

For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible.

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The Art of Literature

The highest proof of virtue is to possess boundless power without abusing it.

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The Life and Writings of Addison', The Edinburgh Review (July 1843), quoted in T. B. Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to The Edinburgh Review: A New Edition (1852), p. 706
2 months 1 week ago

With a foolish man make no dispute.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

I have assumed throughout that the persons in the original position are rational.

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Chapter III, Section 25, pg. 142
1 month 1 week ago

Whit Meynell was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.

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The Philosopher's Pupil (1983) p. 165.
2 weeks 4 days ago

The oppression of a majority by a minority, and the demoralization inevitably resulting from it, is a phenomenon that has always occupied me and has done so most particularly of late.

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I

The very ideology of "cultural production" is antithetical to all culture, as is that of visibility and of the polyvalent space: culture is a site of the secret, of seduction, of initiation, of a restrained and highly ritualized symbolic exchange.

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"The Beaubourg Effect," p. 64
2 months 3 weeks ago

As a general rule-never substitute the symbol for the thing signified, unless it is impossible to show the thing itself; for the child's attention is so taken up with the symbol that he will forget what it signifies.

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2 months 1 week ago

Thou shouldst not become presumptuous through great connections and race; for in the end thy trust is on thine own deeds.

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(p. 60)
1 month 3 weeks ago

Be substantially great in thyself, and more than thou appearest unto others.

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Part I, Section XIX
2 months 2 weeks ago

We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.

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Letters of C. S. Lewis (29 April 1959), para. 1, p. 285 - as reported in The Quotable Lewis (1989), p. 469
2 months 2 weeks ago

Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.

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(p. 142)
1 month 1 week ago

If I compare arithmetic with a tree that unfolds upward into a multitude of techniques and theorems while its root drives into the depths, then it seems to me that the impetus of the root.

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Gottlob Frege, Montgomery Furth (1964). The Basic Laws of Arithmetic: Exposition of the System. p. 10
2 months 1 week ago

Why in the world shouldn't they have regarded with awe and reverence that act by which the human race is perpetuated. Not every religion has to have St. Augustine's attitude to sex. Why even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn't prevent it being a religious ceremony.

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Intentionality, and Romanticism (1997) by Richard Thomas Eldridge, p. 130
1 month 3 weeks ago

The heart of man is the place the devil dwells in; I feel sometimes a hell within myself.

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Section 51
2 months 2 weeks ago

...inversion...is an outlet that a child discovers when he is suffocating.

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p. 91
1 month 1 week ago

The concept of God was for a long time the place where the idea was kept alive that there are other norms besides those to which nature and society give expression in their operation.

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"Thoughts on Religion," Critical Theory: Selected Essays (1995), p. 129.
2 months 3 weeks ago

The most profound joy has more of gravity than of gaiety in it.

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Book II, Ch. 20
2 months 2 weeks ago

Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?

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1 month 5 days ago

A man should be mourned at his birth, not at his death.

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No. 40. (Usbek writing to Ibben)
2 months 3 weeks ago

He who remembers the evils he has undergone, and those that have threatened him, and the slight causes that have changed him from one state to another, prepares himself in that way for future changes and for recognizing his condition. The life of Caesar has no more to show us than our own; an emperor's or an ordinary man's, it is still a life subject to all human accidents.

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Ch. 13
2 months 1 week ago

Aim at being loved without being admired.

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p. 38e
1 month 4 days ago

Hegel ... destroyed the illusion of the subject's being-in-itself and showed that the subject is itself an aspect of social objectivity. ... However, ... we must ask this question: is this objectivity which we have shown to be a necessary condition and which subsumes abstract subjectivity in fact the higher factor? Does it not rather remain precisely what Hegel reproached it with being in his youth, namely pure externality, the coercive collective? Does not the retreat to this supposedly higher authority signify the regression of the subject, which had earlier won its freedom only with the greatest efforts, with infinite pains?

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p. 16
2 months 3 weeks ago

Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog.

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Chapter II, p. 14.
1 month 1 week ago

As also the great number of Corporations; which are as it were many lesser Common-wealths in the bowels of a greater, like wormes in the entrayles of a natural man.

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The Second Part, Chapter 29, p. 174
1 month 5 days ago

It is sad not to be loved, but it is much sadder not to be able to love.

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To a Young Writer
3 months 1 week ago

The Yin based its propriety on that of the Xia, and what it added and subtracted is knowable. The Zhou has based its propriety on that of the Shang and what it added and subtracted is knowable. In this way, what continues from the Chou, even if 100 generations hence, is knowable.

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1 month 1 week ago

If it were not for the founder of the school, Charles S. Pierce, who has told us that he 'learned philosophy out of Kant,' one might be tempted to deny any philosophical pedigree to a doctrine that holds not that our expectations are fulfilled and our actions successful because our ideas are true, but rather that our ideas are true because our expectations are fulfilled and our actions successful. describing the pragmatist view,

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p. 42.
3 months 1 week ago

The Superior Man has nothing to compete for. But if he must compete, he does it in an archery match, wherein he ascends to his position, bowing in deference. Descending, he drinks (or has [the winner] drink) the ritual cup. Note: Bowing is a courtesy for the host who invites him as well drinking a cup.

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I adopt Mr. Darwin's hypothesis, therefore, subject to the production of proof that physiological species may be produced by selective breeding; just as a physical philosopher may accept the undulatory theory of light, subject to the proof of the existence of the hypothetical ether; or as the chemist adopts the atomic theory, subject to the proof of the existence of atoms; and for exactly the same reasons, namely, that it has an immense amount of primâ facie probability: that it is the only means at present within reach of reducing the chaos of observed facts to order; and lastly, that it is the most powerful instrument of investigation which has been presented to naturalists since the invention of the natural system of classification and the commencement of the systematic study of embryology.

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Ch.2, p. 128

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