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3 months 3 days ago

The man that does not know himself not to be at the mercy of other men, that does not feel that he is invulnerable to all the vicissitudes of fortune, is incapable of a constant and inflexible virtue.

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Book V, "Of Education"
4 weeks 1 day ago

We seek not what God could have done but what He has done.... God could have caused birds to fly with bones of solid gold, with veins full of quicksilver, with flesh heavier than lead and very small and heavy wings, so as to better show His power ... but He wanted to make their bones, flesh and feathers very light ... to teach us that He likes simplicity and ease.

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Notes in a copy of Jean-Baptiste Morin's "Famous and ancient problems of the earth's motion or rest, yet to be solved" (published 1631).
4 months 4 days ago

All-powerful god, who am I but the fear that I inspire in others?

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King Aegistheus to Jupiter, Act 2
4 months 1 week ago

An armed insurrection ... would hinder and bring into disrepute this spiritual insurrection.

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p. 68
2 months 3 weeks ago

Concern for the symbol has completely disappeared from our science. And yet, if one were to give oneself the trouble, one could easily find, in certain parts at least of contemporary mathematics... symbols as clear, as beautiful, and as full of spiritual meaning as that of the circle and mediation. From modern thought to ancient wisdom the path would be short and direct, if one cared to take it.

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The Need for Roots (1949), p. 292
4 months 3 weeks ago

Since, of desires some are natural and necessary; others natural, but not necessary; and others neither natural nor necessary, but the offspring of false judgment; it must be the office of temperance to gratify the first class, as far as nature requires: to restrain the second within the bounds of moderation; and, as to the third, resolutely to oppose, and, if possible, entirely repress them.

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4 months 4 days ago

Don't you feel the same way? When I cannot see myself, even though I touch myself, I wonder if I really exist.

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Estelle, discovering that there are no mirrors in Hell, Act 1, sc. 5
4 months 3 weeks ago

When your father is alive, observe his will. When your father is dead observe his former actions. If, for three years after the death of your father you do not change from the ways of your father, you can be called a 'real son'.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting - the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

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Ch. 6
2 months 4 weeks ago

His disciples said to Him, "When will the Kingdom come?" Jesus said, "It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying 'Here it is' or 'There it is.' Rather, the Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it."

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Underlying the concept of positivity is the conviction that the positive is intrinsically positive in itself, without anyone pausing to ask what is to be regarded as positive. ... It is significant and really quite interesting that the term 'positive' actually contains this ambivalence. On the one hand, 'positive' means what is given, is postulated, is there-as when we speak of positivism as the philosophy that sticks to the facts. But, equally, 'positive' also refers to the good, the approvable, in a certain sense, the ideal. And I imagine that this semantic constellation expresses with precision what countless people actually feel to be the case.

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p. 18

I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents... The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature, for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society... Every one, by his property, or by his satisfactory situation, is interested in the support of law and order. And such men may safely and advantageously reserve to themselves a wholesome control over their public affairs, and a degree of freedom, which, in the hands of the canaille [the masses] of the cities of Europe, would be instantly perverted to the demolition and destruction of everything public and private.

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Letter to John Adams
4 months 3 weeks ago

Cornered vessel without corners, strange cornered vessel, strange cornered vessel.

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4 months 1 day ago

There is no information about the thingness of the thing without knowledge of the kind of truth in which the thing stands. But there is no information about this truth of the thing without knowledge of the thingness of the thing whose truth is in question. Where are we to get a foothold? The ground slips away under us. Perhaps we are already close to falling into the well. At any rate the housemaids are already laughing.

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p. 27
2 months 4 weeks ago

The judgment that human life is worth living, or rather can and ought to be made worth living, ... underlies all intellectual effort; it is the a priori of social theory, and its rejection (which is perfectly logical) rejects theory itself.

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p. xliii
2 months 2 weeks ago

One has to do something new in order to see something new.

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J 1770
3 months 1 day ago

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.

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3 weeks 5 days ago

Normal science, the puzzle-solving activity we have just examined, is a highly cumulative enterprise, eminently successful in its aim, the steady extension of the scope and precision of scientific knowledge. In all these respects it fits with great precision the most usual image of scientific work. Yet one standard product of the scientific enterprise is missing. Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none.

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p. 52
1 month 1 day ago

Today we have arrived at a point when the three principles [of modern resistance: 1. measure of efficacy, 2. the form of political and military organization correspond to the current forms of economic and social production, 3. democracy and freedom] coincide. The distributed network structure provides the model for an absolutely democratic organization that corresponds to the dominant forms of economic and social production and is also the most powerful weapon against the ruling power structure.

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88
4 months 1 week ago

... happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination, resting on merely empirical grounds…

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4:418-19, p.29
2 months 1 day ago

Nothing like a little judicious levity.

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The Wrong Box, ch. 7 (1889).
3 months 1 week ago

Good music is very close to primitive language.

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"Correspondence of Ideas with the Motion of Organs"
1 month 1 week ago

Human rights are not just cultural or legal constructions, as fashionable western relativists are fond of claiming. They are universal values. To deny the benefits of the new regime of rights to other cultures is to patronise them in a way that is reminiscent of the colonial era. If the new regime on torture is good enough for the US, who can say that it is not good for everyone?

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3 months 2 weeks ago

By Silence, the discretion of a man is known: and a fool, keeping Silence, seemeth to be wise.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Pyrrhus said, "If I should overcome the Romans in another fight, I were undone."

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47 Pyrrhus
3 months 1 day ago

If death had only negative aspects, dying would be an unmanageable action.

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4 months 1 week ago

The history of mankind can be seen, in the large, as the realization of Nature's secret plan to bring forth a perfectly constituted state as the only condition in which the capacities of mankind can be fully developed, and also bring forth that external relation among states which is perfectly adequate to this end.

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Eighth Thesis
3 weeks 4 days ago

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; 'these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions'; we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit: 'the good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life... for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy'.

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p. 87; the quoted phrases within the quotation are from the Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, 4; Book I, 7
2 months 3 weeks ago

Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about.

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Ways of Paradox and Other Essays (1976), p. 174
3 months 2 days 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
5 months 6 days ago

Those who assert that the mathematical sciences say nothing of the beautiful or the good are in error. For these sciences say and prove a great deal about them; if they do not expressly mention them, but prove attributes which are their results or definitions, it is not true that they tell us nothing about them. The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

The most important part of education - to teach the meaning of to know (in the scientific sense). The last statement in her notebook

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3 months 5 days ago

Time: That which man is always trying to kill, but which ends in killing him.

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Definitions, as quoted in The Dictionary of Essential Quotations (1983) by Kevin Goldstein-Jackson, p. 154
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
1 month 1 week ago

Progress in civilization seems possible only in interludes when history is idling.

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An Old Chaos: The Emperor's Tomb (p. 35)
4 months 6 days ago

The art of music is good, for the reason, among others, that it produces pleasure; but what proof is it possible to give that pleasure is good? If, then, it is asserted that there is a comprehensive formula, including all things which are in themselves good, and that whatever else is good, is not so as an end, but as a mean, the formula may be accepted or rejected, but is not a subject of what is commonly understood by proof.

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Ch. 1
3 months 1 day ago

Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.

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4 months 4 days ago

The claims of existing social arrangements and of self interest have been duly allowed for. We cannot at the end count them a second time because we do not like the result.

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Chapter III, Section 23, pg. 135
4 months 5 days ago

In modern eyes, precious though wars may be they must not be waged solely for the sake of the ideal harvest. Only when forced upon one, is a war now thought permissible. It was not thus in ancient times. The earlier men were hunting men, and to hunt a neighboring tribe, kill the males, loot the village and possess the females, was the most profitable, as well as the most exciting, way of living. Thus were the more martial tribes selected, and in chiefs and peoples a pure pugnacity and love of glory came to mingle with the more fundamental appetite for plunder. Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to plunder; but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors. Showing war's irrationality and horror is of no effect on him. The horrors make the fascination. War is the strong life; it is life in extremis; war taxes are the only ones men never hesitate to pay, as the budgets of all nations show us.

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3 months 5 days ago

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts!

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Ch. 8, Humanity
2 months 4 weeks ago

If your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault, just between the two of you. If he listens to you, you have won your brother over.

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(Matthew 18:15) (NIV)
4 months 4 days ago

Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research program. Unsourced variant: Evolution is not a fact. Evolution doesn't even qualify as a theory or as a hypothesis. It is a metaphysical research program, and it is not really testable science.

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5 months 2 days ago

Yes, everyone sleeps at that hour, and this is reassuring, since the great longing of an unquiet heart is to possess constantly and consciously the loved one...

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4 months 5 days ago

I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.

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Lecture III, Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered
4 months 1 week ago

Enjoin him to play so many hours every day, and look that he do it; and you shall see he will quickly be sick of it; and willing to leave it. By this means making the recreations you dislike a business to him, he will of himself with delight betake himself to those things you would have him do, especially if they be proposed as rewards for having performed the task in that play which is commanded of him.

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Sec. 129
2 weeks 6 days ago

Meanwhile, hold fast to this thought, and grip it close: yield not to adversity; trust not to prosperity; keep before your eyes the full scope of Fortune's power, as if she would surely do whatever is in her power to do.

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2 weeks 2 days ago

Any religion or philosophy which is not based on a respect for life is not a true religion or philosophy.

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Letter to a Japanese Animal Welfare Society (1961); also in The Words of Albert Schweitzer (1984) edited by ‎Norman Cousins, p. 37
4 months 4 days ago

Justice as fairness provides what we want.

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Chapter III, Section 30, pg. 190

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