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3 months 2 weeks ago

No man ought to glory except in that which is his own.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

When I read the catechism of the Council of Trent, it seems as though I had nothing in common with the religion there set forth.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

A on his lips and not-A in his heart.

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E 95
7 months 5 days ago

We may define "faith" as a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. Where there is evidence, no one speaks of "faith". We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence. The substitution of emotion for evidence is apt to lead to strife, since different groups substitute different emotions.

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p. 215
6 months 2 days ago

You rejoice in having made a convert to Atheism. I think there is something unnatural in a zeal of proselytism in an Atheist. I do not believe in an intellectual God, a God made after the image of man. In the vulgar acceptation of the word, therefore, I think a man is right who does not believe in God, but I am also persuaded that a man is wrong who is without religion.

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Letter to H. B. Rosser (7 March 1820), quoted in C. Kegan Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, Vol. II (1876), p. 263
6 months 3 weeks ago

And what he fears he cannot make attractive with his touch he abandons.

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Line 149 (tr. H. R. Fairclough)
3 months 3 weeks ago

It is no longer the moral, religious, spiritual condition of the people that is our concern, but their physical, practical, economical condition, as regulated by public laws.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

The startling truth is that our best efforts for civil rights, international peace, population control, conservation of natural resources, and assistance to the starving of the earth-urgent as they are-will destroy rather than help if made in the [current] spirit. For, as things stand, we have nothing to give. If our own riches and our own way of life are not enjoyed here, they will not be enjoyed anywhere else. Certainly they will supply the immediate jolt of energy and hope that methedrine, and similar drugs, give in extreme fatigue. But peace can be made only by those who are peaceful, and love can be shown only by those who love. No work of love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.

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p. 83
7 months 3 weeks ago

To study and not think is a waste. To think and not study is dangerous. Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

No one is ignorant that there are two avenues by which opinions are received into the soul, which are its two principal powers: the understanding and the will.

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7 months 4 days ago

I suppose you imagined I was so insanely in love with you that I could commit any folly. When will you women understand that one isn't insanely in love? All one asks for is a quiet life, which you won't allow one to have. I don't know what the devil ever induced me to marry you. It was all a damned stupid, practical joke. And now you go about saying I'm a murderer. I won't stand it.

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The Gioconda smile, in Mortal Coils, 1921
5 months 3 weeks ago

When scientists take part in activity they transform themselves from scientists into acting beings, that is, they become elements, data, facts; as soon as they reflect on their activity, however, they are re-transformed into scientists. The trained specialist qua scientist looks upon himself as a chain of judgments and inferences; qua member of society, he regard himself as a mere object. The same holds for everyone. The individual is divided into innumerable functions, the interconnection of which are unknown. In society a man is pater familias under one aspect, business man under another, thinker under a third; to be more precise, he is not a human being at all, but all these aspects and many more in an inevitable succession.

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p. 155.
3 months 2 weeks ago

Perhaps its destruction has been brought about only that it may be raised up again to a better destiny. Oftentimes a reverse has but made room for more prosperous fortune. Many structures have fallen only to rise to a greater height.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

The liberating force of technology-the instrumentalization of things-turns into ... the instrumentalization of man.

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p. 159
7 months 1 week ago

An evil may be real, tho' its cause has no relation to us: It may be real, without being peculiar: It may be real, without shewing itself to others: It may be real, without being constant: And it may be real, without falling under the general rules. Such evils as these will not fail to render us miserable, tho' they have little tendency to diminish pride: And perhaps the most real and the most solid evils of life will be found of this nature.

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Part 1, Section 6
6 months 5 days ago

Every uneducated person is a caricature of himself.

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"Selected Aphorisms from the Athenaeum (1798)", Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, trans. (Pennsylvania University Press:1968) #63
4 months 2 weeks ago

The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. To dig for treasures shows not only impatience and greed, but lack of faith. Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach - waiting for a gift from the sea.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.

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8:32
7 months 3 days ago

Justice as fairness provides what we want.

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Chapter III, Section 30, pg. 190
5 months 6 days ago

If nonviolence is to make sense as an ethical and political position, it cannot simply repress aggression or do away with its reality; rather, nonviolence emerges as a meaningful concept precisely when destruction is most likely or seems most certain.

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p. 39
4 months 2 weeks ago

The extent of the region of the uncertain, the number of the problems the investigation of which ends in a verdict of not proven, will vary according to the knowledge and the intellectual habits of the individual agnostic. I do not very much care to speak of anything as unknowable. What I am sure about is that there are many topics about which I know nothing, and which, so far as I can see, are out of reach of my faculties. But whether these things are knowable by any one else is exactly one of those matters which is beyond my knowledge, though I may have a tolerably strong opinion as to the probabilities of the case.

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7 months 1 week ago

I have in this treatise followed the mathematical method, if not with all strictness, at least imitatively, not in order, by a display of profundity, to procure a better reception for it, but because I believe such a system to be quite capable of it, and that perfection may in time be obtained by a cleverer hand, if stimulated by this sketch, mathematical investigators of nature should find it not unimportant to treat the metaphysical portion, which anyway cannot be got rid of, as a special fundamental department of general physics, and to bring it into unison with the mathematical doctrine of motion.

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Preface, Tr. Bax, 1883
5 months 2 weeks ago

No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.

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Ch. 32, January 13, 1944.
7 months 2 weeks ago

Love and the gracious heart are a single thing...one can no more be without the otherthan the reasoning mind without its reason.

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Chapter XVI (tr. Mark Musa)
3 months 2 weeks ago

The proof of a theory is in its reasoning, not in its sponsorship.

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7 months 1 week ago

Accent is the soul of language; it gives to it both feeling and truth.

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English translation as quoted in A Dictionary of Thoughts: Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Best Authors of the World, Both Ancient and Modern (1908) by Tryon Edwards, p. 2.
3 months 2 weeks ago

What really matters is that we should all of us realize that we are guilty of inhumanity. The horror of this realization should shake us out of our lethargy so that we can direct our hopes and our intentions to the coming of an era in which war will have no place.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Cartan developed a general scheme of infinitesimal geometry in which Klein's notions were applied to the tangent plane and not to the n-dimensional manifold M itself. On the foundations of general infinitesimal geometry.

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Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 35 (1929) 716-725 doi:10.1090/S0002-9904-1929-04812-2 (quote on p. 716)
3 months 1 day ago

To-day, there are too many points of view of equal value and prestige, each showing the relativity of the other, to permit us to take any one position and to regard it as impregnable and absolute. Only this socially disorganized intellectual situation makes possible the insight, hidden until now by a generally stable social structure and the practicability of certain traditional norms, that every point of view is particular to a social situation.

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7 months 4 days ago

As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.

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"The Will to Believe" p. 10
6 months 4 weeks ago

But a punishment like forced labour or even imprisonment - mere loss of liberty - has never functioned without a certain additional element of punishment that certainly concerns the body itself: rationing of food, sexual deprivation, corporal punishment, solitary confinement ... There remains, therefore, a trace of 'torture' in the modern mechanisms of criminal justice - a trace that has not been entirely overcome, but which is enveloped, increasingly, by the non-corporal nature of the penal system

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Life is that which is discontent, which struggles and seeks, which suffers and creates.

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Ch. 1 : Our life begins
6 months 1 week ago

The decisions of law courts should never be printed: in the long run, they form a counterauthority to the law.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

It is generally agreed that no activity can be successfully pursued by an individual who is preoccupied - not rhetoric or liberal studies - since the mind when distracted absorbs nothing deeply, but rejects everything which is, so to speak, crammed into it.

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De Brevitate Vitae ("On the Shortness of Life", trans. C. D. N. Costa), Ch. 7
6 months 4 weeks ago

I remind young people everywhere I go, one of the worst things the older generation did was to tell them for twenty-five years "Be successful, be successful, be successful" as opposed to "Be great, be great, be great". There's a qualitative difference.

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Speech in San Francisco: Democracy Matters
3 months 1 day ago

If mind is common to us, then also the reason, whereby we are reasoning beings, is common. If this be so, then also the reason which enjoins what is to be done or left undone is common. If this be so, law also is common; if this be so, we are citizens; if this be so, we are partakers in one constitution; if this be so, the Universe is a kind of Commonwealth.

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IV, 4 (as translated by ASL Farquharson)
6 months ago

When you know quite absolutely that everything is unreal, you then cannot see why you should take the trouble to prove it.

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8 months 5 days ago

It is impossible for motion to subsist without place, and void, and time.

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7 months 3 days ago

And all the time - such is the tragi-comedy of our situation - we continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more "drive", or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or "creativity". In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

The mediaeval university looked backwards: it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge... The modern university looks forward: it is a factory of new knowledge.

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Letter to E. Ray Lankester (11 April 1892) Huxley Papers, Imperial College: 30.448
4 months 3 weeks ago

Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from the birth, as a paternal, or, in other words, a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read, and say, and eat, and drink, and wear.

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p. 252
3 months 5 days ago

God, what is all this talk put out by the popes? Paradise is here, my good man. God, give me no other paradise!

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Freedom and Death
3 months 4 days ago

I believe the Indian then to be in body and mind equal to the white man.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

A fool is known by his Speech; and a wise man by Silence.

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7 months 6 days ago

Morality is everywhere the same for all men, therefore it comes from God; sects differ, therefore they are the work of men.

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"Atheist", 1764
7 months 3 days ago

The circumstances of justice may be described as the normal conditions under which human cooperation is both possible and necessary.

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Chapter III, Section 22, pg. 126
6 months ago

I don't need any support, advice, or compassion, because even if I am the most ruinous man, I still feel so powerful, so strong and fierce. For I am the only one that lives without hope.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

We should become angels and not devils, that's why we have been created and born into the world. Therefore be and stick to what God has chosen you for.

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