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1 month 2 weeks ago

It is a greatness not of mere body and gigantic bulk, but a rude greatness of soul. There is a sublime uncomplaining melancholy traceable in these old hearts. A great free glance into the very deeps of thought. They seem to have seen, these brave old Northmen, what Meditation has taught all men in all ages, That this world is after all but a show,-a phenomenon or appearance, no real thing. All deep souls see into that,-the Hindoo Mythologist, the German Philosopher,-the Shakspeare, the earnest Thinker, wherever he may be.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

The question of "unreality," which confronts us at this point, is a very important one. Misled by grammar, the great majority of those logicians who have dealt with this question have dealt with it on mistaken lines. They have regarded grammatical form as a surer guide in analysis than, in fact, it is. And they have not known what differences in grammatical form are important.

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Ch. 16: Descriptions
5 months 1 week ago

All teems with symbol; the wise man is the man who in any one thing can read another.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Science, ever since the time of the Arabs, has had two functions: (1) to enable us to know things, and (2) to enable us to do things.

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1 month 1 week ago

I do not mean to be disrespectful, but the attempt of the Lords to stop the progress of reform reminds me very forcibly of the great storm at Sidmouth, and of the conduct of the excellent Mrs Partington on that occasion. In the winter of 1824 there set in a great flood upon that town - the tide rose to an incredible height - the waves rushed in upon the houses, and everything was threatened with destruction. In the midst of this sublime and terrible storm, Dame Partington, who lived upon the beach, was seen at the door of her house with mop and pattens, trundling her mop, squeezing out the sea-water, and vigorously pushing away the Atlantic Ocean. The Atlantic was roused; Mrs. Partington's spirit was up. But I need not tell you that the contest was unequal.

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The Atlantic Ocean beat Mrs. Partington. Speech at Taunton
3 months 1 week ago

Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion. Our brains merely register and act upon what is telegraphed to them by our bodily experience. Intellect is to emotion as our clothes are to our bodies; we could not very well have civilized life without clothes, but we would be in a poor way if we had only clothes without bodies.

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Ch. 29, June 10, 1943.
3 weeks 2 days ago

I'm not doing weekly videos anymore. Just once in a while I'll post a video here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzFA9pEGwgU

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Once the philosophical foundation of democracy has collapsed, the statement that dictatorship is bad is rationally valid only for those who are not its beneficiaries, and there is no theoretical obstacle to the transformation of this statement into its opposite.

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p. 29.
1 month 3 days ago

These influences of my young childhood were greatest: 1, the mountain landscape, 2, my father the impossible idealist, and 3, the upringing of a closely-knit Christian home.

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Memoirs of an Octogenarian (1975), pp. 8-9
3 months 1 week ago

The discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing.

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Conclusion
5 months 3 weeks ago

There is more to a science fiction story than the science it contains.

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3 months 1 week ago

As man loses touch with his 'inner being', his instinctive depths, he finds himself trapped in the world of consciousness, that is to say, in the world of other people. Any poet knows this truth; when other people sicken him, he turns to hidden resources of power inside himself, and he knows then that other people don't matter a damn. He knows the 'secret life' inside him is the reality; other people are mere shadows in comparison. but the 'shadows' themselves cling to one another. 'Man is a political animal', said Aristotle, telling one of the greatest lies in human history. Man has more in common with the hills, or with the stars, than with other men.

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p. 170
4 months 3 weeks ago

In place of the bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, shall we have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

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Section 2, paragraph 72 (last paragraph).
4 months 3 weeks ago

The more you obey your conscience, the more your conscience will demand of you.

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Book IV, Chapter 8, "Is Christianity Hard or Easy?"
5 months 1 week ago

If what the philosophers say be true,—that all men's actions proceed from one source; that as they assent from a persuasion that a thing is so, and dissent from a persuasion that it is not, and suspend their judgment from a persuasion that it is uncertain, so likewise they seek a thing from a persuasion that it is for their advantage.

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Book I, ch. 18, 1.
4 months 3 weeks ago

Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.

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p. 33
1 month 3 days ago

It is not enough to be wrong, one must also be polite.

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As quoted in The Genius of Science: A Portrait Gallery (2000) by Abraham Pais, p. 24
4 months 2 weeks ago

I do not believe that the source of value is unitary - displaying apparent multiplicity only in its application to the world. I believe that value has fundamentally different kinds of sources, and that they are reflected in the classification of values into types. Not all values represent the pursuit of some single good in a variety of settings.

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"The Fragmentation of Value" (1977), pp. 131-132.
3 months 1 week ago

Systems, scientific and philosophic, come and go. Each method of limited understanding is at length exhausted. In its prime each system is a triumphant success: in its decay it is an obstructive nuisance.

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p. 203.
3 months 3 weeks ago

Evil perpetually tends to disappear.

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Part I, Ch. 2 : The Evanescence of Evil, § 2
3 months 3 weeks ago

There is a sort of enthusiasm in all projectors, absolutely necessary for their affairs, which makes them proof against the most fatiguing delays, the most mortifying disappointments, the most shocking insults; and what is severer than all, the presumptuous judgments of the ignorant upon their designs.

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Volume I, p. 7
4 months 4 weeks ago

Through laziness and cowardice a large part of mankind, even after nature has freed them from alien guidance, gladly remain immature. It is because of laziness and cowardice that it is so easy for others to usurp the role of guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor!

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4 months 2 weeks ago

If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: "This is simply what I do."

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§ 217
3 months 3 weeks ago

To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!

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3 weeks 3 days ago

All law is "situational law." The sovereign produces and guarantees the situation in its totality. He has the monopoly over this last decision.

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p.13
1 month 2 weeks ago

To rule the imperial population, behold our vocation.

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94
3 weeks 2 days ago

All the science in the world began in temples, and the first astronomers especially were priests. I do not say that it necessary to begin again with the antique initiation, and to change the presidents of our academies into hierophants, but I say that all things begin again as they began, that they all carry an original principle that modifies itself according to the different character of nations and the progressive advance of the human mind, but which however always shows itself in one way or another. Priests have preserved everything, brooded over everything, and taught us everything.

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p. 283
4 months 4 weeks ago

At present they philosophers seem to be in a very lamentable condition, and such as the poets have given us but a faint notion of in their descriptions of the punishment of Sisyphus and Tantalus. For what can be imagin'd more tormenting, than to seek with eagerness, what for ever flies us; and seek for it in a place, where 'tis impossible it can ever exist?

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Part 4, Section 3
5 months 3 weeks ago

I do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible. I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone.

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1 month 1 week ago

To take Macaulay out of literature and society and put him in the House of Commons, is like taking the chief physician out of London during a pestilence.

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Vol. I, ch. 9, p. 315
4 months 3 weeks ago

Pass in, pass in, the angels say, In to the upper doors; Nor count compartments of the floors, But mount to Paradise By the stairway of surprise.

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Merlin, I, st. 2

Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself.

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F 49
3 months 2 weeks ago

The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is a queen, infinitely fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice.

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5 months 3 days ago

Throughout your treatment you forget that you said that 'free-will' can do nothing without grace, and you prove that 'free-will' can do all things without grace! Your inferences and analogies "For if man has lost his freedom, and is forced to serve sin, and cannot will good, what conclusion can more justly be drawn concerning him, than that he sins and wills evil necessarily?

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p. 149
2 months 1 week ago

I really have no claim to rank myself among fatalistic, materialistic, or atheistic philosophers. Not among fatalists, for I take the conception of necessity to have a logical, and not a physical foundation; not among materialists, for I am utterly incapable of conceiving the existence of matter if there is no mind in which to picture that existence; not among atheists, for the problem of the ultimate cause of existence is one which seems to me to be hopelessly out of reach of my poor powers. Of all the senseless babble I have ever had occasion to read, the demonstrations of these philosophers who undertake to tell us all about the nature of God would be the worst, if they were not surpassed by the still greater absurdities of the philosophers who try to prove that there is no God.

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5 months 3 days ago

By God's grace, I know Satan very well. If Satan can turn God's Word upside down and pervert the Scriptures, what will he do with my words -- or the words of others?

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Confession Concerning Christ's Supper, Part 3. Robert E. Smith, tr. Dr. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtsusgabe. (Weimar: Herman Boehlaus Nachfolger, 1909), pp. 499-500.
2 months 3 weeks ago

We must fight those who are committed to destruction, without replicating their destructiveness. Understanding how to fight in this way is the task and the bind of a nonviolent ethics and politics.

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p. 64
4 months 3 weeks ago

The capitalist cannot store labour-power in warehouses after he has bought it, as he may do with the raw material.

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Vol. II, Ch. XV, p. 285.
4 months 3 weeks ago

The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.

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You believe that I run after the strange because I do not know the beautiful; no, it is because you do not know the beautiful that I seek the strange.

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F160
4 months 1 week ago

Again, Amyclas the Heracleotean, one of Plato's familiars, and Menæchmus, the disciple, indeed, of Eudoxus, but conversant with Plato, and his brother Dinostratus, rendered the whole of geometry as yet more perfect. But Theudius, the Magnian, appears to have excelled, as well in mathematical disciplines, as in the rest of philosophy. For he constructed elements egregiously, and rendered many particulars more universal. Besides, Cyzicinus the Athenian, flourished at the same period, and became illustrious in other mathematical disciplines, but especially in geometry. These, therefore, resorted by turns to the Academy, and employed themselves in proposing common questions.

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Ch. IV.
3 months 3 weeks ago

The earth with yellow pears And overgrown with roses wild Upon the pond is bent, And swans divine, With kisses drunk You drop your heads In the sublimely sobering water. But where, with winter come, am I To find, alas, the floweres, and where The sunshine And the shadow of the world? Cold the walls stand And the wordless, in the wind The weathercocks are rattling.

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"Halves of Life"
4 months 1 week ago

But Eudoxus the Cnidian, who was somewhat junior to Leon, and the companion of Plato, first of all rendered the multitude of those theorems which are called universals more abundant; and to three proportions added three others; and things relative to a section, which received their commencement from Plato, he diffused into a richer multitude, employing also resolutions in the prosecution of these.

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Ch. IV.

Talking and knowing ARE action.....c'mon with shit....

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The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other; and with them this conviction does not spring from that barren traditionary faith which seems to vegetate in the soul rather than to live.

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Chapter XVII.
3 months 1 week ago

But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.

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All About Love: New Visions, 1999

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