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C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
5 months ago
It is Christ Himself, not the...

It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true Word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him.

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Letter (8 November 1952); published in Letters of C. S. Lewis (1966), p. 247
Philosophical Maxims
Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale
3 months 1 week ago
It is very well to say...

It is very well to say "be prudent, be careful, try to know each other." But how are you to know each other? Unless a woman had lost all pride, how is it possible for her, under the eyes of all her family, to indulge in long exclusive conversations with a man? "Such a thing" must not take place till after her "engagement." And how is she to make an engagement, if "such a thing" has not taken place?

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Philosophical Maxims
Joseph de Maistre
Joseph de Maistre
4 weeks ago
The question is frequently asked: why...

The question is frequently asked: why there is a school of theology attached to every University? The answer is easy: It is, that the Universities may subsist, and that the instruction may not become corrupt. Originally, the Universities were only schools of theology, to which other faculties were joined, as subjects around their Queen. The edifice of public instruction, placed on such a foundation, has continued even to our day. Those who have subverted it among themselves, will repent it, in vain, for a long time to come. To burn a city, there is needed only a child or a madman; but to rebuild it, architects, materials, workmen, money, and especially time, will be required.

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XXXVIII, p. 111
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
5 months 1 week ago
God might grant us riches, honours,...

God might grant us riches, honours, life, and even health, to our own hurt; for every thing that is pleasing to us is not always good for us. If he sends us death, or an increase of sickness, instead of a cure, Vvrga tua et baculus, tuus ipsa me consolata sunt. "Thy rod and thy staff have comforted me," he does it by the rule of his providence, which better and more certainly discerns what is proper for us than we can do; and we ought to take it in good part, as coming from a wise and most friendly hand.

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Ch. 12
Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
3 months 2 weeks ago
During the last quarter of a...

During the last quarter of a century all the authority associated with the function of spiritual guidance ... has seeped down into the lowest publications. ... Between a poem by Valéry and an advertisement for a beauty cream promising a rich marriage to anyone who used it there was at no point a breach of continuity. So as a result of literature's spiritual usurpation a beauty cream advertisement possessed, in the eyes of little village girls, the authority that was formerly attached to the words of priests.

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"Morality and literature," p. 164
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
3 months 6 days ago
There is one ethical principle...

There is one ethical principle, either you are preserving life generally, or you aren't. Preserving life in your ends and your means determines whether you are good or evil.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 month 3 weeks ago
The true University of these days...

The true University of these days is a Collection of Books.

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Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
4 months 1 day ago
Applaud us when we run, console...

Applaud us when we run, console us when we fall, cheer us when we recover.

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Speech at Bristol Previous to the Election (6 September 1780), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II (1855), p. 129
Philosophical Maxims
Zoroaster
Zoroaster
4 months 3 weeks ago
Make thyself pure, 0 righteous man!...

Make thyself pure, 0 righteous man! Anyone in the world here below can win purity for himself, namely, when he cleanses himself with Good Thoughts, Good Words, and Good Deeds.

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Philosophical Maxims
Albert Schweitzer
Albert Schweitzer
1 month 1 week ago
The awareness that we are all...

The awareness that we are all human beings together has become lost in war and through politics. We have reached the point of regarding each other only as members of a people either allied with us or against us and our approach; prejudice, sympathy, or antipathy are all conditioned on that. Now we must rediscover the fact that we - all together - are human beings, and that we must strive to concede to each other what moral capacity we have. Only in this way can we begin to believe that in other peoples as well as in ourselves there will arise the need for a new spirit which can be the beginning of a feeling of mutual trustworthiness toward each other.

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Radio appeal for peace, Oslo, Norway (30 March 1958); also in Peace or Atomic War (1958) Three Appeals Broadcast from Oslo, Norway, on April 28, 29, and 30, 1958.
Philosophical Maxims
Nikos Kazantzakis
Nikos Kazantzakis
1 month 1 day ago
Do you believe in dreams, Uncle...

Do you believe in dreams, Uncle Simeon? I do; I believe in nothing else. One night I dreamed that invisible enemies had me tied to a dead cypress. Long red arrows were sticking into me from my head to my feet, and the blood was flowing. On my head they had placed a crown of thorns, and intertwined with the thorns were fiery letters which said: "Saint Blasphemer." I am Saint Blasphemer, Rabbi Simeon. So you'd better not ask me anything else, or I'll start my blasphemies.

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Ch. 10
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
1 month 2 weeks ago
It is not the man…

It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.

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Line 6.
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
5 months 3 weeks ago
There is the love of...

There is the love of knowing without the love of learning; the beclouding here leads to dissipation of mind.

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Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
3 months 2 weeks ago
In his Experiment in Autobiography (1934),...

In his Experiment in Autobiography (1934), H.G. Wells pointed out that ever since the beginning of life, most creatures have been 'up against it'. Their lives are a drama of struggle against the forces of nature. Yet nowadays you can say to a man: Yes, you earn a living, you support a family, you love and hate, but -- what do you do? His real interest may be in something else -- art, science, literature, philosophy. The bird is a creature of the air, the fish is a creature of the water, and man is a creature of the mind.

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pp. 346-347
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 months 3 weeks ago
Get hold of yourself, be confident...

Get hold of yourself, be confident once more, don't forget that it is not given to just anyone to have idolized discouragement without succumbing to it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry
1 month 1 day ago
The politicians have kept the environmental...

The politicians have kept the environmental movement quiet by designating wilderness areas. And in the meantime, they've let corporations run completely out of control, and extraordinarily destructively, in the economic landscapes, without any acknowledgement at all that the natural world is out there just the same as it is in the parks.

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Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
3 months ago
In order to correctly define art,...

In order to correctly define art, it is necessary, first of all, to cease to consider it as a means to pleasure and consider it as one of the conditions of human life. ...Reflecting on it in this way, we cannot fail to observe that art is one of the means of affective communication between people.

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Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
3 months 2 weeks ago
It seemed perfectly possible that, in...

It seemed perfectly possible that, in spite of my certainty of my own genius, I might die of some illness, or perhaps even in a street accident, before I had ever glimpsed the meaning of life. My moods of happiness and self-confidence convinced me that I had a "destiny" to become a famous writer, and to be remembered as one of the most important thinkers of the century.

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p. 67
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
5 months 1 day ago
The profit of books is according...

The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.

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Quotation and Originality
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 months 3 weeks ago
But, braggart demons, we postpone our...

But, braggart demons, we postpone our end: how could we renounce the display of our freedom, the show of our pride?

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
5 months 1 day ago
He who can buy bravery is...

He who can buy bravery is brace, though a coward. As money is not exchanged for anyone specific quality, for any one specific thing, or for any particular human essential power, but for the entire objective world of man and nature, from the standpoint of its possessor it therefore serves to exchange every property for every other, even contradictory, property and object: it is the fraternization of impossibilities. It makes contradictions embrace.

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p. 105, The Marx-Engels Reader
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
5 months 4 days ago
I have therefore found it necessary...

I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.

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Philosophical Maxims
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
3 weeks ago
One reason why mathematics enjoys...

One reason why mathematics enjoys special esteem, above all other sciences, is that its laws are absolutely certain and indisputable, while those of other sciences are to some extent debatable and in constant danger of being overthrown by newly discovered facts.

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Philosophical Maxims
Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus
5 months 1 week ago
You venerate the saints, and you...

You venerate the saints, and you take pleasure in touching their relics. But you disregard their greatest legacy, the example of a blameless life. No devotion is more pleasing to Mary than the imitation of Mary's humility. No devotion is more acceptable and proper to the saints than striving to imitate their virtues.

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The Erasmus Reader (1990), p. 144.
Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
2 months 4 weeks ago
The loss which is unknown is...

The loss which is unknown is no loss at all.

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Maxim 38
Philosophical Maxims
Lin Yutang
Lin Yutang
1 month 1 week ago
There are two kinds of animals...

There are two kinds of animals on earth. One kind minds his own business, the other minds other people's business. The former are vegetarians, like cows, sheep and thinking men. The latter are carnivorous, like hawks, tigers and men of action.

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As quoted by Tai-yi Lin (Lin Yutang's daughter) in her Foreword (26 March 1950) to The Importance of Living, p. x
Philosophical Maxims
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
3 months 3 weeks ago
The most immediate result of this...

The most immediate result of this unbalanced specialisation has been that to-day, when there are more "scientists" than ever, there are much less "cultured" men than, for example, about 1750. And the worst is that with these turnspits of science not even the real progress of science itself is assured. For science needs from time to time, as a necessary regulator of its own advance, a labour of reconstitution, and, as I have said, this demands an effort towards unification, which grows more and more difficult, involving, as it does, ever-vaster regions of the world of knowledge. Newton was able to found his system of physics without knowing much philosophy, but Einstein needed to saturate himself with Kant and Mach before he could reach his own keen synthesis. Kant and Mach - the names are mere symbols of the enormous mass of philosophic and psychological thought which has influenced Einstein.

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Chapter XII: The Barbarism Of "Specialisation"
Philosophical Maxims
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
3 months 3 weeks ago
The complexity of the connection between...

The complexity of the connection between the world of perception and the world of physics does not preclude that such a connection can be shown to exist at any time.

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p. 133.
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 month 3 weeks ago
I am fast becoming a patriot...

I am fast becoming a patriot of the most decided stamp. Scornfully as I used to speak and think of Scotland in my hours of bitterness and irritation, I never fail to stand up manfully in defence of it thro' thick and thin, whenever a renegade Scot takes upon him to abuse it.

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Letter to Thomas Murray (24 August 1824), quoted in Fred Kaplan, Thomas Carlyle: A Biography (1983), p. 100
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
5 months 1 day ago
Bad times have a scientific value....

Bad times have a scientific value. [...] We learn geology the morning after the earthquake, on ghastly diagrams of cloven mountains, upheaved plains, and the dry bed of the sea.

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Considerations by the Way
Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
4 months 1 day ago
If you are penitent, you love....

If you are penitent, you love. And if you love you are of God. All things are atoned for, all things are saved by love. If I, a sinner even as you are, am tender with you and have pity on you, how much more will God have pity upon you. Love is such a priceless treasure that you can redeem the whole world by it, and cleanse not only your own sins but the sins of others.

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Book II, Chapter 3 (trans. Constance Garnett) The Elder Zossima, speaking to a devout widow afraid of death
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
6 months 2 days ago
The person who is going to...

The person who is going to preach ought to live in the Christian thoughts and ideas: they ought to be his daily life. If so, this is the view of Christianity, then you, too, will have eloquence enough and precisely that which is needed when you speak extemporaneously without specific preparation. However, it is fallacious eloquence if someone, without otherwise occupying himself with, without living in these thoughts, once in a while sits down and laboriously collects such thoughts, perhaps in the field of literature, and then works them into a well-composed discourse, which is then committed to memory and delivered superbly, with respect both to voice and diction and gestures.

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Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
2 months 3 weeks ago
I think it is not helpful...

I think it is not helpful to apply Darwinian language too widely. Conquest of nation by nation is too distant for Darwinian explanations to be helpful. Darwinism is the differential survival of self-replicating genes in a gene pool, usually as manifested by individual behaviour, morphology, and phenotypes. Group selection of any kind is not Darwinism as Darwin understood it nor as I understand it. There is a very vague analogy between group selection and conquest of a nation by another nation, but I don't think it's a very helpful analogy. So I would prefer not to invoke Darwinian language for that kind of historical interpretation.

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Philosophical Maxims
Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek
9 months 6 days ago
Perception is part of the problem

I think that the task of philosophy is not to provide answers, but to show how the way we perceive a problem can be itself part of a problem.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Gray
John Gray
2 months 1 week ago
In thinking of history in this...

In thinking of history in this [progressive & eschatological] way Islam shares common ground with Christianity and with the secular creeds of the modern West. It is misleading to represent Islam and 'the West' as forming civilisations that have nothing in common. Christianity and Islam are integral parts of western monotheism, and as such they share a view of history that marks them off from the rest of the world. Both are militant faiths that seek to convert all humankind. Other religions have been implicated in twentieth-century violence-the state cult of Shintō in Japan during the militarist period and Hindu nationalism in contemporary India, for example. But only Christianity and Islam have engendered movements that are committed to the systematic use of force to achieve universal goals.

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Enlightenment and Terror in the Twentieth Century: Terror and the Western Tradition
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
5 months 1 day ago
We can act as if there...

We can act as if there were a God; feel as if we were free; consider Nature as if she were full of special designs; lay plans as if we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life.

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Lecture III, "The Reality of the Unseen"
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
5 months ago
Children are nowhere taught, in any...

Children are nowhere taught, in any systematic way, to distinguish true from false, or meaningful from meaningless, statements. Why is this so? Because their elders, even in the democratic countries, do not want them to be given this kind of education.

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Chapter 11 (p. 106)
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
5 months ago
We have been given free will,...

We have been given free will, in order that we may will our self-will out of existence and so come to live continuously in a 'state of grace.' All our actions must be directed, in the last analysis, to making ourselves passive in relation to the activity and the being of divine reality. We are, as it were, aeolian harps, endowed with the power either to expose themselves to the wind of the Spirit or to shut themselves away from it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard
3 months 4 days ago
The great event of this period,...

The great event of this period, the great trauma, is this decline of strong referentials, these death pangs of the real and of the rational that open onto an age of simulation. Whereas so many generations, and particularly the last, lived in the march of history, in the euphoric or catastrophic expectation of a revolution-today one has the impression that history has retreated, leaving behind it an indifferent nebula, traversed by currents, but emptied of references. It is into this void that the phantasms of a past history recede, the panoply of events, ideologies, retro fashions-no longer so much because people believe in them or still place some hope in them, but simply to resurrect the period when at least there was history, at least there was violence (albeit fascist), when at least life and death were at stake.

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"History: A Retro Scenario," pp. 43-44
Philosophical Maxims
Lucretius
Lucretius
5 months 2 weeks ago
Custom renders love…

Custom renders love attractive; for that which is struck by oft-repeated blows however lightly, yet after long course of time is overpowered and gives way. See you not too that drops of water falling on rocks after long course of time scoop a hole through these rocks?

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Book IV, lines 1283-1287 (tr. Munro)
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 month 3 weeks ago
Can there be a more horrible...

Can there be a more horrible object in existence than an eloquent man not speaking the truth?

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Address as Lord Rector of Edinburgh University, (1866), reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
5 months 4 days ago
The prejudices of the second species,...

The prejudices of the second species, since they impose upon the intellect by the sensual conditions restricting the mind if it wishes in certain cases to attain to what is intellectual, lurk more deeply. One of them is that which affects knowledge of quantity, the other that affecting knowledge of qualities generally. The former is: every actual multiplicity can be given numerically, and hence, every infinite quantity; the latter, whatever is impossible contradicts itself. In either of them the concept of time, it is true, does not enter into the very notion of the predicate, nor is it attributed as a qualification to the subject. But yet it serves as a means for forming an idea of the predicate, and thus, being a condition, affects the intellectual concept of the subject to the extent that the latter is only attained by its aid.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
4 weeks ago
Concentrate every minute like a Roman-like...

Concentrate every minute like a Roman-like a man-on doing what's in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions.

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(Hays translation) II, 5
Philosophical Maxims
Isaiah Berlin
Isaiah Berlin
3 months 3 weeks ago
The fundamental sense of freedom is...

The fundamental sense of freedom is freedom from chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement by others. The rest is extension of this sense, or else metaphor.

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Philosophical Maxims
Novalis
Novalis
3 months 4 weeks ago
Most observers of the French Revolution,...

Most observers of the French Revolution, especially the clever and noble ones, have explained it as a life-threatening and contagious illness. They have remained standing with the symptoms and have interpreted these in manifold and contrary ways. Some have regarded it as a merely local ill. The most ingenious opponents have pressed for castration. They well noticed that this alleged illness is nothing other than the crisis of beginning puberty.

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Fragment No. 105
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
3 weeks ago
Why does this magnificent applied...

Why does this magnificent applied science which saves work and makes life easier bring us so little happiness? The simple answer runs: Because we have not yet learned to make sensible use of it. In war it serves that we may poison and mutilate each other. In peace it has made our lives hurried and uncertain. Instead of freeing us in great measure from spiritually exhausting labor, it has made men into slaves of machinery, who for the most part complete their monotonous long day's work with disgust and must continually tremble for their poor rations. ... It is not enough that you should understand about applied science in order that your work may increase man's blessings. Concern for the man himself and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavours; concern for the great unsolved problems of the organization of labor and the distribution of goods in order that the creations of our mind shall be a blessing and not a curse to mankind. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations.

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Speech to students at the California Institute of Technology, in [http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50A1FFF3F5E1B7A93C5A81789D85F458385F9&scp=4&sq=&st=p "Einstein Sees Lack in Applying Science"], The New York Times (16 February 1931)
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
2 weeks 2 days ago
Manuscript culture...
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Main Content / General
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
4 weeks ago
Yes, you can--if you do everything...

Yes, you can--if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable. You will find rest from vain fancies if you perform every act in life as though it were your last.

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II, 5
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
3 months 2 weeks ago
Could it be that sexual perversion...

Could it be that sexual perversion and romanticism sprang from the same longing for distant horizons?

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p. 17
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
5 months ago
He begins to think for himself...

He begins to think for himself and meets Nineteenth-century Rationalism Which can explain away religion by any number of methods.

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Pilgrim's Regress 19-20
Philosophical Maxims
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