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2 weeks 6 days ago

Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle...

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2 months 2 days ago

Concerning the female sorcerer. Roman law also prescribes this. Why does the law name women more than men here, even though men are also guilty of this? Because women are more susceptible to those superstitions of Satan; take Eve, for example. They are commonly called "wise women." Let them be killed.

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Sermon on Exodus, 1526, WA XVI, p. 551 as quoted in Luther on Women: A Sourcebook, edited by Susan C. Karant-Nunn, Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, (2003), p. 231
1 month 3 weeks ago

I fancy that most people who think at all have done a great deal of their thinking in the first fourteen years.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

A spectre is haunting Europe; the spectre of Communism.

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Preamble, paragraph 1, line 1.
4 weeks 1 day ago

I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpetuate the world without this trivial and vulgar act of coition; It is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life, nor is there anything that will more deject his cooled imagination, when he shall consider what an odd and unworthy piece of folly he hath committed.

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Section 9
1 month 3 weeks ago

Reason, if consulted with, would advise, that their children's time should be spent in acquiring what might be useful to them when they come to be men, rather than to have their heads stuff'd with a deal of trash, a great part whereof they usually never do ('tis certain they never need to) think on again as long as they live: and so much of it as does stick by them they are only the worse for.

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Sec. 94
2 months 3 weeks ago

There is a contrast of primary significance between Augustine and Pelagius. The former crushes everything in order to rebuild it again. The other addresses himself to man as he is. The first system, therefore, in respect to Christianity, falls into three stages: creation – the fall and a consequent condition of death and impotence; a new creation - whereby man is placed in a position where he can choose; and then, if he chooses - Christianity. The other system addresses itself to man as he is (Christianity fits into the world). From this is seen the significance of the theory of inspiration for the first system; from this also is seen the relationship between the synergistic and the semipelagian conflict. It is the same question, only that the syngeristic struggle has its presupposition in the new creation of the Augustinian system.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.

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§ 464
1 month 3 weeks ago

The really important facts were that spatial relationships had ceased to matter very much and that my mind was perceiving the world in terms of other than spatial categories. At ordinary times the eye concerns itself with such problems as where? - how far? - how situated in relation to what? In the mescaline experience the implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern."

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3 weeks 3 days ago

Evolution is definable as a change from an incoherent homogeneity to a coherent heterogeneity, accompanying the dissipation of motion and integration of matter.

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Pt. II, The Knowable; Ch. XV, The Law of Evolution (continued)
2 weeks 1 day ago

I do not think that the dancing and singing of even little children can be explained wholly on the basis of unlearned and unformed responses to then existing objective conditions. Clearly there must be something in the present to evoke happiness. But the act is expressive only a there is in it a unison of something stored from past experience, something therefore generalized, with present conditions. In the case of expressions of happy children the marriage of past values and present incidents takes place easily; there are few obstructions to be overcome, few wounds to heal, few conflicts to resolve. With maturer persons, the reverse is the case. Accordingly the achievement of complete unison is rare; but when it occurs it is so on a deeper level and with a fuller content of meaning. And then, even though after long incubation and after precedent pangs of labor, the final expression may issue with the spontaneity of the cadenced speech or rhythmic movement of happy childhood.

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p. 74
1 month 3 weeks ago

Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite skeptical about ethics, but bred to believe that 'a gentleman does not cheat,' than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers. In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

I work quite diligently and wish that I were better and smarter. And these both are one and the same.

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In a letter to Paul Engelmann (1917) as quoted in The Idea of Justice (2010) by Amartya Sen, p. 31
1 week 3 days ago

In order to be exercised, the intelligence requires to be free to express itself without control by any authority. There must therefore be a domain of pure intellectual research, separate but accessible to all, where no authority intervenes. The human soul has need of some solitude and privacy and also of some social life.The human soul has need of both personal property and collective property.

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1 week 3 days ago

Alexander is to a peasant proprietor what Don Juan is to a happily married husband.

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p. 78,
3 weeks 4 days ago

Early and provident fear is the mother of safety.

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Speech on the Petition of the Unitarians (11 May 1792), volume vii, p. 50
3 weeks 3 days ago

Granted I am a babbler, a harmless vexatious babbler, like all of us. But what is to be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is babble, that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?

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Part 1, Chapter 5
2 months 1 week ago

So it is more useful to watch a man in times of peril, and in adversity to discern what kind of man he is; for then at last words of truth are drawn from the depths of his heart, and the mask is torn off, reality remains.

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Book III, lines 55-58 (reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations)
1 month 2 weeks ago

The authority of science ... promotes and encourages the activity of observing, comparing, measuring and ordering the physical characteristics of human bodies.... Cartesian epistemology and classical ideals produced forms of rationality, scientificity and objectivity that, though efficacious in the quest for truth and knowledge, prohibited the intelligibility and legitimacy of black equality.... In fact, to "think" such an idea was to be deemed irrational, barbaric or mad.

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Prophesy Deliverance!
1 week 4 days ago

I do not understand these men who tell me that the prospect of the yonder side of death has never tormented them, that the thought of their own annihilation never disquiets them. For my part I do not wish to make peace between my heart and my head, between my faith and my reason - I wish rather that there should be war between them.

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2 weeks 2 days ago

To eat, teeth must meet.

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The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974), p. 66.
1 month 3 weeks ago

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask - half our great theological and metaphysical problems - are like that.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.

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Behavior
1 month 3 weeks ago

In fact, contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.

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p. 198
2 months 2 weeks ago

Virtuous, worthy, wise and capable people are chosen as leaders.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Chance seldom interferes with the wise man; his greatest and highest interests have been, are, and will be, directed by reason throughout his whole life.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

I will take it all: tongs, molten lead, prongs, garrotes, all that burns, all that tears, I want to truly suffer. Better one hundred bites, better the whip, vitriol, than this suffering in the head, this ghost of suffering which grazes and caresses and never hurts enough.

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Act 1, sc. 5
1 month 3 weeks ago

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of our science. 

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Works and Days;
1 month 3 weeks ago

We have just seen that, apart from money-capital, circulating capital is only another name for commodity-capital. But to the extent that labour power circulates in the market,it is not capital, no form of commodity-capital. It is not capital at all; the labourer is not a capitalist, although he brings a commodity to market, namely his own skin.

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Vol. II, Ch. X, p. 211.
4 weeks 1 day ago

I could never divide myself from any man upon the difference of an opinion, or be angry with his judgement for not agreeing with me in that, from which perhaps within a few days I should dissent myself.

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Section 6
2 weeks 1 day ago

Surrender of individuality by the many to someone who is taken to be a superindividual explains the retrograde movement of society. Dictatorships and totalitarian states, and belief in the inevitability of this or that result coming to pass are, strange as it may sound, ways of denying the reality of time and the creativeness of the individual.

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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.
2 months 3 days ago

Truth will sooner come out from error than from confusion.

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Aphorism 20
2 months 3 weeks ago
One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear.
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1 week 4 days ago

But Don Quixote was converted. Yes - and died, poor soul. But the other, the real Don Quixote, he who remained on earth and lives among us with his spirit - this Don Quixote was not converted, this Don Quixote continues to incite us to make ourselves ridiculous, this Don Quixote must never die.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

The inscrutable wisdom through which we exist is not less worthy of veneration in respect to what it denies us than in respect to what it has granted.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

To desire you to read my book over and mark all the corrections you would wish me to make...would oblige me greatly: I know how much I shall be benefitted and I shall at the same time preserve the pretious right of private judgement for the sake of which our forefathers kicked out the Pope and the Pretender. I believe you to be much more infalliable than the Pope, but as I am a Protestant my conscience makes me scruple to submit to any unscriptural authority.

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Letter to William Strahan (4 April 1760), quoted in Adam Smith, The Correspondence of Adam Smith, eds. E. C. Mossner and I. S. Ross (1987), pp. 67-68

Creativity is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity.

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Pt. I, ch. 2, sec. 2.

The time is come when women must do something more than the "domestic hearth," which means nursing the infants, keeping a pretty house, having a good dinner and an entertaining party.

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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.
1 month 3 weeks ago

It is obvious that "obscenity" is not a term capable of exact legal definition; in the practice of the Courts, it means "anything that shocks the magistrate."

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Ch. 10: Recrudescence of Puritanism
1 month 2 weeks ago

Choose a wife who is of character, because that one is good who in the end is more respected.

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(p. 60)
2 weeks 1 day ago

Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it.

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p. 45
2 weeks 6 days ago

No one has the audacity to exclaim: "I don't want to do anything!" - we are more indulgent with a murderer than with a mind emancipated from actions.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.

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The great thing however is, in the show of the temporal and the transient to recognize the substance which is immanent and the eternal which is present. For the work of Reason (which is synonymous with the Idea) when considered in its own actuality, is to simultaneously enter external existence and emerge with an infinite wealth of forms, phenomena and phases - a multiplicity that envelops its essential rational kernel with a motley outer rind with which our ordinary consciousness is earliest at home. It is this rind that the Concept must penetrate before Reason can find its own inward pulse and feel it still beating even in the outward phases. But this infinite variety of circumstances which is formed in this element of externality by the light of the rational essence shining in it - all this infinite material, with its regulatory laws - is not the object of philosophy....To comprehend what is, is the task of philosophy: and what is is Reason.

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Works, VII, 17.

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