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1 month 1 week ago

Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.

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1 month 1 week ago

People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad.

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1841

The living have never shown me how to live.

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"On My Friendly Critics"
2 weeks 3 days ago

Every attempt to refer chemical questions to mathematical doctrines must be considered, now and always, profoundly irrational, as being contrary to the nature of the phenomena. . . . but if the employment of mathematical analysis should ever become so preponderant in chemistry (an aberration which is happily almost impossible) it would occasion vast and rapid retrogradation....

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1 month 1 week ago

There are various, nay, incredible faiths; why should we be alarmed at any of them? What man believes, God believes.

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Universities produce PhDs knowing no jobs await. They exploit graduate student labor, then abandon degree-holders to contingent poverty. The academic job market is pyramid scheme: many enter, few succeed, all blame themselves. Structural unemployment presented as individual failure.

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In the state of nature, Profit is the measure of Right.

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De Cive
2 months 1 week ago

It is surely better to be wronged than to do wrong.

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1 month 1 week ago

You can't worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it's hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you've got to die to every other moment.

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John Rivers in The Genius and the Goddess, 1955

Education requires massive debt because society refuses to collectively fund what benefits everyone. You pay individually for public good, then work decades repaying loans while universities and banks profit. Student loans aren't unfortunate necessity - they're wealth extraction disguised as opportunity.

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4 days ago

Well both original seizure and subsequent critical discrimination have equal claims, each to its own complete development and must not be forgotten that direct and unreasoned impression comes first. There is such occasions something of the quality of the wind that bloweth where it listeth. Sometimes it comes and sometimes it does not, even in the presence of the same object. It cannot be forced and when it does not arrive it is not wise to seek to recover by direct action the first fine rapture.

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p. 151
2 weeks 5 days ago

The Divine light is always in man, presenting itself to the senses and to the comprehension, but man rejects it.

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As quoted in Life and Teachings of Giordano Bruno : Philosopher, Martyr, Mystic 1548 - 1600 (1913) by Coulson Turnbull
1 month 1 week ago

For what avail the plough or sail, Or land or life, if freedom fail?

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Boston
1 month 2 weeks ago

What does it mean to have a god? or, what is God? Answer: A god means that from which we are to expect all good and to which we are to take refuge in all distress, so that to have a God is nothing else than to trust and believe Him from the [whole] heart; as I have often said that the confidence and faith of the heart alone make both God and an idol. If your faith and trust be right, then is your god also true; and, on the other hand, if your trust be false and wrong, then you have not the true God; for these two belong together faith and God. That now, I say, upon which you set your heart and put your trust is properly your god.

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Large Catechism 1.1-3, F. Bente and W.H.T. Dau, tr. Triglot Concordia: The Symbolical Books of the Ev. Lutheran Church(St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1921), 565.
1 month 3 days ago

To protest about bullfighting in Spain, the eating of dogs in South Korea, or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada while continuing to eat eggs from hens who have spent their lives crammed into cages, or veal from calves who have been deprived of their mothers, their proper diet, and the freedom to lie down with their legs extended, is like denouncing apartheid in South Africa while asking your neighbors not to sell their houses to blacks.

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Ch. 4: Becoming a Vegetarian
2 months 1 week 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 2 days ago

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Since sounds have no natural connection with our ideas ... the doubtfulness and uncertainty of their signification ... has its cause more in the ideas they stand for than in any incapacity there is in one sound more than another to signify any idea.

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Book III, Ch. 9, sec. 4
1 week 2 days ago

I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Fashion is the science of appearances, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

it is absurd ... to hope that maybe another Newton may some day arise, to make intelligible to us even the genesis of but a blade of grass

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("Dialectic of Teleological Judgment" §75)

Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.

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George Santayana, as quoted in Quotations for Our Time (1977) edited by Laurence J. Peter
1 month 1 week ago

The World and Life are one. Physiological life is of course not "Life". And neither is psychological life. Life is the world. Ethics does not treat of the world. Ethics must be a condition of the world, like logic. Ethics and Aesthetics are one.

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Journal entry (24 July 1916), p. 77e
1 month 1 week ago

The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success - is our national disease.

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To H. G. Wells, 9/11/1906
1 week 2 days ago

There is nothing to say about anything. So there can be no limit to the number of books.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.

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Part 4, Section 7
2 months 1 week ago

To stand on one leg and prove God's existence is a very different thing from going on one's knees and thanking Him.

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1 month 1 week ago

The live dead-man is dead as a producer and alive insofar as he consumes.

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p. 139
1 week 1 day ago

The theory of transparency was set up in reaction to the theory of mental images, of an inner tableu which the perception of an object would leave in us. In imagination our gaze always goes outward, but imagination modifies and neutralizes the gaze: the real world appears in it as it were between parenthesis or quote marks.

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The Levinas reader by Levinas, Emmanuel p. 134
1 month 2 weeks ago

There is no wish more natural than the wish to know.

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Ch. 13
2 months 1 week ago

A man is more a man through the things he keeps to himself than through those he says.

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2 months 2 days ago

All human laws are nourished by one divine law.

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1 month 1 week ago

When you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell a story: the plausible disappears at the same time as the friends. You let events flow by too: you suddenly see people appear who speak and then go away; you plunge into stories of which you can't make head or tail: you'd make a terrible witness.

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Diary entry of Tuesday, 30 January
1 week 2 days ago

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

When the apostle James was talking about faith and works against those who thought their faith was enough, and didn't want to have good works, he said, You believe God is one; you do well; the demons also believe, and tremble.

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(Jas 2:19) 183:13:2
4 days ago

Works of art express space as opportunity for movement and action.

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p. 217
2 months 1 week ago

All mankind, right down to those you most despise, are your neighbors.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

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Book II, vii, 5
3 weeks 3 days ago

We have two ears and one mouth, so we should listen more than we say.

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As quoted in Diogenes Laërtius Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, vii. 23.

Nobody really thinks who does not abstract from that which is given, who does not relate the facts to the factors which have made them, who does not - in his mind - undo the facts. Abstractness is the very life of thought, the token of its authenticity.

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p. 134
1 month 1 week ago

Nature is too thin a screen; the glory of the One breaks in everywhere.

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p. 182
1 month 1 week ago

"Everything is both a trap and a display; the secret reality of the object is what the Other makes of it."

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1 week 2 days ago

Everyone must destroy their life. According to the way they do it, they're either triumphants or failures.

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1 month ago

Rest gives relish to labour.

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Of the Training of Children, 9 (Tr. Babbitt)
1 month 1 week ago

It is the duty of all who care for their country or for civilisation to point out that we cannot further any of our ideals by participation in the next war, and that we ought therefore to resist all measures based upon the assumption that we shall take part in it. In the late war it was arguable that victory, being possible, might do some good. With the modern technique of gas attack, no belligerent can hope for victory. Absolute pacifism, therefore, in every country, in which it is politically possible, is the only sane policy both for Governments and individuals.

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Letter to The New Statesman and Nation (10 August 1935), quoted in Yours Faithfully, Bertrand Russell
1 month 2 weeks ago

Go into the London Stock Exchange - a more respectable place than many a court - and you will see representatives from all nations gathered together for the utility of men. Here Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt. Here the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist and the Anglican accepts a promise from the Quaker.

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Letters on England, letter 6, "On the Presbyterians" as quoted in Trust and Tolerance, Richard H. Dees, Routledge, London and New York, (2004) p. 92, published first in English in 1733.
1 month 1 week ago

Most people, at a crisis, feel more loyalty to their nation than to their class.

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Ch. 8: Economic Power
1 month 1 week ago

It seems to me that the current political task in a society like ours is to criticize the working of institutions that are apparently the most neutral and independent, to criticize these institutions and attack them in such a way that the political violence that exercises itself obscurely through them becomes manifest, so that one can fight against them.

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Debate with Noam Chomsky, École Supérieure de Technologie à Eindhoven, November 1971
2 months 2 weeks ago
With all great deceivers there is a noteworthy occurrence to which they owe their power. In the actual act of deception... they are overcome by belief in themselves. It is this which then speaks so miraculously and compellingly to those who surround them.
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5 days ago

For he must rule as king until God has put all enemies under his feet. And the last enemy, death, is to be brought to nothing.

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Paul of Tarsus, 1 Corinthians 15: 25-26, NWT

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