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The religion and philosophy of the Hebrews are those of a wilder and ruder tribe, wanting the civility and intellectual refinements and subtlety of Vedic culture.

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A Tribute to Hinduism, 2008
4 months 3 weeks ago

In particular, it is certainly wrong to condemn poor old Homo sapiens as the only species to kill his own kind, the only inheritor of the mark of Cain, and similar melodramatic charges. Whether a naturalist stresses the violence or the restraint of animal aggression depends partly on the kinds of animals he is used to watching, and partly on his evolutionary preconceptions-Lorenz is, after all, a 'good of the species' man. Even if it has been exaggerated, the gloved fist view of animal fights seems to have at least some truth. Superficially this looks like a form of altruism. The selfish gene theory must face up to the difficult task of explaining it. Why is it that animals do not go all out to kill rival members of their species at every possible opportunity?

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Ch. 5. Aggression: stability and the selfish machine
4 months 4 weeks ago

Science may fall back on its stupid excuse that science works for science, and that when it has been developed by the scientists it will become accessible to the people also; but art, if it be art, should be accessible to all, and particularly to those for whom it is produced. And the position of our art strikingly arraigns the producers of art for not wishing, not knowing how, and being unable, to serve the people.

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3 months 1 week ago

Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.

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As quoted in Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007) by Karen Michelle Barad, p. 254
7 months 1 week ago

Justice is a temporary thing that must at last come to an end; but the conscience is eternal and will never die.

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On Marriage
7 months 1 day ago

Life is bristling with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one's garden.

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Letter to Pierre-Joseph Luneau de Boisjermain (21 October 1769), from Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire: Correspondance [Garnier frères, Paris, 1882], vol. XIV, letter # 7692 (p. 478)
5 months 3 weeks ago

Friendship and domestic happiness are continually praised; yet how little is there of either in the world, because it requires more cultivation of mind to keep awake affection, even in our own hearts, than the common run of people suppose. Besides, few like to be seen as they really are; and a degree of simplicity, and of undisguised confidence, which, to uninterested observers, would almost border on weakness, is the charm, nay the essence of love or friendship, all the bewitching graces of childhood again appearing.

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Letter 12
5 months 3 weeks ago

When we are young, we take a certain pleasure in our infirmities. They seem so new, so rich! With age, they no longer surprise us, we know them too well. Now, without anything unexpected in them, they do not deserve to be endured.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

O poor mortals, how ye make this earth bitter for each other.

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Pt. I, Bk. V, ch. 5.
6 months 4 weeks ago

The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.

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February 12, 1851; cf. the remark of John Wilkes about Samuel Johnson, "Liberty is as ridiculous in his mouth as Religion in mine" (20 March 1778), quoted in Boswell's Life of Johnson, 1791
4 months 3 weeks ago

Give us grace and strength to forbear and to persevere. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind, spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies.

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Prayer, inscribed on the bronze memorial to Stevenson in St. Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh, Scotland
6 months 4 weeks ago

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

The Age of Empty Freedom ... does not know that man must first through labour, industry, and art, learn how to know; but it has a certain fixed standard for all conceptions, and an established Common Sense of Mankind always ready and at hand, innate within itself and there present without trouble on its part;-and those conceptions and this Common Sense are to it the measure of the efficient and the real. It has this great advantage over the Age of Science, that it knows all things without having learned anything; and can pass judgment upon whatever comes before it at once and without hesitation,-without needing any preliminary evidence:-'That which I do not immediately comprehend by the conceptions which dwell within me, is nothing,'-says Empty Freedom.

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p. 20
5 months 3 weeks ago

The transition from philosophy to the domain of state and society had been an intrinsic part of Hegel's system.

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P. 251
3 months 2 weeks 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
5 months 3 weeks ago

Existing is plagiarism.

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6 months 4 weeks ago

Every man I meet is in some way my superior, and in that, I can learn of him.

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As quoted in Think, Vol. 4-5 (1938), p. 32
5 months 3 weeks ago

Ah! why do women condescend to receive a degree of attention and respect from strangers different from that reciprocation of civility which the dictates of humanity and the politeness of civilization authorize between man and man? And why do they not discover, when, "in the noon of beauty's power", that they are treated like queens only to be deluded by hollow respect. Confined, then, in cages like the feathered race, they have nothing to do but to plume themselves, and stalk with mock majesty from perch to perch.

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Ch. 4
1 month 2 weeks ago

The same goes for Sartre's waiter...the same goes for Christians, Muslims....it's what you are like, not what you are...

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3 months 1 week ago

I strongly suspect that the average reader does not suspect India has as rich a culture, as creative an imagination and wit and humor as any China has to offer, and that India was China's teacher in religion and imaginative literature, and the world's teacher in trigonometry, quadratic equations, grammar, phonetics, Arabian Nights, animal fables, chess, as well as in philosophy, and that she inspired Boccaccio, Goethe, Herder, Schopenhauer, Emerson, and probably also old Aesop.

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The Wisdom Of China And India by ) Lin Yutang
2 months 2 weeks ago

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

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7 months 2 days ago

The offender never forgives.

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Émile et Sophie, ou Les Solitaires, "Lettre Première", 1781
5 months 2 weeks ago

Philosophy ... must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth.

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p. 7
6 months 5 days ago

I thanke God for my happy Dreams|dreames, as I doe for my good rest, for there is a satisfaction in them unto reasonable desires, and such as can be content with a fit of happinesse; and surely it is not a melancholy conceite to thinke we are all asleepe in this world, and that the conceits of this life are as meare dreames to those of the next, as the Phantasmes of the night, to the conceit of the day. There is an equall delusion in both, and the one doth but seeme to bee the embleme or picture of the other;

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Section 12
3 months 2 weeks ago

Every toiling Manchester, its smoke and soot all burnt, ought it not, among so many world-wide conquests, to have a hundred acres or so of free greenfield, with trees on it, conquered, for its little children to disport in; for its all-conquering workers to take a breath of twilight air in? You would say so! A willing Legislature could say so with effect. A willing Legislature could say very many things! And to whatsoever 'vested interest,' or such like, stood up, gainsaying merely, "I shall lose profits,"-the willing Legislature would answer, "Yes, but my sons and daughters will gain health, and life, and a soul."-

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Love all men, even your enemies; love them, not because they are your brothers, but that they may become your brothers. Thus you will ever burn with fraternal love, both for him who is already your brother and for your enemy, that he may by loving become your brother. Even he that does not as yet believe in Christ, love him, and love him with fraternal love. He is not yet thy brother, but love him precisely that he may be thy brother.

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p.436

The application of algebra to geometry... far more than any of his metaphysical speculations, has immortalized the name of Descartes, and constitutes the greatest single step ever made in the progress of the exact sciences.

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An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (1865) as quoted in 5th ed. (1878) p. 617.
2 months 3 weeks ago

Does anything genuinely beautiful need supplementing? No more than justice does-or truth, or kindness, or humility. Are any of those improved by being praised? Or damaged by contempt? Is an emerald suddenly flawed if no one admires it? Or gold, or ivory, or purple? Lyres? Knives? Flowers? Bushes?

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(Hays translation) IV, 20
6 months 4 weeks ago

If things are ever to move upward, some one must take the first step, and assume the risk of it. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try non-resistance as the saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods will or will not succeed.

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Lectures XIV and XV, "The Value of Saintliness"
7 months 2 weeks 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

Democracies owe their existence to national loyalties - the loyalties that are supposedly shared by government and opposition, by all political parties, and by the electorate as a whole. Wherever the experience of nationality is weak or non-existent, democracy has failed to take root. For without national loyalty, opposition is a threat to government, and political disagreements create no common ground.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

In forming a store of good works thou shouldst be diligent, so that it may come to thy assistance among the spirits.

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6 months 4 weeks ago

I wanted pure love: foolishness; to love one another is to hate a common enemy: I will thus espouse your hatred. I wanted Good: nonsense; on this earth and in these times, Good and Bad are inseparable: I accept to be evil in order to become good.

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Act 11, sc. 2
7 months 3 days ago

Nature is satisfied with little; and if she is, I am also.

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As quoted in The Story of Philosophy (1933) by Will Durant, p. 176

Truth never turns to rebuke falsehood; her own straightforwardness is the severest correction.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 264
2 months 4 weeks ago

We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, self-preservation in the other.

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On slavery, in a letter to John Holmes
4 months 3 weeks ago

The wine is bottled poetry.

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Pt. I, ch. II
3 months 3 weeks ago

No effective blueprint [of a political alternative to Empire] will ever arise from a theoretical articulation such as ours.

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206
5 months 2 weeks ago

No criticism can be brought against a branch of technical science from outside; no thought fitted out with the knowledge of a period and setting its course by definite historical aims could have anything to say to the specialist. Such thought and the critical, dialectical element it communicates to the process of cognition, thereby maintaining conscious connection between that process and historical life, do not exist for empiricism; nor do the associated categories, such as the distinction between essence and appearance, identity in change, and rationality of ends, indeed, the concept of man, of personality, even of society and class taken in the sense that presupposes specific viewpoints and directions of interest.

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p. 145.
7 months 3 days ago

His character does not appear more extraordinary and unusual by the mixture of so much absurdity with so much penetration, than by his tempering such violent ambition, and such enraged fanaticism with so much regard to justice and humanity.

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Volume III, Chapter LXI; referring to Oliver Cromwell
5 months 2 weeks ago

The Great Beast is the only object of idolatry, the only ersatz of God, the only imitation of something which is infinitely far from me and which is I myself.

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p. 121; footnote in Gravity and Grace
2 months 3 weeks ago

It is not given to a cylinder to move everywhere by its own motion, nor yet to water nor to fire nor to anything else which is governed by nature or an irrational soul, for the things which check them and stand in the way are many. But intelligence and reason are able to go through everything that opposes them, and in such manner as they are formed by nature and as they choose. Place before thy eyes this facility with which the reason will be carried through all things, as fire upwards, as a stone downwards, as a cylinder down an inclined surface, and seek for nothing further. For all other obstacles either affect the body only, which is a dead thing; or, except for opinion and the yielding of reason itself, they do not crush nor do any harm of any kind; for if they did, he who felt it would immediately become bad.

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X, 33

In all the flat, lethargic, dull moments, when the sensate dominates a person, to him Christianity is a madness because it is incommensurate with any finite wherefore. But then what good is it? Answer: Be quiet, it is the absolute. And that is how it must be presented, consequently as, that is, it must appear as madness to the sensate person. And therefore it is true, so true, and also in another sense so true when the sensible person in the situation of contemporaneity (see II A) censoriously says of Christ, “He is literally nothing”-quite so, for he is the absolute. Christianity is an absolute. Christianity came into the world as the absolute, not, humanly speaking, for comfort; on the contrary, it continually speaks about how the Christian must suffer or about how a person in order to become and remain a Christian must endure sufferings that he consequently can avoid simply by refraining from becoming a Christian.

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6 months ago

To the Deity must be left the task of infinite perfection, while to us poor, weak, incapable mortals, there was no rule of conduct so safe as experience.

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Speech in the House of Commons (6 May 1791), quoted in The Parliamentary History of England, From the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, Vol. XXIX (1817), column 388
5 months 2 weeks ago

Rome is the Great Beast of atheism and materialism, adoring nothing but itself. Israel is the Great Beast of religion. Neither one nor the other is likable. The Great Beast is always repulsive.

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p. 123
6 months 4 weeks ago

If a man own land, the land owns him.

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Wealth

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