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2 months 4 weeks ago

No proceeding is better than that which you have concealed from the enemy until the time you have executed it. To know how to recognize an opportunity in war, and take it, benefits you more than anything else. Nature creates few men brave, industry and training makes many. Discipline in war counts more than fury.

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Book 7
1 month 3 weeks ago

The true Christian knows no Covenant or Mediation with God, but only the Old, Eternal, and Unchangeable Relation, that in Him we live, and move, and have our being; and he asks not who has said this, but only what has been said;-even the book wherein this may be written is nothing to him as a proof, but only as a means of culture; he bears the proof in his own breast. This is my view of the matter...

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p. 105
2 months 2 weeks ago

A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the written words.

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Refusing the Nobel Prize, New York Times
2 months 3 weeks ago

Take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure. Either his ideals in the line of his achievements are pitched far higher than the achievements themselves, or else he has secret ideals of which the world knows nothing, and in regard to which he inwardly knows himself to be found wanting.

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Lectures VI and VII, "The Sick Soul"
1 month 2 weeks ago

The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society-the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society-this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a State. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not "abolished." It dies out.

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Socialism, Utopian and Scientific
3 months 2 weeks ago

An observer studying the Solar system dispassionately, and finding himself capable of bringing the four giant planets to his notice, could reasonably say that the Solar system consisted of one star, four planets, and some traces of debris.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Now men seem, not unreasonably, to form their notions of the supreme good and of happiness from the lives of men.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Eternity is absence.

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What the English call "comfortable" is something endless and inexhaustible. Every condition of comfort reveals in turn its discomfort, and these discoveries go on for ever. Hence the new want is not so much a want of those who have it directly, but is created by those who hope to make profit from it.

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S. Dyde, trans. (1896), § 191
1 month 2 weeks ago

Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.

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2 months 4 weeks ago

Not because Socrates said so, but because it is in truth my own disposition - and perchance to some excess - I look upon all men as my compatriots, and embrace a Pole as a Frenchman, making less account of the national than of the universal and common bond.

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Ch. 9
3 weeks 2 days ago

Lives matter in the sense that they assume physical form within the sphere of appearance; lives matter because they are to be valued equally.

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p. 12
1 month 1 week ago

But the truth is that my work - I was going to say my mission - is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention in faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself; it is to war against all those who submit, whether it be to Catholicism, or to rationalism, or to agnosticism; it is to make all men live the life of inquietude and passionate desire.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Opinions have caused more ills than the plague or earthquakes on this little globe of ours.

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Letter to Élie Bertrand, 5 January 1759
2 months 3 weeks ago

Men are what their mothers made them.

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Fate
2 months 3 weeks ago

Our island is this earth; and the most striking object we behold is the sun. As soon as we pass beyond our immediate surroundings, one or both of these must meet our eye. Thus the philosophy of most savage races is mainly directed to imaginary divisions of the earth or to the divinity of the sun.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

They had no temples, but they had a real living and uninterrupted sense of oneness with the whole of the universe; they had no creed, but they had a certain knowledge that when their earthly joy had reached the limits of earthly nature, then there would come for them, for the living and for the dead, a still greater fullness of contact with the whole of the universe. They looked forward to that moment with joy, but without haste, not pining for it, but seeming to have a foretaste of it in their hearts, of which they talked to one another.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

The very man who has argued you down will sometimes be found, years later, to have been influenced by what you said.

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Reflections on the Psalms (1958), ch. VII: Connivance, p. 73
2 months 3 weeks ago

The deceiver is really the fool.

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Kant, Immanuel (1996), page 101
1 month 3 weeks ago

All writers, not ours alone but foreigners also, who have sought to represent Absolute Beauty, were unequal to the task, for it is an infinitely difficult one. The beautiful is the ideal ; but ideals, with us as in civilized Europe, have long been wavering. There is in the world only one figure of absolute beauty: Christ. That infinitely lovely figure is, as a matter of course, an infinite marvel.

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Letter to his Niece Sofia Alexandrovna, Geneva, January 1, 1868. Ethel Golburn Mayne, Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoyevsky to His Family and Friends (1879), Dostoevsky's Letters XXXIX, p. 136
3 months 2 weeks ago

Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

In its flight from death, the craving for permanence clings to the very things sure to be lost in death.

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p. 17
2 months 3 weeks ago

Thee will find out in time that I have a great love of professing vile sentiments, I don't know why, unless it springs from long efforts to avoid priggery.

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Letter to Alys Pearsall Smith (1894). Smith was a Quaker, thus the archaic use of "Thee" in this and other letters to her.
2 months 3 weeks ago

To think that because those who wield power in society wield in the end that of government, therefore it is of no use to attempt to influence the constitution of the government by acting on opinion, is to forget that opinion is itself one of the greatest active social forces. One person with a belief is a social power equal to ninety-nine who have only interests.

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Ch. I: To What Extent Forms of Government Are a Matter of Choice (p. 155)
2 months 3 weeks ago

I do not, therefore, need any penetrating acuteness to see what I have to do in order that my volition be morally good. Inexperienced in the course of the world, incapable of being prepared for whatever might come to pass in it, I ask myself only: can you also will that your maxim become a universal law?

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3 months 1 week ago

Sincerity is the end and beginning of things; without sincerity there would be nothing. On this account, the superior man regards the attainment of sincerity as the most excellent thing.

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1 month 5 days ago

Nature is a structure of evolving processes. The reality is the process.

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Ch. 4: "The Eighteenth Century", p. 102
2 months 3 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)
3 months 3 weeks ago

When one merely states that one has many subscribers and keeps on saying it, then one gets many; just as when one sheep goes to water, the next one also goes, and when it is continually said of a large flock of sheep that they go hither and yon to water, then the rest must also go, so people believe that it must be the demand of the times, that for the sake of use and custom, they must also subscribe.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

That all men are equal is a proposition which at ordinary times no sane individual has ever given his assent.

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"The Idea of Equality"
1 month 1 week ago

We suppose, it would seem, that concepts grow in the individual mind like leaves on a tree, and we think to discover their nature by studying their growth; we seek to define them psychologically, in terms of the human mind. But this account makes everything subjective, and if we follow it through to the end, does away with truth. What is known as the history of concepts is really a history either of our knowledge of concepts or of the meanings of words.

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Translation J. L. Austin (Oxford, 1950) as quoted by Stephen Toulmin, Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts (1972) Vol. 1, p. 56.
3 months 3 weeks ago

What if the equality between us human being, in which we completely resemble one another, were that none of us really thinks about his being loved?

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2 months 3 weeks ago

...You could take up the line that some of the gnostics took up - a line which I often thought was a very plausible one - that as a matter of fact this world that we know was made by the devil at a moment when God was not looking. There is a good deal to be said for that, and I am not concerned to refute it.

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"The Moral Arguments for Deity"
6 months 3 weeks ago

Tibetan prayer wheels: you write a prayer on a paper, put the rolled paper on a wheel, and turn it automatically, without thinking. In this way, the wheel itself is praying for me, instead of me - or more precisely, I myself am praying through the medium of the wheel. The beauty of it all is that in my psychological inferiority I can think about whatever I want, I can yield to the most dirty and obscene fantasies, and it does not matter because - to use a good old Stalinist expression - 'whatever I am thinking, objectively I am praying.'

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1 month 2 weeks ago

We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.

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4 weeks 1 day ago

It was Rudolf Carnap's dream for the last three decades of his life to show that science proceeds by a formal syntactic method; today no one to my knowledge holds out any hope for that project.

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Hilary Putnam, in: James Conant, Urszula M. Zeglen (2012) Hilary Putnam: Pragmatism and Realism. p. 14
1 month 2 weeks ago

It depends only on the weakness of our organs and of our self-excitement (Selbstberuhrung), that we do not see ourselves in a Fairy-world. All Fabulous Tales (Mahrchen) are merely dreams of that home world, which is everywhere and nowhere. The higher powers in us, which one day as Genies, shall fulfil our will, are, for the present, Muses, which refresh us on our toilsome course with sweet remembrances.

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2 months 1 week ago

With an ill-famed man form no connection.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

The Indians, whom we call barbarous, observe much more decency and civility in their discourses and conversation, giving one another a fair silent hearing till they have quite done; and then answering them calmly, and without noise or passion. And if it be not so in this civiliz'd part of the world, we must impute it to a neglect in education, which has not yet reform'd this antient piece of barbarity amongst us.

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Sec. 145
2 weeks 5 days ago

It is perhaps typical of very creative minds that they hit very large nails not quite on the head.

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Kenneth Boulding in McLuhan: Hot & Cool (1967) p. 68
2 months 4 weeks ago

He who remembers the evils he has undergone, and those that have threatened him, and the slight causes that have changed him from one state to another, prepares himself in that way for future changes and for recognizing his condition. The life of Caesar has no more to show us than our own; an emperor's or an ordinary man's, it is still a life subject to all human accidents.

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Ch. 13
1 month 1 week ago

Even the eye that is artificially trained to see color as color, apart from things that colors qualify, cannot shut out the resonances and transfers of value.

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p. 126
1 month 2 weeks ago

The more you are a victim of contradictory impulses, the less you know which to yield to. To lack character - precisely that and nothing more.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

What is now common to all men is a mere abstract universal, an H.C.F. [Highest Common Factor], and Man's conquest of himself means simply the rule of the Conditioners over the conditioned human material, the world of post-humanity which, some knowingly and some unknowingly, nearly all men in all nations are at present labouring to produce.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, and no force of character can make any stand against good wit.

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The Comic
4 weeks 1 day ago

If there were no limits to human rationality administrative theory would be barren. It would consist of the single precept: Always select that alternative, among those available, which will lead to the most complete achievement of your goals.

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Simon (1945, p. 240); As cited in:
1 month 1 week ago

So long as you "have" yourself, have yourself as an object, your experience of man is only as of a thing among things.

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p. 148
2 months 3 weeks ago

The object of this Essay is to explain as clearly as I am able grounds of an opinion which I have held from the very earliest period when I had formed any opinions at all on social political matters, and which, instead of being weakened or modified, has been constantly growing stronger by the progress reflection and the experience of life. That the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes - the legal subordination of one sex to the other - is wrong itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.

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Ch. 1
2 months 2 weeks ago

Looking for God-or Heaven-by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare's plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters or Stratford as one of the places. Shakespeare is in one sense present at every moment in every play.

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"The Seeing Eye", in Christian Reflections (1967), p. 167

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