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3 months 3 weeks ago

Once you had read the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, you knew that everyday life was psychopathology.

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Humboldt's Gift (1975) [Penguin Classics, 1996, ISBN 0-140-18944-0], p. 5
4 months 1 day ago

World War I a railway war of centralization and encirclement. World War II a radio war of decentralization concluded by the Bomb. World War III a TV guerrilla war with no divisions between civil and military fronts.

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(p. 152)
6 months 4 days ago

The philosophy of nature must not be unduly terrestrial; for it, the earth is merely one of the smaller planets of one of the smaller stars of the Milky Way. It would be ridiculous to warp the philosophy of nature in order to bring out results that are pleasing to the tiny parasites of this insignificant planet. Vitalism as a philosophy, and evolutionism, show, in this respect, a lack of sense of proportion and logical relevance. They regard the facts of life, which are personally interesting to us, as having a cosmic significance, not a significance confined to the earth's surface. Optimism and pessimism, as cosmic philosophies, show the same naive humanism; the great world, so far as we know it from the philosophy of nature, is neither good nor bad, and is not concerned to make us happy or unhappy. All such philosophies spring from self-importance and are best corrected by a little astronomy.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.

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6 months 4 days ago

I hardly know an intellectual man, even, who is so broad and truly liberal that you can think aloud in his society. Most with whom you endeavor to talk soon come to a stand against some institution in which they appear to hold stock, - that is, some particular, not universal, way of viewing things.

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p. 490
6 months 3 days 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 months 3 weeks ago

To know how just a cause we have for grieving is already a consolation.

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Ch. IV.: Music
6 months 4 days ago

In England women are still occasionally used instead of horses for hauling canal boats, because the labour required to produce horses and machines is an accurately known quantity, while that required to maintain the women of the surplus population is below all calculation.

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Vol. I, Ch. 15, Section 2, pg. 430.
4 months 3 weeks ago

Take, eat; this is my body. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins. But I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom.

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26:26-29 (KJV)
6 months 6 days ago

The evil effect of science upon men is principally this, that by far the greatest number of those who wish to display a knowledge of it accomplish no improvement at all of the understanding, but only a perversity of it, not to mention that it serves most of them as a tool of vanity.

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Part III : Selection on Education from Kant's other Writings, Ch. I Pedagogical Fragments, # 52
2 months 3 days ago

The poem is important, but not more than the people whose survival it serves...

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In A Motel Parking Lot, Thinking Of Dr. Williams
2 months 2 days ago

My primary object is to defend and advance a principle in which I see the only possible relief from much that enthralls and degrades and distorts, turning light to darkness and good to evil, rather than to gage a philosopher or weigh a philosophy. Yet the examination I propose must lead to a decisive judgment upon both.

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Introduction : The Reason for the Examination

It is not enough for a wise man to study nature and truth; he should dare state truth for the benefit of the few who are willing and able to think.

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That's because believing in "God" or not doesn't determine goodness....universality does that...understanding each individual is an end in themselves.....

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2 months 2 weeks ago

We now come to a decisive step of mathematical abstraction: we forget about what the symbols stand for... [The mathematician] need not be idle; there are many operations which he may carry out with these symbols, without ever having to look at the things they stand for.

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The Mathematical Way of Thinking
5 months 3 weeks ago

The problem is one of opposition between subjective and objective points of view. There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality. But often what appears to a more subjective point of view cannot be accounted for in this way. So either the objective conception of the world is incomplete, or the subjective involves illusions that should be rejected.

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"Subjective and Objective" (1979), p. 196.
5 months 1 day ago

I was still blind, but twinkling stars did dance Throughout my being's limitless expanse, Nothing had yet drawn close, only at distant stages I found myself, a mere suggestion sensed in past and future ages.

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As quoted in Romantic Vision, Ethical Context: Novalis and Artistic Autonomy (1987) by Géza von Molnár, p. 2
7 months 1 day ago

There is no version of primeval history, preceding the discoveries of modern science, that is as rational and as inspiring as that of the first eleven chapters of the Book of Genesis.

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4 months ago

To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer.

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Chapter 6 "Origins and Miracles" (p. 141)
4 months 6 days ago

We often attribute "understanding" and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions.

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6 months 6 days ago

The concept of space, therefore, is a pure intuition, being a singular concept, not made up by sensations, but itself the fundamental form of all external sensation.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

The supreme effort of the avant-guard is onward, ever onward.

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Light and Shadows in the Life of an Avant-Guard
3 months 2 weeks ago

Man is a born geometer. Even when he is expressing himself in curves, as he has done in the undulating roofs of Eastern Asia and in the flowing sculptures at Borobudur, his lines follow mathematical laws that are unknown to Nature; and he is frankly defying her when he works in rectangles. Angkor is perhaps the greatest of Man's essays in rectangular architecture that has yet been brought to light... The Buddhist stupa at Borobudur in Central Java is a lyric poem in stone, flowing round the crown of a hill to the musical accompaniment of a jagged mountain range on one side and a green expanse of rice fields on the other. Angkor is not orchestral; it is monumental. It is an epic poem which makes its effect, like the Odyssey and like Paradise Lost, by the grandeur of its structure as well as by the beauty of the details. Angkor is an epic in rectangular forms imposed upon the Cambodian jungle.

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27. Angkor
7 months 6 days ago
Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.
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6 months 4 days ago

To choose one sock from each of infinitely many pairs of socks requires the Axiom of Choice, but for shoes the Axiom is not needed.

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As quoted in Williams' Weighing the Odds: A Course in Probability and Statistics (2001), p. 498
5 months 3 weeks ago

By convention sweet is sweet, bitter is bitter, hot is hot, cold is cold, color is color; but in truth there are only atoms and the void.

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(trans. Durant 1939), Ch. XVI, §II, p. 353; citing C. Bakewell, Sourcebook in Ancient Philosophy, New York, 1909, "Fragment O" (Diels), p. 60
5 months 1 week ago

The world that I regard is my selfe, it is the Microcosme of mine owne frame, that I cast mine eye on; for the other, I use it but like my Globe, and turne it round sometimes for my recreation. Men that look upon my outside, perusing onely my condition, and fortunes, do erre in my altitude; for I am above Atlas his shoulders.

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Section 12
4 months 2 weeks ago

An eternal purgatory, then, rather than a heaven of glory; an eternal ascent. If there is an end to all suffering, however pure and spiritualized we may suppose it to be, if there is an end to all desire, what is it that makes the blessed in paradise go on living? If in paradise they do not suffer for want of God, how shall they love Him? And if there, in the heaven of glory, while they behold God little by little and closer and closer, yet without ever wholly attaining Him, there does not always remain something more for them to know and desire, if there does not always remain a substratum of doubt, how shall they not fall asleep?

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Living virtuously is equal to living in accordance with one's experience of the actual course of nature.

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As quoted by Diogenes Laërtius, vii. 182.
2 months 2 weeks ago

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.
4 months 6 days ago

Particularly in the case of all professional of press-images which testify of the real events. In making reality, even the most violent, emerge to the visible, it makes the real substance disappear. It is like the Myth of Eurydice : when Orpheus turns around to look at her, she vanishes and returns to hell. That is why, the more exponential the marketing of images is growing the more fantastically grows the indifference towards the real world. Finally, the real world becomes a useless function, a collection of phantom shapes and ghost events. We are not far from the silhouettes on the walls of the cave of Plato.

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5 months 3 days ago

Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all. Like the majority of men who are born to a given belief, they demand the most rigorous proof of any adverse belief, but assume that their own needs none.

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2 months 1 week ago

Those who are wise won't be busy, and those who are too busy can't be wise.

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p. 150
4 months 4 weeks ago

I call a sign which stands for something merely because it resembles it, an icon. Icons are so completely substituted for their objects as hardly to be distinguished from them. Such are the diagrams of geometry. A diagram, indeed, so far as it has a general signification, is not a pure icon; but in the middle part of our reasonings we forget that abstractness in great measure, and the diagram is for us the very thing. So in contemplating a painting, there is a moment when we lose the consciousness that it is not the thing, the distinction of the real and the copy disappears, and it is for the moment a pure dream, - not any particular existence, and yet not general. At that moment we are contemplating an icon.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Not from fear but from a sense of duty refrain from your sins.

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6 months 4 days ago

Men go to a fire for entertainment. When I see how eagerly men will run to a fire, whether in warm or in cold weather, by day or by night, dragging an engine at their heels, I'm astonished to perceive how good a purpose the level of excitement is made to serve.

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June, 1850
5 months 4 days ago

To care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it's good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things.

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Part 1, Chapter 9
4 months 2 weeks ago

Every human being is the natural guardian of his own importance.

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Ch. 9: "Science and Philosophy", p. 195
6 months 2 days ago

...inversion...is an outlet that a child discovers when he is suffocating.

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p. 91
5 months 4 weeks ago

You could attach prices to thoughts. Some cost a lot, some a little. And how does one pay for thoughts? The answer, I think, is: with courage.

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p. 52e
5 months 4 weeks ago

One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.

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Journal entry (11 October 1914), p. 10e
4 months 3 weeks ago

Having given up autonomy, reason has become an instrument.

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p. 21.
4 months 4 weeks ago

Though we may prefer ourselves to the universe, we nonetheless loathe ourselves much more than we suspect. If the wise man is so rare a phenomenon, it is because he seems unshaken by the aversion which, like all beings, he must feel for himself.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

The task of the educator is to make the child's spirit pass again where its forefathers have gone, moving rapidly through certain stages but suppressing none of them. In this regard, the history of science must be our guide.

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[Logic and intuition in the science of mathematics and in teaching], L'enseignement mathématique
3 months 2 weeks ago

Compassion is the desire that moves the individual self to widen the scope of its self-concern to embrace the whole of the universal self.

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The Toynbee-Ikeda Dialogue: Man Himself Must Choose
6 months 5 days ago

Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 26, § 310, as translated by Eric F. J. Payne
5 months 3 weeks ago

The man who is fortunate in his choice of son-in-law gains a son; the man unfortunate in his choice loses his daughter also.

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Freeman (1948), p. 169

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