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6 months 5 days ago

O saving Victim, opening wideThe gate of heaven to man below,Our foes press on from every side,Thine aid supply, Thy strength bestow.

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Verbum Supernum Prodiens (hymn for Lauds on Corpus Christi), stanza 5 (O Salutaris Hostia)
5 months 2 weeks ago

The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. With the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion the devaluation of the world of men. Labour produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity - and does so in the proportion in which it produces commodities generally.

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p. 71, The Marx-Engels Reader
2 months 3 weeks ago

Skills are called hidden treasure as they save like a mother in a foreign country.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Must we then speak of this subject also: and shall we write concerning things that are not to be told, and shall we publish things not to be divulged, and secrets not to be spoken aloud? Who indeed is Attis or Gallos; who the Mother of the Gods; what is the reason of this rule of Chastity; moreover for what cause has such an institution been established among us from remote antiquity; handed down to us indeed from the most ancient of the Phrygians, but accepted in the first place by the Greeks - and those not the vulgar herd, but the Athenians - taught by the event that they had not done well in ridiculing him that was performing the rites of the Great Mother. For they are said to have insulted and driven off the Gallos, as one who was making innovations in religion: because they did not understand the character of the goddess, or how that she was the very "Deo", "Rhea," and " "Demeter" so much honoured amongst them themselves.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Who knows whether the best of men be known, or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot, than any that stand remembered in the known account of time? Without the favour of the everlasting register, the first man had been as unknown as the last, and Methuselah's long life had been his only chronicle.Oblivion is not to be hired. The greater part must be content to be as though they had not been, to be found in the register of God, not in the record of man. Twenty seven names make up the first story before the flood, and the recorded names ever since contain not one living century. The number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live. The night of time far surpasseth the day, and who knows when was the Æquinox? Every hour adds unto that current arithmetick, which scarce stands one moment.

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Chapter V
1 month 3 weeks ago

If compelled to indicate my religion on an immigration blank, I might be tempted to put down the word "Taoist," to the amazement of the customs officer who probably never heard of it.

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The Wisdom of Laotse (1948), Introduction, p. 15
1 month 2 weeks ago

Once more I realized to what an extent earthly happiness is made to the measure of man. It is not a rare bird which we must pursue at one moment in heaven, at the next in our minds. Happiness is a domestic bird found in our own courtyards.

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"Italy", Ch. 18, p. 182
1 month 3 weeks ago

In the realm of physics it is perhaps only the theory of relativity which has made it quite clear that the two essences, space and time, entering into our intuition, have no place in the world constructed by mathematical physics. Colours are thus "really" not even æther-vibrations, but merely a series of values of mathematical functions in which occur four independent parameters corresponding to the three dimensions of space, and the one of time.

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Introduction
6 months 2 weeks ago

You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer 'yes' without having asked any clear question.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.

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Success
2 months 2 weeks ago

The learning of the gentleman enters through his ears, fastens to his heart, spreads through his four limbs, and manifests itself in his actions. ... The learning of the petty person enters through his ears and passes out his mouth. From mouth to ears is only four inches-how could it be enough to improve a whole body much larger than that?

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Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy (2001), p. 259
5 months 3 weeks ago

There is another ground of hope that must not be omitted. Let men but think over their infinite expenditure of understanding, time, and means on matters and pursuits of far less use and value; whereof, if but a small part were directed to sound and solid studies, there is no difficulty that might not be overcome.

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Aphorism 111
1 month 2 weeks ago

The concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion, and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism.

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2 months 2 days ago

The archer must know what he is seeking to hit; then he must aim and control the weapon by his skill. Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbour he is making for, no wind is the right wind. Chance must necessarily have great influence over our lives, because we live by chance. It is the case with certain men, however, that they do not know that they know certain things. Just as we often go searching for those who stand beside us, so we are apt to forget that the goal of the Supreme Good lies near us.

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Line 3
2 months 1 week ago

But leaving this, let us remark one thing which is very plain: That whatever be the uses and duties, real or supposed, of a Secretary in Parliament, his faculty to accomplish these is a point entirely unconnected with his ability to get elected into Parliament, and has no relation or proportion to it, and no concern with it whatever.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

I am not so much afraid of death, as ashamed thereof; 'tis the very disgrace and ignominy of our natures, that in a moment can so disfigure us that our nearest friends, Wife, and Children stand afraid and start at us.

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Section 40
4 months 3 days ago

No human being escapes the necessity of conceiving some good outside himself towards which his thought turns in a movement of desire, supplication, and hope. consequently, the only choice is between worshipping the true God or an idol. Every atheist is an idolater - unless he is worshipping the true God in his impersonal aspect. The majority of the pious are idolaters.

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Last Notebook (1942) p. 308
1 month 2 weeks ago

Individualism is going around these days in uniform, handing out the party line on individualism.

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Think Little
5 months 2 weeks ago

Other curious and rather ominous consequences of war are the increased anti-Semitism which one meets in all classes, particularly the common people, and the strong recrudescence of anti-negro passions in the South. The first is due to the age-old dislike of a monied, influential and pushing minority, coupled with a special grudge against the Jews as being chiefly instrumental, in public opinion, in getting America into the war.

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Letter to Julian Huxley (1943), published in Letters of Aldous Huxley (1970), p. 486, also in Aldous Huxley: A Quest for Values, 2017
1 month 2 weeks ago

My new trade of nail-making is to me in this country what an additional title of nobility or the ensigns of a new order are in Europe.

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As quoted in The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson, by Henry Wiencek, Smithsonian Magazine,
5 months 1 week ago

Truthfulness under oath is, by now, a matter of our civic religion, our relation to our fellow citizens rather than our relation to a nonhuman power.

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"John Searle on Realism and Relativism." Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (1998).
4 months 3 days ago

I do not think discursively. It is not so much that I arrive at truth as that I take my start from it.

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Introduction
4 months 3 weeks ago

There are three successive states of morality answering to the three principal stages of human life; the personal, the domestic, and the social stage.

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p. 104
5 months 2 weeks ago

Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead. Consistent intellectualism and spirituality may be socially valuable, up to a point; but they make, gradually, for individual death.

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"Wordsworth in the Tropics" in Do What You Will, 1929
4 months ago

Christianity was an epidemic rather than a religion. It appealed to fear, hysteria and ignorance. It spread across the Western world, not because it was true, but because humans are gullible and superstitious.

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p. 212
5 months 2 weeks ago

Now shall we say that only the first men were well alive, and the existing generation is invalided and degenerate? ... A more subtle and severe criticism might suggest that some dislocation has befallen the race; that men are off their centre; that multitudes of men do not live with Nature, but behold it as exiles. People go out to look at sunrises and sunsets who do not recognize their own quietly and happily, but know that it is foreign to them. As they do by books, so they quote the sunset and the star, and do not make them theirs. Worse yet, they live as foreigners in the world of truth, and quote thoughts, and thus disown them. Quotation confesses inferiority.

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Quotation and Originality
4 months ago

Yet its essence was the certitude that his life was not totally at the mercy of chance. Somehow, it was more important than that. This sense of power inside his head - which he could intensify by pulling a face and wrinkling up the muscles of his forehead - aroused a glow of optimism, an expectation of exciting events. He knew that for him, fate held something special in store.

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p. 26
4 months ago

I had never doubted my own abilities, but I was quite prepared to believe that "the world" would decline to recognize them.

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p. 3
4 months 1 week ago

I know well that many of my readers do not think as I do. This also is most natural and confirms the theorem. For although my opinion turn out erroneous, there will always remain the fact that many of those dissentient readers have never given five minutes' thought to this complex matter. How are they going to think as I do? But by believing that they have a right to an opinion on the matter without previous effort to work one out for themselves, they prove patently that they belong to that absurd type of human being which I have called the "rebel mass." It is precisely what I mean by having one's soul obliterated, hermetically closed. Here it would be the special case of intellectual hermetism.

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Chap. VIII: The Masses Intervene In Everything, And Why Their Intervention Is Solely By Violence
5 months 2 weeks ago

We may define "faith" as a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. Where there is evidence, no one speaks of "faith". We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence. The substitution of emotion for evidence is apt to lead to strife, since different groups substitute different emotions.

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p. 215
5 months 2 weeks ago

Philosophy of religion ... really amounts to ... philosophizing on certain favorite assumptions that are not confirmed at all.

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E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 143
3 months 2 weeks ago

He dies twice who perishes by his own hand.

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Maxim 97
4 months 3 weeks ago

Since I have spread my wings to purpose high, The more beneath my feet the clouds I see, The more I give the winds my pinions free, Spurning the earth and soaring to the sky.

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As quoted in "Giordano Bruno" by Thomas Davidson, in The Index Vol. VI. No. 36 (4 March 1886), p. 429
6 months 2 weeks ago

Throughout history there have been peasant rebellions which have followed always the same course. Blindly, the peasants sacked and destroyed, and when members of the "upper classes" fell into their hands, they killed ruthlessly and cruelly, for never in their lives had they been taught gentleness and mercy by those now in their power.

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1 month 1 week ago

The leadership has failed. Even so, the leadership can and must be recreated from the masses and out of the masses. The masses are the decisive element, they are the rock on which the final victory of the revolution will be built. The masses were on the heights; they have developed this 'defeat' into one of the historical defeats which are the pride and strength of international socialism. And that is why the future victory will bloom from this 'defeat'. 'Order reigns in Berlin!' You stupid henchmen! Your 'order' is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will already 'raise itself with a rattle' and announce with fanfare, to your terror: I was, I am, I will be!

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"Order reigns in Berlin", Last written words. Collected Works 4
1 month 3 weeks ago

In my work, I have always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful. In a conversation with Freeman Dyson.

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Quoted in Chandrasekhar, S. (2010-12-01) . "Beauty and the quest for beauty in science". Physics Today 63 (12): 57-62. ISSN 0031-9228. DOI:10.1063/1.3529003.
3 months 4 weeks ago

Mysticism: to dwell on the unseen, to withdraw ourselves from the things of sense into communion with God - to endeavour to partake of the Divine nature; that is, of Holiness. When we ask ourselves only what is right, or what is the will of God (the same question), then we may truly be said to live in His light.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

When the wise man opens his mouth, the beauties of his soul present themselves to the view, like the statues in a temple.

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Pythagorean Ethical Sentences From Stobæus
6 months 2 weeks ago

When you read God's Word, in everything you read, continually to say to yourself: It is I to whom it is speaking - this is earnestness, precisely this is earnestness. Not a single one of those to whom the cause of Christianity in the higher sense has been entrusted forgot to urge this again and again as most crucial, as unconditionally the condition if you are to come to see yourself in the mirror.

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It is easier to discover a deficiency in individuals, in states, and in providence, than to see their real import or value.

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2 months 1 week ago

The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.

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Loose paraphrase of Salviati on Day 3
5 months 1 week ago

The most thought provoking thing in our thought provoking time is that we are still not thinking.

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What is Called Thinking? (1951-1952), as translated by Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray
3 months 3 days ago

Within the last fifty years, the extraordinary growth of every department of physical science has spread among us mental food of so nutritious and stimulating a character that a new ecdysis seems imminent.

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Ch.2, p. 73
1 month 3 weeks ago

Immortality is the privilege of the few, and, according to the Aryan conception, specifically the privilege of heroes. Continuing to live - not as a shadow, but as a demigod - is reserved to those which a special spiritual action has elevated from the one nature to the other.

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p. 102
4 months 4 days ago

There may be a rationalist who has never wavered in his conviction of the mortality of the soul, and there may be a vitalist who has never wavered in his faith in immortality; but at the most this would prove that just as there are natural monstrosities, so there are those who are stupid as regards heart and feeling, however great their intelligence, and those who are stupid intellectually, however great their virtue. But, in normal cases, I cannot believe those who assure me that never, not in a fleeting moment, not in the hours of direst loneliness and grief, has this murmur of uncertainty breathed upon their consciousness.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

As Being and Life are one and the same, so are Death and Nothingness one and the same. But there is no real Death and no real Nothing ness, as we have already said. There is, however, an Apparent Life, and this is the mixture of life and death, of being and nothingness.

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P. 4
4 months ago

Husserl has shown that man's prejudices go a great deal deeper than his intellect or his emotions. Consciousness itself is 'prejudiced' - that is to say, intentional.

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p. 54

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