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1 week 3 days ago

The Pythagoreans thought those who teach for the sake of reward show themselves worse than sculptors, or artists who perform the work sitting. For these, when someone orders wood to make a statue of Hermes, search for wood suited to receive the proper form; while those pretend that they can readily produce the works of virtue from every nature.

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2 months 4 weeks ago

I feel that I have within me a medieval soul, and I believe that the soul of my country is medieval, that it has perforce passed through the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Revolution - learning from them, yes, but without allowing them to touch the soul, preserving the spiritual inheritance which has come down from what are called the Dark Ages. And Quixotism is simply the most desperate phase of the struggle between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which was the offering of the Middle Ages.

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3 weeks 6 days ago

To no creature besides man has been given wisdom, foresight, industry, and reflection.

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4 months 1 week ago

Social and economic inequalities, for example inequalities of wealth and authority, are just only if they result in compensating benefits for everyone, and in particular for the least advantaged members of society.

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p. 14.
4 months 3 weeks ago

By protracting life, we do not deduct one jot from the duration of death.

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Book III, lines 1087-1088 (tr. Rouse)
2 months 1 week ago

The happiness of men consists in life. And life is in labor.

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What Is To Be Done? (1886) Chap. XXXVIII
2 months 1 week ago

Human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.

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Chapter 3 "Accumulating Small Change" (p. 50)
4 months 1 week ago

If production be capitalistic in form, so, too, will be reproduction.

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Vol. I, Ch. 23, pg. 620.
4 months 1 week ago

Human beings are not born identical. There are many different temperaments and constitutions; and within each psycho-physical class one can find people at very different stages of spiritual development. Forms of worship and spiritual discipline which may be valuable for one individual maybe useless or even positively harmful for another belonging to a different class and standing, within that class, at a lower or higher level of development.

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We shall, therefore, assume the complete physical equivalence of a gravitational field and a corresponding acceleration of the reference system.

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Statement of the equivalence principle in Yearbook of Radioactivity and Electronics (1907)
4 months 2 weeks ago

My trade and my art is living.

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Ch. 6 (tr. Donald M. Frame)
1 week 5 days ago

If ever there was a holy war, it was that which saved our liberties and gave us independence.

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Letter to John W. Eppes (6 November 1813). Reported in Albert Ellery Bergh, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (1907), p. 430
3 months 2 days ago

Although the formulations of science now offer the most advanced knowledge of nature, men continue to use obsolete forms of thought long discarded by scientific theory. In so far as these obsolete forms are superfluous for science, the fact that they persist violated the principle of the economy of thought, that characteristic trait of the bourgeois temper.

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p. 133.
2 months 1 week ago

You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with someone else.

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Virginibus Puerisque, Ch. 1. Cornhill Magazine,
1 week 2 days 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
1 week 5 days ago

You will next read the new testament. It is the history of a personage called Jesus. Keep in your eye the opposite pretensions 1. of those who say he was begotten by God, born of a virgin, suspended & reversed the laws of nature at will, & ascended bodily into heaven: and 2. of those who say he was a man of illegitimate birth, of a benevolent heart, enthusiastic mind, who set out without pretensions to divinity, ended in believing them, & was Punished capitally for sedition by being gibbeted according to the Roman law which punished the first commission of that offence by whipping, & the second by exile or death in furcâ.

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3 months 2 days ago

The hypostasis of the particular methods of procedure employed by natural science ... results in the view that all theoretical differences which rest on historically conditioned antagonisms of interest are to be settles by a "crucial experiment" rather than by struggle and counter-struggle. The harmonious relation of individuals to one another becomes a fact, therefore, that has even more general character than a law of nature.

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p. 148.
2 months 3 weeks ago

The martyr sacrifices herself (himself in a few instances) entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for she (or he) makes the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

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As quoted in Forever Yours (1990) by Martha Vicinus and Bea Nergaard , p. 275. Letter, c. 1867, to the scholar Benjamin Jowett.
3 months 1 week ago

My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.

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5 months 1 week ago

If, then, in the sphere of action there is some one end which we desire for its own sake, and for the sake of which we desire every thing else; and if we do not choose every thing for the sake of something else, for this would go on without limit, and our desire would be idle and futile, it is clear that this must be the supreme good, and the best thing of all.

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4 months 1 week ago

It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself.

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Preamble, paragraph 3.
4 months 2 weeks ago

For a very small expence the public can facilitate, can encourage, and can even impose upon almost the whole body of the people, the necessity of acquiring those most essential parts of education.

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Chapter I, Part III, Article II, p. 847.
4 months 1 week ago

A fundamental economic reconstruction, bringing with it very far-reaching changes in ways of thinking and feeling, in philosophy and art and private relations, seems absolutely necessary if industrialism is to become the servant of man instead of his master. In all this, I am at one with the Bolsheviks; politically, I criticize them only when their methods seem to involve a departure from their own ideals.

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Preface
4 months 2 weeks ago

The art of dining well is no slight art, the pleasure not a slight pleasure.

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1 month 6 days ago

Roemer used eclipses of the satellites of Jupiter, and sought how much the event fell behind its prediction. But... this prediction is made... by... astronomic laws; for instance Newton's... The velocity of light... is adopted, such that the astronomic laws compatible with this value may be as simple as possible.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

I have gathered a posy of other men's flowers, and nothing but the thread that binds them is mine own.

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Ch. 12: Of Physiognomy
3 months 4 days ago

Be ye therefore ready also: for the Son of man cometh at an hour when ye think not.

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12:40
4 months 2 days ago

Now as of old the gods give men all good things, excepting only those that are baneful and injurious and useless. These, now as of old, are not gifts of the gods: men stumble into them themselves because of their own blindness and folly.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

The world neither ever saw, nor ever will see, a perfectly fair lottery.

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Chapter X, Part I.
2 months 3 weeks ago

It is a conceded fact that woman is being reared as a sex commodity, and yet she is kept in absolute ignorance of the meaning and importance of sex.

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3 months 1 week ago

The great honor of Christianity, its incontestable merit, and the whole secret of its unprecedented and yet thoroughly legitimate triumph, lay in the fact that it appealed to that suffering and immense public to which the ancient world, a strict and cruel intellectual and political aristocracy, denied even the simplest rights of humanity. Otherwise it never could have spread.

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Dover edition, p. 75
3 weeks 6 days ago

Because our time is struggling toward the word with which it may express its spirit, many names come to the fore and all make claim to being the right one. Without our assistance, time will not bring the right word to light; we must all work together on it. If, however, so much depends on us, we may reasonably ask what they have made of us and what they propose to make of us; we ask about the education through which they seek to make us creators of that word. Do they conscientiously cultivate our predisposition to become creators or do they treat us only as creatures whose nature simply permits training? Therefore we are concerned above all with what they make of us in the time of our plasticity; the school question is a life question.

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p. 11
3 months 3 days ago

This new philosophy, however, was far from giving the temporal an inherent position and function in the constitution of things. Change was acting on the side of man but only because of fixed laws which governed the changes that take place. There was hope in change just because the laws that govern it do not change.

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1 week 2 days ago

By remembering then that I am a part of such a whole, I shall be content with everything that happens. And inasmuch as I am in a manner intimately related to the parts which are of the same kind with myself, I shall do nothing unsocial, but I shall rather direct myself to the things which are of the same kind with myself, and I shall turn all my efforts to the common interest, and divert them from the contrary.

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X, 6
5 months 1 week ago

People who want to do so can lose weight most safely and permanently if they realize that above all they must be patient. ... It is better to eat a little less at each meal than impulse would suggest and to do that constantly. Add to this a little more exercise or activity than impulse suggests and keep that up constantly too. A few less calories taken in each day and a few more used up will decrease weight, slowly, to be sure, but without undue misery. And with better long-range results too.

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4 months 1 week ago

Science is not a system of certain, or well established, statements; nor is it a statement which steadily advances towards state of finality. Our science is not knowledge (epistēmē): it can newer claim to have attained truth, or even substitute for it, such as probability. . . . We do not know; we can only guess.

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Ch. 10 "Corroboration, or How a Theory Stands up to Tests", section 85: The Path of Science, p. 278.
1 month 3 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
2 months 1 week ago

Be your money's master, not its slave.

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Maxim 657
5 months 2 days ago

Benevolence is the characteristic element of humanity.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

This proof can at most, therefore, demonstrate the existence of an architect of the world, whose efforts are limited by the capabilities of the material with which he works, but not of a creator of the world, to whom all things are subject.

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A 627, B 655 (Physico-Theological Proof Impossible)
4 months 6 days ago

By virtue of its innermost intention, and like all questions about language, structuralism escapes the classical history of ideas which already supposes structuralism's possibility, for the latter naively belongs to the province of language and propounds itself within it.Nevertheless, by virtue of an irreducible region of irreflection and spontaneity within it, by virtue of the essential shadow of the undeclared, the structuralist phenomenon will deserve examination by the historian of ideas. For better or for worse. Everything within this phenomenon that does not in itself transparently belong to the question of the sign will merit this scrutiny; as will everything within it that is methodologically effective, thereby possessing the kind of infallibil-ity now ascribed to sleepwalkers and formerly attributed to instinct, which was said to be as certain as it was blind.

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Force and Signification
3 months 2 days ago

The basic word I-Thou can be spoken only with one's whole being. The concentration and fusion into a whole being can never be accomplished by me, can never be accomplished without me. I require a Thou to become; becoming I, I say Thou.

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3 months 1 week ago

The divine origin of man, as taught by Vedanta, IS continually inculcated, to stimulate his efforts to return, to animate him in the struggle, and incite him to consider a reunion and reincorporation with Divinity as the one primary object of every action and reaction. Even the loftiest philosophy of the European, the idealism of reason as it is set forth by the Greek philosophers, appears in comparison with the abundant light and vigor of Oriental idealism like a feeble Promethean spark in the full flood of heavenly glory of the noonday sun, faltering and feeble and ever ready to be extinguished.

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quoted in Londhe, S. (2008). A tribute to Hinduism: Thoughts and wisdom spanning continents and time about India and her culture. New Delhi: Pragun Publication.
5 months 1 week ago

Autumn is a second Spring when every leaf is a flower.

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