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7 months 1 week ago

The man who esteems himself as he ought, and no more than he ought, seldom fails to obtain from other people all the esteem that he himself thinks due. He desires no more than is due to him, and he rests upon it with complete satisfaction.

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Section III.
6 months 1 week ago

Persecution is a bad and indirect way to plant Religion.

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Section 25
7 months 6 days ago

For the purpose of acquiring gain, everything else is pushed aside or thrown overboard, for example, as is philosophy by the professors of philosophy.

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E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 347
3 months 2 days ago

Concentrate every minute like a Roman-like a man-on doing what's in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions.

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(Hays translation) II, 5
5 months 2 weeks ago

The function of knowledge in the decision-making process is to determine which consequences follow upon which of the alternative strategies.

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p. 75
3 months 3 weeks ago

All this of Liberty and Equality, Electoral suffrages, Independence and so forth, we will take, therefore, to be a temporary phenomenon, by no means a final one. Though likely to last a long time, with sad enough embroilments for us all, we must welcome it, as the penalty of sins that are past, the pledge of inestimable benefits that are coming.

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7 months 1 week ago

As much in vain, perhaps, will they search ancient history for examples of the modern Slave-Trade. Too many nations enslaved the prisoners they took in war. But to go to nations with whom there is no war, who have no way provoked, without farther design of conquest, purely to catch inoffensive people, like wild beasts, for slaves, is an hight of outrage against Humanity and Justice, that seems left by Heathen nations to be practised by pretended Christians. How shameful are all attempts to colour and excuse it!

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7 months 4 days ago

...the prisoner's dreams is the guard's spirituality.

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p. 400
6 months 1 week ago

Furthermore, when citizens are all almost equal, it becomes difficult for them to defend their independence against the aggressions of power.

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Chapter III.
7 months 1 week ago

If man in the state of nature be so free, as has been said; if he be absolute lord of his own person and possessions, equal to the greatest, and subject to no body, why will he part with his freedom, this empire, and subject himself to the dominion and control of any other power?

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Second Treatise of Government, Ch. IX, sec. 123
3 months 6 days ago

Every word is an Ark of the Covenant around which we dance and shudder, divining God to be its dreadful inhabitant. You shall never be able to establish in words that you live in ecstasy. But struggle unceasingly to establish it in words. Battle with myths, with comparisons, with allegories, with rare and common words, with exclamations and rhymes, to embody it in flesh, to transfix it! God, the Great Ecstatic, works in the same way. He speaks and struggles to speak in every way He can, with seas and with fires, with colors, with wings, with horns, with claws, with constellations and butterflies, that he may establish His ecstasy. Like every other living thing, I also am in the center of the Cosmic whirlpool.

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7 months 6 days ago

... it may be hoped that the white population of the world will soon cease to increase. The Asiatic races will be longer, and the negroes still longer, before their birth rate falls sufficiently to make their numbers stable without help of war and pestilence. But it is to be hoped that the religious prejudices which have hitherto hampered the spread of birth control will die out, and that ... the whole world will learn not to be unduly prolific. Until that happens, the benefits aimed at by socialism can only be partially realized, and the less prolific races will have to defend themselves against the more prolific by methods which are disgusting even if they are necessary.

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7 months 6 days ago

What is called politics is comparatively something so superficial and inhuman, that, practically, I have never fairly recognized that it concerns me at all. The newspapers, I perceive, devote some of their columns specially to politics or government without charge; and this, one would say, is all that saves it; but, as I love literature, and, to some extent, the truth also, I never read those columns at any rate. I do not wish to blunt my sense of right so much.

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p. 494
6 months 1 week ago

If it be of the highest importance to man, as an individual, that his religion should be true, the case of society is not the same. Society has no future life to hope for or to fear; and provided the citizens profess a religion, the peculiar tenets of that religion are of very little importance to its interests. Variant translation: Though it is very important for man as an individual that his religion should be true, that is not the case for society. Society has nothing to fear or hope from another life; what is most important for it is not that all citizens profess the true religion but that they should profess religion.

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Chapter XVII.
7 months 4 days ago

As for the square at Meknes, where I used to go every day, it's even simpler: I do not see it at all anymore. All that remains is the vague feeling that it was charming, and these five words that are indivisibly bound together: a charming square at Meknes. ... I don't see anything any more: I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, whether they are memories or just fiction.

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Diary entry of Friday 3:00pm (9 February?)
7 months 3 weeks ago

Incomprehensible and immutable is the love wherewith God loves. He did not begin to love us only on the day we were reconciled to Him by the blood of His Son; He loved us before the world was made, that we too might become His sons together with His Only-begotten Son, long before we had any existence.

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p.435
5 months 5 days ago

Wealth brings a heavy purse; poverty, a light spirit.

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p. 88
2 months 3 weeks ago

I have come to believe that the motion of the Earth cannot be detected by any optical experiment.

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How I Created the Theory of Relativity, speech at Kyoto University, Japan, December 14, 1922, as cited in Physics Today, August, 1982.
5 months 5 days ago

"They must understand that we can only lose by taking the offensive. Patience and time are my warriors, my champions," thought Kutúzov. He knew that an apple should not be plucked while it is green. It will fall of itself when ripe, but if picked unripe the apple is spoiled, the tree is harmed, and your teeth are set on edge.

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Bk XIII, Ch. 17
7 months 3 weeks ago

Only after Winter comes do we know that the pine and the cypress are the last to fade.

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3 months 6 days ago

Thus did the Holy Harlots unhinge the brains of man,and when they met and clashed with the pure Mountain Maidens,they raised their white arms high, their armpits smelled of musk,and, as the rites decreed, both fought their verbal war:"God swoops from mountain peeks to eat and play on earth;we are his food and drink and even his sacred toys -and learn, O sterile maids, we are his soft, sweet mates.Let her now leave who fears to merge with her dread God!"The scornful savage mouth of Krino flashed reply:"We will not leave! We guard the innocent soul of man!God is a spirit with pure white wings, a soul that sails,light, disembodied, deep in our thoughts, without embrace.It's we who keep the world in bloom with virgin souls!"

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From the Bull Ritual, Book VI, line 197
6 months 3 weeks ago

As for me, when you want a good laugh, you will find me in fine state... fat and sleek, a true hog of Epicurus' herd.

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Book I, epistle iv, lines 15-16
3 months 2 weeks ago

Time is the primitive form of the stream of consciousness. ...If we project ourselves outside the stream of consciousness and represent its content as an object, it becomes an event happening in time, the separate stages of which stand to one another in the relations of earlier and later.

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Introduction
5 months 3 weeks ago

Every living creature is happy when he fulfills his destiny, that is, when he realizes himself, when he is being that which in truth he is. For this reason, Schlegel, inverting the relationship between pleasure and destiny, said, "We have a genius for what we like." Genius, man's superlative gift for doing something, always carries a look of supreme pleasure.

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pp. 16-17
6 months 3 weeks ago

Often must you turn your pencil to erase, if you hope to write something worth a second reading.

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Book I, satire i, lines 72-3,
7 months 6 days ago

The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.

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Ch. 14: Freedom Versus Authority in Education
3 months 3 weeks ago

There are depths in man which go down the length of the lowest Hell, as there are heights which reach the highest Heaven; - for are not both Heaven and Hell made out of him, everlasting Miracle and Mystery that he is?

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Pt. III, Bk. I, ch. 4. This was slightly paraphrased in A Dictionary of Thoughts : Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Best Authors, Both Ancient and Modern (1891) edited by Tryon Edwards. p. 327.
6 months 5 days ago

Paper, they say, does not blush, but I assure you it's not true and that it's blushing just as I am now, all over.

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6 months 3 days ago

We are near awakening when we dream that we dream.

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7 months 4 days ago

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.

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The Words (1964), speaking of his grandmother.
7 months 5 days ago

The unconsciousness of man is the consciousness of God.

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7 months 5 days ago

The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.

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p. 6
7 months 4 days ago

Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.

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The Human Condition (1958), part 3, chapter 16
7 months 5 days ago

Sunshine cannot bleach the snow, Nor time unmake what poets know.

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"The Test", as quoted in Emerson As A Poet (1883) by Joel Benton, p. 40
5 months 1 week ago

The state monopolizes violence by calling its critics "violent". Hence, we should be wary about those who claim that violence is necessary to curb or check violence; those who praise the forces of law, including the police and the prisons, as the final arbiters. To oppose violence is to understand that violence does not always take the form of the blow.

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p. 63
3 months 4 days ago

The concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

Mathematicians do not study objects, but the relations between objects; to them it is a matter of indifference if these objects are replaced by others, provided that the relations do not change. Matter does not engage their attention, they are interested in form alone.

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Ch. II: Dover abridged edition (1952), p. 20
5 months 3 weeks ago

Words ... are little houses, each with its cellar and garret. Common sense lives on the ground floor, always ready to engage in 'foreign commerce' on the same level as the others, as the passers-by, who are never dreamers. To go upstairs in the word house is to withdraw step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream, it is losing oneself in the distant corridors of an obscure etymology, looking for treasures that cannot be found in words. To mount and descend in the words themselves-this is a poet's life. To mount too high or descend too low is allowed in the case of poets, who bring earth and sky together.

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Ch. 6
5 months 4 weeks ago

Loren von Stein thus turned the dialectic into an ensemble of objective laws calling for social reform as the adequate solution of all contradictions and neutralized the critical elements of the dialectic.

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P. 388
7 months 6 days ago

It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?

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Letter to Harrison Blake, November 16, 1857
3 months 1 week ago

The purpose of the magnanimous is to be found in procuring benefits for the world and eliminating its calamities. ... Mutual attacks among states, mutual usurpation among houses, mutual injuries among individuals; the lack of grace and loyalty between ruler and ruled, the lack of affection and filial piety between father and son, the lack of harmony between elder and younger brothers - these are the major calamities in the world.

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Book 4; Universal Love II
5 months 2 weeks ago

You cannot think without abstractions; accordingly, it is of the utmost importance to be vigilant in critically revising your modes of abstraction. It is here that philosophy finds its niche as essential to the healthy progress of society. It is the critic of abstractions. A civilisation which cannot burst through its current abstractions is doomed to sterility.

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Ch. 4: "The Eighteenth Century", pp. 82-83
3 months 6 days ago

With clarity and quiet, I look upon the world and say: All that I see, hear, taste, smell, and touch are the creations of my mind. The sun comes up and the sun goes down in my skull. Out of one of my temples the sun rises, and into the other the sun sets. The stars shine in my brain; ideas, men, animals browse in my temporal head; songs and weeping fill the twisted shells of my ears and storm the air for a moment.

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6 months 1 week ago

The principle of equality does not destroy the imagination, but lowers its flight to the level of the earth.

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Book Three, Chapter XI.
6 months 3 weeks ago

September 11, 2001, was just another day for most of the world's desperately poor people, so presumably close to 30,000 children under five died from these causes on that day-about ten times the number of victims of the terrorist attacks. The publication of these figures did not lead to an avalanche of money for UNICEF or other aid agencies helping to reduce infant mortality. In the year 2000 Americans made private donations for foreign aid of all kinds totaling about $4 per person in extreme poverty, or roughly $20 per family. New Yorkers who were living in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001, whether wealthy or not, were able to receive an average of $5,300 per family. The distance between these amounts encapsulates the way in which, for many people, the circle of concern for others stops at the boundaries of their own country-if it extends even that far.

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Chapter 5: One Community (p. 176)
7 months 4 days 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.

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