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4 months 3 days ago

I think I have already said somewhere that mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.

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Part I. Ch. 2 : The Future of Mathematics, p. 31
7 months 5 days ago

The domination of the public way in which things have been interpreted has already decided upon even the possibilities of being attuned, that is, about the basic way in which Da-sein lets itself be affected by the world. The they prescribes that attunement, it determines what and how one "sees."

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Stambaugh translation
7 months 1 week ago

In its widest possible sense, however, a man's Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account. All these things give him the same emotions. If they wax and prosper, he feels triumphant; if they dwindle and die away, he feels cast down.

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Ch. 10
7 months 1 week ago

If throughout your life you abstain from murder, theft, fornication, perjury, blasphemy, and disrespect toward your parents, your church, and your king, you are conventionally held to deserve moral admiration even if you have never done a single kind or generous or useful action. This very inadequate notion of virtue is an outcome of taboo morality, and has done untold harm.

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p. 32
5 months 3 weeks ago

In the inescapable flux, there is something that abides; in the overwhelming permanence, there is an element that escapes into flux. Permanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can find its adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Do you ask me whom I have conquered? Neither the Persians, nor the far-off Medes, nor any warlike race that lies beyond the Dahae; not these, but greed, ambition, and the fear of death that has conquered the conquerors of the world.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Even to have come forth is something, since I see that being able to conquer is placed in the hands of fate. However, there was in me, whatever I was able to do, that which no future century will deny to be mine, that which a victor could have for his own: Not to have feared to die, not to have yielded to any equal in firmness of nature, and to have preferred a courageous death to a noncombatant life.

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6 months ago

The significance of God, cause, number, substance or soul consists, as James asserts, in nothing but the tendency of the given concept to make us act or think. If the world should reach a point at which it ceases to care not only about such metaphysical entities but also about murders perpetrated behind closed frontiers or simply in the dark, one would have to conclude that the concepts of such murders have no meaning, that they represent no 'distinct ideas' or truths, since they do not make any 'sensible difference to anybody.

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describing the pragmatist view, pp. 46-47.
6 months 5 days ago

We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.

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4 months ago

All old Poems, Homer's and the rest, are authentically Songs. I would say, in strictness, that all right Poems are; that whatsoever is not sung is properly no Poem, but a piece of Prose cramped into jingling lines,-to the great injury of the grammar, to the great grief of the reader, for most part! What we wants to get at is the thought the man had, if he had any: why should he twist it into jingle, if he could speak it out plainly? It is only when the heart of him is rapt into true passion of melody, and the very tones of him, according to Coleridge's remark, become musical by the greatness, depth and music of his thoughts, that we can give him right to rhyme and sing; that we call him a Poet, and listen to him as the Heroic of Speakers,-whose speech is Song.

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4 months 4 days ago

The Left's identity politics poses a threat to free speech and to the kind of rational discourse needed to sustain a democracy... The focus on lived experience by identity groups prioritizes the emotional world of the inner self over the rational examination of issues in the outside world and privileges sincerely held opinions over a process of reasoned deliberation that may force one to abandon prior opinions.

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Against Identity Politics (14 August 2018), Foreign Affairs
7 months ago

It is now generally accepted that the roots of our ethics lie in patterns of behavior that evolved among our pre-human ancestors, the social mammals and that we retain within our biological nature elements of these evolved responses. We have learned considerably more about these responses, and we are beginning to to understand how they interact with our capacity to reason.

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Preface To The 2011 edition, p. xi
7 months 1 week ago

If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.

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7 months 1 week ago

The guidelines for achieving wisdom consist of three leading maxims: 1) Think for yourself; 2) (in communication with other people) Put yourself in the place of the other person; 3) Always think by remaining faithful to your own self.

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Kant, Immanuel (1996), page 95
5 months 3 weeks ago

The free expression of the hopes and aspirations of a people is the greatest and only safety in a sane society.

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8 months 6 days ago

God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves.

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2 months 4 weeks ago

Jesus is too colossal for the pen of phrasemongers, however artful. No man can dispose of Christianity with a bon mot.

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5 months 5 days ago

Youth is wholly experimental.

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Letter to a Young Gentleman Scribner's Magazine (September 1888).
8 months 1 week ago

For well-being and health, again, the homestead should be airy in summer, and sunny in winter. A homestead possessing these qualities would be longer than it is deep; and its main front would face the south.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Sovereignty, the freedom unto death, is threatening to a society that is organized around work and production.

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3 months 6 days ago

Socrates used to call the opinions of the many by the name of Lamiae, bugbears to frighten children.

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XI, 23
7 months 1 week ago

Life is a task to be done. It is a fine thing to say defunctus est; it means that the man has done his task.

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"On the Sufferings of the World"
6 months 2 weeks ago

Pray, O pray to God, dear friends, if you are not already asses - that he will cause you to become asses... There is none who praiseth not the golden age when men were asses: they knew not how to work the land. One knew not how to dominate another, one understood no more than another; caves and caverns were their refuge; they were not so well covered nor so jealous nor were they confections of lust and of greed. Everything was held in common.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

In an autobiography one must surely be allowed to boast, just for fun. I have, at a range of twenty feet, shot the tobacco out of a cigarette and left the paper intact. At a range of thirty feet, I have split a target, edge towards me, with an air pistol. I am also the world's champion in a game called "You Are the Target," in which anyone better than I would be dead. The game is to shoot an arrow straight up and see how near to you it can be allowed to land. You have to watch its fall very carefully, but I have had it hit the ground exactly between my feet. Of course, there were no witnesses. Had there been, they would forcefully have discouraged the experiment. I was using a fifty-five pound bow.

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p. 18
6 months 5 days ago

What are you waiting for in order to give up?

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6 months 1 day ago

What happens in the movement of art is emergence of new materials of experience demanding expression, and therefore involving in their expression new forms and techniques.

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p. 148
7 months 1 week ago

If a workman can conveniently spare those three halfpence, he buys a pot of porter. If he cannot, he contents himself with a pint, and, as a penny saved is a penny got, he thus gains a farthing by his temperance.

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Chapter II, Part II, Article IV, p. 951.

And now the sagacious reader, who is capable of reading into these lines what does not stand written in them, but is nevertheless implied, will be able to form some conception of the serious feelings with which I then set foot in Emmendingen.

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Autobiography: Truth and Poetry Book xviii. London 1884 p. 115 books.google.de
7 months 1 week ago

It is an uphill race, and a race against time, for if the American form of democracy overtakes us first, the majority will no more relax their despotism than a single despot would. But our only chance is to come forward as Liberals, carrying out the democratic idea, not as Conservatives, resisting it.

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Letter to Henry Fawcett (5 February 1860), quoted in Michael St. John Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill (1954), p. 418
3 months 6 days ago

Let opinion be taken away, and no man will think himself wronged. If no man shall think himself wronged, then is there no more any such thing as wrong.

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IV. 7, trans. Méric Casaubon
7 months 2 weeks ago

What can only be taught by the rod and with blows will not lead to much good; they will not remain pious any longer than the rod is behind them.

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The Great Catechism. Second Command
6 months 2 days ago

The victor and the one who keeps My works to the end: I will give him authority over the nations and He will shepherd them with an iron scepter; He will shatter them like pottery just as I have received this from My Father.

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3 months 1 week ago

This also is a beautiful circumstance, that they referred every thing to Pythagoras, and called it by his name, and that they did not ascribe to themselves the glory of their own inventions, except very rarely.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Gregorian chant, Romanesque architecture, the Iliad, the invention of geometry were not, for the people through whom they were brought into being and made available to us, occasions for the manifestation of personality.

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p. 55
5 months 5 days ago

A faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.

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An Apology for Idlers.
7 months 1 week ago

The question was, whether, if the reformers of society and government could succeed in their objects, and every person in the community were free and in a state of physical comfort, the pleasures of life, being no longer kept up by struggle and privation, would cease to be pleasures.

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(pp. 145-146)
6 months 3 weeks ago

A soldier told Pelopidas, "We are fallen among the enemies." Said he, "How are we fallen among them more than they among us?"

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63 Pelopidas
7 months 2 weeks ago

To an atheist all writings tend to atheism: he corrupts the most innocent matter with his own venom.

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Ch. 12
8 months 6 days ago

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

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7 months 1 week ago

In different hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man's skin, - seven or eight ancestors at least, - and they constitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music which his life is.

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Fate
5 months 1 week ago

The general nature of the speech act fallacy can be stated as follows, using "good" as our example. Calling something good is characteristically praising or commending or recommending it, etc. But it is a fallacy to infer from this that the meaning of "good" is explained by saying it is used to perform the act of commendation.

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P. 139.
7 months 1 week ago

To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.

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Page 159
3 months 2 weeks ago

A very weighty argument is this - namely, that neither does the light which descends from thence, chiefly upon the world, mix itself with anything, nor admit of dirtiness or pollution, but remains entirely, and in all things that are, free from defilement, admixture, and suffering. Besides, we must pay attention to the other kinds of phenomena, both to the Intelligible, and yet more to the Sensible - whatever are connected with matter, or will manifest themselves in relation to our subject.

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6 months 2 days ago

Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.

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Ch. 2, sect. 3
6 months 1 week ago

Whoever does not philosophize for the sake of philosophy, but rather uses philosophy as a means, is a sophist.

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"Selected Aphorisms from the Athenaeum (1798)", Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, trans. (Pennsylvania University Press:1968) #96
6 months 4 weeks ago

Fame and wealth without wisdom are unsafe possessions.

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7 months 1 week ago

It is not only when it takes the form of physical addiction that sex is evil. It is also evil when it manifests itself as a way of satisfying the lust for power or the climber's craving for position and social distinction.

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Ch. 14, p. 358 [2012 reprint]

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