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9 months 2 weeks ago

I shall assume that your silence gives consent.

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9 months 2 weeks ago

The attempt to separate everything from everything else is not only not in good taste but also shows that a man is utterly uncultivated and unphilosophical. The complete separation of each thing from all is the utterly final obliteration of all discourse. For our power of discourse is derived from the interweaving of the classes or ideas with one another.

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8 months 1 day ago

As touching the gods, I do not know whether they exist or not, nor how they are featured; for there is much to prevent our knowing: the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life.

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Opening lines of Concerning the Gods (DK 80 B4).
8 months 5 days ago

When he was wounded with an arrow in the ankle, and many ran to him that were wont to call him a god, he said smiling, "That is blood, as you see, and not, as Homer saith, 'such humour as distils from blessed gods.'"

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43 Alexander
8 months 3 weeks ago

Actions may be laudable or blameable; but they cannot be reasonable: Laudable or blameable, therefore, are not the same with reasonable or unreasonable. The merit and demerit of actions frequently contradict, and sometimes controul our natural propensities. But reason has no such influence. Moral distinctions, therefore, are not the offspring of reason. Reason is wholly inactive, and can never be the source of so active a principle as conscience, or a sense of morals.

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Part 1, Section 1
6 months 2 weeks ago

The public has yet to see TV as TV. Broadcasters have no awareness of its potential. The movie people are just beginning to get a grasp on film.

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quoted in "Marshall McLuhan, Author, Dies; Declared 'Medium Is the Message'" by Alden Whitman, The New York Times, January 1, 1981
4 months 1 week ago

I should unconditionally refuse every direct or indirect war service and try to induce my friends to adopt the same attitude, irrespective of the general opinion of the causes of war.

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5 months 1 week ago

The Philosopher of this age is not a Socrates, a Plato, a Hooker, or Taylor, who inculcates on men the necessity and infinite worth of moral goodness, the great truth that our happiness depends on the mind which is within us, and not on the circumstances which are without us; but a Smith, a De Lolme, a Bentham, who chiefly inculcates the reverse of this,-that our happiness depends entirely on external circumstances; nay, that the strength and dignity of the mind within us is itself the creature and consequence of these. Were the laws, the government, in good order, all were well with us; the rest would care for itself! Dissentients from this opinion, expressed or implied, are now rarely to be met with; widely and angrily as men differ in its application, the principle is admitted by all.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Never would the humanities or psychoanalysis have existed if it had been miraculously possible to reduce man to his "rational" behaviors.

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"The Animals: Territory and Metamorphoses," p. 132
8 months 3 weeks ago

We are beggars: this is true.

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"The Last Written Words of Luther," Table Talk No. 5468, (16 February 1546), in Dr. Martin Luthers Werke (1909) as translated by James A. Kellerman, Band 85 (TR 5) 317-318
8 months 3 weeks ago

She became the Mother of God, in which work so many and such great good things are bestowed on her as pass man's understanding. For on this there follows all honor, all blessedness, and her unique place in the whole of mankind, among which she has no equal, namely, that she had a child by the Father in heaven, and such a Child.... Hence men have crowded all her glory into a single word, calling her the Mother of God.... None can say of her nor announce to her greater things, even though he had as many tongues as the earth possesses flowers and blades of grass: the sky, stars; and the sea, grains of sand. It needs to be pondered in the heart what it means to be the Mother of God.

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Luther's Works, 21:326, cf. 21:346
7 months 2 weeks ago

The Scientific discourse extracts truths from the errors which surround and oppose it on all sides and in every form; and, by demolition of these opposing views as error, and as impossible to true thought, shows the truth as that which alone remains after their withdrawal, and therefore as the only possible truth:--and in this separation of opposites, and elucidation of the truth from the confused chaos in which truth and error lie mingled together, consists the peculiar and characteristic nature of the Scientific discourse. This method creates and produces truth, before our eyes, out of a world full of error.

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P. 26-27
6 months 3 days ago

So far as cerebral structure goes... it is clear that Man differs less from the Chimpanzee or the Orang, than these do even from the Monkeys, and that the difference between the brains of the Chimpanzee and of Man is almost insignificant, when compared with that between the Chimpanzee brain and that of a Lemur.

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Ch.2, p. 120
8 months 2 weeks ago

Whatever bitterness and hate may be found in the movements which we are to examine, it is not bitterness or hate, but love, that is their mainspring. It is difficult not to hate those who torture the objects of our love. Though difficult, it is not impossible; but it requires a breadth of outlook and a comprehensiveness of understanding which are not easy to preserve amid a desperate contest. If ultimate wisdom has not always been preserved by Socialists and Anarchists, they have not differed in this from their opponents; and in the source of their inspiration they have shown themselves superior to those who acquiesce ignorantly or supinely in the injustices and oppressions by which the existing system is preserved.

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Introduction, p. 10.
7 months 3 days ago

Truth is sought not because it is truth but because it is good.

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p. 213
7 months 1 week ago

The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.

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Luke 4:18-19 NIV
6 months 2 weeks ago

Gutenberg made all history available as classified data: the transportable book brought the world of the dead into the space of the gentlemen's library; the telegraph brought the entire world of the living to the workman's breakfast table.

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(p. 15)
8 months 2 weeks ago

For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible.

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The Art of Literature
7 months 4 weeks ago

Envy has been, is, and shall be, the destruction of many. What is there, that Envy hath not defamed, or Malice left undefiled? Truly, no good thing.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

All movements go too far.

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9 months 2 weeks ago

Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience.

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8 months 5 days 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 4 weeks ago

By Silence, the discretion of a man is known: and a fool, keeping Silence, seemeth to be wise.

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7 months 2 days ago

I now come to the second reason for the modern fading of interest in religion. Religion is the reaction of human nature to its search for God. The presentation of God under the aspect of power awakens every modern instinct of critical reaction. This is fatal; for religion collapses unless its main positions command immediacy of assent. In this respect the old phraseology is at variance with the psychology of modern civilisations. This change in psychology is largely due to science, and is one of the chief ways in which the advance of science has weakened the hold of the old religious forms of expression.

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Ch. 12: "Religion and Science", pp. 266-267
5 months 1 week ago

I know how unfashionable it is now to acknowledge in life or history any genius loftier than ourselves. Our democratic dogma has leveled not only all voters but all leaders; we delight to show that living geniuses are only mediocrities, and that dead ones are myths. ... Since it is contrary to good manners to exalt ourselves, we achieve the same result by slyly indicating how inferior are the great men of the earth. In some of us, perhaps, it is a noble and merciless asceticism, which would root out of our hearts the last vestige of worship and adoration, lest the old gods should return and terrify us again. For my part, I cling to this final religion, and discover in it a content and stimulus more lasting than came from the devotional ecstasies of youth.

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The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time (2002) edited by John Little, Ch. 1 : The Shameless Worship of Heroes
5 months 2 days ago

That which Fortune has not given, she cannot take away.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

In the metaphysical elements of aesthetics the various nonmoral feelings are to be made use of; in the elements of moral metaphysics the various moral feelings of men, according to the differences in sex, age, education, and government, of races and climates, are to be employed.

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Part III : Selection on Education from Kant's other Writings, Ch. I Pedagogical Fragments, # 58
8 months 2 weeks ago

What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time. His perception is not limited to what is biologically or socially useful.

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Page 168
7 months 3 days ago

Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up.

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On high culture and popular culture, in a letter to Walter Benjamin
7 months 1 week ago

By becoming the pure subject who knows the world objectively, man ultimately realizes that absolute consciousness with respect to which the body and individual existence are no longer anything but objects; death is deprived of meaning. Reduced to the status of object of consciousness, the body could not be conceived as an intermediary between "things" and the consciousness which knows them.

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p. 204
6 months 3 weeks ago

I might try to save the view that 'future contingents' have no truth value by saying that even present-tense statements have no truth value if they refer to the outcome of events that are so far away that a causal signal informing me of the outcome could not have reached me-now without traveling faster than light. In other words, I might attempt saying that statements about events that are in neither the upper half nor the lower half of my light-cone have no truth value. In addition, statements about events in the upper half of my light-cone have no truth value, since they are in my future according to every coordinate system. So only statements about events in the lower half of my light-cone have a truth value; only events that are in 'my past* according to all observers are determined.

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Time and physical geometry
8 months 3 weeks ago

There is no man so good, who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the laws, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.

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Book III, Ch. 9. Of Vanity
4 months 3 weeks ago

It is the season of the Kronia, during which the god allows us to make merry. But, my dear friend, as I have no talent for amusing or entertaining I must methinks take pains not to talk mere nonsense." "But, Caesar, can there be anyone so dull and stupid as to take pains over jesting? I always thought that such pleasantries were a relaxation of the mind and a relief from pains and cares." "Yes, and no doubt your view is correct, but that is not how the matter strikes me. For by nature I have no turn for raillery, or parody, or raising a laugh."

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8 months 3 weeks ago

We believe that the very beginning and end of salvation, and the sum of Christianity, consists of faith in Christ, who by His blood alone, and not by any works of ours, has put away sin, and destroyed the power of death.

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p. 224
8 months 1 week ago

Satisfaction linked with dishonor or with harm to others is a prison for the seeker.

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Vahishto-Ishti Gatha; Yasna 53, 6.
8 months 3 weeks ago

No Man is wise at all Times, or is without his blind Side.

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The Alchymyst, in Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I.
7 months 1 week ago

The only satisfied rationalists today are blinkered scientists or Marxists.

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Ch. 7, p. 113
4 months 3 weeks ago

The greatest ideal that man can aspire to is not to be a show-case of virtue, but just to be a genial, likable and reasonable human being.

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p. 242
8 months 3 weeks ago

Faith is born and preserved in us by preaching why Christ came, what he brought and gave to us, and the benefits we obtain when we receive him. This happens when Christian liberty - which he gives to us - is rightly taught and we are told in what way as Christians we are all kings and priests and therefore lords of all.

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p. 70
4 months 2 weeks ago

Professional standards, the standards of ambition and selfishness, are always sliding downward toward expense, ostentation, and mediocrity. They tend always to narrow the ground of judgment. But amateur standards, the standards of love, are always straining upward toward the humble and the best. They enlarge the ground of judgment. The context of love is the world.

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The Responsibility of the Poet
5 months 1 week ago

All work, even cotton spinning, is noble; work is alone noble ... A life of ease is not for any man, nor for any god.

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Bk. III, ch. 4.
4 months 3 weeks ago

Man is something that is to be overcome.Logically considered, this, too, presents a contradiction: he who overcomes himself is admittedly the victor, but he is also the defeated. The ego succumbs to itself, when it wins; it achieves victory, when it suffers defeat. Yet the contradiction only arises when the two aspects of this unity are hardened into opposed, mutually exclusive conceptions. It is precisely the fully unified process of the moral life which overcomes and surpasses every lower state by achieving a higher one, and again transcends this latter state through one still higher. That man overcomes himself means that he reaches out beyond the bounds that the moment sets for him. There must be something at hand to be overcome, but it is only there in order to be overcome. Thus even as an ethical agent, man is the limited being that has no limit.

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p. 5-6 part of the first essay "Life as Transcendence"
9 months 1 day ago

What is food to one, is to others bitter poison.

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Book IV, line 637 (reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations) Compare: "What's one man's poison, signor, / Is another's meat or drink", Beaumont and Fletcher, Love's Cure (1647), Act III, scene 2
6 months 2 weeks ago

What began as a "Romantic reaction" towards organic wholeness may or may not have hastened the discovery of electro-magnetic waves. But certainly the electro-magnetic discoveries have recreated the simultaneous "field" in all human affairs so that the human family now exists under conditions of a "global village." We live in a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums. So that concern with the "primitive" today is as banal as nineteenth-century concern with "progress," and as irrelevant to our problems. The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

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(p. 36)

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