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4 months 1 week ago

Live among men as if God beheld you; speak with God as if men were listening.

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6 months 1 week ago

The revolutionary and critical thinker is in a certain way always outside of his society while of course he is at the same time also in it. That he is in it is obvious, but why is he outside it? First, because he is not brainwashed by the ruling ideology, that is to say, he has an extraordinary kind of independence of thought and feeling; hence he can have a greater objectivity than the average person has. There are many emotional factors too. And certainly I do not mean to enter here into the complex problem of the revolutionary thinker. But it seems to me essential that in a certain sense he transcends his society. You may say he transcends it because of the new historical developments and possibilities he is aware of, while the majority still think in traditional terms.

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The good is the idea, or unity of the conception of the will with the particular will. Abstract right, well-being, the subjectivity of consciousness, and the contingency of external reality, are in their independent and separate existences superseded in this unity, although in their real essence they are contained in it and preserved. This unity is realized freedom, the absolute final cause of the world. Addition.-Every stage is properly the idea, but the earlier steps contain the idea only in more abstract form. The I, as person, is already the idea, although in its most abstract guise. The good is the idea more completely determined; it is the unity of the conception of will with the particular will. It is not something abstractly right, but has a real content, whose substance constitutes both right and well-being.

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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Right translated by SW Dyde Queen's University Canada 1896 p. 123
6 months 4 weeks ago

In this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood, binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties, adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections, keeping inseparable and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

If a poor person envies a rich person, he is no better than the rich person.

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p. 89
6 months 2 weeks ago

I am the resurrection and the life. The one who exercises faith in me, even though he dies, will come to life; and everyone who is living and exercises faith in me will never die at all.

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11:25-26, NWT
7 months 4 weeks ago

It is very strange that men should deny a creator and yet attribute to themselves the power of creating eels.

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From the Philosophic Dictionary, as quoted in The life of Pasteur, 1902
4 months 1 week ago

It is the quality of a great soul to scorn great things and to prefer that which is ordinary rather than that which is too great.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Every story of conversion is the story of a blessed defeat.

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Foreword to Joy Davidman's Smoke on the Mountain, 1954
6 months 4 weeks ago

Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute.

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Book II, ch. 4 (trans. Constance Garnett) The Elder Zossima, speaking to Mrs. Khoklakov
8 months 2 weeks ago

Chi Wan thought thrice, and then acted. When the Master was informed of it, he said, "Twice may do."

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6 months 2 weeks ago

I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death. Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter.

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Revelation 1:18-19
5 months 2 weeks ago

A good American makes propaganda for whatever existence has forced him to become.

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"Cousins," from Him With His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories (1984), p. 263
6 months 1 week ago

The child shows its individual tendencies in its plays, in its questions, in its association with people and things. But it has to struggle with everlasting external interference in its world of thought and emotion. It must not express itself in harmony with its nature, with its growing personality. It must become a thing, an object. Its questions are met with narrow, conventional, ridiculous replies, mostly based on falsehoods; and, when, with large, wondering, innocent eyes, it wishes to behold the wonders of the world, those about it quickly lock the windows and doors, and keep the delicate human plant in a hothouse atmosphere, where it can neither breathe nor grow freely.

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4 months 1 week ago

A good education would be devoted to encouraging and refining the love of the beautiful, but a pathologically misguided moralism instead turns such longing into a sin against the high goal of making everyone feel good, of overcoming nature in the name of equality. ... Love of the beautiful may be the last and finest sacrifice to radical egalitarianism.

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p. 15.
3 months 3 weeks ago

How absurd it must seem for an immortal soul to be destined for Heaven or Hell, and yet be sitting in a kitchen, as a maid, or to see oneself objectified as a mechanic! how falsely the usual sunrise waked us, the clock dial, the city street the job! How wrongfully people find themselves in these systems - our time isn't there, our space isn't there, our space isn't even here... the whole social story of waking, and certainly the day of the mechanic, is false.

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Traces (1930), p. 27
8 months 3 weeks ago

Parmenides: Whatever the subject of your hypothesis, if you suppose that it is or is not, or that it experiences any other affection, you must consider what happens to it and to any other particular things you may choose, and to a greater number and to all in the same way; and you must consider other things in relation to themselves and to anything else you may choose in any instance, whether you suppose that the subject of your hypothesis exists or does not exist, if you are to train yourself completely to see the truth perfectly.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

The whole contains nothing which is not or its advantage; and all natures indeed have this common principle, but the nature of the universe has this principle besides, that it cannot be compelled even by any external cause to generate anything harmful to itself.

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X, 6
7 months 3 weeks ago

The human body is essentially something other than an animal organism.

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Letter on Humanism
6 months 5 days ago

Many modern philosophers claim that probability is relation between an hypothesis and the evidence for it.

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Chapter 4, Evidence, p. 31.
4 months 3 weeks ago

For both the pragmatic... and... moral reasons... liberalism became the dominant doctrine of the 20th century, and should... continue to be defended....

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12:32
6 months 1 week ago

Can the "word" be pinned down to either one period or one church? All churches are, of course, only more or less unsuccessful attempts to represent the unseen to the mind.

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Letter quoted in Florence Nightingale in Rome : Letters Written by Florence Nightingale in Rome in the Winter of 1847-1848 (1981)
8 months 6 days ago

Animals destitute of reason live with their own kind in a state of social amity. Elephants herd together; sheep and swine feed in flocks; cranes and crows take their flight in troops; storks have their public meetings to consult previously to their emigration, and feed their parents when unable to feed themselves; dolphins defend each other by mutual assistance; and everybody knows, that both ants and bees have respectively established by general agreement, a little friendly community.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of 'No answer.' It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, 'Peace, child; you don't understand.'

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7 months 3 weeks ago

The live dead-man is dead as a producer and alive insofar as he consumes.

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p. 139
7 months 3 days ago

I believe the world grows near its end, yet is neither old nor decayed, nor will ever perish upon the ruins of its own principles.

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Section 45
3 months 3 weeks ago

And if the matter of the Philosophers Stone, and the manner of preparing it, be such Mysteries as they would have the World believe them, they may Write Intelligibly and Clearly of the Principles of mixt Bodies in General, without Discovering what they call the Great Work.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

An integral part of totalitarian control is the attack on critical and independent thought. The appeal to facts is substituted for the appeal to reason. No reason can sanction a regime that uses the greatest productive apparatus man has ever created in the interest of an increasing restriction on human satisfactions-no reason except the fact that the economic system can be retained in no other way. Just as the Fascist emphasis on action and change prevents the insight into necessity of rational courses of action and change, [Giovanni] Gentile's deification of thinking prevents the liberation of thought from the shackles of 'the given.'

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P. 405
6 months 3 weeks ago

Woes and wonders of power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.

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5 months 6 days ago

It's not that there are no differences between human and non-human animals, any more than there are no differences between black people and white people, freeborn citizens and slaves, men and women, Jews and gentiles, gays or heterosexuals. The question is rather: are they morally relevant differences? This matters because morally catastrophic consequences can ensue when we latch on to a real but morally irrelevant difference between sentient beings.

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"The Abolitionist Project", Talks given at the FHI (Oxford University) and the Charity International Happiness Conference, 2007
7 months 4 weeks ago

Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible. Even if all are miserable, all will believe themselves happy, because the government will tell them that they are so.

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7 months 4 weeks ago

Thought depends largely on the stomach. In spite of this, those with the best stomachs are not always the best thinkers.

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Letter to Jean le Rond d'Alembert, 20 August 1770
6 months 3 weeks ago

Fear is the antidote to boredom: the remedy must be stronger than the disease.

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Aims, principles, &c., have a place in our thoughts, in our subjective design only; but not yet in the sphere of reality. That which exists for itself only, is a possibility, a potentiality; but has not yet emerged into Existence. A second element must be introduced in order to produce actuality - viz. actuation, realization; and whose motive power is the Will - the activity of man in the widest sense.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

What has to be accepted, the given, is - so one could say - forms of life.

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Pt II, p. 226 of the 1968 English edition
4 months 3 weeks 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
3 months 3 weeks ago

Look beneath the surface; let not the several quality of a thing nor its worth escape thee.

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VI, 3
6 months 5 days ago

My own view is that philosophy at its best has always, in every period, included some philosophers who brilliantly represent the moral face of the subject and some philosophers who brilliantly represent the theoretical face, as well as some geniuses whose insights span and unite both sides of the subject. To renounce either the moral ambitions of philosophy or its theoretical ambitions is not just to kill the subject of philosophy; it is to commit intellectual and spiritual suicide.

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Science and Philosophy
7 months 4 weeks 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)
7 months 4 weeks ago

We all look for happiness, but without knowing where to find it: like drunkards who look for their house, knowing dimly that they have one.

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Notebooks (c.1735-c.1750)
6 months 1 week ago

When we are lulled into somnolence by lack of challenge every molehill tends to become a mountain, every minor inconvenience an intolerable imposition. For a self-chosen reality tends to become a prison. The factors that protect and insulate civilized man can easily end by suffocating him unless he possesses a high degree of self-discipline, the 'highly developed vital sense' that Shaw speaks of. And since clever and sensitive people are inclined to lack self-discipline, a high degree of culture usually involves a high degree of pessimism. This is what has happened to Western civilisation over the past two centuries. It explains why so many distinguished artists, writers and musicians have taken such a negative view of the human situation.

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Introduction, p. xiii
7 months 4 weeks ago

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

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6 months 1 week ago

The oneness of the universe, and the oneness of each element of the universe, repeat themselves to the crack of doom in the creative advance from creature to creature, each creature including in itself the whole of history and exemplifying the self-identity of things and their mutual diversities.

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Pt. III, ch. 1, sec. 7.

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