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3 months 4 weeks ago

I see again what I thought I saw the first time, when I sent forth the little book that was compared to and in fact could best be compared to a humble little flower under the cover of the great forest.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Often, writers on historical events tend to consider ... a loss of willingness to fight as a sign of "decadence," as though there were something despicable about not being a bully and not being willing to engage in mass murder. Perhaps we ought to feel instead that to cease to be warlike means to begin to be civilized and decent.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

There is nothing more visible than what is secret, and nothing more manifest than what is minute. Therefore the superior man is watchful over himself, when he is alone.

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2 months 4 weeks ago

Every artist was first an amateur.

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Progress of Culture
3 weeks ago

A civilization is a social entity that manifests religious, political , legal, and customary uniformity over an extended period, and which confers on its members the benefits of socially accumulated knowledge.

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"What is Culture?" (p. 2)
1 month 4 weeks ago

If we owe to it [civil society] any duty, it is not subject to our will. Duties are not voluntary. Duty and will are even contradictory terms. Now though civil society might be at first a voluntary act (which in many cases it undoubtedly was) its continuance is under a permanent standing covenant, coexisting with the society; and it attaches upon every individual of that society, without any formal act of his own. This is warranted by the general practice, arising out of the general sense of mankind.

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p. 442
3 months ago

His reputation will go on increasing because scarcely anyone reads him.

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"Dante", 1765

One cannot demand of a scholar that he show himself a scholar everywhere in society, but the whole tenor of his behavior must none the less betray the thinker, he must always be instructive, his way of judging a thing must even in the smallest matters be such that people can see what it will amount to when, quietly and self-collected, he puts this power to scholarly use.

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J 85
2 months 4 weeks ago

There are moments of sentimental and mystical experience. . . that carry an enormous sense of inner authority and illumination with them when they come. But they come seldom, and they do not come to everyone; and the rest of life makes either no connection with them, or tends to contradict them more than it confirms them. Some persons follow more the voice of the moment in these cases, some prefer to be guided by the average results. Hence the sad discordancy of so many of the spiritual judgments of human beings; a discordancy which will be brought home to us acutely enough before these lectures end.

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Lecture I, "Religion and Neurology"
2 months 3 weeks ago

"The cardinal difficulty," said MacPhee, "in collaboration between the sexes is that women speak a language without nouns. If two men are doing a bit of work, one will say to the other, 'Put this bowl inside the bigger bowl which you'll find on the top shelf of the green cupboard.' The female for this is, 'Put that in the other one in there.' And then if you ask them, 'in where?' they say, 'in there, of course.' There is consequently a phatic hiatus."

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Ch. 8 : Moonlight at Belbury, section 2
3 weeks 4 days ago

I am often accused of expressing contempt and despising religious people. I don't despise religious people, I despise what they stand for. I like to quote the British journalist Johann Hari who said, "I have so much respect for you, that I cannot respect your ridiculous ideas."

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Reason Rally, National Mall, Washington, DC, 2012-03-24 Richard Dawkins and his Foundation at the Reason Rally, YouTube, 7 April 2012
3 months 3 weeks ago

To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.

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3 weeks 5 days ago

Speech is a mirror of the soul; as a man speaks, so is he.

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Maxim 1073
1 month 4 weeks ago

The world is chaos. Nothingness is the yet-to-be-born god of the world.

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Act IV
2 months 2 weeks ago

The principles of ethics come from our own nature as social, reasoning beings.

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Chapter 6, A New Understanding Of Ethics, p. 149
3 weeks 3 days ago

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.

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Truth of Intercourse.
2 months 3 weeks ago

Nothing is more important than the formation of fictional concepts, which teach us at last to understand our own.

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p. 85e
3 months 1 week ago

Appearances to the mind are of four kinds. Things either are what they appear to be; or they neither are, nor appear to be; or they are, and do not appear to be; or they are not, and yet appear to be. Rightly to aim in all these cases is the wise man's task.

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Book I, ch. 27, § 1.
3 weeks 5 days ago

Cartoons drove the photo back to myth and dream screen.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

For it is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.

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18:25 (KJV)
2 months 4 weeks ago

Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.

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Ch. 4
1 month 1 week ago

The consequences of a plethora of half-digested theoretical knowledge are deplorable.

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3 weeks 5 days ago

Omnipresence has become an ordinary human dimension.

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2 months 4 weeks ago

We have just seen that, apart from money-capital, circulating capital is only another name for commodity-capital. But to the extent that labour power circulates in the market,it is not capital, no form of commodity-capital. It is not capital at all; the labourer is not a capitalist, although he brings a commodity to market, namely his own skin.

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Vol. II, Ch. X, p. 211.
1 month 1 week ago

There is something between the gross specialised values of the mere practical man, and the thin specialised values of the mere scholar. Both types have missed something; and if you add together the two sets of values, you do not obtain the missing elements.

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Ch. 13: "Requisites for Social Progress", p. 279
3 weeks 5 days ago

Familiarity breeds contempt.

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2 months 4 weeks ago

The imagination is not a talent of some men but is the health of every man.

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Poetry and Imagination
1 month 1 week ago

In a block universe, dust and shadow is forever....

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My body and my will are one.

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Book 1
2 months 4 weeks ago

We boil at different degrees.

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Eloquence
2 months 4 weeks ago

Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

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Wanted, A New Pleasure
1 month 3 weeks ago

Every interpretation is hypothetical, for it is a mere attempt to read an unfamiliar text. An obscure dream, taken by itself, can rarely be interpreted with any certainty, so that I attach little importance to the interpretation of single dreams. With a series of dreams we can have more confidence in our interpretations, for the later dreams correct the mistakes we have made m handling those that went before. We are also better able, in a dream series, to recognize the important contents and basic themes.

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p. 14
3 months 2 days ago

The heights of popularity and patriotism are still the beaten road to power and tyranny ; flattery to treachery ; standing armies to arbitrary government ; and the glory of God to the temporal interest of the clergy.

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Part I, Essay 8: Of Public Credit (This appears as a footnote in editions H to P. Other editions include it in the body of the text, and some number it Essay 9.)
2 months 3 weeks ago

What I give is the morphology of the use of an expression. I show that it has kinds of uses of which you had not dreamed. In philosophy one feels forced to look at a concept in a certain way. What I do is suggest, or even invent, other ways of looking at it. I suggest possibilities of which you had not previously thought. You thought that there was one possibility, or only two at most. But I made you think of others. Furthermore, I made you see that it was absurd to expect the concept to conform to those narrow possibilities. Thus your mental cramp is relieved, and you are free to look around the field of use of the expression and to describe the different kinds of uses of it.

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Lectures of 1946 - 1947, as quoted in Ludwig Wittgenstein : A Memoir (1966) by Norman Malcolm, p. 43
3 months 2 weeks ago

Thou hast made us for Thyself, and the heart never resteth till it findeth rest in Thee.

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p. 515
1 month 1 week ago

The two most far-reaching critical theories at the beginning of the latest phase of industrial society were those of Marx and Freud. Marx showed the moving powers and the conflicts in the social-historical process. Freud aimed at the critical uncovering of the inner conflicts. Both worked for the liberation of man, even though Marx's concept was more comprehensive and less time-bound than Freud's.

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The Art of Being" Pt. 3
3 months 2 weeks ago

On Ps 60:3: To Thee have I cried from the ends of the earth.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Those who have ever valued liberty for its own sake believed that to be free to choose, and not to be chosen for, is an inalienable ingredient in what makes human beings human.

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3 weeks 5 days ago

Do not take part in the council, unless you are called.

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Maxim 310
2 months 4 weeks ago

Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little: it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.

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An Outline of Philosophy Ch.15 The Nature of our Knowledge of Physics, 1927
3 months ago

To pray to God is to flatter oneself that with words one can alter nature.

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Notebooks, c.1735-c.1750
1 month 3 weeks ago

To think is to submit to the whims and commands of an uncertain health.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

What appears as the positive is essentially the negative, i.e. the thing that is to be criticized.

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p. 18

The "second sight" possessed by the Highlanders in Scotland is actually a foreknowledge of future events. I believe they possess this gift because they don't wear trousers... That is also why in all countries women are more prone to utter prophecies.

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L 26
3 months 3 weeks ago

Consider the most famous pure dystopian tale of modern times, 1984, by George Orwell (1903-1950), published in 1948 (the same year in which Walden Two was published). I consider it an abominably poor book. It made a big hit (in my opinion) only because it rode the tidal wave of cold war sentiment in the United States.

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2 months 4 weeks ago

The application of algebra to geometry... far more than any of his metaphysical speculations, has immortalized the name of Descartes, and constitutes the greatest single step ever made in the progress of the exact sciences.

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An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (1865) as quoted in 5th ed. (1878) p. 617.
2 months 2 weeks ago

There are two sentences inscribed upon the Delphic oracle, hugely accommodated to the usages of man's life: "Know thyself," and "Nothing too much;" and upon these all other precepts depend.

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3 months 1 week ago

These reasonings are unconnected: "I am richer than you, therefore I am better"; "I am more eloquent than you, therefore I am better." The connection is rather this: "I am richer than you, therefore my property is greater than yours;" "I am more eloquent than you, therefore my style is better than yours." But you, after all, are neither property nor style.

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(44).
3 months 1 week ago

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.

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Book II, xxi, 9

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