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6 months 3 weeks ago

When one learns something one first performs an act of will, because only by willing to learn can one learn.

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"Vico: Autodidact and Humanist," The Centennial Review, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Summer 1967), p. 340
7 months 1 week ago

This morning I thought, hence lost my bearings, for a good quarter of an hour.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Delay is preferable to error.

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Letter to George Washington
8 months 1 day ago

For it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be.

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Frag. B 3, quoted by Plotinus, Enneads V, i.8
4 months 3 weeks ago

Psychotherapists ... are dealing with people whose distress arises from what may be termed maya, to use the Hindu-Buddhist word whose exact meaning is not merely 'illusion' but the entire world-conception of a culture, considered as illusion in the strict etymological sense of a play (Latin, ludere). The aim of a way of liberation is not the destruction of maya but seeing it for what it is, or seeing through it. Play is not to be taken seriously, or, in other words, ideas of the world and of oneself which are social conventions and institutions are not to be confused with reality.

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p. 9
7 months 1 week ago

Philosophy, as I understand the word, is a positive theoretical science, and a science in an early stage of development. As such it has no more to do with belief than any other science. Indeed, I am bound to confess that it is at present in so unsettled a condition, that if the ordinary theorems of molecular physics and of archaeology are but the ghosts of beliefs, then to my mind, the doctrines of the philosophers are little better than the ghosts of ghosts. I know this is an extremely heretical opinion.

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Lecture II : The Universal Categories, §3. Laws: Nominalism, CP 5.61
8 months 1 week ago

A sovereign shows himself to be a tyrant if he disregards his honest advisors, or punishes them for what they have said.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

A city that outdistances Man's walking powers is a trap for Man. It threatens to become a prison from which he cannot escape unless he has mechanical means of transport, the thoroughfares for carrying these, and the purchasing power for commanding the use of artificial means of communication.

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"Has Man's Metropolitan Environment Any Precedents?", Ekistics, vol. 22, no. 133 (December 1966) pp. 385-7
6 months 1 week ago

It is terrible when people do not know God, but it is worse when people identify as God what is not God.

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p. 5
7 months 6 days ago

No, you cannot expect people to understand the higher reaches of philosophy. Culture should be taken out of the hands of the dollar chasers. We need a national subsidy for literature. It is disgraceful that artists are treated like peddlers and that art works have to be sold like soap.

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7 months 1 week ago

Never to have occasion to take a position, to make up one's mind, or to define oneself - there is no wish I make more often.

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5 months 1 week ago

The great artist liberates the emotions and recreates the sheer wonder of childhood without surrendering the development of the intellect.

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p. 258
8 months 1 week ago

It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.

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7 months 6 days ago

The eyes see only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.

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Robertson Davies as quoted in The White Bedouin‎ (2007) by George Potter, p. 241
8 months 4 days ago

For already, sometime, I have been a boy and a girl, a shrub, a bird, and a silent fish in the sea.

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fr. 117
5 months 4 weeks ago

If Man be separated by no greater structural barrier from the brutes than they are from one another-then it seems to follow that if any process of physical causation can be discovered by which the genera and families of ordinary animals have been produced, that process of causation is amply sufficient to account for the origin of Man.

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Ch.2, p. 125
8 months 2 weeks ago

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.

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8 months 3 weeks ago

Saying is one thing, doing another.

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Book II, Ch. 31. Of Anger
8 months 1 week ago

Mr. Sensible learned only catchwords from them. He could talk like Epicurus of spare diet, but he was a glutton. He had from Montaigne the language of friendship, but no friend.

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Pilgrim's Regress 176
7 months 1 week ago

What I know wreaks havoc upon what I want.

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5 months 5 days ago

Consider, for example, the state of Science generally, in Europe, at this period. It is admitted, on all sides, that the Metaphysical and Moral Sciences are falling into decay, while the Physical are engrossing, every day, more respect and attention. In most of the European nations there is now no such thing as a Science of Mind; only more or less advancement in the general science, or the special sciences, of matter.

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4 months 1 week ago

Before making a decision the first thing to do - don't get worked up. For everything happens according to the nature of all things, and in a short time you'll be nobody and nowhere even as the great emperors Hadrian and Augustus are now. The next thing to do - consider carefully the task at hand for what it is, while remembering that your purpose is to be a good human being. Get straight to doing what nature requires of you, and speak as you see most just and fitting - with kindness, modesty, and sincerity.

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VIII. 5:162
4 months 3 weeks ago

However, what is really required to defend 'the West' against the sudden rise of these barbaric and elemental forces is the strengthening, to an extent perhaps still unknown to Western man, of a heroic vision of life. Apart from the military-technical apparatus the world of the 'Westerners' has at its disposal only a limp and shapeless substance - and the cult of the skin, the myth of 'safety' and of 'war on war', and the ideal of the long, comfortable guaranteed, 'democratic' existence, which is preferred to the ideal of the fulfilment which can be grasped only on the frontiers between life and death in the meeting of the essence of living with the extreme of danger.

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p. 152
4 months 3 weeks ago

It is a great pity that human beings cannot find all of their satisfaction in scientific contemplativeness.

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As quoted in Chandra: A Biography of S. Chandrasekhar‎ (1991) by Kameshwar C. Wali, p. 147
6 months 1 week ago

TV is not good at covering single events. It needs a ritual, a rhythm, and a pattern...TV tends to fosters patterns rather than events.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Man has many wishes that he does not really wish to fulfil, and it would be a misunderstanding to suppose the contrary. He wants them to remain wishes, they have value only in his imagination; their fulfilment would be a bitter disappointment to him. Such a desire is the desire for eternal life. If it were fulfilled, man would become thoroughly sick of living eternally, and yearn for death. In reality man wishes merely to avoid a premature, violent or gruesome death. Everything has its measure, says a pagan philosopher; in the end we weary of everything, even of life; a time comes when man desires death. Consequently there is nothing frightening about a normal, natural death, the death of a man who has fulfilled himself and lived out his life.

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Lecture XXX, Atheism alone a Positive View
5 months 3 weeks 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
4 months 3 weeks ago

Himmler approved the idea of recruiting divisions of the Waffen-SS with volunteers from all nations under the banner of the struggle against Communist Russia and in defence of Europe and its civilisation. This was the restoration of the function that the Order of Teutonic Knights had in the beginning as guardian of the East and, at the same time, of the spirit that had animated the Freikorps, the voluntary groups that, on their own initiative, had fought against the Bolsheviks in the eastern regions and the Baltic countries after the end of the First World War. In the end, more than seventeen nations were represented in the Waffen-SS, often with their own complete divisions: French, Belgians, Dutch, Scandinavians, Ukrainians, Spaniards, even Swiss, with a total of about 800,000 men, of whom only a part came from the Germanic area.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body.

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Ch. V: Applications
5 months 3 days ago

Childhood may be defined as the age of play; therefore some children are never young, and some adults are never old.

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Ch. 1 : Our life begins
8 months 4 days ago

Asked where he came from, he said, "I am a citizen of the world."

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Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 63
8 months 1 week ago

I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.

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As quoted in The Beginning of the End (2004) by Peter Hershey, p. 109 Also, as quoted in "The Relentless Rise of Science as Fun", by Jeremy Burgess, in New Scientist, Volume 143, Issues 1932-1945, originally published 1994.
4 months 3 weeks ago

Religion is always falling apart. Buddhism, the Religion of No-Religion.

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8 months 1 week ago

There is no more light in a genius than in any other honest man-but he has a particular kind of lens to concentrate this light into a burning point.

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p. 41e
6 months 3 weeks ago

It seems as if the female spirit of the world were mourning everlastingly over blessings, not lost, but which she has never had, and which, in her discouragement she feels that she never will have, they are so far off.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

A major task in organizing is to determine, first, where the knowledge is located that can provide the various kinds of factual premises that decisions require.

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p. 24.
8 months 3 days ago

Mediocrity in poets has never been tolerated by either men, or gods, or booksellers.

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Lines 372-373
4 months 3 weeks ago

True peace of mind comes from accepting the worst.

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p. 158
4 months 4 days ago

Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.

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7 months 1 day ago

I am dreaming ...? Let me dream, if this dream is my life. Do not awaken me from it. I believe in the immortal origin of this yearning for immortality, which is the very substance of my soul. But do I really believe in it ...? And wherefore do you want to be immortal? you ask me, wherefore? Frankly, I do not understand the question, for it is to ask the reason of the reason, the end of the end, the principle of the principle.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very "expressions" that are said to be its results.

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Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
5 months 3 weeks ago

Evangelical atheists preach the need for a scientific view of things, but a settled view does not go with scientific method. If we know anything it is that most of the theories that prevail at any one time are false. Scientific theories are not components of a world-view but tools we use to tinker with the world.

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Sweet Morality (p. 224)
8 months 2 weeks ago

Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.

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Montaigne; or, The Skeptic

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