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7 months 3 weeks ago

Not from a vain or shallow thought His awful Jove young Phidias brought.

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The Problem, st. 2
11 months 4 weeks ago

I think that the task of philosophy is not to provide answers, but to show how the way we perceive a problem can be itself part of a problem.

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6 months 4 days ago

I believe that man is the product of natural evolution that is born from the conflict of being a prisoner and separated from nature, and from the need to find unity and harmony with it.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

The ego involved in responsibility is me and no one else, me with whom one whould have liked to pair up a sister soul, from whom one would have substitution and sacrifice.

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The Levinas reader by Levinas, Emmanuel p. 116
4 months 1 week ago

Man with the great M is only an ideal, the species only something thought of.

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Dover 2005, p. 182
4 months 1 week ago

This Burns appeared under every disadvantage: uninstructed, poor, born only to hard manual toil; and writing, when it came to that, in a rustic special dialect, known only to a small province of the country he lived in. Had he written, even what he did write, in the general language of England, I doubt not he had already become universally recognized as being, or capable to be, one of our greatest men.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

The images of mankind have become the most basic thing about them. And they're all software, and disembodied.

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(p. 346)
3 months 2 weeks ago

Some people, when they do someone a favor, are always looking for a chance to call it in. And some aren't, but they're still aware of it--still regard it as a debt. But others don't even do that. They're like a vine that produces grapes without looking for anything in return. (Hays translation) A man makes no noise over a good deed, but passes on to another as a vine to bear grapes again in season.

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V, 6
6 months 2 weeks ago

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy. Variant translation: We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth.

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Conclusion, p. 628
6 months 2 weeks ago

Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

France wanted to make proselytes to her opinions, and turn every government in the world into a republic. If every government was against her, it was because she had declared herself hostile to every government. He knew of nothing to which this strange republic could be compared, but to the system of Mahomet, who with the koran in one hand, and a sword in the other, held out the former to the acceptance of mankind, and with the latter compelled them to adopt it as their creed. The koran which France held out, was the declaration of the rights of man and universal fraternity; and with the sword she was determined to propagate her doctrines, and conquer those whom she could not convince.

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Speech in the House of Commons (14 December 1792), quoted in The Parliamentary History of England, From the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, Vol. XXX (1817), column 72
6 months 3 weeks ago

It is almost never when a state of things is the most detestable that it is smashed, but when, beginning to improve, it permits men to breathe, to reflect, to communicate their thoughts with each other, and to gauge by what they already have the extent of their rights and their grievances. The weight, although less heavy, seems then all the more unbearable.

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Letter to Pierre Freslon, 23 September 1853 Selected Letters, p. 296 as cited in Toqueville's Road Map p. 103
3 months 2 weeks ago

To change your mind and to follow him who sets you right is to be nonetheless the free agent that you were before. Remember that to change thy opinion and to follow him who corrects thy error is as consistent with freedom as it is to persist in thy error.

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(Long translation) VIII, 16
3 months 2 weeks ago

He would be the finer gentleman that should leave the world without having tasted of lying or pretence of any sort, or of wantonness or conceit.

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IX, 2
8 months ago

We have now completed both the spiritual and the temporal government, that is, the divine and the paternal authority and obedience. But here now we go forth from our house among our neighbors to learn how we should live with one another, every one himself toward his neighbor. Therefore God and government are not included in this commandment nor is the power to kill, which they have taken away. For God has delegated His authority to punish evil-doers to the government instead of parents, who aforetime (as we read in Moses) were required to bring their own children to judgment and sentence them to death. Therefore, what is here forbidden is forbidden to the individual in his relation to any one else, and not to the government.

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[The Large Catechism] by Martin Luther, Translated by F. Bente and W.H.T. Dau Published in: Triglot Concordia: The Symbolical Books of the Ev. Lutheran Church (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1921) pp. 565-773,
8 months 3 weeks ago
What does man actually know about himself? Is he, indeed, ever able to perceive himself completely, as if laid out in a lighted display case? Does nature not conceal most things from him even concerning his own body in order to confine and lock him within a proud, deceptive consciousness, aloof from the coils of the bowels, the rapid flow of the blood stream, and the intricate quivering of the fibers! She threw away the key.
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6 months 5 days ago

What can characterize the Outsider is a sense of strangeness, or unreality.

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Chapter one, The Country of the Blind
4 months 1 week ago

Ah, you flavour everything; you are the vanilla of society.

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Vol. I, ch. 9, p. 312
6 months 2 weeks ago

We Shall Naturally look round in vain the macrophysical world for acausal events, for the simple reason that we cannot imagine events that are connected non-causally and are capable of a non-causal explanation. But that does not mean that such events do not exist... The so-called "scientific view of the world" based on this can hardly be anything more than a psychologically biased partial view which misses out all those by no means unimportant aspects that cannot be grasped statistically.

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p. 5
7 months 3 weeks ago

I wanted pure love: foolishness; to love one another is to hate a common enemy: I will thus espouse your hatred. I wanted Good: nonsense; on this earth and in these times, Good and Bad are inseparable: I accept to be evil in order to become good.

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Act 11, sc. 2
3 months 2 weeks ago

Either all things proceed from one intelligent source and come together as in one body, and the part ought not to find fault with what is done for the benefit of the whole; or there are only atoms, and nothing else than a mixture and dispersion. Why, then, art thou disturbed? Say to this ruling faculty, Art thou dead, art thou corrupted, art thou playing the hypocrite, art thou become a beast, dost thou herd and feed with the rest?

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IX, 39
7 months 3 weeks ago

The inscrutable wisdom through which we exist is not less worthy of veneration in respect to what it denies us than in respect to what it has granted.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

At the present time a serious, strong state can have but one sound foundation - military and bureaucratic centralization. Between a monarchy and the most democratic republic there is only one essential difference: in the former, the world of officialdom oppresses and robs the people for the greater profit of the privileged and propertied classes, as well as to line its own pockets, in the name of the monarch; in the latter, it oppresses and robs the people in exactly the same way, for the benefit of the same classes and the same pockets, but in the name of the people's will. In a republic a fictitious people, the "legal nation" supposedly represented by the state, smothers the real, live people. But it will scarcely be any easier on the people if the cudgel with which they are beaten is called the people's cudgel.

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6 months 5 days ago

Without narration, life is purely additive.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs 'pass,' so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.

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Lecture VI, Pragmatism's Conception of Truth
7 months 3 weeks ago

No man is liberated from fear who dare not see his place in the world as it is; no man can achieve the greatness of which he is capable until he has allowed himself to see his own littleness.

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Dreams and Facts, 1919
4 months 2 weeks ago

In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.

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Ch. XII: "The Political Principles of Liberalism", §6, p. 267
4 months 1 week ago

If any one is angry with you, meet his anger by returning benefits for it: a quarrel which is only taken up on one side falls to the ground: it takes two men to fight.

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De Ira (On Anger): Book 2, cap. 34, line 5.
6 months 1 week ago

Man must be free of it all, of his bad conscience and of the bad salvation from this conscience in order to become in truth the way. Now, he no longer promises others the fulfillment of his duties, but promises himself the fulfillment of man.

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p. 178
7 months 3 weeks ago

Characters and talents are complemental and suppletory. The world stands by balanced antagonisms. The more the peculiarities are pressed the better the result. The air would rot without lightning; and without the violence of direction that men have, without bigots, without men of the fixed idea, no excitement, no efficiency. The novelist should not make any character act absurdly, but only absurdly as seen by others. For it is so in life. Nonsense will not keep its unreason if you come into the humorist's point of view, but unhappily we find it is fast becoming sense, and we must flee again into the distance if we would laugh.

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"The Natural History of Intellect", p. 45
7 months 3 weeks ago

I am responsible for everything ... except for my very responsibility, for I am not the foundation of my being. Therefore everything takes place as if I were compelled to be responsible. I am abandoned in the world ... in the sense that I find myself suddenly alone and without help, engaged in a world for which I bear the whole responsibility without being able, whatever I do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for an instant.

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Part 4, Chapter 1, III
6 months 2 weeks ago

Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.

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(Matthew 12:31-32) (KJV)
6 months 2 weeks ago

By striving to do the impossible, man has always achieved what is possible. Those who have cautiously done no more than they believed possible have never taken a single step forward.

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As quoted in The Explorers (1996) by Paolo Novaresio ISBN 1-55670-495-X
4 months 3 days ago

The restoration of our world-view can come only as a result of inexorably truth-loving and recklessly courageous thought. Such thinking alone is mature enough to learn by experience how the rational, when it thinks itself out to a conclusion, passes necessarily over into the non-rational. World- and life-affirmation and ethics are non-rational. They are not justified by any corresponding knowledge of the nature of the world, but are the disposition in which, through the inner compulsion of our will-to-live, we determine our relation to the world. What the activity of this disposition of ours means in the evolution of the world, we do not know. Nor can we regulate this activity from outside; we must leave entirely to each individual its shaping and its extension. From every point of view, then, world- and life-affirmation and ethics are non-rational, and we must have the courage to admit it.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Our laws, language, religion, politics, & manners are so deeply laid in English foundations, that we shall never cease to consider their history as a part of ours, and to study ours in that as it's origin.

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Letter to William Duane
6 months 1 week ago

I can assure you that no kingdom has ever had as many civil wars as the kingdom of Christ.

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No. 29. (Rica writing to Ibben)
7 months 1 week 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 2 weeks ago

It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.

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(p. 9)
8 months 2 weeks ago

It is impossible that evils should be done away with, for there must always be something opposed to the good; and they must inevitably hover about mortal nature and this earth. Therefore we ought to try to escape from earth to the dwelling of the gods as quickly as we can; and to escape is to become like God, so far as this is possible, God is in no wise and in no manner unrighteous, but utterly and perfectly righteous, and there is nothing so like him as that one of us who in turn becomes most nearly perfect in righteousness.

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3 months 1 week ago

I was sitting in a chair in the patent office at Bern when all of sudden a thought occurred to me: If a person falls freely he will not feel his own weight. I was startled. This simple thought made a deep impression on me. It impelled me toward a theory of gravitation.

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8 months 1 week ago

One who liberates his country by killing a tyrant is to be praised and rewarded.

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Trans. J.G. Dawson (Oxford, 1959), 44, 2 in O’Donovan, pp. 329-30
6 months 5 days ago

Emptiness simply prevents what is individual from insisting on itself.

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2 months 6 days ago

"There is certainly some chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and laborious science; but it is all round about you, and for the trouble of looking, that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life."
- Robert Louis Stevenson

See biography for Robert Louis Stevenson:
https://civilsimian.com/RobertLouisStevenson

Read Robert Louis Stevenson's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/182/content

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3 months 3 weeks ago

We, who are dying, are doing better, than they, who will live. For Crete doesn't need householders, she needs madmen like us. These madmen make Crete immortal.

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Freedom and Death
6 months 2 weeks ago

Democracy would be wholly valueless to the proletariat if it were not immediately used as a means for putting through measures directed against private property and ensuring the livelihood of the proletariat.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Without God, everything is nothingness; and with God? Supreme nothingness.

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