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3 months 2 weeks ago

Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.

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1836
3 months 2 weeks ago

The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood.

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Nature
3 months 2 weeks ago

If the colleges were better, if they ... had the power of imparting valuable thought, creative principles, truths which become powers, thoughts which become talents, - if they could cause that a mind not profound should become profound, - we should all rush to their gates: instead of contriving inducements to draw students, you would need to set policy at the gates to keep order in the in-rushing multitude.

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The Celebration of Intellect, 1861
3 months 2 weeks ago

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

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May 25, 1843
3 months 2 weeks ago

But genius looks forward: the eyes of men are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates.

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par. 18
3 months 2 weeks ago

A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.

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June 20, 1831
3 months 2 weeks ago

The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco.

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1859
3 months 2 weeks ago

He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.

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The Method of Nature, 1841
3 months 2 weeks ago

How we hate this solemn Ego that accompanies the learned, like a double, wherever he goes.

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1839
3 months 2 weeks ago

A man is a god in ruins.

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Prospects
3 months 2 weeks ago

We are never without a pilot. When we know not how to steer, and dare not hoist a sail, we can drift. The current knows the way, though we do not. The ship of heaven guides itself, and will not accept a wooden rudder.

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"The Sovereignty of Ethics", in The North America Review, no. 262 (May-June 1878) p. 407
3 months 2 weeks ago

The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.

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February 12, 1851; cf. the remark of John Wilkes about Samuel Johnson, "Liberty is as ridiculous in his mouth as Religion in mine" (20 March 1778), quoted in Boswell's Life of Johnson, 1791
3 months 2 weeks ago

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.

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November 8, 1838
3 months 2 weeks ago

The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title. To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food.

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Nature
3 months 2 weeks ago

Always put the best interpretation on a tenet. Why not on Christianity, wholesome, sweet, and poetic? It is the record of a pure and holy soul, humble, absolutely disinterested, a trutn-speaker, and bent on serving, teaching, and uplifting men. Christianity taught the capacity, the element, to Jove the All-perfect without a stingy bargain for personal happiness. It taught that to love him was happiness,-to love him in other's virtues.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

If I made laws for Shakers or a school, I should gazette every Saturday all the words they were wont to use in reporting religious experience, as "spiritual life," "God," "soul," "cross," etc., and if they could not find new ones next week, they might remain silent.

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June 15, 1844
3 months 2 weeks ago

Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over influence.

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par. 19
3 months 2 weeks ago

A man contains all that is needful to his government within himself. He is made a law unto himself. All real good or evil that can befal [sic] him must be from himself. He only can do himself any good or any harm. Nothing can be given to him or can taken from him but always there is a compensation.. There is a correspondence between the human soul and everything that exists in the world; more properly, everything that is known to man. Instead of studying things without the principles of them, all may be penetrated unto with him. Every act puts the agent in a new position. The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself. He is not to live the future as described to him but to live the real future to the real present. The highest revelation is that God is in every man.

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September 8, 1833
3 months 2 weeks ago

A nation never falls but by suicide.

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1861
3 months 2 weeks ago

I fancy I need more than another to speak (rather than write), with such a formidable tendency to the lapidary style. I build my house of boulders.

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Letter to Thomas Carlyle, 30 October 1841
3 months 2 weeks ago

A good indignation brings out all one's powers.

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1841
3 months 2 weeks ago

The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,-a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.

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par. 5
3 months 2 weeks ago

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

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December 20, 1822
3 months 2 weeks ago

I trust a good deal to common fame, as we all must. If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.

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February 1855
3 months 2 weeks ago

I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom.

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June 27, 1839
3 months 2 weeks ago

Standing on the bare ground, - my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, - all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

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Nature
3 months 2 weeks ago

Only the great generalizations survive. The sharp words of the Declaration of Independence, lampooned then and since as 'glittering generalities,' have turned out blazing ubiquities that will burn forever and ever.

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From a lecture on Books given in the Fraternity Course in Boston in 1864
3 months 2 weeks ago

Poetry must be new as foam, and as old as the rock.

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March 1845
3 months 2 weeks ago

Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments.

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par. 20
3 months 2 weeks ago

Everything intercepts us from ourselves.

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1833
3 months 2 weeks ago

You can take better care of your secret than another can.

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1863
3 months 2 weeks ago

Yet a man may love a paradox, without losing either his wit or his honesty.

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"Walter Savage Landor", from The Dial, xii, 1841
3 months 2 weeks ago

People say law but they mean wealth.

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1841
3 months 2 weeks ago

The soul is subject to dollars.

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par. 6
3 months 2 weeks ago

Since property here exists in the form of stock, its movement and transfer become purely a result of gambling on the stock exchange, where the little fish are swallowed by the sharks and the lambs by the stock exchange wolves.

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Vol. III, Ch. XXVII, The Role of Credit, p. 440.
3 months 2 weeks ago

In short, competition has to shoulder the responsibility of explaining all the meaningless ideas of the economists, whereas it should rather be the economists who explain competition.

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Vol. III, Ch. L, Illusions Created by Competition, p. 866.
3 months 2 weeks ago

Democracy is the road to socialism.

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Attributed to Marx in recent years, including in Communism (2007) by Tom Lansford, p. 48
3 months 2 weeks ago

Last words are for fools who haven't said enough.

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Various attributions,
3 months 2 weeks ago

In a social order dominated by capitalist production even the non-capitalist producer is gripped by capitalist conceptions.

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Vol. III, Ch. I, Cost Price and Profit, p. 39.
3 months 2 weeks ago

Unlimited exploitation of cheap labour-power is the sole foundation of their power to compete.

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Vol. I, Ch. 15, Section 8, pg. 520.
3 months 2 weeks ago

In capitalist society however where social reason always asserts itself only post festum great disturbances may and must constantly occur.

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Vol. II, Ch. XVI, p. 319.
3 months 2 weeks ago

Money is a crystal formed of necessity in the course of the exchanges, whereby different products of labour are practically equated to one another and thus by practice converted into commodities.

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Vol. I, Ch. 2, pg. 99.
3 months 2 weeks ago

The national debt has given rise to joint stock companies, to dealings in negotiable effects of all kinds, and to agiotage, in a word to stock-exchange gambling and the modern bankocracy.

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Vol. I, Ch. 31, pg. 827.
3 months 2 weeks ago

Technology discloses the active relation of man towards nature, as well as the direct process of production of his very life, and thereby the process of production of his basic societal relations, of his own mentality, and his images of society, too.

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Vol. I, Ch. 13: "Machinery and Big Industry".
3 months 2 weeks ago

It goes without saying that the normal durability of fixed capital is calculated on the supposition that all the conditions under which it can perform its functions normally during that time are fulfilled, just as we assume, in placing a mans life at 30 years on the average,that he will wash himself.

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Volume II, Ch. VIII, p. 176-177.
3 months 2 weeks ago

But if the labourers could live on air they could not be bought at any price.

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Vol. I, Ch. 24, Section 4, pg. 657.
3 months 2 weeks ago

As the variable capital always stays in the hands of the capitalist in some form or other, it cannot be claimed in any way that it converts itself into revenue for anyone.

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Vol. II, Ch. XX, p. 452.
3 months 2 weeks ago

A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst of architects from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.

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Vol. I, Ch. 7, pg. 198.
3 months 2 weeks ago

The entire process seems simple and natural, i.e., possesses the naturalness of a shallow rationalism.

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Vol. II, Ch. III, p. 95.
3 months 2 weeks ago

Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the labourer.

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Vol. I, Ch. 15 (last sentence), pg. 556.

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