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4 months 3 weeks ago

But voice is a certain sound of that which is animated; for nothing inanimate emits a voice; but they are said to emit a voice from similitude, as a pipe, and a lyre, and such other inanimate things, have extension, modulation, and dialect; for thus it appears, because voice, also, has these.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows.

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Ch. 5
3 months 3 days ago

It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.

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Included as a quotation in The Great Quotations (1977) by George Seldes, p. 35
1 week 4 days ago

Mankind is born for mutual assistance, anger for mutual ruin: the former loves society, the latter estrangement.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible.

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Said in conversation with Mrs. Alan Wood; quoted in Alan Wood's Bertrand Russell, the Passionate Sceptic (Allen and Unwin, 1957), pp. 236-7
2 months 1 week ago

Nietzsche's great concept of Yea-saying gave him a notion of purpose that is seen as positive.

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Nietzsche, in short, was a religious mystic. p. 275
3 months 1 week ago

If thou intend to do any good; tarry not till to-morrow! for thou knowest not what may chance thee this night.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

And seeing every man is presumed to do all things in order to his own benefit, no man is a fit Arbitrator in his own cause.

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The First Part, Chapter 15, p. 78
4 months 1 week ago

To wisdom belongs the intellectual apprehension of things eternal; to knowledge, the rational apprehension of things temporal.

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As quoted in The Anchor Book of Latin Quotations: with English translations‎ (1990) by Norbert Guterman, p. 375
1 week ago

Above all, the ominous clouds of those phenomena that we are with varying success seeking to explain by means of the quantum of action, are throwing their shadows over the sphere of physical knowledge, threatening no one knows what new revolution.

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Ch. 3 "Relativity of Space and Time"
4 months 2 weeks ago

The superior man loves his soul; the inferior man loves his property.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

What began as a "Romantic reaction" towards organic wholeness may or may not have hastened the discovery of electro-magnetic waves. But certainly the electro-magnetic discoveries have recreated the simultaneous "field" in all human affairs so that the human family now exists under conditions of a "global village." We live in a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums. So that concern with the "primitive" today is as banal as nineteenth-century concern with "progress," and as irrelevant to our problems. The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

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(p. 36)
3 months 3 weeks ago

For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic and must remain so if he does not wish to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.

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Vol. 1, Part 1.
3 months 1 week ago

It is requisite to defend those who are unjustly accused of having acted injuriously, but to praise those who excel in a certain good.

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Pythagorean Ethical Sentences From Stobæus
3 months 3 weeks ago

It seems to me as good as certain that we cannot get the upper hand against England. The English - the best race in the world - cannot lose! We, however, can lose and shall lose, if not this year then next year. The thought that our race is going to be beaten depresses me terribly, because I am completely German.

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Writing about the eventual outcome of World War I, in which he was a volunteer in the Austro-Hungarian army (25 October 1914), as quoted in The First World War (2004) by Martin Gilbert, p. 104
3 months 2 weeks ago

Since ancient times, philosophers have maintained that to strive too hard for one's own happiness is self-defeating.

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Chapter 5, Reason And Genes, p. 145
4 months 6 days ago

As Christ had recommended peace during the whole of his life, mark with what anxiety he enforces it at the approach of his dissolution. Love one another, says he; as I have loved you, so love one another; and again, my peace I give unto you, my peace I leave you. Do you observe the legacy he leaves to those whom he loves? Is it a pompous retinue, a large estate, or empire? Nothing of this kind. What is it then? Peace he giveth, his peace he leaveth; peace, not only with our near connections, but with enemies and strangers!

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Well, as you know, I was blessed to do over a hundred events for my dear brother [Bernie Sanders]. And this is the first time I've had a chance to publicly endorse him again, but yes, indeed. I'll be in his corner that we're going to win this time. And it has to do with the Martin Luther King like criteria of assessing a candidate namely the issues of militarism, poverty, materialism, and racism, xenophobia in all of its forms that includes any kind of racism as you know against black people, brown people, yellow people, anybody, Arabs, Muslims, Jews, Palestinians, Kashmirians, Tibetans and so forth. So that there's no doubt that the my dear brother Bernie stands shoulders above any of the other candidates running in the Democratic primary when it comes to that Martin Luther King-like standards or criteria.

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Quoted in: Cornel West on Bernie, Trump, and Racism, The Intercept, Mehdi Hasan,
3 months 3 weeks ago

The necessity of faith as an ingredient in our mental attitude is strongly insisted on by the scientific philosophers of the present day; but by a singularly arbitrary caprice they say that it is only legitimate when used in the interests of one particular proposition, - the proposition, namely, that the course of nature is uniform. That nature will follow to-morrow the same laws that she follows to-day is, they all admit, a truth which no man can know; but in the interests of cognition as well as of action we must postulate or assume it.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

The modern world gives proof at every point that it is far easier to destroy institutions than to create them. Nevertheless, few people seem to understand this truth.

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Rousseau & the origins of liberalism, The New Criterion
2 weeks 5 days ago

While the positivists were proclaiming the end "once and for all" of unverifiable metaphysical systems and speculative philosophy in general, new doctrines in flagrant contradiction to those ideals have sprung up one after the other. Positivists see no more in this development than evidence of human stupidity, not any reflection on themselves.

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Chapter Eight, Logical Empiricism, p. 198
2 weeks 4 days ago

Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness on the confines of two everlasting hostile empires, - Necessity and Free Will.

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Essays, Goethe's Works.
3 months 2 weeks ago

Everyone is entitled to commit murder in the imagination once in a while, not to mention lesser infractions.

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Concealment and Exposure and Other Essays (1998).
2 weeks 4 days ago

It must have been in his teens, perhaps rather early, that he and his elder brother John, with William Bell (afterwards of Wylie Hill, and a noted drover) and his brother, all met in the kiln at Eelief to play cards. The corn was dried then at home. There was a fire, therefore, aud perhaps it was both heat and light. The boys had played, perhaps, often enough for trifling stakes, and always parted in good humor. One night they came to some disagreement. My father spoke out what was in him about the folly, the sinfulness, of quarreling over a perhaps sinful amusement. The earnest mind persuaded other minds. They threw the cards into the fire, and (I think the younger Bell told my brother James) no one of the four ever touched a card again through life. My father certainly never hinted at such a game since I knew him. I cannot remember that I, at that age, had any such force of belief. Which of us can?

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth.

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"Natural History of Massachusetts". The Dial (July 1842) p. 39
1 month 4 weeks ago

Generally speaking, espionage offers each spy an opportunity to go crazy in a way he finds irresistible.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Big industry has brought all the people of the Earth into contact with each other, has merged all local markets into one world market, has spread civilization and progress everywhere and has thus ensured that whatever happens in civilized countries will have repercussions in all other countries. It follows that if the workers in England or France now liberate themselves, this must set off revolution in all other countries - revolutions which, sooner or later, must accomplish the liberation of their respective working class.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.

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Very similar were the views expressed by Raymundus of Sabunde or Sabeyde, a Spaniard of the fifteenth century, and professor at Toulouse about the year 1437. In his theologia natural is, which he handled in a speculative spirit, he dealt with the Nature of things, and with the revelation of God in Nature and in the history of the God-man. He sought to prove to unbelievers the Being, the trinity, the incarnation, the life, and the revelation of God in Nature, and in the history of the God-man, basing his arguments on Reason. From the contemplation of Nature he rises to God; and in the same way he reaches morality from; observation of man's inner nature. This purer and simpler style must be set off against the other, if we are to do justice to the Scholastic theologians in their turn.

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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History Vol 3 1837 translated by ES Haldane and Francis H. Simson) first translated 1896 P. 91-92
2 months 2 weeks ago

The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath.

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Mark 2:27 (KJV)
3 months 3 weeks ago

The totalitarian movements aim at and succeed in organizing masses-not classes, like the old interest parties of the Continental nation-states; not citizens with opinions about, interests in, the handling of public affairs, like the parties of Anglo-Saxon countries.

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Part 3, Ch. 10
3 months 2 weeks ago

The noblest people are those despising wealth, learning, pleasure and life; esteeming above them poverty, ignorance, hardship and death.

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Stobaeus, iv. 29a. 19
3 months 3 weeks ago

Everyone is the other, and no one is himself. The they, which supplies the answer to the who of everyday Da-sein, is the nobody to whom every Da-sein has always already surrendered itself, in its being-among-one-another.

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Stambaugh translation
3 months 3 weeks ago

The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.

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Ch. 9: On the Notion of Cause
1 month 3 weeks ago

At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal force in the heart of man: one very reasonably tells the man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of avoiding it; the other even more reasonable says that it is too painful and harassing to think of the danger, since it is not a man's power to provide for everything and escape from the general march of events; and that it is therefore better to turn aside from the painful subject till it has come, and to think of what is pleasant. In solitude a man generally yields to the first voice; in society to the second.

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Bk. X, ch. 17
2 months 3 weeks ago

Nothing surpasses the pleasures of idleness: even if the end of the world were to come, I would not leave my bed at an ungodly hour.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.

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Ch. 1
2 months 3 weeks ago

There are only Epicureans, either crude or refined; Christ was the most refined.

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Act I.

I believe that world literature has it in its power to help mankind, in these its troubled hours, to see itself as it really is, notwithstanding the indoctrinations of prejudiced people and parties. World literature has it in its power to convey condensed experience from one land to another so that we might cease to be split and dazzled, that the different scales of values might be made to agree, and one nation learn correctly and concisely the true history of another with such strength of recognition and painful awareness as it had itself experienced the same, and thus might it be spared from repeating the same cruel mistakes.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Now precisely because Galilean science is, in the formation of its concepts, the technic of a specific Lebenswelt, it does not and cannot transcend this Lebenswelt. It remains essentially within the basic experiential framework and within the universe of ends set by this reality.

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p. 164
3 months 3 weeks ago

The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing - to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from - my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.

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Psyche
2 months 2 weeks 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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1 month 1 week ago

I can assure you that there is the greatest practical benefit in making a few failures early in life. You learn that which is of inestimable importance - that there are a great many people in the world who are just as clever as you are. You learn to put your trust, by and by, in an economy and frugality of the exercise of your powers, both moral and intellectual; and you very soon find out, if you have not found it out before, that patience and tenacity of purpose are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness.

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On Medical Education
3 months 3 weeks ago

The way you use the word "God" does not show whom you mean - but, rather, what you mean.

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p. 50e
3 months 2 weeks ago

To one who asked what was the proper time for lunch, he said, "If a rich man, when you will; if a poor man, when you can." Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 40

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4 months 3 weeks ago

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest, whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer. And if it is true, as Nietzsche claims, that a philosopher, to deserve our respect, must preach by example, you can appreciate the importance of that reply, for it will precede the definitive act. These are facts the heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect. If I ask myself how to judge that this question is more urgent than that, I reply that one judges by the actions it entails. I have never seen anyone die for the ontological argument. 

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Absurdity and Suicide

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