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9 months ago

Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books.

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Proposition touching Amendment of Laws
8 months 4 weeks ago

No matter that we may mount on stilts, we still must walk on our own legs. And on the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.

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Ch. 13
9 months 2 weeks ago

Titles are an important part of a story and I take considerable care in choosing one. In fact, I cannot start a story until I have chosen a title.

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8 months 3 weeks ago

Let him sensibly perceive, that the kindness he shews to others, is no ill husbandry for himself; but that it brings a return in kindness both from those that receive it, and those who look on. Make this a contest among children, who shall out-do one another in this way: and by this means, by a constant practise, children having made it easy to themselves to part with what they have, good nature may be settled in them into a habit, and they may take pleasure, and pique themselves in being kind, liberal and civil, to others.

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Sec. 110
5 months 2 days ago

The great fault of all ethics hitherto has been that they believed themselves to have to deal only with the relations of man to man. In reality, however, the question is what is his attitude to the world and all life that comes within his reach. A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, and that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help. Only the universal ethic of the feeling of responsibility in an ever-widening sphere for all that lives - only that ethic can be founded in thought. ... The ethic of Reverence for Life, therefore, comprehends within itself everything that can be described as love, devotion, and sympathy whether in suffering, joy, or effort.

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Ch. 13, p. 188
6 months 3 weeks ago

When a person is haughty, he distances himself from other people and thereby deprives himself of one of life's biggest pleasures-open, joyful communication with everyone.

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p. 108

To receive applause for works which do not demand all our powers hinders our advance towards a perfecting of our spirit. It usually means that thereafter we stand still.

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K 42
7 months 1 week ago

Of all Discourse, governed by desire of Knowledge, there is at last an End, either by attaining, or by giving over.

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The First Part, Chapter 7, p. 30
9 months 2 weeks ago

The purpose of aphorisms is to keep fools who have memorised them from having nothing to say.

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9 months 1 week ago

Be loyal and trustworthy. Do not befriend anyone who is lower than yourself in this regard. When making a mistake, do not be afraid to correct it.

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4 months 1 week ago

As an eminent pioneer in the realm of high frequency currents... I congratulate you on the great successes of your life's work.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Pierre, who from the moment Prince Andrew entered the room had watched him with glad, affectionate eyes, now came up and took his arm. Before he looked round Prince Andrew frowned again, expressing his annoyance with whoever was touching his arm, but when he saw Pierre's beaming face he gave him an unexpectedly kind and pleasant smile. "There now!... So you, too, are in the great world?" said he to Pierre. "I knew you would be here," replied Pierre. "I will come to supper with you. May I?" he added in a low voice so as not to disturb the vicomte who was continuing his story. "No, impossible!" said Prince Andrew, laughing and pressing Pierre's hand to show that there was no need to ask the question. He wished to say something more, but at that moment Prince Vasíli and his daughter got up to go and the two young men rose to let them pass.

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Bk. I, Ch. IV
8 months 1 week ago

When some one boasted that at the Pythian games he had vanquished men, Diogenes replied, "Nay, I defeat men, you defeat slaves."

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Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 33, 43
7 months 4 days ago

Truths dead and forgotten long ago, conceptions of the world and its people, covered with mould, even during the times of our grandmothers, are being hammered into the heads of our young generation.

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7 months 1 week ago

A terrible thing is intelligence. It tends to death as memory tends to stability. The living, the absolutely unstable, the absolutely individual, is strictly unintelligible. Logic tends to reduce everything to identities and genera, to each representation having no more than one self-same content in whatever place, time or relation it may occur to us. And there is nothing that remains for two successive moments of its existence. My idea of God is different each time that I conceive it. Identity, which is death, is the goal of the intellect. The mind seeks what is dead, for what is living escapes it; it seeks to congeal the flowing stream in blocks of ice; it seeks to arrest it. In order to analyze a body it is necessary to extenuate or destroy it. In order to understand anything it is necessary to kill it, to lay it out rigid in the mind.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

The precise reason why abstinence from animal food will be the first act ... of a moral life is admirably explained in the book, The Ethics of Diet [by Howard Williams]; and not by one man only, but by all mankind in the persons of its best representatives during all the conscious life of humanity. ... the moral progress of humanity - which is the foundation of every other kind of progress - is always slow; but ... the sign of true, not casual, progress is its uninterruptedness and its continual acceleration. And the progress of vegetarianism is of this kind. That progress, is expressed both in the words of the writers cited in the above-mentioned book and in the actual life of mankind, which from many causes is involuntarily passing metre and more from carnivorous habits to vegetable food, and is also deliberately following the same path in a movement which shows evident strength, and which is growing larger and larger - viz., vegetarianism.

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Ch. X
5 months 1 week ago

His Religion is not an easy one: with rigorous fasts, lavations, strict complex formulas, prayers five times a day, and abstinence from wine, it did not "succeed by being an easy religion." As if indeed any religion, or cause holding of religion, could succeed by that! It is a calumny on men to say that they are roused to heroic action by ease, hope of pleasure, recompense, - sugar-plums of any kind, in this world or the next! In the meanest mortal there lies something nobler.

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8 months 1 week ago

The essence of the belief that bats have experience is that there is something that it is like to be a bat. Now we know that most bats (the microchiroptera, to be precise) perceive the external world primarily by sonar, or echolocation. ... But bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine. This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat.

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p. 168.
9 months 5 days ago

Yet God hath not only granted these faculties, by which we may bear every event without being depressed or broken by it, but like a good prince and a true father, hath placed their exercise above restraint, compulsion, or hindrance, and wholly within our own control.

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Book I, ch. 6, 40.
7 months 3 weeks ago

Humiliate the reason and distort the soul...

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Part 2, Chapter ?
7 months 4 days ago

The Outsider may be an artist, but the artist is not necessarily an Outsider.

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Chapter one, The Country of the Blind
7 months 2 weeks ago

From the cradle to the grave, each individual pays for the sin of not being God. That's why life is an uninterrupted religious crisis, superficial for believers, shattering for doubters.

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8 months 3 weeks ago

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

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Section 1, paragraph 1, lines 1-2.
5 months 1 week ago

No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.

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Bk. I, ch. 4.
7 months 1 week ago

We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them. Man cannot discover them by his own powers, and if he sets out to seek for them he will find in their place counterfeits of which he will be unable to discern falsity.

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5 months 1 week ago

Such souls are, in these days, getting somewhat out of humour with the world. Your very Byron, in these days, is at least driven mad; flatly refuses fealty to the world. The world with its injustices, its golden brutalities, and dull yellow guineas, is a disgust to such souls: the ray of Heaven that is in them does at least pre-doom them to be very miserable here. Yes:-and yet all misery is faculty misdirected, strength that has not yet found its way. The black whirlwind is mother of the lightning. No smoke, in any sense, but can become flame and radiance! Such soul, once graduated in Heaven's stern University, steps out superior to your guinea.

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8 months 3 weeks ago

Never read any book that is not a year old.

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Books
7 months 1 week ago

Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.

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The Psychoanalysis of Fire, ch. 2, "Fire and Reverie"
7 months 2 weeks ago

A character is a completely fashioned will.

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(vollkommen gebildeter Wille).
7 months 2 weeks ago

If someone incessantly drops the word "life," you know he's a sick man.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

Do not allow your dreams of a beautiful world to lure you away from the claims of men who suffer here and now.

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p. 485
4 months 3 weeks ago

The truth is, that the greatest enemies of the doctrine of Jesus are those, calling themselves the expositors of them, who have perverted them to the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in his genuine words. And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter ... But may we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated reformer of human errors.

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Letter to John Adams (11 April 1823) (Scan at The Library of Congress)
8 months 3 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
7 months 5 days ago

The new tinge to modern minds is a vehement and passionate interest in the relation of general principles to irreducible and stubborn facts. All the world over and at all times there have been practical men, absorbed in 'irreducible and stubborn facts'; all the world over and at all times there have been men of philosophic temperament, who have been absorbed in the weaving of general principles. It is this union of passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal devotion to abstract generalisation which forms the novelty of our present society.

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Ch. 1: "The Origins of Modern Science", pp. 3-4
4 months 3 weeks ago

Philological analogies are to be preserved if possible, but modified according to scientific convenience.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

Her face seems ravaged by both lightning and hail. But on yours there is something like the promise of a storm: one day passion will burn it to the bone.

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Act 1
6 months 2 weeks ago

Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the electronic world.

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(p. 30)
9 months 5 days ago

Although life is a matter of indifference, the use which you make of it is not a matter of indifference.

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Book II, ch. 6, 1.
4 months 3 weeks ago

The government of the United States have no idea of paying their debt in a depreciated medium, and... in the final liquidation of the payments which shall have been made, due regard will be had to an equitable allowance for the circumstance of depreciation.

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Letter to Jean Baptiste de Ternant, 1791. ME 8:247
5 months 2 weeks ago

Empire is a very stimulating account of globalisation, but it is hopelessly wrong on two central issues. The state has not withered away. Strong states still exist-USA, China, Germany, etc-but the difference with the past is that there is now only one Empire and this is not the nebulous entity imagined by Cultural Studies, but a real, living organism and it has a name; the United States of America.

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Tariq Ali, How Bush Used 9/11 to Remap the World. CounterPunch, 8 July 2002.
7 months 4 days ago

Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labelled Utopian.

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"Socialism: Caught in the Political Trap", a lecture (c. 1912), published in Red Emma Speaks, Part 1 (1972) edited by Alix Kates Shulman
6 months 2 weeks ago

It is an article of passionate faith among "politically correct" biologists and anthropologists that brain size has no connection with intelligence; that intelligence has nothing to do with genes; and that genes are probably nasty fascist things anyway.

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9 months 1 week ago

All people respect and love their own parents and children, as well as the parents and children of others.

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8 months 3 weeks ago

The beauty or uncomeliness of many things, in good and ill breeding, will be better learnt, and make deeper impressions on them, in the examples of others, than from any rules or instructions can be given about them.

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Sec. 82
9 months ago

We are wont to call that human reasoning which we apply to Nature the anticipation of Nature (as being rash and premature) and that which is properly deduced from things the interpretation of Nature.

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5 months 1 week ago

Let us ask the Gods not for possessions, but for things to do; happiness is in making things rather than consuming them.

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Ch. 2 : On Youth
5 months 6 days ago

Everything sacred is a tie, a fetter.

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Cambridge 1995, p. 192

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