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8 months 1 week ago

Happy is the one in whom there is true sorrow over his sin, so that the extreme unimportance to him of everything else is only the negative expression of the confirmation that one thing is unconditionally important to him, so that the unconditional unimportance to him of everything else is a deadly sickness that still is very far from being a sickness unto death but is precisely unto life, because the life is in this, that one thing is unconditionally important to him: to find forgiveness.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Sobriety is the strength of the soul, for it preserves its reason unclouded by passion.

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As quoted in The History of Philosophy: From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Present Century (1819) by William Enfield Sobriety is the strength of the mind
3 months 2 weeks ago

Warrior spirit is characterised by direct, clear and loyal relations, based on fidelity and honour and a sound instinct for the various dignities, which it can well distinguish: it opposes everything which is impersonal and trivial.

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p. 117
2 weeks 2 days ago

I'm tempted to say all life is sacred...but, do we neeeeed ticks.....

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7 months 1 week ago

As we passed under the last bridge over the canal, just before reaching the Merrimack, the people coming out of church paused to look at us from above, and apparently, so strong is custom, indulged in some heathenish comparisons; but we were the truest observers of this sunny day.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Do not be arrogant because of your knowledge, but confer with the ignorant man as with the learned. For knowledge has no limits, and none has yet achieved perfection in it. Good speech is more hidden than malachite, yet it is found in the possession of women slaves at the millstones.

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Maxim no. 1.
5 months 2 weeks ago

On the whole, the scientist is better off if he collects his facts by accident, little by little, so he can study them before he tries to fit them into a jigsaw puzzle, This is how the late Tom Lethbridge came to arrive at his theories about other dimensions of reality. It is also how Guy Lyon Playfair came to develop his own theories about the nature of the poltergeist.

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p. 196
6 months 4 days ago

The peoples' revolution .... will arrange its revolutionary organisation from the bottom up and from the periphery to the centre, in keeping with the principle of liberty.

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8 months 4 days ago

Writing is hard work. The fact that I love doing it doesn't make it less hard work. People who love tennis will sweat themselves to exhaustion playing it, and the love of the game doesn't stop the sweating. The casual assumption that writers are unemployed bums because they don't go to the office and don't have a boss is something every writer has to live with. I have never known a writer who hasn't suffered as a result of this, hasn't resented it, and hasn't dreamed of murdering the next person who says "Boy, you've sure got it made. You just sit there and toss off a story or something whenever you feel like it."

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7 months 3 weeks ago

All human laws are nourished by one divine law.

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7 months 1 week ago

Manufacture was all the time sheltered by protective duties in the hoe market, by monopolies in the colonial market, and broad as much as possible by differential duties.

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ibid, pp. 183
6 months 2 days ago

Since the only things we remember are humiliations and defeats, what is the use of all the rest?

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7 months 3 weeks ago

The wise is one only. It is unwilling and willing to be called by the name of Zeus.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Is it not a noble farce, wherein kings, republics, and emperors have for so many ages played their parts, and to which the whole vast universe serves for a theatre?

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Book II, Ch. 36. Of the most Excellent Men
7 months 3 weeks ago

A hymn is the praise of God with song; a song is the exultation of the mind dwelling on eternal things, bursting forth in the voice.

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Commentary on the Psalms (c. 1273), Introduction
5 months 3 weeks ago

Einstein analyses the ideas of time-order and of simultaneity. Primarily (according to his analysis) time-order only refers to the succession of events at a given place. Accordingly each given place has its own time-order. But these time-orders are not independent in the system of nature, and their correlation is known to us by means of physical measurement. Now ultimately all physical measurement depends upon coincidence in time and place.

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p. 51
7 months 1 week ago

Hatred, as well as love, renders its votaries credulous.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Immature love says: "I love you because I need you." Mature love says: "I need you because I love you."

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Ch. 2
7 months 1 week ago

Beneficence is a duty. He who often practices this, and sees his beneficent purpose succeed, comes at last really to love him whom he has benefited. When, therefore, it is said, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," this does not mean, "Thou shalt first of all love, and by means of love (in the next place) do him good"; but: "Do good to thy neighbour, and this beneficence will produce in thee the love of men (as a settled habit of inclination to beneficence)."

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Metaphysical Elements of Ethics (1780). Translated by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott, translation available at Philosophy.eserver.org. From section "Preliminary Notions of the Susceptibility of the Mind for Notions of Duty Generally", Part C ("Of love to men")
3 months 2 weeks ago

And the simple step of a simple courageous man is not to partake in falsehood, not to support false actions! Let THAT enter the world, let it even reign in the world - but not with my help. But writers and artists can achieve more: they can CONQUER FALSEHOOD! In the struggle with falsehood art always did win and it always does win! Openly, irrefutably for everyone! Falsehood can hold out against much in this world, but not against art. And no sooner will falsehood be dispersed than the nakedness of violence will be revealed in all its ugliness - and violence, decrepit, will fall.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

Bourgeois political economy ... never gets to see man who is its real subject. It disregards the essence of man and his history and is thus in the profoundest sense not a 'science of people' but of non-people and of an inhuman world of objects and commodities.

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"The Foundations of Historical Materialism," Studies in Critical Philosophy (1972), p. 9
3 months 6 days ago

That we are overdone with banking institutions which have banished the precious metals and substituted a more fluctuating and unsafe medium, that these have withdrawn capital from useful improvements and employments to nourish idleness, that the wars of the world have swollen our commerce beyond the wholesome limits of exchanging our own productions for our own wants, and that, for the emolument of a small proportion of our society who prefer these demoralizing pursuits to labors useful to the whole, the peace of the whole is endangered and all our present difficulties produced, are evils more easily to be deplored than remedied.

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Letter to Abbe Salimankis, 1810. ME 12:379
5 months 6 days ago

We know very well that we are only allowed to go on eating our dinner, to finish seeing the new play, or to enjoy to the end the ball, the Christmas fete, the promenade, the races or, the hunt, thanks to the policeman's revolver or the soldier's rifle, which will shoot down the famished outcast who has been robbed of his share, and who looks round the corner with covetous eyes at our pleasures, ready to interrupt them instantly, were not policeman and soldier there prepared to run up at our first call for help.

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Chapter XII, Conclusion-Repent Ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at Hand
7 months 6 days ago

I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.

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par. 15
6 months 3 weeks ago

We do not have to make self- sacrifice a necessary element of altruism. We can regard people as altruists because of the kind of interests they have rather than because they are sacrificing their interests.

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Chapter 9: Altruism and Happiness (p. 103)
7 months 1 week ago

In spite of Death, the mark and seal of the parental control, Man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticise, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings.

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p 186
8 months 3 days ago

Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful.

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This quote is deceptively simple. There are not many people that could write from this place....

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5 months 4 weeks ago

But to manipulate men, to propel them towards goals which you - the social reformer - see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them.

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7 months 1 week ago

A company of solemn tyrants is impervious to all seductions.

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"Tyranny", 1764
6 months 2 days ago

It is unjust to call imaginary the diseases which are, on the contrary, only too real, since they proceed from our mind, the only regulator of our equilibrium and our health.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

I believe that man is in the last resort so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested.

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L 98
8 months 4 days ago

Predicting the future is a hopeless, thankless task, with ridicule to begin with and, all too often, scorn to end with.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

The Apostle says: I make up in my flesh what is lacking to the sufferings of Christ (Col. 1:24). I make up, he tells us, not what is lacking to my sufferings, but what is lacking to the sufferings of Christ; not in Christ flesh, but in mine. not in Christ's flesh, but in mine. Christ is still suffering, not in His own flesh which He took with Him into heaven, but in my flesh, which is still suffering on earth.

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p.423
7 months 1 week ago

We are not that we are, nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for that we are capable of being.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 37
8 months 1 week ago

Once in his early youth a man allowed himself to be so far carried away in an overwrought irresponsible state as to visit a prostitute. It is all forgotten. Now he wants to get married. Then anxiety stirs. He is tortured day and night with the thought that he might possibly be a father, that somewhere in the world there could be a created being who owed his life to him. He cannot share his secret with anyone; he does not even have any reliable knowledge of the fact. –For this reason the incident must have involved a prostitute and taken place in the wantonness of youth; had it been a little infatuated or an actual seduction, it would be hard to imagine that he could know nothing about it, but now this this very ignorance is the basis of his agitated torment. On the other hand, precisely because of the rashness of the whole affair, his misgivings do not really start until he actually falls in love.

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1 month 1 week ago

This is closer to the truth about poverty. The other day there was a quote that said poverty made people "light of heart"...I forget who said it.....

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5 months 2 weeks ago

We Americans claim to be a peace-loving people. We hate bloodshed; we are opposed to violence. Yet we go into spasms of joy over the possibility of projecting dynamite bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens. We are ready to hang, electrocute, or lynch anyone, who, from economic necessity, will risk his own life in the attempt upon that of some industrial magnate. Yet our hearts swell with pride at the thought that America is becoming the most powerful nation on earth, and that it will eventually plant her iron foot on the necks of all other nations. Such is the logic of patriotism.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Has any man, or any society of men, a truth to speak, a piece of spiritual work to do; they can nowise proceed at once and with the mere natural organs, but must first call a public meeting, appoint committees, issue prospectuses, eat a public dinner; in a word, construct or borrow machinery, wherewith to speak it and do it. Without machinery, they were hopeless, helpless.

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7 months 1 week ago

Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 95
7 months 2 weeks ago

The hair is the finest ornament women have. . . . I like women to let their hair fall down their back, it is a most agreeable sight.

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-- Table Talk, quoted in Luther On "Woman"
7 months 1 week ago

When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others. It is much more nearly certain that we are assembled here tonight than it is that this or that political party is in the right. Certainly there are degrees of certainty, and one should be very careful to emphasize that fact, because otherwise one is landed in an utter skepticism, and complete skepticism would, of course, be totally barren and completely useless.

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"Skepticism"
7 months 2 weeks ago

I am further of opinion that it would be better for us to have [no laws] at all than to have them in so prodigious numbers as we have.

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Book III, Ch. 13. Of Experience
6 months 4 days ago

The spirit of Poesy is the morning light, which makes the Statue of Memnon sound.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

A theologian is born by living, nay dying and being damned, not by thinking, reading, or speculating.

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