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6 months 2 weeks ago

I must plunge into the water of doubt again and again.

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Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 119
4 months 1 week ago

Man is the creature of circumstances.

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"The Philanthropist"
5 months 5 days ago

He who bases or thinks he bases his conduct - his inward or his outward conduct, his feeling or his action - upon a dogma or a principle which he deems incontrovertible, runs the risk of becoming a fanatic, and moreover, the moment that this dogma is weakened or shattered, the morality based upon it gives way. If the earth that he thought firm begins to rock, he himself trembles at the earthquake, for we do not all come up to the standard of the ideal Stoic who remains undaunted among the ruins of a world shattered into atoms. Happily the stuff that is underneath a man's ideas will save him. For if a man should tell you that he does not defraud or cuckold his best friend only because he is afraid of hell, you may depend upon it that neither would he do so even if he were to cease to believe in hell, but that he would invent some other excuse instead. And this is all to the honor of the human race.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

To live each day as though one's last, never flustered, never apathetic, never attitudinizing - here is perfection of character.

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VII, 69
6 months 2 weeks ago

Money is always to be found when men are to be sent to the frontiers to be destroyed: when the object is to preserve them, it is no longer so.

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"Charity", 1770
6 months 2 weeks ago

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

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March 1845
3 months 3 days 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

The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact, though that fact be his neighbor, there is an unsettled wilderness between him and Canada, between him and the setting sun, or, farther still, between him and it.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

By means of the new education we want to mould the Germans into a corporate body, which shall be stimulated and animated in all its individual members by the same interest.

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Introduction p. 15
6 months 2 weeks ago

In reality, the labourer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital.

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Vol. I, Ch. 23, pg. 633.
6 months 1 week ago

Ethics seems a morass which we have to cross, but get hopelessly bogged in when we make the attempt.

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Chapter 6, A New Understanding Of Ethics, p. 167
3 months 2 weeks ago

The capitalist call workers to the factory, for example, directing them to collaborate and communicate in production and giving them the means to do so. In the paradigm of immaterial production, in contrast, labor itself tends to produce the means of interaction, communication, and cooperation for production directly. Affective labor always directly constructs a relationship.

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147
6 months 2 weeks ago

I think He made one law of that kind in order that there might be obedience. In all these other matters what you call obeying Him is but doing what seems good in your eyes also. Is love content with that? You do them, indeed, because they are His will, but not only because they are his will. Where can you taste the joy of obeying unless he bids you do something for which His bidding is the only reason?

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4 months 4 weeks ago

Reason now gazes above the realm of the dark but warm feelings as the Alpine peaks do above the clouds. They behold the sun more clearly and distinctly, but they are cold and unfruitful.

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L 50
5 months 4 days ago

In order to be exercised, the intelligence requires to be free to express itself without control by any authority. There must therefore be a domain of pure intellectual research, separate but accessible to all, where no authority intervenes. The human soul has need of some solitude and privacy and also of some social life.The human soul has need of both personal property and collective property.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Life is writing. The sole purpose of mankind is to engrave the thoughts of divinity onto the tablets of nature.

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"On Philosophy: To Dorothea," in Theory as Practice (1997), p. 420
5 months 1 day ago

The history of the American kings of capital and authority is the history of repeated crimes, injustice, oppression, outrage, and abuse, all aiming at the suppression of individual liberties and the exploitation of the people. A vast country, rich enough to supply all her children with all possible comforts, and insure well-being to all, is in the hands of a few, while the nameless millions are at the mercy of ruthless wealth gatherers, unscrupulous lawmakers, and corrupt politicians.The reign of these kings is holding mankind in slavery, perpetuating poverty and disease, maintaining crime and corruption; it is fettering the spirit of liberty, throttling the voice of justice, and degrading and oppressing humanity. It is engaged in continual war and slaughter, devastating the country and destroying the best and finest qualities of man; it nurtures superstition and ignorance, sows prejudice and strife, and turns the human family into a camp of Ishmaelites.

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5 months 1 week ago

We return to our analysis of qualities. Something preserves itself throughout this flux, something that passes into other things, but also stands against them as a being for itself. This something can exist only as the product of a process through which it integrates its otherness with its own proper being. Hegel says that its existence comes about through 'the negation of the negation.' The first negation is the otherness in which it turns, and the second is the incorporation of this other into its own self. Such a process presupposes that things possess a certain power over their movement, that they exist in a certain self-relation that enables them to 'mediate' their existential conditions.

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P. 132-133
5 months 3 weeks ago

Around us knowledge has been extinguished, and recruitment of men of religion and men of law has ceased; that is to say, we have made Muslim society much more miserable, more disordered, more ignorant, and more barbarous than it had been before knowing us.

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Travail sur l'Algerie, Travels in Algeria p. 185
6 months 2 weeks ago

Need-love cries to God from our poverty; Gift-love longs to serve, or even to suffer for, God; Appreciative love says: "We give thanks to thee for thy great glory." Need-love says of a woman "I cannot live without her"; Gift-love longs to give her happiness, comfort, protection - if possible, wealth; Appreciative love gazes and holds its breath and is silent, rejoices that such a wonder should exist even if not for him, will not be wholly dejected by losing her, would rather have it so than never to have seen her at all.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

There is a limit to the time assigned you, and if you don't use it to free yourself it will be gone and never return.

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(Hays translation) II, 4
4 months 2 weeks ago

Casting my perils before swains.

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7 months 3 weeks ago
Arrogance on the part of the meritorious is even more offensive to us than the arrogance of those without merit: for merit itself is offensive.
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4 months 2 weeks ago

Life is short, but its ills make it seem long.

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Maxim 124
5 months 1 week ago

This heaven will pass away, and the one above it will pass away. The dead are not alive, and the living will not die. In the days when you consumed what is dead, you made it what is alive. When you come to dwell in the light, what will you do? On the day when you were one you became two. But when you become two, what will you do?

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4 months 1 week ago

A civilization is a social entity that manifests religious, political , legal, and customary uniformity over an extended period, and which confers on its members the benefits of socially accumulated knowledge.

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"What is Culture?" (p. 2)
6 months 6 days ago

The only roads of enquiry there are to think of: one, that it is and that it is not possible for it not to be, this is the path of persuasion (for truth is its companion); the other, that it is not and that it must not be - this I say to you is a path wholly unknowable.

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Frag. B 2.2-6, quoted by Proclus, Commentary on the Timaeus I, 345
6 months 3 weeks ago

The great end of all human industry, is the attainment of happiness. For this were arts invented, sciences cultivated, laws ordained, and societies modelled, by the most profound wisdom of patriots and legislators.

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Part I, Essay 16: The Stoic
7 months 2 weeks ago

For whoever has what he has from the God himself clearly has it at first hand; and he who does not have it from the God himself is not a disciple. Let us assume that it is otherwise, that the contemporary generation of disciples had received the condition from the God, and that the subsequent generations were to receive it from these contemporaries, what would follow?

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5 months 1 week ago

Reason ... contradicts the established order of men and things on behalf of existing societal forces that reveal the irrational character of this order - for "rational" is a mode of thought and action which is geared to reduce ignorance, destruction, brutality, and oppression.

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pp. 141-142
6 months 2 weeks 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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3 months 3 days ago

I do not know whether I shall make progress; but I should prefer to lack success rather than to lack faith.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

To speak impartially, the best men that I know are not serene, a world in themselves. For the most part, they dwell in forms, and flatter and study effect only more finely than the rest. We select granite for the underpinning of our houses and barns; we build fences of stone; but we do not ourselves rest on an underpinning of granitic truth, the lowest primitive rock. Our sills are rotten.

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p. 490
2 months 2 weeks ago

The good old Dominion, the blessed mother of us all.

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"Thoughts on Lotteries", 1826
7 months 2 weeks ago

Death induces the sensual person to say: Let us eat and drink, because tomorrow we shall die – but this is sensuality's cowardly lust for life, that contemptible order of things where one lives in order to eat and drink instead of eating and drinking in order to live.

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5 months 1 week ago

The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few; Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers into his harvest.

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9:37-38 (KJV)
6 months 2 weeks ago

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

The possibility of democracy on a global scale is emerging today for the very first time.

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(xi)
6 months 2 weeks ago

I hear beyond the range of sound, I see beyond the range of sight,New earths and skies and seas around, And in my day the sun doth pale his light.

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"Inspiration", in An American Anthology, 1900
7 months 1 week ago

All human laws are nourished by one divine law.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Pass by us, and forgive us our happiness.

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Part 4, Chapter 5
7 months 1 week ago

I am not bothered by the fact that I am not understood. I am bothered when I do not know others.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Night is falling: at dusk, you must have good eyesight to be able to tell the Good Lord from the Devil.

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Act 10, sc. 2
6 months 1 week ago

The core of ethics runs deep in our species and is common to human beings everywhere. It survives the most appalling hardships and the most ruthless attempts to deprive human beings of their humanity. Nevertheless, some people resist the idea that his core has a biological basis which we have inherited from our pre-human ancestors.

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Chapter 2, The Biological Basis Of Ethics, p. 27
2 months 1 week ago

...to the question whether or not the motion of the Earth in space can be made perceptible in terrestrial experiments. We have already remarked... that all attempts of this nature led to a negative result. Before the theory of relativity was put forward, it was difficult to become reconciled to this negative result.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Law could never, by determining exactly what is noblest and must just for one and all, enjoin upon them that which is best; for the differences of men and of actions and the fact that nothing, I may say, in human life is ever at rest, forbid any science whatsoever to promulgate any simple rule for everything and for all time. So, that which is persistently simple is inapplicable to things which are never simple.

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6 months 1 week ago

With deep roots Ether plunged into earth.

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fr. 54
6 months 2 weeks ago

How you produce volume after volume the way you do is more than I can conceive. ...But you haven't to forge every sentence in the teeth of irreducible and stubborn facts as I do. It is like walking through the densest brush wood.

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Letter to Henry James (ca. 1890) as quoted by Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (2007) p. 297.

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