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2 months 5 days ago

Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope. Give us leave to live! The eternity that is like an eternal present, without memory and without hope, is death. Thus do ideas exist in the God-Idea, but not thus do men live in the living God, in the God-Man.

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2 months 1 week ago

Hegel's philosophy was an integral part of the culture which authoritarianism had to overcome. It is therefore no accident that the National Socialist assault on Hegel begins with the repudiation of his political theory.

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P. 411
4 months 1 week ago

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

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3 months 3 weeks ago

A criminal who, having renounced reason ... hath, by the unjust violence and slaughter he hath committed upon one, declared war against all mankind, and therefore may be destroyed as a lion or tyger, one of those wild savage beasts with whom men can have no society nor security. And upon this is grounded the great law of Nature, "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed."

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Second Treatise of Civil Government, Ch. II, sec. 11
4 months 1 week ago

Justice respects man as living in society, and is the common bond without which no society can subsist.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Man is certainly crazy. He could not make a mite, and he makes gods by the dozen.

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Ch. 12

Joe Hume talked to me very earnestly about the necessity of an union of Liberals. He said much about Ballot and the Franchise. I told him that I could easily come to some compromise with him and his friends on these matters, but that there were other questions about which I feared that there was an irreconcileable difference, particularly the vital question of national defence. He seemed quite confounded, and had absolutely nothing to say. I am fully determined to make them eat their words on that point, or to have no political connection with them.

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Journal entry (November 1852), quoted in George Otto Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, Volume II (1876), p. 368
4 months 1 week ago

It is more shameful to distrust our friends than to be deceived by them.

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2 months 3 days ago

Intolerance is the besetting sin of moral fervour.

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p. 63, Ch. 4
3 months 2 weeks ago

Besides, we should never attempt to balance anybody's misery against somebody else's happiness.

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pp. 486-487
3 months 3 weeks ago

My whole heart and soul are stirred and incensed against the Turks and Mohammed, when I see this intolerable raging of the Devil. Therefore I shall pray and cry to God, nor rest until I know that my cry is heard in heaven.

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Statement while being confined to residence at Coburg, as quoted in History of the Christian Church, (1910) by Philip Schaff, Vol. VII
2 months 4 days ago

The notion of rights is linked with the notion of sharing out, of exchange, of measured quantity. It has a commercial flavor, essentially evocative of legal claims and arguments. Rights are always asserted in a tone of contention; and when this tone is adopted, it must rely upon force in the background, or else it will be laughed at.

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p. 61
2 months 3 days ago

Without doubt, if we are to go back to that ultimate, integral experience, unwarped by the sophistications of theory, that experience whose elucidation is the final aim of philosophy, the flux of things is one ultimate generalization around which we must weave our philosophical system.

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Pt. II, ch. 10, sec. 1.
1 week 3 days ago

It lies deep in our habits, confirmed by all manner of educational and other arrangements for several centuries back, to consider human talent as best of all evincing itself by the faculty of eloquent speech. Our earliest schoolmasters teach us, as the one gift of culture they have, the art of spelling and pronouncing, the rules of correct speech; rhetorics, logics follow, sublime mysteries of grammar, whereby we may not only speak but write. And onward to the last of our schoolmasters in the highest university, it is still intrinsically grammar, under various figures grammar. To speak in various languages, on various things, but on all of them to speak, and appropriately deliver ourselves by tongue or pen,-this is the sublime goal towards which all manner of beneficent preceptors and learned professors, from the lowest hornbook upwards, are continually urging and guiding us.

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4 months 1 day ago

As to the objection that these rules are common in the world, that it is necessary to define every thing and to prove every thing, and that logicians themselves have placed them among their art, I would that the thing were true and that it were so well known... But so little is this the case, that, geometricians alone excepted, who are so few in number that they are a single in a whole nation and long periods of time, we see no others that know it.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Among these Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if He was God. He claims to forgive sins. He says He has always existed. He says He is coming to judge the world at the end of time. Now let us get this clear. Among Pantheists, like the Indians, anyone might say that he was a part of God, or one with God: there would be nothing very odd about it. But this man, since He was a Jew, could not mean that kind of God. God, in their language, meant the Being outside of the world, who had made it and was infinitely different from anything else. And when you have grasped that, you will see that what this man said was, quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips.

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Book II, Chapter 3, "The Shocking Alternative"
2 months 5 days ago

There may be a rationalist who has never wavered in his conviction of the mortality of the soul, and there may be a vitalist who has never wavered in his faith in immortality; but at the most this would prove that just as there are natural monstrosities, so there are those who are stupid as regards heart and feeling, however great their intelligence, and those who are stupid intellectually, however great their virtue. But, in normal cases, I cannot believe those who assure me that never, not in a fleeting moment, not in the hours of direst loneliness and grief, has this murmur of uncertainty breathed upon their consciousness.

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3 days ago

Every rock in the ocean where a cormorant can perch is occupied by our troops - has a governor, deputy-governor, storekeeper, and deputy-storekeeper - and will soon have an archdeacon and a bishop. Military colleges, with thirty-four professors, educating seventeen ensigns per annum, being half an ensign for each professor, with every species of nonsense, athletic, sartorial, and plumigerous.

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Catholics, published in The Edinburgh Review (1827). See The Works of the Rev. Sydney Smith. 2. 1859. p. 123.
2 months 3 weeks ago

I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all.

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Book Three, Chapter XXI.
2 months 2 weeks ago

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to the good.

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Speech in opening the impeachment of Warren Hastings (18 February 1788), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Volume the Tenth (1899), p. 48
1 week 3 days ago

The most remarkable piece of reading that you may be recommended to take and try if you can study is a book by Goethe-one of his last books, which he wrote when he was an old man, about seventy years of age-I think one of the most beautiful he ever wrote, full of mild wisdom, and which is found to be very touching by those who have eyes to discern and hearts to feel it. It is one of the pieces in "Wilhelm Meister's Travels." I read it through many years ago; and, of course, I had to read into it very hard when I was translating it (applause), and it has always dwelt in my mind as about the most remarkable bit of writing that I have known to be executed in these late centuries. I have often said, there are ten pages of that which, if ambition had been my only rule, I would rather have written than have written all the books that have appeared since I came into the world.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

He thinks like a philosopher, but governs like a king.

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Of Frederick the Great XII
3 months 3 weeks ago

I find that the best goodness I have has some tincture of vice.

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Ch. 20
3 months 2 weeks ago

One might say: art shows us the miracles of nature. It is based on the concept of the miracles of nature.

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We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.

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p. 315
4 months 1 week ago

We can open our hearts to God, but only with Divine help.

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q. 24, art. 15, ad 2
3 months 3 weeks ago

There is a sort of gratification in doing good which makes us rejoice in ourselves.

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Book III, Ch. 2
2 months 2 days ago

The outsider, Haller says, is a self-divided man; being self-divided, his chief desire is to be unified. He is selfish as a man with a lifelong raging toothache.

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Chapter Three, The Romantic Outsider
1 month 1 week ago

The errors of the times of superstition and bigotry still hold some sway, and compel those who wish to preserve a regard to their respectability in society to an over strained demeanor; and this demeanor sometimes degenerates into hypocrisy, and is often the cause of great inconsistency. It is destructive of every open, honest, generous, and manly feeling. It disgusts many, and drives them to the opposite extreme. It is sometimes the cause of insanity. It is founded in ignorance. While erroneous customs prevail in any country, it would evince an ignorance of human nature in any individual to offend against them, until he has convinced the community of their error.

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Essay Third
3 months 2 weeks ago

Our elucidations of the preliminary concept of phenomenology show that its essential character does not consist in its actuality as a philosophical "movement." Higher than actuality stands possibility. We can understand phenomenology solely by seizing upon it as a possibility.

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Introduction: The Exposition of the Question of the Meaning of Being (Stambaugh translation)
3 months 2 weeks ago

There was once a millionaire who bought an infinite number of pairs of shoes and, whenever he bought a pair of shoes, he also bought a pair of socks. We can make a selection choosing one out of each pair of shoes, because we can choose always the right shoe or always the left shoe. Thus, so far as the shoes are concerned, selections exist. But, as regards the socks, where there is no distinction of right and left, we cannot use this rule of selection.

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pp. 93-93
3 months 2 weeks ago

His obedience is real since he really and truly fulfills his mission, since he runs real risks in order to carry out the beloved's orders. But, on the other hand, it is imaginary because he submits only to a creature of his mind.

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p. 152
3 months 1 week ago

It is often remarked that nothing we do now will matter in a million years. But if that is true, then by the same token, nothing that will be the case in a million years matters now.

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"The Absurd" (1971), p. 11.
3 months 2 weeks ago

Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very beginning that all living is relationship. Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village and in the country around it. Rub it in.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.

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Act 1
2 months 1 week ago

Jesus answered: "Believe me, Barnabas that I cannot weep as much as I ought. For if men had not called me God, I should have seen God here as he will be seen in paradise, and should have been safe not to fear the day of judgment. But God knows that I am innocent, because never have I harboured thought to be held more than a poor slave. No, I tell you that if I had not been called God I should have been carried into paradise when I shall depart from the world, whereas now I shall not go thither until the judgment. Now you see if I have cause to weep."

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Ch. 112
3 months 2 weeks ago

Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.

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Letter XVI
2 months 2 weeks ago

You seek life, and a godly fire Gushes and gleams for you out of the earth, As, with shuddering long, you Hurl yourself down to the flames of the Etna. So by a queen's wanton whim Pearls were dissolved in wine- heed her not! What folly, poet, to cast your riches Into that bright and bubbling cup! Yet still are you holy to me, as the might of the earth That bore you away, audaciously perishing! And I would follow the hero into the depths Did love not hold me.

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"Empedokles"
3 months 3 weeks ago

In such a chain, too, or succession of objects, each part is caused by that which preceded it, and causes that which succeeds it. Where then is the difficulty? But the WHOLE, you say, wants a cause. I answer, that the uniting of these parts into a whole, like the uniting of several distinct countries into one kingdom, or several distinct members into one body, is performed merely by an arbitrary act of the mind, and has no influence on the nature of things. Did I show you the particular causes of each individual in a collection of twenty particles of matter, I should think it very unreasonable, should you afterwards ask me, what was the cause of the whole twenty. This is sufficiently explained in explaining the cause of the parts.

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Cleanthes to Demea, Part IX
3 months 3 weeks ago

Sophistry is only fit to make men more conceited in their ignorance.

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You see that man can endure toil: Cato, on foot, led an army through African deserts. You see that thirst can be endured: he marched over sun-baked hills, dragging the remains of a beaten army and with no train of supplies, undergoing lack of water and wearing a heavy suit of armour; always the last to drink of the few springs which they chanced to find. You see that honour, and dishonour too, can be despised: for they report that on the very day when Cato was defeated at the elections, he played a game of ball. You see also that man can be free from fear of those above him in rank: for Cato attacked Caesar and Pompey simultaneously, at a time when none dared fall foul of the one without endeavouring to oblige the other. You see that death can be scorned as well as exile: Cato inflicted exile upon himself and finally death, and war all the while.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

One of the ideas I had discussed in The Poverty of Historicism was the influence of a prediction upon the event predicted. I had called this the "Oedipus effect", because the oracle played a most important role in the sequence of events which led to the fulfilment of its prophecy. ... For a time I thought that the existence of the Oedipus effect distinguished the social from the natural sciences. But in biology, too-even in molecular biology-expectations often play a role in bringing about what has been expected.

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Page 29
4 months 1 week ago

Dogs, also, bark at what they do not know.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

The New Englander is attached to his township because it is strong and independent; he has an interest in it because he shares in its management; he loves it because he has no reason to complain of his lot; he invests his ambition and his future in it; in the restricted sphere within his scope, he learns to rule society; he gets to know those formalities without which freedom can advance only through revolutions, and becoming imbued with their spirit, develops a taste for order, understands the harmony of powers, and in the end accumulates clear, practical ideas about the nature of his duties and the extent of his rights.

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Chapter V.

Soon fades the spell, soon comes the night: Say will it not be then the same, Whether we played the black or white,Whether we lost or won the game?

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Sermon in a Churchyard, st. 8 (1825), quoted in The Miscellaneous Writings of Lord Macaulay, Vol. II (1860), p. 390
3 months 2 weeks ago

No production without a need. But consumption reproduces the need.

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Introduction, p. 12.

I would rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who did not love reading.

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Letter to his Niece, 15 September 1842
2 months 2 weeks ago

Gentlemen, the melancholy event of yesterday reads to us an awful lesson against being too much troubled about any of the objects of ordinary ambition. The worthy gentleman, who has been snatched from us at the moment of the election, and in the middle of contest, whilst his desires were as warm, and his hopes as eager as ours, has feelingly told us, what shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue.

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Speech at Bristol on declining the poll, referring to a Mr. Richard Coombe (9 September 1780), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II (1855), p. 171
4 days ago

The republic is nothing whatever but - absolute monarchy; for it makes no difference whether the monarch is called prince or people, both being a 'majesty'.

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Cambridge 1995, p. 202, 203
4 months 2 weeks ago

A sub-clerk in the post office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them. All experiences are indifferent in this regard. There are some that do either a service or a disservice to man. They do him a service if he is conscious. Otherwise, that has no importance: a man's failures imply judgment, not of circumstances, but of himself.

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