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3 months 3 weeks ago
Good prose is written only face to face with poetry.
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3 months 2 days ago

Those who read and rightly understand my teaching will not start an insurrection; they have not learned that from me.

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p. 65
1 month 2 weeks ago

Are ye come out as against a thief with swords and staves for to take me? I sat daily with you teaching in the temple, and ye laid no hold on me. But all this was done, that the scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled.

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26:55-56 (KJV)
1 week 3 days ago

A small beginning has led us to a great ending. If I were to put the bit of chalk with which we started into the hot but obscure flame of burning hydrogen, it would presently shine like the sun. It seems to me that this physical metamorphosis is no false image of what has been the result of our subjecting it to a jet of fervent, though nowise brilliant, thought to-night. It has become luminous, and its clear rays, penetrating the abyss of the remote past, have brought within our ken some stages of the evolution of the earth. And in the shifting "without haste, but without rest" of the land and sea, as in the endless variation of the forms assumed by living beings, we have observed nothing but the natural product of the forces originally possessed by the substance of the universe.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

The guiding question of Marx's analysis was, How does capitalist society supply its members with the necessary use-values? And the answer disclosed a process of blind necessity, chance, anarchy and frustration. The introduction of the category of use-value was the introduction of a forgotten factor, forgotten, that is, by the classical political economy which was occupied only with the phenomenon of exchange value. In the Marxian theory, this factor becomes an instrument that cuts through the mystifying reification of the commodity world.

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P. 304
1 month 4 weeks ago

No man has received from nature the right to give orders to others. Freedom is a gift from heaven, and every individual of the same species has the right to enjoy it as soon as he is in enjoyment of his reason.

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Article on Political Authority, Vol. 1, (1751) as quoted in Selected Writings (1966) edited by Lester G. Crocker
1 month 3 weeks ago

Whether directly or indirectly all nations are originally nothing but Indian colonies... the oriental antiquity could, if we consented to deepen it, bring us back more safely towards the divine....

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Friedrich Schlegel, Essay on the Language and Wisdom of the Indians, quoted by Roger-Pol Droit in L'Oubli de I'Inde, Paris Presses Universitaires de France, 1989, p. 129.
2 months 2 weeks ago

A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation. So it is not necessary to use force to constrain the convict to good behavior, the madman to calm, the worker to work, the schoolboy to application, the patient to the observation of the regulations.

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Part Four, Complete and austere institutions
3 weeks 6 days ago

Materialism ends up denying the existence of any irreducible subjective qualitative states of sentience or awareness.

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Consciousness and Language (2002) p. 47.
1 month 6 days ago

I believe that love is the main key to open the doors to the "growth" of man. Love and union with someone or something outside of oneself, union that allows one to put oneself into relationship with others, to feel one with others, without limiting the sense of integrity and independence. Love is a productive orientation for which it is essential that there be present at the same time: concern, responsibility, and respect for and knowledge of the object of the union. I believe that the experience of love is the most human and humanizing act that it is given to man to enjoy and that it, like reason, makes no sense if conceived in a partial way.

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3 weeks 3 days ago

If a poor person envies a rich person, he is no better than the rich person.

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p. 89
1 day ago

Talk of secularism is meaningful when it refers to the weakness of traditional religious belief or the lack of power of churches and other religious bodies. That is what is meant when we say Britain is a more secular country than the United States, and in this sense secularism is an achievable condition. But if it means a type of society in which religion is absent, secularism is a kind of contradiction, for it is defined by what it excludes. Post-Christian secular societies are formed by the beliefs they reject, whereas a society that had truly left Christianity behind would lack the concepts that shaped secular thought.

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Post-Apocalypse: After Secularism (pp. 267-8)
1 month 2 weeks ago

Man is fulfilled only when he ceases to be man.

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1 week 3 days ago

The student of development finds, not only that the chick commences its existence as an egg, primarily identical, in all essential respects, with that of the Dog, but that the yelk of this egg undergoes division-that the primitive groove arises, and that the contiguous parts of the germ are fashioned, by precisely similar methods into a young chick, which, at one stage of its existence, is so like the nascent Dog, that ordinary inspection would hardly distinguish the two.

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The history of the development of any other vertebrate animal, Lizard, Snake, Frog, or Fish, tells the same story. Ch.2, p. 79
2 months 4 weeks ago

After experience had taught me that all the usual surroundings of social life are vain and futile; seeing that none of the objects of my fears contained in themselves anything either good or bad, except in so far as the mind is affected by them, I finally resolved to inquire whether there might be some real good having power to communicate itself, which would affect the mind singly, to the exclusion of all else: whether, in fact, there might be anything of which the discovery and attainment would enable me to enjoy continuous, supreme, and unending happiness.

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I, 1
2 months 3 weeks ago

People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

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Worship
2 months 2 weeks ago

I shall develop the thesis that anyone acting communicatively must, in performing any speech act, raise universal validity claims and suppose that they can be vindicated.

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p. 22
2 months 3 weeks ago

The horseman serves the horse, The neatherd serves the neat, The merchant serves the purse, The eater serves his meat; 'Tis the day of the chattel, Web to weave, and corn to grind; Things are in the saddle, And ride mankind.

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Ode: Inscribed to W. H. Channing, st. 7
3 weeks 6 days ago

Today's terrorism is not the product of a traditional history of anarchism, nihilism, or fanaticism. It is instead the contemporary partner of globalization.

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The Spirit of Terrorism (2003) "The Violence of the Global"
2 months 3 weeks ago

Bold ideas, unjustified anticipations, and speculative thought, are our only means for interpreting nature: our only organon, our only instrument, for grasping her. And we must hazard them to win our prize. Those among us who are unwilling to expose their ideas to the hazard of refutation do not take part in the scientific game.

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Ch. 10 "Corroboration, or How a Theory Stands up to Tests", section 85: The Path of Science, p. 280.
1 month 4 weeks ago

The principle of equality does not destroy the imagination, but lowers its flight to the level of the earth.

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Book Three, Chapter XI.
2 months 3 weeks ago

Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

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Wanted, A New Pleasure
1 month 3 weeks ago

Dying people often become childish.

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Act II.
2 months 3 weeks ago

Doctors are men who prescribe medicine of which they know little, to human beings of whom they know less, to cure diseases of which they know nothing.

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Note: This attribution to Voltaire appears in Strauss' Familiar Medical Quotations (1968), p. 394, and in publications as early as 1956
3 months 3 weeks ago

But it is better to assume principles less in number and finite, as Empedocles makes them to be. All philosophers... make principles to be contraries... (for Parmenides makes principles to be hot and cold, and these he demominates fire and earth) as those who introduce as principles the rare and the dense. But Democritus makes the principles to be the solid and the void; of which the former, he says, has the relation of being, and the latter of non-being. ...it is necessary that principles should be neither produced from each other, nor from other things; and that from these all things should be generated. But these requisites are inherent in the first contraries: for, because they are first, they are not from other things; and because they are contraries, they are not from each other.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

On the frontiers of the self: "What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I."

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The coming of Buddhism to the West may well prove to be the most important event of the Twentieth Century.

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In Lama Surya Das, Awakening the Buddha Within
1 month 1 week ago

Eros, erotic desire, conquers depression. It delivers us from the inferno of the same to the utopia, indeed utopia, of the wholly other.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

He lit a lamp in broad daylight and said, as he went about, "I am looking for a human."

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Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 41. This line is frequently translated as "I am looking for an honest man."
3 months 2 days ago

Furthermore, how will you endure [the Romanists'] terrible idolatries? It was not enough that they venerated the saints and praised God in them, but they actually made them into gods. They put that noble child, the mother Mary, right into the place of Christ. They fashioned Christ into a judge and thus devised a tyrant for anguished consciences, so that all comfort and confidence was transferred from Christ to Mary, and then everyone turned from Christ to his particular saint. Can anyone deny this? Is it not true?

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Luther's Works, 47:45; cf. also Anderson, Stafford & Burgess (1992), p. 29
2 months 2 weeks ago

What should we gain by a definition, as it can only lead us to other undefined terms?

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p. 26
3 weeks 1 day ago

Does the interiorization of media such as letters alter the ratio among our senses and change mental processes?

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(p. 28)
2 months 3 weeks ago

A third illusion haunts us, that a long duration, as a year, a decade, a century, is valuable. But an old French sentence says, "God works in moments," - "En peu d'heure Dieu labeure." We ask for long life, but 't is deep life, or grand moments, that signify. Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical. Life is unnecessarily long. Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance, - what ample borrowers of eternity they are! Life culminates and concentrates; and Homer said, "The Gods ever give to mortals their appointed share of reason only on one day."

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Works and Days
2 months 3 weeks ago

Whoever has used what means he is capable of, for the informing of himself, with a readiness to believe and obey what shall be taught and prescribed by Jesus, his Lord and King, is a true and faithful subject of Christ's kingdom; and cannot be thought to fail in any thing necessary to salvation.

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§ 233
2 months 3 weeks ago

They are in bad faith - they are afraid - and fear, bad faith have an aroma that the gods find delicious. Yes, the gods like that, the pitiful souls.

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Act 1
3 months 3 weeks ago

Creationists make it sound as though a "theory" is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken.

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A Fresh Look at Empiricism: 1927-42 (1996), p. 281
2 months 2 weeks ago

The human being is not the lord of beings, but the shepherd of Being.

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Letter on Humanism
2 months 4 weeks ago

The consequences of beliefs that go against the providence of a perfectly good, wise, and just God, or against that immortality of souls which lays them open to the operations of justice.... I even find that somewhat similar opinions, by stealing gradually into the minds of men of high station who rule the rest and on whom affairs depend, and by slithering into fashionable books, are inclining everything toward the universal revolution with which Europe is threatened, and are completing the destruction of what still remains in the world of the generous Greeks and Romans who placed love of country and of the public good, and the welfare of future generations before fortune and even before life.

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Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement humain, 1704
1 month 2 weeks ago

Death is too exact; it has all the reasons on its side. Mysterious for our instincts, it takes shape, to our reflection, limpid, without glamor, and without the false lures of the unknown. By dint of accumulating non-mysteries and monopolizing non-meanings, life inspires more dread than death: it is life which is the Great Unknown.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

I mean, a genuinely productive society. I mean you could produce plenty of goods without much freedom, but I think the whole sort of creative life of man is ultimately impossible without a considerable measure of individual freedom, of initiative, creation, all these things which we value, and I think value properly, are impossible without a large measure of freedom.

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3 months 1 week ago

The inclination to seek the truth is safer than the presumption which regards unknown things as known.

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(Cambridge: 2002), Book 9, Chapter 1, p. 24
2 months 3 weeks ago

Dissimulation is innate in woman, and almost as much a quality of the stupid as of the clever.

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"Of Women"
3 weeks 5 days ago

Whatever the explicit strategic or political aims of a war may be, they prove to be weak in comparison with its aims of destruction; what war destroys first are the very restrictions imposed on destructive license. If we can rightly speak about the unstated "aim" of war, it is neither primarily to alter the political landscape nor to establish a new political order, but rather to destroy the social basis of politics itself.

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p. 154
1 month 2 weeks 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
2 months 3 weeks ago

The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion twenty years later.

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Culture
1 month 1 week ago

The task of power is to transform the always possible 'no' into a 'yes.'

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1 month 3 weeks ago

It is better to be unhappy and know the worst, than to be happy in a fool's paradise!

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Part 4, Chapter 5
3 months 2 days ago

I want death to find me planting my cabbages.

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Ch. 20. Of the Force of Imagination (tr. Donald M. Frame)
2 months 1 day ago

Coulson Turnbull in Life and Teachings of Giordano Bruno : Philosopher, Martyr, Mystic 1548 - 1600 (1913), p. 41

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