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2 months 3 weeks ago

When speaking of the spiritual nature or the soul, we are referring to that which is "inner" or "new." When speaking of the bodily nature, or that which is flesh and blood, we are referring to that which is called "sensual," "outward," or "old." Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 4:16: "Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day."

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p. 51
2 months 3 weeks ago

Good sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed; for every one thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that those even who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already possess.

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3 weeks 1 day ago

"If he is this good at acting crazy, it's because he is." Nor is military psychology mistaken in this regard: in this sense, all crazy people simulate, and this lack of distinction is the worst kind of subversion. It is against this lack of distinction that classical reason armed itself in all its categories. But it is what today again outflanks them, submerging the principle of truth.

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"The Precession of Simulacra," p. 4
2 months 2 weeks ago

The worst of misfortunes is still a stroke of luck, since one feels oneself living when one experiences it.

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p. 275
2 months 2 weeks ago

Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint.

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As quoted in "Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard on the ethico-religious" by Roe Fremstedal in Ideas in History Vol. 1
2 months 3 weeks ago

The world would be a happier place than it is if acquisitiveness were always stronger than rivalry. But in fact, a great many men will cheerfully face impoverishment if they can thereby secure complete ruin for their rivals. Hence the present level of taxation. Vanity is a motive of immense potency. Anyone who has much to do with children knows how they are constantly performing some antic, and saying "Look at me." "Look at me" is one of the most fundamental desires of the human heart. It can take innumerable forms, from buffoonery to the pursuit of posthumous fame.

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1 month 1 week ago

Coleridge said that every work of art must have about it something not understood to obtain its full effect.

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p. 202
2 months 2 weeks ago

We are apt to imagine that this hubbub of Philosophy, Literature, and Religion, which is heard in pulpits, lyceums, and parlors, vibrates through the universe, and is as catholic a sound as the creaking of the earth's axle. But if a man sleeps soundly, he will forget it all between sunset and dawn.

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January 6, 1842
2 months 3 weeks ago

I must before I die, find some way to say the essential thing that is in me, that I have never said yet - a thing that is not love or hate or pity or scorn, but the very breath of life, fierce and coming from far away, bringing into human life the vastness and fearful passionless force of non-human things...

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p. 261
2 months 3 weeks ago

... a penny saved is better than a penny earned.

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The Duty of a Husband and Wife (17 March 1539), No. 4408. LW 54:337
2 months 3 weeks ago

There cannot any one moral Rule be propos'd, whereof a Man may not justly demand a Reason.

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Book I, Ch. 3, sec. 4
2 months 3 weeks ago

Do not fight against these harmful spells. For you do not know what God wants with them. You do not know the greater divine plan behind it all.

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As attributed by Kai Lehmann, curator of the exhibition "Luther und die Hexen" ("Luther and the witches"). (2013) in "Interview with Dr. Kai Lehmann, curator of the exhibition "Luther und die Hexen" ("Luther and the witches")"
3 months 1 week ago

Guide the people by law, subdue them by punishment; they may shun crime, but will be void of shame. Guide them by example, subdue them by courtesy; they will learn shame, and come to be good.

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2 weeks 2 days ago

The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.

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From tail to tale on the path of pilgrims in life, The Scotsman
2 months 3 weeks ago

There are 80,000 prostitutes in London alone and what are they, if not bloody sacrifices on the altar of monogamy?

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"Of Women"
3 weeks 1 day ago

Nonviolence is not an absolute principle, but an open-ended struggle with violence and its countervailing forces.

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p. 56
2 months 3 weeks ago

The average man's opinions are much less foolish than they would be if he thought for himself: in science, at least, his respect for authority is on the whole beneficial.

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On Education, Especially in Early Childhood (1926), Ch. 2: The Aims of Education, p. 63
3 months 2 days ago

No one is ignorant that there are two avenues by which opinions are received into the soul, which are its two principal powers: the understanding and the will.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

The institution of religion exists only to keep mankind in order, and to make men merit the goodness of God by their virtue. Everything in a religion which does not tend towards this goal must be considered foreign or dangerous.

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"The Ecclesiastical Ministry"
2 months 4 weeks ago

Seek first the virtues of the mind; and other things either will come, or will not be wanted.

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Book II, xxxi
1 month 3 weeks ago

When an opinion has taken root in a democracy and established itself in the minds of the majority, it afterward persists by itself, needing no effort to maintain it since no one attacks it. Those who at first rejected it as false come in the end to adopt it as accepted, and even those who still at the bottom of their hearts oppose it keep their views to themselves, taking great care to avoid a dangerous and futile contest.

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Book Three, Chapter XXI.
2 months 3 weeks ago

Nature offers nothing that can be called this man's rather than another's ; but, under nature, everything belongs to all - that is, they have authority to claim it for themselves. But, under dominion, where it is by common law determined what belongs to this man, and what to that, he is called just who has a constant will to render to every man his own, but he, unjust who strives, on the contrary, to make his own that which belongs to another.

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Ch. 2, Of Natural Right
1 month 3 days ago

Power is not opposed to freedom. It is precisely freedom that distinguishes power from violence or coercion.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

It seems to me as good as certain that we cannot get the upper hand against England. The English - the best race in the world - cannot lose! We, however, can lose and shall lose, if not this year then next year. The thought that our race is going to be beaten depresses me terribly, because I am completely German.

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Writing about the eventual outcome of World War I, in which he was a volunteer in the Austro-Hungarian army (25 October 1914), as quoted in The First World War (2004) by Martin Gilbert, p. 104
1 month 2 weeks ago

The march of the human mind is slow.

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1 week 6 days ago

The will of man has no power whatever over his opinions; he must, and ever did, and ever will, believe what has been, is, or may be impressed on his mind by his predecessors, and the circumstances which surround him.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows.

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Ch. 5
2 weeks 3 days ago

The role of the artist is to create an Anti-environment as a means of perception and adjustment.

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(p. 31)
2 months 3 weeks ago

Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality. 

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"Don't Be Too Certain!"
2 months 4 weeks ago

Lucid intervals and happy pauses.

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History of King Henry VII, III
1 month 3 days ago

Religion, mysticism and magic all spring from the same basic 'feeling' about the universe: a sudden feeling of meaning, which human beings sometimes 'pick up' accidentally, as your radio might pick up some unknown station. Poets feel that we are cut off from meaning by a thick, lead wall, and that sometimes for no reason we can understand the wall seems to vanish and we are suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of the infinite interestingness of things.

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p. 28
2 months 1 week ago

I do not believe that the source of value is unitary - displaying apparent multiplicity only in its application to the world. I believe that value has fundamentally different kinds of sources, and that they are reflected in the classification of values into types. Not all values represent the pursuit of some single good in a variety of settings.

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"The Fragmentation of Value" (1977), pp. 131-132.
1 month 2 weeks ago

Learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.

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Volume iii, p. 335
3 months 2 weeks ago

If anyone can be considered the greatest writer who ever lived, it is Shakespeare.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

What is really disturbing about The Name of the Rose, however, is the underlying belief in the liberating, anti-totalitarain force of laughter, of ironic distance. Our thesis here is almost the exact opposite of the underlying premise of Eco's novel: in contemporary socities, democratic or totalitarian, that cynical distance, laughter, irony, are so to speak, part of the game. The ruling ideology is not meant to be taken seriously or literally. Perhaps the greatest danger for totalitarianism is people who take ideology seriously.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.

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Ch. 2
1 month 2 weeks ago

I want to proclaim a truth that would forever exile me from among the living. I know only the conditions but not the words that would allow me to formulate it.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Apart from autograph hunters, I get... many letters from Hindus, beseeching me to adopt some form of mysticism, from young Americans, asking me where I think the line should be drawn in petting, and from Poles, urging me to admit that while all other nationalism may be bad that of Poland is wholly noble. I get letters from engineers who cannot understand Einstein, and from parsons who think that I cannot understand Genesis, from husbands whose wives have deserted them - not (they say) that that would matter, but the wives have taken the furniture with them, and what in these circumstances should an enlightened male do? ...I get letters (concerning whose genuineness I am suspicious) trying to get me to advocate abortion, and I get letters from young mothers asking my opinion of bottle-feeding.

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Letter to Mr C. L. Aiken, March 19, 1930
3 months 5 days ago

Do not despair: one thief was saved. Do not presume: one thief was damned.

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Attributed to St. Augustine in The Repentance of Robert Greene, Master of Arts (1592) by Robert Greene.
3 weeks 1 day ago

Nonviolence is perhaps best described as a practice of resistance that becomes possible, if not mandatory, precisely at the moment when doing violence seems most justified and obvious. In this way, it can be understood as a practice that not only stops a violent act, or a violent process, but requires a form of sustained action, sometimes aggressively pursued. So, one suggestion I will make is that we can think of nonviolence not simply as the absence of violence, or as the act of refraining from committing violence, but as a sustained commitment, even a way of rerouting aggression for the purposes of affirming ideals of equality and freedom.

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p. 27
3 months 2 weeks ago

What the age needs is not a genius - it has had geniuses enough, but a martyr, who in order to teach men to obey would himself be obedient unto death. What the age needs is awakening. And therefore someday, not only my writings but my whole life, all the intriguing mystery of the machine will be studied and studied. I never forget how God helps me and it is therefore my last wish that everything may be to his honour.

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3 months 3 weeks ago
We still do not yet know where the drive for truth comes from. For so far we have heard only of the duty which society imposes in order to exist: to be truthful means to employ the usual metaphors. Thus, to express it morally, this is the duty to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie with the herd and in a manner binding upon everyone. Now man of course forgets that this is the way things stand for him. Thus he lies in the manner indicated, unconsciously and in accordance with habits which are centuries' old; and precisely by means of this unconsciousness and forgetfulness he arrives at his sense of truth.
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2 weeks 3 days ago

All words at every level of prose and poetry and all devices of language and speech derive their meaning from figure / ground relation.

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quoted in McLuhan: A Guide for the Perplexed by W. Terrence Gordon, 2010, p. 167
1 month 3 days ago

The purpose of consciousness is to illuminate the world. If we try to run consciousness at half its proper voltage, the result will be a "devalued" world. But that is not the fault of the world; it is our fault. Low-voltage consciousness shows us less of the world than high-voltage consciousness, just as we would see an art gallery less clearly by candlelight than by sunlight.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings you conceive the objects of your conception to have. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object.

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Vol. V, par. 438
1 month 2 weeks ago

Someday the old shack we call the world will fall apart. How, we don't know, and we don't really care either. Since nothing has real substance, and life is a twirl in the void, its beginning and its end are meaningless.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

God might grant us riches, honours, life, and even health, to our own hurt; for every thing that is pleasing to us is not always good for us. If he sends us death, or an increase of sickness, instead of a cure, Vvrga tua et baculus, tuus ipsa me consolata sunt. "Thy rod and thy staff have comforted me," he does it by the rule of his providence, which better and more certainly discerns what is proper for us than we can do; and we ought to take it in good part, as coming from a wise and most friendly hand.

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Ch. 12

As human beings, we are endowed with this freedom of choice, and we cannot shuffle off our responsibility upon the shoulders of God or nature. We must shoulder it ourselves. It is up to us.

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Ch. 3: Does History Repeat Itself?
2 months 3 weeks ago

Philosophy of religion ... really amounts to ... philosophizing on certain favorite assumptions that are not confirmed at all.

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E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 143

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