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2 months 3 weeks ago

Only the feeble resign themselves to final death and substitute some other desire for the longing for personal immortality. In the strong the zeal for perpetuity overrides the doubt of realizing it, and their superabundance of life overflows upon the other side of death.

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4 weeks 1 day ago

In that strange island Iceland,-burst up, the geologists say, by fire from the bottom of the sea; a wild land of barrenness and lava; swallowed many months of every year in black tempests, yet with a wild gleaming beauty in summertime; towering up there, stern and grim, in the North Ocean with its snow jokuls, roaring geysers, sulphur-pools and horrid volcanic chasms, like the waste chaotic battle-field of Frost and Fire;-where of all places we least looked for Literature or written memorials, the record of these things was written down.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Well, he wasn't a relativist. There's a long and complicated story of the rise of a desire for scientific relativism. Part of it may well be simply sort of rage against reason, the fear of the sciences and a kind of total dislike of the arrogance of a great many scientists who say we're finding out the truth about everything-and here [with Kuhn] there was a way to undermine that arrogance.

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Ian Hacking, in Gary Stix, "A Q&A with Ian Hacking on Thomas Kuhn's Legacy as "The Paradigm Shift" Turns 50"
3 months 1 day ago

As first a man cannot lay down the right of resisting them, that assault him by force, to take away his life; because he cannot be understood to ayme thereby, at any Good to himself.

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The First Part, Chapter 14, p. 66
2 months 3 weeks ago

Philosophy ... must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth.

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p. 7
4 months 1 week ago

Whatever bitterness and hate may be found in the movements which we are to examine, it is not bitterness or hate, but love, that is their mainspring. It is difficult not to hate those who torture the objects of our love. Though difficult, it is not impossible; but it requires a breadth of outlook and a comprehensiveness of understanding which are not easy to preserve amid a desperate contest. If ultimate wisdom has not always been preserved by Socialists and Anarchists, they have not differed in this from their opponents; and in the source of their inspiration they have shown themselves superior to those who acquiesce ignorantly or supinely in the injustices and oppressions by which the existing system is preserved.

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Introduction, p. 10.
5 months 1 week ago

Christ speaks of two debtors, one of whom owed much and the other little, and who both found forgiveness. He asks: Which of these two ought to love more? The answer: The one who has forgiven much. When you love much, you are forgiven much-and when you are forgiven much, you love much. See here the blessed recurrence of salvation in love!

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3 months 6 days ago

Political Freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie; and the workers want no lying.

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The Red Association
4 weeks 1 day ago

In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.

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3 months 6 days ago

Nothing, I am sure, calls forth the faculties so much as the being obliged to struggle with the world; and this is not a woman's province in a married state. Her sphere of action is not large, and if she is not taught to look into her own heart, how trivial are her occupations and pursuits! What little arts engross and narrow her mind!

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Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), "Matrimony", p. 100
4 weeks ago

Philosophy accepts the hard and hazardous task of dealing with problems not yet open to the methods of science - problems like good and evil, beauty and ugliness, order and freedom, life and death; so soon as a field of inquiry yields knowledge susceptible of exact formulation it is called science. Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

As we speak cruel time is fleeing. Seize the day, believing as little as possible in the morrow.

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Book I, ode xi, line 7
4 months 1 week ago

Let me give two cautions. 1) The one is, that you keep them to the practice of what you would have grow into a habit with them, by kind words, and gentle admonitions, rather as minding them of what they forget, than by harsh rebukes and chiding, as if they were wilfully guilty. 2) Another thing you are to take care of, is, not to endeavour to settle too many habits at once, lest by variety you confound them, and so perfect none. When constant custom has made any one thing easy and natural to 'em, and they practice it without reflection, you may then go on to another.

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Sec. 66
1 month 2 days ago

What is objective must be common to many minds and consequently transmissible from one to the other, and as this transmission can only come about by... discourse... we are even forced to conclude: no discourse no objectivity.

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3 months 5 days ago

We must now turn to the question of how the existence of archetypes can be proved. Since archetypes are supposed to produce certain psychic forms, we must discuss how and where one can get hold of the material demonstrating these forms. The main source, then, is dreams, which have the advantage of being involuntary, spontaneous products of nature not falsified by any conscious purpose. By questioning the individual one can ascertain which of the motifs appearing in the dream are known to him... Consequently, we must look for motifs which could not possibly be known to the dreamer and yet behave functionally of the archetype known from historical sources.

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p. 48
3 weeks 3 days ago

Look upon yourself as more powerful than they give you out for, and you have more power; look upon yourself as more, and you have more.

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Cambridge 1995, p. 318
3 months 6 days ago

There is, properly speaking, no Misfortune in the world. Happiness and Misfortune stand in continual balance. Every Misfortune is, as it were, the obstruction of a stream, which, after overcoming this obstruction, but bursts through with the greater force.

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3 months 1 day ago

Now precisely because Galilean science is, in the formation of its concepts, the technic of a specific Lebenswelt, it does not and cannot transcend this Lebenswelt. It remains essentially within the basic experiential framework and within the universe of ends set by this reality.

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p. 164
1 week 1 day ago

The whole history of these books is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills

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Letter to John Adams, on Christian scriptures
3 months 1 week ago

Wit is the appearance, the external flash of imagination. Thus its divinity, and the witty character of mysticism.

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Aphorism 26, as translated in Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms (1968)
4 months 1 week ago

Thus it may be said that not only the soul, the mirror of an indestructible universe, is indestructible, but also the animal itself, though its mechanism may often perish in part and take off or put on an organic slough.

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La monadologie (77). Sometimes paraphrased as: The soul is the mirror of an indestructible universe.
3 months 1 week ago

The plea of anger or of drunkenness - as having placed the criminal for the moment beyond the control of his reason - relieves him from the charge of premeditated and malicious intent; but a rational legislation will rather provide more severe than milder punishment for such cases, particularly if such a state of mind is habitual with the accused; for a single unlawful act may well constitute an exception from an otherwise blameless life. But a person who pleads, "I habitually get so angry or so drunk as not to be any longer master of my senses!" confesses thereby that he changes himself into a beast on a fixed principle, and that he is, therefore, not fit to live among rational beings.

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P. 351
3 months 1 week ago

There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.

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As quoted in Dictionary of Foreign Quotations (1980) by Mary Collison, Robert L. Collison, p. 235
1 week 2 days ago

You have your brush, you have your colours, you paint paradise, then, in you go.

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As quoted in Journal of Modern Literature Vol. 2, No. 2, Nikos Kazantzakis
4 months 1 week ago

To aspire to be superhuman is a most discreditable admission that you lack the guts, the wit, the moderating judgment to be successfully and consummately human.

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Spinoza's Worm," p. 75
3 months 4 weeks ago

We are but dust and shadow.

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Book IV, ode vii, line 16
4 months 2 weeks ago

A prudent man should always follow in the path trodden by great men and imitate those who are most excellent.

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The Prince (1513), Ch. 6; translated by Luigi Ricci
4 months 1 week ago

So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation.

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The Moral Equivalent of War
1 month 2 weeks ago

No doubt markets transmit information in the way that Hayek claimed. But what reason is there to believe that - unlike any other social institution - they have a built-in capacity to correct their mistakes? History hardly supports the supposition. Moods of irrational exuberance and panic can, and often do, swamp the price-discovery functions of markets.

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3 months 5 days ago

There is rarely a creative man who does not have to pay a high price for the divine spark of his greatest gifts...the human element is frequently bled for the benefit of the creative element and to such an extent that it even brings out the bad qualities, as for instance, ruthless, naive egoism (so-called "auto-eroticism"), vanity, all kinds of vices-and all this in order to bring to the human I at least some life-strength, since otherwise it would perish of sheer inanition.

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1 week 1 day ago

And so no force however great can stretch a cord however fine into an horizontal line which is accurately straight.

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Elementary Treatise on Mechanics, The Equilibrium of Forces on a Point, 1819
3 months 1 day ago

An integral part of totalitarian control is the attack on critical and independent thought. The appeal to facts is substituted for the appeal to reason. No reason can sanction a regime that uses the greatest productive apparatus man has ever created in the interest of an increasing restriction on human satisfactions-no reason except the fact that the economic system can be retained in no other way. Just as the Fascist emphasis on action and change prevents the insight into necessity of rational courses of action and change, [Giovanni] Gentile's deification of thinking prevents the liberation of thought from the shackles of 'the given.'

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P. 405
5 months 6 days ago

They despised everything but virtue, caring little for their present state of life, and thinking lightly of the possession of gold and other property, which seemed only a burden to them; neither were they intoxicated by luxury; nor did wealth deprive them of their self-control; but they were sober, and saw clearly that all these goods are increased by virtue and friendship with one another, whereas by too great regard and respect for them, they are lost and friendship with them.

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3 weeks 3 days ago

Liberty of the people is not my liberty!

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Cambridge 1995, p. 190
4 months 3 weeks ago

So far as it goes, a small thing may give an analogy of great things, and show the tracks of knowledge.

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Book II, lines 123-124 (tr. Rouse)
4 months 2 weeks ago

Man is by nature unable to want God to be God. Indeed, he himself wants to be God, and does not want God to be God.

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Thesis 17
4 months 2 weeks ago

Some will object that the Law is divine and holy. Let it be divine and holy. The Law has no right to tell me that I must be justified by it.

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Chapter 2
1 week 1 day ago

We took the liberty to make some enquiries concerning the ground of their pretensions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our friends who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation. The Ambassador [of Tripoli] answered us that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

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Letter from the commissioners (John Adams, Thomas Jefferson) to John Jay, 28 March 1786, in Thomas Jefferson Travels: Selected Writings, 1784-1789, by Anthony Brandt, pp. 104-105
4 months 2 weeks ago

Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.

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Ch. 2
2 months 3 weeks ago

The Hebrews took for their idol, not something made of metal or wood, but a race, a nation, something just as earthly. Their religion is essentially inseparable from such idolatry, because of the notion of the "chosen people".

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Section 2
3 months 1 week ago

I believe in God, although I live very happily with atheists... It is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley; but not at all so to believe or not in God.

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As quoted in Against the Faith (1985) by Jim Herrick, p. 75
2 months 4 days ago

In one way or another, all my books have been devoted to expounding and exploring the almost limitless power of the Darwinian principle-power unleashed whenever and wherever there is enough time for the consequences of primordial self-replication to unfold. Preface

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5 months 1 week ago

The majority of mankind and people who lack refinement conceive it to be pleasure, and hence they approve a life of sensual enjoyment.

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2 months ago

Propaganda:

Good = God (take a letter)
Evil = Devil (add a letter)

😁🚀📖

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2 months 4 weeks ago

At present, when the prevailing forms of society have become hindrances to the free expression of human powers, it is precisely the abstract branches of science, mathematics and theoretical physics, which ... offer a less distorted form of knowledge than other branches of science which are interwoven with the pattern of daily life, and the practicality of which seemingly testifies to their realistic character.

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p. 133.
3 months 4 days ago

By creating the world market, big industry has already brought all the peoples of the Earth, and especially the civilized peoples, into such close relation with one another that none is independent of what happens to the others. Further, it has co-ordinated the social development of the civilized countries to such an extent that, in all of them, bourgeoisie and proletariat have become the decisive classes, and the struggle between them the great struggle of the day. It follows that the communist revolution will not merely be a national phenomenon but must take place simultaneously in all civilized countries.

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4 weeks 1 day ago

Far be it from me to say or insinuate a word of disparagement against such characters as Hampden, Elliot, Pym; whom I believe to have been right worthy and useful men. I have read diligently what books and documents about them I could come at;-with the honestest wish to admire, to love and worship them like Heroes; but I am sorry to say, if the real truth must be told, with very indifferent success! At bottom, I found that it would not do. They are very noble men, these; step along in their stately way, with their measured euphemisms, philosophies, parliamentary eloquences, Ship-moneys, Monarchies of Man; a most constitutional, unblamable, dignified set of men. But the heart remains cold before them.

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