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4 months 2 weeks ago

In the case of colors, there is a tridimensional spread of feelings. Originally all feelings may have been connected in the same way, and the presumption is that the number of dimensions was endless. For development essentially involves a limitation of possibilities. But given a number of dimensions of feeling, all possible varieties are obtainable by varying the intensities of the different elements.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality.

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Chapter I, Part II, p. 770.
5 months 2 weeks ago

Nothing can be preserved that is not good.

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Books
6 months 2 weeks ago

It is my own experience ... that commentators are far more ingenious at finding meaning than authors are at inserting it.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

When I started life Hegelianism was the basis of everything: it was in the air, found expression in magazine and newspaper articles, in novels and essays, in art, in histories, in sermons, and in conversation. A man unacquainted with Hegel had no right to speak: he who wished to know the truth studied Hegel. Everything rested on him; and suddenly forty years have gone by and there is nothing left of him, he is not even mentioned - as though he had never existed. And what is most remarkable is that, like pseudo-Christianity, Hegelianism fell not because anyone refuted it, but because it suddenly became evident that neither the one nor the other was needed by our learned, educated world.

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Chapter XXIX
1 month 2 weeks ago

I shall take leave to think the worse, rather of the practice of the men than of the book of God.

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Some Considerations Touching the Style of the Holy Scriptures (1661) "Seventh Objection"
4 months 3 weeks ago

The possibility of divorce renders both marriage partners stricter in their observance of the duties they owe to each other. Divorces help to improve morals and to increase the population.

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5 months ago

In anger we should refrain both from speech and action.

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As quoted in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, "Pythagoras", Sect. 23-24, as translated in Dictionary of Quotations (1906) by Thomas Benfield Harbottle, p. 370
5 months 2 weeks ago

As to [General Douglas] Macarthur, I don't feel in a position to have clear opinions about anyone I know only from newspapers. You see, whenever they deal with anyone (or anything) I know myself, I find they're always a mass of lies & misunderstandings: so I conclude they're no better in the places where I don't know.

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Letter to Mrs. Mary Van Deusen, April 30, 1951. Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, vol. 3, "Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy", 1950-1963. p. 114.
3 months 3 weeks ago

Computers were within my sphere of attention, but only computers used as number crunchers. In spite of the "giant brain" metaphor, there is little suggestion in this 1950 talk that the most important application of computers might lie in imitating intelligence symbolically, not numerically.

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p. 199.
3 months 2 weeks ago

While people are engaged in creating a totally different world, they always form vivid images of the preceding world.

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(p. 21)
2 months 1 week ago

They have their belief, these poor Thibet people, that Providence sends down always an Incarnation of Himself into every generation. At bottom some belief in a kind of Pope! At bottom still better, belief that there is a Greatest Man; that he is discoverable; that, once discovered, we ought to treat him with an obedience which knows no bounds! This is the truth of Grand Lamaism; the "discoverability" is the only error here.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

If children are a joy for the well-to-do, they are a torment for seven-eights of all civlizees, who cannot afford to maintain and educate them.

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1 month 1 week ago

May they not forget to keep pure the great heritage that puts them ahead of the West: the artistic configuration of life, the simplicity and modesty of personal needs, and the purity and serenity of the Japanese soul.

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5 months ago

No evil is honorable; but death is honorable; therefore death is not evil.

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As quoted in Epistles No. 82, by Seneca the Younger
2 months 1 week ago

Every noble work is at first impossible.

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From Past and Present (1843), Chapter XI : Labour
1 month 4 weeks ago

Must we then speak of this subject also: and shall we write concerning things that are not to be told, and shall we publish things not to be divulged, and secrets not to be spoken aloud? Who indeed is Attis or Gallos; who the Mother of the Gods; what is the reason of this rule of Chastity; moreover for what cause has such an institution been established among us from remote antiquity; handed down to us indeed from the most ancient of the Phrygians, but accepted in the first place by the Greeks - and those not the vulgar herd, but the Athenians - taught by the event that they had not done well in ridiculing him that was performing the rites of the Great Mother. For they are said to have insulted and driven off the Gallos, as one who was making innovations in religion: because they did not understand the character of the goddess, or how that she was the very "Deo", "Rhea," and " "Demeter" so much honoured amongst them themselves.

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4 months 1 week ago

Resignation' is a keynote in Comte's writings, deriving directly from assent to invariable social laws. 'True resignation, that is, a disposition to endure necessary evils steadfastly and without any hope of compensation therefore, can result only from a profound feeling for the invariable laws that govern the variety of natural phenomena.

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P. 345
5 months 2 weeks ago

I trust that some may be as near and dear to Buddha, or Christ, or Swedenborg, who are without the pale of their churches. It is necessary not to be Christian to appreciate the beauty and significance of the life of Christ. I know that some will have hard thoughts of me, when they hear their Christ named beside my Buddha, yet I am sure that I am willing they should love their Christ more than my Buddha, for the love is the main thing, and I like him too.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Supply and demand constantly determine the prices of commodities; never balance, or only coincidentally; but the cost of production, for its part, determines the oscillations of supply and demand.

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Notebook I, The Chapter on Money, p. 58.
5 months 4 weeks ago

He that gives quickly gives twice.

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Adagia, 1508
3 months 2 weeks ago

A beautiful face is a silent commendation.

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Maxim 283
1 month 2 weeks ago

A man standing by a spring of clear, sweet water and cursing it. While the fresh water keeps on bubbling up. He can shovel mud into it, or dung, and the stream will carry it away, wash itself clean, remain unstained. (Hays translation) Suppose that men kill thee, cut thee in pieces, curse thee. What then can these things do to prevent thy mind from remaining pure, wise, sober, just? For instance, if a man should stand by a limpid pure spring, and curse it, the spring never ceases sending up potable water; and if he should cast clay into it or filth, it will speedily disperse them and wash them out, and will not be at all polluted. How then shalt thou possess a perpetual fountain? By forming thyself hourly to freedom conjoined with contentment, simplicity and modesty.

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VIII, 51
4 months 1 week ago

The total victimization of the individual that takes place is encouraged for the specific benefit of the industrial and political bureaucracy. It therefore cannot be justified on the ground of the individual's true interest. National Socialist ideology simply states that true human existence consists in unconditional sacrifice, that it is of the essence of the individual's life to abbey and to serve-'service which never comes to an end because service and life coincide.'

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P. 416
2 months 3 weeks ago

Genes and culture have co-evolved. But crudely, natural selection "designed" male human primates to hunt nonhumans and build coalitions of other male human primates in order to wage territorial wars of aggression. Nature didn't design us to become a scientific community and collaborate to overcome aging. It's difficult to imagine that any human enemy could inflict such gruesome damage on the victims as growing old. The ravages of aging strike down combatants and civilians alike. So the trillions of dollars that humans currently spend on ways to harm and kill each other ("defence") would be more fruitfully spent on defeating our common enemy. We should work together to build a "Triple S" civilisation of superlongevity, superhappiness and superintelligence.

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Transhumanism 2017: Towards a 'Triple S' civilisation of Superlongevity, Superintelligence and Superhappiness, Timeship Buddha
5 months 2 weeks ago

It seems to me that science has a much greater likelihood of being true in the main than any philosophy hitherto advanced (I do not, of course, except my own). In science there are many matters about which people are agreed; in philosophy there are none. Therefore, although each proposition in a science may be false, and it is practically certain that there are some that are false, yet we shall be wise to build our philosophy upon science, because the risk of error in philosophy is pretty sure to be greater than in science. If we could hope for certainty in philosophy, the matter would be otherwise, but so far as I can see such a hope would be chimerical.

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Logical Atomism, 1924
2 months 2 weeks ago

Disobedience to authority is one of the most natural and healthy acts.

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210
1 month 4 weeks ago

It is very difficult to understand proletarian violence as long as we try to think in terms of the ideas disseminated by bourgeois philosophy; according to this philosophy, violence is a relic of barbarism which is bound to disappear under the progress of enlightenment.

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p. 65
3 months 4 weeks ago

The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.

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F 44
5 months 2 weeks ago

Social and economic inequalities, for example inequalities of wealth and authority, are just only if they result in compensating benefits for everyone, and in particular for the least advantaged members of society.

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p. 14.
4 months 2 weeks ago

The lover who kills himself for a girl has an experience which is more complete and much more profound than the hero who overturns the world.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: Every man I meet is my master at some point, and in that, I learn of him.

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Greatness
5 months 3 weeks ago

Let us not forget what befits our present state in the pursuit of vain fancies. Mankind has its place in the sequence of things; childhood has its place in the sequence of human life; the man must be treated as a man and the child as a child. Give each his place, and keep him there. Control human passions according to man's nature; that is all we can do for his welfare. The rest depends on external forces, which are beyond our control.

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2 months 1 week ago

All greatness is unconscious, or it is little and naught.

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5 months 1 week ago

Repentance for one's evil deeds is the safeguard of life.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.

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Ch. 2
2 months 1 week ago

In the true Literary Man there is thus ever, acknowledged or not by the world, a sacredness: he is the light of the world; the world's Priest;-guiding it, like a sacred Pillar of Fire, in its dark pilgrimage through the waste of Time.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Tell your master that if there were as many devils at Worms as tiles on its roofs, I would enter.

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Psalm. Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott (translated by Frederic H. Hedge), Reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
6 months 3 days ago

Yes, to seek power that's vain and never grantedand for it to suffer hardship and endless pain:this is to heave and strain to push uphilla boulder, that still from the very top rolls backand bounds and bounces down to the bare, broad field.

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Book III, lines 998-1002 (tr. Frank O. Copley)
5 months ago

A good Soul hath neither too great joy, nor too great sorrow: for it rejoiceth in goodness; and it sorroweth in wickedness. By the means whereof, when it beholdeth all things, and seeth the good and bad so mingled together, it can neither rejoice greatly; nor be grieved with over much sorrow.

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4 months 4 days ago

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

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Talking, in A Lover's Discourse
1 month 2 weeks ago

If the gods care not for me and for my children, There is a reason for it.

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VII, 41
5 months 1 week ago

The appearance in nineteenth-century psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality, inversion, pederasty, and "psychic hermaphroditism" made possible a strong advance of social controls into this area of "perversity"; but it also made possible the formation of a "reverse" discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or "naturality" be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified.

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Vol. I, p. 101
4 months 3 days ago

It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense.

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ch. 15.
4 months 3 days ago

Philosophy finds religion, and modifies it; and conversely religion is among the data of experience which philosophy must weave into its own scheme. Religion is an ultimate craving to infuse into the insistent particularity of emotion that non-temporal generality which primarily belongs to conceptual thought alone. In the higher organisms the differences of tempo between the mere emotions and the conceptual experiences produce a life-tedium, unless this supreme fusion has been effected. The two sides of the organism require a reconciliation in which emotional experiences illustrate a conceptual justification, and conceptual experiences find an emotional illustration.

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Pt. I, ch. 1, sec. 6.
6 months 3 weeks ago
What does man actually know about himself? Is he, indeed, ever able to perceive himself completely, as if laid out in a lighted display case? Does nature not conceal most things from him even concerning his own body in order to confine and lock him within a proud, deceptive consciousness, aloof from the coils of the bowels, the rapid flow of the blood stream, and the intricate quivering of the fibers! She threw away the key.
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2 months 3 days ago

Impurity is caused by attitude, not events.

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(trans. Emily Wilson)

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