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3 weeks 3 days ago

Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.

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(p. 48)

In one point I fully agree with the gentlemen to whose general views I am opposed. I feel with them, that it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.

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Quoted in John Dewey and American Democracy by Robert Westbrook (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 440
2 months 3 weeks ago

When people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid.

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Theory of Knowledge, 1913
3 months 1 week ago

If you would be a good reader, read; if a writer, write.

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Book II, ch. 18, 1.
2 months 4 weeks ago

Lying... is so ill a quality, and the mother of so many ill ones that spawn from it, and take shelter under it, that a child should be brought up in the greatest abhorrence of it imaginable. It should be always spoke of before him with the utmost detestation, as a quality so wholly inconsistent with the name and character of a gentleman, that no body of any credit can bear the imputation of a lie; a mark that is judg'd in utmost disgrace, which debases a man to the lowest degree of a shameful meanness, and ranks him with the most contemptible part of mankind and the abhorred rascality; and is not to be endured in any one who would converse with people of condition, or have any esteem or reputation in the world.

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Sec. 131
1 month 1 week ago

The collective is the object of all idolatry, this it is which chains us to the earth. In the case of avarice: gold is of the social order. In the case of ambition: power is of the social order. Science and art are full of the social element also. And love? Love is more or less of an exception: that is why we can go to God through love, not through avarice and ambition.

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p. 121
3 months 1 week ago

The Apostle says: I make up in my flesh what is lacking to the sufferings of Christ (Col. 1:24). I make up, he tells us, not what is lacking to my sufferings, but what is lacking to the sufferings of Christ; not in Christ flesh, but in mine. not in Christ's flesh, but in mine. Christ is still suffering, not in His own flesh which He took with Him into heaven, but in my flesh, which is still suffering on earth.

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p.423
1 month 3 weeks ago

...for stones, plants, and animals there is no God, but only for man.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

We may become the makers of our fate when we have ceased to pose as its prophets.

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Introduction
1 month 3 weeks ago

Morality must be the heart of our existence, if it is to be what it wants to be for us. ... The highest form of philosophy is ethics. Thus all philosophy begins with "I am." The highest statement of cognition must be an expression of that fact which is the means and ground for all cognition, namely, the goal of the I.

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Fichte Studies § 556
2 months 3 weeks ago

If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. As if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down!

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p. 485
1 month 1 week ago

The recognition of human wretchedness is difficult for whoever is rich and powerful because he is almost invincibly led to believe that he is something. It is equally difficult for the man in miserable circumstances because he is almost invincibly led to believe that the rich and powerful man is something.

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p. 216
1 month 1 week ago

The success of most things depends upon knowing how long it will take to succeed.

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1 month 1 week ago

If we want a love which will protect the soul from wounds we must love something other than God.

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p. 62
1 month 3 weeks ago

Who consciously throws himself into the water or onto the knife?

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Part 2, Chapter ?
2 months 3 weeks ago

Merely to come into the world the heir of a fortune is not to be born, but to be still-born, rather. To be supported by the charity of friends, or a government-pension, - provided you continue to breathe, - by whatever fine synonymes you describe these relations, is to go into the almshouse.

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p. 487
3 weeks 5 days ago

When a person inflates his own importance, he does not see his own sins; and his sins get bigger right along with him.

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p. 108
3 months 3 weeks ago

Death cannot explain itself. The earnestness consists precisely in this, that the observer must explain it to himself.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

People are entirely too disbelieving of coincidence. They are far too ready to dismiss it and to build arcane structures of extremely rickety substance in order to avoid it. I, on the other hand, see coincidence everywhere as an inevitable consequence of the laws of probability, according to which having no unusual coincidence is far more unusual than any coincidence could possibly be.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Third, these general ideas are not mere words, nor do they consist in this, that certain concrete facts will every time happen under certain descriptions of conditions; but they are just as much, or rather far more, living realities than the feelings themselves out of which they are concreted. And to say that mental phenomenon are governed by law does not mean merely that they are describable by a general formula; but that there is a living idea, a conscious continuum of feeling which pervades them, and to which they are docile.

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1 month 1 week ago

His concept of the anal character as one that has not reached maturity is in fact a sharp criticism of bourgeois society of the nineteenth century, in which the qualities of the anal character constituted the norm for moral behavior.

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To Have or to Be? (2005) p. 68
1 month 3 weeks ago

The mental operation by which one achieves new concepts and which one denotes generally by the inadequate name of induction is not a simple but rather a very complicated process. Above all, it is not a logical process although such processes can be inserted as intermediary and auxiliary links. The principle effort that leads to the discovery of new knowledge is due to abstraction and imagination.

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3rd edition, p. 318ff, As quoted by Phillip Frank, Philosophy of Science: The Link Between Science and Philosophy
1 month 2 weeks ago

Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.

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3 months 6 days ago

For what is life but a play in which everyone acts a part until the curtain comes down?

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2 months 3 weeks ago

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

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Part 3, Ch. 13, § 3
3 months 4 days ago

How many worthy men have we seen survive their own reputation!

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Book II, Ch. 16. Of Glory
1 month 3 weeks ago

The world begins and ends with us. Only our consciousness exists, it is everything, and this everything vanishes with it. Dying, we leave nothing. Then why so much fuss around an event that is no such thing?

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live.

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Considerations by the Way
3 months 3 weeks ago

He tried to recall what he had read about the disease. Figures floated across his memory, and he recalled that some thirty or so great plagues known to history had accounted for nearly a hundred million deaths. But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one actually sees him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

If teleological study of the world is philosophy, and if the Law commands such a study, then the Law commands philosophy.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Everyone must destroy their life. According to the way they do it, they're either triumphants or failures.

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3 months 4 days ago

Cunning and deceit will every time serve a man better than force to rise from a base condition to great fortune.

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Book 2, Ch. 13
4 months 3 weeks ago

Caring about others....all you need to know....

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2 months 3 weeks ago

I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason.

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Not only must philosophy be in agreement with our empirical knowledge of Nature, but the origin and formation of the Philosophy of Nature presupposes and is conditioned by empirical physics. However, the course of a science's origin and the preliminaries of its construction are one thing, while the science itself is another. In the latter, the former can no longer appear as the foundation of the science; here, the foundation must be the necessity of the Concept.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

We too often forget that not only is there "a soul of goodness in things evil," but very generally also, a soul of truth in things erroneous.

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Pt. I, The Unknowable; Ch. I, Religion and Science; quoting from "There is some soul of goodness in things evil / Would men observingly distil it out", William Shakespeare, Henry V, act iv. sc. i
1 month 3 weeks ago

I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide . . .

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2 months 3 weeks ago

A thing forgotten on one day will be remembered on the next. Something we have made the most strenuous efforts to recall, but all in vain, will, soon after... saunter into the mind... The sphere of possible recollection may be wider than we think, and... apparent oblivion is no proof against possible recall under other conditions.

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Ch. 16
2 months 3 weeks ago

The constitution of madness as mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, bears witness to a rupture in a dialogue, gives the separation as already enacted, and expels from the memory all those imperfect words, of no fixed syntax, spoken falteringly, in which the exchange between madness and reason was carried out. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence.

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Preface to 1961 edition
2 weeks 5 days ago

The future of mankind, for the socialist, is simple: pull down the existing order and allow the future to emerge.

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"Eliot and Conservatism" (p. 208)
3 weeks 3 days ago

I've always been careful never to predict anything that had not already happened.

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Interview: Tom Wolfe, TVOntario, August 1970
1 month 3 weeks 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
2 months 3 weeks ago

In science men have discovered an activity of the very highest value in which they are no longer, as in art, dependent for progress upon the appearance of continually greater genius, for in science the successors stand upon the shoulders of their predecessors; where one man of supreme genius has invented a method, a thousand lesser men can apply it.

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Ch. 2: The Place of Science in a Liberal Education
2 months 3 days ago

The Universe is one, infinite, immobile. The absolute potential is one, the act is one, the form or soul is one, the material or body is one, the thing is one, the being in one, one is the maximum and the best... It is not generated, because there is no other being it could desire or hope for, since it comprises all being. It does not grow corrupt. because there is nothing else into which it could change, given that it is itself all things. It cannot diminish or grow, since it is infinite.

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As translated by Paul Harrison
2 months 3 weeks ago

As image and apprehension are in an organic unity, so, for a Christian, are human body and human soul.

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"Priestesses in the Church?" (1948), p. 237

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