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1 month 3 weeks ago

Not to feel exasperated, or defeated, or despondent because your days aren't packed with wise and moral actions. But to get back up when you fail, to celebrate behaving like a human--however imperfectly--and fully embrace the pursuit that you've embarked on. (Hays translation) Flinch not, neither give up nor despair, if the achieving of every act in accordance with right principle is not always continuous with thee.

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V, 9
5 months 1 week ago

For this, to draw a right line from every point, to every point, follows the definition, which says, that a line is the flux of a point, and a right line an indeclinable and inflexible flow.

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Book III. Concerning Petitions and Axioms.
6 months 1 week ago

It is the act of an ill-instructed man to blame others for his own bad condition; it is the act of one who has begun to be instructed, to lay the blame on himself; and of one whose instruction is completed, neither to blame another, nor himself.

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(5) [tr. George Long (1888)].
4 months 1 week ago

Although people seem to be unaware of it today, the development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

From all these indignities, such as the very beasts of the field would not endure, you can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

When you wish to instruct, be brief; that men's minds may take in quickly what you say, learn its lesson, and retain it faithfully. Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind.

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Lines 335-337; Edward Charles Wickham translation
5 months 2 weeks ago

For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules - it hasn't been taught us by means of strict rules, either.

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p. 25
6 months 3 weeks ago

I may live for thirty years, or perhaps forty, or maybe just one day: therefore I have resolved to use this day, or whatever I have to say in these thirty years or whatever I have to say this one day I may have to live - I have resolved to use it in such a way that if not one day in my whole past life has been used well, this one by the help of God will be.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Friends, the soil is poor, we must sow seeds in plenty for us to garner even modest harvests.

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Motto
1 month 3 weeks ago

Always take the short cut; and that is the rational one. Therefore say and do everything according to soundest reason.

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IV, 51
6 months 2 days ago

Staying as I am, one foot in one country and the other in another, I find my condition very happy, in that it is free.

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Letter to Elisabeth of Bohemia, Princess Palatine, Paris, June/July 1648
4 months 2 weeks ago

Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.

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The Psychoanalysis of Fire, ch. 2, "Fire and Reverie"
2 months 2 weeks ago

Getting along with women, Knocking around with men, Having more credit than money, Thus one goes through the world.

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Claudine von Villa Bella
6 months 3 weeks ago

The division between human and robot is perhaps not as significant as that between intelligence and nonintelligence.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

The child must be brought up free (that he allow others to be free). He must learn to endure the restraint to which freedom subjects itself for its own preservation (experience no subordination to his command). Thus he must be disciplined. This precedes instruction. Training must continue without interruption. He must learn to do without things and to be cheerful about it. He must not be obliged to dissimulate, he must acquire immediate horror of lies, must learn so to respect the rights of men that they become an insurmountable wall for him. His instruction must be more negative. He must not learn religion before he knows morality. He must be refined, but not spoiled (pampered). He must learn to speak frankly, and must assume no false shame. Before adolescence he must not learn fine manners ; thoroughness is the chief thing. Thus he is crude longer, but earlier useful and capable.

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Part III : Selection on Education from Kant's other Writings, Ch. I Pedagogical Fragments, # 3
5 months 3 weeks ago

Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.

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Book III, Chapter 4, "Morality and Psychoanalysis"
4 months 3 weeks ago

The reasons for persisting in Being seem less and less well founded, and our successors will find it easier than we to be rid of such obstinacy.

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5 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
4 months 2 weeks ago

Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained.

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pp. 48-49
4 months 6 days ago

If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

The Scientific discourse extracts truths from the errors which surround and oppose it on all sides and in every form; and, by demolition of these opposing views as error, and as impossible to true thought, shows the truth as that which alone remains after their withdrawal, and therefore as the only possible truth:--and in this separation of opposites, and elucidation of the truth from the confused chaos in which truth and error lie mingled together, consists the peculiar and characteristic nature of the Scientific discourse. This method creates and produces truth, before our eyes, out of a world full of error.

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P. 26-27
6 months 2 weeks ago

Corpses are more fit to be cast out than dung.

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4 months 1 week ago

You', the ego, live in your left brain. When we say that man is the only creature who spends 99 per cent of his time inside his own head, we mean, in fact, inside his left cerebral hemisphere. And in the basement of the left hemisphere is the library full of filing cabinets -- the stuffy room that we mistake for reality.

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p. 9
5 months 3 weeks ago

The belief in a political Utopia is especially dangerous. This is possibly connected with the fact that the search for a better world, like the investigation of our environment, is (if I am correct) one of the oldest and most important of all the instincts.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don't help us, who else in the world can help us do this?

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6 months 2 days ago

For Christ is Joy and Sweetness to a broken heart. Christ is a Lover of poor sinners, and such a Lover that He gave Himself for us. Now if this is true, and it is true, then are we never justified by our own righteousness.

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Chapter 3, verse 20
2 months 4 days ago

It is not sufficient to say, "God spake and it was so." For the natures of things that are created ought to harmonise with the commands of God. I will say more clearly what I mean. Did God ordain that fire should mount upwards by chance and earth sink down? Was it not necessary, in order that the ordinance of God should be fulfilled, for the former to be light and the latter to weigh heavy? And in the case of other things also this is equally true.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Nothing is great but truth, and the smallest truth is great. The other day I had a thought, which I put like this: Even a harmful truth is useful, for it can be harmful only for the moment and will lead to other truths, which must always become useful, very much so. Conversely, even a useful error is harmful, for it can be useful only for the moment, enticing us into other errors, which become more and more harmful.

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Letter to Charlotte von Stein (1787) in Goethe's World View: Presented in His Reflections and Maxims (1963), Edited with an Introduction by Frederick Ungar, Translated by Heinz Norden, pp. 72-73, Frederick Ungar Publishing Company, New York.
2 months 2 weeks ago

My father's education was altogether of the worst and most limited. I believe he was never more than three months at any school. What he learned there showed what he might have learned. A solid knowledge of arithmetic, a fine antique handwriting - these, with other limited practical etceteras, were all the things he ever heard mentioned as excellent. He had no room to strive for more.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

I have often wondered how it should come to pass, that every man loving himself best, should more regard other men's opinions concerning himself than his own.

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XII, 3
6 months 1 week ago

And what can be more divine than the exhalations of the earth, which affect the human soul so as to enable her to predict the future ? And could the hand of time evaporate such a virtue? Do you suppose you are talking of some kind of wine or salted meat ?

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Book I, Chapter III
4 months 3 weeks ago

A man does not kill himself, as is commonly supposed, in a fit of madness but rather in a fit of unendurable lucidity, in a paroxysm which may, if so desired, be identified with madness; for an excessive perspicacity, carried to the limit and of which one longs to be rid at all costs, exceeds the context of reason.

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6 months 1 week ago

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

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To Varro, in Ad Familiares IX, 4
4 months 4 weeks ago

The genius of democracies is seen not only in the great number of new words introduced but even more in the new ideas they express.

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Book One, Chapter XVI.

Life has a value only when it has something valuable as its object.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Our entire linear and accumulative culture collapses if we cannot stockpile the past in plain view. "

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The Precession of Simulacra," p. 10
3 months 3 weeks ago

The mother tongue is propaganda.

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The University of Windsor review, Volumes 1-2, 1965, p. 10
4 months 3 weeks ago

A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

The Philosopher of this age is not a Socrates, a Plato, a Hooker, or Taylor, who inculcates on men the necessity and infinite worth of moral goodness, the great truth that our happiness depends on the mind which is within us, and not on the circumstances which are without us; but a Smith, a De Lolme, a Bentham, who chiefly inculcates the reverse of this,-that our happiness depends entirely on external circumstances; nay, that the strength and dignity of the mind within us is itself the creature and consequence of these. Were the laws, the government, in good order, all were well with us; the rest would care for itself! Dissentients from this opinion, expressed or implied, are now rarely to be met with; widely and angrily as men differ in its application, the principle is admitted by all.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Words are good servants but bad masters.

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As quoted by Laura Huxley, in conversation with Alan Watts about her memoir This Timeless Moment (1968), in Pacifica Archives #BB2037
5 months 2 weeks ago

In order to remain silent Da-sein must have something to say.

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Stambaugh translation
4 months 3 weeks ago

Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.

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4 months 1 week ago

No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole.

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"Two Dogmas of Empiricism"
6 months 2 weeks ago

See a person's means (of getting things). Observe his motives. Examine that in which he rests. How can a person conceal his character? See a person's "being", observe his motive, notice his result. How can a person conceal his character?

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5 months 3 weeks ago

I have in this treatise followed the mathematical method, if not with all strictness, at least imitatively, not in order, by a display of profundity, to procure a better reception for it, but because I believe such a system to be quite capable of it, and that perfection may in time be obtained by a cleverer hand, if stimulated by this sketch, mathematical investigators of nature should find it not unimportant to treat the metaphysical portion, which anyway cannot be got rid of, as a special fundamental department of general physics, and to bring it into unison with the mathematical doctrine of motion.

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Preface, Tr. Bax, 1883
2 months 2 weeks ago

In the learned professions as in the unlearned, and in human things throughout, in every place and in every time, the true function of intellect is not that of talking, but of understanding and discerning with a view to performing!

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