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For it still seemed to me that it is not we who sin, but some other nature sinned in us. And it gratified my pride to be beyond blame, and when I did anything wrong not to have to confess that I had done wrong. I loved to excuse my soul and to accuse something else inside me (I knew not what) but which was not I. But, assuredly, it was I, and it was my impiety that had divided me against myself. That sin then was all the more incurable because I did not deem myself a sinner.

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A. Outler, trans. (Dover: 2002), Book 5, Chapter 10, p. 77
5 months 3 weeks ago

I have gathered a posy of other men's flowers, and nothing but the thread that binds them is mine own.

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Ch. 12: Of Physiognomy
5 months 3 weeks ago

Further, it will not be amiss to distinguish the three kinds and, as it were, grades of ambition in mankind. The first is of those who desire to extend their own power in their native country, a vulgar and degenerate kind. The second is of those who labor to extend the power and dominion of their country among men. This certainly has more dignity, though not less covetousness. But if a man endeavor to establish and extend the power and dominion of the human race itself over the universe, his ambition (if ambition it can be called) is without doubt both a more wholesome and a more noble thing than the other two. Now the empire of man over things depends wholly on the arts and sciences. For we cannot command nature except by obeying her.

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Aphorism 129
4 months ago

A modern factory reaches perhaps almost the limit of horror. Everybody in it is constantly harassed and kept on edge by the interference of extraneous wills while the soul is left in cold and desolate misery. What man needs is silence and warmth; what he is given is an icy pandemonium.Physical labour may be painful, but it is not degrading as such. It is not art; it is not science; it is something else, possessing an exactly equal value with art and science, for it provides an equal opportunity to reach the impersonal stage of attention.

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p. 59
3 months 2 weeks ago

Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.

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Bk. XV, ch. 1
1 month 4 weeks ago

You can tell the character of every man when you see how he gives and receives praise.

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Line 12.
4 months 5 days ago

Greatness by nature includes a power, but not a will to power.

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p. 150
1 month 3 weeks ago

When a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique. He is universal by virtue of the inseparability of his organism from the cosmos. He is unique in that he is just this organism and not any stereotype of role, class, or identity assumed for the convenience of social communication.

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p. 9
4 months 1 week ago

Unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.

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12:48
5 months 2 weeks ago

No man is liberated from fear who dare not see his place in the world as it is; no man can achieve the greatness of which he is capable until he has allowed himself to see his own littleness.

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Dreams and Facts, 1919
5 months 3 weeks 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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4 months 2 weeks ago

Whoever hasn't yet arrived at the clear realization that there might be a greatness existing entirely outside his own sphere and for which he might have absolutely no feeling; whoever hasn't at least felt obscure intimations concerning the approximate location of this greatness in the geography of the human spirit: that person either has no genius in his own sphere, or else he hasn't been educated to the level of the classic.

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Lucinde and the Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991), "Critical Fragments," § 36
5 months 2 weeks ago

Hatred comes from the heart; contempt from the head; and neither feeling is quite within our control.

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"Psychological Observations"
3 months 2 weeks ago

In former times the chief method of justifying the use of violence and thereby infringing the law of love was by claiming a divine right for the rulers: the Tsars, Sultans, Rajahs, Shahs, and other heads of states. But the longer humanity lived the weaker grew the belief in this peculiar, God-given right of the ruler. That belief withered in the same way and almost simultaneously in the Christian and the Brahman world, as well as in Buddhist and Confucian spheres, and in recent times it has so faded away as to prevail no longer against man's reasonable understanding and the true religious feeling. People saw more and more clearly, and now the majority see quite clearly, the senselessness and immorality of subordinating their wills to those of other people just like themselves, when they are bidden to do what is contrary not only to their interests but also to their moral sense.

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III
5 months 2 weeks ago

It requires twenty years for a man to rise from the vegetable state in which he is within his mother's womb, and from the pure animal state which is the lot of his early childhood, to the state when the maturity of reason begins to appear. It has required thirty centuries to learn a little about his structure. It would need eternity to learn something about his soul. It takes an instant to kill him.

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"Man: General Reflection on Man", 1771
1 month 4 weeks ago

Kindly remember that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives and dies. It is just as possible for you to see in him a free-born man as for him to see in you a slave.

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Line 10.
5 months 2 weeks ago

An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

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All truth, in the long run, is only common sense clarified.

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"On the Study of Biology"
6 months 2 weeks ago

You wanted God's ideas about what was best for you to coincide with your ideas, but you also wanted him to be the almighty Creator of heaven and earth so that he could properly fulfill your wish. And yet, if he were to share your ideas, he would cease to be the almighty Father.

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1 month 1 week ago

And virtue they will curse, speaking harsh words.

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XI, 32
4 months 1 week ago

I long to be free - desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

If, when a man writes a poem or commits a murder, the bodily movements involved in his act result solely from physical causes, it would seem absurd to put up a statue to him in the one case and to hang him in the other.

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"The Doctrine of Free Will"
5 months 2 weeks ago

A book can never be anything more than the impression of its author's thoughts [Ein Buch kann nie mehr seyn, als der Abdruck der Gedanken des Verfassers]. The value of these thoughts lies either in the matter about which he has thought, or in the form in which he develops his matter - that is to say, what he has thought about it.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

It is true that may hold in these things, which is the general root of superstition; namely, that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss; and commit to memory the one, and forget and pass over the other.

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Sylva Sylvarum Century X, 1627
5 months 2 weeks ago

How just, how suitable to our crime is the punishment with which Providence threatens us? We have enslaved multitudes, and shed much innocent blood in doing it; and now are threatened with the same. And while other evils are confessed, and bewailed, why not this especially, and publicly; than which no other vice, if all others, has brought so much guilt on the land?

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4 months 2 weeks ago

The writers against religion, whilst they oppose every system, are wisely careful never to set up any of their own.

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Preface
6 months 3 days ago

This is one of the most intricate problems of religion. For if you look into the traditional arguments (Hadith) about this problem you will find them contradictory; such also being the case with arguments of reason. The contradiction in the arguments of the first kind is found in the Qur'an and the Hadith.

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4 months 1 week ago

To tell the truth, I couldn't care less about the relativity of knowledge, simply because the world does not deserve to be known.

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The goal to be reached is the mind's insight into what knowing is. Impatience asks for the impossible, wants to reach the goal without the means of getting there. The length of the journey has to be borne with, for every moment is necessary, ... because by nothing less could that all-pervading mind ever manage to become conscious of what itself is - for that reason, the individual mind, in the nature of the case, cannot expect by less toil to grasp what its own substance contains.

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Preface (J. B. Baillie translation), § 29
5 months 2 weeks ago

We think it also necessary to express our astonishment that a government, desirous of being called free, should prefer connection with the most despotic and arbitrary powers in Europe.

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Address and Declaration at a Select Meeting of the Friends of Universal Peace and Liberty (August 20, 1791) p. 5
3 months 3 weeks ago

The human tendency to regard little things as important has produced very many great things. G 46 Variant translation: The inclination of people to consider small things as important has produced many great things.

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2 months 1 week ago

After the publication of my dialogues, I was summoned to Rome by the Congregation of the holy Office, where, being arrived on the 10th of February 1633, I was subjected to the infinite clemency of that tribunal, and of the Sovereign Pontiff, Urban the Eighth; who, notwithstanding, thought me deserving of his esteem.

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pp. 145-146
3 months 1 week ago

You contain a trillion copies of a large, textual document written in a highly accurate, digital code, each copy as voluminous as a substantial book. I'm talking, of course, of the DNA in your cells.

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4 months 1 week ago

The pessimist has to invent new reasons to exist every day: he is a victim of the "meaning" of life.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

What is food to one, is to others bitter poison.

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Book IV, line 637 (reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations) Compare: "What's one man's poison, signor, / Is another's meat or drink", Beaumont and Fletcher, Love's Cure (1647), Act III, scene 2
5 months 1 week ago

The word "art" does not designate the concept of a mere eventuality; it is a concept of rank.

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p. 125
5 months 2 weeks ago

The very cannibalism of the counterrevolution will convince the nations that there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.

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"The Victory of the Counter-Revolution in Vienna," Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 7 November 1848.
3 months 3 weeks ago

Everything I have written in these lectures underlines the importance to the intellectual of passionate engagement, risk, exposure, commitment to principles, vulnerability in debating and being involved in worldly causes. For example, the difference I drew earlier between a professional and an amateur intellectual rests precisely on this, that the professional claims detachment on the basis of a profession and pretends to objectivity, whereas the amateur is moved neither by reward nor by the fulfillment of an immediate career plan but by a committed engagement with ideas and values in the public sphere.

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p. 109
3 months 3 weeks ago

Obviously, Anarchism, or any other social theory, making man a conscious social unit, will act as a leaven for rebellion.

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3 months 3 days ago

Let us remember that the government and the society act and react on each other. Sometimes the government is in advance of the society, and hurries the society forward. So urged, the society gains on the government, comes up with the government, outstrips the government, and begins to insist that the government shall make more speed. If the government is wise, it will yield to that just and natural demand. The great cause of revolutions is this, that, while nations move onward, constitutions stand still. The peculiar happiness of England is that here, through many generations, the constitution has moved onward with the nation.

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Speech in the House of Commons on the Reform Bill (5 July 1831), quoted in Speeches of the Right Honourable T. B. Macaulay, M.P. (1854), p. 25
1 month 4 weeks ago

A good judge condemns wrongful acts, but does not hate them.

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De Ira (On Anger): Book 1, cap. 16, line 6.
5 months 3 weeks ago

The most disadvantageous peace is better than the most just war.

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Adagia, 1508
5 months 4 weeks ago

Superstition is now in her turn cast down and trampled underfoot, whilst we by the victory are exalted high as heaven.

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Book I, lines 78-79 (tr. W. H. D. Rouse)
5 months 2 weeks ago

I pre-suppose, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself.

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Author's prefaces to the First Edition.
5 months 1 day ago

To one that promised to give him hardy cocks that would die fighting, "Prithee," said Cleomenes, "give me cocks that will kill fighting."

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61 Cleomenes
9 months 1 week ago

Think differently, but know when it's your duty to think the same...

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1 month 2 weeks ago

In the effort to tell a whole story, to see it whole and clear, I have had to imagine more than I have known.

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"Imagination in Place"

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