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4 months 4 days ago

In fine, I repeat, you must lay aside all prejudice on both sides, and neither believe nor reject anything, because any other persons, or description of persons, have rejected or believed it. Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable, not for the rightness, but uprightness of the decision.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it. This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientist do, each in his own fashion. Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way the peace and security which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

We ought so to behave to one another as to avoid making enemies of our friends, and at the same time to make friends of our enemies. 

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As quoted in Diogenes Laërtius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, "Pythagoras", Sect. 23, as translated in Dictionary of Quotations (1906) by Thomas Benfield Harbottle, p. 320
6 months 3 weeks ago

Man is a substantial emigrant on a pilgrimage of being, and it is accordingly meaningless to set limits to what he is capable of being.

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"Man has no nature"
5 months 4 weeks ago

We do not merely study the past: we inherit it, and inheritance brings with it not only the rights of ownership, but the duties of trusteeship. Things fought for and died for should not be idly squandered. For they are the property of others, who are not yet born.

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4 months 1 week ago

For a long time there have been no true sovereigns, monarchs by divine right capable of wielding sword and scepter, and symbols of a higher human ideal. More than a century ago, Juan Donoso Cortés stated that no kings existed capable of proclaiming themselves as such except "by the will of the nation," adding that, even if any had existed, they would not have been recognized. The few monarchies still surviving are notoriously impotent and empty, while the traditional nobility has lost its essential character as a political class and any existential prestige and rank along with it. Its current representatives may still interest our contemporaries when put on the same plane as film actors and actresses, sport heroes and opera stars, and when through some private, sentimental, or scandalous chance, they serve as fodder for magazine articles.

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p. 172
4 months 4 days ago

When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become corrupt as in Europe.

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Letter to James Madison (20 December 1787), The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (19 Vols., 1905) edited by Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, Vol. VI, p. 392.
6 months 2 weeks ago

I do not mean to deny the biologic, physiologic, or psychologic factors in creating crime; but there is hardly an advanced criminologist who will not concede that the social and economic influences are the most relentless, the most poisonous germs of crime.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

For it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be.

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Frag. B 3, quoted by Plotinus, Enneads V, i.8
8 months 4 days ago

Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs; and lucky it is if the passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way.

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4 months 1 day ago

Know the joy of life by piling good deed on good deed until no rift or cranny appears between them.

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XII, 29
4 months 4 weeks ago

The Scientist must set in order. Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.

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Ch. IX: Hypotheses in Physics, Tr. George Bruce Halsted
8 months 1 week ago

In vain, therefore, should we pretend to determine any single event, or infer any cause or effect, without the assistance of observation and experience.

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§ 4.11
3 weeks 3 days ago

This thinking just seems so quaint now...it's just pure art at this point...

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A mere nothing, a tiny fibre, something that could never be found by the most delicate anatomy, would have made of Erasmus and Fontenelle two idiots, and Fontenelle himself speaks of this very fact in one of his best dialogues.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Bourgeois civilization has built railroads and electric power plants, has invented explosives and airplanes, in order to create wealth. Imperialism has placed the tools of peace in the service of destruction. With modern means it would be easy to wipe out humanity at one blow.

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p. 252
6 months 3 weeks ago

The world is so possessed by the power of what is and the efforts of adjustment to it, that the adolescent's rebellion, which once fought the father because his practices contradicted his own ideology, can no longer crop up. ... Psychologically, the father is ... replaced by the world of things.

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p. 41-42.
7 months 1 day ago

After all, why should ordinary people want to contemplate the End, especially when we see the condition of those who do?

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8 months 3 days ago

You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.

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Commonly attributed to Mere Christianity, where it is not found. Earliest reference seems to be an unsourced attribution to George MacDonald in an 1892 issue of the Quaker periodical The British Friend.
8 months 3 days ago

...and if you are common, you can dress up as a woman, show you behind or write poems: there's nothing offensive about a naked behind if it's everybody's; each person will be mirrored in it.

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p. 463
7 months 2 weeks ago

Sobriety is the strength of the soul, for it preserves its reason unclouded by passion.

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As quoted in The History of Philosophy: From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Present Century (1819) by William Enfield Sobriety is the strength of the mind
6 months 2 days ago

By doing nothing men learn to do ill.

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Maxim 318 Compare Ecclesiasticus 33:27 (KJV): "idleness teacheth much evil".
8 months 3 days ago

If there is equality, it is in His love, not in us.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

(The end is) life in agreement with nature.

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As quoted by Diogenes Laërtius, in Lives of Eminent Philosophers: 'Zeno', 7.87
4 months 4 days ago

I'm not a Baptist in any formal way. I go to the Baptist church, where my wife plays the piano, on days of bad weather. On days of good weather, I ramble off into the woods somewhere. I am a person who takes the Gospel seriously, but I have had trouble conforming my thoughts to a denomination.

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The Brian Lehrer Show
7 months 5 days ago

There is but one law for all, namely, that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity - the law of nature, and of nations.

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28 May 1794
1 month 3 weeks ago

Identity particularity is constructed and should never subvert ACTUAL life. But, we share common physical ancestors, so, groups CAN be based on physical evolutionary determinism. Universality, understanding all humans have a common physical ancestor...Universal Humanism...an identity group based on pre-choice determinism that supports basic ethics and justice.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

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Ch. 1: "The Origins of Modern Science", p. 6
4 months 1 week ago

There are two kinds of animals on earth. One kind minds his own business, the other minds other people's business. The former are vegetarians, like cows, sheep and thinking men. The latter are carnivorous, like hawks, tigers and men of action.

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As quoted by Tai-yi Lin (Lin Yutang's daughter) in her Foreword (26 March 1950) to The Importance of Living, p. x
9 months 2 days ago

The Dantean conceptions of Inferno were childish and unworthy of the Divine imagination: fire and torture. Boredom is much more subtle. The inner torture of a mind unable to escape itself in any way, condemned to fester in its own exuding mental pus for all time, is much more fitting. Oh, yes, my friend, we have been judged, and condemned, too, and this is not Heaven, but hell.

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8 months 5 days ago

I do not believe that I am now dreaming, but I cannot prove that I am not. I am, however, quite certain that I am having certain experiences, whether they be those of a dream or those of waking life.

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Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948), p. 172
8 months 1 week ago

In order to seek truth, it is necessary once in the course of our life, to doubt, as far as possible, of all things.

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Descartes, René (1644). Principles of Philosophy.
7 months 1 week ago

The most dangerous madmen are those created by religion, and ... people whose aim is to disrupt society always know how to make good use of them on occasion.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science. What the mystic finds waiting for him, then, is a humanity which has been prepared to listen to his message by other mystics invisible and present in the religion which is actually taught. Indeed his mysticism itself is imbued with this religion, for such was its starting point. His theology will generally conform to that of the theologians. His intelligence and his imagination will use the teachings of the theologians to express in words what he experiences, and in material images what he sees spiritually. And this he can do easily, since theology has tapped that very current whose source is the mystical. Thus his mysticism is served by religion, against the day when religion becomes enriched by his mysticism. This explains the primary mission which he feels to be entrusted to him, that of an intensifier of religious faith.

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Chapter III : Dynamic Religion
7 months 5 days ago

Think of something finite molded into the infinite, and you think of man.

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"Selected Ideas (1799-1800)", Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, trans. (1968) #98
4 months 2 weeks ago

As long as you live, keep learning how to live.

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8 months 3 weeks ago

The way of the superior man may be compared to what takes place in traveling, when to go to a distance we must first traverse the space that is near, and in ascending a height, when we must begin from the lower ground.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

We make a ladder of our vices, if we trample those same vices underfoot.

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8 months 5 days ago

In the Hindoo scripture the idea of man is quite illimitable and sublime. There is nowhere a loftier conception of his destiny. He is at length lost in Brahma himself 'the divine male.' ... there is no grandeur conception of creation anywhere .... The very indistinctness of its theogeny implies a sublime truth.

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A Tribute to Hinduism, 2008
8 months 1 week 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
4 months 3 weeks ago

May not this religious reticence, in these devout good souls, be perhaps a merit, and sign of health in them? Jocelin, Eadmer, and such religious men, have as yet nothing of 'Methodism;' no Doubt or even root of Doubt. Religion is not a diseased self-introspection, an agonising inquiry: their duties are clear to them, the way of supreme good plain, indisputable, and they are traveling on it. Religion lies over them like an all-embracing heavenly canopy, like an atmosphere and life-element, which is not spoken of, which in all things is presupposed without speech. Is not serene or complete Religion the highest aspect of human nature.

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6 months 4 days ago

It is often better for a person to recognize a sin than to do a good deed. Recognizing a sin makes a person humble. Doing a good deed often can feed a person's pride.

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p. 108
6 months 3 weeks ago

No, you cannot expect people to understand the higher reaches of philosophy. Culture should be taken out of the hands of the dollar chasers. We need a national subsidy for literature. It is disgraceful that artists are treated like peddlers and that art works have to be sold like soap.

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4 weeks 1 day ago

I'd say being is the FOUNDATION of truth, language corresponds, then actions that preserve life are Good....

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