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7 months 4 days ago

Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.

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19:23-24 (KJV)
8 months 1 week ago

Every questioning is a seeking. Every seeking takes its direction beforehand from what is sought. Questioning is a knowing search for beings in their thatness and whatness.

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Introduction: The Exposition of the Question of the Meaning of Being (Stambaugh translation)
8 months 1 week ago

Wherever you are it is your own friends who make your world.

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As quoted in The Thought and Character of William James (1935) by Ralph Barton Perry, Vol. II, ch. 91
7 months 3 weeks ago

All the good are friends of one another.

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As quoted in Stromata, v. 14. by Clement of Alexandria
5 months 2 days ago

Henry of Essex's religion was the Inner Light or Moral Conscience of his own soul; such as is vouchsafed still to all souls of men;-which Inner Light shone here 'through such intellectual and other media' as there were; producing 'Phantasms,' Kircherean Visual-Spectra, according to circumstances! It is so with all men. The clearer my Inner Light may shine, through the less turbid media; the fewer Phantasms it may produce,-the gladder surely shall I be, and not the sorrier! Hast thou reflected, O serious reader, Advanced- Liberal or other, that the one end, essence, use of all religion past, present and to come, was this only: To keep that same Moral Conscience or Inner Light of ours alive and shining.

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8 months 1 week ago

Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.

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p. 39e
8 months 3 weeks ago

My mother spoke of Christ to my father, by her feminine and childlike virtues, and, after having borne his violence without a murmur or complaint, gained him at the close of his life to Christ.

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Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 351
8 months 1 week 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.
6 months 3 weeks ago

Nothing can contribute more to peace of soul than the lack of any opinion whatever.

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E 11

One needs only eyes to see the necessary influence of old age on reason.

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4 months 5 days ago

If life is a test, what do you have to defend what you stood for? Your actions in a tumultuous confusing world? If life is a test, you're going to want to have developed your own philosophy to point to.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

He was a one-book man. Some men have only one book in them; others, a library.

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Vol. I, ch. 11, p. 402
8 months 1 week ago

The days .... come and go like muffled and veiled figures, sent from a distant friendly party; but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.

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Works and Days
8 months 3 weeks ago

You are in the same manner surrounded with a small circle of persons... full of desire. They demand of you the benefits of desire... You are therefore properly the king of desire. ...equal in this to the greatest kings of the earth... It is desire that constitutes their power; that is, the possession of things that men covet.

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7 months 1 week ago

The supporters of the Development Hypothesis... can show that any existing species-animal or vegetable-when placed under conditions different from its previous ones, immediately begins to undergo certain changes fitting it for the new conditions. They can show that in successive generations these changes continue; until, ultimately, the new conditions become the natural ones. They can show that in cultivated plants, in domesticated animals, and in the several races of men, such alterations have taken place. They can show that the degrees of difference so produced are often, as in dogs, greater than those on which distinctions of species are in other cases founded.

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4 months 1 day ago

I lie on the beach like a crocodile and let myself be roasted by the sun. I never see a newspaper and don't give a damn for what is called the world.

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8 months 1 week ago

Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man's resources?

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9 months 1 day ago

Against the diseases of the mind, philosophy provides sufficient antidotes. The instruments which it employs for this purpose are the virtues; the root of which, whence all the rest proceed, is prudence. This virtue comprehends the whole art of living discreetly, justly, and honorably, and is, in fact, the same thing with wisdom. It instructs men to free their understandings from the clouds of prejudice; to exercise temperance and fortitude in the government of themselves: and to practice justice towards others. Although pleasure, or happiness, which is the end of living, be superior to virtue, which is only the means, it is every one's interest to practice all the virtues; for in a happy life, pleasure can never be separated from virtue.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Our philosophy... reduceth to a single origin and relateth to a single end, and maketh contraries to coincide so that there is one primal foundation both of origin and of end. From this coincidence of contraries, we deduce that ultimately it is divinely true that contraries are within contraries; wherefore it is not difficult to compass the knowledge that each thing is within every other.

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As translated by Dorothea Waley Singer
4 months 1 week ago

I remember that in a widely distributed French newspaper they asked the famous author of the Génie du Christianisme, if a nymph was not a bit more beautiful than a nun. In supposing them represented by the same talent or by equal talents (a condition without which the question would make no sense), there is no doubt that the nun would be more beautiful. The error best suited to extinguishing the true sentiment of beauty is that of confusing that which pleases with that which is beautiful, or in other words, that which pleases the senses with that which pleases the intelligence.

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4 months 1 week ago

We may believe what goes beyond our experience, only when it is inferred from that experience by the assumption that what we do not know is like what we know. We may believe the statement of another person, when there is reasonable ground for supposing that he knows the matter of which he speaks, and that he is speaking the truth so far as he knows it.It is wrong in all cases to believe on insufficient evidence; and where it is presumption to doubt and to investigate, there it is worse than presumption to believe.

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8 months 1 week ago

If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all.

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Ch. 5: Mathematics and the Metaphysicians
7 months 2 days ago

The metaphysical apologia at least betrayed the injustice of the established order through the incongruence of concept and reality. The impartiality of scientific language deprived what was powerless of the strength to make itself heard and merely provided the existing order with a neutral sign for itself. Such neutrality is more metaphysical than metaphysics.

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E. Jephcott, trans., p. 17.
7 months 1 week ago

Fate and temperament are the names of a concept.

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As quoted in Demian (1972) by Hermann Hesse, trans. W.J. Strachan
6 months 2 weeks ago

In conclusion, then, no satisfactory interpretation of quantum mechanics exists today. The questions posed by the confrontation between the Copenhagen interpretation and the hidden variable theorists go to the very foundations of microphysics, but the answers given by hidden variable theorists and Copenhagenists are alike unsatisfactory. Human curiosity will not rest until those questions are answered, but whether they will be answered by conceptual innovations within the framework of the present theory or only within the framework of an as yet unforeseen theory is unknown. The first step toward answering them has been attempted here. It is the modest but essential step of becoming clear on the nature and magnitude of the difficulties.

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A philosopher looks at quantum mechanics
7 months 2 weeks ago

Nothing seems at first sight less important than the outward form of human actions, yet there is nothing upon which men set more store: they grow used to everything except to living in a society which has not their own manners.

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Book Three, Chapter XIV.
6 months 1 week ago

To the blind all things are sudden.

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(p. 41)
8 months 1 week ago

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will... The really diligent student... is as solitary as a dervish in the desert. The farmer can work alone in the field or the woods all day, hoeing or chopping, and not feel lonesome.

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4 months 1 week ago

One loves to possess arms, though they hope never to have occasion for them.

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Letter to George Washington (1796); published in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 20 Vols., Washington, D.C., (1903-04), 9:341
8 months 1 week ago

Have no mean hours, but be grateful for every hour, and accept what it brings. The reality will make any sincere record respectable. No day will have been wholly misspent, if one sincere, thoughtful page has been written. Let the daily tide leave some deposit on these pages, as it leaves sand and shells on the shore. So much increase of terra firma. this may be a calendar of the ebbs and flows of the soul; and on these sheets as a beach, the waves may cast up pearls and seaweed.

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July 6, 1840
8 months 2 weeks ago

Knowledge, that tendeth but to satisfaction, is but as a courtesan, which is for pleasure, and not for fruit or generation.

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Valerius Terminus: Of the Interpretation of Nature (ca. 1603), in Works, Vol. 1, p. 83; The Works of Francis Bacon (1819), Vol. 2, p. 133
8 months 1 week ago

He will better comprehend the foundations and measures of decency and justice, and have livelier, and more lasting impressions of what he ought to do, by giving his opinion on cases propos'd, and reasoning with his tutor on fit instances, than by giving a silent, negligent, sleepy audience to his tutor's lectures; and much more than by captious logical disputes, or set declamations of his own, upon any question. The one sets the thoughts upon wit and false colours, and not upon truth; the other teaches fallacy, wrangling, and opiniatry; and they are both of them things that spoil the judgment, and put a man out of the way of right and fair reasoning; and therefore carefully to be avoided by one who would improve himself, and be acceptable to others.

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Sec. 98
8 months 1 day ago

You can tell the man who rings true from the man who rings false, not by his deeds alone, but also by his desires.

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I despise intentionally bad behavior. Being a good judge would definitely be learned behavior for me.

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8 months 1 week ago

Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract. Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say.

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The Scientific Outlook, 1931
7 months 1 week ago

Murder begins where self-defense ends.

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Act I.
8 months 1 week ago

The ceremonial (hot or cold) as opposed to the haphazard (lukewarm) characterizes piety.

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Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 127
8 months 1 week ago

The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.

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Experience
6 months 4 days ago

Liberty is not the same thing as equality, and that those who call themselves liberals are far more interested in equalizing than in liberating their fellows.

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The Limits of Liberty, The American Spectator
8 months 3 weeks ago

In a quarrel for earth, turn not to earth.

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First Homily, as translated by John Burnaby (1955), p. 267
6 months 3 weeks ago

What is generally regarded as success - acquisition of wealth, the capture of power or social prestige - I consider the most dismal failures. I hold when it is said of a man that he has arrived, it means that he is finished - his development has stopped at that point. I have always striven to remain in a state of flux and continued growth, and not to petrify in a niche of self-satisfaction. If I had my life to live over again, like anyone else, I should wish to alter minor details. But in any of my more important actions and attitudes I would repeat my life as I have lived it. Certainly I should work for Anarchism with the same devotion and confidence in its ultimate triumph.

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6 months 1 week ago

Hypnotized by their rear-view mirrors, philosophers and scientists alike tried to focus the figure of man in the old ground of nineteenth-century industrial mechanism and congestion. They failed to bridge from the old figure to the new. It is man who has become both figure and ground via the electrotechnical extension of his awareness. With the extension of his nervous system as a total information environment, man bridges art and nature.

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(p. 11)
4 months 1 week ago

Blessed are those eyes that have seen more water than any man! Blessed be that haughty mind that aimed at the greatest hope! May you be blessed who row the current your life longand now with dry unfreshened lips descend to Hadesto find the hidden deathless springs and slake your thirst! My son, it's death who keeps and pours the deathless waters.

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Voice of the Nile, from Odysseus' story, Book VIII, line 1290 (the first line is taken from an Egyptian hieroglyph.)
9 months 1 week ago

Between God and man there is and remains an eternal, essential, qualitative difference. The paradoxical relationship (which, quite rightly, cannot be thought, but only believed) appears when God appoints a particular man to divine authority, in relation, be it carefully noted, to that which has entrusted to him.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

When the wise man opens his mouth, the beauties of his soul present themselves to the view, like the statues in a temple.

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Pythagorean Ethical Sentences From Stobæus
8 months 6 days ago

If torture was so strongly embedded in legal practice, it was because it revealed truth and showed the operation of power. It assured the articulation of the written on the oral, the secret on the public, the procedure of investigation on the operation of the confession; it made it possible to reproduce the crime on the visible body of the criminal.

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Chapter One, pp.55
8 months 6 days ago

The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the social worker-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behavior, his aptitudes, his achievements.

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