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4 months ago
As soon as men live entirely in accord with the law of love natural to their hearts and now revealed to them, which excludes all resistance by violence, and therefore hold aloof from all participation in violence — as soon as this happens, not only will hundreds be unable to enslave millions, but not even millions will be able to enslave a single individual.
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V
4 months ago
One must be careful with regard to the form of the letters, so that a yud will not resemble a vav, nor a vav a yud; a kaf should not resemble a beit, nor a beit a kaf; a dalet should not resemble a resh, nor a resh a dalet.
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[http://www.sefaria.org/Mishneh_Torah%2C_Tefillin%2C_Mezuzah_and_the_Torah_Scroll.1.19 Sefer Ahavah, "Tefillin, Mezuzah and the Torah Scroll" 1:19]
4 months 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 ago
on first priority in design consideration is the full realization of individual potential in order to reach the second derivative — full realization for all individuals
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No More Secondhand God (1963)
4 months ago
At the beginning of this marvelous era it was natural to expect, and it was expected, that labor-saving inventions would lighten the toil and improve the condition of the laborer; that the enormous increase in the power of producing wealth would make real poverty a thing of the past. … It is true that disappointment has followed disappointment, and that discovery upon discovery, and invention after invention, have neither lessened the toil of those who most need respite, nor brought plenty to the poor. But there have been so many things to which it seemed this failure could be laid, that up to our time the new faith has hardly weakened. We have better appreciated the difficulties to be overcome; but not the less trusted that the tendency of the times was to overcome them. Now, however, we are coming into collision with facts which there can be no mistaking. From all parts of the civilized world come complaints of industrial depression; of labor condemned to involuntary idleness; of capital massed and wasting; of pecuniary distress among businessmen; of want and suffering and anxiety among the working classes. All the dull, deadening pain, all the keen, maddening anguish, that to great masses of men are involved in the words "hard times," afflict the world to-day. This state of things, common to communities differing so widely in situation, in political institutions, in fiscal and financial systems, in density of population and in social organization, can hardly be accounted for by local causes.
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Introductory : The Problem
4 months ago
If I had as clear an idea of ghosts, as I have of a triangle or a circle, I should not in the least hesitate to affirm that they had been created by God; but as the idea I possess of them is just like the ideas, which my imagination forms of harpies, gryphons, hydras, &c., I cannot consider them as anything but dreams, which differ from God as totally as that which is not differs from that which is.
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Letter to Hugo Boxel (October 1674) The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza (1891) Tr. R. H. M. Elwes, Vol. 2, Letter 58 (54).
4 months ago
I shall in no time forget that moment. We felt as if we had had in our souls a clear passing glimpse into this wondrous World.
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4 months ago
Rest satisfied with doing well, and leave others to talk of you as they please.
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As quoted in The World's Laconics: Or, The Best Thoughts of the Best Authors (1853) by Everard Berkeley | Variant: Rest satisfied with doing well, and leave others to talk of you as they will.
4 months ago
The stronger becomes master of the weaker, in so far as the latter cannot assert its degree of independence — here there is no mercy, no forbearance, even less a respect for "laws."
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Sec. 630 (Notebook W I 4. June - July 1885, KGW VII, 3.283, KSA 11.559)
4 months ago
If you want to be happy, be.
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Attributed in Wisdom for the Soul : Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing (2006) by Larry Chang, p. 352; this statement appears in late 20th century inspirational books, but with no known citation to original material by Tolstoy. | This is
4 months ago
Man's shortcomings and sins are all due to the substance of the body and not to its form; while all his merits are exclusively due to his form.
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Ch.8
4 months ago
England's genius filled all measure Of heart and soul, of strength and pleasure, Gave to the mind its emperor, And life was larger than before: Nor sequent centuries could hit Orbit and sum of Shakespeare's wit. The men who lived with him became Poets, for the air was fame.
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Solution, ll. 35-42
4 months ago
It seems to demonstrate that periods of industrial activity in technical syntheses of principles, data, free energy and energy as "matter," find highest employment by the fear-amassed credits of warfare. Therefore the assumption approaches fact that war promotes the major technical advances of civilization... What has not been clear is that the potential of this emergency-born technology has always accrued to human's prewar individual initiatives taken in a humble but irrepressible progression of assumptions, measurements, deductions, and codifications of pure science.
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Earth, Inc. (1973) In this passage, Fuller begins to explain why technological progress seems to make great gains in war time and states his view that this is a reflection of advances mainly made in peacetime — wars simply force nations to take notice of
4 months ago
There is no original truth, only original error.
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A Retrospective Glance at the Lifework of a Master of Books
4 months ago
Free trade consists simply in letting people buy and sell as they want to buy and sell. It is protection that requires force, for it consists in preventing people from doing what they want to do. Protective tariffs are as much applications of force as are blockading squadrons, and their object is the same—to prevent trade. The difference between the two is that blockading squadrons are a means whereby nations seek to prevent their enemies from trading; protective tariffs are a means whereby nations attempt to prevent their own people from trading. What protection teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.
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Ch. 6
4 months ago
The true Poet is all-knowing; he is an actual world in miniature.
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4 months ago
Above all things reverence thy Self.
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Variant translations: | Respect yourself above all. | As quoted in [http://www.sacredscience.com/pythagoras.htm Divine Harmony: The Life and Teachings of Pythagoras] by John Strohmeier and Peter Westbrook. (1999) | Above all things reverence thy self. Abo
4 months ago
You know these things as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, they are an echo and after-effect of your experiences: as when your room trembles when a carriage goes past. I however am sitting in the carriage, and often I am the carriage itself.
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Attributed across social media to TSZ. Is actually quoted in TSZ, Penguin Classics, Reg Hollingdale translation, in the introduction pg 12. Attributed to 'posthumously produced notes' [Nachlass?] Hollingdale continues.' In a man who thinks like this, the
4 months ago
Tolstoy, who among European writers of the nineteenth century probably had the widest access to all sectors of his society, was able to stock War and Peace with an enormous cast of characters and range of situations.
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Ruth Wisse The Modern Jewish Canon (2000)
4 months ago
This shows the kindness of God to His creatures, even to us weak beings. His righteousness and justice as regards all animals are well known; for in the transient world there is among the various kinds of animals no individual being distinguished from the rest of the same species... all physical, psychical, and vital forces and organs that are possessed by one individual are found also in the other individuals. If any one is somehow different it is by accident, in consequence of some exception, and not by a natural property; it is also a rare occurrence.
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Ch.12
4 months ago
Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.
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Works and Days
4 months ago
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
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As quoted in Beyond Civilization: Humanity's Next Great Adventure (1999), by Daniel Quinn, p. 137
4 months ago
That the forms of natural bodies may depend upon different arrangements of the same particles of matter has been a favourite hypothesis advanced in the earliest era of physical research, and often supported by the reasonings of the ablest philosophers. This sublime chemical speculation sanctioned by the authority of Hooke, Newton, and Boscovich, must not be confounded with the ideas advanced by the alchemists concerning the convertibility of the elements into each other. The possible transmutation of metals has generally been reasoned upon not as a philosophical research, but as an empirical process. Those who have asserted the actual production of the precious metals from other elements, or their decomposition, or who have defended the chimera of the philosopher's stone, have been either impostors, or men deluded by impostors. In this age of rational inquiry it will be useless to decry the practices of the adepts, or to caution the public against confounding the hypothetical views respecting the elements founded upon distinct analogies, with the dreams of alchemical visionaries, most of whom, as an author of the last century justly observed, professed an art without principles, the beginning of which was deceit, the progress delusion, and the end poverty.
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Elements of Chemical Philosophy, pt. 1, vol. 1 (London: J. Johnson and Co, 1812) pt. 7, sec. 1, pp. 488-489
4 months ago
A fool is known by his Speech; and a wise man by Silence.
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4 months ago
I did not direct my life. I didn't design it. I never made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That's what life is.
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As quoted in "Unpacking the Skinner Box : Revisiting B. F. Skinner through a Postformal Lens" by Dana Salter in The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology Vol. 4 (2008) edited by Joe L. Kincheloe and Raymond A. Horn, Ch. 99, p. 872
4 months ago
There are two godheads: the world and my independent I. I am either happy or unhappy, that is all. It can be said: good or evil do not exist. A man who is happy must have no fear. Not even in the face of death. Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy.
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Journal entry (8 July 1916), p. 74e
4 months ago
I find it expressed in various passages of Scripture that the fact that God knows things while in a state of possibility, when their existence belongs to the future, does not change the nature of the possible in any way; that nature remains unchanged; and the knowledge of the realisation of one of several possibilities does not yet effect that realisation. This is likewise one of the fundamental principles of the Law of Moses concerning which there is no doubt nor any dispute.
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Ch.20
4 months ago
Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: Every man I meet is my master at some point, and in that, I learn of him.
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Greatness
4 months ago
You have to decide whether you want to make money or make sense, because the two are mutually exclusive.
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Pg. 226
4 months ago
I see philosophy as a fairly abstract activity, as concerned mainly with the analysis of criticism and concepts, and of course most usefully of scientific concepts.
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As quoted in Profile of Sir Alfred Ayer (June 1971) by Euro-Television, quoted in A.J. Ayer: A Life (1999), p. 2.
4 months ago
Practice yourself, for heaven's sake, in little things; and thence proceed to greater.
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Book I, ch. 18, § 18.
4 months ago
In this theater of man's life it is reserved only for God and angels to be lookers on.
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Francis Bacon, in The Advancement of Learning (1605) Book II, xx, 8.
4 months ago
What I give is the morphology of the use of an expression. I show that it has kinds of uses of which you had not dreamed. In philosophy one feels forced to look at a concept in a certain way. What I do is suggest, or even invent, other ways of looking at it. I suggest possibilities of which you had not previously thought. You thought that there was one possibility, or only two at most. But I made you think of others. Furthermore, I made you see that it was absurd to expect the concept to conform to those narrow possibilities. Thus your mental cramp is relieved, and you are free to look around the field of use of the expression and to describe the different kinds of uses of it.
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Lectures of 1946 - 1947, as quoted in Ludwig Wittgenstein : A Memoir (1966) by Norman Malcolm, p. 43
4 months ago
The most evident of the wonders described in the book On the Use of the Limbs [by Galen]... is clearly perceived by all who examine them with a sharp eye. In a similar manner did God provide for each individual animal of the class of mammalia. When such an animal is born it is extremely tender, and cannot be fed with dry food. Therefore breasts were provided which yield milk, and the young can be fed with moist food which corresponds to the condition of the limbs of the animal, until the latter have gradually become dry and hard. Many precepts in our Law are the result of a similar course adopted by the same Supreme Being. It is, namely, impossible to go suddenly from one extreme to the other; it is therefore according to the nature of man impossible for him suddenly to discontinue everything to which he has been accustomed.
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Ch.32
4 months ago
Every man I meet is in some way my superior, and in that, I can learn of him.
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As quoted in Think, Vol. 4-5 (1938), p. 32
4 months ago
When I was born, humanity was 95 per cent illiterate. Since I've been born, the population has doubled and that total population is now 65 per cent literate. That's a gain of 130-fold of the literacy. When humanity is primarily illiterate, it needs leaders to understand and get the information and deal with it. When we are at the point where the majority of humans them-selves are literate, able to get the information, we're in an entirely new relationship to Universe. We are at the point where the integrity of the individual counts and not what the political leadership or the religious leadership says to do.
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4 months ago
Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.
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Pt. IV, Expression; § 67: "Conclusion.", p. 270
4 months ago
I am aware that the great Plato himself, and after him, a man posterior to him in date, though not in mind, I mean Iamblichus of Chalcis (who initiated us into other branches of philosophy, and also into this by means of his discourses), did both of them as far as hypothesis goes, take for granted the fact of a Creation and assumed the universe to have been, in a certain sense, the Work of Time, in order that the most important of the effects produced by this Power, may be reduced into a shape for examination. … On the same subject you will obtain more complete and more abstruse information by consulting the works upon it composed by the divine Iamblichus: you will find there the extreme limit of human wisdom attained. May the mighty Sun grant me to attain to no less knowledge of himself, and to teach it publicly to all, and privately to such as are worthy to receive it: and as long as the god grants this to us, let us consult in common his well-beloved Iamblichus; out of whose abundance a few things, that have come into my mind, I have here set down. That no other person will treat of this subject more perfectly than he has done, I am well aware; not even though he should expend much additional labour in making new discoveries in the research; for in all probability he will go astray from the most correct conception of the nature of the god.
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Emperor Julian, in [http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/julian_apostate_1_sun.htm Upon the Sovereign Sun] (362), as translated by C. W. King in Julian the Emperor (1888) - [http://www.archive.org/details/julianemperorco00juligoog Full text online]
4 months ago
Know, first, who you are, and then adorn yourself accordingly.
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Book III, ch. 1, § 25.
4 months ago
Much learning does not teach wisdom; otherwise it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, and again Xenophanes and Hecataeus.
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Heraclitus (c. 500 BC) as quoted by Sir Thomas Little Heath, A History of Greek Mathematics, [https://books.google.com/books?id=h4JsAAAAMAAJ Vol. 1], p.65, citing Diog. L. ix. 1 (Fr. 40 in Vorsokratiker i3, p. 86. 1-3).
4 months ago
Why in the world shouldn't they have regarded with awe and reverence that act by which the human race is perpetuated. Not every religion has to have St. Augustine's attitude to sex. Why even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn't prevent it being a religious ceremony.
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In reaction to statements by Maurice O'Connor Drury who expressed disapproval of depictions of an ancient Egyptian god with an erect phallus, in "Conversations with Wittgenstein" as quoted in Leading a Human Life: Wittgenstein, Intentionality, and Romanti
4 months ago
Rationalism in politics, as I have interpreted it, involves an identifiable error, a misconception with regard to the nature of human knowledge, which amounts to a corruption of the mind. And consequently it is without the power to correct its own short-comings; it has no homeopathic quality; you cannot escape its errors by becoming more sincerely or more profoundly rationalistic.
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4 months ago
Self-command is the main elegance.
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p. 205
4 months ago
No science has ever been born on a specific day. Each science emerges out of a convergence of an increased interest in some class of problems and the development of scientific methods, techniques, and tools which are adequate to solve these problems. Operations Research (O.R.) is no exception. Its roots are as old as science and the management function. Its name dates back only to 1940.
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p. 3; Partly cited in: Ivor Grattan-Guinness (2003) Companion encyclopedia of the history and philosophy of the mathematical sciences, Vol 1. p. 841
4 months 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 ago
We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.
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Part 3, Section 3
4 months ago
Those of our pleasures which come most rarely give the greatest delight.
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Fragment 33 ([https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Epictetus,_the_Discourses_as_reported_by_Arrian,_the_Manual,_and_Fragments/Fragments Oldfather translation])
4 months ago
Around 600 BCE, Pythagoras observed that the tones of a lyre sound most harmonious when the ratio of string lengths forms a simple whole-number fraction. Inspired by such hints, Pythagoras and his followers made a remarkable intuitive leap. They foresaw the possibility of a different kind of world-model, less dependent on the accident of our senses but more in tune with Nature's hidden harmonies, and ultimately more faithful to reality. This is the meaning of... "All things are number."
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Frank Wilczek, The Lightness of Being (2008)
4 months ago
To write well is to think well; there is no art of style distinct from the culture of the mind. The good writer is a complete mind, gifted with judgment, passion, imagination, and at the same time well trained. The inner qualities of rectitude, of brilliant geniality, are not given; instruction, wealth of information, fulness of knowledge, are acquired. Thus good training of the mind is the only school of good style. Wanting that, you have merely rhetoric and bad taste.
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As quoted in The Art of Authorship (1890) by George Bainton
4 months ago
115. If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes .
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