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7 months 1 week ago

It is a woman's outstanding characteristic that she can do anything for the love of a man. But those women who can achieve something important for the love of a thing are most exceptional, because this does not really agree with their nature. Love for a thing is a man's prerogative. But since masculine and feminine elements are united in our human nature, a man can live in the feminine part of himself, I and a woman in her masculine part. None the less the feminine element in man is only something in the background, as is the masculine element in woman. If one lives out the opposite sex in oneself one is living in one's own background, and one's real individuality suffers. A man should live as a man and a woman as a woman.

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P. 243
4 months 1 week ago

To farm is to be placed absolutely.

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"Imagination in Place"
7 months 2 weeks ago

It is the function of a judge not to make but to declare the law, according to the golden mete-wand of the law and not by the crooked cord of discretion.

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Preface to Brissot's Address
8 months 3 weeks ago

Kings and philosophers shit, and so do ladies.

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Ch. 42, English translation from Hartle, Ann (2003), Michel de Montaigne: Accidental Philosopher, Cambridge University Press.
9 months 2 weeks ago
Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him!
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7 months 1 week ago

The death clock is ticking slowly in our breast, and each drop of blood measures its time, and our life is a lingering fever.

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Act II.
9 months 3 days ago

Sobriety, as opposed to inebriety and gluttony, is of admirable use in teaching men that nature is satisfied with a little, and enabling them to content themselves with simple and frugal fare.

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8 months 3 days ago

Wealth and poverty do not lie in a person's estate, but in their souls.

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iv. 34
6 months 1 week ago

Remember then: there is only one time that is important-Now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any power. The most necessary man is he with whom you are, for no man knows whether he will ever have dealings with any one else: and the most important affair is, to do him good, because for that purpose alone was man sent into this life!

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Part VII: Stories Given to Aid Persecuted Jews (1903) "Three Questions", translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude, p271.
8 months 4 days ago

Science does not stand still, and neither does philosophy, although the latter has a tendency to walk in circles.

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Afterword To The 2011 Edition, p. 187
8 months 2 weeks ago

Most of us are not neutral in feeling, but, as human beings, we have to remember that, if the issues between East and West are to be decided in any manner that can give any possible satisfaction to anybody, whether Communist or anti-Communist, whether Asian or European or American, whether White or Black, then these issues must not be decided by war. We should wish this to be understood, both in the East and in the West.

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5 months 4 days ago

Friend!-Will the ballot-box raise the Noblest to the chief place; does any sane man deliberately believe such a thing?

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5 months 2 weeks ago

There is no social entity with a good that undergoes some sacrifice for its own good. There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives. Using one of these people for the benefit of others, uses him and benefits the others. Nothing more.

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Ch. 3 : Moral Constraints and the State; Why Side Constraints?, p. 32
9 months 1 week ago

The best way to describe anyone is to give an example of the kind of thing he would do.

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8 months 3 days ago

Making money is not without its value, but nothing is baser than to make it by wrong-doing.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

It is not, what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice, tell me I ought to do.

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1 month 4 days ago

But...good and bad are different for everybody....🙄

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9 months 3 days ago

They hate not to make use of their abilities... they do not necessarily work for their own self-interest.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Not only does reality resist those who still criticize it, but it also abandons those who defend it. Maybe it is a way for reality to get its revenge from those who claim to believe in it for the sole purpose of eventually transforming it: sending back its supporters to their own desires.

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8 months 3 days ago

This to the right, that to the left hand strays, and all are wrong, but wrong in different ways.

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Book II, satire iii, line 50 (trans. Conington)
8 months 2 weeks ago

Howitt says of the man who found the great nugget which weighed twenty-eight pounds, at the Bendigo diggings in Australia: - "He soon began to drink; got a horse, and rode all about, generally at full gallop, and, when he met people, called out to inquire if they knew who he was, and then kindly informed them that he was 'the bloody wretch that had found the nugget.' At last he rode full speed against a tree, and nearly knocked his brains out." I think, however, there was no danger of that, for he had already knocked his brains out against the nugget.

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p. 489
6 months 3 weeks ago

To do the opposite of something is also a form of imitation, namely an imitation of its opposite.

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D 96 Variant translation: To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation.
8 months 2 weeks ago

As regards the objection that possibles are independent of the decrees of God I grant it of actual decrees (although the Cartesians do not at all agree to this), but I maintain that the possible individual concepts involve certain possible free decrees; for example, if this world was only possible, the individual concept of a particular body in this world would involve certain movements as possible, it would also involve the laws of motion, which are the free decrees of God; but these, also, only as possibilities. Because, as there are an infinity of possible worlds, there are also an infinity of laws, certain ones appropriate to one; others, to another, and each possible individual of any world involves in its concept the laws of its world.

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(May, 1686) as quoted in George R. Montgomery, Tr., "Correspondence between Leibniz and Arnauld," Leibniz: Discourse on metaphysics; correspondence with Arnauld, and Monadology (1916) VIII, p. 108
4 months 3 weeks ago

But let us now dismiss these poetical fictions; because with what is divine they have mingled much of human alloy; and let us now consider what the deity has declared concerning himself and the other gods. The region surrounding the Earth has its existence in virtue of birth. From whom then does it receive its eternity and imperishability, if not from him who holds all things together within defined limits, for it is impossible that the nature of bodies (material) should be without a limit, inasmuch as they cannot dispense with a Final Cause, nor exist through themselves.

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7 months 1 week ago

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

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4 months 3 weeks ago

There is a word very commonly used these days: "anti-communism." It's a very stupid word, badly put together. It makes it appear as though communism were something original, something basic, something fundamental. Therefore, it is taken as the point of departure, and anti-communism is defined in relation to communism. Here is why I say that this word was poorly selected, that it was put together by people who do not understand etymology: the primary, the eternal concept is humanity. And communism is anti-humanity. Whoever says "anti-communism" is saying, in effect, anti-anti-humanity. A poor construction. So we should say: that which is against communism is for humanity. Not to accept, to reject this inhuman Communist ideology is simply to be a human being. It isn't being a member of a party.

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Speech in Washington D.C. (30 June 1975), published in Solzhenitsyn: The Voice of Freedom (1975), p. 30
4 months 3 days ago

I do not carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books. ...The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.

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7 months 1 week ago

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

The "dreams of youth" have become a proverb. That organisations, early rich, fall far short of their promise has been repeated to satiety. But is it extraordinary that it should be so? For do we ever utilise this heroism? Look how it lives upon itself and perishes for lack of food. We do not know what to do with it. We had rather that it should not be there. Often we laugh at it. Always we find it troublesome. Look at the poverty of our life! Can we expect anything else but poor creatures to come out of it?

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away. That is, one can even say that the more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind.

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Part 1, Chapter 11
4 months 1 week ago

The politicians have kept the environmental movement quiet by designating wilderness areas. And in the meantime, they've let corporations run completely out of control, and extraordinarily destructively, in the economic landscapes, without any acknowledgement at all that the natural world is out there just the same as it is in the parks.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Of all things nothing exists that is not by its substance the offspring of ocean. But why will you have me tell this to the vulgar? Although better to have been shrouded in silence, it nevertheless has been spoken; at all events I declare it, although all men will not readily receive the same.

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9 months 2 weeks ago

That which is desirable on its own account and for the sake of knowing it is more of the nature of wisdom than that which is desirable on account of its results.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

A created thing is never invented and it is never true: it is always and ever itself.

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Creation
9 months 1 week ago

Of all the schools of patience and lucidity, creation is the most effective. It is also the staggering evidence of man's sole dignity: the dogged revolt against his condition, perseverance in an effort considered sterile. It calls for a daily effort, self-mastery, a precise estimate of the limits of truth, measure, and strength. It constitutes an ascesis. All that "for nothing," in order to repeat and mark time. But perhaps the great work of art has less importance in itself than in the ordeal it demands of a man and the opportunity it provides him of overcoming his phantoms and approaching a little closer to his naked reality.

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8 months 1 week ago

A scheme is unjust when the higher expectations, one or more of them, are excessive. If these expectations were decreased, the situation of the less favored would be improved.

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Chapter II, Section 13, pg. 79
8 months 4 weeks ago

If it is my interest to have a farm, it is my interest to take it away from my neighbour; if it is my interest to have a cloak, it is my interest also to steal it from a bath. This is the source of wars, seditions, tyrannies, plots.

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Book I, ch. 22, 14.
7 months 2 weeks ago

I consider you the most honest and truthful of men, more honest and truthful than anyone; and if they say that your mind...that is, that you're sometimes afflicted in your mind, it's unjust. I made up my mind about that, and disputed with others, because, though you really are mentally afflicted (you won't be angry with that, of course; I'm speaking from a higher point of view), yet the mind that matters is better in you than in any of them. It's something, in fact, they have never dreamed of. For there are two sorts of mind: one that matters, and one that doesn't matter.

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Part 3, Chapter 8
6 months 1 week ago

Our senses are not receptors so much as reactors and makers of different modalities of space. Perhaps touch is not just skin contact with things, but the very life of things in the mind.

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(p. 256)
8 months 1 week ago

"Say what you like," we shall be told, "the apocalyptic beliefs of the first Christians have been proved to be false. It is clear from the New Testament that they all expected the Second Coming in their own lifetime. And, worse still, they had a reason, and one which you will find very embarrassing. Their Master had told them so. He shared, and indeed created, their delusion. He said in so many words, 'this generation shall not pass till all these things be done.' And he was wrong. He clearly knew no more about the end of the world than anyone else." It is certainly the most embarrassing verse in the Bible.

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7 months 1 week ago

When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.

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7 months 1 week ago

In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.

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8 months 1 week ago

Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear.

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Success
8 months 2 weeks ago

For my part, while I am as convinced a Socialist as the most ardent Marxian, I do not regard Socialism as a gospel of proletarian revenge, nor even, primarily, as a means of securing economic justice. I regard it primarily as an adjustment to machine production demanded by considerations of common sense, and calculated to increase the happiness, not only of proletarians, but of all except a tiny minority of the human race.

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Ch. 7: The Case for Socialism
8 months 4 weeks ago

What is the use of believing, if the dost blaspheme? Thou adorest Him as Head, and dost blaspheme Him in His body. He loves His body. Thou canst cut thyself off from the body, but the Head does not detach itself from its body. "Thou dost honor me in vain," He cries from heaven, "thou dost honor Me in vain!" If someone wished to kiss thy cheek, but insisted at the same time on trampling thy feet; if with his hailed boots he were to crush thy feet as he tries to hold thy head and kiss thee, wouldst thou not interrupt his expression of respect and cry out: "What are thou doing, man? Thou art trampling upon me!" It is for this reason that before He ascended into heaven our Lord Jesus Christ recommended to us His body, by which He was to remain upon earth. For He foresaw that many would pay Him homage because of His glory in heaven, but that their homage would be vain, so long as they despise His members on earth.

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(pp. 436-437)
7 months 1 week ago

The poverty of the incapable, the distresses that come upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so many "in shallows and in miseries," are the decrees of a large, far-seeing benevolence.

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Pt. III, Ch. 25 : Poor-Laws

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