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philosophybits · 10 hours
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“The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public.”
— Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Books and Reading”, Parerga and Paralipomena
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philosophybits · 13 hours
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Pure truth could burst the world apart.
Nikolai Berdyaev, The Spirit and Reality
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philosophybits · 15 hours
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“The new order contradicts reason so fundamentally that reason does not dare to doubt it. Even the consciousness of oppression fades. The more incommensurate become the concentration of power and the helplessness of the individual, the more difficult for him to penetrate the human origin of his misery.”
— Max Horkheimer, “The End of Reason”
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philosophybits · 18 hours
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The rules of logical syntax must go without saying, once we know how each individual sign signifies.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
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philosophybits · 1 day
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“A world without delight and without affection is a world destitute of value.”
— Bertrand Russell, The Scientific Outlook
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philosophybits · 2 days
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Poetry is the hero of philosophy. Philosophy raises poetry to the status of a principle. It teaches us to recognize the worth of poetry. Philosophy is the theory of poetry. It shows us what poetry is, that it is one and all.
Novalis, Logological Fragments II
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philosophybits · 2 days
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“The ability to understand a great deal of ill-formed language is not the accidental fallout of linguistic competence (i.e., the ability to speak in well-formed language), but is rather the anterior state necessary to have any concept of the well-formed at all. Rather, grammar always follows language and is generated as an always-partial description of what is actually there (i.e., a description of the parts there that are particularly useful in ways the concept of grammar defines).”
— Samuel R. Delany, “Some Remarks on Narrative and Technology”
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philosophybits · 2 days
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In Paradise, where there is no labour, and no need for long rest and heavy sleep, all temptations become dangerous. It is a peril to live there.... Perhaps present-day people eschew the paradisal state. They prefer work, for where there is no work there is no smoothness, no regularity, no peacefulness, no satisfaction.
Lev Shestov, All Things Are Possible
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philosophybits · 2 days
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“What the learned world tends to offer is one second-hand scrap of information illustrating ideas derived from another second-hand scrap of information. The second-handedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity.”
— Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education
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philosophybits · 3 days
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Thinking well is the greatest excellence and wisdom: to act and speak what is true, perceiving things according to their nature.
Heraclitus, Fragments, B112
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philosophybits · 3 days
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“The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
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philosophybits · 3 days
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Fortune may crowd a man’s life with fortunate circumstances and happy opportunities, but they will, as we all know, avail him nothing unless he makes a wise and vigorous use of them. It does not matter that the wind is fair and the tide at its flood, if the mariner refuses to weigh his anchor and spread his canvas to the breeze.
Frederick Douglass, "Self-Made Men (1872)"
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philosophybits · 3 days
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“Nature has planted in our minds an insatiable longing to see the truth.”
— Cicero, Tusculan Disputations
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philosophybits · 4 days
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“Faith comes and goes. It rises and falls like the tides of an invisible ocean. If it is presumptuous to think that faith will stay with you forever, it is just as presumptuous to think that unbelief will.”
— Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being
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philosophybits · 4 days
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“A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experiences.”
— John Dewey, Democracy and Education
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philosophybits · 4 days
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The rise of the notion of knowledge as a matter of rightly ordered inner representations — an unclouded and undistorting Mirror of Nature — was due to the notion that the difference between the man whose beliefs were true and the man whose beliefs were false was a matter of "how their minds worked." If this phrase is taken in the sense of "what they would say in a conversation," it is true but shallow and unphilosophical. To make it deep and philosophical, one must believe, with Descartes and Locke, that a taxonomy of mental entities and processes will lead to discoveries which will provide one with a method of discovering truth, and not just truth about the mind.
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
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philosophybits · 4 days
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“What we do in dreams we also do when we are awake: we invent and fabricate the person with whom we associate — and immediately forget we have done so.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
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