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Quote by Nescio

“God was good that afternoon, and merciful. His world came in through our eyes and lived in our heads, and our thoughts went wordlessly out across the world, far beyond the horizon they went. - Out Along the Ij”

Quote by Nescio

Book:Amsterdam Stories
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Amsterdam Stories

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Nescio

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“But these aren’t the first eventful times I have lived through and if I’m granted even more years then with God’s help I will most likely get to my third war. The silent course of things takes its silent, implacable course, the little man who is a hero today will tomorrow, when peace comes, be scolded in his stupid little job or maybe won’t have a job at all and will turn back into the useless piece of clockwork he used to be. And if he has a little more to him, maybe he will read the first chapter of Ecclesiastes: “All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it.” Eventful times. What remains from Italy’s eventful times in the thirteenth century except Dante’s Inferno? Do. As if I haven’t had enough pointless doing. Oh they have nothing else, they only are when they do. I want to be, and for me to do is: not to be.”

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Book:Amsterdam Stories
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“The Great Library of Alyssium, with its soaring spires, stained-glass windows, and labyrinthine bookshelves, was the jewel of the Crescent Islands Empire. Its hallowed stacks were filled with centuries-old treatises, histories, studies, and (most importantly, in Kiela's opinion) spellbooks. Only the elite, the crème de la crème of the scholars, were allowed to even view the spellbooks, as only the rarefied few were permitted, by imperial law, to use magic.”

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“Ivy and Rose's favorite spot in the cottage was the library, and there were trinkets and talismans hidden behind all the books they loved most. Those numbered in the hundreds, and they were rarely without one. Back in those days, no one cared if girls went to school, so Ivy and Rose were free to learn what they thought was necessary. If Ivy discovered the diary of a medieval botanist--- or a dusty grimoire with ancient symbols scribbled in the margins--- she could go an entire week without speaking. No one in her family minded at all. Rose, whose taste in books leaned toward romance and poetry, was happy to speak for the both of them.”

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“But he had expressed to Mme. du Chatelet the hope that a way out might lie in applying philosophy to history, and endeavoring to trace, beneath the flux of political events, the history of the human mind. 'Only philosophers should write history,' he said. 'In all nations, history is disfigured by fable, till at last philosophy comes to enlighten man; and when it does finally arrive in the midst of darkness, it finds the human mind so blinded centuries of error, that it can hardly undeceive it; it finds ceremonies, facts and monuments, heaped up to prove lies.' 'History,' he concludes, 'is after all nothing but a pack of tricks which we play upon the dead;' we transform the past to suit our wishes for the future, and in the upshot 'history proves that anything can be proved by history.”

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Book:The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers
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“Conceptual historians of various stripes asked after the origins of ideas, but they sought them by tracing the changing meanings of words across different socio-historical contexts. My concern, by contrast, is with the practical origins of ideas: with the ways in which the ideas we live by can be shown to be rooted in practical needs and concerns generated by certain facts about us and our situation.”

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Book:The Practical Origins of Ideas: Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering
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