Things I've Underlined

a personal study of the liberal arts. for great justice

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New account for this tumblog. In order to deepen and expand the thingsiveunderlined project, I've moved it to its own primary account. Posts will be a mix of new underlinings and old.

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The man who thinks too much is likely to go to exhausted extremes where the world becomes a shadowy paradigm of ideas. To keep sane he must continually come back to reality.

Colin Wilson, The Outsider

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Let the little way to death be as it might - the kernel of life of mine was noble. It came of high descent, and turned, not on trifles, but on the stars.

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

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Tolerance is our homage to the abundance of inexhaustible novelty which is awaiting the future, and to the complexity of accomplished fact which exceeds our stretch of insight.

Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas

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To understand is to exclude a background of intellectual incoherence. But Wisdom is persistent pursuit of the deeper understanding, ever confronting intellectual system with the importance of its omissions.

Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas

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Nature states no ‘facts’: these come only in statements devised by human beings to refer to the seamless web of actuality around them.

Walter J Ong, Orality and Literacy

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The savage mind totalizes.

Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind<\em>

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Without a writing system, breaking up thought - analysis - is a high-risk procedure.

Walter J Ong, Orality and Literacy

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A great idea in the background of a dim consciousness is like a phantom ocean beating upon the shores of human life in successive waves of specialization. A whole succession of such waves are slowly doing their work of sapping the base of some cliff of habit.

Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas

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In each [age] there is a general form of the forms of thought; and, like the air we breathe, such a form is so translucent, and so pervading, and so seemingly necessary, that only by extreme effort can we become aware of it.

Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas

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— Colin Wilson, Beyond the Outsider

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The ultimate logical interpretant of the concept is not a sign but a modification in a person's tendency toward action.

Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers

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Custom makes for a powerful economy in the learning of an individual.

E. Sapir, Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (1930)

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What makes possible reading and writing is not a single anterior action which serves as origin and moment of plentitude but an open series of acts, both identifiable and lost, which work together to constitute something like a language.

Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs

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Culture as a whole is made up of an indefinite and a very great number of particular cultures, no two of which are alike.

Leslie A. White, The Evolution of Culture

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"Symbolic communication is, in a sense, a form of radiation: vibrations from one body affect another and influence its behavior."

— Leslie A. White. The Evolution of Culture

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Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.

Bertrand Russell as quoted by Werner Heisenburg in Across the Frontiers