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Max Stirner
Max Stirner
1 month 1 week ago
Feuerbach ... recognizes ... "even love,...

Feuerbach ... recognizes ... "even love, in itself the truest, most inward sentiment, becomes an obscure, illusory one through religiousness, since religious love loves man only for God's sake, therefore loves man only apparently, but in truth God only." Is this different with moral love? Does it love the man, this man for this man's sake, or for morality's sake, for Man's sake, and so-for homo homini Deus-for God's sake?

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Cambridge 1995, p. 56
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
3 months 1 week ago
He who bases or thinks he...

He who bases or thinks he bases his conduct - his inward or his outward conduct, his feeling or his action - upon a dogma or a principle which he deems incontrovertible, runs the risk of becoming a fanatic, and moreover, the moment that this dogma is weakened or shattered, the morality based upon it gives way. If the earth that he thought firm begins to rock, he himself trembles at the earthquake, for we do not all come up to the standard of the ideal Stoic who remains undaunted among the ruins of a world shattered into atoms. Happily the stuff that is underneath a man's ideas will save him. For if a man should tell you that he does not defraud or cuckold his best friend only because he is afraid of hell, you may depend upon it that neither would he do so even if he were to cease to believe in hell, but that he would invent some other excuse instead. And this is all to the honor of the human race.

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Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
4 months 3 weeks ago
One always speaks badly….

One always speaks badly when one has nothing to say.

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1827
Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
4 months 3 weeks ago
He that knows anything, knows this,...

He that knows anything, knows this, in the first place, that he need not seek long for instances of his ignorance.

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Book IV, Ch. 3, sec. 22
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
4 months 3 weeks ago
Good roads, canals, and navigable rivers,...

Good roads, canals, and navigable rivers, by diminishing the expence of carriage, put the remote parts of the country more nearly upon a level with those of the neighbourhood of the town. They are upon that the greatest of all improvements.

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Chapter XI, Part I, p. 174.
Philosophical Maxims
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut
2 months 3 weeks ago
Say what you will about the...

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.

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Philosophical Maxims
Albert Schweitzer
Albert Schweitzer
1 month 5 days ago
At sunset of the third day,...

At sunset of the third day, near the village of Igendja, we moved along an island set in the middle of the wide river. On a sandback to our left, four hippopotamuses and their young plodded along in our same direction. Just then, in my great tiredness and discouragement, the phrase "Reverence for Life" struck me like a flash. As far as I knew, it was a phrase I had never heard nor ever read. I realized at once that it carried within itself the solution to the problem that had been torturing me. Now I knew that a system of values which concerns itself only with our relationship to other people is incomplete and therefore lacking in power for good. Only by means of reverence for life can we establish a spiritual and humane relationship with both people and all living creatures within our reach. Only in this fashion can we avoid harming others, and, within the limits of our capacity, go to their aid whenever they need us.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
3 months 2 weeks ago
Whosoever will come after me, let...

Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel's, the same shall save it. For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

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8:34b-36 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Will Durant
Will Durant
1 month 1 week ago
Both Stoicism and Epicureanism - the...

Both Stoicism and Epicureanism - the apathetic acceptance of defeat, and the effort to forget defeat in the arms of pleasure - were theories as to how one might yet be happy though subjugated or enslaved; precisely as the stoicism of Schopenhauer and the despondent epicureanism of Renan were in the nineteenth century the symbols of a shattered revolution and a broken France.

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Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
2 months 3 weeks ago
People understand the meaning of eating...

People understand the meaning of eating lies in the nourishment of the body only when they cease to consider that the object of that activity is pleasure. ...People understand the meaning of art only when they cease to consider that the aim of that activity is beauty, i.e., pleasure.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 month 2 weeks ago
I here, on the very threshold,...

I here, on the very threshold, protest against it in reference to Paganism, and to all other isms by which man has ever for a length of time striven to walk in this world. They have all had a truth in them, or men would not have taken them up. Quackery and dupery do abound; in religions, above all in the more advanced decaying stages of religions, they have fearfully abounded: but quackery was never the originating influence in such things; it was not the health and life of such things, but their disease, the sure precursor of their being about to die! Let us never forget this.

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Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
4 months 3 weeks ago
Men are by nature merely indifferent...

Men are by nature merely indifferent to one another; but women are by nature enemies.

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Vol. 2 "On Women" as translated in Essays and Aphorisms (1970), as translated by R. J. Hollingdale
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
4 months 3 weeks ago
Friendship is the greatest of worldly...

Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I shd. say, 'sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.

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Letter to Arthur Greeves (29 December 1935) - in They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914-1963) (1979), p. 477
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 3 weeks ago
I must before I die, find...

I must before I die, find some way to say the essential thing that is in me, that I have never said yet - a thing that is not love or hate or pity or scorn, but the very breath of life, fierce and coming from far away, bringing into human life the vastness and fearful passionless force of non-human things...

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p. 261
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
2 months 3 weeks ago
The Quakers sent me books, from...

The Quakers sent me books, from which I learnt how they had, years ago, established beyond doubt the duty for a Christian of fulfilling the command of non-resistance to evil by force, and had exposed the error of the Church's teaching in allowing war and capital punishment.

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Chapter I, The Doctrine of Non-resistance to Evil by Force has been Professed by a Minority of Men from the Very Foundation of Christianity
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Browne
Thomas Browne
3 months 4 weeks ago
Persecution is a bad and indirect...

Persecution is a bad and indirect way to plant Religion.

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Section 25
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
4 months 3 weeks ago
The utilitarian morality does recognise in...

The utilitarian morality does recognise in human beings the power of sacrificing their own greatest good for the good of others. It only refuses to admit that the sacrifice is itself a good. A sacrifice which does not increase, or tend to increase, the sum total of happiness, it considers as wasted. The only self-renunciation which it applauds, is devotion to the happiness, or to some of the means of happiness, of others; either of mankind collectively, or of individuals within the limits imposed by the collective interests of mankind.

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Ch. 2
Philosophical Maxims
Lin Yutang
Lin Yutang
1 month 2 days ago
It is not when he is...

It is not when he is working in the office but when he is lying idly on the sand that his soul utters, "Life is beautiful."

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Ch. I : The Awakening, p. 2
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
3 months 1 week ago
The intellectual world is divided into...

The intellectual world is divided into two classes - dilettantes, on the one hand, and pedants, on the other.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 month 2 weeks ago
But oppression by your Mock-Superiors well...

But oppression by your Mock-Superiors well shaken off, the grand problem yet remains to solve: That of finding government by your Real-Superiors! Alas, how shall we ever learn the solution of that, benighted, bewildered, sniffing, sneering, godforgetting unfortunates as we are? It is a work for centuries; to be taught us by tribulations, confusions, insurrections, obstructions; who knows if not by conflagration and despair! It is a lesson inclusive of all other lessons; the hardest of all lessons to learn.

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Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
3 months 1 week ago
In fact, the real problem with...

In fact, the real problem with the thesis of A Genealogy of Morals is that the noble and the aristocrat are just as likely to be stupid as the plebeian. I had noted in my teens that major writers are usually those who have had to struggle against the odds -- to "pull their cart out of the mud," as I put it -- while writers who have had an easy start in life are usually second rate -- or at least, not quite first-rate. Dickens, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Shaw, H. G. Wells, are examples of the first kind; in the twentieth century, John Galsworthy, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Samuel Beckett are examples of the second kind. They are far from being mediocre writers; yet they tend to be tinged with a certain pessimism that arises from never having achieved a certain resistance against problems.

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p. 188
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
2 weeks 6 days ago
He who flies from his master...

He who flies from his master is a runaway; but the law is master, and he who breaks the law is a runaway. And he also who is grieved or angry or afraid, is dissatisfied because something has been or is or shall be of the things which are appointed by Him who rules all things, and He is Law, and assigns to every man what is fit. He then who fears or is grieved or is angry is a runaway.

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X, 25
Philosophical Maxims
Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei
1 month 2 weeks ago
I have never met a man...

I have never met a man so ignorant that I could not learn something from him.

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As quoted in The Story of Civilization : The Age of Reason Begins, 1558-1648 (1935) by Will Durant, p. 605
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
3 weeks 3 days ago
You seem to consider the federal...

You seem to consider the federal judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions, a very dangerous doctrine, indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so. They have with others the same passions for the party, for power and the privilege of the corps. Their power is the more dangerous, as they are in office for life and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves.

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Letter to William Charles Jarvis, 1820
Philosophical Maxims
Epicurus
Epicurus
5 months 1 week ago
It is impossible for someone to...

It is impossible for someone to dispel his fears about the most important matters if he doesn't know the nature of the universe but still gives some credence to myths. So without the study of nature there is no enjoyment of pure pleasure.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel
4 months 2 weeks ago
I should not really object to...

I should not really object to dying if it were not followed by death.

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"Death" (1970), p. 3 footnote.
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
2 months 3 weeks ago
The unformulated message of an assembly...

The unformulated message of an assembly of news items from every quarter of the globe is that the world today is one city. All war is civil war. All suffering is our own.

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p. 291
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 months 2 weeks ago
Anyone who speaks in the name...

Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor.

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Philosophical Maxims
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
2 months 6 days ago
The wave of the future is...

The wave of the future is coming and there is no fighting it.

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The Wave of the Future
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
4 months 3 weeks ago
You must love the crust of...

You must love the crust of the earth on which you dwell more than the sweet crust of any bread or cake; you must be able to extract nutriment out of a sand heap.

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January 25, 1858
Philosophical Maxims
Parmenides
Parmenides
4 months 1 week ago
It is indifferent to me where...

It is indifferent to me where I am to begin, for there shall I return again.

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Frag. B 5, quoted by Proclus, Commentary on the Parmenides, 708
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
3 weeks 3 days ago
One loves to possess arms, though...

One loves to possess arms, though they hope never to have occasion for them.

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Letter to George Washington (1796); published in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 20 Vols., Washington, D.C., (1903-04), 9:341
Philosophical Maxims
Diogenes of Sinope
Diogenes of Sinope
4 months 2 weeks ago
To one who asked what was...

To one who asked what was the proper time for lunch, he said, "If a rich man, when you will; if a poor man, when you can." Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 40

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Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
4 months 3 weeks ago
They should always be heard, and...

They should always be heard, and fairly and kindly answer'd, when they ask after any thing they would know, and desire to be informed about. Curiosity should be as carefully cherish'd in children, as other appetites suppress'd.

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Sec. 108
Philosophical Maxims
John Rawls
John Rawls
4 months 3 weeks ago
When the basic structure of society...

When the basic structure of society is publicly known to satisfy its principles for an extended period of time, those subject to these arrangements tend to develop a desire to act in accordance with these principles and to do their part in institutions which exemplify them.

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Chapter III, Section 29, pg.177
Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
3 months 3 weeks ago
If you want to be respected...

If you want to be respected by others the great thing is to respect yourself. Only by that, only by self-respect will you compel others to respect you.

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Part III, Chapter 2
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
4 months 3 weeks ago
You can do everything with bayonets...

You can do everything with bayonets except sit on them. If you want to preserve your power indefinitely you have to get the consent of the ruled. And this they will do partly by drugs as I foresaw in "Brave new World", and partly by these new techniques of propaganda. They will do it by bypassing the sort of rational side of man and appealing to his subconscious, and his deeper emotions, and his physiology, even, and so making him actually love his slavery. I mean I think this is the danger that actually people may be, in some ways, happy under the new regime. But they will be happy in situations when they oughtn't be happy.

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Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
3 months 3 weeks ago
Falsehood has a perennial spring.

Falsehood has a perennial spring.

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Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
4 months 3 weeks ago
I think that yesterday was a...

I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier's second Essais and see no reason why his definition of free will-"the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts"-need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present-until next year-that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.

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Diary entry (April 30, 1870) as quoted in Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, vol. 1, p. 323; Letters of William James, vol. I, p. 147.
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
2 weeks 6 days ago
In contemplating thyself never include the...

In contemplating thyself never include the vessel which surrounds thee, and these instruments which are attached about it. For they are like an ax, differing only in this, that they grow to the body. For indeed there is no more use in these parts without the cause which moves and checks them than in the weaver's shuttle, and the writer's pen, and the driver's whip.

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X, 38
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
3 months 1 week ago
All of this that is happening...

All of this that is happening to me, and happening to others about me, is it reality or is it fiction? May not all of it perhaps be a dream of God, or of whomever it may be, which will vanish as soon as He wakes? And therefore when we pray to Him, and cause canticles and hymns to rise to Him, is it not that we may lull Him to sleep, rocking the cradle of His dreams? Is not the whole liturgy, of all religions, only a way perhaps of soothing God in His dreams, so that He shall not wake and cease to dream us?

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Niebla [Mist]
Philosophical Maxims
Henri Poincaré
Henri Poincaré
1 month 2 weeks ago
We have not a direct intuition...

We have not a direct intuition of simultaneity, nor of the equality of two durations. If we think we have this intuition, this is an illusion. We replace it by the aid of certain rules which we apply almost always without taking count of them....We ...choose these rules, not because they are true, but because they are the most convenient, and we may recapitulate them as follows: "The simultaneity of two events, or the order of their succession, the equality of two durations, are to be so defined that the enunciation of the natural laws may be as simple as possible. In other words, all these rules, all these definitions, are only the fruit of an unconscious opportunism."

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
4 days ago
In reality, the law always....
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Main Content / General
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
4 months 3 weeks ago
But simultaneously with the development of...

But simultaneously with the development of capitalist production the credit system also develops. The money-capital which the capitalist cannot as yet employ in his own business is employed by others, who pay him interest for its use.

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Vol. II, Ch. XVII, p. 325.
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
4 months 3 weeks ago
In manufactures, a very small advantage...

In manufactures, a very small advantage will enable foreigners to undersell our own workmen, even in the home market. It will require a very great one to enable them to do so in the rude produce of the soil. If the free importation of foreign manufactures were permitted, several of the home manufactures would probably suffer, and some of them, perhaps, go to ruin altogether, and a considerable part of the stock and industry at present employed in them, would be forced to find out some other employment. But the freest importation of the rude produce of the soil could have no such effect upon the agriculture of the country.

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Chapter II
Philosophical Maxims
L.P. Jacks
L.P. Jacks
3 weeks ago
Would not all we mean by...

Would not all we mean by "communication between mind and mind" be provided for if we suppose that common knowledge comes about, not from our explaining things to one another, but from things explaining themselves in the same terms to us all? Accepting the object as its own interpreter, as its own "medium of communication," do we not begin to understand what is utterly dark on any other view, how it comes to pass that the resulting knowledge is a common possession?

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
3 months 2 weeks ago
In the state of nature…

In the state of nature, Profit is the measure of Right.

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De Cive
Philosophical Maxims
Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno
4 months ago
Your god is too small. Attributed...

Your god is too small.

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Attributed to Bruno in episode 1 of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014). Earliest use of this phrase appears to be in Your God is Too Small (1961) by English priest John Bertram Phillips.
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
3 weeks 3 days ago
Among the sayings and discourses imputed...

Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him [Jesus] by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being. I separate, therefore, the gold from the dross; restore to Him the former, and leave the latter to the stupidity of some, and roguery of others of His disciples. Of this band of dupes and impostors, Paul was the great Coryphaeus, and first corruptor of the doctrines of Jesus. These palpable interpolations and falsifications of His doctrines, led me to try to sift them apart.

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Letter to William Short
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
4 months 3 weeks ago
Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate...

Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favor of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favor of the masters.

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Chapter x, Part II, p. 168.
Philosophical Maxims
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