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Friedrich Schlegel
Friedrich Schlegel
2 months ago
The romantic poetry…

The romantic poetry is a progressive universal poetry.

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Progressive Universalpoesie (1798)
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
2 months 4 weeks ago
In order to make myself recognized...

In order to make myself recognized by the Other, I must risk my own life. To risk one's life, in fact, is to reveal oneself as not-bound to the objective form or to any determined existence - as not-bound to life.

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p. 237, 1998 edition
Philosophical Maxims
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal
3 months 1 week ago
Do not imagine that it is...

Do not imagine that it is less an accident by which you find yourself master of the wealth which you possess, than that by which this man found himself king.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
3 months ago
The New Testament is an invaluable...

The New Testament is an invaluable book, though I confess to having been slightly prejudiced against it in my very early days by the church and the Sabbath school, so that it seemed, before I read it, to be the yellowest book in the catalogue. Yet I early escaped from their meshes. It was hard to get the commentaries out of one's head and taste its true flavor. - I think that Pilgrim's Progress is the best sermon which has been preached from this text; almost all other sermons that I have heard, or heard of, have been but poor imitations of this. - It would be a poor story to be prejudiced against the Life of Christ because the book has been edited by Christians.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 months ago
If the stars should appear one...

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

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Nature
Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
2 months ago
I have never in my life...

I have never in my life met a man like him for noble simplicity, and boundless truthfulness. I understood from the way he talked that anyone who chose could deceive him, and that he would forgive anyone afterwards who had deceived him, and that was why I grew to love him.

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Part 4, Chapter 8
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay
2 weeks 4 days ago
Many evils, no doubt, were produced...

Many evils, no doubt, were produced by the civil war. They were the price of our liberty.

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p. 39
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
1 month 3 weeks ago
For the Lawes of Nature (as...

For the Lawes of Nature (as Justice, Equity, Modesty, Mercy, and (in summe)doing to others, as wee would be done to,) of themselves, without the terrour of some Power, to cause them to be observed, are contrary to our naturall Passions, that carry us to Partiality, Pride, Revenge, and the like. And Covenants, without the Sword, are but Words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.

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The Second Part, Chapter 17, p. 85
Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
3 months 2 weeks ago
For it still seemed to me...

For it still seemed to me that it is not we who sin, but some other nature sinned in us. And it gratified my pride to be beyond blame, and when I did anything wrong not to have to confess that I had done wrong. I loved to excuse my soul and to accuse something else inside me (I knew not what) but which was not I. But, assuredly, it was I, and it was my impiety that had divided me against myself. That sin then was all the more incurable because I did not deem myself a sinner.

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A. Outler, trans. (Dover: 2002), Book 5, Chapter 10, p. 77
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
3 weeks 6 days ago
The pre-atomist multisensory void was an...

The pre-atomist multisensory void was an animate, pulsating, and moving vibrant interval, neither container nor contained, acoustic space penetrated by tactility.

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p. 34
Philosophical Maxims
Epicurus
Epicurus
3 months 2 weeks ago
Of all the means which wisdom...

Of all the means which wisdom acquires to ensure happiness throughout the whole of life, by far the most important is friendship.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 3 weeks ago
Lucidity is not necessarily compatible with...

Lucidity is not necessarily compatible with life, actually not at all.

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Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
3 weeks 4 days ago
In anything fit to be called...

In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye.

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A Gossip on Romance, printed in Longman's Magazine (November 1882).
Philosophical Maxims
Horace
Horace
2 months 2 weeks ago
People are enticed….

People are enticed by a desire which continually cheats them.'Nothing is enough,' they say, 'for you're only worth what you have.'

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Book I, satire i, lines 61-62, as translated by N. Rudd
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
3 months ago
Those only are happy

Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.

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(p. 142)
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
2 weeks 4 days ago
There will be a time....

There will be a time when those trying to turn the world into a Colosseum for their own amusement will be raw meat thrown to the wolves themselves, and the rest of us will watch, as justice is served, with a clean conscience.

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Philosophical Maxims
Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus
3 months 1 week ago
No Man is wise at all...

No Man is wise at all Times, or is without his blind Side.

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The Alchymyst, in Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I.
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 1 day ago
Ironclads and Maxim guns must be...

Ironclads and Maxim guns must be the ultimate arbiters of metaphysical truth.

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Quoted in The Edinburgh Review: Or Critical Journal, Vol. 209 (1909), p. 387
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
4 months 4 weeks ago
Dreaming of everybody winning...
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Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
4 weeks 1 day ago
When I started life Hegelianism was...

When I started life Hegelianism was the basis of everything: it was in the air, found expression in magazine and newspaper articles, in novels and essays, in art, in histories, in sermons, and in conversation. A man unacquainted with Hegel had no right to speak: he who wished to know the truth studied Hegel. Everything rested on him; and suddenly forty years have gone by and there is nothing left of him, he is not even mentioned - as though he had never existed. And what is most remarkable is that, like pseudo-Christianity, Hegelianism fell not because anyone refuted it, but because it suddenly became evident that neither the one nor the other was needed by our learned, educated world.

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Chapter XXIX
Philosophical Maxims
George Santayana
George Santayana
1 month 3 weeks ago
Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions,...

Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.

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"On My Friendly Critics"
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 1 day ago
Power, like vanity, is insatiable. Nothing...

Power, like vanity, is insatiable. Nothing short of omnipotence could satisfy it completely. And as it is especially the vice of energetic men, the causal efficacy of love of power is out of all proportion to its frequency. It is, indeed, by far the strongest motive in the lives of important men. Love of power is greatly increased by the experience of power, and this applies to petty power as well as to that of potentates.

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Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
3 months 2 days ago
It is sometimes said….

It is sometimes said, common sense is very rare.

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Philosophical Dictionary ('Sens Commun') (1767). Compare Juvenal, Satires, viii:73: Original Latin: rarus enim ferme sensus communis in illa fortuna.
Philosophical Maxims
Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek
7 months 5 days ago
Love the Muslims

In the electoral campaign, President Bush named as the most important person in his life Jesus. Now he has a unique chance to prove that he meant it seriously: for him, as for all Americans today, "Love thy neighbor!" means "Love the Muslims!" OR IT MEANS NOTHING AT ALL.

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Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 month 2 weeks ago
What we really long for after...

What we really long for after death is to go on living this life, this same mortal life, but without its ills without its tedium, and without death. Seneca, the Spaniard, gave expression to this in his Consolatio ad Marciam... And what but that is the meaning of that comic conception of the eternal recurrence which issued from the tragic soul of poor Nietzsche, hungering for concrete and temporal immortality?

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 1 day ago
Either we must have war against...

Either we must have war against Russia, before she has the atom bomb, or we will have to lie down and let them govern us. ... Anything is better than submission.

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Speech quoted in The Observer (21 November 1948), quoted in Robert Skildesky, Oswald Mosley (1981), p. 542 and Martin Ceadel, Thinking about Peace and War (1987), p. 52
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
3 months 3 weeks ago
He tried to recall what he...

He tried to recall what he had read about the disease. Figures floated across his memory, and he recalled that some thirty or so great plagues known to history had accounted for nearly a hundred million deaths. But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one actually sees him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.

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Philosophical Maxims
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
2 months 3 weeks ago
"To stamp becoming with the character...

"To stamp becoming with the character of being-that is the supreme will to power." (WM 617) This suggests that becoming only is if it is grounded in being as being: "That everything recurs is the closest approximation of a world of becoming to one of being."

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p. 19
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel
2 months 2 weeks ago
If we tried to rely entirely...

If we tried to rely entirely on reason, and pressed it hard, our lives and beliefs would collapse - a form of madness that may actually occur if the inertial force of taking the world and life for granted is somehow lost. If we lose our grip on that, reason will not give it back to us.

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"The Absurd" (1971), p. 20.
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 1 day ago
I cannot escape from the conclusion...

I cannot escape from the conclusion that the great ages of progress have depended upon a small number of individuals of transcendent ability. 

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Ch. 8: Western Civilisation
Philosophical Maxims
Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini
1 week 2 days ago
All art is autobiographical; the pearl...

All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography.

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On the autobiographical nature of his films, in The Atlantic
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
2 months 3 weeks ago
I am my world.

I am my world.

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(The microcosm.) (5.63) Original German: Ich bin meine welt (Der Mikrokosmos.)
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
3 months 3 weeks ago
Generals are, as a matter of...

Generals are, as a matter of course, allowed to be far more idiotic than ordinary human beings are permitted to be.

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Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
3 months 1 day ago
If children were brought into the...

If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence?

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"On the Sufferings of the World"
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
3 weeks 4 days ago
To be what we are, and...

To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.

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Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1882).
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley
2 weeks 1 day ago
Our reverence for the nobility of...

Our reverence for the nobility of manhood will not be lessened by the knowledge, that Man, is in substance and in structure, one with the brutes; for, he alone possesses the marvellous endowment of intelligible and rational speech, whereby, in the secular period of his existence, he has slowly accumulated and organized the experience which is almost wholly lost with the cessation of every individual life in other animals; so that now he stands raised upon it as on a mountain top, far above the level of his humble fellows, and transfigured from his grosser nature by reflecting, here and there, a ray from the infinite source of truth.

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Ch.2, p. 132
Philosophical Maxims
Baruch Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza
3 months 3 days ago
Extreme pride or dejection….

Extreme pride or dejection indicates extreme ignorance of self.

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Part IV, Prop. LV
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
2 months 3 weeks ago
What I give is the morphology...

What I give is the morphology of the use of an expression. I show that it has kinds of uses of which you had not dreamed. In philosophy one feels forced to look at a concept in a certain way. What I do is suggest, or even invent, other ways of looking at it. I suggest possibilities of which you had not previously thought. You thought that there was one possibility, or only two at most. But I made you think of others. Furthermore, I made you see that it was absurd to expect the concept to conform to those narrow possibilities. Thus your mental cramp is relieved, and you are free to look around the field of use of the expression and to describe the different kinds of uses of it.

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Lectures of 1946 - 1947, as quoted in Ludwig Wittgenstein : A Memoir (1966) by Norman Malcolm, p. 43
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
3 weeks 6 days ago
Physiologically, man in the normal use...

Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth. One of the merits of motivation research has been the revelation of man's sex relation to the motorcar.

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(p.46)
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
3 months ago
Poetry is the universal art of...

Poetry is the universal art of the spirit which has become free in itself and which is not tied down for its realization to external sensuous material; instead, it launches out exclusively in the inner space and the inner time of ideas and feelings.

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As quoted in the Introduction to Aesthetics (1842), translated by T. M. Knox, (1979), p. 89
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
3 weeks 6 days ago
Such is the content of the...

Such is the content of the mental life of the Hemingway hero and the good guy in general. Every day he gets beaten into a servile pulp by his own mechanical reflexes, which are constantly busy registering and reacting to the violent stimuli which his big, noisy, kinesthetic environment has provided for his unreflective reception.

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Eye Appeal, p. 79-80
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
2 months 4 weeks ago
His business is here, it is...

His business is here, it is here that he is despised and vilified, it is here that he must carry out his undertaking.

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p. 67
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
3 months ago
England has to fulfill a double...

England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating - the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia... When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch... and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.

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"The Future Results of British Rule in India," New York Daily Tribune, 08 August 1853
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
3 weeks 4 days ago
When things fall out opportunely for...

When things fall out opportunely for the person concerned, he is not apt to be critical about the how or why, his own immediate personal convenience seeming a sufficient reason for the strangest oddities and revolutions in our sublunary things.

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The Sire de Maletroit's Door.
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
3 months ago
She with one breath attunes the...

She with one breath attunes the spheres, And also my poor human heart.

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"Inspiration", in An American Anthology, 1900
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 3 weeks ago
The first thinker was, without a...

The first thinker was, without a doubt, the first man obsessed by why. An unaccustomed mania, not at all contagious: rare indeed are those who suffer from it, who are a prey to questioning, and who can accept no given because they were born in consternation.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 months ago
Art is a jealous mistress.

Art is a jealous mistress.

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Wealth
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
4 weeks 1 day ago
Science has adapted itself entirely to...

Science has adapted itself entirely to the wealthy classes and accordingly has set itself to heal those who can afford everything, and it prescribes the same methods for those who have nothing to spare.

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Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 month 2 weeks ago
And He is the God of...

And He is the God of the humble, for in the words of the Apostle, God chose the foolish things of the world to confound the wise and the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty (I Cor. i. 27) And God is in each of us in the measure in which one feels Him and loves Him. "If of two men," says Kierkegaard, "one prays to the true God without sincerity of heart, and the other prays to the an idol with all the passion of an infinite yearning, it is the first who really prays to the idol, while the second really prays to God." It would be better to say that the true God is He to whom man truly prays and whom man truly desires. And there may even be a truer revelation in superstition itself than in theology.

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Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton
1 month 3 days ago
When a man is taken in...

When a man is taken in a mystical sense, his qualities are often signified by his actions, and by the circumstances of things about him. So a Ruler is signified by his riding on a beast; a Warrior and Conqueror, by his having a sword and bow; a potent man, by his gigantic stature; a Judge, by weights and measures... the affliction or persecution which a people suffers in laboring to bring forth a new kingdom, by the pain of a woman in labor to bring forth a man-child; the dissolution of a body politic or ecclesiastic, by the death of a man or beast; and the revival of a dissolved dominion, by the resurrection of the dead.

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Vol. I, Ch. 2: Of the Prophetic Language
Philosophical Maxims
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