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Aristotle
Aristotle
4 months ago
The least initial deviation from the...

The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.

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Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
1 month 3 weeks ago
An autonomous electorate, free because it...

An autonomous electorate, free because it is free from indoctrination and manipulation, would indeed be on a "level of articulate opinion and ideology" which is not likely to be found. Therefore, the concept has to be rejected as "unrealistic"-has to be if one accepts the factually prevailing level of opinion and ideology as prescribing the valid criteria for sociological analysis. And-if indoctrination and manipulation have reached the stage where the prevailing level of opinion has become a level of falsehood, where the actual state of affairs is no longer recognized as that which it is, then an analysis which is methodologically committed to reject transitive concepts commits itself to a false consciousness. Its very empiricism is ideological.

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p. 117
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
3 weeks 6 days ago
There are no passengers on Spaceship...

There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew.

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Statement in 1965, in reference to Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963) by Buckminster Fuller
Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
2 months ago
Fathers and teachers, I ponder, "What...

Fathers and teachers, I ponder, "What is hell?" I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.

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Book VI, Chapter 3 (trans. Constance Garnett)
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
3 months 3 weeks ago
Someone once asked me, "If you...

Someone once asked me, "If you had your choice, Dr. Asimov, would it be women or writing?" My answer was, "Well, I can write for twelve hours at a time without getting tired."

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Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
4 months 2 days ago
Where there is happiness, there is...
Where there is happiness, there is found pleasure in nonsense. The transformation of experience into its opposite, of the suitable into the unsuitable, the obligatory into the optional (but in such a manner that this process produces no injury and is only imagined in jest), is a pleasure; ...
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Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
1 month 1 week ago
Cautiousness in judgment is nowadays to...

Cautiousness in judgment is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient. ... To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.

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A 38
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
4 months ago
The Sophist demonstrates that everything is...

The Sophist demonstrates that everything is true and nothing is true.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
3 months ago
Politics is, as it were, the...

Politics is, as it were, the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its two opposite halves, - sometimes split into quarters, it may be, which grind on each other. Not only individuals, but States, have thus a confirmed dyspepsia, which expresses itself, you can imagine by what sort of eloquence. Thus our life is not altogether a forgetting, but also, alas! to a great extent, a remembering of that which we should never have been conscious of, certainly not in our waking hours. Why should we not meet, not always as dyspeptics, to tell our bad dreams, but sometimes as eupeptics, to congratulate each other on the ever glorious morning? I do not make an exorbitant demand, surely.

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p. 495
Philosophical Maxims
Horace
Horace
2 months 2 weeks ago
This to the right….

This to the right, that to the left hand strays, and all are wrong, but wrong in different ways.

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Book II, satire iii, line 50 (trans. Conington)
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
3 months 3 days ago
Society and conversation, therefore, are the...

Society and conversation, therefore, are the most powerful remedies for restoring the mind to its tranquillity, if, at any time, it has unfortunately lost it; as well as the best preservatives of that equal and happy temper, which is so necessary to self-satisfaction and enjoyment. Men of retirement and speculation, who are apt to sit brooding at home over either grief or resentment, though they may often have more humanity, more generosity, and a nicer sense of honour, yet seldom possess that equality of temper which is so common among men of the world.

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Section I, Chap. III.
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
3 months 3 weeks ago
Radiation, unlike smoking, drinking, and overeating,...

Radiation, unlike smoking, drinking, and overeating, gives no pleasure, so the possible victims object.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
3 weeks 6 days ago
The mosaic form of the TV...

The mosaic form of the TV image demands participation and involvement in depth, of the whole being, as does the sense of touch.

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(p. 334)
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
3 months 1 day ago
One always speaks badly….

One always speaks badly when one has nothing to say.

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1827
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
3 months 2 days ago
It is difficult for the isolated...

It is difficult for the isolated individual to work himself out of the immaturity which has become almost natural for him. He has even become fond of it and for the time being is incapable of employing his own intelligence, because he has never been allowed to make the attempt. Statutes and formulas, these mechanical tools of a serviceable use, or rather misuse, of his natural faculties, are the ankle-chains of a continuous immaturity. Whoever threw it off would make an uncertain jump over the smallest trench because he is not accustomed to such free movement. Therefore there are only a few who have pursued a firm path and have succeeded in escaping from immaturity by their own cultivation of the mind.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
1 month 3 weeks ago
Because of your unbelief: for verily...

Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you. Howbeit this kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting.

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17:20-21 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
3 weeks 4 days ago
Wherever a man is, there will...

Wherever a man is, there will be a lie.

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Episodes in the Story of a Mine.
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
3 months ago
In my education, as in that...

In my education, as in that of everyone, the moral influences, which are so much more important than all others, are also the most complicated, and the most difficult to specify with any approach to completeness.

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(p. 38)
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Rorty
Richard Rorty
2 months 2 weeks ago
If I had to lay bets,...

If I had to lay bets, my bet would be that everything is going to go to hell, but, you know, what else have we got except hope?

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"Richard Rorty Interviewed by Gideon Lewis-Kraus." The Believer, June 2003.
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
1 month 3 weeks ago
Freed from the sublimated form which...

Freed from the sublimated form which was the very token of its irreconcilable dreams-a form which is the style, the language in which the story is told-sexuality turns into a vehicle for the bestsellers of oppression. ... This society turns everything it touches into a potential source of progress and of exploitation, of drudgery and satisfaction, of freedom and of oppression. Sexuality is no exception.

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pp. 77-78
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
2 months 4 weeks ago
If you want to deserve Hell,...

If you want to deserve Hell, you need only stay in bed. The world is iniquity; if you accept it, you are an accomplice, if you change it you are an executioner.

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Act 3, sc. 6
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay
2 weeks 4 days ago
What a singular destiny has been...

What a singular destiny has been that of this remarkable man! To be regarded in his own age as a classic, and in ours as a companion! To receive from his contemporaries that full homage which men of genius have in general received only from posterity! To be more intimately known to posterity than other men are known to their contemporaries!

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'Samuel Johnson', The Edinburgh Review (September 1831), quoted in T. B. Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to The Edinburgh Review, Vol. I (1843), p. 407
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
3 months ago
Reason has always existed, but not...

Reason has always existed, but not always in a rational form.

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Letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge, September 1843
Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
4 months ago
The life of money-making is one...

The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else.

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Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
2 months 4 days ago
If exclusive privileges were not granted,...

If exclusive privileges were not granted, and if the financial system would not tend to concentrate wealth, there would be few great fortunes and no quick wealth. When the means of growing rich is divided between a greater number of citizens, wealth will also be more evenly distributed; extreme poverty and extreme wealth would be also rare.

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Article on Wealth
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
2 months ago
Men are qualified for civil liberty...

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites, - in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity, - in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption, - in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 3 days ago
The whole title...
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Main Content / General
Horace
Horace
2 months 2 weeks ago
Life grants nothing…

Life grants nothing to us mortals without hard work.

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Book I, satire ix, line 59
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
1 month 1 week ago
During his lifetime Gurdjieff did not...

During his lifetime Gurdjieff did not publish any books on the techniques of his teaching, and his pupils were bound to secrecy on the subject. Since his death in Paris in 1949, however, many of his works have been published, and there has been a flood of memoirs by disciples and admirers. Gurdjieff was in almost ever respect the antithesis of Aleister Crowley. Whereas Crowley craved publicity, Gurdjieff shunned it. Crowley was forgotten for two decades after his death; Gurdjieff on the contrary, has become steadily better known, and his influence continues to grow. One of the main reasons for this is that there was so little of the charlatan about him. He is no cult figure with hordes of gullible disciples. What he has to teach makes an appeal to the intelligence, and can be fully understood only by those who are prepared to make a serious effort.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
3 weeks 6 days ago
Each new technology is a reprogramming...

Each new technology is a reprogramming of sensory life.

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(p. 33)
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
3 months ago
There are Plebes in all classes....

There are Plebes in all classes.

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As quoted by Julien Coupat in Interview with Julien Coupat, 2009
Philosophical Maxims
Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno
2 months 6 days ago
It is manifest... that every soul...

It is manifest... that every soul and spirit hath a certain continuity with the spirit of the universe, so that it must be understood to exist and to be included not only there where it liveth and feeleth, but it is also by its essence and substance diffused throughout immensity... The power of each soul is itself somehow present afar in the universe... Naught is mixed, yet is there some presence. Anything we take in the universe, because it has in itself that which is All in All, includes in its own way the entire soul of the world, which is entirely in any part of it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 3 weeks ago
So it is that after each...

So it is that after each night, facing a new day, the impossible necessity of dealing with it fills us with dread; exiled in light as if the world had just started, inventing the sun, we flee from tears-just one of which would be enough to wash us out of time.

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Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
3 months 1 week ago
Faith ever says, "If Thou wilt,"...

Faith ever says, "If Thou wilt," not "If Thou canst."

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p. 241
Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
2 months ago
I think that the principal and...

I think that the principal and most basic spiritual need of the Russian People is the need for suffering, incessant and unslakeable suffering, everywhere and in everything. I think the Russian People have been infused with this need to suffer from time immemorial. A current of martyrdom runs through their entire history, and it flows not only from external misfortunes and disasters but springs from the very heart of the People themselves. There is always an element of suffering even in the happiness of the Russian People, and without it their happiness is incomplete.

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A Writer's Diary, Vol. 1: 1873-1876 (1994), pp. 161-162
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
2 months 4 weeks ago
And when we speak of "abandonment"...

And when we speak of "abandonment" - a favorite word of Heidegger - we only mean to say that God does not exist and that it is necessary to draw the consequences of his absence to the end.

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pp. 32-33
Philosophical Maxims
Novalis
Novalis
1 month 3 weeks ago
Where children are, there is a...

Where children are, there is a golden age.

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Fragment No. 97
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 month 2 weeks ago
In fact, for a voluntarist like...

In fact, for a voluntarist like Schopenhauer, a theory so sanely and cautiously empirical and rational as that of Darwin, left out of account the inward force, the essential motive, of evolution. For what is, in effect, the hidden force, the ultimate agent, which impels organisms to perpetuate themselves and to fight for their persistence and propagation? Selection, adaptation, heredity, these are only external conditions. This inner, essential force has been called will on the supposition that there exists also in other beings that which we feel in ourselves as a feeling of will, the impulse to be everything, to be others as well as ourselves yet without ceasing to be what we are.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Browne
Thomas Browne
2 months 5 days ago
A man may be in as...

A man may be in as just possession of Truth as of a City, and yet be forced to surrender.

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Section 6
Philosophical Maxims
Porphyry
Porphyry
2 months 1 week ago
Soul, indeed, is a certain medium...

Soul, indeed, is a certain medium between an impartible essence, and an essence which is divisible about bodies. But intellect is an impartible essence alone. And qualities and material forms are divisible about bodies. Not everything which acts on another, effects that which it does effect by approximation and contact; but those natures which effect any thing by approximation and contact, use approximation accidentally.

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Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 month 2 weeks ago
Consciousness, the craving for more, more,...

Consciousness, the craving for more, more, always more, hunger of eternity and thirst of infinity, appetite for God - these are never satisfied. Each consciousness seeks to be itself and all other consciousnesses without ceasing to be itself; it seeks to be God. And matter, unconsciousness, tends to be less and less, tends to be nothing, its thirst being a thirst for repose. Spirit says: I wish to be! and matter answers: I wish not to be!

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Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
3 months 2 days ago
Phenomena of the external sense are...

Phenomena of the external sense are examined and set forth in physics; those of the internal sense in empirical psychology. Pure mathematics considers space in geometry and time in pure mechanics. To these is to be added a certain concept, intellectual to be sure in itself, but whose becoming actual in the concrete requires the auxiliary notions of time and space in the successive addition and simultaneous juxtaposition of separate units, which is the concept of number treated in arithmetic.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
1 month 4 weeks ago
On the whole, Borne, Heine, Feuerbach,...

On the whole, Borne, Heine, Feuerbach, and such authors are the individualities who have great interest for someone who is composing an imaginary construction. They frequently are well informed about the religious-that is, they know definitely that they do not want to have anything to do with it. This is a great advantage over the systematicians, who without knowing where the religious really is located take it upon themselves to explain it-sometimes obsequiously, sometimes superciliously, but always unsuccessfully.

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Soren Kierkegaard, Stages on Life's Way, 1845, Hong 1988 p. 452
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay
2 weeks 4 days ago
Hence it may be concluded that...

Hence it may be concluded that the happiest state of society is that in which supreme power resides in the whole body of a well-informed people. This is an imaginary, perhaps an unattainable, state of things. Yet, in some measure, we may approximate to it; and he alone deserves the name of a great statesman, whose principle it is to extend the power of the people in proportion to the extent of their knowledge, and to give them every facility for obtaining such a degree of knowledge as may render it safe to trust them with absolute power. In the mean time, it is dangerous to praise or condemn constitutions in the abstract; since, from the despotism of St. Petersburg to the democracy of Washington, there is scarcely a form of government which might not, at least in some hypothetical case, be the best possible.

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pp. 161-162
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
3 months ago
Howitt says of the man who...

Howitt says of the man who found the great nugget which weighed twenty-eight pounds, at the Bendigo diggings in Australia: - "He soon began to drink; got a horse, and rode all about, generally at full gallop, and, when he met people, called out to inquire if they knew who he was, and then kindly informed them that he was 'the bloody wretch that had found the nugget.' At last he rode full speed against a tree, and nearly knocked his brains out." I think, however, there was no danger of that, for he had already knocked his brains out against the nugget.

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p. 489
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
3 months 1 week ago
Plato says, "'Tis to no purpose...

Plato says, "'Tis to no purpose for a sober man to knock at the door of the Muses;" and Aristotle says "that no excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of folly."

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Book II, Ch. 2. Of Drunkenness
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 3 weeks ago
There are no arguments. Can anyone...

There are no arguments. Can anyone who has reached the limit bother with arguments, causes, effects, moral considerations, and so forth? Of course not. For such a person there are only unmotivated motives for living. On the heights of despair, the passion for the absurd is the only thing that can still throw a demonic light on chaos. When all the current reasons - moral, esthetic, religious, social, and so on - no longer guide one's life, how can one sustain life without succumbing to nothingness? Only by a connection with the absurd, by love of absolute uselessness, loving something which does not have substance but which simulates an illusion of life. I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
2 months 4 weeks ago
But, if it will help ease...

But, if it will help ease your irritated souls, please know, dearly departed, that you have ruined our lives.

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Aegistheus, Act 2
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
2 months 4 weeks ago
Everything is a subject on which...

Everything is a subject on which there is not much to be said.

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Studies in Words (1960), ch. 2
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
3 weeks 6 days ago
I am not a "culture critic"...

I am not a "culture critic" because I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities. That is why I have no interest in the academic world.

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Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p. 413
Philosophical Maxims
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