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John Rawls
John Rawls
4 months 4 days ago
The first statement of the two...

The first statement of the two principles reads as follows. First: each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others. Second: social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a)reasonably expected to be to everyone's advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all.

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Chapter II, Section 11, pg. 60
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 6 days ago
The question of "unreality," which confronts...

The question of "unreality," which confronts us at this point, is a very important one. Misled by grammar, the great majority of those logicians who have dealt with this question have dealt with it on mistaken lines. They have regarded grammatical form as a surer guide in analysis than, in fact, it is. And they have not known what differences in grammatical form are important.

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Ch. 16: Descriptions
Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
4 months 1 week ago
The beauty or uncomeliness of many...

The beauty or uncomeliness of many things, in good and ill breeding, will be better learnt, and make deeper impressions on them, in the examples of others, than from any rules or instructions can be given about them.

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Sec. 82
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
2 days ago
Whensoever by some present hard occurrences...

Whensoever by some present hard occurrences thou art constrained to be in some sort troubled and vexed, return unto thyself as soon as may be, and be not out of tune longer than thou must needs. For so shalt thou be the better able to keep thy part another time, and to maintain the harmony, if thou dost use thyself to this continually; once out, presently to have recourse unto it, and to begin again.

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VI, 9
Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
5 months 6 days ago
A friend is one soul abiding...

A friend is one soul abiding in two bodies. p. 188; also reported in various sources as:Friendship is a single soul dwelling in two bodies. A true friend is one soul in two bodies. Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies. What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.

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Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
2 weeks 6 days ago
We are weak, watery beings standing...

We are weak, watery beings standing in the midst of unrealities; therefore let us turn our minds to the things that are everlasting.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 6 days ago
There is a connected set of...

There is a connected set of events (light-waves) travelling outward from a centre... there are some respects in which all events are alike, and others in which they differ... We must not think of a light-wave as a 'thing', but as a connected group of rhythmical events. The mathematical characteristics of such a group can be inferred by physics, but the intrinsic character of the component events cannot be inferred.

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An Outline of Philosophy Ch.15 The Nature of our Knowledge of Physics, 1927
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 months 1 day ago
Without the faculty of forgetting, our...

Without the faculty of forgetting, our past would weigh so heavily on our present that we should not have the strength to confront another moment, still less to live through it. Life would be bearable only to frivolous natures, those in fact who do not remember.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
4 months 4 days ago
He is dead, and my hatred...

He is dead, and my hatred has died with him.

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Electra, before the dead Aegistheus, Act 2
Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
4 months 2 weeks ago
If we are not stupid or...

If we are not stupid or insincere when we say that the good or ill of man lies within his own will, and that all beside is nothing to us, why are we still troubled?

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Book I, ch. 25, § 1.
Philosophical Maxims
Xunzi
Xunzi
1 month 2 days ago
Human nature is evil, and goodness...

Human nature is evil, and goodness is caused by intentional activity.

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Quoted in: Fayek S. Hourani (2012) Daily Bread for Your Mind and Soul, p. 336
Philosophical Maxims
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
4 weeks ago
Should I not be proud, when...

Should I not be proud, when for twenty years I have had to admit to myself that the great Newton and all the mathematicians and noble calculators along with him were involved in a decisive error with respect to the doctrine of color, and that I among millions was the only one who knew what was right in this great subject of nature?

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Letter to Eckermann
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
4 months 1 week ago
He who establishes his argument by...

He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
4 months 1 day ago
It seems to me as good...

It seems to me as good as certain that we cannot get the upper hand against England. The English - the best race in the world - cannot lose! We, however, can lose and shall lose, if not this year then next year. The thought that our race is going to be beaten depresses me terribly, because I am completely German.

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Writing about the eventual outcome of World War I, in which he was a volunteer in the Austro-Hungarian army (25 October 1914), as quoted in The First World War (2004) by Martin Gilbert, p. 104
Philosophical Maxims
Max Stirner
Max Stirner
3 weeks 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
Aristotle
Aristotle
5 months 6 days ago
As for him who neither possesses...

As for him who neither possesses nor can acquire them, let him take to heart the words of Hesiod: He is the best of all who thinks for himself in all things. He, too, is good who takes advice from a wiser (person). But he who neither thinks for himself, nor lays to heart another's wisdom, this is a useless man.

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Philosophical Maxims
Robert Boyle
Robert Boyle
1 day ago
I am glad (sayes Eleutherius) to...

I am glad (sayes Eleutherius) to see the Vanity or Envy of the canting Chymists thus discover'd and chastis'd; and I could wish, that Learned Men would conspire together to make these deluding Writers sensible, that they must no longe[r] hope with Impunity to abuse the World. For whilst such Men are quietly permitted to publish Books with promising Titles, and therein to Assert what they please, and contradict others, and ev'n themselves as they please, with as little danger of being confuted as of being understood, they are encourag'd to get themselves a name, at the cost of the Readers, by finding that intelligent Men are wont for the reason newly mention'd, to let their Books and Them alone: And the ignorant and credulous (of which the number is still much greater then that of the other) are forward to admire most what they least understand.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
4 months 1 week ago
He who fears he shall suffer,...

He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.

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Book III, Ch. 13
Philosophical Maxims
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
2 weeks 2 days ago
Ivanov came to quite the same...

Ivanov came to quite the same conclusion, though life supplied him with quite different material to think about. He puts it like this: many lives have a mystical sense, but not everyone reads it right; more often than not it is given to us in cryptic form, and when we fail to decipher it we despair because our lives seem meaningless... the secret of a great life is often a man's success in deciphering the mysterious symbols vouchsafed to him, understanding them, and so learning to walk in the true path.

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Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
4 months 1 week ago
Every sensible man…

Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror.

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Examen important de milord Bolingbroke (1736): Conclusion
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
2 months 4 weeks ago
What, could ye not watch with...

What, could ye not watch with me one hour? Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.

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26:40-41 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Rosa Luxemburg
Rosa Luxemburg
1 day ago
The self-discipline of the Social Democracy...

The self-discipline of the Social Democracy is not merely the replacement of the authority of bourgeois rulers with the authority of a socialist central committee. The working class will acquire the sense of the new discipline, the freely assumed self-discipline of the Social Democracy, not as a result of the discipline imposed on it by the capitalist state, but by extirpating, to the last root, its old habits of obedience and servility.

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Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay
1 month 3 weeks ago
No doubt a tumult caused by...

No doubt a tumult caused by local and temporary irritation ought to be suppressed with promptitude and vigour. Such disturbances, for example, as those which Lord George Gordon raised in 1780, should be instantly put down with the strong hand. But woe to the Government which cannot distinguish between a nation and a mob! Woe to the Government which thinks that a great, a steady, a long continued movement of the public mind is to be stopped like a street riot! This error has been twice fatal to the great House of Bourbon. God be praised, our rulers have been wiser. The golden opportunity which, if once suffered to escape, might never have been retrieved, has been seized. Nothing, I firmly believe, can now prevent the passing of this noble law, this second Bill of Rights.

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Speech in the House of Commons on the Reform Bill (5 July 1831), quoted in Speeches of the Right Honourable T. B. Macaulay, M.P. (1854), pp. 34-35
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
5 days ago
The priests of the different religious...

The priests of the different religious sects, who dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of day-light; and scowl on it the fatal harbinger announcing the subversion of the duperies on which they live. In this the Presbyterian clergy take the lead. the tocsin is sounded in all their pulpits, and the first alarm denounced is against the particular creed of Doctr. Cooper; and as impudently denounced as if they really knew what it is.

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Letter to José Correia da Serra
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 6 days ago
...You could take up the line...

...You could take up the line that some of the gnostics took up - a line which I often thought was a very plausible one - that as a matter of fact this world that we know was made by the devil at a moment when God was not looking. There is a good deal to be said for that, and I am not concerned to refute it.

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"The Moral Arguments for Deity"
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
4 months 6 days ago
The fact that labour is external...

The fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself.

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Estranged Labour, p. 30.
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
4 months 1 week ago
The light dove, cleaving the air...

The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space.

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B 8
Philosophical Maxims
Cisero
Cisero
4 months 3 weeks ago
Since our leading men think themselves...

since our leading men think themselves in a seventh heaven, if there are bearded mullets in their fish-ponds that will come to hand for food, and neglect everything else, do not you think that I am doing no mean service if I secure that those who have the power, should not have the will, to do any harm?

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Letters to Atticus, Book II, 1.
Philosophical Maxims
George Santayana
George Santayana
2 months 4 weeks ago
Perhaps the only true dignity of...

Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
2 months 3 days ago
The coverage is the war. If...

The coverage is the war. If there were no coverage, there'd be no war. Yes, the newsmen and the mediamen around the world are actually the fighters, not the soldiers anymore.

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Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
3 months 1 week ago
The first promise exchanged by two...

The first promise exchanged by two beings of flesh was at the foot of a rock that was crumbling into dust; they took as witness for their constancy a sky that is not the same for a single instant; everything changed in them and around them, and they believed their hearts free of vicissitudes. O children! always children!

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
4 months 5 days ago
There are two laws discrete Not...

There are two laws discrete Not reconciled, Law for man, and law for thing.

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Ode: Inscribed to W. H. Channing, st. 9
Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
3 months 2 weeks ago
None but a Craftsman can judge...

None but a Craftsman can judge of a craft.

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Philosophical Maxims
Martin Buber
Martin Buber
2 months 3 weeks ago
In the presence of God himself...

In the presence of God himself man stands always like a solitary tree in the wilderness.

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p. 95
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
2 months 2 weeks ago
Suffering is admittedly one of the...

Suffering is admittedly one of the central problems of human existence; but this is because we have a suspicion that it is all for nothing. If we had a certainty about meaning, the suffering would be bearable. With no certainty of meaning, even comfort begins to feel futile.

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p. 89
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
5 months 2 days ago
A fate is not a punishment.

A fate is not a punishment.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
2 weeks 2 days ago
Blow the dust off the clock....

Blow the dust off the clock. Your watches are behind the times. Throw open the heavy curtains which are so dear to you - you do not even suspect that the day has already dawned outside.

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Letter to the Secretariat of the Soviet Writers' Union (12 November 1969) as translated in Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record (1970) edited by Leopold Labedz, "Expulsion"
Philosophical Maxims
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
1 month 2 weeks ago
I must write it all out,...

I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.

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Locked Rooms and Open Doors
Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
5 months 6 days ago
Homer has taught all other poets...

Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
3 months 5 days ago
Pantheism makes God into a present,...

Pantheism makes God into a present, real, and material being; empiricism - to which rationalism also belongs - makes God into an absent, remote, unreal, and negative being. Empiricism does not deny God existence, but denies him all positive determinations, because their content is supposed to be only finite and empirical; the infinite cannot, therefore, be an object for man. But the more determinations I deny to a being, the more do I cut it of[ from myself, and the less power and influence do I concede to it over me, the freer do I make myself of it. The more qualities I possess, the more I am for others, and the greater is the extent of my influence and effects. And the more one is, the more one is known to others. Hence, each negation of an attribute of God is a partial atheism, a sphere of godlessness.

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Part I, Section 16
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
2 months 3 weeks ago
Conduct, practice, is the proof of...

Conduct, practice, is the proof of doctrine, theory. "If any man will do His will - the will of Him that sent me," said Jesus, "he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God or whether I speak of myself" (John vii. 17); and there is a well known saying of Pascal: "Begin by taking holy water and you will end by becoming a believer." And pursuing a similar train of thought, Johann Jakob Moser, the pietist, was of the opinion that no atheist or naturalist had the right to regard the Christian religion as void of truth so long as he had not put it to the proof by keeping its precepts and commandments.

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(Ritschl, Geschichte des Pietismus, book viii., 43)
Philosophical Maxims
Nikos Kazantzakis
Nikos Kazantzakis
6 days ago
The wife of my God is...

The wife of my God is matter; they wrestle with each other, they laugh and weep, they cry out in the nuptial bed of flesh. They spawn and are dismembered. They fill sea, land, and air with species of plants, animals, men, and spirits. This primordial pair embraces, is dismembered, and multiplies in every living creature. All the concentrated agony of the Universe bursts out in every living thing. God is imperiled in the sweet ecstasy and bitterness of flesh. But he shakes himself free, he leaps out of brains and loins, then clings to new brains and new loins until the struggle for liberation again breaks out from the beginning.

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Philosophical Maxims
Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze
2 months 2 weeks ago
Second, we make no distinction between...

Second, we make no distinction between man and nature: the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man become one within nature in the form of production or industry, just as they do within the life of man as a species. Industry is then no longer considered from the extrinsic point of view of utility, but rather from the point of view of its fundamental identity with nature as production of man and by man.

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The Desiring Machine
Philosophical Maxims
Peter Singer
Peter Singer
3 months 3 weeks ago
Beginning to reason is like stepping...

Beginning to reason is like stepping onto an escalator that leads upward and out of sight. Once we take the first step, the distance to be traveled is independent of our will and we cannot know in advance where we shall end.

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Chapter 4, Reason, p. 88
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 3 weeks ago
Eternal vigilance...
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Niccolò Machiavelli
Niccolò Machiavelli
4 months 1 week ago
Men never do good unless necessity...

Men never do good unless necessity drives them to it; but when they are free to choose and can do just as they please, confusion and disorder become rampant.

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Book 1, Ch. 3 (as translated by LJ Walker and B Crick)
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
2 days ago
You want praise from people who...

You want praise from people who kick themselves every fifteen minutes, the approval of people who despise themselves. (Is it a sign of self-respect to regret nearly everything you do?)

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(Hays translation) VIII, 53
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
2 weeks 6 days ago
Clothe yourself with a hero's courage,...

Clothe yourself with a hero's courage, and withdraw for a little space from the opinions of the common man. Form a proper conception of the image of virtue, a thing of exceeding beauty and grandeur; this image is not to be worshipped by us with incense or garlands, but with sweat and blood.

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Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
4 months 1 week ago
He is happy, whose circumstances suit...

He is happy, whose circumstances suit his temper; but he is more excellent, who can suit his temper to any circumstances.

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§ 6.9 : Of Qualities Useful to Ourselves, Pt. 1
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
2 months 4 weeks ago
I thank thee, O Father, Lord...

I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes. Even so, Father: for so it seemed good in thy sight. All things are delivered unto me of my Father: and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him. Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

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11:25-30 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
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