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Joseph de Maistre
Joseph de Maistre
1 month 3 weeks ago
How many mistakes power has committed!...

How many mistakes power has committed! And how often has it ignored the means to conserve itself! Man is insatiable for power; he is infinite in his desires, and, always discontented with what he has, he loves only what he has not. People complain about the despotism of princes; they should complain about that of man. We are all born despots, from the most absolute monarch of Asia to the child who smothers a bird with his hand for the pleasure of seeing something in the world weaker than himself. There is no man who does not abuse power, and experience proves that the most abominable despots, if they come to seize the sceptre, will be precisely those who rant against despotism.

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Philosophical Maxims
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
4 months 3 weeks ago
Affection requires a firmer foundation than...

Affection requires a firmer foundation than sympathy, and few people have a principle of action sufficiently stable to produce rectitude of feeling; for in spite of all the arguments I have heard to justify deviations from duty, I am persuaded that even the most spontaneous sensations are more under the direction of principle than weak people are willing to allow.

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Letter 17
Philosophical Maxims
John Dewey
John Dewey
4 months 2 weeks ago
In ordinary visual perception, we see...

In ordinary visual perception, we see by means of light; we distinguish by means of reflected and refracted colors. But in ordinary perception, this medium of color is mixed, adulterated. While we see, we also hear; we feel pressures, and heat and cold. In a painting, color renders the scene without these alloys and impurities. They are part of the dross that is squeezed out and left behind in an act of intensified expression. The medium becomes color alone, and since color alone must now carry the qualities of movement, touch, sound, etc., that are present physically on their own account in ordinary vision, the expressiveness and energy of color are enhanced.

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p. 203
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
4 months 1 week ago
I know that all this is...

I know that all this is dull reading, tiresome, perhaps tedious, but it is all necessary. And I must repeat once again that we have nothing to do with a transcendental police system or with the conversion of God into a great Judge or Policeman - that is to say, we are not concerned with heaven or hell considered as buttresses to shore up our poor earthly mortality, nor are we concerned with anything egoistic or personal. It is not I myself alone, it is the whole human race that is involved, it is the ultimate finality of all our civilization. I am but one, but all men are I's.

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Philosophical Maxims
Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm
4 months 6 days ago
I believe that freedom is not...

I believe that freedom is not a constant attribute that "we have" or "we don't have"; perhaps there is only one reality: the act of liberating ourselves in the process of using choices. Every step in life that heightens the maturity of man heightens his ability to choose the freeing alternative. I believe that "freedom of choice" is not always equal for all men at every moment. The man with an exclusively necrophilic orientation; who is narcissistic; or who is symbiotic-incestuous, can only make a regressive choice. The free man, freed from irrational ties, can no longer make a regressive choice.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
6 months 3 weeks ago
For the purposes of poetry a...

For the purposes of poetry a convincing impossibility is preferable to an unconvincing possibility.

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Philosophical Maxims
Heraclitus
Heraclitus
6 months 1 week ago
War is the father and king...

War is the father and king of all: some he has made gods, and some men; some slaves and some free. War is the father and king of all, and has produced some as gods and some as men, and has made some slaves and some free.

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Philosophical Maxims
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
1 month 2 weeks ago
Every man knows that in...

Every man knows that in his work he does best and accomplishes most when he has attained a proficiency that enables him to work intuitively. That is, there are things which we come to know so well that we do not know how we know them. So it seems to me in matters of principle. Perhaps we live best and do things best when we are not too conscious of how and why we do them.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay
3 months 1 week 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
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine
5 months 3 weeks ago
Lead, follow, or get out of...

Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

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George S. Patton: "Lead me, follow me, or get out of my way", as quoted in Pocket Patriot: Quotes from American Heroes (2005) edited by Kelly Nickell, p. 157
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
1 month 3 weeks ago
Nothing can come out of nothing,...

Nothing can come out of nothing, any more than a thing can go back to nothing.

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IV, 4
Philosophical Maxims
Peter Singer
Peter Singer
5 months 2 weeks ago
It is easy for us to...

It is easy for us to criticize the prejudices of our grandfathers, from which our fathers freed themselves. It is more difficult to search for prejudices among the beliefs and values that we hold.

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Ch. 3: Equality for Animals? (p. 49)
Philosophical Maxims
Montesquieu
Montesquieu
4 months 1 week ago
Life was given to me as...

Life was given to me as a favor, so I may abandon it when it is one no longer.

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No. 76. (Usbek writing to Ibben)
Philosophical Maxims
Susan Neiman
Susan Neiman
3 months 2 weeks ago
Like many others, I came to...

Like many others, I came to philosophy to study matters of life and death, and was taught that professionalization required forgetting them. The more I learned, the more I grew convinced of the opposite: the history of philosophy was indeed animated by the questions that drew us there.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
3 months 3 weeks ago
The reader is the content of...

The reader is the content of any poem or of the language he employs, and in order to use any of these forms, he must put them on.

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"Roles, Masks, and Performances", New Literary History, Vol. 2, No. 3, Performances in Drama, the Arts, and Society (Spring, 1971), p. 520
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
2 months 2 weeks ago
Let us honor all honest human...

Let us honor all honest human power of contrivance in its degree. The beaver intellect, so long as it steadfastly refuses to be vulpine, and answers the tempter pointing out short routes to it with an honest "No, no," is truly respectable to me; and many a highflying speaker and singer whom I have known, has appeared to me much less of a developed man than certain of my mill-owning, agricultural, commercial, mechanical, or otherwise industrial friends, who have held their peace all their days and gone on in the silent state. If a man can keep his intellect silent, and make it even into honest beaverism, several very manful moralities, in danger of wreck on other courses, may comport well with that, and give it a genuine and partly human character; and I will tell him, in these days he may do far worse with himself and his intellect than change it into beaverism, and make honest money with it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
4 months 3 weeks ago
They defend their errors as if...

They defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
1 month 3 weeks ago
In matter of writing…

In matter of writing or reading thou must needs be taught before thou can do either: much more in matter of life.

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XI, 29 (el en)
Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
6 months 3 weeks ago
Just as it sometimes happens that...

Just as it sometimes happens that deformed offspring are produced by deformed parents, and sometimes not, so the offspring produced by a female are sometimes female, sometimes not, but male, because the female is as it were a deformed male.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
5 months 3 weeks ago
Gold is now money with reference...

Gold is now money with reference to all other commodities only because it was previously, with reference to them, a simple commodity.

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Vol. I, Ch. 1, Section 3, pg. 81.
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
4 months 1 week ago
The point I wish to make...

The point I wish to make is that I became aware that we discipline our minds to see only certain aspects of the world; life is complicated, and we need all our wits about us to deal with its complexities. There would be no great point in having second sight or thaumaturgic powers for most of us. But it is worth observing that they can generally be developed where needed.

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p. 240
Philosophical Maxims
George Santayana
George Santayana
4 months 2 weeks ago
Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions...

Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continual comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.

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Ch. VIII: Ideal Society
Philosophical Maxims
Alan Watts
Alan Watts
2 months 5 days ago
You do not ask what is...

You do not ask what is the value, or what is the use, of this feeling. Of what use is the universe? What is the practical application of a million galaxies? Yet just because it has no use, it has a use-which may sound like a paradox, but is not. What, for instance, is the use of playing music? If you play to make money, to outdo some other artist, to be a person of culture, or to improve your mind, you are not really playing-for your mind is not on the music. You don't swing. When you come to think of it, playing or listening to music is a pure luxury, an addiction, a waste of valuable time and money for nothing more than making elaborate patterns of sound.

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p. 92
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
5 months 3 weeks ago
The more you obey your conscience,...

The more you obey your conscience, the more your conscience will demand of you.

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Book IV, Chapter 8, "Is Christianity Hard or Easy?"
Philosophical Maxims
Joseph de Maistre
Joseph de Maistre
1 month 3 weeks ago
If you wish to extinguish that...

If you wish to extinguish that enthusiasm, which inspires great thoughts, and impels to noble enterprises;-if you wish to render men's hearts cold, and unfeeling; and to substitute egotism in the room of generous, and ardent, patriotism,-if you wish to do this, only take away from the people their faith, and make them philosophers.

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p. 61
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
5 months 3 weeks ago
When memory begins to decay, proper...

When memory begins to decay, proper names are what go first ...[C]ommon qualities and names have contracted an infinitely greater number of associations ...than the names of most of the persons ...Their memory is better organized. ...'Organization' means numerous associations; and the more numerous the associations, the greater the number of paths of recall. For the same reason... words... which form the grammatical framework of all our speech, are the very last to decay.

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Ch. 16
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
4 months 1 week ago
In his Experiment in Autobiography (1934),...

In his Experiment in Autobiography (1934), H.G. Wells pointed out that ever since the beginning of life, most creatures have been 'up against it'. Their lives are a drama of struggle against the forces of nature. Yet nowadays you can say to a man: Yes, you earn a living, you support a family, you love and hate, but -- what do you do? His real interest may be in something else -- art, science, literature, philosophy. The bird is a creature of the air, the fish is a creature of the water, and man is a creature of the mind.

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pp. 346-347
Philosophical Maxims
Ernst Mach
Ernst Mach
4 months 2 weeks ago
Personally, people know themselves very poorly....

Personally, people know themselves very poorly.

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Contributions to the analysis of the sensations (1897), translated by Cora May Williams, published by Open Court Publishing Company, p. 4
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
5 months 3 weeks ago
A good symbol is the best...

A good symbol is the best argument and is a missionary to persuade thousands.

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Poetry and Imagination
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Jean Jacques Rousseau
5 months 3 weeks ago
What I had to say was...

What I had to say was so clear and I felt it so deeply that I am amazed by the tediousness, repetitiousness, verbiage, and disorder of this writing. What would have made it lively and vehement coming from another's pen is precisely what has made it dull and slack coming from mine. The subject was myself, and I no longer found on my own interest that zeal and vigor of courage which can exalt a generous soul only for another person's cause.

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On the Subject and Form of This Writing; translated by Judith R. Bush, Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
5 months 3 weeks ago
A mind does not receive truth...

A mind does not receive truth as a chest receives jewels that are put into it, but as the stomach takes up food into the system. It is no longer food, but flesh, and is assimilated. The appetite and the power of digestion measure our right to knowledge. He has it who can use it. As soon as our accumulation overruns our invention or power to use, the evils of intellectual gluttony begin,- congestion of the brain, apoplexy, and strangulation.

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"The Natural History of Intellect", p. 30
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
6 months 1 week ago
Sincerity is the way of Heaven....

Sincerity is the way of Heaven. The attainment of sincerity is the way of men. He who possesses sincerity is he who, without an effort, hits what is right, and apprehends, without the exercise of thought — he is the sage who naturally and easily embodies the right way. He who attains to sincerity is he who chooses what is good, and firmly holds it fast. To this attainment there are requisite the extensive study of what is good, accurate inquiry about it, careful reflection on it, the clear discrimination of it, and the earnest practice of it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas
6 months 1 week ago
Truth is the ultimate end of...

Truth is the ultimate end of the whole universe.

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I, 1, 2
Philosophical Maxims
John Gray
John Gray
3 months 1 day ago
In the world as we find...

In the world as we find it, even the barest requirements of a life worth living cannot all be always met in full. Toppling a tyranny may trigger civil war. Protecting a broad range of liberal freedoms may result in the regime that guarantees them being short lived. At the same time, supporting a strong state as a bulwark against anarchy may worsen the abuse of power. Wise policy can temper these conflicts. It cannot hope to overcome them.

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'Modus Vivendi' (p.28)
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
5 months 2 weeks ago
The human body is essentially something...

The human body is essentially something other than an animal organism.

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Letter on Humanism
Philosophical Maxims
Nikos Kazantzakis
Nikos Kazantzakis
1 month 3 weeks ago
Enlighten the dark blood of your...

Enlighten the dark blood of your ancestors, shape their cries into speech, purify their will, widen their narrow, unmerciful brows. This is your second duty. For you are not only a slave. As soon as you were born, a new possibility was born with you, a free heartbeat stormed through the great sunless heart of your race.

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Philosophical Maxims
Robert Nozick
Robert Nozick
2 months 3 weeks ago
Some anarchists have claimed not merely...

Some anarchists have claimed not merely that we would be better off without a state, but that any state necessarily violates people's moral rights and hence is intrinsically immoral. Our starting point then, though nonpolitical, is by intention far from nonmoral. Moral philosophy sets the background for, and boundaries of, political philosophy. What persons may and may not do to one another limits what they may do through the apparatus of a state, or do to establish such an apparatus.

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Ch. 1 : Why State of Nature Theory?; Political Philosophy, p. 6
Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
4 months 2 weeks ago
One of the most marked features...

One of the most marked features about the law of mind is that it makes time to have a definite direction of flow from past to future. ...This makes one of the great contrasts between the law of mind and the law of physical force, where there is no more distinction between the two opposite directions in time than between moving northward and moving southward.

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Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
4 months 3 weeks ago
People ... become so preoccupied with...

People ... become so preoccupied with the means by which an end is achieved, as eventually to mistake it for the end. Just as money, which is a means of satisfying wants, comes to be regarded by a miser as the sole thing to be worked for, leaving the wants unsatisfied; so the conduct men have found preferable because most conducive to happiness, has come to be thought of as intrinsically preferable: not only to be made a proximate end (which it should be), but to be made an ultimate end, to the exclusion of the true ultimate end.

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Ethics (New York:1915), § 14, pp. 38-39
Philosophical Maxims
John Gray
John Gray
3 months 1 day ago
For a consistent naturalist science can...

For a consistent naturalist science can only be a refinement of animal exploration, a practice humans have devised for finding their way in the bit of the universe in which they have so far survived. Instead of thinking of science as a law-seeking activity, we can think of it as a tool humans use to cope with a world they will never understand.

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Sweet Morality (p. 224)
Philosophical Maxims
Vandana Shiva
Vandana Shiva
3 months 1 week ago
Biopiracy is biological theft; illegal collection...

Biopiracy is biological theft; illegal collection of indigenous plants by corporations who patent them for their own use.

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On biopiracy, from the booklet "No Patents on Seeds: A Handbook For Activists"
Philosophical Maxims
Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Bakunin
4 months 3 weeks ago
All religions are cruel, all founded...

All religions are cruel, all founded on blood; for all rest principally on the idea of sacrifice - that is, on the perpetual immolation of humanity to the insatiable vengeance of divinity.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
6 months 1 day ago
There is no pleasure to me...

There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to.

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Philosophical Maxims
Sir Thomas Browne
Sir Thomas Browne
4 months 4 weeks ago
He who discommendeth others obliquely commendeth...

He who discommendeth others obliquely commendeth himself.

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Part I, Section XXXIV
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
5 months 3 weeks ago
Lincoln is not the product of...

Lincoln is not the product of a popular revolution. This plebeian, who worked his way up from stone-breaker to Senator in Illinois, without intellectual brilliance, without a particularly outstanding character, without exceptional importance-an average person of good will, was placed at the top by the interplay of the forces of universal suffrage unaware of the great issues at stake. The new world has never achieved a greater triumph than by this demonstration that, given its political and social organisation, ordinary people of good will can accomplish feats which only heroes could accomplish in the old world!

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Philosophical Maxims
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
4 months 2 weeks ago
Men have been released from concentration...

Men have been released from concentration camps who have taken over the jargon of their jailers and with cold reason and mad consent (the price, as it were, of their survival) tell their story as if it could not have been otherwise than it was, contending that they have not been treated so badly after all.

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p. 45.
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
2 months 1 week ago
The archer must…

The archer must know what he is seeking to hit; then he must aim and control the weapon by his skill. Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbour he is making for, no wind is the right wind. Chance must necessarily have great influence over our lives, because we live by chance. It is the case with certain men, however, that they do not know that they know certain things. Just as we often go searching for those who stand beside us, so we are apt to forget that the goal of the Supreme Good lies near us.

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Line 3
Philosophical Maxims
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut
3 months 3 weeks ago
What should young people do with...

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

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Commencement Address to Hobart and William Smith Colleges, May 26, 1974
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 3 days ago
Society attacks early....
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Main Content / General
Richard Rorty
Richard Rorty
5 months 2 weeks ago
To abjure the notion of the...

To abjure the notion of the "truly human" is to abjure the attempt to divinize the self as a replacement for a divinized world.

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Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), p. 35
Philosophical Maxims
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