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Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
2 months 1 week ago
...as the great Unitarian preacher Channing...

...as the great Unitarian preacher Channing pointed out, that in France and Spain there are multitudes who have proceeded from rejecting Popery to absolute atheism, because "the fact is, that false and absurd doctrines, when exposed, have a natural tendency to beget skepticism in those who receive them without reflection. None are so likely to believe too little as those who have begun by believing too much." Here is, indeed, the terrible danger of believing too much. But no! the terrible danger comes from another quarter - from seeking to believe with the reason and not with the life.

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Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Schlegel
Friedrich Schlegel
2 months 3 weeks ago
One can only become a philosopher,...

One can only become a philosopher, but not be one. As one believes he is a philosopher, he stops being one.

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"Selected Aphorisms from the Athenaeum (1798)", Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, trans. (Pennsylvania University Press:1968) #54
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
3 months 3 weeks ago
Many people think they are thinking...

Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. 

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To his young son from the Yosemite Valley on
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 week 2 days ago
Preserve life...

1) Preserve Life
2) State of war (opportunism)
3) Relativism
4) Confusion

Civilization, goodness, justice, fairness all contained inside the first option. Under # 1 (Universal Humanism):


1) Survive.
2) Don't prevent another from surviving.
3) Help the less fortunate.

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Philosophical Maxims
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut
1 month 3 weeks ago
All these people talk so eloquently...

All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let's get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States-and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!

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As quoted in "An Interview with Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Carey Horwitz, Library Journal, Apr. 15, 1973: 1131
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 2 weeks ago
The deepest and most organic death...

The deepest and most organic death is death in solitude, when even light becomes a principle of death. In such moments you will be severed from life, from love, smiles, friends and even from death. And you will ask yourself if there is anything besides the nothingness of the world and your own nothingness.

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Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
4 months 3 weeks ago
A white spot is on the...

A white spot is on the horizon. There it is. A terrible storm is brewing. But no one sees the white spot or has any inkling of what it might mean. But no (this would not be the most terrible situation either), no, there is one person who sees it and knows what it means-but he is a passenger. He has no authority on the ship, can take no action. ... The fact that in Christendom there is visible on the horizon a white speck which means that a storm is threatening-this I knew; but, alas, I was an am only a passenger.

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Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
4 months 3 weeks ago
The venerability, reliability, and utility of...
The venerability, reliability, and utility of truth is something which a person demonstrates for himself from the contrast with the liar, whom no one trusts and everyone excludes. As a "rational" being, he now places his behavior under the control of abstractions. He will no longer tolerate being carried away by sudden impressions, by intuitions.
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Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
4 months 2 days ago
It is an article of faith...

It is an article of faith that Mary is Mother of the Lord and still a Virgin.

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Weimar edition of Martin Luther's Works, English translation edited by J. Pelikan [Concordia: St. Louis], Vol. 11, 319-320
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
3 months 2 weeks ago
If our intention now is to...

If our intention now is to reveal classical unreason on its own terms, outside of its ties with dreams and error, it must be understood not as a form of reason that is somehow diseased, lost or mad, but quite simply as reason dazzled.

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Part Two: 2. The Transcendence of Delirium
Philosophical Maxims
Epicurus
Epicurus
4 months 1 week ago
Since, of desires some are natural...

Since, of desires some are natural and necessary; others natural, but not necessary; and others neither natural nor necessary, but the offspring of false judgment; it must be the office of temperance to gratify the first class, as far as nature requires: to restrain the second within the bounds of moderation; and, as to the third, resolutely to oppose, and, if possible, entirely repress them.

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Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
2 months 2 weeks ago
Fifth, in what measure this unification...

Fifth, in what measure this unification acts, seems to be regulated only by special rules; or, at least, we cannot in our present knowledge say how far it goes. But it may be said that, judging by appearances, the amount of arbitrariness in the phenomenon of human minds is neither altogether trifling nor very prominent.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida
3 months 2 weeks ago
By virtue of its innermost intention,...

By virtue of its innermost intention, and like all questions about language, structuralism escapes the classical history of ideas which already supposes structuralism's possibility, for the latter naively belongs to the province of language and propounds itself within it.Nevertheless, by virtue of an irreducible region of irreflection and spontaneity within it, by virtue of the essential shadow of the undeclared, the structuralist phenomenon will deserve examination by the historian of ideas. For better or for worse. Everything within this phenomenon that does not in itself transparently belong to the question of the sign will merit this scrutiny; as will everything within it that is methodologically effective, thereby possessing the kind of infallibil-ity now ascribed to sleepwalkers and formerly attributed to instinct, which was said to be as certain as it was blind.

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Force and Signification
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 3 weeks ago
You will have seen that my...

You will have seen that my brother died suddenly in Marseilles. I inherit from him a title, but not a penny of money, as he was bankrupt. A title is a great nuisance to me, and I am at a loss what to do, but at any rate I do not wish it employed in connection with any of my literary work. There is, so far as I know, only one method of getting rid of it, which is to be attainted of high treason, and this would involve my head being cut off on Tower Hill. This method seems to me perhaps somewhat extreme...

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Letter to W. W. Norton, 11 March, 1931
Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
4 months 1 week ago
The propositions which are true and...

The propositions which are true and evident must of necessity be employed even by those who contradict them.

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Book II, ch. 20, 1
Philosophical Maxims
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
2 months 3 weeks ago
The Scientific discourse extracts truths from...

The Scientific discourse extracts truths from the errors which surround and oppose it on all sides and in every form; and, by demolition of these opposing views as error, and as impossible to true thought, shows the truth as that which alone remains after their withdrawal, and therefore as the only possible truth:--and in this separation of opposites, and elucidation of the truth from the confused chaos in which truth and error lie mingled together, consists the peculiar and characteristic nature of the Scientific discourse. This method creates and produces truth, before our eyes, out of a world full of error.

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P. 26-27
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
4 months 3 weeks ago
Q. You do not consider your...

Q. You do not consider your statement a disloyal one? A. No, sir. Scientific truth is beyond loyalty and disloyalty. Q. You are sure that your statement represents scientific truth? A. I am.

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Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
2 months 2 weeks ago
Third, these general ideas are not...

Third, these general ideas are not mere words, nor do they consist in this, that certain concrete facts will every time happen under certain descriptions of conditions; but they are just as much, or rather far more, living realities than the feelings themselves out of which they are concreted. And to say that mental phenomenon are governed by law does not mean merely that they are describable by a general formula; but that there is a living idea, a conscious continuum of feeling which pervades them, and to which they are docile.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel
3 months 2 weeks ago
We appear to be faced with...

We appear to be faced with a general difficulty about psychophysical reduction. In other areas the process of reduction is a move in the direction of greater objectivity, toward a more accurate view of the real nature of things. ... The less it depends on a specifically human viewpoint, the more objective is our description. ...Experience itself, however, does not seem to fit the pattern. ... If the subjective character of experience is fully comprehensible only from one point of view, then any shift to greater objectivity - that is, less attachment to a specific viewpoint - does not take us nearer to the real nature of the phenomenon: it takes us further away from it.

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p. 174.
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
2 months 1 week ago
Heaven knows what seeming nonsense may...

Heaven knows what seeming nonsense may not to-morrow be demonstrated truth.

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Ch. 7: "Relativity", p. 161
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
3 months 3 weeks ago
I trust that some may be...

I trust that some may be as near and dear to Buddha, or Christ, or Swedenborg, who are without the pale of their churches. It is necessary not to be Christian to appreciate the beauty and significance of the life of Christ. I know that some will have hard thoughts of me, when they hear their Christ named beside my Buddha, yet I am sure that I am willing they should love their Christ more than my Buddha, for the love is the main thing, and I like him too.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
4 months 3 weeks ago
May not we then confidently pronounce...

May not we then confidently pronounce that man happy who realizes complete goodness in action, and is adequately furnished with external goods? Or should we add, that he must also be destined to go on living not for any casual period but throughout a complete lifetime in the same manner, and to die accordingly, because the future is hidden from us, and we conceive happiness as an end, something utterly and absolutely final and complete? If this is so, we shall pronounce those of the living who possess and are destined to go on possessing the good things we have specified to be supremely blessed, though on the human scale of bliss.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
3 months 3 weeks ago
Liberty, as we all know, cannot...

Liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of central government.

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Chapter 1 (p. 14)
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Jean Jacques Rousseau
3 months 3 weeks ago
There is only one man who...

There is only one man who gets his own way-he who can get it single-handed; therefore freedom, not power, is the greatest good. That man is truly free who desires what he is able to perform, and does what he desires. This is my fundamental maxim. Apply it to childhood, and all the rules of education spring from it. Society has enfeebled man, not merely by robbing him of the right to his own strength, but still more by making his strength insufficient for his needs. This is why his desires increase in proportion to his weakness; and this is why the child is weaker than the man. If a man is strong and a child is weak it is not because the strength of the one is absolutely greater than the strength of the other, but because the one can naturally provide for himself and the other cannot. Thus the man will have more desires and the child more caprices, a word which means, I take it, desires which are not true needs, desires which can only be satisfied with the help of others.

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Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
3 months 4 weeks ago
It is a great mortification to...

It is a great mortification to the vanity of man, that his utmost art and industry can never equal the meanest of nature's productions, either for beauty or value. Art is only the under-workman, and is employed to give a few strokes of embellishment to those pieces, which come from the hand of the master.

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Part I, Essay 15: The Epicurean
Philosophical Maxims
Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton
1 month 2 weeks ago
We are not born free, nor...

We are not born free, nor do we come into this world with a self-identity and autonomy of our own. We achieve those things, through the conflict and cooperation that weave us into the social fabric.

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Where We Are: The State of Britain Now
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
2 months 4 days ago
He who says he hates every...

He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery.

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K 41
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
3 months 3 weeks 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
Confucius
Confucius
4 months 2 weeks ago
It is only he, possessed of...

It is only he, possessed of all sagely qualities that can exist under heaven, who shows himself quick in apprehension, clear in discernment, of far-reaching intelligence, and all-embracing knowledge, fitted to exercise rule; magnanimous, generous, benign, and mild, fitted to exercise forbearance; impulsive, energetic, firm, and enduring, fitted to maintain a firm hold; self-adjusted, grave, never swerving from the Mean, and correct, fitted to command reverence; accomplished, distinctive, concentrative, and searching, fitted to exercise discrimination. All-embracing is he and vast, deep and active as a fountain, sending forth in their due season his virtues. All-embracing and vast, he is like Heaven. Deep and active as a fountain, he is like the abyss. He is seen, and the people all reverence him; he speaks, and the people all believe him; he acts, and the people all are pleased with him.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 3 weeks 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
John Rawls
John Rawls
3 months 3 weeks ago
Justice is the first virtue of...

Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust. Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests.

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Chapter I, Section 1, pg. 3-4
Philosophical Maxims
John Searle
John Searle
1 month 3 weeks ago
Just acquiring this amount of "education"...

Just acquiring this amount of "education" will not, by itself, make you an educated person, even less will it give you what Oakeshott calls "judgment." But if the manner of instruction is adequate, the student should be able to acquire this much knowledge in a way that combines intellectual openness, critical scrutiny, and logical clarity. If so, learning will not stop when the student leaves the university.

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Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
2 months 1 week ago
Dadaism and surrealism ... represented the...

Dadaism and surrealism ... represented the intoxication of total license, the intoxication in which the mind wallows when it has made a clean sweep of value and surrendered to the immediate. The good is the pole towards which the human spirit is necessarily oriented, not only in action but in every effort, including the effort of pure intelligence. The surrealists have set up non-oriented thought as a model; they have chosen the total absence of value as their supreme value. Men have always been intoxicated by license, which is why, throughout history, towns have been sacked. But there has not always been a literary equivalent for the sacking of towns. Surrealism is such an equivalent.

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"The responsibility of writers," p. 167
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 3 weeks ago
In democratic countries, the most important...

In democratic countries, the most important private organizations are economic. Unlike secret societies, they are able to exercize their terrorism without illegality, since they do not threaten to kill their enemies, but only to starve them.

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Ch. 12: Powers and forms of governments
Philosophical Maxims
Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton
1 month 2 weeks ago
It goes without saying that apartheid...

It goes without saying that apartheid is offensive. It was adopted, however, as the lesser of two evils. The Afrikaners believe that black majority rule has, in almost every case, led to the collapse of the constitutional government which they brought to South Africa, and upon which their freedoms and privileges - and perhaps even their lives - depend. And it did not seem so very bad to deny to blacks a vote which they would, when in power, promptly deny to themselves.

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'A lift at last for the other Afrikaners', The Times (17 May 1983), p. 12
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 2 weeks ago
Fortunate those who, born before science,...

Fortunate those who, born before science, were privileged to die of their first disease!

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Philosophical Maxims
Georg Simmel
Georg Simmel
4 days ago
The social game has a deeper...

The social game has a deeper double meaning-that it is played not only in a society as its outward bearer but that with its help people actually "play" "society."

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Sociability (1910) in On Individuality and Social Forms (1971), p. 134
Philosophical Maxims
Walter Kaufmann
Walter Kaufmann
3 weeks 3 days ago
Of faith and morals, one cannot...

Of faith and morals, one cannot speak honestly for long without hurting feelings. Therefore, most people speak dishonestly of the most important subjects. Many recent philosophers prefer not to speak of them at all. But in some situations honesty is incompatible with silence.

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Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
1 month 3 weeks ago
I know that my unity with...

I know that my unity with all people cannot be destroyed by national boundaries and government orders.

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My Religion (1884)
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Browne
Thomas Browne
2 months 4 weeks ago
Sleep is a death; oh, make...

Sleep is a death; oh, make me try By sleeping what it is to die, And as gently lay my head On my grave as now my bed.

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Section 12
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 month 3 weeks ago
Environment is process, not container.

Environment is process, not container.

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(p. 30)
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 2 weeks ago
What every man who loves his...

What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots.

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Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
2 months 2 weeks ago
The quality of feeling is the...

The quality of feeling is the true psychical representative of the first category of the immediate as it is in its immediacy, of the present in its direct positive presentness. Qualities of feeling show myriad-fold variety, far beyond what the psychologists admit. This variety however is in them only insofar as they are compared and gathered into collections. But as they are in their presentness, each is sole and unique; and all the others are absolute nothingness to it - or rather much less than nothingness, for not even a recognition as absent things or as fictions is accorded to them. The first category, then, is Quality of Feeling, or whatever is such as it is positively and regardless of aught else.

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Lecture II : The Universal Categories, § 1 : Presentness, CP 5.44
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 month 3 weeks ago
The literate man is a sucker...

The literate man is a sucker for propaganda...You cannot propagandize a native. You can sell him rum and trinkets, but you cannot sell him ideas.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
3 weeks 6 days ago
Is it conceivable....
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Main Content / General
John Locke
John Locke
3 months 3 weeks ago
This is that which I think...

This is that which I think great readers are apt to be mistaken in; those who have read of everything, are thought to understand everything too; but it is not always so. Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections ; unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment.

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As quoted in "Hand Book : Caution and Counsels" in The Common School Journal Vol. 5, No. 24 (15 December 1843) by Horace Mann, p. 371
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert A. Simon
Herbert A. Simon
2 months 3 days ago
Administration is not unlike play-acting. The...

Administration is not unlike play-acting. The task of the good actor is to know and play his role, although different roles may differ greatly in content. The effectiveness of the performance will depend on the effectiveness of the play and the effectiveness with which it is played. The effectiveness of the administrative process will vary with the effectiveness of the organization and the effectiveness with which its members play their parts.

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p. 252; As cited in: Herbert Simon (1996) The Sciences of the Artificial. page xii.
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 3 weeks ago
The slave is doomed to worship...

The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.

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Philosophical Maxims
Empedocles
Empedocles
3 months 2 weeks ago
A law there is….

A law there is, an oracle of Doom, Of old enacted by the assembled gods, That if a Daemon-such as live for ages- Defile himself with foul and sinful murder, He must for seasons thrice ten thousand roam Far from the Blest; such is the path I tread, I too a wanderer and exile from heaven.

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tr. Phillip H. De Lacy and Benedict Einarson. Cf. full quotation at Leonard p. 54-55 fr. 115, as paraphrased in Plutarch's Moralia
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
3 months 3 weeks ago
I opened with that which good...

I opened with that which good Catholics have more than once made to Huguenots. "My dear sir," said I, "were you ever baptized?" "No, friend," replied the Quaker, "nor any of my brethren." "Zounds!" said I to him, "you are not Christians then!" "Friend," replied the old man, in a soft tone of voice, "do not swear; we are Christians, but we do not think that sprinkling a few drops of water on a child's head makes him a Christian." "My God!" exclaimed I, shocked at his impiety, "have you then forgotten that Christ was baptized by St. John?" "Friend," replied the mild Quaker, "once again, do not swear. Christ was baptized by John, but He Himself never baptized any one; now we profess ourselves disciples of Christ, and not of John." "Mercy on us," cried I, "what a fine subject you would be for the holy inquisitor! In the name of God, my good old man, let me baptize you."

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Voltaire's account of his conversations with Andrew Pit
Philosophical Maxims
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