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Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
4 months 4 days ago
Man is forming thousands of ridiculous...

Man is forming thousands of ridiculous relations between himself and God.

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Ch. 12
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
3 months 3 weeks ago
The tendency has always been strong...

The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or thing, having an independent existence of its own; and if no real entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something peculiarly abstruse and mysterious, too high to be an object of sense. The meaning of all general, and especially of all abstract terms, became in this way enveloped in a mystical base...

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Note to Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829) by James Mill, edited with additional notes by John Stuart Mill, 1869
Philosophical Maxims
Lin Yutang
Lin Yutang
4 days ago
The creative imagination of the Hindus...

The creative imagination of the Hindus has conceived no loftier and holier character than Sita; the literature of the world has not produced a higher ideal of womanly love, womanly truth, and womanly devotion.

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The Wisdom Of China And India by ) Lin Yutang
Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
4 months 1 week ago
Reason is not measured by size...

Reason is not measured by size or height, but by principle.

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Book I, ch. 12, 26.
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 3 weeks ago
Erect I make a resolution; prone...

Erect I make a resolution; prone I revoke it.

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Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
3 months 3 weeks ago
The sins of the flesh are...

The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport, and back-biting; the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither.

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Book III, Chapter 5, "Sexual Morality"
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
2 months 1 week ago
Martyrs create faith, faith does not...

Martyrs create faith, faith does not create martyrs.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
2 months 4 days ago
Our responsibility is...
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Main Content / General
Epictetus
Epictetus
4 months 1 week ago
Whatever you would make habitual, practice...

Whatever you would make habitual, practice it; and if you would not make a thing habitual, do not practice it, but accustom yourself to something else.

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Book II, ch. 18, 4.
Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
3 months 4 weeks ago
The chief objection I have to...

The chief objection I have to Pantheism is that it says nothing. To call the world "God" is not to explain it; it is only to enrich our language with a superfluous synonym for the word "world".

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On Pantheism as quoted in Faiths of Famous Men in Their Own Words (1900) by John Kenyon Kilbourn; also in Religion: A Dialogue and Other Essays (2007), p. 40
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Kuhn
2 weeks 3 days ago
These three classes of problems-determination of...

These three classes of problems-determination of significant fact, matching of facts with theory, and articulation of theory-exhaust, I think, the literature of normal science, both empirical and theoretical. They do not, of course, quite exhaust the entire literature of science. There are also extraordinary problems, and it may well be their resolution that makes the scientific enterprise as a whole so particularly worthwhile. But extraordinary problems are not to be had for the asking. They emerge only on special occasions prepared by the advance of normal research.

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p. 34
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
2 months 6 days ago
Ideas too are a life and...

Ideas too are a life and a world.

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F 70
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
3 months 3 weeks ago
We may become the makers of...

We may become the makers of our fate when we have ceased to pose as its prophets.

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Introduction
Philosophical Maxims
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
2 months 1 week ago
Money, as a matter of principle,...

Money, as a matter of principle, makes everything the same.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
2 weeks 3 days ago
Wise command, wise obedience: the capability...

Wise command, wise obedience: the capability of these two is the net measure of culture, and human virtue, in every man; all good lies in the possession of these two capabilities; all evil, wretchedness and ill-success in the want of these.

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Philosophical Maxims
Antonio Negri
Antonio Negri
3 weeks 1 day ago
The legacy of modernity is a...

The legacy of modernity is a legacy of fratricidal wars, devastating "development," cruel "civilization," and previously unimagined violence. Erich Auerbach once wrote that tragedy is the only genre that can properly claim realism in Western literature, and perhaps this is true precisely because of the tragedy Western modernity has imposed on the world.

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46
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
3 months 3 weeks ago
We are asleep. Our Life is...

We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.

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Philosophical Maxims
Hilary Putnam
Hilary Putnam
2 months 4 days ago
I might try to save the...

I might try to save the view that 'future contingents' have no truth value by saying that even present-tense statements have no truth value if they refer to the outcome of events that are so far away that a causal signal informing me of the outcome could not have reached me-now without traveling faster than light. In other words, I might attempt saying that statements about events that are in neither the upper half nor the lower half of my light-cone have no truth value. In addition, statements about events in the upper half of my light-cone have no truth value, since they are in my future according to every coordinate system. So only statements about events in the lower half of my light-cone have a truth value; only events that are in 'my past* according to all observers are determined.

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Time and physical geometry
Philosophical Maxims
John Dewey
John Dewey
2 months 2 weeks ago
The utmost possible regarding an individual...

The utmost possible regarding an individual is a statement as to some order of probability about the future. Heisenberg's principle has been seized upon as a basis for wild statements to the effect that the doctrine of arbitrary free will and totally uncaused activity are now scientifically substantiated. Its actual force and significance is generalization of the idea that the individual is a temporal career whose future cannot logically be deduced from its past.

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Philosophical Maxims
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut
1 month 4 weeks ago
The public health authorities never mention...

The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.

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Preface (p. xi)
Philosophical Maxims
Averroes
Averroes
4 months 2 weeks ago
Philosophers do not claim that God...

Philosophers do not claim that God does not know particulars; they rather claim that He does not know them the way humans do. God knows particulars as their Creator whereas humans know them as a privileged creations of God might know them.

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Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
2 months 1 week ago
Proceeding from ourselves, from our own...

Proceeding from ourselves, from our own human consciousness, the only consciousness which we feel from within and in which feeling is identical with being, we attribute some sort of consciousness, more or less dim, to all living things, and even to the stones themselves, for they also live. And the evolution of organic beings is simply the struggle to realize fullness of consciousness through suffering, a continual aspiration to be others without ceasing to be themselves, to break and yet to preserve their proper limits.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
2 weeks 3 days ago
I warmly second the advice of...

I warmly second the advice of the wisest of men-"Don't be ambitious; don't be at all too desirous to success; be loyal and modest." Cut down the proud towering thoughts that you get into you, or see they be pure as well as high. There is a nobler ambition than the gaining of all California would be, or the getting of all the suffrages that are on the planet just now.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
3 months 3 weeks ago
There is a physical relation between...

There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities.

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Vol. I, Ch. 1, Section 4, pg. 83.
Philosophical Maxims
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
2 months 2 weeks ago
The surrealist thinks he has outstripped...

The surrealist thinks he has outstripped the whole of literary history when he has written (here a word that there is no need to write) where others have written "jasmines, swans and fauns." But what he has really done has been simply to bring to light another form of rhetoric which hitherto lay hidden in the latrines.

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Chapter XI: The Self-Satisfied Age
Philosophical Maxims
Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton
1 month 2 weeks ago
Kant's position is extremely subtle -...

Kant's position is extremely subtle - so subtle, indeed, that no commentator seems to agree with any other as to what it is.

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Some More -isms (p. 25)
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
2 weeks 3 days ago
Our English careers to born genius...

Our English careers to born genius are twofold. There is the silent or unlearned career of the Industrialisms, which are very many among us; and there is the articulate or learned career of the three professions, Medicine, Law (under which we may include Politics), and the Church. Your born genius, therefore, will first have to ask himself, Whether he can hold his tongue or cannot? True, all human talent, especially all deep talent, is a talent to do, and is intrinsically of silent nature; inaudible, like the Sphere Harmonies and Eternal Melodies, of which it is an incarnated fraction.

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Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
1 month 3 weeks ago
Saying that what we call our...

Saying that what we call our "selves" consist only of our bodies and that reason, soul, and love arise only from the body, is like saying that what we call our body is equivalent to the food that feeds the body. It is true that my body is only made up of digested food and that my body would not exist without food, but my body is not the same as food. Food is what the body needs for life, but it is not the body itself. The same thing is true of my soul. It is true that without my body there would not be that which I call my soul, but my soul is not my body. The soul may need the body, but the body is not the soul.

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p. 12
Philosophical Maxims
bell hooks
bell hooks
2 months 1 week ago
Today's fashion magazines may carry an...

Today's fashion magazines may carry an article about the dangers of anorexia while bombarding its readers with images of emaciated young bodies representing the height of beauty and desirability.

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As quoted in Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (2014), p.34
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
1 week 4 days ago
Drunkenness is nothing….

Drunkenness is nothing but voluntary madness.

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Line 18.
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
4 months 4 days ago
It is not death, it is...

It is not death, it is dying that alarms me.

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Book II, Ch. 13
Philosophical Maxims
Ernest Renan
Ernest Renan
3 weeks ago
I can die when I wish...

I can die when I wish to: that is my elixir of life.

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The Republic.
Philosophical Maxims
René Descartes
René Descartes
4 months 4 days ago
No doubt you know that Galileo...

No doubt you know that Galileo had been convicted not long ago by the Inquisition, and that his opinion on the movement of the Earth had been condemned as heresy. Now I will tell you that all things I explain in my treatise, among which is also that same opinion about the movement of the Earth, all depend on one another, and are based upon certain evident truths. Nevertheless, I will not for the world stand up against the authority of the Church. ...I have the desire to live in peace and to continue on the road on which I have started.

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Letter to Marin Mersenne (end of Feb., 1634) as quoted by Amir Aczel, Pendulum: Leon Foucault and the Triumph of Science
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 3 weeks ago
Lucidity is not necessarily compatible with...

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

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Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
3 months 3 weeks ago
Friendship, I have said, is born...

Friendship, I have said, is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself..."

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Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
2 months 6 days ago
Nowadays three witty turns of phrase...

Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

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D 25
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 3 weeks ago
Life is not, and death is...

Life is not, and death is a dream. Suffering has invented them both as self-justification. Man alone is torn between an unreality and an illusion.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
2 months 2 weeks ago
I came to set fire to...

I came to set fire to the earth, and I wish it were already on fire!

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12:49 (CEV)
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 month 3 weeks ago
Faced with information overload, we have...

Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.

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(p. 132)
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
2 months 2 weeks ago
With men this is impossible; but...

With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible.

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19:26 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
3 months 1 day ago
We swallow greedily any lie that...

We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.

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Philosophical Maxims
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
3 months 3 weeks ago
The main characteristic of any event...

The main characteristic of any event is that it has not been foreseen. We don't know the future but everybody acts into the future. Nobody knows what he is doing because the future is being done, action is being done by a "we" and not an "I." Only if I were the only one acting could I foretell the consequences of what I'm doing. What actually happens is entirely contingent, and contingency is indeed one of the biggest factors in all history.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
4 months 4 days ago
God might grant us riches, honours,...

God might grant us riches, honours, life, and even health, to our own hurt; for every thing that is pleasing to us is not always good for us. If he sends us death, or an increase of sickness, instead of a cure, Vvrga tua et baculus, tuus ipsa me consolata sunt. "Thy rod and thy staff have comforted me," he does it by the rule of his providence, which better and more certainly discerns what is proper for us than we can do; and we ought to take it in good part, as coming from a wise and most friendly hand.

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Ch. 12
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 months 3 weeks ago
Poetry must be new as foam,...

Poetry must be new as foam, and as old as the rock.

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March 1845
Philosophical Maxims
John Dewey
John Dewey
2 months 2 weeks ago
Just because emotion is essential to...

Just because emotion is essential to that act of expression which produces a work of art, it is easy for inaccurate analysis to misconceive its mode of operation and conclude that the work of art has emotion for its significant content. One may cry out with joy or even weep upon seeing a friend from whom one has been long separated. The outcome is not an expressive object -- save to the onlooker. But if the emotion leads one to gather material that is affiliated to the mood which is aroused, a poem may result. In the direct outburst, an objective situation is the stimulus, the cause, of the emotion. In the poem, objective material becomes the content and matter of the emotion, not just its evocative occasion.

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pp. 71-72
Philosophical Maxims
Novalis
Novalis
2 months 3 weeks ago
The spirit of Poesy is the...

The spirit of Poesy is the morning light, which makes the Statue of Memnon sound.

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Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
4 months 2 weeks ago
They who know the truth...

They who know the truth are not equal to those who love it, and they who love it are not equal to those who delight in it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
4 months 4 days ago
I say that man without the...

I say that man without the grace of God nonetheless remains the general omnipotence of God who effects, and moves and impels all things in a necessary, infallible course; but the effect of man's being carried along is nothing--that is, avails nothing in God's sight, nor is reckoned to be anything but sin.

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p. 265
Philosophical Maxims
Hilary Putnam
Hilary Putnam
2 months 4 days ago
The problem with all this--the problem...

The problem with all this--the problem I discussed in the first lecture--is that if the causes/background conditions distinction is fundamentally subjective, not descriptive of the world in itself, then current philosophical explanations of the metaphysical nature of reference are bankrupt.

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Lecture II: Realism and Reasonableness
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
2 months 3 weeks ago
...no Monarchy limited or unlimited, nor...

...no Monarchy limited or unlimited, nor any of the old Republics, can possibly be safe as long as this strange, nameless, wild, enthusiastic thing is established in the Center of Europe.

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Letter to John Trevor (January 1791), quoted in Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith (eds.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Volume VI: July 1789-December 1791 (1967), p. 218
Philosophical Maxims
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