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Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
5 months ago
The most advanced nations are always...

The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most.

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Civilization
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
5 months 1 day ago
The necessities of the time have...

The necessities of the time have accorded to the petty interests of every day life such overwhelming attention : the deep interests of actuality and the strife respecting these have engrossed all the powers and the forces of the mind - as also the necessary means - to so great an extent, that no place has been left to the higher inward life, the intellectual operations of a purer sort; and the better natures have thus been stunted in their growth, and in great measure sacrificed.

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p. x Inaugural Address, delivered at Heidelberg on the 28th October(1816), Lectures on the history of philosophy, translated from German by E. S. Haldane in Three Volumes (1892-96) full text.
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
4 months 3 weeks ago
Mathematics is as little a natural...

Mathematics is as little a natural science as philosophy is one of the humanities. Philosophy in its essence belongs as little in the philosophical faculty as mathematics belongs to natural science. To house philosophy and mathematics in this way today seems to be a blemish or a mistake in the catalog of the universities. Plato put over the entrance to his Academy the words: "Let no one who has not grasped the mathematical enter here!"

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p. 69,75
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
3 months ago
People try to do all sorts...

People try to do all sorts of clever and difficult things to improve life instead of doing the simplest, easiest thing-refusing to participate in activities that make life bad.

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p. 210
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
5 months ago
We are, like Nebuchadnezzar, dethroned, bereft...

We are, like Nebuchadnezzar, dethroned, bereft of reason, and eating grass like an ox.

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Prospects
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
5 months 1 day ago
When I was a child the...

When I was a child the atmosphere in the house was one of puritan piety and austerity. There were family prayers at eight o'clock every morning. Although there were eight servants, food was always of Spartan simplicity, and even what there was, if it was at all nice, was considered too good for children. For instance, if there was apple tart and rice pudding, I was only allowed the rice pudding. Cold baths all the year round were insisted upon, and I had to practice the piano from seven-thirty to eight every morning although the fires were not yet lit. My grandmother never allowed herself to sit in an armchair until the evening. Alcohol and tobacco were viewed with disfavor although stern convention compelled them to serve a little wine to guests. Only virtue was prized, virtue at the expense of intellect, health, happiness, and every mundane good.

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p. 9
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
4 months 1 day ago
To execute laws is a royal...

To execute laws is a royal office; to execute orders is not to be a king. However, a political executive magistracy, though merely such, is a great trust.

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Volume iii, p. 497
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
5 months 1 day ago
Marriage is for women the commonest...

Marriage is for women the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
5 months 1 day ago
It is so rare to meet...

It is so rare to meet with a man out-doors who cherishes a worthy thought in his mind, which is independent of the labor of his hands.

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Philosophical Maxims
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
3 months 4 weeks ago
A modest man is steady, an...

A modest man is steady, an humble man timid, and a vain one presumptuous.

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Ch. 7
Philosophical Maxims
L.P. Jacks
L.P. Jacks
3 weeks 6 days ago
Are not the richest and most...

Are not the richest and most significant experiences of man precisely those which are the least patient of verbal reproduction? A book, a treatise, a discourse, is the very thing that cannot contain them, that can contain at most their lower elements, their less significant aspects. Who shall transfer them to paper, write them in ink, utter them in words? And yet, though inexpressible thus, these things crave expression, for they are full of meaning and must be expressed. They have a language of their own. Art can utter some of them, and Nature, perhaps, can interpret them all. They borrow her tongues, speaking in the winds, singing in the voice of moving waters, looking down upon us in the cold shining of the stars. What they mean, we, too, can express; but we express it, not by speaking there and then, but by all that we become through their influence, by all that we are led to do, through their compelling, till life shall end.

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Philosophical Maxims
Plato
Plato
5 months 4 weeks ago
The orators

The orators and the despots have the least power in their cities since they do nothing that they wish to do, practically speaking, though they do whatever they think to be best.

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Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
4 months 4 weeks ago
But the man is a humbug...

But the man is a humbug - a vulgar, shallow, self-satisfied mind, absolutely inaccessible to the complexities and delicacies of the real world. He has the journalist's air of being a specialist in everything, of taking in all points of view and being always on the side of the angels: he merely annoys a reader who has the least experience of knowing things, of what knowing is like. There is not two pence worth of real thought or real nobility in him. But he isn't dull.

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Part of a diary entry dated "Wednesday-Wednesday 9-16 July", 1924, regarding Thomas Babington Macaulay
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
4 months 3 weeks ago
One of the most difficult of...

One of the most difficult of the philosopher's tasks is to find out where the shoe pinches.

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p. 61
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
5 months 1 day ago
The position of the revolutionary party...

The position of the revolutionary party in Germany is certainly difficult at the moment, but, with some critical analysis of the circumstances, clear nevertheless. As to the "governments," it is obvious from every point of view, if only for the sake of Germany's existence, that the demand must be put to them not to remain neutral, but, as you rightly say, to be patriotic. But the revolutionary point is to be given to the affair simply by emphasising the antagonism to Russia more strongly than the antagonism against Boustrapa.

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Letter to Friedrich Engels (18 May 1859), quoted in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Correspondence, 1846-1895 (1943), p. 122
Philosophical Maxims
Lucretius
Lucretius
5 months 2 weeks ago
Thus the sum…

Thus the sum of things is ever being renewed, and mortal creatures live dependent one upon another. Some species increase, others diminish, and in a short space the generations of living creatures are changed and, like runners, pass on the torch of life.

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Book II, line 75 (tr. Rouse)
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
5 months 1 day ago
When I was 4 years old...

When I was 4 years old ... I dreamt that I'd been eaten by a wolf, and to my great surprise I was in the wolf's stomach and not in heaven.

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BBC interview on "Face to Face" (1959); The Listener, Vol. 61 (1959), p. 503
Philosophical Maxims
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
3 months 3 weeks ago
Philosophy is in history, and is...

Philosophy is in history, and is never independent of historical discourse. But for the tacit symbolism of life it substitutes, in principle, a conscious symbolism; for a latent meaning, one that is manifest. It is never content to accept its historical situation. It changes this situation by revealing it to itself.

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p. 57
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
4 months 4 weeks ago
When you live alone you no...

When you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell a story: the plausible disappears at the same time as the friends. You let events flow by too: you suddenly see people appear who speak and then go away; you plunge into stories of which you can't make head or tail: you'd make a terrible witness.

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Diary entry of Tuesday, 30 January
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
1 month 2 weeks ago
There is no sorrow in the...

There is no sorrow in the world, when we have escaped from the fear of death.

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Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
4 months 5 days ago
What chiefly diverts the men of...

What chiefly diverts the men of democracies from lofty ambition is not the scantiness of their fortunes, but the vehemence of the exertions they daily make to improve them.

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Book Three, Chapter XIX.
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
5 months 4 weeks ago
Generals are usually a conservative force...

Generals are usually a conservative force who can be relied on to oppose social change.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay
2 months 2 weeks ago
If we consider merely the subtlety...

If we consider merely the subtlety of disquisition, the force of imagination, the perfect energy and elegance of expression, which characterise the great works of Athenian genius, we must pronounce them intrinsically most valuable; but what shall we say when we reflect that from hence have sprung, directly or indirectly, all the noblest creations of the human intellect; that from hence were the vast accomplishments, and the brilliant fancy of Cicero; the withering fire of Juvenal; the plastic imagination of Dante; the humour of Cervantes; the comprehension of Bacon; the wit of Butler; the supreme and universal excellence of Shakspeare? All the triumphs of truth and genius over prejudice and power, in every country and in every age, have been the triumphs of Athens. Wherever a few great minds have made a stand against violence and fraud, in the cause of liberty and reason, there has been her spirit in the midst of them; inspiring, encouraging, consoling.

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p. 178
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
2 months 3 weeks ago
Ten years ago, you could have...

Ten years ago, you could have traveled thousands of miles through the United States and never seen a baseball cap turned back to front. Today, the reverse baseball cap is ubiquitous. I do not know what the pattern of geographical spread of the reverse baseball cap precisely was, but epidemiology is certainly among the professions primarily qualified to study it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
3 months 3 weeks ago
When an active individual of sound...

When an active individual of sound common sense perceives the sordid state of the world, desire to change it becomes the guiding principle by which he organizes given facts and shapes them into a theory. The methods and categories as well as the transformation of the theory can be understood only in connection with his taking of sides. This, in turn, discloses both his sound common sense and the character of the world. Right thinking depends as much on right willing as right willing on right thinking.

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p. 162.
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
5 months 1 week ago
Marriage, a market which has nothing...

Marriage, a market which has nothing free but the entrance.

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Philosophical Maxims
George Santayana
George Santayana
3 months 3 weeks ago
Professional philosophers are usually only apologists:...

Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained.

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pp. 48-49
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
1 month ago
If there be any among us...

If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
5 months 3 weeks ago
Then we understand that rebellion cannot...

Then we understand that rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love. Those who find no rest in God or in history are condemned to live for those who, like themselves, cannot live; in fact, for the humiliated.

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Philosophical Maxims
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal
5 months 1 week ago
Do not imagine that it is...

Do not imagine that it is less an accident by which you find yourself master of the wealth which you possess, than that by which this man found himself king.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 month 3 weeks ago
Misery which, through long ages, had...

Misery which, through long ages, had no spokesman, no helper, will now be its own helper and speak for itself.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Gray
John Gray
2 months 1 week ago
The basis of science is the...

The basis of science is the empirical method, which uses the senses to build up a picture of the world; but science tells us that our senses have evolved to help us get by, not to show us the world as it is. Science is only a systematic examination of our impressions, and in the end all each of us has left are our own sensations ... The end-result of the empirical method, then, is that each individual is left alone with their own experiences. We can escape this solitude, Balfour suggested, only if we accept that there is a divine mind.

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Cross-correspondences (p. 69-70)
Philosophical Maxims
John Dewey
John Dewey
3 months 3 weeks ago
There are in our minds in...

There are in our minds in solution a vast number of emotional attitudes, feelings ready to be re-excited when the proper stimulus arrives, and more than anything else it is these forms, this residue of experience, which, fuller and richer than in the mind if the ordinary man, constitute the artist's capital. What is called the magic of the artist resides in his ability to transfer these values from one field of experience to another, to attach them to objects of our common life, and by his imaginative insight make these objects poignant and momentous. Not colors, not sense qualities as such, are either matter or form, but these qualities as thoroughly imbued, impregnated, with transferred value. And then they are either matter or form according to the direction of our interest.

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p. 123
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
5 months 4 weeks ago
The best way to describe anyone...

The best way to describe anyone is to give an example of the kind of thing he would do.

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Philosophical Maxims
Novalis
Novalis
3 months 4 weeks ago
There is but one Temple in...

There is but one Temple in the World; and that is the Body of Man. Nothing is holier than this high form. Bending before men is a reverence done to this Revelation in the Flesh. We touch Heaven, when we lay our hand on a human body. Variant translation: There is but one temple in the Universe and that is the Body of Man.

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As inscribed on the Library of Congress, quoted in Handbook of the New Library of Congress (1897) by Herbert Small, p. 53
Philosophical Maxims
Plato
Plato
5 months 4 weeks ago
When there is a number...

Parnenides: When there is a number of things which seem to you to be great, you may think, as you look at them all, that there is one and the same idea in them, and hence you think the great is one. But if with your mind's eye you regard the absolute great and these many great things in the same way, will not another great appear beyond, by which all these must appear to be great?

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Philosophical Maxims
John Searle
John Searle
3 months 3 days ago
I once had a conversation with...

I once had a conversation with a famous French philosopher who's a friend of mine. And I said to him, "Why the hell do you write so badly? Pourquoi tu écris si mal?" ... And this was Michel Foucault. He was a very smart guy and wrote a lot of very good stuff but in general he just wrote badly. When you heard him give a lecture in Berkeley, it was perfectly clear, just as clear as I am. ... And he said, "Well, in France, it would be regarded as somewhat childish and naive if you wrote clearly. ... In France you've got to have 10% incomprehensible."

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Otherwise people won't think it's deep. They won't think you're a profound thinker.
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
5 months 2 weeks ago
The man of perfect virtue is...

The man of perfect virtue is cautious and slow in his speech. When a man feels the difficulty of doing, can he be other than cautious and slow in speaking?

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Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
3 months 3 weeks ago
The consciousness of a general idea...

The consciousness of a general idea has a certain "unity of the ego" in it, which is identical when it passes from one mind to another. It is, therefore, quite analogous to a person, and indeed, a person is only a particular kind of general idea.

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Man's Glassy Essence in The Monist, Vol. III, No. 1
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
4 months 3 weeks ago
A proposition is completely logically analyzed...

A proposition is completely logically analyzed if its grammar is made completely clear: no matter what idiom it may be written or expressed in...

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Philosophical Remarks (1930), Part I (1)
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
5 months ago
There has been a general trend...

There has been a general trend in recent times toward a Unitarian mythology and the worship of one God. This is the tendency which it is customary to regard as spiritual progress. On what grounds? Chiefly, so far as one can see, because we in the Twentieth Century West are officially the worshippers of a single divinity. A movement whose consummation is Us must be progressive. Quod erat demonstrandum.

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"One and Many," p. 16
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley
2 months 2 weeks ago
If the hypothesis of evolution is...

If the hypothesis of evolution is true, living matter must have arisen from non-living matter; for by the hypothesis the condition of the globe was at one time such, that living matter could not have existed in it, life being entirely incompatible with the gaseous state.

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In the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Ninth edition, (1876) Vol. III, "Biology", p. 689. Also quoted in Joseph Cook (1878), Biology, with Preludes on Current Events, Houghton, Osgood, p. 39
Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
2 months 4 weeks ago
Better to be ignorant of a...

Better to be ignorant of a matter than half know it.

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Maxim 865
Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
5 months 2 days ago
The state of nature has a...

The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.

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Second Treatise of Government, Ch. II, sec. 6
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 2 weeks ago
Great minds are....
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Main Content / General
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
3 months 2 weeks ago
The consequences of a plethora of...

The consequences of a plethora of half-digested theoretical knowledge are deplorable.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Jaspers
Karl Jaspers
3 months 3 weeks ago
The teacher of love…

The teacher of love teaches struggle. The teacher of lifeless isolation from the world teaches peace.

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Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
3 months ago
People understand the meaning of eating...

People understand the meaning of eating lies in the nourishment of the body only when they cease to consider that the object of that activity is pleasure. ...People understand the meaning of art only when they cease to consider that the aim of that activity is beauty, i.e., pleasure.

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Philosophical Maxims
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
4 months ago
There is nothing enduring, permanent, either...

There is nothing enduring, permanent, either in me or out of me, nothing but everlasting change. I know of no existence, not even of my own. I know nothing and am nothing. Images - pictures - only are, pictures which wander by without anything existing past which they wander, without any corresponding reality which they might represent, without significance and without aim. I myself am one of these images, or rather a confused image of these images. All reality is transformed into a strange dream, without a world of which the dream might be, or a mind that might dream it. Contemplation is a dream; thought, the source of all existence and of all that I fancied reality, of my own existence, my own capacities, is a dream of that dream.

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Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p. 60
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
5 months 1 day ago
There is no rule more invariable...

There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 254
Philosophical Maxims
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