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Charles Fourier
Charles Fourier
1 month 2 weeks ago
Nowhere is there more constancy and...

Nowhere is there more constancy and more unanimity than among the French to subordinate that sex which they pretend to honor so highly.

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The Theory of Social Organization
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Jaspers
Karl Jaspers
3 months 1 week ago
"There is no God," cry the...

"There is no God," cry the masses more and more vociferously; and with the loss of God man loses his sense of values - is, as it were, massacred because he feels himself of no account.

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Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
1 month 1 week ago
It would be some consolation for...

It would be some consolation for the feebleness of ourselves and our works, if all things should perish as slowly as they come into being; but as it is, increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid.

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Letters to Lucilius, letter 91, page 294.
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
3 weeks 1 day ago
I may say Christianity itself divided...

I may say Christianity itself divided into its thousands also, who are disputing, anathematizing and where the laws permit burning and torturing one another for abstractions which no one of them understand, and which are indeed beyond the comprehension of the human mind.

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Letter to George Logan (12 November 1816). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 12, pp. 43
Philosophical Maxims
Iamblichus
Iamblichus
2 weeks 6 days ago
They also gave it the title...

They also gave it the title of "opinion," because truth and falsity lie in opinion. And they called it "movement," "generation," "change," "division," "length," "multiplication," "addition," "kinship," "relativity," "the ratio in proportionality." For the relation of two numbers is of every conceivable form.

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On the Dyad
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
4 months 3 weeks ago
You know how much I admire...

You know how much I admire Che Guevara. In fact, I believe that the man was not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age: as a fighter and as a man, as a theoretician who was able to further the cause of revolution by drawing his theories from his personal experience in battle.

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As quoted in Marianne Alexandre (ed.), !Viva Che!: Contributions in Tribute to Ernesto 'Che' Guevara, 1968
Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
5 months 1 week ago
Two principles we should always have...

Two principles we should always have ready that there is nothing good or evil save in the will; and that we are not to lead events, but to follow them.

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Book III, ch. 10, 18.
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 months 2 weeks ago
Old age, after all, is merely...

Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Dewey
John Dewey
3 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
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
4 months 2 weeks ago
"What is a thing?" is historical,...

"What is a thing?" is historical, because every report of the past, that is of the preliminaries to the question about the thing, is concerned with something static. This kind of historical reporting is an explicit shutting down of history, whereas it is, after all, a happening. We question historically if we ask what is still happening even if it seems to be past. We ask what is still happening and whether we remain equal to this happening so that it can really develop.

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p. 43
Philosophical Maxims
Max Stirner
Max Stirner
1 month 1 week ago
On the contrary, to educate rational...

On the contrary, to educate rational people, that should be sufficient; it is not really intended for sensible people; to understand things and conditions, there is the matter ended,-to understand oneself does not seem to be everyman's concern.

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p. 22
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
4 months 3 weeks ago
It is one of the superstitions…

It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.

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Notebooks (c.1735-c.1750) Note: This quotation and the three that follow directly below are from the so-called Leningrad Notebook, also known as Le Sottisier; it is one of several posthumously published notebooks of Voltaire.
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Hölderlin
Friedrich Hölderlin
3 months 3 weeks ago
The earth with yellow pears And...

The earth with yellow pears And overgrown with roses wild Upon the pond is bent, And swans divine, With kisses drunk You drop your heads In the sublimely sobering water. But where, with winter come, am I To find, alas, the floweres, and where The sunshine And the shadow of the world? Cold the walls stand And the wordless, in the wind The weathercocks are rattling.

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"Halves of Life"
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Jean Jacques Rousseau
4 months 3 weeks ago
I love liberty…

I love liberty, and I loathe constraint, dependence, and all their kindred annoyances. As long as my purse contains money it secures my independence, and exempts me from the trouble of seeking other money, a trouble of which I have always had a perfect horror; and the dread of seeing the end of my independence, makes me proportionately unwilling to part with my money. The money that we possess is the instrument of liberty, that which we lack and strive to obtain is the instrument of slavery.

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Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
5 months 1 week ago
It is characteristic of the most...

It is characteristic of the most entire sincerity to be able to foreknow. When a nation or family is about to flourish, there are sure to be happy omens; and when it is about to perish, there are sure to be unlucky omens.

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Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
5 months 1 week ago
To give one's self earnestly...

To give one's self earnestly to the duties due to men, and, while respecting spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them, may be called wisdom.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
4 months 3 weeks ago
Write it on your heart that...

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

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Works and Days
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 3 days ago
Long before physics....
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Main Content / General
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
3 weeks 1 day ago
Let those flatter who fear; it...

Let those flatter who fear; it is not an American art. To give praise which is not due might be well from the venal, but would ill beseem those who are asserting the rights of human nature. They know, and will therefore say, that kings are the servants, not the proprietors of the people.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 3 weeks ago
Ethics is in origin the art...

Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for co-operation with oneself.

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Ch. 6: On the Scientific Method in Philosophy
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
4 months 3 weeks ago
May we not return….

May we not return to those scoundrels of old, the illustrious founders of superstition and fanaticism, who first took the knife from the altar to make victims of those who refused to be their disciples?

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Letter to Frederick II of Prussia (December 1740), published in Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, Vol. 7 (1869), edited by Georges Avenel, p. 105; as translated by Richard Aldington
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
5 months 2 weeks ago
Nothing can discourage the appetite for...

Nothing can discourage the appetite for divinity in the heart of man.

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Philosophical Maxims
David Pearce
David Pearce
2 months 1 day ago
There is no fundamental biological reason...

There is no fundamental biological reason why the human genome can't be rewritten to allow everyone to be "in" love with everyone else - if we should so choose. But simply loving each other will be miraculous enough; and will probably suffice. An empty religious piety can be transformed into a biological reality. 

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"Brave New World? A Defence of Paradise-Engineering", BLTC Research, 1998
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
3 months 5 days ago
The 'open' mind of the poet...

The 'open' mind of the poet and artist can sense realities beyond the reach of our normal senses. The real problem is that our materialistic assumptions have a number of false premises built into them: it is only when we recognize this that we see there is no sharp dividing line between the everyday world and the invisible world of the clairvoyant.

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p. 294
Philosophical Maxims
John Rawls
John Rawls
4 months 3 weeks ago
First of all, no one knows...

First of all, no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status; nor does he know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence and strength, and the like. Nor, again, does anyone know his conception of the good, the particulars of his rational plan of life, or even the special features of psychology such as his aversion to risk or liability to optimism or pessimism. More than this, I assume that the parties do not know the particular circumstances of their own society. That is, they do not know its particular economic or political situation, or the level of civilization and culture it has been able to achieve. The persons in the original position have no information as to which generation they belong.

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p. 117
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig von Mises
Ludwig von Mises
1 month 1 week ago
The characteristic feature of militarism is...

The characteristic feature of militarism is not the fact that a nation has a powerful army or navy. It is the paramount role assigned to the army within the political structure. Even in peacetime the army is supreme; it is the predominant factor in political life. The subjects must obey the government as soldiers must obey their superiors. Within a militarist community there is no freedom; there are only obedience and discipline.

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Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
5 months 3 weeks ago
In the Church which was founded...

In the Church which was founded at Corinth, St. Paul had special difficulties of the kind I have mentioned. In that flourishing commercial city, which through its shipping and situation, maintained a vital connexion between East and West, numerous crowds of people flocked together from all quarters, different in speech and in culture. As they mingled with the inhabitants, they produced, by contacts and contrasts, new and ever new differences. Even in the Church this differentiation endeavoured to make itself felt in sects and parties; and a kind of pagan wisdom made a special attempt to force itself forward as a teacher of truth. In his first letter to this church, from which the text I read is taken, St. Paul strongly combats this tendency.

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Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
4 months 3 weeks ago
The only non-Christians who seemed to...

The only non-Christians who seemed to me really to know anything were the Romantics; and a good many of them were dangerously tinged with something like religion, even at times with Christianity. The upshot of it all could nearly be expressed in a perversion of Roland's great line in the Chanson: 'Christians are wrong, but all the rest are bores.'

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Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
3 months 2 weeks ago
It is important to understand what...

It is important to understand what I mean by semiosis. All dynamic action, or action of brute force, physical or psychical, either takes place between two subjects, - whether they react equally upon each other, or one is agent and the other patient, entirely or partially, - or at any rate is a resultant of such actions between pairs. But by "semiosis" I mean, on the contrary, an action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs.

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"Pragmatism" (1907) in The Essential Peirce : Selected Philosophical Writings (1998) edited by the Peirce Edition Project, Vol. 2, p. 411, Indiana University Press.
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 3 weeks ago
All traditional logic habitually assumes that...

All traditional logic habitually assumes that precise symbols are being employed. It is therefore not applicable to this terrestial life but only to an imagined celestial existence... logic takes us nearer to heaven than other studies.

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Vagueness', first published in The Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy, 1 June, 1923
Philosophical Maxims
Vandana Shiva
Vandana Shiva
2 months 6 days ago
The business of grabbing and money-making,...

The business of grabbing and money-making, through a violent extractive economy that the 1% have built, is burdening the earth and humanity with unbearable and non-sustainable costs, and has brought us to the brink of extinction. We do not have to escape from the earth; we have to escape from the illusions that enslave our minds and make extinction look inevitable.

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Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
3 months 1 week ago
The deepest definition of youth is...

The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.

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p. 285.
Philosophical Maxims
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
4 months 3 weeks ago
It was mathematics, the non-empirical science...

It was mathematics, the non-empirical science par excellence, wherein the mind appears to play only with itself, that turned out to be the science of sciences, delivering the key to those laws of nature and the universe that are concealed by appearances.

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p. 7
Philosophical Maxims
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
3 months 3 weeks ago
What man is to be, he...

What man is to be, he must become; and as he is to be a being for himself, must become through himself. Nature completed all her works; only from man did she withdraw her hands, and precisely thereby gave him over to himself. Cultivability, as such, is the character of mankind. The impossibility of subsuming to the human form any other conception than that of his own Ego, is it, which forces every man inwardly to consider every other man as his equal.

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P. 119
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
4 months 3 weeks ago
Man is condemned to be free;...

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

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Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
1 month 1 week ago
Dumb creatures have not human feelings,...

Dumb creatures have not human feelings, but have certain impulses which resemble them: for if it were not so, if they could feel love and hate, they would likewise be capable of friendship and enmity, of disagreement and agreement. Some traces of these qualities exist even in them, though properly all of them, whether good or bad, belong to the human breast alone.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
4 months 3 weeks ago
Society can and does execute its...

Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.

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Ch. 1: Introductory
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 months 2 weeks ago
We have convictions only if we...

We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.

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Philosophical Maxims
Martin Buber
Martin Buber
3 months 1 week ago
In the ice of solitude man...

In the ice of solitude man becomes most inexorably a question to himself, and just because the question pitilessly summons and draws into play his most secret life he becomes an experience to himself.

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p. 150
Philosophical Maxims
Nikos Kazantzakis
Nikos Kazantzakis
3 weeks 2 days ago
Every man has his own circle...

Every man has his own circle composed of trees, animals, men, ideas, and he is in duty bound to save this circle. He, and no one else. If he does not save it, he cannot be saved. These are the labors each man is given and is in duty bound to complete before he dies. He may not otherwise be saved. For his own soul is scattered and enslaved in these things about him, in trees, in animals, in men, in ideas, and it is his own soul he saves by completing these labors.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
2 weeks 5 days ago
People try to get away from...

People try to get away from it all-to the country, to the beach, to the mountains. You always wish that you could too. Which is idiotic: you can get away from it anytime you like. By going within. Nowhere you can go is more peaceful-more free of interruptions-than your own soul.

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(Hays translation) IV, 4
Philosophical Maxims
Julius Evola
Julius Evola
1 month 1 day ago
Love for distance and order, the...

Love for distance and order, the ability to subordinate one's individualistic and passionate element to principles, the ability to take action and work above mere personhood, a feeling of dignity devoid of vanity are features of the true warrior spirit as essential as those which refer to actual combat.

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pp. 114-115
Philosophical Maxims
Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale
3 months 4 days ago
I use the word nursing for...

I use the word nursing for want of a better. It has been limited to signify little more than the administration of medicines and the application of poultices. It ought to signify the proper use of fresh air, light, warmth, cleanliness, quiet, and the proper selection and administration of diet - all at the least expense of vital power to the patient.

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Notes on Nursing
Philosophical Maxims
William Whewell
William Whewell
3 weeks 1 day ago
It is better to form new...

It is better to form new words as technical terms, than to employ old ones in which the last three Aphorisms cannot be complied with.

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Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
3 months 2 days ago
Do we write books so that...

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

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E 65
Philosophical Maxims
Niccolò Machiavelli
Niccolò Machiavelli
5 months ago
Women are the most…

Women are the most charitable creatures, and the most troublesome. He who shuns women passes up the trouble, but also the benefits. He who puts up with them gains the benefits, but also the trouble. As the saying goes, there's no honey without bees.

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Act III, scene iv
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
3 months 2 days ago
There exists a species of transcendental...

There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.

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F 84
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 month 1 week ago
To reconcile Despotism with Freedom:-well, is...

To reconcile Despotism with Freedom:-well, is that such a mystery? Do you not already know the way? It is to make your Despotism just. Rigorous as Destiny; but just too, as Destiny and its Laws. The Laws of God: all men obey these, and have no 'Freedom' at all but in obeying them. The way is already known, part of the way;-and courage and some qualities are needed for walking on it!

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Philosophical Maxims
Hermann Weyl
Hermann Weyl
1 month 3 days ago
Time is the primitive form of...

Time is the primitive form of the stream of consciousness. ...If we project ourselves outside the stream of consciousness and represent its content as an object, it becomes an event happening in time, the separate stages of which stand to one another in the relations of earlier and later.

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Introduction
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
5 months 1 week ago
Let the states of equilibrium and...

Let the states of equilibrium and harmony exist in perfection, and a happy order will prevail throughout heaven and earth, and all things will be nourished and flourish.

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Philosophical Maxims
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