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Richard Rorty
Richard Rorty
4 months 2 days ago
... our maturation has consisted in...

... our maturation has consisted in the gradual realization that, if we can rely on one another, we need not rely on anything else. In religious terms, this is the Feuerbachian thesis that God is just a projection of the best, and sometimes the worst, of humanity. In philosophical terms, it is the thesis that anything that talk of objectivity can do to make our practices intelligible can be done equally well by talk of intersubjectivity.

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"John Searle on Realism and Relativism." Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (1998).
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 month 2 days ago
Men, I say, never did believe...

Men, I say, never did believe idle songs, never risked their soul's life on allegories: men in all times, especially in early earnest times, have had an instinct for detecting quacks, for detesting quacks.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
Just now
You are a little....
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Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
3 months 4 days ago
Nobody really thinks who does not...

Nobody really thinks who does not abstract from that which is given, who does not relate the facts to the factors which have made them, who does not - in his mind - undo the facts. Abstractness is the very life of thought, the token of its authenticity.

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p. 134
Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
4 months 3 weeks ago
Incomprehensible and immutable is the love...

Incomprehensible and immutable is the love wherewith God loves. He did not begin to love us only on the day we were reconciled to Him by the blood of His Son; He loved us before the world was made, that we too might become His sons together with His Only-begotten Son, long before we had any existence.

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p.435
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
4 months 1 week ago
"'Are the gods not just?' 'Oh...

"'Are the gods not just?' 'Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were?'"

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Orual & The Fox
Philosophical Maxims
George Santayana
George Santayana
3 months 4 days ago
They [the wise spirits of antiquity...

They [the wise spirits of antiquity in the first circle of Dante's Inferno] are condemned, Dante tells us, to no other penalty than to live in desire without hope, a fate appropriate to noble souls with a clear vision of life.

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Obiter Scripta
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
2 months 1 week ago
There is no single speech nor...

There is no single speech nor article in which it is not said that the purpose of all these orgies is the peace of Europe. At a dinner given by the representatives of French literature, all breathe of peace. M. Zola, who, a short time previously, had written that war was inevitable, and even serviceable; M. de Vogue, who more than once has stated the same in print, say, neither of them, a word as to war, but speak only of peace. The sessions of Parliament open with speeches upon the past festivities; the speakers mention that such festivities are an assurance of peace to Europe. It is as if a man should come into a peaceful company, and commence energetically to assure everyone present that he has not the least intention to knock out anyone's teeth, blacken their eyes, or break their arms, but has only the most peaceful ideas for passing the evening.

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Ch. 1
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
3 weeks 5 days ago
You have demanded of me, Novatus,...

You have demanded of me, Novatus, that I should write how anger may be soothed, and it appears to me that you are right in feeling especial fear of this passion, which is above all others hideous and wild: for the others have some alloy of peace and quiet, but this consists wholly in action and the impulse of grief, raging with an utterly inhuman lust for arms, blood and tortures, careless of itself provided it hurts another, rushing upon the very point of the sword, and greedy for revenge even when it drags the avenger to ruin with itself.

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Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
2 months 1 week ago
It takes intellectual courage to kick...

It takes intellectual courage to kick yourself out of your emotional incredulity and persuade yourself that there is no other rational choice.

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The Intellectual and Moral Courage of Atheism
Philosophical Maxims
Étienne de La Boétie
Étienne de La Boétie
1 month 6 days ago
Do not imagine that there is...

Do not imagine that there is any bird more easily caught by decoy, nor any fish sooner fixed on the hook by wormy bait, than are all these poor fools neatly tricked into servitude by the slightest feather passed, so to speak, before their mouths. Truly it is a marvelous thing that they let themselves be caught so quickly at the slightest tickling of their fancy. Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naïvely, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright picture books.

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Part 2
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
1 week 1 day ago
That which had grown from the...

That which had grown from the earth, to the earth, But that which has sprung from heavenly seed, Back to the heavenly realms returns. This is either a dissolution of the mutual involution of the atoms, or a similar dispersion of the unsentient elements.

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VII, 50
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 month 2 days ago
O poor mortals, how ye make...

O poor mortals, how ye make this earth bitter for each other.

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Pt. I, Bk. V, ch. 5.
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
1 week 1 day ago
Time is a sort of river...

Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.

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IV, 43
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
2 months 3 weeks ago
And in a flash I understood...

And in a flash I understood the meaning of sex. It is a craving for the mingling of consciousness, whose symbol is the mingling of bodies. Every time a man and a woman slake their thirst in the strange waters of the other's identity, they glimpse the immensity of their freedom.

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p. 252
Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
3 months 2 weeks ago
The people reign over the American...

The people reign over the American political world as God rules over the universe. It is the cause and the end of all things; everything rises out of it and is absorbed back into it.

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Chapter IV, Part I.
Philosophical Maxims
Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale
2 months 3 weeks ago
To have no food for our...

To have no food for our heads no food for our hearts, no food for our activity, is that nothing? If we have no food for the body, how do we cry out, how all the world hears of it, how all the newspapers talk of it, with a paragraph headed in great capital letters, DEATH FROM STARVATION! But suppose one were to put a paragraph in the Times, Death of Thought from Starvation, or Death of Moral Activity from Starvation, how people would stare, how they would laugh and wonder! One would think we had no heads nor hearts, by the total indifference of the public towards them. Our bodies are the only things of any consequence.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
2 months 1 week ago
The unique innovation of the phonetic...

The unique innovation of the phonetic alphabet released the Greeks from the universal acoustic spill of tribal societies.

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(p. 70)
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
2 months 1 week ago
An arrogant person considers himself perfect....

An arrogant person considers himself perfect. This is the chief harm of arrogance. It interferes with a person's main task in life-becoming a better person.

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p. 110
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 months 1 week ago
By capitulating to life, this world...

By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness. . . . I resign from movement, and from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole glory. . . . Let "desire" be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 1 week ago
The law of causality, I believe,...

The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.

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Ch. 9: On the Notion of Cause
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
2 months 3 weeks ago
We do not require elaborate training...

We do not require elaborate training merely in order to refrain from embarking upon intricate trains of inference. Such abstinence is only too easy.

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Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (1927).
Philosophical Maxims
Alan Watts
Alan Watts
3 weeks 1 day ago
If I first see a tree...

If I first see a tree in the winter, I might assume that it is not a fruit-tree. But when I return in the summer to find it covered with plums, I must exclaim, 'Excuse me! You were a fruit-tree after all.' Imagine, then, that a billion years ago some beings from another part of the galaxy made a tour through the solar system in their flying saucer and found no life. They would dismiss it as 'Just a bunch of old rocks!' But if they returned today, they would have to apologize: 'Well - you were peopling rocks after all!' You may, of course, argue that there is no analogy between the two situations. The fruit-tree was at one time a seed inside a plum, but the earth - much less the solar system or the galaxy - was never a seed inside a person. But, oddly enough, you would be wrong.

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p. 74
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
4 months 1 week ago
To love at all is to...

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

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Philosophical Maxims
Edward Said
Edward Said
2 months 3 weeks ago
The central fact for me is,...

The central fact for me is, I think, that the [role of the] intellectual ... cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d'être is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug. Representation of the Intellectual

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1994
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
4 months 1 week ago
Everywhere we remain unfree and chained...

Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.

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The Question Concerning Technology
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
4 months 2 weeks ago
In particular, at this point also...

In particular, at this point also urge governing authorities and parents to rule well and to send their children to school. Point out how they are obliged to do so and what a damnable sin they commit if they do not, for thereby, as the worst enemies of God and humanity, they overthrow and lay waste both the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the world. Explain very clearly what kind of horrible damage they do when they do not help to train children as pastors, preachers, civil servants, etc., and tell them that God will punish them dreadfully for this. For in our day and age it is necessary to preach about these things. The extent to which parents and governing authorities are now sinning in these matters defies description. The devil, too, intends to do something horrible in all this.

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Foreword to the small catechismus, as quoted in the Preface, The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (2000) by Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert, p. 19
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
4 months 2 weeks ago
England and France, the two most...

England and France, the two most civilized nations on earth, who are in contrast to each other because of their different characters, are, perhaps chiefly for that reason, in constant feud with one another. Also, England and France, because of their inborn characters, of which the acquired and artificial character is only the result, are probably the only nations who can be assumed to have a particular and, as long as both national characters are not blended by the force of war, unalterable characteristics. That French has become the universal language of conversation, especially in the feminine world, and that English is the most widely used language of commerce among tradesmen, probably reflects the difference in their continental and insular geographic situation.

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Kant, Immanuel (1996), page 226
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
5 months 1 week ago
Outside of that single fatality of...

Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty.

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Philosophical Maxims
Theodor Adorno
Theodor Adorno
2 months 3 weeks ago
Being, in whose name Heidegger's philosophy...

Being, in whose name Heidegger's philosophy increasingly concentrates itself, is for him-as a pure self-presentation to passive consciousness-just as immediate, just as independent of the mediations of the subject as the facts and the sensory data are for the positivists. In both philosophical movements thinking becomes a necessary evil and is broadly discredited. Thinking loses its element of independence. The autonomy of reason vanishes: the part of reason that exceeds the subordinate reflection upon and adjustment to pre-given data. With it, however, goes the conception of freedom and, potentially, the self-determination of human society.

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p. 9
Philosophical Maxims
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
3 months 1 week ago
Show me what thou truly lovest,...

Show me what thou truly lovest, what thou seekest and strivest for with thy whole heart when thou hopest to attain to true en joyment of thyself-and thou hast thereby shown me thy Life. What thou lovest, in that thou livest. This very Love is thy Life, the root, the seat, the central point of thy being. All other emotions within thee have life only in so far as they are governed by this one central emotion.

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P. 3
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 1 week ago
The camera is as subjective as...

The camera is as subjective as we are.

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An Outline of Philosophy Ch.15 The Nature of our Knowledge of Physics, 1927
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel
4 months 2 days ago
Philosophy is the childhood of the...

Philosophy is the childhood of the intellect, and a culture that tries to skip it will never grow up.

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p. 12.
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
3 months 1 week ago
Influences of various kinds conspire to...

Influences of various kinds conspire to increase corporate action and decrease individual action. And the change is being on all sides aided by schemers, each of whom thinks only of his pet plan and not at all of the general reorganization which his plan, joined with others such, are working out. It is said that the French Revolution devoured its own children. Here, an analogous catastrophe seems not unlikely. The numerous socialistic changes made by Act of Parliament, joined with the numerous others presently to be made, will by-and-by be all merged in State-socialism-swallowed in the vast wave which they have little by little raised."But why is this change described as 'the coming slavery'?," is a question which many will still ask. The reply is simple. All socialism involves slavery.

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Philosophical Maxims
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
4 months 1 week ago
The most radical revolutionary will become...

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.

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The New Yorker
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
4 months 1 week ago
Shallow men believe in luck, believe...

Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances...Strong men believe in cause and effect.

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Worship
Philosophical Maxims
Sydney Smith
Sydney Smith
3 weeks 5 days ago
Did you ever hear my definition...

Did you ever hear my definition of marriage? It is, that it resembles a pair of shears, so joined that they can not be separated; often moving in opposite directions, yet always punishing anyone who comes between them.

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Vol. I, ch. 11, p. 415; paraphrased variant: "Marriage resembles a pair of shears, so joined that they can not be separated; often moving in opposite directions, yet always punishing anyone who comes between them."
Philosophical Maxims
Walter Lippmann
Walter Lippmann
1 month 1 week ago
The totalitarian states, whether of the...

The totalitarian states, whether of the fascist or the communist persuasion, are more than superficially alike as dictatorships, in the suppression of dissent, and in operating planned and directed economies. They are profoundly alike.

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Ch. V: "The Totalitarian Regimes", §7, p. 89
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
4 months 1 week ago
Be not afraid of life. Believe...

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

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"Is Life Worth Living?"
Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
4 months 2 weeks ago
People who invented the word charity,...

People who invented the word charity, and used it in a good sense, inculcated more clearly, and much more efficaciously, the precept, Be charitable, than any pretended legislator or prophet, who should insert such a maxim in his writings.

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Part I, Essay 22: Of the Standard of Taste
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
4 months 1 week ago
Existence precedes and rules…

Existence precedes and rules essence.

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Part 4, chapter 1
Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
3 months 2 weeks ago
In America, conscription is unknown; men...

In America, conscription is unknown; men are enlisted for payment. Compulsory recruitment is so alien to the ideas and so foreign to the customs of the people of the United States that I doubt whether they would ever dare to introduce it into their law.

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Chapter XIII.
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
4 months 1 week ago
This life is worth living, we...

This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it, from the moral point of view.

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"Is Life Worth Living?"
Philosophical Maxims
Lucretius
Lucretius
4 months 3 weeks ago
Superstition is now…

Superstition is now in her turn cast down and trampled underfoot, whilst we by the victory are exalted high as heaven.

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Book I, lines 78-79 (tr. W. H. D. Rouse)
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
5 months 1 week ago
I was assailed by memories of...

I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn't mine anymore, but one in which I'd found the simplest and most lasting joys.

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Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
2 months 4 weeks ago
Suffering is a spiritual thing. It...

Suffering is a spiritual thing. It is the most immediate revelation of consciousness, and it may be that our body was given us simply in order that suffering might be enabled to manifest itself. A man who had never known suffering, either in greater or less degree, would scarcely possess consciousness of himself. The child first cries at birth when the air, entering into his lungs and limiting him, seems to say to him: You have to breathe me in order to live!

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Philosophical Maxims
Alan Watts
Alan Watts
3 weeks 1 day ago
The basic problem is to understand...

The basic problem is to understand that there are no such things as things; that is to say separate things, separate events. That is only a way of talking. What do you mean by a thing? A thing is a noun. A noun isn't a part of nature it's a part of speech. There are no nouns in the physical world. There are no separate things in the physical world either.

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Watts on Wiggles Waves, used in the Cosmosis track No Such Thing (2007).
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
2 months 4 weeks ago
I must avert here once again...

I must avert here once again to my view of the opposition that exists between individuality and personality, notwithstanding the fact that the one demands the other. Individuality is, if I may so express it, the container or thing which contains, personality the content or thing contained, or I might say that my personality is in a certain sense my comprehension, that which I comprehend or embrace within myself - which is in a certain way the whole Universe - and that my individuality is my extension; the one my infinite, the other my finite.

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Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
2 months 3 weeks ago
To receive applause for works which...

To receive applause for works which do not demand all our powers hinders our advance towards a perfecting of our spirit. It usually means that thereafter we stand still.

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K 42
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
4 months 1 week ago
We are told that Christ was...

We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He has disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ's death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and, if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself.

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Book II, Chapter 4, "The Perfect Penitent"
Philosophical Maxims
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