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Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 day ago
Societies have always been shaped more...

Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which humans communicate than by the content of the communication.

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(p. 23)
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
1 month 4 days ago
A great profusion of things, which...

A great profusion of things, which are splendid or valuable in themselves, is magnificent. The starry heaven, though it occurs so very frequently to our view, never fails to excite an idea of grandeur. This cannot be owing to the stars themselves, separately considered. The number is certainly the cause. The apparent disorder augments the grandeur, for the appearance of care is highly contrary to our idea of magnificence. Besides, the stars lie in such apparent confusion, as makes it impossible on ordinary occasions to reckon them. This gives them the advantage of a sort of infinity.

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Part II Section XIII
Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
2 months 5 days ago
The fundament upon which all our...

The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 1, § 1
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
2 weeks 2 days ago
Man should possess an infinite appetite...

Man should possess an infinite appetite for life. It should be self-evident to him, all the time, that life is superb, glorious, endlessly rich, infinitely desirable. At present, because he is in a midway position between the brute and the truly human, he is always getting bored, depressed, weary of life. He has become so top-heavy with civilisation that he cannot contact the springs of pure vitality. Control of the prefrontal cortex will change all of this. He will cease to cast nostalgic glances towards the womb, for he will realise that death is no escape. Man is a creature of life and the daylight; his destiny lies in total objectivity.

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pp. 317-318
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
1 month 3 days ago
"Can any good come out of...

"Can any good come out of Nazareth?" This is always the question of the wiseacres and the knowing ones. But the good, the new, comes from exactly that quarter whence it is not looked for, and is always something different from what is expected. Everything new is received with contempt, for it begins in obscurity. It becomes a power unobserved.

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As quoted in "Voices of the New Time" as translated by C. C. Shackford in The Radical Vol. 7 (1870), p. 329
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
3 months 4 days ago
For whoever has what he has...

For whoever has what he has from the God himself clearly has it at first hand; and he who does not have it from the God himself is not a disciple. Let us assume that it is otherwise, that the contemporary generation of disciples had received the condition from the God, and that the subsequent generations were to receive it from these contemporaries, what would follow?

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Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
1 month 4 days ago
A great revolution is on the...

A great revolution is on the point of being accomplished. It is a revolution not in human affairs, but in man himself.

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p. 2
Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
2 weeks 5 days ago
That is why St. John of...

That is why St. John of the Cross calls faith a night. With those who have received a Christian education, the lower parts of the soul become attached to these mysteries when they have no right at all to do so. That is why such people need a purification of which St. John of the Cross describes the stages. Atheism and incredulity constitute an equivalent of such a purification.

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Faiths of Meditation; Contemplation of the divine" as translated in The Simone Weil Reader (1957) edited by George A. Panichas, p. 418
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
2 months 1 week ago
There are some defeats more triumphant...

There are some defeats more triumphant than victories.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 4 days ago
Political ideals must be based upon...

Political ideals must be based upon ideals for the individual life. The aim of politics should be to make the lives of individuals as good as possible.

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Philosophical Maxims
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut
5 days ago
Someday, someday, this crazy world will...

Someday, someday, this crazy world will have to end, And our God will take things back that He to us did lend. And if, on that sad day, you want to scold our God, Why go right ahead and scold Him. He'll just smile and nod.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
6 days ago
Truth is the cry....
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Main Content / General
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
2 weeks 5 days ago
The collective is the object of...

The collective is the object of all idolatry, this it is which chains us to the earth. In the case of avarice: gold is of the social order. In the case of ambition: power is of the social order. Science and art are full of the social element also. And love? Love is more or less of an exception: that is why we can go to God through love, not through avarice and ambition.

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p. 121
Philosophical Maxims
Judith Butler
Judith Butler
5 days ago
Gender is a kind of imitation...

Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself.

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"Imitation and Gender Insubordination" in Inside/Out (1991) edited by Diana Fuss
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas
2 months 3 weeks ago
Man reaches the highest point of...

Man reaches the highest point of his knowledge about God when he knows that he knows him not, inasmuch as he knows that that which is God transcends whatsoever he conceives of him.

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q. 7, art. 5, ad 14
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 4 days ago
Philosophy seems to me on the...

Philosophy seems to me on the whole a rather hopeless business.

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Letter to Gilbert Murray, December 28, 1902
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
2 weeks 2 days ago
These men traveling down to the...

These men traveling down to the City in the morning, reading their newspapers or staring at advertisements above the opposite seats, they have no doubt of who they are. Inscribe on the placard in place of the advertisement for corn-plasters, Elliot's lines: We are the hollow men

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
3 weeks 5 days ago
To understand this for sense it...

To understand this for sense it is not required that a man should be a geometrician or a logician, but that he should be mad. On the proposition that the volume generated by revolving the region under 1/x from 1 to infinity has finite volume.

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Quoted in Mathematical Maxims and Minims by N. Rose
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
2 weeks 6 days ago
...as the great Unitarian preacher Channing...

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

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Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
1 month ago
It is sometimes difficult to avoid...

It is sometimes difficult to avoid the impression that there is a sort of foreknowledge of the coming series of events.

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p. 94
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 weeks 1 day ago
The most interesting aspect of suffering...

The most interesting aspect of suffering is the sufferer's belief in its absoluteness. He believes he has a monopoly on suffering. I think that I alone suffer, that I alone have the right to suffer, although I also realize that there are modalities of suffering more terrible than mine, pieces of flesh falling from the bones, the body crumbling under one's very eyes, monstrous, criminal , shameful sufferings. One asks oneself, How can this be, and if it be, how can one still speak of finality and other such old wives' tales? Suffering moves me so much that I lose all my courage. I lose heart because I do not understand why there is suffering in the world.

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in essay: the monopoly of suffering
Philosophical Maxims
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
1 month 3 days ago
By means of the new education...

By means of the new education we want to mould the Germans into a corporate body, which shall be stimulated and animated in all its individual members by the same interest.

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Introduction p. 15
Philosophical Maxims
John Dewey
John Dewey
3 weeks 4 days ago
The determination of the mot juste,...

The determination of the mot juste, of the right incident in the right place, of exquisiteness of proportion, of the precise tone, hue, and shade that helps unify the whole while it defines a part, is accomplished by emotion. Not every emotion, however, can do this work, but only one informed by material that is grasped and gathered. Emotion is informed and carried forward when it is spent indirectly in search for material and in giving it order, not when it is directly expended.

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p. 73
Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
1 month ago
When one is not understood one...

When one is not understood one should as a rule lower one's voice, because when one really speaks loudly enough and is not heard, it is because people do not want to hear. One had better begin to mutter to oneself, then they get curious.

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Nietzsche's Zarathustra (1988), p. 30
Philosophical Maxims
Novalis
Novalis
1 month 1 day ago
Pure mathematics…

Pure mathematics is religion.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
2 months 5 days ago
New opinions are always suspected, and...

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.

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Dedicatory epistle, as quoted in Fred R Shapiro (2006). The Yale Book of Quotations. Yale University Press. p. 468. ISBN 0-300-10798-6.
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard
6 days ago
When the real is no longer...

When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. "The Precession of Simulacra,"

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p. 6
Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
1 month 4 days ago
What terrible tragedies realism inflicts on...

What terrible tragedies realism inflicts on people.'

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 weeks 1 day ago
Say what we will, death is...

Say what we will, death is the best thing nature has found to please everyone. With each of us, everything vanishes, everything stops forever. What an advantage, what an abuse! Without the least effort on our part, we own the universe, we drag it into our own disappearance. No doubt about it, dying is immoral...

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Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 day ago
Environments work us over and remake...

Environments work us over and remake us. It is man who is the content of and the message of the media, which are extensions of himself. Electronic man must know the effects of the world he has made above all things.

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(p. 90)
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 day ago
What began as a "Romantic reaction"...

What began as a "Romantic reaction" towards organic wholeness may or may not have hastened the discovery of electro-magnetic waves. But certainly the electro-magnetic discoveries have recreated the simultaneous "field" in all human affairs so that the human family now exists under conditions of a "global village." We live in a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums. So that concern with the "primitive" today is as banal as nineteenth-century concern with "progress," and as irrelevant to our problems. The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

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(p. 36)
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
2 months 3 days ago
In the practical use of our...

In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important a function as recollecting.

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Ch. 16
Philosophical Maxims
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal
2 months 2 weeks ago
This right which you have, is...

This right which you have, is not founded any more than his upon any quality or any merit in yourself which renders you worthy of it. Your soul and your body are, of themselves, indifferent to the state of boatman or that of duke; and there is no natural bond that attaches them to one condition rather than to another.

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Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
3 days ago
My reason will still not understand...

My reason will still not understand why I pray, but I shall still pray, and my life, my whole life, independently of anything that may happen to me, is every moment of it no longer meaningless as it was before, but has an unquestionable meaning of goodness with which I have the power to invest it.

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Pt. VIII, ch. 19
Philosophical Maxims
Baruch Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza
2 months 1 week ago
We feel and know….

We feel and know that we are eternal.

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Part V, Prop. XXIII, Scholium
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 weeks 1 day ago
In a republic, that paradise of...

In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Jean Jacques Rousseau
2 months 6 days ago
I want you to read the...

I want you to read the true system of the heart, drafted by a decent man and published under another name. I do not want you to be biased against good and useful books merely because a man unworthy of reading them has the audacity to call himself the Author.

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First Dialogue; translated by Judith R. Bush, Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
2 months 6 days ago
The prejudices of the second species,...

The prejudices of the second species, since they impose upon the intellect by the sensual conditions restricting the mind if it wishes in certain cases to attain to what is intellectual, lurk more deeply. One of them is that which affects knowledge of quantity, the other that affecting knowledge of qualities generally. The former is: every actual multiplicity can be given numerically, and hence, every infinite quantity; the latter, whatever is impossible contradicts itself. In either of them the concept of time, it is true, does not enter into the very notion of the predicate, nor is it attributed as a qualification to the subject. But yet it serves as a means for forming an idea of the predicate, and thus, being a condition, affects the intellectual concept of the subject to the extent that the latter is only attained by its aid.

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Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
1 month 1 week ago
Two things in America are astonishing:...

Two things in America are astonishing: the changeableness of most human behavior and the strange stability of certain principles. Men are constantly on the move, but the spirit of humanity seems almost unmoved.

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Book Three, Chapter XXI.
Philosophical Maxims
Ernst Mach
Ernst Mach
4 weeks 1 day ago
The aim of research is the...

The aim of research is the discovery of the equations which subsist between the elements of phenomena.

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p. 205; On aim of research.
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 4 days ago
Machines are worshipped because they are...

Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery.

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Ch. 6: Machines and the Emotions
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
2 months 4 days ago
The Hindoos are most serenely and...

The Hindoos are most serenely and thoughtfully religious than the Hebrews. They have perhaps a purer, more independent and impersonal knowledge of God. Their religious books describe the first inquisitive and contemplative access to God; the Hebrew bible a conscientious return, a grosser and more personal repentance. Repentance is not a free and fair highway to God. A wise man will dispense with repentance. It is shocking and passionate. God prefers that you approach him thoughtful, not penitent, though you are chief of sinners. It is only by forgetting yourself that you draw near to him. The calmness and gentleness with which the Hindoo philosophers approach and discourse on forbidden themes is admirable. In 1853.

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A Tribute to Hinduism, 2008
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
2 months 2 days ago
We are not necessarily doubting that...

We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.

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Letters of C. S. Lewis (29 April 1959), para. 1, p. 285 - as reported in The Quotable Lewis (1989), p. 469
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 day ago
Literacy, in translating man out of...

Literacy, in translating man out of the closed world of tribal depth and resonance, gave man an eye for an ear and ushered him into a visual open world of specialized and divided consciousness.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 weeks 1 day ago
Whether or not there exists a...

Whether or not there exists a solution to problems troubles only a minority; that the emotions have no outcome, lead to nothing, vanish into themselves - that is the great unconscious drama, the affective insolubility everyone suffers without even thinking about it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
2 months 2 days ago
Ha! to forget. How childish! I...

Ha! to forget. How childish! I feel you in my bones. Your silence screams in my ears. You may nail your mouth shut, you may cut out your tongue, can you keep yourself from existing? Will you stop your thoughts.

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Inès reiterating to Garcin that they cannot ignore one another, Act 1, sc. 5
Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
1 month 1 week ago
Step back in time; look closely...

Step back in time; look closely at the child in the very arms of his mother; see the external world reflected for the first time in the yet unclear mirror of his understanding; study the first examples which strike his eyes; listen to the first words which arouse within him the slumbering power of thought; watch the first struggles which he has to undergo; only then will you comprehend the source of his prejudices, the habits, and the passions which are to rule his life. The entire man, so to speak, comes fully formed in the wrappings of his cradle.

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Chapter II.
Philosophical Maxims
Hilary Putnam
Hilary Putnam
1 week 4 days ago
The real significance of the Russell...

The real significance of the Russell paradox, from the standpoint of the modal-logic picture, is this: it shows that no concrete structure can be a standard model for the naive conception of the totality of all sets; for any concrete structure has a possible extension that contains more 'sets'. (If we identify sets with the points that represent them in the various possible concrete structures, we might say: it is not possible for all possible sets to exist in any one world!) Yet set theory does not become impossible. Rather, set theory becomes the study of what must hold in, e.g. any standard model for Zermelo set theory.

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Mathematics without foundations
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 4 days ago
In fact, contempt for happiness is...

In fact, contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.

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p. 198
Philosophical Maxims
Hilary Putnam
Hilary Putnam
1 week 4 days ago
A few years ago I had...

A few years ago I had occasion to visit Peru, and I got to know a fine philosopher and a truly wonderful human being-Francisco Miro Casada. Miro Casada has been an idealist all his life, while being, at the same time, a man of great experience (a former member of several governments and a former Ambassador to France). I found him a man who represents the social democratic vision in its purest form. Talking to him, and to my other friends in Peru (who represented quite a spectrum of political opinion), I heard something that was summed up in a remark he, Miro Casada, made to me, "Whenever you have a Republican president, we get a wave of military dictatorships in Latin America".

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How Not to Solve Ethical Problems
Philosophical Maxims
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