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Democritus
Democritus
1 month 4 weeks ago
Strength of body is nobility in...

Strength of body is nobility in beasts of burden, strength of character is nobility in men.

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Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
1 month 1 week ago
It is said that desire is...

It is said that desire is a product of the will, but the converse is in fact true: will is a product of desire.

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"Will, Freedom"
Philosophical Maxims
Theodor Adorno
Theodor Adorno
3 weeks 3 days ago
The phrase, the world wants to...

The phrase, the world wants to be deceived, has become truer than had ever been intended. People are not only, as the saying goes, falling for the swindle; if it guarantees them even the most fleeting gratification they desire a deception which is nonetheless transparent to them. They force their eyes shut and voice approval, in a kind of self-loathing, for what is meted out to them, knowing fully the purpose for which it is manufactured. Without admitting it they sense that their lives would be completely intolerable as soon as they no longer clung to satisfactions which are none at all.

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Section 10
Philosophical Maxims
Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek
6 months 1 week ago
Everyone is forced to be a philosopher

The age of philosophy in the sense again that we are confronted more and more often with philosophical problems at an everyday level. It is not that you withdraw from daily life into a world of philosophical contemplation. On the contrary, you cannot find your way around daily life itself without answering certain philosophical questions. It is a unique time when everyone is, in a way, forced to be some kind of philosopher.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
1 month ago
Jesus said to His disciples, "Compare...

Jesus said to His disciples, "Compare me to someone and tell Me whom I am like." Simon Peter said to Him, "You are like a righteous angel." Matthew said to Him, "You are like a wise philosopher." Thomas said to Him, "Master, my mouth is wholly incapable of saying whom You are like." Jesus said, "I am not your master. Because you have drunk, you have become intoxicated by the bubbling spring which I have measured out." And He took him and withdrew and told him three things. When Thomas returned to his companions, they asked him, "What did Jesus say to you?" Thomas said to them, "If I tell you one of the things which he told me, you will pick up stones and throw them at me; a fire will come out of the stones and burn you up."

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Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
2 months 3 weeks ago
No thing great is created suddenly,...

No thing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.

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Book I, ch. 15, 7.
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 1 week ago
But though all...
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Main Content / General
Robert Owen
Robert Owen
1 day ago
They would receive the same care...

They would receive the same care and attention as those who belong to the establishment. Nor will there be any distinction made between the children of those parents who are deemed the worst, and of those who may be esteemed the best members of society: indeed I would prefer to receive the offspring of the worst, if they shall be sent at an early age; because they really require more of our care and pity and by well-training these, society will be more essentially benefited than if the like attention were paid to those whose parents are educating them in comparatively good habits. On educating children of the poor, and of neighboring communities.

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Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
3 weeks ago
Jung believed that alchemy is about...

Jung believed that alchemy is about the transmutation of the mind and the discovery of the self. Inevitably, he saw the male and female elements of the prima materia -- the king and queen of alchemy -- as the animus and anima; this seemed to indicate the (sic) alchemy is about psychological processes.

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p. 103
Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
2 months 3 weeks ago
Since it is Reason which shapes...

Since it is Reason which shapes and regulates all other things, it ought not itself to be left in disorder.

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Book I, ch. 17, 1.
Philosophical Maxims
Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno
1 month 2 weeks ago
Given that annihilation of nature in...

Given that annihilation of nature in its entirety is impossible, and that death and dissolution are not appropriate to the whole mass of this entire globe or star, from time to time, according to an established order, it is renewed, altered, changed, and transformed in all its parts.

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Fifth Dialogue
Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
5 days ago
There are some remedies worse than...

There are some remedies worse than the disease.

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Maxim 301
Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
2 months 3 weeks ago
My mother spoke of Christ to...

My mother spoke of Christ to my father, by her feminine and childlike virtues, and, after having borne his violence without a murmur or complaint, gained him at the close of his life to Christ.

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Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 351
Philosophical Maxims
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
4 weeks ago
Hatred is a feeling which leads...

Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.

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Cited in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations by Subject, ed. Susan Ratcliffe (2010), p. 223
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
1 month 1 week ago
How often misused words generate misleading...

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts!

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Ch. 8, Humanity
Philosophical Maxims
Max Scheler
Max Scheler
4 weeks ago
In the ancient notion of love,...

In the ancient notion of love, on the other hand, there is an element of anxiety. The noble fears the descent to the less noble, is afraid of being infected and pulled down. The "sage" of antiquity does not have the same firmness, the same inner certainty of himself and his own value, as the genius and hero of Christian love.

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L. Coser, trans. (1961), p. 92
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
1 month 1 week ago
Toleration is good for all, or...

Toleration is good for all, or it is good for none.

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Speech on the Bill for the Relief of Protestant Dissenters
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
3 months 5 days ago
If you're going to write a...

If you're going to write a story, avoid contemporary references. They date a story and they have no staying power.

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Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
1 week ago
Only the truth and its expression...

Only the truth and its expression can establish that new public opinion which will reform the ancient obsolete and pernicious order of life; and yet we not only do not express the truth we know, but often even distinctly give expression to what we ourselves regard as false. If only free men would not rely on that which has no power, and is always fettered - upon external aids; but would trust in that which is always powerful and free - the truth and its expression!

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Ch. 17
Philosophical Maxims
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
4 weeks ago
If the subjectivist view hold true,...

If the subjectivist view hold true, thinking cannot be of any help in determining the desirability of any goal in itself. The acceptability of ideals, the criteria for our actions and beliefs, the leading principles of ethics and politics, all our ultimate decisions are made to depend upon factors other than reason. They are supposed to be matters of choice and predilection, and it has become meaningless to speak of truth in making practical, moral or esthetic decisions.

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pp. 7-8.
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
3 weeks 4 days ago
Our life is a hope which...

Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope. Give us leave to live! The eternity that is like an eternal present, without memory and without hope, is death. Thus do ideas exist in the God-Idea, but not thus do men live in the living God, in the God-Man.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
2 months 1 week ago
First, what do we mean by...

First, what do we mean by anguish? The existentialist frankly states that man is in anguish. His meaning is as follows-When a man commits himself to anything, fully realizing that he is not only choosing what he will be, but is thereby at the same time a legislator deciding for the whole of mankind-in such a moment a man cannot escape from the sense of complete and profound responsibility.

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p. 30
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
2 months 1 week ago
The Quaestor turned back the pages...

The Quaestor turned back the pages until he found himself among the Pensées. "We are not satisfied," he read, "with the life we have in ourselves and our own being; we want to live an imaginary life in other people's idea of us. Hence all our efforts are directed to seeming what we are not. We labor incessantly to preserve and embellish this imaginary being, and neglect that which is really ours." The Quaestor put down the book, ... and ruefully reflected that all his own troubles had arisen from this desire to seem what in fact he was not. To seem a man of action, when in fact he was a contemplative; to seem a politician, when nature had made him an introspective psychologist; to seem a wit, which God had intended him for a sage.

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"Variations on a Philosopher" in Themes and Variations (1943), p. 2
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
2 months 1 week ago
This disposition to admire, and almost...

This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and powerful, and to despise or, at least, neglect persons of poor and mean conditions, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.

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Section III, Chap. III.
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
2 months 1 week ago
May it not be the fact...

May it not be the fact that mankind, who after all are made up of single human beings, obtain a greater sum of happiness when each pursues his own, under the rules and conditions required by the good of the rest, than when each makes the good of the rest his only object, and allows himself no personal pleasures not indispensable to the preservation of his faculties? The regimen of a blockaded town should be cheerfully submitted to when high purposes require it, but is it the ideal perfection of human existence?

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Auguste Comte and Positivism, p. 142
Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
3 months 1 week ago
It is simplicity that makes the...

It is simplicity that makes the uneducated more effective than the educated when addressing popular audiences.

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Philosophical Maxims
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
1 month 1 week ago
It is so by nature that...

It is so by nature that the plant will develop with regularity, that the animal will move purposefully, and that human beings will think. Why should I take exception to recognizing also the last as the expression of an original force of nature, as I do the first and the second?

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P. Preuss, trans. (1987), p. 11
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 4 days ago
There are no arguments. Can anyone...

There are no arguments. Can anyone who has reached the limit bother with arguments, causes, effects, moral considerations, and so forth? Of course not. For such a person there are only unmotivated motives for living. On the heights of despair, the passion for the absurd is the only thing that can still throw a demonic light on chaos. When all the current reasons - moral, esthetic, religious, social, and so on - no longer guide one's life, how can one sustain life without succumbing to nothingness? Only by a connection with the absurd, by love of absolute uselessness, loving something which does not have substance but which simulates an illusion of life. I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
2 months 1 week ago
To eat is to appropriate by...

To eat is to appropriate by destruction.

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Part 3: Being-For-Others
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
2 months 1 week ago
If you make the same guess...

If you make the same guess often enough it ceases to be a guess and becomes a Scientific Fact. This is the inductive method.

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Pilgrim's Regress 22
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
1 month ago
The Kingdom is like a wise...

The Kingdom is like a wise fisherman who cast his net into the sea and drew it up from the sea full of small fish. Among them the wise fisherman found a fine large fish. He threw all the small fish back into the sea and chose the large fish without difficulty. Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear.

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Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
3 weeks ago
I was aggressively nonpolitical. I believed...

I was aggressively nonpolitical. I believed that people who make a fuss about politics do so because their heads are too empty to think about more important things. So I felt nothing but impatient contempt for Osborne's Jimmy Porter and the rest of the heroes of social protest.

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p. 2
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 4 days ago
Existence would be a quite impracticable...

Existence would be a quite impracticable enterprise if we stopped granting importance to what has none.

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Philosophical Maxims
Georg Büchner
Georg Büchner
1 month 1 week ago
Dying people often become childish Act...

Dying people often become childish.

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Act II.
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
2 months 1 week ago
Poetry - No definition of poetry...

Poetry - No definition of poetry is adequate unless it be poetry itself. The most accurate analysis by the rarest wisdom is yet insufficient, and the poet will instantly prove it false by setting aside its requisitions. It is indeed all that we do not know. The poet does not need to see how meadows are something else than earth, grass, and water, but how they are thus much. He does not need discover that potato blows are as beautiful as violets, as the farmer thinks, but only how good potato blows are. The poem is drawn out from under the feet of the poet, his whole weight has rested on this ground. It has a logic more severe than the logician's. You might as well think to go in pursuit of the rainbow, and embrace it on the next hill, as to embrace the whole of poetry even in thought.

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January 26, 1840
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
2 months 1 week ago
Fear is in almost all cases...

Fear is in almost all cases a wretched instrument of government, and ought in particular never to be employed against any order of men who have the smallest pretensions to independency.

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Chapter I, Part III, p. 862.
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 1 week ago
By necessity, by proclivity, and by...

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.

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Quotation and Originality
Philosophical Maxims
John Dewey
John Dewey
4 weeks 1 day ago
Freedom of thought and of expression...

Freedom of thought and of expression are not mere rights to be claimed. They have their roots deep in the existence of individuals as developing careers in time. Their denial and abrogation is an abdication of individuality and a virtual rejection of time as opportunity.

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Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
3 weeks 3 days ago
Maurras, with perfect logic, is an...

Maurras, with perfect logic, is an atheist. The Cardinal [Richelieu], in postulating something whose whole reality is confined to this world as an absolute value, committed the sin of idolatry. ... The real sin of idolatry is always committed on behalf of something similar to the State.

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p. 199
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
2 months 1 week ago
To travel is to discover that...

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong.

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Part II: Malaya,
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
2 months 2 weeks ago
The veneration of Mary is inscribed...

The veneration of Mary is inscribed in the very depths of the human heart.

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Weimar edition of Martin Luther's Works (Translation by William J. Cole) 10, III, p. 313
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
2 months 1 week ago
It was the period of my...

It was the period of my mental progress which I have now reached that I formed the friendship which has been the honour and chief blessing of my existence, as well as the source of a great part of all that I have attempted to do, or hope to effect hereafter, for human improvement. My first introduction to the lady who, after a friendship of twenty years, consented to become my wife, was in 1830, when I was in my twenty-fifth and she in her twenty-third year.

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(p. 184)
Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
2 months 3 weeks ago
When then is time?

What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.

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XI, 14
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
2 months 1 week ago
We have been given free will,...

We have been given free will, in order that we may will our self-will out of existence and so come to live continuously in a 'state of grace.' All our actions must be directed, in the last analysis, to making ourselves passive in relation to the activity and the being of divine reality. We are, as it were, aeolian harps, endowed with the power either to expose themselves to the wind of the Spirit or to shut themselves away from it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 1 week ago
We are born believing. A man...

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

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Worship
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
2 months 3 days ago
Philosophy is like trying to open...

Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.

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Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993) edited by James Carl Klagge and Alfred Nordmann
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
6 days ago
Acoustic space is totally discontinuous, like...

Acoustic space is totally discontinuous, like touch. It is a sphere without centers or margins.

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Philosophical Maxims
Theodor Adorno
Theodor Adorno
3 weeks 3 days ago
By abstaining from all definite content,...

By abstaining from all definite content, whether as formal logic and theory of science or as the legend of Being beyond all beings, philosophy declared its bankruptcy regarding concrete social goals.

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p. 6
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
2 weeks 3 days ago
One has to do something new...

One has to do something new in order to see something new.

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J 1770
Philosophical Maxims
Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek
6 months 1 week ago
Love the Muslims

In the electoral campaign, President Bush named as the most important person in his life Jesus. Now he has a unique chance to prove that he meant it seriously: for him, as for all Americans today, "Love thy neighbor!" means "Love the Muslims!" OR IT MEANS NOTHING AT ALL.

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Philosophical Maxims
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