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Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
2 months 1 week ago
McDonald: Now a lot of people...

McDonald: Now a lot of people find great comfort from religion. Not everybody is as you are - well-favored, handsome, wealthy, with a good job, happy family life. I mean, your life is good - not everybody's life is good, and religion brings them comfort.Dawkins: There are all sorts of things that would be comforting. I expect an injection of morphine would be comforting - it might be more comforting, for all I know. But to say that something is comforting is not to say that it's true.

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Philosophical Maxims
Isaiah Berlin
Isaiah Berlin
3 months 5 days ago
Philosophers are adults who persist in...

Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions. 

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As quoted in The Listener
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
5 months 1 week ago
The work of each individual contributes...

The work of each individual contributes to a totality and so becomes an undying part of the totality. That totality of human lives - past and present and to come - forms a tapestry that has been in existence now for many thousands of years and has been growing more elaborate and, on the whole, more beautiful in all that time. Even the Spacers are an offshoot of the tapestry and they, too, add to the elaborateness and beauty of the pattern. An individual life is one thread in the tapestry and what is one thread compared to the whole?

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Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
4 weeks ago
Let another say. "Perhaps the worst...

Let another say. "Perhaps the worst will not happen." You yourself must say. "Well, what if it does happen? Let us see who wins! Perhaps it happens for my best interests; it may be that such a death will shed credit upon my life."

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Philosophical Maxims
Henri Bergson
Henri Bergson
3 months 6 days ago
Men do not sufficiently realise that...

Men do not sufficiently realise that their future is in their own hands. Theirs is the task of determining first of all whether they want to go on living or not. Theirs is the responsibility, then, for deciding if they want merely to live, or intend to make just the extra effort required for fulfilling, even on their refractory planet, the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of gods.

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Philosophical Maxims
Niels Bohr
Niels Bohr
3 weeks ago
Isolated material particles are abstractions, their...

Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems.

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"Atomic Physics and the Description of Nature"
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 2 weeks ago
I do like clarity and exact...

I do like clarity and exact thinking and I believe that very important to mankind because when you allow yourself to think inexactly your prejudices, your bias, your self interest comes in in ways you don't notice and you do bad things without knowing that you are doing them: self deception is very easy. So that I do think clear thinking immensely important.

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Television interview ("On clarity and exact thinking" - available on youtube)
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
3 months 6 days ago
The methods of logical procedure are...

The methods of logical procedure are very different in ancient and modem logic, but behind all difference is the construction of a universally valid order of thought, neutral with respect to material content. Long before technological man and technological nature emerged as the objects of rational control and calculation, the mind was made susceptible to abstract generalization. Terms which could be organized into a coherent logical system, free from contradiction or with manageable contradiction, were separated from those which could not. Distinction was made between the universal, calculable, "objective" and the particular, incalculable, subjective dimension of thought.

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pp. 137-138
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
4 months 1 week ago
A man is a god in...

A man is a god in ruins.

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Prospects
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
2 months 4 weeks ago
A precise language awaits a completed...

A precise language awaits a completed metaphysics.

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Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
3 months 1 week ago
Well, which is the most rational...

Well, which is the most rational theory about these ten millions of species? Is it most likely that there have been ten millions of special creations? or is it most likely that, by continual modifications due to change of circumstances, ten millions of varieties have been produced, as varieties are being produced still?

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Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
2 months 1 week ago
Mysticism is just tomorrow's science dreamed...

Mysticism is just tomorrow's science dreamed today.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
3 months 6 days ago
When there were gathered together an...

When there were gathered together an innumerable multitude of people, insomuch that they trode one upon another, he began to say unto his disciples first of all, Beware ye of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy. For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known. Therefore whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops. And I say unto you my friends, Be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. But I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, which after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, Fear him.

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12:1-5
Philosophical Maxims
Max Stirner
Max Stirner
4 weeks 1 day ago
The divine is God's concern; the...

The divine is God's concern; the human, man's. My concern is neither the divine nor the human, not the true, good, just, free, etc., but solely what is mine, and it is not a general one, but is - unique, as I am unique. Nothing is more to me than myself!

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Cambridge 1995, p. 7
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
4 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
Francis Fukuyama
Francis Fukuyama
1 month 1 week ago
Neoconservatives believed that history can be...

Neoconservatives believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support. ..."War" is the wrong metaphor for the broader struggle, since wars are fought at full intensity and have clear beginnings and endings. Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a "long, twilight struggle" whose core is not a military campaign but a political contest for the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims around the world.

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From the essay "After Neoconservatism" in the New York Times Magazine
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
3 months 6 days ago
Every plant, which my heavenly Father...

Every plant, which my heavenly Father hath not planted, shall be rooted up. Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.

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15:13-14 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
4 months 2 weeks ago
Among the Romans in Christian times...

Among the Romans in Christian times Mithras-worship as very widely spread, and so late as the Middle Ages we meet with a secret Mithras-worship ostensibly connected with the order of the Knights-Templars. Mithras thrusting the knife into the neck of the ox is a figurative representation belonging essentially to the cult of Mithras, of which examples have been frequently found in Europe. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Lectures on the philosophy of religion, together with a work on the proofs of the existence of God.

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Vol 2 Translated from the 2d German ed. 1895 Ebenezer Brown Speirs 1854-1900, and J Burdon Sanderson p. 81-82
Philosophical Maxims
Nikolai Berdyaev
Nikolai Berdyaev
2 months 4 weeks ago
The whole economic system of Capitalism...

The whole economic system of Capitalism is an offshoot of a devouring and overwhelming lust, of a kind that can hold sway only in a society that has deliberately renounced the Christian asceticism and turned away from Heaven to give itself over exclusively to earthly gratifications. ... It is the result of a secularization of economic life, and by it the hierarchical subordination of the material to the spiritual is inverted. The autonomy of economics has ended in their dominating the whole life of human societies: the worship of Mammon has become the determining force of the age. And the worst of it is that this undisguised "mammonism" is regarded as a very good thing, an attainment to the knowledge of truth and a release from illusions. Economic materialism formulates this to perfection when it brands the whole spiritual life of man as a deception and a dream.

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p. 92
Philosophical Maxims
Theodor Adorno
Theodor Adorno
2 months 4 weeks ago
Elements of empirical language are manipulated...

Elements of empirical language are manipulated in their rigidity, as if they were elements of a true and revealed language. The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence.

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p. 7
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 month 4 days ago
Aesop's Fly, sitting on the axle...

Aesop's Fly, sitting on the axle of the chariot, has been much laughed at for exclaiming: What a dust I do raise!

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Philosophical Maxims
Democritus
Democritus
4 months 3 days ago
A life without a holiday is...

A life without a holiday is like a long journey without an inn to rest at.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 3 days ago
Egos appear by....
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Main Content / General
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
1 week 6 days ago
While the art of printing is...

While the art of printing is left to us science can never be retrograde; what is once acquired of real knowlege can never be lost.

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Letter to William Green Mumford
Philosophical Maxims
Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek
8 months 2 weeks ago
Cyphered message

The symptom is not only a cyphered message, it is at the same time a way for the subject to organize his enjoyment - that is why, even after the completed interpretation, the subject is not prepared to renounce his symptom.

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Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
5 months 2 weeks ago
No power can maintain itself if...
No power can maintain itself if only hypocrites represent it.
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Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
5 months 2 weeks ago
In Germany there is much complaining...
In Germany there is much complaining about my "eccentricities." But since it is not known where my center is, it won't be easy to find out where or when I have thus far been "eccentric." That I was a philologist, for example, meant that I was outside my center (which fortunately does not mean that I was a poor philologist). Likewise, I now regard my having been a Wagnerian as eccentric. It was a highly dangerous experiment; now that I know it did not ruin me, I also know what significance it had for me — it was the most severe test of my character.
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Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
4 months 2 weeks ago
Good and strong will. Mechanism must...

Good and strong will. Mechanism must precede science (learning). Also in morals and religion? Too much discipline makes one narrow and kills proficiency. Politeness belongs, not to discipline, but to polish, and thus comes last.

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Part III : Selection on Education from Kant's other Writings, Ch. I Pedagogical Fragments, # 9
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
3 months 1 week ago
It is provable both that the...

It is provable both that the historical sequence was, in its main outlines, a necessary one; and that the causes which determined it apply to the child as to the race. ...as the mind of humanity placed in the midst of phenomena and striving to comprehend them has, after endless comparisons, speculations, experiments, and theories, reached its present knowledge of each subject by a specific route; it may rationally be inferred that the relationship between mind and phenomena is such as to prevent this knowledge from being reached by any other route; and that as each child's mind stands in this same relationship to phenomena, they can be accessible to it only through the same route. Hence in deciding upon the right method of education, an inquiry into the method of civilization will help to guide us.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
4 months 1 week ago
Certainly it is correct to say:...

Certainly it is correct to say: Conscience is the voice of God.

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p. 75
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 2 weeks ago
Since Adam and Eve ate the...

Since Adam and Eve ate the apple, man has never refrained from any folly of which he was capable. The End.

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Full text of Russell's book History of the World in Epitome , written in 1959
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 months 1 week ago
Losing love is so rich a...

Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
2 months 3 weeks ago
The contention that a standing army...

The contention that a standing army and navy is the best security of peace is about as logical as the claim that the most peaceful citizen is he who goes about heavily armed. The experience of every-day life fully proves that the armed individual is invariably anxious to try his strength. The same is historically true of governments. Really peaceful countries do not waste life and energy in war preparations, with the result that peace is maintained.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henri Bergson
Henri Bergson
3 months 6 days ago
The prestige of the Nobel Prize...

The prestige of the Nobel Prize is due to many causes, but in particular to its twofold idealistic and international character: idealistic in that it has been designed for works of lofty inspiration; international in that it is awarded after the production of different countries has been minutely studied and the intellectual balance sheet of the whole world has been drawn up. Free from all other considerations and ignoring any but intellectual values, the judges have deliberately taken their place in what the philosophers have called a community of the mind.

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In a letter accepting the 1927 Nobel Prize in literature, read by the French minister, Armand Bernard.
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
2 months 1 week ago
Many of us saw religion as...

Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that. Revealed faith is not harmless nonsense, it can be lethally dangerous nonsense. Dangerous because it gives people unshakeable confidence in their own righteousness. Dangerous because it gives them false courage to kill themselves, which automatically removes normal barriers to killing others. Dangerous because it teaches enmity to others labelled only by a difference of inherited tradition. And dangerous because we have all bought into a weird respect, which uniquely protects religion from normal criticism. Let's now stop being so damned respectful!

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When asked how the world had changed following the September 11, 2001 attacks Has the world changed?, The Guardian
Philosophical Maxims
Theodor Adorno
Theodor Adorno
2 months 4 weeks ago
Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time,...

Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past.

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"Was bedeutet Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit"
Philosophical Maxims
Alan Watts
Alan Watts
3 weeks 3 days ago
At about the age of eleven,...

At about the age of eleven, I was reading the thrillers of Sax Rohmer and Edgar Wallace concerning Dr. Fu Manchu and other sophisticated Chinese villains, nurturing a secret admiration for these gentlemen because of their opposition to the suet-pudding heroism of our own culture, and because of their refined and mysterious style of life. While other boys dreamed of becoming generals, cowboys, mountain climbers, explorers, and engineers, I wanted to be a Chinese villain. I wanted servants carrying knives in their sleeves, appearing or vanishing without the slightest sound. I wanted a house with secret doors and passages, with Coromandel screens, with ancient scrolls, with ivory and lacquer boxes of exotic poisons, with exquisite brands of tea, with delicate blue porcelain, with jade idols and joss-sticks, and with sonorous gongs.

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p. 63-64
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
3 months 2 weeks ago
Frugality is founded on the principle...

Frugality is founded on the principle that all riches have limits.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
3 weeks 3 days ago
A work of art bears within...

A work of art bears within itself its own verification: conceptions which are devised or stretched do not stand being portrayed in images, they all come crashing down, appear sickly and pale, convince no one. But those works of art which have scooped up the truth and presented it to us as a living force - they take hold of us, compel us, and nobody ever, not even in ages to come, will appear to refute them.

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Philosophical Maxims
Albert Schweitzer
Albert Schweitzer
3 weeks 3 days ago
Very little of the great cruelty...

Very little of the great cruelty shown by men can really be attributed to cruel instinct. Most of it comes from thoughtlessness or inherited habit. The roots of cruelty, therefore, are not so much strong as widespread. But the time must come when inhumanity protected by custom and thoughtlessness will succumb before humanity championed by thought. Let us work that this time may come.

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Philosophical Maxims
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
4 months 1 week ago
Kant's philosophy shifts for the first...

Kant's philosophy shifts for the first time the whole of modern thought and being (Desein) into the clarity and transparency of the foundation (Begrundung). This determines every attitude toward knowledge since then, as well as the bounds (Abgrenzungen) and appraisals of the sciences in the nineteenth century up to the present time. Therein Kant towers so far above all who precede and follow that even those who reject him or go beyond him still remain entirely dependent upon him.

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p. 55-56
Philosophical Maxims
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
2 months 6 days ago
In the greatest confusion there is...

In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves.

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Foreword to The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 month 4 days ago
We will not praise Mahomet's moral...

We will not praise Mahomet's moral precepts as always of the superfinest sort; yet it can be said that there is always a tendency to good in them; that they are the true dictates of a heart aiming towards what is just and true.

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Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
3 months 3 weeks ago
Having departed from your house, turn...

Having departed from your house, turn not back; for the furies will be your attendants.

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Symbol 15
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
3 months 6 days ago
All they that take the sword...

All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.

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Matthew 26:52 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
3 months 2 weeks ago
The stupider one is, the closer...

The stupider one is, the closer one is to reality. The stupider one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence wriggles and hides itself. Intelligence is a knave, but stupidity is honest and straightforward.

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Philosophical Maxims
A. J. Ayer
A. J. Ayer
3 months 1 week ago
While moral rules may be propounded...

While moral rules may be propounded by authority the fact that these were so propounded would not validate them.

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"The Meaning of Life".
Philosophical Maxims
Henri Poincaré
Henri Poincaré
1 month 1 week ago
The task of the educator…

The task of the educator is to make the child's spirit pass again where its forefathers have gone, moving rapidly through certain stages but suppressing none of them. In this regard, the history of science must be our guide.

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[Logic and intuition in the science of mathematics and in teaching], L'enseignement mathématique
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
1 week 3 days ago
The world is nothing but change....

The world is nothing but change. Our life is only perception.

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(Hays translation) IV, 4
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
3 days ago
Our experience hitherto justifies us...

Our experience hitherto justifies us in trusting that nature is the realization of the simplest that is mathematically conceivable. I am convinced that purely mathematical construction enables us to find those concepts and those lawlike connections between them that provide the key to the understanding of natural phenomena. Useful mathematical concepts may well be suggested by experience, but in no way can they be derived from it. Experience naturally remains the sole criterion of the usefulness of a mathematical construction for physics. But the actual creative principle lies in mathematics. Thus, in a certain sense, I take it to be true that pure thought can grasp the real, as the ancients had dreamed.

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Philosophical Maxims
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