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Niccolò Machiavelli
Niccolò Machiavelli
3 months 1 day ago
Bad company will…

Bad company will lead a man to the gallows!

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Act IV, scene vi
Philosophical Maxims
Gaston Bachelard
Gaston Bachelard
1 month 2 weeks ago
The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and...

The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.

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Ch. 2, sect. 2
Philosophical Maxims
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
1 month 2 weeks ago
[I]t is necessary to insist upon...

It is necessary to insist upon this extraordinary but undeniable fact: experimental science has progressed thanks in great part to the work of men astoundingly mediocre, and even less than mediocre. That is to say, modern science, the root and symbol of our actual civilization, finds a place for the intellectually commonplace man and allows him to work therein with success.

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Chapter XII: The Barbarism Of "Specialisation"
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
1 month 1 week ago
And this in turn makes it...

And this in turn makes it plain that the Right Man problem is a problem of highly dominant people. Dominance is a subject of enormous importance to biologists and zoologists because the percentage of dominant animals - or human beings - seems to be amazingly constant. Bernard Shaw once asked the explorer H. M. Stanley how many other men could take over leadership of the expedition if Stanley himself fell ill; Stanley replied promptly: "One in twenty." "Is that exact or approximate?" asked Shaw. "Exact." And biological studies have confirmed this as a fact. For some odd reason, precisely five per cent - one in twenty - of any animal group are dominant - have leadership qualities. During the Korean War, the Chinese made the interesting discovery that if they separated out the dominant five per cent of American prisoners of war, and kept them in separate compound, the remaining ninety-five per cent made no attempt to escape.

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p. 216
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
3 months 2 days ago
The value of life lies not...

The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them... Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will.

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Book I, Ch. 20
Philosophical Maxims
George Santayana
George Santayana
1 month 2 weeks ago
The Bible is literature, not dogma.

The Bible is literature, not dogma.

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Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
3 months 2 days ago
Religion is not 'doctrinal knowledge,' but...

Religion is not 'doctrinal knowledge,' but wisdom born of personal experience.

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Holborn, Hajo; A HISTORY OF MODERN GERMANY: The Reformation; 1959/1982 Princeton university Press
Philosophical Maxims
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
1 month 3 weeks ago
Nothing, I am sure, calls forth...

Nothing, I am sure, calls forth the faculties so much as the being obliged to struggle with the world; and this is not a woman's province in a married state. Her sphere of action is not large, and if she is not taught to look into her own heart, how trivial are her occupations and pursuits! What little arts engross and narrow her mind!

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Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), "Matrimony", p. 100
Philosophical Maxims
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
6 days ago
Lost time was like a run...

Lost time was like a run in a stocking. It always got worse.

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The Steep Ascent
Philosophical Maxims
William Godwin
William Godwin
1 month 3 weeks ago
Duty is that mode of action...

Duty is that mode of action which constitutes the best application of the capacity of the individual to the general advantage. Right is the claim of the individual to his share of the benefit arising from his neighbors' discharge of their several duties.

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"Summary of Principles". 1.5
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Browne
Thomas Browne
1 month 4 weeks ago
Obstinacy in a bad cause, is...

Obstinacy in a bad cause, is but constancy in a good.

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Section 25
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
3 months 2 weeks ago
The administration of government lies in...

The administration of government lies in getting proper men. Such men are to be got by means of the ruler's own character. That character is to be cultivated by his treading in the ways of duty. And the treading those ways of duty is to be cultivated by the cherishing of benevolence.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
1 month 1 week ago
It has been said of old,...

It has been said of old, all roads lead to Rome. In paraphrased application to the tendencies of our day, it may truly be said that all roads lead to the great social reconstruction. The economic awakening of the workingman, and his realization of the necessity for concerted industrial action; the tendencies of modern education, especially in their application to the free development of the child; the spirit of growing unrest expressed through, and cultivated by, art and literature, all pave the way to the Open Road.

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Philosophical Maxims
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
2 months 2 weeks ago
"Here is the chalk."

"Here is the chalk." This is a truth; and here and the now hereby characterize the chalk so that we emphasize by saying; the chalk, which means "this." We take a scrap of paper and we write the truth down: "Here is the chalk." We lay this written statement beside the thing of which it is the truth. After the lecture is finished both doors are opened, the classroom is aired, there will be a draft, and the scrap of paper, let us suppose, will flutter out into the corridor. A student finds it on his way to the cafeteria, reads the sentence. "Here is the chalk," and ascertains that this is not true at all. Through the draft the truth has become an untruth. Strange that a truth should depend on a gust of wind. ... We have made the truth about the chalk independent of us and entrusted it to a scrap of paper.

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p. 29-30
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
3 months 3 weeks ago
The evil that is in the...

The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. There can be no true goodness, nor true love, without the utmost clear-sightedness.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emmanuel Levinas
Emmanuel Levinas
1 month 2 weeks ago
The moral consciousness can sustain the...

The moral consciousness can sustain the mocking gaze of the political man only if the certitude of peace dominates the evidence of war. Such a certitude is not obtained by a simple play of antitheses. The peace of empires issued from war rests on war. It does not restore to the alienated beings their lost identity. For that a primordial and original relation with being is needed.

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Totality and Infinity
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
2 months 3 weeks ago
I respect orders but I respect...

I respect orders but I respect myself too and I do not obey foolish rules made especially to humiliate me.

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Hugo to Slick and Georges, Act 3, sc. 2
Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
1 month 4 weeks ago
Poetry must have something in it...

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 2 weeks ago
We define only out of despair,...

We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade to the void.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
1 month 1 week ago
Our whole civilization, our entire culture...

Our whole civilization, our entire culture is concentrated in the mad demand for the most perfected weapons of slaughter. Ammunition! Ammunition! O, Lord, thou who rulest heaven and earth, thou God of love, of mercy and of justice, provide us with enough ammunition to destroy our enemy. Such is the prayer which is ascending daily to the Christian heaven.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
2 months 3 weeks 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
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
1 month 1 week ago
Phenomenology is not a philosophy; it...

Phenomenology is not a philosophy; it is a philosophical method, a tool. It is like an adjustable spanner that can be used for dismantling a refrigerator or a car, or used for hammering in nails, or even for knocking somebody out.

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p. 92
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 3 weeks ago
My cares and my...
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Main Content / General
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
2 weeks 6 days ago
When things fall out opportunely for...

When things fall out opportunely for the person concerned, he is not apt to be critical about the how or why, his own immediate personal convenience seeming a sufficient reason for the strangest oddities and revolutions in our sublunary things.

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The Sire de Maletroit's Door.
Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
3 months 1 week ago
For it is not death or...

For it is not death or pain that is to be feared, but the fear of pain or death.

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(Book II, ch. 1) Book II, ch. 1, 13.
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
2 months 3 weeks ago
The difference between the first- and...

The difference between the first- and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition - it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind - yet what miles away in the point of preciousness!

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To Henry Rutgers Marshall, 7 February 1899
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
2 months 3 weeks ago
How shall we define a god?...

How shall we define a god? Expressed in psychological terms (which are primary-there is no getting behind them) a god is something that gives us the peculiar kind of feeling which Professor Otto has called "numinous". Numinous feelings are the original god-stuff from which the theory-making mind extracts the individualised gods of the pantheon.

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"Meditation on the Moon"
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
3 months 3 weeks ago
There was no denying that he...

There was no denying that he would always be conscious of the fact that an Earthman was an Earthman. He couldn't help that. That was the result of a childhood immersed in an atmosphere of bigotry so complete that it was almost invisible, so entire that you accepted its axioms as second nature. Then you left it and saw it for what it was when you looked back.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
3 weeks 1 day ago
The invention of printing did away...

The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property.

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(p. 122)
Philosophical Maxims
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
1 month 2 weeks ago
No human acquisition is stable. Even...

No human acquisition is stable. Even what appears to us most completely won and consolidated can disappear in a few generations. This thing we call "civilization" - all these physical and moral comforts, all these conveniences, all these shelters, all these virtues and disciplines which have become habit now, on which we count, and which in effect constitute a repertory or system of securities which man made for himself like a raft in the initial shipwreck which living always is - all these securities are insecure securities which in the twinkling of an eye, at the least carelessness, escape from man's hands and vanish like phantoms.

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p. 25
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
2 months 3 weeks ago
Philosophical knowledge is the knowledge gained...

Philosophical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from concepts; mathematical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from the construction of concepts.

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A 713, B 741
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
2 months 3 weeks ago
The man, who in a fit….

The man, who in a fit of melancholy, kills himself today, would have wished to live had he waited a week.

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"Cato", 1764
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 2 weeks 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
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 3 weeks ago
I regard it as the irresistible...

I regard it as the irresistible effect of the Copernican astronomy to have made the theological scheme of redemption absolutely incredible.

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Quoted in Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson, the Mind On Fire (Univ. of Calif Press 1995), p. 124
Philosophical Maxims
George Santayana
George Santayana
1 month 2 weeks ago
... I once shook hands with...

... I once shook hands with Longfellow at a garden party in 1881; and I often saw Dr. Holmes, who was our neighbor in Beacon Street: but Emerson I never saw.

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p. 50
Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
3 months 1 week ago
It is difficulties that show what...

It is difficulties that show what men are.

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Book I, ch. 24, 1.
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Jaspers
Karl Jaspers
1 month 2 weeks ago
Our questions and answers are in...

Our questions and answers are in part determined by the historical tradition in which we find ourselves. We apprehend truth from our own source within the historical tradition. The content of our truth depends upon our appropriating the historical foundation. Our own power of generation lies in the rebirth of what has been handed down to us. If we do not wish to slip back, nothing must be forgotten; but if philosophising is to be genuine our thoughts must arise from our own source. Hence all appropriation of tradition proceeds from the intentness of our own life. The more determinedly I exist, as myself, within the conditions of the time, the more clearly I shall hear the language of the past, the nearer I shall feel the glow of its life.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay
1 week 6 days ago
As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily...

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

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p. 5
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
3 months 3 weeks ago
The Dantean conceptions of Inferno were...

The Dantean conceptions of Inferno were childish and unworthy of the Divine imagination: fire and torture. Boredom is much more subtle. The inner torture of a mind unable to escape itself in any way, condemned to fester in its own exuding mental pus for all time, is much more fitting. Oh, yes, my friend, we have been judged, and condemned, too, and this is not Heaven, but hell.

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Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
2 months 3 weeks ago
Truth that is naked is the...

Truth that is naked is the most beautiful, and the simpler its expression the deeper is the impression it makes; this is partly because it gets unobstructed hold of the hearer's mind without his being distracted by secondary thoughts, and partly because he feels that here he is not being corrupted or deceived by the arts of rhetoric, but that the whole effect is got from the thing itself.

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Philosophical Maxims
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
2 months 2 weeks ago
There is no information about the...

There is no information about the thingness of the thing without knowledge of the kind of truth in which the thing stands. But there is no information about this truth of the thing without knowledge of the thingness of the thing whose truth is in question. Where are we to get a foothold? The ground slips away under us. Perhaps we are already close to falling into the well. At any rate the housemaids are already laughing.

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p. 27
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 3 weeks ago
I do not believe that I...

I do not believe that I am now dreaming, but I cannot prove that I am not. I am, however, quite certain that I am having certain experiences, whether they be those of a dream or those of waking life.

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Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948), p. 172
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
2 months 3 weeks ago
...man first of all exists, encounters...

...man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world - and defines himself afterwards.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 3 weeks ago
Our words tend to conceal what...

Our words tend to conceal what is private and particular in our impressions, and to make us believe that different people live in a common world to a greater extent than is in fact the case.

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An Outline of Philosophy Ch.15 The Nature of our Knowledge of Physics, 1927
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
2 months 3 weeks ago
The finest workers in stone are...

The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.

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Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
3 months 3 weeks ago
I was once being interviewed by...

I was once being interviewed by Barbara Walters [...] In between two of the segments she asked me [...] "But what would you do if the doctor gave you only six months to live?" I said, "Type faster." This was widely quoted, but the "six months" was changed to "six minutes," which bothered me. It's "six months."

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Philosophical Maxims
Henri Bergson
Henri Bergson
1 month 2 weeks ago
The present contains nothing more than...

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

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Creative Evolution (1907), Chapter I, as translated by Arthur Mitchell (1911), p. 14.; italicized in the original.
Philosophical Maxims
Democritus
Democritus
2 months 2 weeks ago
You can tell the man who...

You can tell the man who rings true from the man who rings false, not by his deeds alone, but also by his desires.

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Philosophical Maxims
Lucretius
Lucretius
3 months 1 week ago
The living force….

The living force of his soul gained the day: on he passed far beyond the flaming walls of the world and traversed throughout in mind and spirit the immeasurable universe.

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Book I, lines 72-74 (tr. H. A. J. Munro); of Epicurus.
Philosophical Maxims
Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton
2 weeks 3 days ago
Kant's position is extremely subtle -...

Kant's position is extremely subtle - so subtle, indeed, that no commentator seems to agree with any other as to what it is.

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Some More -isms (p. 25)
Philosophical Maxims
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