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John Gray
John Gray
1 week 4 days ago
There is no more consensus on...

There is no more consensus on what justice means than there is on the character of the good. If anything, there is less. Among the virtues, justice is one of the most shaped by convention. For that reason it is among the most changeable.

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'Modus Vivendi' (p.34)
Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
3 months 1 week ago
'Tis evident, that sympathy, or the...

Tis evident, that sympathy, or the communication of passions, takes place among animals, no less than among men. Fear, anger, courage and other affections are frequently communicated from one animal to another [...] And 'tis remarkable, that tho' almost all animals use in play the same member, and nearly the same action as in fighting; a lion, a tyger, a cat their paws; an ox his homs; a dog his teeth; a horse his heels: Yet they most carefully avoid harming their companion, even tho' they have nothing to fear from his resentment; which is an evident proof of the sense brutes have of each other's pain and pleasure.

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Part 2, Section 12
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
2 months 4 weeks ago
Religion is, as it were, the...

Religion is, as it were, the calm bottom of the sea at its deepest point, which remains calm however high the waves on the surface may be.

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p. 53e
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
3 months 3 weeks ago
To be fond of learning is...

To be fond of learning is to be near to knowledge. To practice with vigor is to be near to magnanimity. To possess the feeling of shame is to be near to energy.

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Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
3 months 1 week ago
When you see a person squirming...

When you see a person squirming in the clutches of the Law, say to him: "Brother, get things straight. You let the Law talk to your conscience. Make it talk to your flesh.

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Chapter 2, Verse 19
Philosophical Maxims
Boethius
Boethius
3 months 3 weeks ago
Music is associated not only with...

Music is associated not only with speculation but with morality. When rhythms and modes reach an intellect through the ear, they doubtless affect and reshape that mind according to their particular character.

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Philosophical Maxims
Plato
Plato
4 months 2 days ago
Perception and knowledge could never be...

Perception and knowledge could never be the same.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
1 month 2 weeks ago
The student of the history of...

The student of the history of progressive thought is well aware that every idea in its early stages has been misrepresented, and the adherents of such ideas have been maligned and persecuted...The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man's right to his body, or woman's right to her soul. If, then, from time immemorial, the New has met with opposition and condemnation, why should my beliefs be exempt from a crown of thorns?

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay
3 weeks 2 days ago
It will hardly be disputed, I...

It will hardly be disputed, I suppose, that the department of literature in which the Eastern writers stand highest is poetry. And I certainly never met with any orientalist who ventured to maintain that the Arabic and Sanscrit poetry could be compared to that of the great European nations. But when we pass from works of imagination to works in which facts are recorded and general principles investigated, the superiority of the Europeans becomes absolutely immeasurable. It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England. In every branch of physical or moral philosophy, the relative position of the two nations is nearly the same.

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Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
1 month 4 weeks ago
What will be the influence of...

What will be the influence of communist society on the family? It will transform the relations between the sexes into a purely private matter which concerns only the persons involved and into which society has no occasion to intervene. It can do this since it does away with private property and educates children on a communal basis, and in this way removes the two bases of traditional marriage - the dependence rooted in private property, of the women on the man, and of the children on the parents.

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Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
2 months ago
Feeling which has not yet emerged...

Feeling which has not yet emerged into immediate consciousness is already affectible and already affected. In fact, this is habit, by virtue of which an idea is brought up into the present consciousness by a bond that has already been established between it and another idea while it was still in futuro.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 month 2 days ago
To the blind all things are...

To the blind all things are sudden.

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(p. 41)
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
4 months 1 day ago
The papers were always talking about...

The papers were always talking about the debt owed to society. According to them, it had to be paid. But that doesn't speak to the imagination. What really counted was the possibility of escape, a leap to freedom, out of the implacable ritual, a wild run for it that would give whatever chance for hope there was. Of course, hope meant being cut down on some street corner, as you ran like mad, by a random bullet. But when I really thought it through, nothing was going to allow me such a luxury. Everything was against it; I would just be caught up in the machinery again.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 months 4 days ago
A good indignation brings out all...

A good indignation brings out all one's powers.

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1841
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
4 months 1 day ago
Great novelists are philosopher novelists

Great novelists are philosopher novelists, that is, the contrary of thesis-writers.

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Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
3 months 1 week ago
To turn one's eyes away from...

To turn one's eyes away from Jesus means to turn them to the Law.

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Chapter 2
Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
3 months 2 weeks ago
Be bold to look towards God...

Be bold to look towards God and say, "Use me henceforward for whatever you want; I am of one mind with you; I am yours; I refuse nothing that seems good to you; lead me where you will; wrap me in what clothes you will."

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Book II, ch. 16, 42
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
1 month 2 weeks ago
Corruption of politics has nothing to...

Corruption of politics has nothing to do with the morals, or the laxity of morals, of various political personalities. Its cause is altogether a material one. Politics is the reflex of the business and industrial world, the mottos of which are: "To take is more blessed than to give"; "buy cheap and sell dear"; "one soiled hand washes the other." There is no hope even that woman, with her right to vote, will ever purify politics.

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Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
3 months 3 days ago
You never know how much you...

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose that you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn't you then first discover how much you really trusted it? ... Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief.

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Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
4 months 1 day ago
"This is the truth," we say....

"This is the truth," we say. "You can discuss it as much as you want; we aren't interested. But in a few years there'll be the police who will show you we are right."

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Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
3 months 5 days ago
We do not directly go about...

We do not directly go about the execution of the purpose that thrills us, but shut our doors behind us, and ramble with prepared minds, as if the half were already done. Our resolution is taking root or hold on the earth then, as seeds first send a shoot downward, which is fed by their own albumen, ere they send one upwards to the light.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 61
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
1 month 4 days ago
Science has adapted itself entirely to...

Science has adapted itself entirely to the wealthy classes and accordingly has set itself to heal those who can afford everything, and it prescribes the same methods for those who have nothing to spare.

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Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
3 months 1 week ago
Morals excite passions, and produce or...

Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason.

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Part 1, Section 1
Philosophical Maxims
Charles Fourier
Charles Fourier
Just now
The Turks teach women that they...

The Turks teach women that they have no souls, and are unworthy to enter paradise. The French would persuade them that they have no intellects, and are not made to engage in mental labors, and to tread the paths of art and science.

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The Theory of Social Organization
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
3 months 1 week ago
It is more of a job...

It is more of a job to interpret the interpretations than to interpret the things, and there are more books about books than about any other subject: we do nothing but write glosses about each other.

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Ch. 13
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
4 weeks ago
Misfortune shows....
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Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
4 months 5 days ago
Let us suppose that a man...

Let us suppose that a man believes in eternal life on Christ's word. In that case he believes without any fuss about being profound and searching and philosophical and racking his brains.

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Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
1 month 2 weeks ago
When we are the victims of...

When we are the victims of illusion we do not feel it to be an illusion but a reality. It is the same perhaps with evil. Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty.

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p. 64
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
2 months 4 weeks ago
The particularity (Jeweiligkeit) of the places...

The particularity (Jeweiligkeit) of the places and their manifoldness are grounded in space, and the particularity of the time points is grounded in time. That basic characteristic of the thing, that essential determination of the thingness of the thing to be this one (je dieses), is grounded in the essence of space and time. Our question "What is a thing?" includes, therefore, the questions "What is space?" and "What is time?" It is customary The particularity (Jeweiligkeit) os the places.

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p. 16
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
3 months 5 days ago
I now saw, that a science...

I now saw, that a science is either deductive or experimental, according as, in the province it deals with, the effects of causes when conjoined, are or are not the sums of the effects which the same causes produce when separate. It followed that politics must be a deductive science. It thus appeared, that both Macaulay and my father were wrong; the one in assimilating the method of philosophising in politics to the purely experimental method of chemistry; while the other, though right in adopting a deductive method, had made a wrong selection of one, having taken as the type of deduction, not the appropriate process, that of the deductive branches of natural philosophy, but the inappropriate one of pure geometry, which, not being a science of causation at all, does not require or admit of any summing-up of effects.

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(pp. 160-161)
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 months 4 days ago
Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor...

Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.

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Success
Philosophical Maxims
Proclus
Proclus
2 months 2 weeks ago
The Platonic doctrine of Ideas has...

The Platonic doctrine of Ideas has been, in all ages, the derision of the vulgar, and the admiration of the wife. Indeed, if we consider that ideas are the most sublime objects of speculation, and that their nature is no less bright in itself, than difficult to investigate, this opposition in the conduct of mankind will be natural and necessary; for, from our connection with a material nature, our intellectual eye, previous to the irradiations of science, is as ill adapted to objects the most splendid of all, "as the eyes of bats to the light of day.

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A Dissertation on the Doctrine of Ideas, &c." Footnote: see second book of Aristotle's Metaphysics.
Philosophical Maxims
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
3 months 3 days ago
Since it is always the same...

Since it is always the same person whose mind thinks, wills, and judges, the autonomous nature of these activities has created great difficulties. Reason's inability to move the will, plus the fact that thinking can only "understand" what is past what neither remove it nor "rejuvenate it" ... have led to the various doctrines asserting the mind's impotence and the force of the irrational, in brief to Hume's famous dictum that "Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions," that is, to a rather simple-minded reversal of the Platonic notion of reason's uncontested rulership in the household of the soul. What is so remarkable in all these theories and doctrines is their implicit monism, the claim that behind the obvious multiplicity of the world's appearances and, even more pertinently to our context, behind the obvious plurality of man's faculties and abilities, there must exist a oneness - the old hen pan, "the all is one" - either a single source or a single ruler.

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Philosophical Maxims
René Descartes
René Descartes
3 months 1 week ago
M. Desargues puts me under obligations...

M. Desargues puts me under obligations on account of the pains that it has pleased him to have in me, in that he shows that he is sorry that I do not wish to study more in geometry, but I have resolved to quit only abstract geometry, that is to say, the consideration of questions which serve only to exercise the mind, and this, in order to study another kind of geometry, which has for its object the explanation of the phenomena of nature... You know that all my physics is nothing else than geometry.

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Letter to Marin Mersenne (July 27, 1638) as quoted by Florian Cajori, A History of Mathematics (1893) letter dated in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Vol. 3, The Correspondence (1991) ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch
Philosophical Maxims
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
2 months 2 days ago
Nothing could be more natural than...

Nothing could be more natural than the developement of the passions, nor more striking than the views of the human heart. What delicate struggles! and uncommonly pretty turns of thought!

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Mary: A Fiction
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months ago
I have all the defects of...

I have all the defects of other people yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 month 2 days ago
The present is always invisible because...

The present is always invisible because it's environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.

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Mademoiselle: the magazine for the smart young woman, Volume 64, 1966, p. 114
Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
3 months 2 weeks ago
Yet God hath not only granted...

Yet God hath not only granted these faculties, by which we may bear every event without being depressed or broken by it, but like a good prince and a true father, hath placed their exercise above restraint, compulsion, or hindrance, and wholly within our own control.

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Book I, ch. 6, 40.
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
4 months 2 days ago
There's something about a pious man...

There's something about a pious man such as he. He will cheerfully cut your throat if it suits him, but he will hesitate to endanger the welfare of your immaterial and problematical soul.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 months 4 days ago
So nigh is grandeur to our...

So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, Thou must, The youth replies, I can.

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Voluntaries, st. 3
Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
2 months 1 week ago
In the United States, the majority...

In the United States, the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own.

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Book One, Chapter II.
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 months 4 days ago
A mollusk is a cheap edition...

A mollusk is a cheap edition [of man] with a suppression of the costlier illustrations, designed for dingy circulation, for shelving in an oyster-bank or among the seaweed.

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Power and Laws of Thought, c. 1870
Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
2 months 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
chanakya
chanakya
1 week 6 days ago
The world's biggest power is the...

The world's biggest power is the youth and beauty of a woman.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months ago
I pride myself on my capacity...

I pride myself on my capacity to perceive the transitory character of everything. An odd gift which has spoiled all my joys; better: all my sensations.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 months 4 days ago
I have heard with admiring submission...

I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared "that the sense of being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow".

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Social Aims
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
4 months 1 day ago
He discovered the cruel paradox by...

He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love — first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

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Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
1 month 4 days ago
The whole life of the upper...

The whole life of the upper classes is a constant inconsistency. The more delicate a man's conscience is, the more painful this contradiction is to him.

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Chapter V, Contradiction Between our Life and our Christian Conscience
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
3 months 1 week ago
In England, and in all Roman...

In England, and in all Roman Catholic countries, the lottery of the church is in reality much more advantageous than is necessary.

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Chapter X, Part II, p. 155.
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
3 months 3 days ago
It is for the sake of...

It is for the sake of order that I seduced Clytemnestra, for the sake of order that I killed my king. I wanted for order to rule and that it rule through me. I have lived without desire, without love, without hope: I made order. Oh! terrible and divine passion!

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Aegistheus, Act 2
Philosophical Maxims
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