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Albert Camus
Albert Camus
4 months ago
Real fulfillment, for the man who...

Real fulfillment, for the man who allows absolutely free rein to his desires, and who must dominate everything, lies in hatred.

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Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 month 2 weeks ago
It has often been said that...

It has often been said that every man who has suffered misfortunes prefers to be himself, even with his misfortunes, rather than to be someone else without them. For unfortunate men, when they preserve their normality in their misfortune - that is to say, when they endeavor to persist in their own being - prefer misfortune to non-existence. For myself I can say that when a as a youth, and even as a child, I remained unmoved when shown the most moving pictures of hell, for even then nothing appeared to me quite so horrible as nothingness itself. It was a furious hunger of being that possessed me, an appetite for divinity, as one of our ascetics [San Juan de los Angeles] has put it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 4 weeks ago
Reality is a creation of our...

Reality is a creation of our excesses.

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Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
4 weeks 1 day ago
The cruelest lies are often told...

The cruelest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his teeth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator. And how many loves have perished because, from pride, or spite, or diffidence, or that unmanly shame which withholds a man from daring to betray emotion, a lover, at the critical point of the relation, has but hung his head and held his tongue?

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Truth of Intercourse.
Philosophical Maxims
John Searle
John Searle
1 month 6 days ago
The general nature of the speech...

The general nature of the speech act fallacy can be stated as follows, using "good" as our example. Calling something good is characteristically praising or commending or recommending it, etc. But it is a fallacy to infer from this that the meaning of "good" is explained by saying it is used to perform the act of commendation.

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P. 139.
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Browne
Thomas Browne
2 months 1 week ago
Darkness and light divide the course...

Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares with memory, a great part even of our living beings; we slightly remember our felicities, and the smartest strokes of affliction leave but short smart upon us. Sense endureth no extremities, and sorrows destroy us or themselves. To weep into stones are fables.

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Chapter V
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
3 months 3 weeks ago
When you serve your mother...

When you serve your mother and father it is okay to try to correct them once in a while. But if you see that they are not going to listen to you, keep your respect for them and don't distance yourself from them. Work without complaining.

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Philosophical Maxims
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
3 weeks 5 days ago
In politics continental Europe was infantile...

In politics continental Europe was infantile - horrifying. What America lacked, for all its political stability, was the capacity to enjoy intellectual pleasures as though they were sensual pleasures. This is what Europe offered, or was said to offer.

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"My Paris" (1983), p. 235
Philosophical Maxims
G. E. Moore
G. E. Moore
1 month 4 weeks ago
By far the most valuable things,...

By far the most valuable things, which we know or can imagine, are certain states of consciousness, which may roughly be described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects. No one, probably, who has asked himself the question, has ever doubted that personal affection and the appreciation of what is beautiful in Art or Nature, are good in themselves; nor, if we consider strictly what things are worth having purely for their own sakes, does it appear probable that any one will think that anything else has nearly so much value as the things which are included under these two heads.

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Principia Ethica (1903; revised edition, Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
1 month 3 weeks ago
To live one's love and hatred,...

To live one's love and hatred, to live that which one is means defeat, resignation, and death. The crimes of society, the hell that man has made or man become unconquerable cosmic forces.

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p. 61
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
1 month 3 weeks ago
We have reached the point where...

We have reached the point where the Objective Logic turns into the Subjective Logic, or, where subjectivity emerges as the true form of objectivity. We may sum up Hegel's analysis in the following schema: The true form of reality requires freedom. Freedom requires self-consciousness and knowledge of the truth. Self-consciousness and knowledge of the truth are the essentials of the subject. The form of reality must be conceived as subject.

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P. 154-155
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 months 3 days ago
Act, if you like,-but you do...

Act, if you like,-but you do it at your peril. Men's actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action. What they have done commits and enforces them to do the same again. The first act, which was to be an experiment, becomes a sacrament. The fiery reformer embodies his aspiration in some rite or covenant, and he and his friends cleave to the form, and lose the aspiration. The Quaker has established Quakerism, the Shaker has established his monastery and his dance; and, although each prates of spirit, there is no spirit, but repetition, which is anti-spiritual.

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Goethe; or, the Writer
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 2 weeks ago
People seem not to see...
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Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 4 days ago
I should say that the universe...

I should say that the universe is just there, and that is all.

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BBC Radio Debate on the Existence of God, Bertrand Russell v. Frederick Copleston, 1948
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 week 5 days ago
Universal Humanism...

Universal Humanism:

1) Preserve Life (end)

Precludes those who think they get to decide who lives and who dies.

2) Avoid and limit suffering (means)

Precludes those who use absurd exceptions to turn their backs on functional rules.

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Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
3 months 2 weeks ago
Were I a nightingale, I would...

Were I a nightingale, I would act the part of a nightingale; were I a swan, the part of a swan.

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Book I, ch. 16, 20.
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 4 days ago
Organic life, we are told, has...

Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance.

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Ch. 6: On the Scientific Method in Philosophy
Philosophical Maxims
Judith Butler
Judith Butler
1 month 5 days ago
The move from a structuralist account...

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

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"Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time" (1997), which received first place in the Philosophy and Literature Bad Writing Contest
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas
3 months 3 weeks ago
The greatness of the human being...

The greatness of the human being consists in this: that it is capable of the universe.

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q. 1, art. 2, ad 4
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 month 1 day ago
Language is a sense, like touch.

Language is a sense, like touch.

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(p. 271)
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Jean Jacques Rousseau
3 months 6 days ago
Much more naturally than you do:...

Much more naturally than you do: because flight is a much more natural consequence of fear than of hate. He doesn't flee men because he hates them, but because he is afraid of them. He doesn't flee them in order to harm them, but to try o escape the harm they wish to do to him. They, on the contrary, don't seek him through friendship, but through hate. They seek him and he flees from them just as in the wilderness of Africa, where there are few men and many tigers, the men flee the tigers, the men flee the tigers, and the tigers seek the men.

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Second Dialogue; translated by Judith R. Bush, Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 month 2 weeks ago
Passion is like suffering, and like...

Passion is like suffering, and like suffering it creates its object. It is easier for the fire to find something to burn than for something combustible to find the fire.

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Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
3 months 3 weeks ago
The superior man is modest...

The superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions. James Legge translation. Variant translations: The superior man acts before he speaks, and afterwards speaks according to his actions. The greater man does not boast of himself, But does what he must do. A good man does not give orders, but leads by example.

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Philosophical Maxims
David Pearce
David Pearce
1 week 5 days ago
[L]ike nonhuman animals in human factory...

[L]ike nonhuman animals in human factory farms, free-living nonhumans who are starving - or being disembowelled, asphyxiated or eaten alive - cannot console themselves by chanting the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism. The moral case for helping other sentient beings, regardless or race or species, does not rest on the distress their plight does (or doesn't) cause spectators.

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Reply to Meet the people who want to turn predators into herbivores, TreeHugger, 2 Apr. 2015
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
3 months 1 week ago
But men must know that in...

But men must know that in this theater of man's life it is reserved only for God and angels to be lookers on.

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Book II, xx, 8
Philosophical Maxims
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
2 weeks 2 days ago
By and large, mothers and housewives...

By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.

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Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
4 months ago
An intellectual is someone whose mind...

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 month 1 day ago
The metropolis today is a classroom;...

The metropolis today is a classroom; the ads are its teachers. The traditional classroom is an obsolete detention home, a feudal dungeon.

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(p. 12)
Philosophical Maxims
Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm
1 month 2 weeks ago
Envy, jealousy, ambition, any kind of...

Envy, jealousy, ambition, any kind of greed are passions; love is an action, the practice of human power, which can be practiced only in freedom and never as a result of compulsion. Love is an activity, not a passive affect; it is a "standing in," not a "falling for." In the most general way, the active character of love can be described by stating that love is primarily giving, not receiving.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
3 months 4 days ago
Ramsgate is full of Jews and...

Ramsgate is full of Jews and fleas.

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MEKOR IV, 490, 25 August 1879
Philosophical Maxims
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
2 months 1 day ago
Every political good carried to the...

Every political good carried to the extreme must be productive of evil.

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The French Revolution, Bk. V, ch. 4
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
1 month 3 weeks ago
The Value or WORTH of a...

The Value or WORTH of a man, is as of all other things, his Price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his Power...

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The First Part, Chapter 10, p. 42
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
2 months 4 days ago
The zealous never fail to draw...

The zealous never fail to draw political inferences from religious tenets, by which they interest the magistrate in the dispute; and then to the heat of a religious fervour is added the fury of a party zeal. All intercourse is cut off between the parties. They lose all knowledge of each other, tho' countrymen and neighbours, and are therefore easily imposed upon with the most absurd stories concerning each other's opinions and practices. They judge of the hatred of the adverse side by their own. Then fear is added to their hatred; and preventive injuries arise from their fear. The remembrance of the past, the dread of the future, the present ill, will join together to urge them forward to the most violent courses.Such is the manner of proceeding of religious parties towards each other.

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Volume II, p. 147
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
3 months 3 days ago
And suddenly I had an inkling...

And suddenly I had an inkling of what it must feel like to be mad.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
1 month 3 weeks ago
Why do ye also transgress the...

Why do ye also transgress the commandment of God by your tradition? For God commanded, saying, Honour thy father and mother: and, He that curseth father or mother, let him die the death. But ye say, Whosoever shall say to his father or his mother, It is a gift, by whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me; And honour not his father or his mother, he shall be free. Thus have ye made the commandment of God of none effect by your tradition. Ye hypocrites, well did Esaias prophesy of you, saying, This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me. But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.

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15:3-9 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
1 month 2 weeks ago
The human soul has need of...

The human soul has need of consented obedience and of liberty. Consented obedience is what one concedes to an authority because one judges it to be legitimate. It is not possible in relation to a political power established by conquest or coup d'etat nor to an economic power based upon money. Liberty is the power of choice within the latitude left between the direct constraint of natural forces and the authority accepted as legitimate. The latitude should be sufficiently wide for liberty to be more than a fiction, but it should include only what is innocent and should never be wide enough to permit certain kinds of crime.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 month 1 day ago
Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence...

Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.

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(p. 26)
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
4 months 6 days ago
As a genius of construction man...
As a genius of construction man raises himself far above the bee in the following way: whereas the bee builds with wax that he gathers from nature, man builds with the far more delicate conceptual material which he first has to manufacture from himself.
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Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
1 month 2 weeks ago
The mentality of mankind and the...

The mentality of mankind and the language of mankind created each other. If we like to assume the rise of language as a given fact, then it is not going too far to say that the souls of men are the gift from language to mankind. The account of the sixth day should be written: He gave them speech, and they became souls.

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Modes of Thought (1938).
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
4 weeks 1 day ago
Perpetual devotion to what a man...

Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.

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An Apology for Idlers.
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
3 months 4 days ago
The same law that shapes the...

The same law that shapes the earth-star shapes the snow-star. As surely as the petals of a flower are fixed, each of these countless snow-stars comes whirling to earth...these glorious spangles, the sweeping of heaven's floor.

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January 5, 1856
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
2 months 4 days ago
Reflect how you are to govern...

Reflect how you are to govern a people who think they ought to be free, and think they are not. Your scheme yields no revenue; it yields nothing but discontent, disorder, disobedience; and such is the state of America, that after wading up to your eyes in blood, you could only end just where you begun; that is, to tax where no revenue is to be found, to - my voice fails me; my inclination indeed carries me no farther - all is confusion beyond it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 month 2 weeks ago
To say that everything is idea...

To say that everything is idea or that everything is spirit, is the same as saying that everything is matter or that everything is energy, for if everything is idea or spirit, just as my consciousness is, it is not plain why the diamond should not endure for ever, if my consciousness, because it is idea or spirit, endures forever.

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Philosophical Maxims
George Berkeley
George Berkeley
2 months 1 week ago
For no one's authority ought to...

For no one's authority ought to rank so high as to set a value on his words and terms even though nothing clear and determinate lies behind them.

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Paragraph 1
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
3 months 4 days ago
I remember the very place in...

I remember the very place in Hyde Park where, in my fourteenth year, on the eve of leaving my father's house for a long absence, he told me that I should find, as I got acquainted with new people, that I had been taught many things which youths of my age did not commonly know; and that many persons would be disposed to talk to me of this, and to compliment me upon it. What other things he said on this topic I remember very imperfectly; but he wound up by saying, that whatever I knew more than others, could not be ascribed to any merit in me, but to the very unusual advantage which had fallen to my lot.

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(p. 34)
Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
2 months ago
Consciousness must essentially cover an interval...

Consciousness must essentially cover an interval of time; for if it did not, we could gain no knowledge of time, and not merely no veracious cognition of it, but no conception whatever. We are therefore, forced to say that we are immediately conscious through an infinitesimal interval of time.

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Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
4 months 6 days ago
Socialism itself can hope to exist...
Socialism itself can hope to exist only for brief periods here and there, and then only through the exercise of the extremest terrorism. For this reason it is secretly preparing itself for rule through fear and is driving the word 'justice' into the heads of the half-educated masses like a nail so as to rob them of their reason... and to create in them a good conscience for the evil game they are to play.
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Philosophical Maxims
George Santayana
George Santayana
1 month 3 weeks ago
To covet truth is a very...

To covet truth is a very distinguished passion.

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p. 48
Philosophical Maxims
Vandana Shiva
Vandana Shiva
2 weeks 3 days ago
Simplicity and nonviolence are the basis...

Simplicity and nonviolence are the basis of an economy of wellbeing, and such an economy must be localised.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 4 weeks ago
I have never taken myself for...

I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness.

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Philosophical Maxims
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