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Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
3 months 3 weeks ago
Good taste is either that which...

Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason. From this we can see how useful it is to employ reason in seeking out the laws of taste.

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E 69
Philosophical Maxims
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
4 months 1 week ago
It is not a question of...

It is not a question of the mass-man being a fool. On the contrary, to-day he is more clever, has more capacity of understanding than his fellow of any previous period. But that capacity is of no use to him; in reality, the vague feeling that he possesses it seems only to shut him up more within himself and keep him from using it. Once for all, he accepts the stock of commonplaces, prejudices, fag-ends of ideas or simply empty words which chance has piled up within his mind, and with a boldness only explicable by his ingenuousness, is prepared to impose them everywhere.... Why should he listen if he has within him all that is necessary? There is no reason now for listening, but rather for judging, pronouncing, deciding. There is no question concerning public life, in which he does not intervene, blind and deaf as he is, imposing his "opinions."

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Chap. VIII: The Masses Intervene In Everything, And Why Their Intervention Is Solely By Violence
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
5 months 2 weeks ago
Give all to love; Obey thy...

Give all to love; Obey thy heart; Friends, kindred, days, Estate, good fame, Plans, credit, and the muse; Nothing refuse.

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Give All to Love, st. 1
Philosophical Maxims
John Gray
John Gray
2 months 3 weeks ago
For a consistent naturalist science can...

For a consistent naturalist science can only be a refinement of animal exploration, a practice humans have devised for finding their way in the bit of the universe in which they have so far survived. Instead of thinking of science as a law-seeking activity, we can think of it as a tool humans use to cope with a world they will never understand.

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Sweet Morality (p. 224)
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
2 months ago
The intolerant can....
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Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
6 months 2 weeks ago
There are many aspects of the...

There are many aspects of the universe that still cannot be explained satisfactorily by science; but ignorance only implies ignorance that may someday be conquered. To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
3 months 4 weeks ago
The period of the actual revolution,...

The period of the actual revolution, the so-called transitory stage, must be the introduction, the prelude to the new social conditions. It is the threshold to the NEW LIFE, the new HOUSE OF MAN AND HUMANITY. As such it must be of the spirit of the new life, harmonious with the construction of the new edifice.

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Philosophical Maxims
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
4 months 2 weeks ago
It is justice, not charity, that...

It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world.

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Ch. 4
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
5 months 2 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
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
2 months 1 week ago
Patriotism ruins history. Conversation with Friedrich...

Patriotism ruins history.

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Conversation with Friedrich Wilhem Riemer
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
2 months 1 week ago
Complete, at the same time, was...

Complete, at the same time, was his confidence in his own judgment when it spoke to him decisively. He was one of those few that could believe and know as well as inquire and be of opinion. When I remember how much he admired intellectual force, how much he had of it himself, and yet how unconsciously and contentedly he gave others credit for superiority, I again see the healthy spirit of the genuine man.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Dewey
John Dewey
4 months 1 week ago
Because rhythm is a universal scheme...

Because rhythm is a universal scheme of existence, underlying all realization of order in change, it pervades all the arts, literary, musical, plastic and architectural, as well as the dance. Since man succeeds only as he adapts his behavior to the order of nature, his achievements and victories, as they ensue upon resistance and struggle, become the matrix of all esthetic subject-matter; in some sense they constitute the common pattern of art, the ultimate conditions of form. Their cumulative orders of succession become without express intent the means by which man commemorates and celebrates the most intense and full moments of his experience. Underneath the rhythm of every art and every work of art there lies, as a substratum in the depths of the subconsciousness, the basic pattern of the relations of the live creature to his environment.

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p. 156
Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
4 months 1 week ago
I know every numbskull will babble...

I know every numbskull will babble on about "black man," "maneater," "chance," and "retrospective interpretation," in order to banish something terribly inconvenient that might sully the familiar picture of childhood innocence. Ah, these good, efficient, healthy-minded people, they always remind me of those optimistic tadpoles who bask in a puddle in the sun, in the shallowest of waters, crowding together and amiably wriggling their tails, totally unaware that the next morning the puddle will have dried up and left them stranded. On a phallic dream he had as a young child.

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p. 14
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
4 months 3 days ago
The philosophy of Bergson, which is...

The philosophy of Bergson, which is a spiritualist restoration, essentially mystical, medieval, Quixotesque, has been called a demi-mondaine philosophy. Leave out the demi; call it mondaine, mundane. Mundane - yes, a philosophy for the world and not for philosophers, just as chemistry ought to be not for chemists alone. The world desires illusion (mundus vult decipi) - either the illusion antecedent to reason, which is poetry, or the illusion subsequent to reason, which is religion. And Machiavelli has said that whosoever wishes to delude will always find someone willing to be deluded. Blessed are they who are easily befooled!

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
5 months 3 weeks ago
Let us give Nature a chance;...

Let us give Nature a chance; she knows her business better than we do.

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Ch. 13
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
2 months 1 week ago
How does the poet speak to...

How does the poet speak to men with power, but by being still more a man than they?

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Burns.
Philosophical Maxims
Ernest Renan
Ernest Renan
2 months 1 week ago
The regeneration of the inferior…

The regeneration of the inferior or bastard races by the superior ones is consistent with God's plans for humanity. The man of the people, in our countries, is always a fallen aristocrat; his hands are made to handle the sword rather than the laborer's tools. He prefers warring to working, that is, he returns to his original calling.

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93, as translated by Asselin Charles, in "Colonial Discourse Since Christopher Columbus," Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 26, No. 2 (November 1995), 147
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
4 months 1 week ago
Wherefore I say unto you, All...

Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.

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(Matthew 12:31-32) (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Nikos Kazantzakis
Nikos Kazantzakis
1 month 2 weeks ago
I surrender myself to everything. I...

I surrender myself to everything. I love, I feel pain, I struggle. The world seems to me wider than the mind, my heart a dark and almighty mystery.

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Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
4 months 1 week ago
A mother-complex is not got rid...

A mother-complex is not got rid of by blindly reducing the mother to human proportions. Besides that we run the risk of dissolving the experience "Mother" into atoms, thus destroying something supremely valuable and throwing away the golden key which a good fairy laid in our cradle. That is why mankind has always instinctively added the pre-existent divine pair to the personal parents-the "god"father and "god"-mother of the newborn child-so that, from sheer unconsciousness or shortsighted rationalism, he should never forget himself so far as to invest his own parents with divinity.

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"Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype" (1939) In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious P.172
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
5 months 1 week ago
This book is intended as a...

This book is intended as a correlative history of the modern soul and of a new power to judge; a genealogy of the present scientifico-legal complex from which the power to punish derives its bases, justifications and rules, from which it extends its effects and by which it extends its effects and by which it masks its exorbitant singularity.

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Chapter One, The Spectacle of the Scaffold, pp.42
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 1 week ago
We suffer: the external world begins...

We suffer: the external world begins to exist . . . ; we suffer to excess: it vanishes. Pain instigates the world only to unmask its unreality.

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Philosophical Maxims
Susan Neiman
Susan Neiman
3 months 1 week ago
The picture of modern philosophy as...

The picture of modern philosophy as centered in epistemology and driven by the desire to ground our representations is so tenacious that some philosophers are prepared to bite the bullet and declare the effort simply wasted. Rorty, for example, finds it easier to reject modern philosophy altogether than to reject the standard accounts of its history. His narrative is more polemical than most, but it's a polemical version of the story told in most philosophy departments in the second half of the twentieth century. The story is one of tortuously decreasing interest. Philosophy, like some people, was prepared to accept boredom in exchange for certainty as it grew to middle age.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
5 months 2 weeks ago
Essentially, this war...is a great race-conflict,...

Essentially, this war...is a great race-conflict, a conflict of Teuton and Slav, in which certain other nations, England, France and Belgium, have been led into cooperation with the Slav. ... The conflict of Germany and Russia has been produced not by this or that diplomatic incident, but by primitive passions expressing themselves in the temper of the two races.

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War: The Offspring of Fear (1914), quoted in Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude, 1872-1921 (1996), p. 373
Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
4 months 3 weeks ago
Shakespeare's fault is not the greatest...

Shakespeare's fault is not the greatest into which a poet may fall. It merely indicates a deficiency of taste.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
4 months 1 week ago
The kingdom of heaven can be...

The kingdom of heaven can be compared to a king who wanted to settle accounts with his slaves.

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18:23
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
3 months 3 weeks ago
As the few adepts in such...

As the few adepts in such things well know, universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones. There is so much goodness and ingenuity in a raindrop that an apothecary wouldn't let it go for less than half-a-crown.

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B 33
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 1 week ago
To suffer is the great modality...

To suffer is the great modality of taking the world seriously.

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Philosophical Maxims
Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno
4 months 3 weeks ago
If all things are in common...

If all things are in common among friends, the most precious is Wisdom. What can Juno give which thou canst not receive from Wisdom? What mayest thou admire in Venus which thou mayest not also contemplate in Wisdom? Her beauty is not small, for the lord of all things taketh delight in her. Her I have loved and diligently sought from my youth up.

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As quoted in Giordano Bruno : His Life and Thought (1950) by Dorothea Waley Singer
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
2 months 1 week ago
The English are a dumb people....

The English are a dumb people. They can do great acts, but not describe them.

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Bk. III, ch. 5.
Philosophical Maxims
Peter Singer
Peter Singer
5 months 1 week ago
Speciesism is an attitude of prejudice...

Speciesism is an attitude of prejudice towards beings because they're not members of our species, so just as racism means that you're prejudiced against beings who are not members of your race and sexism means you're prejudiced against people of the other sex. So we humans tend to be speciesist in we think that any being that is a member of the species homo sapien just automatically has a higher moral status and is more important than any being that is a member of any other species, irrespective of the actual characteristics of those beings.

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Peter Singer - The Genius of Darwin: The Uncut Interviews - Richard Dawkins, 2009.
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
1 month 6 days ago
Science is international but its...

Science is international but its success is based on institutions, which are owned by nations. If therefore, we wish to promote culture we have to combine and to organize institutions with our own power and means.

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When asked the question, "Why a 'Jewish' University?" when Einstein was assisting Chaim Weizmann in fundraising for The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. | As quoted in [Albert Einstein, Letter "Einstein in Singapore." Manchester Guardian, October 12, 1929]
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
6 months 6 days ago
They who know the truth...

They who know the truth are not equal to those who love it, and they who love it are not equal to those who delight in it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
4 months 1 day ago
Scientists, animated by the purpose of...

Scientists, animated by the purpose of proving they are purposeless, constitute an interesting subject for study.

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Philosophical Maxims
Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Bakunin
4 months 2 weeks ago
We exhort the compromisers to open...

We exhort the compromisers to open their hearts to truth, to free themselves of their wretched and blind circumspection, of their intellectual arrogance, and of the servile fear which dries up their souls and paralyzes their movements. Let us therefore trust the eternal Spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternal source of all life. The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!

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"The Reaction in Germany" (1842) Often paraphrased as, "The urge to destroy is also a creative urge"
Philosophical Maxims
Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton
3 months 1 week ago
Take any aspect of the Western...

Take any aspect of the Western inheritance of which our ancestors were proud, and you will find university courses devoted to deconstructing it. Take any positive feature of our political and cultural inheritance, and you will find concerted efforts in both the media and the academy to place it in quotation marks, and make it look like an imposture or a deceit.

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(p. 40)
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
5 months 2 weeks ago
The child must be brought up...

The child must be brought up free (that he allow others to be free). He must learn to endure the restraint to which freedom subjects itself for its own preservation (experience no subordination to his command). Thus he must be disciplined. This precedes instruction. Training must continue without interruption. He must learn to do without things and to be cheerful about it. He must not be obliged to dissimulate, he must acquire immediate horror of lies, must learn so to respect the rights of men that they become an insurmountable wall for him. His instruction must be more negative. He must not learn religion before he knows morality. He must be refined, but not spoiled (pampered). He must learn to speak frankly, and must assume no false shame. Before adolescence he must not learn fine manners ; thoroughness is the chief thing. Thus he is crude longer, but earlier useful and capable.

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Part III : Selection on Education from Kant's other Writings, Ch. I Pedagogical Fragments, # 3
Philosophical Maxims
bell hooks
bell hooks
4 months ago
My own book Women, Race and...

My own book Women, Race and Class was one of many that were published during that era, including, to name only a few, This Bridge Called My Back, edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherrie Moraga, the work of bell hooks and Michelle Wallace, and the anthology All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies. So behind this concept of intersectionality is a rich history of struggle. A history of conversations among activists within movement formations, and with and among academics as well.

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Angela Davis Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (2015) p 19
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
6 months 1 week ago
Outside of that single fatality of...

Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Dewey
John Dewey
4 months 1 week ago
Art expresses, it does not state;...

Art expresses, it does not state; it is concerned with existences in their perceived qualities, not with conceptions symbolized in terms.

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p. 139
Philosophical Maxims
Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas
5 months 1 week ago
Critical social science attempts to determine...

Critical social science attempts to determine when theoretical statements grasp invariant regularities of social action as such and when they express ideologically frozen relations of dependence that can in principle be transformed.

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p. 310 as cited in: Dominick LaCapra (1983) Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language. p. 170
Philosophical Maxims
Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry
1 month 2 weeks ago
I think we must be careful...

I think we must be careful about too easily accepting, or being too easily grateful for, sacrifices made by others, especially if we have made none ourselves.

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Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
3 months 4 weeks ago
This is a strange -- and...

This is a strange -- and rather alarming -- realisation. For it clearly implies that masturbation is one of our highest faculties that human beings have developed. Many animals masturbate -- but never without the presence of another animal, or some similar stimulus. A human being can masturbate in an empty room: a triumph of pure imagination.

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p. 90
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
1 month 1 week ago
Things have no hold on the...

Things have no hold on the soul. They have no access to it, cannot move or direct it. It is moved and directed by itself alone. It takes the things before it and interprets them as it sees fit.

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(Hays translation) V, 19
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 1 week ago
The need for novelty is the...

The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.

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Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
5 months 2 weeks ago
God can make good use of...

God can make good use of all that happens, but the loss is real.

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Philosophical Maxims
Antonio Negri
Antonio Negri
2 months 1 week ago
In the contemporary economy, however, and...

In the contemporary economy, however, and with the labor relations of post-Fordism, mobility increasingly defines the labor market as a whole, and all categories are tending toward the condition of mobility and cultural mixture common to the migrant.

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130
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
3 months 1 week ago
We humans are an extremely important...

We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb, because it is through us - through our brains, our symbolic culture and our technology - that the explosion may proceed to the next stage and reverberate through deep space.

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Ch. 5: The Replication Bomb
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
5 months 1 week ago
The small are always dependent on...

The small are always dependent on the great; they are "small" precisely because they think they are independent. The great thinker is one who can hear what is greatest in the work of other "greats" and who can transform it in an original manner.

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p. 35
Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
6 months 2 weeks ago
The bodies of which the world...

The bodies of which the world is composed are solids, and therefore have three dimensions. Now, three is the most perfect number, it is the first of numbers, for of one we do not speak as a number, of two we say both, but three is the first number of which we say all. Moreover, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

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Philosophical Maxims
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