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Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
6 months 2 weeks ago
Pyrrhus, when his friends congratulated to...

Pyrrhus, when his friends congratulated to him his victory over the Romans under Fabricius, but with great slaughter of his own side, said to them, "Yes; but if we have such another victory, we are undone".

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No. 193
Philosophical Maxims
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal
6 months 3 weeks ago
They men have corrupted this...

They men have corrupted this order by making profane things what they should make of holy things, because in fact, we believe scarcely any thing except which pleases us.

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Philosophical Maxims
Sydney Smith
Sydney Smith
2 months 3 weeks ago
The fact is that in order...

The fact is that in order to do any thing in this world worth doing, we must not stand shivering on the bank thinking of the cold and the danger, but jump in and scramble through as well as we can.

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Lecture IX : On the Conduct of the Understanding
Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
5 months 1 week ago
Accordingly, time logically supposes a continuous...

Accordingly, time logically supposes a continuous range of intensity of feeling. It follows then, from the definition of continuity, that when any particular kind of feeling is present, an infinitesimal continuum of all feelings differing infinitesimally from that, is present.

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Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
4 months 1 week ago
He and his tyrannicide! I am...

He and his tyrannicide! I am in a mad fury about these explosions. If that is the new world! Damn O'Donovan Rossa; damn him behind and before, above, below, and roundabout; damn, deracinate, and destroy him, root and branch, self and company, world without end. Amen. I write that for sport if you like, but I will pray in earnest, O Lord, if you cannot convert, kindly delete him!

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Letter to Sidney Colvin, 2 August 1881. Quoted in Terrorism and Literature Chapter 12 - "Parliament Is Burning" by Deaglán Ó Donghaile ISBN 9781316987292
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Jean Jacques Rousseau
6 months 2 weeks ago
A country cannot subsist well without...

A country cannot subsist well without liberty, nor liberty without virtue.

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As quoted in A Dictionary of Thoughts: Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Best Authors of the World, Both Ancient and Modern (1908) by Tryon Edwards, p. 301.
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
6 months 1 week ago
The most essential characteristic of scientific...

The most essential characteristic of scientific technique is that it proceeds from experiment, not from tradition. The experimental habit of mind is a difficult one for most people to maintain; indeed, the science of one generation has already become the tradition of the next...

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The Scientific Outlook, 1931
Philosophical Maxims
Gottfried Leibniz
Gottfried Leibniz
6 months 2 weeks ago
To love is to be delighted...

To love is to be delighted by the happiness of someone, or to experience pleasure upon the happiness of another. I define this as true love.

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The Elements of True Piety (c. 1677), The Shorter Leibniz Texts (2006) edited by Lloyd H. Strickland, p. 189
Philosophical Maxims
Horace
Horace
6 months 1 day ago
It is difficult….

It is difficult to speak of the universal specifically.

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Line 128
Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
6 months 3 weeks ago
In a quarrel for earth, turn...

In a quarrel for earth, turn not to earth.

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First Homily, as translated by John Burnaby (1955), p. 267
Philosophical Maxims
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
6 months 1 week ago
In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the...

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. [...] under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

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Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
5 months 2 weeks ago
We are sleeping on a volcano......

We are sleeping on a volcano... A wind of revolution blows, the storm is on the horizon.

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Speaking in the Chamber of Deputies just prior to to outbreak of revolution in Europe (1848).
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
5 months 1 week ago
Intelligence flourishes only in the ages...

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
2 months 1 week ago
Agreeably to the request of the...

Agreeably to the request of the House of Representatives, communicated in their resolution of the 16th instant, I proceed to state under the reserve therein expressed, information received touching an illegal combination of private individuals against the peace and safety of the Union, and a military expedition planned by them against the territories of a power in amity with the United States, with the measures I have pursued for suppressing the same....

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Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
6 months 1 week ago
Death is not an event in...

Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
6 months 1 week ago
All testing, all confirmation and...

All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments; no it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which our arguments have their life.

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Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
6 months 2 weeks ago
It is not the pleasure of...

It is not the pleasure of curiosity, nor the quiet of resolution, nor the raising of the spirit, nor victory of wit, nor faculty of speech that are the true ends of knowledge, but it is a restitution and reinvesting, in great part, of man to the sovereignty and power, for whensoever he shall be able to call the creatures by their true names, he shall again command them.

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Valerius Terminus: Of the Interpretation of Nature (ca. 1603), in Works, Vol. I, p. 83; The Works of Francis Bacon (1819), Vol. 2, p. 133
Philosophical Maxims
Cornel West
Cornel West
6 months 6 days ago
From whence are these "rights of...

From whence are these "rights of individuals" derived, and why should we care? Unless we presume the existence of some greater power that determines what is good, isn't it arbitrary to posit that human survival is more important than private property rights, an equally artificially construed concept? Isn't it arbitrary to assume that some sort of equality is preferable to a system where, say, the poor are assumed to have bad karma? If these 'rights of individuals' are derived only from shared humanity, then do 'individuals' (a thoroughly meaningless term, by the way), begin to lose them when they act inhumanely? And isn't it totally arbitrary to grant rights to humans rather than other creatures anyway?

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Lecture in New Haven, On Constructed Rights
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
5 months 4 days ago
I disclose my mysteries to those...

I disclose my mysteries to those who are worthy of my mysteries.

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Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
5 months 2 weeks ago
Morals are in all countries the...

Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.

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Philosophical Maxims
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
5 months 2 days ago
I know well that many of...

I know well that many of my readers do not think as I do. This also is most natural and confirms the theorem. For although my opinion turn out erroneous, there will always remain the fact that many of those dissentient readers have never given five minutes' thought to this complex matter. How are they going to think as I do? But by believing that they have a right to an opinion on the matter without previous effort to work one out for themselves, they prove patently that they belong to that absurd type of human being which I have called the "rebel mass." It is precisely what I mean by having one's soul obliterated, hermetically closed. Here it would be the special case of intellectual hermetism.

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Chap. VIII: The Masses Intervene In Everything, And Why Their Intervention Is Solely By Violence
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
7 months 1 week ago
Titles are an important part of...

Titles are an important part of a story and I take considerable care in choosing one. In fact, I cannot start a story until I have chosen a title.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
6 months 1 week ago
Suso has even left a diagrammatic...

Suso has even left a diagrammatic picture of the relations subsisting between Godhead, triune God and creatures. In this very curious and interesting drawing a chain of manifestation connects the mysterious symbol of the Divine Ground with the three Persons of the Trinity, and the Trinity in turn is connected in a descending scale with angels and human beings. These last, as the drawing vividly shows, may make one of two choices. They can either live the life of the outer man, the life of the separative selfhood; in which case they are lost (for, in the words of the Theologia Germanica, "nothing burns in hell but the self"). Or else they can identify themselves with the inner man, in which case it becomes possible for them, as Suso shows, to ascend again, through unitive knowledge, to the Trinity and even, beyond the Trinity, to the ultimate Unity of the Divine Ground.

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Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
4 months 3 weeks ago
The deepest definition of youth is...

The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.

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p. 285.
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
4 months 1 week ago
Aesthetic theories arose one hundred fifty...

Aesthetic theories arose one hundred fifty years ago among the wealthy classes of the Christian European world. ...And notwithstanding its obvious insolidity, nobody else's theory so pleased the cultured crowd or was accepted so readily and with such absence of criticism. It so suited the people of the upper classes that to this day, notwithstanding its entirely fantastic character and the arbitrary nature of its assertions, it is repeated by the educated and uneducated as though it were something indubitable and self-evident.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
6 months 1 week ago
...no matter how many instances of...

...no matter how many instances of white swans we may have observed, this does not justify the conclusion that all swans are white.

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Ch. 1 "A Survey of Some Fundamental Problems", Section 1: The Problem of Induction, p. 4.
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 3 weeks ago
Hatred comes from....
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Georg Büchner
Georg Büchner
5 months 1 week ago
Supreme power rests in the will...

Supreme power rests in the will of all or of the majority.

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Philosophical Maxims
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
3 months 3 weeks ago
When one is a stranger to...

When one is a stranger to oneself then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others.

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Philosophical Maxims
Francis Fukuyama
Francis Fukuyama
3 months 6 days ago
In the 1980s and 90s there...

In the 1980s and 90s there was an extension of the autonomy of individual property owners in... a movement towards neoliberalism represented by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and... by the Chicago school of economics that denigrated... the role of the state in the economy, that said the private markets would be able to solve most social distribution problems and the like. This was true in many ways. The world did become much richer in this period, but it also became much more unequal... Without adequate regulation and... effort to protect people against the excesses of market capitalism, you had people... left behind, even as their societies as a whole, grew. ...This ...became one of the triggers for the kind of populism we've seen arise in many rich countries.

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14:13
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Büchner
Georg Büchner
5 months 1 week ago
Dying people often become childish Act...

Dying people often become childish.

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Act II.
Philosophical Maxims
Leszek Kołakowski
Leszek Kołakowski
3 months 4 days ago
We sometimes imagine, under the influence...

We sometimes imagine, under the influence of Spenglerian philosophy or some other kind of "historical morphology," that we live in a similar age [to the Romans], the last witnesses of a condemned civilization. But condemned by whom? Not by God, but by some supposed "historical laws." For although we do not know any historical laws, we are in fact able of inventing them quite freely, and such laws, once invented, can then be realized in the form of self-fulfilling prophecies.

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Looking for the Barbarians
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
6 months 1 week ago
There is no logical impossibility in...

There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that "remembered" a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago.

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The Analysis of Mind (1921), Lecture IX: Memory, p. 159
Philosophical Maxims
Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry
2 months 1 week 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
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
6 months 1 week ago
All the great speakers were bad...

All the great speakers were bad speakers at first.

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Power
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
4 months 1 week ago
Never did Christ….

Never did Christ utter a single word attesting to a personal resurrection and a life beyond the grave.

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My Religion (1884), Ch. 8
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
2 months 3 weeks ago
No man has ever been so...

No man has ever been so far advanced by Fortune that she did not threaten him as greatly as she had previously indulged him.

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Philosophical Maxims
Lucretius
Lucretius
6 months 3 weeks ago
For every one….

For every one feels to what purpose he can use his own powers. Before the horns of a calf appear and sprout from his forehead, he butts with them when angry, and pushes passionately.

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Book V, lines 1033-1035 (tr. Bailey)
Philosophical Maxims
Rosa Luxemburg
Rosa Luxemburg
2 months 1 week ago
Legislative reform and revolution are not...

Legislative reform and revolution are not different methods of historic development that can be picked out at the pleasure from the counter of history, just as one chooses hot or cold sausages. Legislative reform and revolution are different factors in the development of class society. They condition and complement each other, and are at the same time reciprocally exclusive, as are the north and south poles, the bourgeoisie and proletariat.

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Ch. 8
Philosophical Maxims
Hilary Putnam
Hilary Putnam
4 months 2 weeks ago
The similarity between Marxism and neoconservativism...

The similarity between Marxism and neoconservativism might be expressed in the following way: both perspectives say that certain injustices can't be cured under our present system of political democracy and mixed economy. The Marxist concludes that we have to overthrow the present system and the neoconservative concludes that we have to live with the injustices. But they are both wrong.

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How Not to Solve Ethical Problems
Philosophical Maxims
Antonio Negri
Antonio Negri
3 months 1 week ago
Material production - the production, for...

Material production - the production, for example, or cars, televisions, clothing, and food - creates the means of social life. ... Immaterial production, by contrast, including the production of ideas, knowledges, communication, cooperation, and affective relations, tends to create not the means of social life but social life itself. (146)

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146
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
4 months 3 weeks ago
If you have had your attention...

If you have had your attention directed to the novelties in thought in your own lifetime, you will have observed that almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.

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Ch. 3: "The Century of Genius", pp. 67-68
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
2 months 1 week ago
Cultivators of the earth are the...

Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bands. As long therefore as they can find employment in this line, I would not convert them into mariners, artisans, or any thing else. But our citizens will find employment in this line till their numbers, and of course their productions, become too great for the demand both internal and foreign.

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Letter to John Jay (23 August 1785); published in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (1953), edited by Julian P. Boyd, vol. 8, p. 426
Philosophical Maxims
Porphyry
Porphyry
5 months 3 weeks ago
Soul, indeed, is a certain medium...

Soul, indeed, is a certain medium between an impartible essence, and an essence which is divisible about bodies. But intellect is an impartible essence alone. And qualities and material forms are divisible about bodies. Not everything which acts on another, effects that which it does effect by approximation and contact; but those natures which effect any thing by approximation and contact, use approximation accidentally.

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Philosophical Maxims
Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm
4 months 3 weeks ago
People have committed suicide because of...

People have committed suicide because of their failure to realize the passions for love, power, fame, revenge. Cases of suicide because of a lack of sexual satisfaction are virtually nonexistent.

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p. 30
Philosophical Maxims
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
3 months 3 weeks ago
Only in growth, reform, and change,...

Only in growth, reform, and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found.

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The Wave of the Future
Philosophical Maxims
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut
4 months 1 week ago
What should young people do with...

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

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Commencement Address to Hobart and William Smith Colleges, May 26, 1974
Philosophical Maxims
bell hooks
bell hooks
4 months 3 weeks ago
The moment we choose to love...

The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.

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Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
2 months 3 weeks ago
Whoever complains about the death of...

Whoever complains about the death of anyone, is complaining that he was a man. Everyone is bound by the same terms: he who is privileged to be born, is destined to die.

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Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
2 months 3 weeks ago
It is best....

It is best to bear what cannot be changed.

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Seneca, Moral Letters, 107. 9. As quoted in: Frank Breslin (Retired High-School Teacher) (December 21, 2017)
Philosophical Maxims
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