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John Locke
John Locke
2 months 2 weeks ago
Let him sensibly perceive, that the...

Let him sensibly perceive, that the kindness he shews to others, is no ill husbandry for himself; but that it brings a return in kindness both from those that receive it, and those who look on. Make this a contest among children, who shall out-do one another in this way: and by this means, by a constant practise, children having made it easy to themselves to part with what they have, good nature may be settled in them into a habit, and they may take pleasure, and pique themselves in being kind, liberal and civil, to others.

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Sec. 110
Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
1 month 3 weeks ago
There is not a Musselman alive...

There is not a Musselman alive who would not imagine that he was performing an action pleasing to God and his Holy Prophet by exterminating every Christian on earth, while the Christians are scarcely more tolerant on their side.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 2 weeks ago
Hitch your wagon to a star....

Hitch your wagon to a star.

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Civilization
Philosophical Maxims
Epicurus
Epicurus
3 months 6 days ago
Of our desires some are natural...

Of our desires some are natural and necessary, others are natural but not necessary; and others are neither natural nor necessary, but are due to groundless opinion.

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Philosophical Maxims
Novalis
Novalis
1 month 2 weeks ago
Imagination places the future world for...

Imagination places the future world for us either above or below or in reincarnation. We dream of travels throughout the universe: is not the universe within us? We do not know the depths of our spirit. The mysterious path leads within. In us, or nowhere, lies eternity with its worlds, the past and the future. Fragment No. 16 Variant translations: We dream of a journey through the universe. But is the universe then not in us? We do not know the depths of our spirit. Inward goes the secret path. Eternity with its worlds, the past and the future, is in us or nowhere.

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As translated in "Bildung in Early German Romanticism" by Frederick C. Beiser, in Philosophers on Education : Historical Perspectives (1998) by Amélie Rorty, p. 294
Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
2 months 2 weeks ago
I have always thought the actions...

I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.

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Book 1, Ch. 3, sec. 3 Variant: The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 2 weeks ago
We plant trees, we build stone...

We plant trees, we build stone houses, we redeem the waste, we make prospective laws, we found colleges and hospitals, for remote generations.

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Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
3 months 6 days ago
The Superior Man is all-embracing...

The Superior Man is all-embracing and not partial. The inferior man is partial and not all-embracing.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Browne
Thomas Browne
1 month 3 weeks ago
No man can justly censure or...

No man can justly censure or condemn another, because indeed no man truly knows another.

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Section 4
Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
2 months 2 weeks ago
The charlatan takes very different shapes...

The charlatan takes very different shapes according to circumstances; but at bottom he is a man who cares nothing about knowledge for its own sake, and only strives to gain the semblance of it that he may use it for his own personal ends, which are always selfish and material.

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"Similes, Parables and Fables" Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. 2, § 394
Philosophical Maxims
Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale
4 weeks ago
In one sense, I do believe...

In one sense, I do believe I am "like a man," as Parthe [the writer's sister] says. But how? In having sympathy. ... Women crave for being loved, not for loving. They scream out at you for sympathy all day long, they are incapable of giving any in return, for they cannot remember your affairs long enough to do so. ... They cannot state a fact accurately to another, nor can that other attend to it accurately enough for it to become information. Now is not all this the result of want of sympathy?

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Letter to Madame Mohl
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
3 months 2 weeks ago
There are limits beyond which your...

There are limits beyond which your folly will not carry you. I am glad of that. In fact, I am relieved.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 2 weeks ago
Everything in the universe goes by...

Everything in the universe goes by indirection. There are no straight lines.

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Works and Days
Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
2 months 2 weeks ago
A young man before he leaves...

A young man before he leaves the shelter of his father's house, and the guard of a tutor, should be fortify'd with resolution, and made acquainted with men, to secure his virtues, lest he should be led into some ruinous course, or fatal precipice, before he is sufficiently acquainted with the dangers of conversation, and his steadiness enough not to yield to every temptation.

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Sec. 70
Philosophical Maxims
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut
2 weeks 4 days ago
I do feel that evolution is...

I do feel that evolution is being controlled by some sort of divine engineer. I can't help thinking that. And this engineer knows exactly what he or she is doing and why, and where evolution is headed. That's why we've got giraffes and hippopotami and the clap.

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On evolution vs. "intelligent design", interviewed by Jon Stewart, The Daily Show
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
2 months 2 weeks ago
The tolls for the maintenance of...

The tolls for the maintenance of a high road, cannot with any safety be made the property of private persons.

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Chapter I, Part III, Article I, p. 786 (See also.. Public-private partnerships).
Philosophical Maxims
Emmanuel Levinas
Emmanuel Levinas
1 month 1 week ago
The transition of the subject-object relation...

The transition of the subject-object relation to that of the I-Thou implies a passage of consciousness to a new sphere of existence, viz, the interval, betweenness or Zwischen; and this is a passage from thought to Umfassung.

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The Levinas reader by Levinas, Emmanuel p. 73
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 week 4 days ago
I will not be modest...
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Anaxagoras
Anaxagoras
2 months 6 days ago
The sun provides the moon with...

The sun provides the moon with its brightness.

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Fragment in Plutarch De facie in orbe lunae, 929b, as quoted in The Riverside Dictionary of Biography (2005), p. 23
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 2 weeks ago
It is sometimes maintained that racial...

It is sometimes maintained that racial mixture is biologically undesirable. There is no evidence whatever for this view. Nor is there, apparently, any reason to think that Negroes are congenitally less intelligent than white people, but as to that it will be difficult to judge until they have equal scope and equally good social conditions.

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Part II: Man and Man, Ch. 12: Racial Antagonism, p. 108
Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
2 weeks ago
Prosperity makes friends, adversity tries them....

Prosperity makes friends, adversity tries them.

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Maxim 872
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 2 weeks ago
Take the question whether other people...

Take the question whether other people exist. ...It is plain that it makes for happiness to believe that they exist - for even the greatest misanthropist would not wish to be deprived of the objects of his hate. Hence the belief that other people exist is, pragmatically, a true belief. But if I am troubled by solipsism, the discovery that a belief in the existence of others is 'true' in the pragmatist's sense is not enough to allay my sense of loneliness: the perception that I should profit by rejecting solipsism is not alone sufficient to make me reject it. For what I desire is not that the belief in solipsism should be false in the pragmatic sense, but that other people should in fact exist. And with the pragmatist's meaning of truth, these two do not necessarily go together. The belief in solipsism might be false even if I were the only person or thing in the universe.

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"William James's Conception of Truth" , published in Philosophical Essays, London, 1910
Philosophical Maxims
Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek
6 months 3 weeks ago
Everyone is forced to be a philosopher

The age of philosophy in the sense again that we are confronted more and more often with philosophical problems at an everyday level. It is not that you withdraw from daily life into a world of philosophical contemplation. On the contrary, you cannot find your way around daily life itself without answering certain philosophical questions. It is a unique time when everyone is, in a way, forced to be some kind of philosopher.

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Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
1 month 1 week ago
The conscious side of woman corresponds...

The conscious side of woman corresponds to the emotional side of man, not to his "mind." Mind makes up the soul, or better, the "animus" of woman, and just as the anima of a man consists of inferior relatedness, full of affect, so the animus of woman consists of inferior judgments, or better, opinions.

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The Secret of the Golden Flower (1931) Commentary by C.G.Jung in CW 13: Alchemical Studies. P. 60
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay
5 days ago
He had a head which statuaries...

He had a head which statuaries loved to copy, and a foot the deformity of which the beggars in the streets mimicked.

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p. 313
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
2 months 1 week ago
I believe that one of the...

I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life.)

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p. 53e
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
2 months 2 weeks ago
Labour was the first price, the...

Labour was the first price, the original purchase-money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased; and its value, to those who possess it, and who want to exchange it for some new productions, is precisely equal to the quantity of labour which it can enable them to purchase or command.

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Chapter V, p. 38.
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
3 months 6 days ago
To rank the effort above the...

To rank the effort above the prize may be called love.

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Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
1 month 1 week ago
...the relatively unconscious man driven by...

...the relatively unconscious man driven by his natural impulses because, imprisoned in his familiar world, he clings to the commonplace, the obvious, the probable, the collectively valid, using for his motto: 'Thinking is difficult. Therefore, let the herd pronounce judgement.'

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Frequently misquoted as "Thinking is difficult, that's why most people judge" and close variants. Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky. (1959), C.G. Jung, R.F.C. Hull (translator) (Princeton Press, 1979, ISBN 9780691018225
Philosophical Maxims
Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm
4 weeks ago
Man is born as a freak...

Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision-making which replace the principles of instincts. He has to have a frame of orientation which permits him to organize a consistent picture of the world as a condition for consistent actions. He has to fight not only against the dangers of dying, starving, and being hurt, but also against another danger which is specifically human: that of becoming insane. In other words, he has to protect himself not only against the danger of losing his life but also against the danger of losing his mind.

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The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology (1968), p. 61
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 2 weeks ago
In obedience to the feeling of...

In obedience to the feeling of reality, we shall insist that, in the analysis of propositions, nothing "unreal" is to be admitted. But, after all, if there is nothing unreal, how, it may be asked, could we admit anything unreal? The reply is that, in dealing with propositions, we are dealing in the first instance with symbols, and if we attribute significance to groups of symbols which have no significance, we shall fall into the error of admitting unrealities, in the only sense in which this is possible, namely, as objects described.

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Ch. 16: Descriptions
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
2 months 3 weeks ago
For where God built a church,...

For where God built a church, there the Devil would also build a chapel...Thus is the Devil ever God's ape.

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67. Compare "Where God hath a temple, the Devil will have a chapel", Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, part III, section 4, member 1, subsection 1
Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
1 month 1 week ago
It is important to understand what...

It is important to understand what I mean by semiosis. All dynamic action, or action of brute force, physical or psychical, either takes place between two subjects, - whether they react equally upon each other, or one is agent and the other patient, entirely or partially, - or at any rate is a resultant of such actions between pairs. But by "semiosis" I mean, on the contrary, an action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs.

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"Pragmatism" (1907) in The Essential Peirce : Selected Philosophical Writings (1998) edited by the Peirce Edition Project, Vol. 2, p. 411, Indiana University Press.
Philosophical Maxims
Zeno of Citium
Zeno of Citium
1 month 4 weeks ago
Happiness is a good flow of...

Happiness is a good flow of life. 

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As quoted by Stobaeus, ii. 77.
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
2 months 2 weeks ago
I always made one prayer…

I always made one prayer to God, a very short one. Here it is: "O Lord, make our enemies quite ridiculous!" God granted it.

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16 May 1767, Letter to Étienne Noël Damilaville
Philosophical Maxims
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
1 week 2 days ago
Apparently the rise of consciousness is...

Apparently the rise of consciousness is linked to certain kinds of privation. It is the bitterness of self-consciousness that we knowers know best. Critical of the illusions that sustained mankind in earlier times, this self-consciousness of ours does little to sustain us now. The question is: which is disenchanted, the world itself or the consciousness we have of it?

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A Matter of the Soul (1975), pp. 75-76
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 month 3 days ago
And the conversion of the other...

And the conversion of the other Don Quixote - he who was converted only to die - was possible because he was mad, and it was his madness, and not his death or his conversion that immortalized him, earning him forgiveness for this crime of having been born. Felix culpa! And neither was his madness cured, but only transformed. His death was his last knightly adventure; in dying he stormed heaven, which suffereth violence.

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Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 month 3 days ago
The Catholic solution of our problem,...

The Catholic solution of our problem, of our unique vital problem, the problem of the immortality and eternal salvation of the soul, satisfies the will, and therefore satisfies life; but the attempt to rationalize it by means of a dogmatic theology fails to satisfy the reason. And reason has its exigencies as imperious as those of life. It is no use seeking to force ourselves to consider as super-rational what clearly appears to us to be contra-rational... Infallibility, a notion of Hellenic origin, is in its essence a rationalistic category.

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Philosophical Maxims
Heraclitus
Heraclitus
3 months 6 days ago
Greater fates gain greater rewards.

Greater fates gain greater rewards.

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Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
1 month 1 week ago
When all capital, all production, all...

When all capital, all production, all exchange have been brought together in the hands of the nation, private property will disappear of its own accord, money will become superfluous, and production will so expand and man so change that society will be able to slough off whatever of its old economic habits may remain.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
2 months 2 weeks ago
I felt less alone when I...

I felt less alone when I didn't know you yet: I was waiting for the other. I thought only of his strength and never of my weakness. And now here you are, Orestes, it was you. I look at you and I see that we are two orphans.

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Electra to her brother Orestes, Act 2
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine
2 months 2 weeks ago
The christian religion is a parody...

The christian religion is a parody on the worship of the Sun, in which they put a man whom they call Christ, in the place of the Sun, and pay him the same adoration which was originally paid to the Sun.

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An Essay on the Origin of Free-Masonry (1803-1805); found in manuscript form after Paine's death and thought to have been written for an intended part III of The Age of Reason. It was partially published in 1810 and published in its entirety in 1818.
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 2 weeks ago
There lies before us, if we...

There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.

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Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
3 months 1 week ago
Those who need myths are indeed...

Those who need myths are indeed poor. Here the gods serve as beds or resting places as the day races across the sky.

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Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
3 months 2 days ago
Variant translation: Inasmuch as love grows...

Inasmuch as love grows in you, in so much beauty grows; for love is itself the beauty of the soul.

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as translated by H. Browne and J. H. Meyers, The Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers (1995)
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
2 months 2 weeks ago
I am an investigator by inclination....

I am an investigator by inclination. I feel a great thirst for knowledge and an impatient eagerness to advance, also satisfaction at each progressive step. There was a time when I thought that all this could constitute the honor of humanity, and I despised the mob, which knows nothing about it. Rousseau set me straight. This dazzling excellence vanishes; I learn to honor men, and would consider myself much less useful than common laborers if I did not believe that this consideration could give all the others a value, to establish the rights of humanity.

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Part III : Selection on Education from Kant's other Writings, Ch. I Pedagogical Fragments, # 55
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
2 months 2 weeks ago
You don't have a soul. You...

You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.

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Commonly attributed to Mere Christianity, where it is not found. Earliest reference seems to be an unsourced attribution to George MacDonald in an 1892 issue of the Quaker periodical The British Friend.
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 2 weeks ago
What a monstrous thing that a...

What a monstrous thing that a University should teach journalism! I thought that was only done at Oxford. This respect for the filthy multitude is ruining civilisation.

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Letter to Lucy Martin Donnely, July 6, 1902
Philosophical Maxims
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
2 months 2 weeks ago
The phenomenon of the will [in...

The phenomenon of the will [in Epictetus ] [...] a different mental ability whose chief characteristic is that it speaks an imperative even when it commands nothing but our ability to think. The goal is to annihilate reality insofar it concerns me.

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Hannah Arendt Lecture on Thinking
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
1 month 1 week ago
The judgment that human life is...

The judgment that human life is worth living, or rather can and ought to be made worth living, ... underlies all intellectual effort; it is the a priori of social theory, and its rejection (which is perfectly logical) rejects theory itself.

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p. xliii
Philosophical Maxims
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