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comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 1 week ago
Anger is a momentary....
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Main Content / General
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
3 months 3 days ago
Meditation on the chance which led...

Meditation on the chance which led to the meeting of my mother and father is even more salutary than meditation on death.

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p. 277
Philosophical Maxims
Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei
1 month 1 week ago
I am certainly interested in a...

I am certainly interested in a tribunal in which, for having used my reason, I was deemed little less than a heretic. Who knows but men will reduce me from the profession of a philosopher to that of historian of the Inquisition! But they behave to me in order that I may become the ignoramus and the fool of Italy...

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p. 244
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 month 1 week ago
Misery which, through long ages, had...

Misery which, through long ages, had no spokesman, no helper, will now be its own helper and speak for itself.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
4 months 2 weeks ago
I am responsible for everything ......

I am responsible for everything ... except for my very responsibility, for I am not the foundation of my being. Therefore everything takes place as if I were compelled to be responsible. I am abandoned in the world ... in the sense that I find myself suddenly alone and without help, engaged in a world for which I bear the whole responsibility without being able, whatever I do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for an instant.

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Part 4, Chapter 1, III
Philosophical Maxims
John Rawls
John Rawls
4 months 2 weeks ago
Justice is the first virtue of...

Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust. Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests.

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Chapter I, Section 1, pg. 3-4
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
4 months 2 weeks ago
In any case, if you ever...

In any case, if you ever leave me with a handsome man, do not tell me that you trust me because, let me warn you: that is not what will prevent me from deceiving you, if I want to. On the contrary.

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Jessica to her husband Hugo, Act 3, sc. 5
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
4 months 3 weeks ago
I will first discuss images according...

I will first discuss images according to the Law of Moses, and then according to the gospel. And I say at the outset that according to the Law of Moses no other images are forbidden than an image of God which one worships. A crucifix, on the other hand, or any other holy image is not forbidden. Heigh now! you breakers of images, I defy you to prove the opposite!

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pp. 85-86
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
5 months 2 weeks ago
These people who have fled inward...
These people who have fled inward for their freedom also have to live outwardly, become visible, let themselves be seen; they are united with mankind through countless ties of blood, residence, education, fatherland, chance, the importunity of others; they are likewise presupposed to harbour countless opinions simply because these are the ruling opinions of the time; every gesture which is not clearly a denial counts as agreement.
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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 2 weeks ago
Written words differ from spoken words...

Written words differ from spoken words in being material structures. A spoken word is a process in the physical world, having an essential time-order; a written word is a series of pieces of matter, having an essential space-order.

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An Outline of Philosophy Ch.4 Language, 1927
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
4 months 2 weeks ago
To be shaken out of the...

To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large - this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.

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Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
2 months 2 weeks ago
We are interested in others, when...

We are interested in others, when they are interested in us.

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Maxim 16
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
4 months 2 weeks ago
He came in sight of a...

He came in sight of a pass guarded by armed men. 'you cannot pass ... Do you not know that all this country belongs to the Spirit of the Age? ... Here Enlightenment, take this fugitive to our Master.'

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Pilgrim's Regress 44-45
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
2 months 2 weeks ago
Each generation is a filter, a...

Each generation is a filter, a sieve; good genes tend to fall through the sieve into the next generation; bad genes tend to end up in bodies that die young or without reproducing.

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Philosophical Maxims
Allan Bloom
Allan Bloom
4 weeks ago
Only the search back to the...

Only the search back to the origins of one's ideas in order to see the real arguments for them, before people became so certain of them that they ceased thinking about them at all, can liberate us. Our study of history has taught us to laugh at the follies of the whole past, the monarchies, oligarchies, theocracies, and aristocracies with the fanaticism for empire or salvation, once taken so seriously. But we have very few tools for seeing ourselves in the same way, as others will see us. Each age always conspires to make its own way of thinking appear to be the only possible or just way, and our age has the least resistance to the triumph of its own way. There is less real presence of respectable alternatives and less knowledge of the titanic intellectual figures who founded our way.

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Western Civ, p. 20.
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
4 months 3 weeks ago
A Christian has no need of...

A Christian has no need of any law in order to be saved, since through faith we are free from every law. Thus all the acts of a Christian are done spontaneously, out of a sense of pure liberty. As Christians we do not seek our own advantage or salvation because we are already fully satisfied and saved by God's grace through faith. Now our only motive is to do that which is pleasing to God.

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pp. 75-76
Philosophical Maxims
Hermann Weyl
Hermann Weyl
4 weeks ago
All characteristics of material things as...

All characteristics of material things as they are presented to us in the acts of external perception (e.g. colour) are endowed with the separateness of spatial extension, but it is only when we build up a single connected real world out of all our experiences that the spatial extension, which is a constituent of every perception, becomes a part of one and the same all-inclusive space. ... every material thing can, without changing content, equally well occupy a position in Space different from its present one. This immediately gives us the property of the homogeneity of space which is the root of the conception, Congruence.

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Introduction
Philosophical Maxims
Max Stirner
Max Stirner
1 month 3 days ago
Thus the radii of all education...

Thus the radii of all education run together into one center which is called personality.

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p. 25
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay
2 months 6 days ago
His imagination resembled the wings of...

His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to run, though not to soar.

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p. 223
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Schweitzer
Albert Schweitzer
4 weeks ago
To the man who is truly...

To the man who is truly ethical all life is sacred, including that which from the human point of view seems lower in the scale. He makes distinctions only as each case comes before him, and under the pressure of necessity, as, for example, when it falls to him to decide which of two lives he must sacrifice in order to preserve the other. But all through this series of decisions he is conscious of acting on subjective grounds and arbitrarily, and knows that he bears the responsibility for the life which is sacrificed.

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p. 269
Philosophical Maxims
Henri Bergson
Henri Bergson
3 months 1 week ago
A philosopher worthy...

A philosopher worthy of the name has never said more than a single thing: and even then it is something he has tried to say, rather than actually said. And he has said only one thing because he has seen only one point: and at that it was not so much a vision as a contact...

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"L'intuition philosophique (Philosophical Intuition)" (10 April 1911); translated by Mabelle L. Andison in: Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, Courier Dover Publications, 2012, p. 91
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
4 months 2 weeks ago
I have been writing & speaking...

I have been writing & speaking what were once called novelties, for twenty five or thirty years, & have not now one disciple. Why? Not that what I said was not true; not that it has not found intelligent receivers but because it did not go from any wish in me to bring men to me, but to themselves. I delight in driving them from me. What could I do, if they came to me? - they would interrupt and encumber me. This is my boast that I have no school & no follower. I should account it a measure of the impurity of insight, if it did not create independence.

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April 1859
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
5 months 1 week ago
There is nothing more visible than...

There is nothing more visible than what is secret, and nothing more manifest than what is minute. Therefore the superior man is watchful over himself, when he is alone.

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Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
1 month 2 days ago
Much must also be withdrawn into...

Much must also be withdrawn into oneself: for a well-composed conversation of differences disturbs and renews the affections, and infuriates whatever is weak in the mind and has not been cared for...Loneliness will cure the hatred of the crowd, the boredom of solitude will be cured by the crowd.... A certain dullness and languor of the mind is born from constant toil....Nor would the desire of men so much tend to this, unless play and fun had a kind of natural voluptuousness. The frequent use of which will relieve all the weight of the soul and all the vigor.For sleep is also necessary for refreshment, but if you continue it day and night, death will result.

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Philosophical Maxims
Joseph de Maistre
Joseph de Maistre
2 weeks 1 day ago
Man cannot be wicked without being...

Man cannot be wicked without being evil, nor evil without being degraded, nor degraded without being punished, nor punished without being guilty. In short ... there is nothing so intrinsically plausible as the theory of original sin.

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Second Dialogue, p. 38
Philosophical Maxims
John Rawls
John Rawls
4 months 2 weeks ago
Inequalities are permissible when they maximize,...

Inequalities are permissible when they maximize, or at least all contribute to, the long term expectations of the least fortunate group in society.

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Chapter III, Section 26, pg. 151
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
4 months 3 weeks ago
Great abuses in the world are...

Great abuses in the world are begotten, or, to speak more boldly, all the abuses of the world are begotten, by our being taught to be afraid of professing our ignorance, and that we are bound to accept all things we are not able to refute: we speak of all things by precepts and decisions. The style at Rome was that even that which a witness deposed to having seen with his own eyes, and what a judge determined with his most certain knowledge, was couched in this form of speaking: "it seems to me." They make me hate things that are likely, when they would impose them upon me as infallible.

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Ch. 12, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Carew Hazlitt, 1877
Philosophical Maxims
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
3 months ago
There is no such thing as...

There is no such thing as data-driven thinking.

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Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
3 months 4 days ago
There may be a rationalist who...

There may be a rationalist who has never wavered in his conviction of the mortality of the soul, and there may be a vitalist who has never wavered in his faith in immortality; but at the most this would prove that just as there are natural monstrosities, so there are those who are stupid as regards heart and feeling, however great their intelligence, and those who are stupid intellectually, however great their virtue. But, in normal cases, I cannot believe those who assure me that never, not in a fleeting moment, not in the hours of direst loneliness and grief, has this murmur of uncertainty breathed upon their consciousness.

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Philosophical Maxims
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
3 months 2 weeks ago
As Being and Life are one...

As Being and Life are one and the same, so are Death and Nothingness one and the same. But there is no real Death and no real Nothing ness, as we have already said. There is, however, an Apparent Life, and this is the mixture of life and death, of being and nothingness.

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P. 4
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
4 months 2 weeks ago
A poem is one undivided unimpeded...

A poem is one undivided unimpeded expression fallen ripe into literature, and it is undividedly and unimpededly received by those for whom it was matured.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
4 months 1 week ago
If life becomes hard to bear...

If life becomes hard to bear we think of a change in our circumstances. But the most important and effective change, a change in our own attitude, hardly even occurs to us, and the resolution to take such a step is very difficult for us.

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p. 53e
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 months 1 week ago
Love's great (and sole) originality is...

Love's great (and sole) originality is to make happiness indistinct from misery.

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Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
5 months 2 weeks ago
There is no version of primeval...

There is no version of primeval history, preceding the discoveries of modern science, that is as rational and as inspiring as that of the first eleven chapters of the Book of Genesis.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 2 weeks ago
Of all evils of war the...

Of all evils of war the greatest is the purely spiritual evil: the hatred, the injustice, the repudiation of truth, the artificial conflict.

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Justice in War-Time (1916), p. 27
Philosophical Maxims
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
1 month 1 week ago
Young Schopenhauer, a zealous and thorough-going...

Young Schopenhauer, a zealous and thorough-going Kantian, tried to explain that light would cease to exist along with the seeing eye. "What!" he said, according to Schopenhauer's own report, "looking at him with his Jove-like eyes,"-"You should rather say that you would not exist if the light could not see you?"

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As quoted by Friedrich Jodl, "Goethe and Kant," The Monist (1901) f. Edward C. Hegeler, ed. Paul Carus, Vol. 11, p. 264. As translated from Professor Jodl's MS. by W. H. Carruth, of the University of Kansas.
Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
5 months 2 weeks ago
What is the essence of life?...

What is the essence of life? To serve others and to do good. Often given as a saying of Aristotle with no reference.

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Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
3 months 2 weeks ago
There are few with whom I...

There are few with whom I can communicate so freely as with Pope. But Pope cannot bear every truth. He has a timidity which hinders the full exertion of his faculties, almost as effectually as bigotry cramps those of the general herd of mankind. But whoever is a genuine follower of truth keeps his eye steady upon his guide, indifferent whither he is led, provided that she is the leader. And, my Lord, if it may be properly considered, it were infinitely better to remain possessed by the whole legion of vulgar mistakes, than to reject some, and, at the same time, to retain a fondness for others altogether as absurd and irrational. The first has at least a consistency, that makes a man, however erroneously, uniform at least; but the latter way of proceeding is such an inconsistent chimera and jumble of philosophy and vulgar prejudice, that hardly anything more ridiculous can be conceived.

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Philosophical Maxims
Proclus
Proclus
4 months 1 day ago
Not much younger than these...

Not much younger than these (sc. Hermotimus of Colophon and Philippus of Mende) is Euclid, who put together the Elements, collecting many of Eudoxus' theorems, perfecting many of Theaetetus', and also bringing to irrefragable demonstration the things which were only somewhat loosely proved by his predecessors. This man lived in the time of the first Ptolemy. For Archimedes, who came immediately after the first (Ptolemy), makes mention of Euclid: and, further, they say that Ptolemy once asked him if there was in geometry any shorter way than that of the elements, and he answered that there was no royal road to geometry. He is then younger than pupils of Plato but older than Eratosthenes and Archimedes; for the latter were contemporary with one another, as Eratosthenes somewhere says.

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As quoted by Sir Thomas Little Heath, The Thirteen Books of Euclid's Elements (1908) Vol.1 Introduction and Books I, II p.1, citing Proclus ed. Friedlein, p. 68, 6-20.
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
5 months 2 weeks ago
I will make an attempt to...
I will make an attempt to attain freedom, the youthful soul says to itself; and is it to be hindered in this by the fact that two nations happen to hate and fight one another, or that two continents are separated by an ocean, or that all around it a religion is taught with did not yet exist a couple of thousand years ago. All that is not you, it says to itself.
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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 2 weeks ago
Next to enjoying ourselves, the next...

Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.

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Ch. 10: Recrudescence of Puritanism
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
4 months 2 weeks ago
It is our interest and our...

It is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far - not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world - that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers. Our concern cannot simply be to modify private property, but to abolish it, not to hush up class antagonisms but to abolish classes, not to improve the existing society but to found a new one.

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Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League in London, March 1850
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
3 months 1 week ago
I thank thee, O Father, Lord...

I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes. Even so, Father: for so it seemed good in thy sight. All things are delivered unto me of my Father: and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him. Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

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11:25-30 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
5 months 2 weeks ago
Forgetting when God does it in...

Forgetting when God does it in relation to sin, is the opposite of creating, since to create is to bring forth from nothing and to forget is to take back into nothing. What is hidden from my eyes, that I have never seen; but what is hidden behind my back, that I have seen. The one who loves forgives in this way; he forgives, he forgets, he blots out the sin, in love he turns toward the one he forgives; but when he turns toward him, he of course, cannot see what is lying behind his back.

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Philosophical Maxims
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
2 months 1 week ago
When we read the best nineteenth-...

When we read the best nineteenth- and twentieth-century novelists, we soon realize that they are trying in a variety of ways to establish a definition of human nature, to justify the continuation of life as well as the writing of novels.

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"The Sealed Treasure" (1960), p. 60
Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
4 months 2 weeks ago
Suicide may also be regarded as...

Suicide may also be regarded as an experiment - a question which man puts to Nature, trying to force her to answer. The question is this: What change will death produce in a man's existence and in his insight into the nature of things? It is a clumsy experiment to make; for it involves the destruction of the very consciousness which puts the question and awaits the answer.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 13, § 160
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
4 months 2 weeks ago
The difference between the first- and...

The difference between the first- and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition - it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind - yet what miles away in the point of preciousness!

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To Henry Rutgers Marshall, 7 February 1899
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley
2 months 3 days ago
I have endeavoured to show that...

I have endeavoured to show that no absolute structural line of demarcation, wider than that between the animals which immediately succeed us in the scale, can be drawn between the animal world and ourselves; and I may add the expression of my belief that the attempt to draw a physical distinction is equally futile, and that even the highest faculties of feeling and of intellect begin to germinate in lower forms of life.

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Ch.2, p. 129
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
4 months 3 weeks ago
How selfish soever man may be...

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.

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Section I, Chap. I
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 2 weeks ago
In a logically perfect language, there...

In a logically perfect language, there will be one word and no more for every simple object, and everything that is not simple will be expressed by a combination of words, by a combination derived, of course, from the words for the simple things that enter in, one word for each simple component.

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Philosophical Maxims
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