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Adam Smith
Adam Smith
2 months 1 week ago
...the competition of the poor takes...

...the competition of the poor takes away from the reward of the rich.

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Chapter X, Part II, p. 154.
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
2 weeks 1 day ago
The greatest events occur without intention...

The greatest events occur without intention playing any part in them; chance makes good mistakes and undoes the most carefully planned undertaking. The world's greatest events are not produced, they happen.

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K 68
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
2 weeks ago
Neither family, nor privilege...
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Main Content / General
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
2 days ago
I do feel visceral revulsion at...

I do feel visceral revulsion at the burka because for me it is a symbol of the oppression of women.

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As quoted in Richard Dawkins causes outcry after likening the burka to a bin liner (10 August 2010), The Telegraph.
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Jean Jacques Rousseau
2 months 1 week ago
Through the fortunate effect of my...

Through the fortunate effect of my frankness, I had the rarest and surest opportunity to know a man well, which is to study him at leisure in his private life and living, so to speak, with himself. For he share himself without reservation and made me feel as much at home in his house as in mine. I had almost no other abode than his own.

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Second Dialogue; translated by Judith R. Bush, Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters
Philosophical Maxims
George Santayana
George Santayana
4 weeks ago
History is nothing but assisted and...

History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory. It might almost be said to be no science at all, if memory and faith in memory were not what science necessarily rest on. In order to sift evidence we must rely on some witness, and we must trust experience before we proceed to expand it. The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.

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Ch. 2 "History"
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
2 weeks 6 days ago
Philosophy, in one of its functions,...

Philosophy, in one of its functions, is the critic of cosmologies. It is its function to harmonise, refashion, and justify divergent intuitions as to the nature of things. It has to insist on the scrutiny of the ultimate ideas, and on the retention of the whole of the evidence in shaping our cosmological scheme. Its business is to render explicit, and - so far as may be - efficient, a process which otherwise is unconsciously performed without rational tests.

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Preface, pp. ix-x
Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
3 days ago
There is no penalty attached to...

There is no penalty attached to a lover's oath.

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Maxim 23
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
2 months ago
All those movements which took place...

All those movements which took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and which had the Reformation as their main expression and result should be analyzed as a great crisis of the Western experience of subjectivity and a revolt against the kind of religious and moral power which gave form, during the Middle Ages, to this subjectivity. The need to take a direct part in spiritual life, in the work of salvation, in the truth which lies in the Book-all that was a struggle for a new subjectivity.

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p. 782
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
2 weeks 1 day ago
The most dangerous untruths are truths...

The most dangerous untruths are truths moderately distorted.

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H 7 Variant translation: The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted.
Philosophical Maxims
Al-Ghazali
Al-Ghazali
1 month 1 week ago
If you believe in the future...

If you believe in the future life and, instead of preparing for it, sell it in order to buy this world, then that is folly! You do not normally sell two things for one; how can you give up an endless life for a limited number of days.

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IV. The True Nature of Prophecy and the Compelling Need of All Creation for it, p. 67.
Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
1 month 2 days ago
The great problems of life -...

The great problems of life - sexuality, of course, among others - are always related to the primordial images of the collective unconscious. These images are really balancing or compensating factors which correspond with the problems life presents in actuality. This is not to be marvelled at, since these images are deposits representing the accumulated experience of thousands of years of struggle for adaptation and existence.

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Ch. 5, p. 271
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
2 months 5 days ago
The hell to be endured hereafter,...

The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way.

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Ch. 4
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 5 days ago
By the rude bridge that arched...

By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world. The foe long since in silence slept; Alike the conqueror silent sleeps; And Time the ruined bridge has swept Down the dark stream which seaward creeps. On this green bank, by this soft stream, We set to-day a votive stone; That memory may their deed redeem, When, like our sires, our sons are gone. Spirit, that made those heroes dare, To die, and leave their children free, Bid Time and Nature gently spare The shaft we raise to them and thee.

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Concord Hymn, 1837
Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
2 months 1 week ago
To be a philosopher, that is...

To be a philosopher, that is to say, a lover of wisdom (for wisdom is nothing but truth), it is not enough for a man to love truth, in so far as it is compatible with his own interest, with the will of his superiors, with the dogmas of the church, or with the prejudices and tastes of his contemporaries; so long as he rests content with this position, he is only a philautos, not a philosophos [a lover of self, not a lover of wisdom]. For this title of honor is well and wisely conceived precisely by its stating that one should love the truth earnestly and with one's whole heart, and thus unconditionally and unreservedly, above all else, and, if need be, in defiance of all else. Now the reason for this is the one previously stated that the intellect has become free, and in this state it does not even know or understand any other interest than that of truth.

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E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, pp. 21-22
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
2 months 4 days ago
Commoners are weightless. But he was...

Commoners are weightless. But he was a royal bon vivant who, no matter what, always weighed 125 kilos. I would be very surprised if he didn't have a few pounds left.

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A soldier in Argos, speaking of the dead King Agamemnon, Act 2
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
3 months 3 days ago
When one plays for top prizes...

When one plays for top prizes one must be prepared to pay top stakes.

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Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
3 months 1 week ago
The Philology of Christianity.
The Philology of Christianity. How little Christianity cultivates the sense of honesty can be inferred from the character of the writings of its learned men. They set out their conjectures as audaciously as if they were dogmas, and are but seldom at a disadvantage in regard to the interpretation of Scripture. Their continual cry is: am right, for it is written and then follows an explanation so shameless and capricious that a philologist, when he hears it, must stand stock-still between anger and laughter, asking himself again and again: Is it possible? Is it honest? Is it even decent?It is only those who never or always attend church that underestimate the dishonesty with which this subject is still dealt in Protestant pulpits; in what a clumsy fashion the preacher takes advantage of his security from interruption; how the Bible is pinched and squeezed; and how the people are made acquainted with every form of the art of false reading.
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Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
2 months 5 days ago
I will now confess my own...

I will now confess my own utopia. I devoutly believe in the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of some sort of socialistic equilibrium. The fatalistic view of the war function is to me nonsense, for I know that war-making is due to definite motives and subject to prudential checks and reasonable criticisms, just like any other form of enterprise. And when whole nations are the armies, and the science of destruction vies in intellectual refinement with the science of production, I see that war becomes absurd and impossible from its own monstrosity. Extravagant ambitions will have to be replaced by reasonable claims, and nations must make common cause against them.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 5 days ago
If the stars should appear one...

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

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Nature
Philosophical Maxims
Judith Butler
Judith Butler
1 week ago
For consequentialists, of course, the imperative...

For consequentialists, of course, the imperative to imagine the consequences of living in a world in which everyone would act as you choose to act leads to the conclusion that some practices are utterly untenable, not because they are irrational, but because they inflict consequential damage that is unwanted. In both cases, I would suggest, a potential action is figured as hypothetically reciprocal: one's own act comes back in the imagined form of another's act; another might act on me as I would act on the other, and the consequences are unacceptable because of those damaging consequences.

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p. 78
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
2 months ago
The most defenseless tenderness and the...

The most defenseless tenderness and the bloodiest of powers have a similar need of confession. Western man has become a confessing animal.

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Vol. I, p. 59
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
2 months 6 days ago
It appears... that a work similar...

It appears... that a work similar in its object and general conception to that of Adam Smith, but adapted to the more extended knowledge and improved ideas of the present age, is the kind of contribution which Political Economy at present requires. The Wealth of Nations is in many parts obsolete, and in all, imperfect. Political Economy... has grown up almost from infancy since the time of Adam Smith; and the philosophy of society... has advanced many steps beyond the point at which he left it.

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Preface, 1848
Philosophical Maxims
Auguste Comte
Auguste Comte
1 month 1 week ago
The object of all true Philosophy...

The object of all true Philosophy is to frame a system which shall comprehend human life under every aspect, social as well as individual. It embraces, therefore, the three kinds of phenomena of which our life consists, Thoughts, Feelings, and Actions.

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p. 9
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
2 months 1 week ago
To found a great empire for...

To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers, may at first appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers; but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers.

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Chapter VII, Part Third, p. 667.
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
2 months 1 day ago
If a lion could talk, we...

If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.

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Pt II, p. 223 of the 1968 English edition
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
2 months 5 days ago
Art, I suppose, is only for...

Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 6 days ago
I quite understand the principle of...

I quite understand the principle of confining employment as far as possible to the British without regard for efficiency. I think, however, that the Ministry is not applying the principle sufficiently widely. I know many Englishmen who have married foreigners, and many English potential wives who are out of a job. Would not a year be long enough to train an English wife to replace the existing foreign one in such cases?

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Enclosed reply to the Ministry of Labour, in defense of A. S. Neill (who declined to send it), 27 January, 1931
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
5 days ago
The universal hypocrisy has so entered...

The universal hypocrisy has so entered into the flesh and blood of all classes of our modern society, it has reached such a pitch that nothing in that way can rouse indignation. Hypocrisy in the Greek means "acting," and acting-playing a part-is always possible. Chapter XII, Conclusion-Repent Ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at Hand Variant Translation: Hypocrisy with good reason means the same as acting, and anybody can pretend - act a part.

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Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
1 month 1 day ago
All nature abounds in proofs of...

All nature abounds in proofs of other influences than merely mechanical action, even in the physical world. They crowd in upon us at the rate of several every minute. And my observation of men has led me to this little generalization. Speaking only of men who really think for themselves and not of mere reporters, I have not found that it is the men whose lives are mostly passed within the four walls of a physical laboratory who are most inclined to be satisfied with a purely mechanical metaphysics. On the contrary, the more clearly they understand how physical forces work the more incredible it seems to them that such action should explain what happens out of doors. A larger proportion of materialists and agnostics is to be found among the thinking physiologists and other naturalists, and the largest proportion of all among those who derive their ideas of physical science from reading popular books.

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Lecture II : The Universal Categories, §3. Laws: Nominalism, CP 5.65
Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
3 weeks ago
The respect inspired by the link...

The respect inspired by the link between man and the reality alien to this world can make itself evident to that part of man which belongs to the reality of this world. The reality of this world is necessity. The part of man which is in this world is the part which is in bondage to necessity and subject to the misery of need. The one possibility of indirect expression of respect for the human being is offered by men's needs, the needs of the soul and of the body, in this world.

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Philosophical Maxims
Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale
2 weeks 3 days ago
I have had a larger responsibility...

I have had a larger responsibility of human lives than ever man or woman had before. And I attribute my success to this - I never gave or took an excuse. Yes, I do see the difference now between me and other men. When a disaster happens, I act and they make excuses.

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Letter to Miss H. Bonham Carter, 1861. As quoted in The Gigantic Book of Teachers' Wisdom (2007) by Frank McCourt and Erin Gruwell, p. 410
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
2 months 1 week ago
A minister of state…

A minister of state is excusable for the harm he does when the helm of government has forced his hand in a storm; but in the calm he is guilty of all the good he does not do.

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Le Siècle de Louis XIV, ch. VI: "État de la France jusqu'à la mort du cardinal Mazarin en 1661" (1752)
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
2 weeks 1 day ago
The American who first discovered Columbus...

The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.

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G 42
Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
2 months 3 weeks ago
Christ is not valued at all...

Christ is not valued at all unless He be valued above all.

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p. 395
Philosophical Maxims
Ernst Mach
Ernst Mach
1 month 1 day ago
The student of mathematics often finds...

The student of mathematics often finds it hard to throw off the uncomfortable feeling that his science, in the person of his pencil, surpasses him in intelligence,-an impression which the great Euler confessed he often could not get rid of. This feeling finds a sort of justification when we reflect that the majority of the ideas we deal with were conceived by others, often centuries ago. In a great measure it is really the intelligence of other people that confronts us in science.

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Mach, Ernst. p. 196: Mathematics seems possessed of intelligence
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
2 months 1 week ago
It seldom happens, however, that a...

It seldom happens, however, that a great proprietor is a great improver.

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Chapter IV, p. 420.
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
2 weeks 6 days ago
The fact of the religious vision,...

The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.

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Ch. 12: "Religion and Science", p. 268
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
2 months ago
We are aware of all the...

We are aware of all the inconveniences of prison, and that it is dangerous when it is not useless. And yet one cannot 'see' how to replace it. It is the detestable solution, which one seems unable to do without.

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Part Four, Complete and austere institutions
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
1 month 6 days ago
"War," says Machiavel, "ought to be...

"War," says Machiavel, "ought to be the only study of a prince;" and by a prince he means every sort of state, however constituted. "He ought," says this great political doctor, "to consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes ability to execute military plans." A meditation on the conduct of political societies made old Hobbes imagine that war was the state of nature.

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Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
5 days ago
The attitude of the ruling classes...

The attitude of the ruling classes to the laborers is that of a man who has felled his adversary to the earth and holds him down, not so much because he wants to hold him down, as because he knows that if he let him go, even for a second, he would himself be stabbed, for his adversary is infuriated and has a knife in his hand. And therefore, whether their conscience is tender or the reverse, our rich men cannot enjoy the wealth they have filched from the poor as the ancients did who believed in their right to it. Their whole life and all their enjoyments are embittered either by the stings of conscience or by terror.

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Chapter V, Contradiction Between our Life and our Christian Conscience
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
2 months 3 weeks ago
The superior man governs men, according...

The superior man governs men, according to their nature, with what is proper to them, and as soon as they change what is wrong, he stops.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
3 days ago
It is perhaps typical of very...

It is perhaps typical of very creative minds that they hit very large nails not quite on the head.

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Kenneth Boulding in McLuhan: Hot & Cool (1967) p. 68
Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
3 days ago
There is but a step between...

There is but a step between a proud man's glory and his disgrace.

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Maxim 138
Philosophical Maxims
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
2 weeks 4 days ago
If things are deprived of memory,...

If things are deprived of memory, they become information or commodities. They are pushed into a time-free, ahistorical place.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel
1 month 3 weeks ago
We appear to be faced with...

We appear to be faced with a general difficulty about psychophysical reduction. In other areas the process of reduction is a move in the direction of greater objectivity, toward a more accurate view of the real nature of things. ... The less it depends on a specifically human viewpoint, the more objective is our description. ...Experience itself, however, does not seem to fit the pattern. ... If the subjective character of experience is fully comprehensible only from one point of view, then any shift to greater objectivity - that is, less attachment to a specific viewpoint - does not take us nearer to the real nature of the phenomenon: it takes us further away from it.

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p. 174.
Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
1 month 2 weeks ago
Repentance deserveth Pardon.

Repentance deserveth Pardon.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 6 days ago
Religions, which condemn the pleasures of...

Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.

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The New York Herald-Tribune Magazine, 3/6/1938
Philosophical Maxims
Willard van Orman Quine
Willard van Orman Quine
3 weeks ago
Logic chases truth up the tree...

Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar.

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Philosophy of Logic
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 6 days ago
That I, a funny little gesticulating...

That I, a funny little gesticulating animal on two legs, should stand beneath the stars and declaim in a passion about my rights - it seems so laughable, so out of all proportion. Much better, like Archimedes, to be killed because of absorption in eternal things... There is a possibility in human minds of something mysterious as the night-wind, deep as the sea, calm as the stars, and strong as Death, a mystic contemplation, the "intellectual love of God." Those who have known it cannot believe in wars any longer, or in any kind of hot struggle. If I could give to others what has come to me in this way, I could make them too feel the futility of fighting. But I do not know how to communicate it: when I speak, they stare, applaud, or smile, but do not understand.

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Letter to Miss Rinder, July 30, 1918
Philosophical Maxims
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