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Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 month 4 weeks ago
The work we desire and prize...

The work we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.

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Philosophical Maxims
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
3 months 3 weeks ago
Catastrophic fatality abruptly switches over into...

Catastrophic fatality abruptly switches over into salvation.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 month 4 weeks ago
O reader, to what shifts is...

O reader, to what shifts is poor Society reduced, struggling to give still some account of herself, in epochs when Cash Payment has become the sole nexus of man to men!

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Ch. 6, Laissez-Faire.
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 4 days ago
Ennui is the echo in us...

Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.

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Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Schlegel
Friedrich Schlegel
4 months 1 week ago
One has only…

One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.

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"Selected Ideas (1799-1800)", Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, trans. (Pennsylvania University Press:1968) #62
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley
2 months 3 weeks ago
I cannot say that I am...

I cannot say that I am in the slightest degree impressed by your bigness, or your material resources, as such. Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation. The great issue, about which hangs true sublimity, and the terror of overhanging fate, is what are you going to do with all these things?

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"Address on University Education" (1876), delivered at the formal opening of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, September 12, 1876. Huxley, American Addresses (1877), p. 125.
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
4 weeks ago
How can this cosmic religious...

How can this cosmic religious experience be communicated from man to man, if it cannot lead to a definite conception of God or to a theology? It seems to me that the most important function of art and of science is to arouse and keep alive this feeling in those who are receptive.

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Philosophical Maxims
Anaxagoras
Anaxagoras
4 months 4 weeks ago
And since these things are so,...

And since these things are so, we must suppose that there are contained many things and of all sorts in the things that are uniting, seeds of all things, with all sorts of shapes and colours and savours.

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Frag. B 4, quoted in John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy, (1920), Chapter 6.
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
5 months 1 week ago
In a constantly revolving circle every...

In a constantly revolving circle every point is simultaneously a point of departure and a point of return. If we interrupt the rotation, not every point of departure is a point of return.

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Vol. II, Ch. IV, p. 104.
Philosophical Maxims
Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry
1 month 1 week ago
What we do need to worry...

What we do need to worry about is the possibility that we will be reduced, in the face of the enormities of our time, to silence or to mere protest.

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A Poem of Difficult Hope
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
5 months 1 week ago
Now, to-day, this moment, is our...

Now, to-day, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last for ever. We must take it or leave it.

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Book II, Chapter 5, "The Practical Conclusion"
Philosophical Maxims
Horace
Horace
4 months 3 weeks ago
The mountains will be in labor…

The mountains will be in labor, and a ridiculous mouse will be brought forth.

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Line 139. Horace is hereby poking fun at heroic labours producing meager results; his line is also an allusion to one of Æsop's fables, The Mountain in Labour. Cf. Matthew Paris (AD 1237): Fuderunt partum montes: en ridiculus mus.
Philosophical Maxims
Mozi
Mozi
1 month 2 weeks ago
What is the purpose of houses?...

What is the purpose of houses? It is to protect us from the wind and cold of winter, the heat and rain of summer, and to keep out robbers and thieves. Once these ends have been secured, that is all. Whatever does not contribute to these ends should be eliminated.

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Ch 20, as quoted in Van Norden, Bryan W. (2011). Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy. Hackett Publishing. p. 52. ISBN 978-1-60384-468-0.
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
5 months 1 week ago
What is serious about excitement is...

What is serious about excitement is that so many of its forms are destructive. It is destructive in those who cannot resist excess in alcohol or gambling. It is destructive when it takes the form of mob violence. And above all it is destructive when it leads to war. It is so deep a need that it will find harmful outlets of this kind unless innocent outlets are at hand. There are such innocent outlets at present in sport, and in politics so long as it is kept within constitutional bounds. But these are not sufficient, especially as the kind of politics that is most exciting is also the kind that does most harm. Civilized life has grown altogether too tame, and, if it is to be stable, it must provide harmless outlets for the impulses which our remote ancestors satisfied in hunting.

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Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
3 months 3 weeks ago
The term many presupposes the term...

The term many presupposes the term one, and the term one presupposes the term many.

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Pt. I, ch. 2, sec. 2.
Philosophical Maxims
bell hooks
bell hooks
3 months 3 weeks ago
The process begins with the individual...

The process begins with the individual woman's acceptance that American women, without exception, are socialized to be racist, classist and sexist, in varying degrees, and that labeling ourselves feminists does not change the fact that we must consciously work to rid ourselves of the legacy of negative socialization.

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Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
3 months 3 weeks ago
Science is a cemetery of dead...

Science is a cemetery of dead ideas, even though life may issue from them.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
6 days ago
I have often....
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Main Content / General
Ernest Renan
Ernest Renan
2 months 3 days ago
Never has any one been less...

Never has any one been less a priest than Jesus, never a greater enemy of forms, which stifle religion under the pretext of protecting it. By this we are all his disciples and his successors; by this he has laid the eternal foundation-stone of true religion; and if religion is essential to humanity, he has by this deserved the Divine rank the world has accorded him.

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Ch. 5.
Philosophical Maxims
William Godwin
William Godwin
4 months 5 days ago
Men may one day feel that...

Men may one day feel that they are partakers of a common nature, and that true freedom and perfect equity, like food and air, are pregnant with benefit to every constitution.

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Vol. 1, bk. 1, ch. 3
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
3 months 6 days ago
The content or time-clothing of any...

The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture.

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(p. 168)
Philosophical Maxims
Lin Yutang
Lin Yutang
1 month 2 weeks ago
On the whole, the enjoyment of...

On the whole, the enjoyment of leisure is something which decidedly costs less than the enjoyment of luxury. All it requires is an artistic temperament which is bent on seeking a perfectly useless afternoon spent in a perfectly useless manner.

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p. 153. Often quoted as: "If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live."
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
5 months 1 week ago
Consumption is the sole end and...

Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.

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Chapter VIII, p. 719.
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
6 months 1 week ago
Above all do not forget your...

Above all do not forget your duty to love yourself; do not permit the fact that you have been set apart from life in a way, been prevented from participating actively in it, and that you are superflous in the obtruse eyes of a busy world, above all, do not permit this to deprive you of your idea of yourself, as if your life, if lived in inwardness, did not have just as much meaning and worth as that of any human being in the eyes of all-wise Governance, and considerably more than the busy, busiest haste of busy-ness - busy with wasting life and losing itself.

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Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
4 months 1 week ago
If we owe to it [civil...

If we owe to it [civil society] any duty, it is not subject to our will. Duties are not voluntary. Duty and will are even contradictory terms. Now though civil society might be at first a voluntary act (which in many cases it undoubtedly was) its continuance is under a permanent standing covenant, coexisting with the society; and it attaches upon every individual of that society, without any formal act of his own. This is warranted by the general practice, arising out of the general sense of mankind.

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p. 442
Philosophical Maxims
Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes
3 months 3 weeks ago
The bourgeoisie hides the fact that...

The bourgeoisie hides the fact that it is the bourgeoisie and thereby produces myth; revolution announces itself openly as revolution and thereby abolishes myth.

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p. 146
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
5 months 2 weeks ago
She [virtue] requires a rough and...

She [virtue] requires a rough and stormy passage; she will have either outward difficulties to wrestle with, ... or internal difficulties.

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Book II, Ch. 11. Of Cruelty
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
5 months 1 week ago
I opened with that which good...

I opened with that which good Catholics have more than once made to Huguenots. "My dear sir," said I, "were you ever baptized?" "No, friend," replied the Quaker, "nor any of my brethren." "Zounds!" said I to him, "you are not Christians then!" "Friend," replied the old man, in a soft tone of voice, "do not swear; we are Christians, but we do not think that sprinkling a few drops of water on a child's head makes him a Christian." "My God!" exclaimed I, shocked at his impiety, "have you then forgotten that Christ was baptized by St. John?" "Friend," replied the mild Quaker, "once again, do not swear. Christ was baptized by John, but He Himself never baptized any one; now we profess ourselves disciples of Christ, and not of John." "Mercy on us," cried I, "what a fine subject you would be for the holy inquisitor! In the name of God, my good old man, let me baptize you."

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Voltaire's account of his conversations with Andrew Pit
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
4 months 1 week ago
One may observe, that men of...

One may observe, that men of all persuasions confine the word persecution, and all the ill ideas of injustice and violence which belong to it, solely to those severities which are exercised upon themselves, or upon the party they are inclined to favour. Whatever is inflicted upon others, is a just punishment upon obstinate impiety, and not a restraint upon conscientious differences.

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Volume II, p. 146
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
5 months 1 week ago
Religion...is a man's total reaction upon...

Religion...is a man's total reaction upon life.

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Lecture II, "Circumscription of the Topic"
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
3 months 6 days ago
Nobody can doubt that the entire...

Nobody can doubt that the entire range of applied science contributes to the very format of a newspaper. But the headline is a feature which began with the Napoleonic Wars. The headline is a primitive shout of rage, triumph, fear, or warning, and newspapers have thrived on wars ever since.

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p. 7
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 4 days ago
Detachment from the world as an...

Detachment from the world as an attachment to the ego... Who can realize the detachment in which you are as far away from yourself as you are from the world?

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Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
5 months 1 week ago
Truly, if the preservation of all...

Truly, if the preservation of all mankind, as much as in him lies, were every one's persuasion, as indeed it is every one's duty, and the true principle to regulate our religion, politicks and morality by, the world would be much quieter, and better natur'd than it is.

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Sec. 116
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
5 months 1 week ago
I am not sure but I...

I am not sure but I should betake myself in extremities to the liberal divinities of Greece, rather than to my country's God. Jehovah, though with us he has acquired new attributes, is more absolute and unapproachable, but hardly more divine, than Jove. He is not so much of a gentleman, not so gracious and catholic, he does not exert so intimate and genial an influence on nature, as many a god of the Greeks.

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Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
5 months 1 week ago
From the fundamental nature of the...

From the fundamental nature of the Philistine, it follows that, in regard to others, as he has no intellectual but only physical needs, he will seek those who are capable of satisfying the latter not the former. And so of all the demands he makes of others the very smallest will be that of any outstanding intellectual abilities. On the contrary, when he comes across these they will excite his antipathy and even hatred. For here he has a hateful feeling of inferiority and also a dull secret envy which he most carefully attempts to conceal even from himself; but in this way it grows sometimes into a feeling of secret rage and rancour. Therefore it will never occur to him to assess his own esteem and respect in accordance with such qualities, but they will remain exclusively reserved for rank and wealth, power and influence, as being in his eyes the only real advantages to excel in which is also his desire.

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E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, pp. 344-345
Philosophical Maxims
Julien Offray de La Mettrie
Julien Offray de La Mettrie
1 month 5 days ago
I reduce to two the systems...

I reduce to two the systems of philosophy which deal with man's soul. The first and older system is materialism; the second is spiritualism.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
4 months ago
O my Father, if this cup...

O my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done.

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26:42 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
4 months ago
This language controls by reducing the...

This language controls by reducing the linguistic forms and symbols of reflection, abstraction, development, contradiction; by substituting images for concepts. It denies or absorbs the transcendent vocabulary; it does not search for but establishes and imposes truth and falsehood.

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p. 103
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
5 months 1 week ago
II. The tax which each individual...

II. The tax which each individual is bound to pay ought to be certain, and not arbitrary.

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Chapter II, Part II, p. 892.
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
5 months 1 week ago
The inclination to act as the...

The inclination to act as the laws command, a virtue, is a synthesis in which the law ... loses its universality and the subject its particularity; both lose their opposition, while in the Kantian conception of virtue this opposition remains, and the universal becomes the master and the particular the mastered.

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Philosophical Maxims
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
3 months 4 weeks ago
Man's being is made of such...

Man's being is made of such strange stuff as to be partly akin to nature and partly not, at once natural and extranatural, a kind of ontological centaur, half immersed in nature, half transcending it.

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"Man has no nature"
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
3 months 6 days ago
When we invent a new technology,...

When we invent a new technology, we become cannibals. We eat ourselves alive since these technologies are merely extensions of ourselves. The new environment shaped by electric technology is a cannibalistic one that eats people. To survive one must study the habits of cannibals.

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(p. 261)
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Browne
Thomas Browne
4 months 1 week ago
A man may be in as...

A man may be in as just possession of Truth as of a City, and yet be forced to surrender.

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Section 6
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
6 months 4 days ago
He marveled at the strange blindness...

He marveled at the strange blindness by which men, though they are so alert to what changes in themselves, impose on their friends an image chosen for them once and for all. He was being judged by what he had been. Just as dogs don't change character, men are dogs to one another.

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Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
1 month 3 weeks ago
"They are slaves," people declare. Nay,...

"They are slaves," people declare. Nay, rather they are men. "Slaves!" No, comrades. "Slaves!" No, they are unpretentious friends. "Slaves!" No, they are our fellow-slaves, if one reflects that Fortune has equal rights over slaves and free men alike.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
5 months 2 weeks ago
A good marriage would be between...

A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband.

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Book III, Ch. 5
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
4 months 1 week ago
Custom reconciles us to every thing....

Custom reconciles us to every thing.

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Part IV Section XVIII
Philosophical Maxims
Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm
3 months 2 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
Thomas Browne
Thomas Browne
4 months 1 week ago
We all labour against our own...

We all labour against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases.

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Section 9
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
5 months 1 week ago
The moral things I wish to...

The moral things I wish to say to future generations is very simple. I should say love is wise hatred is foolish. In this world which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other. We have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don't like. We can only live together in that way, and if we are to live together and not die together we must learn the kind of charity and kind of tolerance which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.

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Philosophical Maxims
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