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Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
1 month 1 week ago
This education, therefore, results at the...

This education, therefore, results at the very outset in knowledge which transcends all experience, which is abstract, absolute, and strictly universal, and which includes within itself beforehand all subsequently possible experience. On the other hand, the old education was concerned, as a rule, only with the actual qualities of things as they are and as they should be believed and rioted, without anyone being able to assign a reason for them. It aimed, therefore, at purely passive reception by means of the power of memory, which was completely at the service of things. It was, therefore, impossible to have any idea of the mind as an independent original principle of things themselves.

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General Nature of New Eduction p. 28
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
1 month 6 days ago
I know not how the world...

I know not how the world will receive it, nor how it may reflect on those that shall seem to favor it. For in a way beset with those that contend, on one side for too great Liberty, and on the other side for too much Authority, 'tis hard to passe between the points of both unwounded.

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The Epistle Dedicatory, Paris, April 15-25, 1651
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
2 months 1 week ago
This dysfunction of power was related...

This dysfunction of power was related to a central excess: what might be called the monarchical 'super-power', which identified the right to punish with the personal power of the sovereign.

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Chapter Two, pp.80
Philosophical Maxims
Gaston Bachelard
Gaston Bachelard
1 month 6 days ago
Man is a creation of desire,...

Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.

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The Psychoanalysis of Fire, ch. 2, "Fire and Reverie"
Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
2 months 2 weeks ago
Sophistry is only fit to make...

Sophistry is only fit to make men more conceited in their ignorance.

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Philosophical Maxims
Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus
2 months 3 weeks ago
Animals only follow their natural instincts;...

Animals only follow their natural instincts; but man, unless he has experienced the influence of learning and philosophy, is at the mercy of impulses that are worse than those of a wild beast. There is no beast more savage and dangerous than a human being who is swept along by the passions of ambition, greed, anger, envy, extravagance, and sensuality.

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Translated by Beert C. Verstraete as On Education for Children, in The Erasmus Reader (University of Toronto Press: 1990), p. 73
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
3 weeks 2 days ago
There is no greater impediment to...

There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.

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K 72
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
3 months 2 weeks ago
Someone in despair despairs over something....

Someone in despair despairs over something. So, for a moment, it seems, but only for a moment. That same instant the true despair shows itself, or despair in its true guise. In despairing over something he was really despairing over himself, and he wants now to be rid of himself.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
3 months 2 weeks ago
The male has more teeth than...

The male has more teeth than the female in mankind, and sheep, and goats, and swine. This has not been observed in other animals.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
2 weeks 4 days ago
Thou shouldst not....
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St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
2 months 4 weeks ago
God judged it better to bring...

God judged it better to bring good out of evil than to suffer no evil to exist.

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Enchiridion (c. 420 ), Ch. 27
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
4 weeks ago
The power of God is the...

The power of God is the worship He inspires. The worship of God is not a rule of safety - it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. The death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure.

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Ch. 12: "Religion and Science", pp. 268-269
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay
2 days ago
Time, and reflection, and discussion, have...

Time, and reflection, and discussion, have produced their natural effect on minds eminently intelligent and candid. No intermediate shades of opinion are now left. There is no twilight. The light has been divided from the darkness. Two parties are ranged in battle array against each other. There is the standard of monopoly. Here is the standard of free trade; and by the standard of free trade I pledge myself to stand firmly.

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Speech in Edinburgh (2 December 1845), quoted in Speeches of the Right Honourable T. B. Macaulay, M.P. (1854), p. 423
Philosophical Maxims
Democritus
Democritus
2 months 3 days ago
The friendship of one wise man...

The friendship of one wise man is better than the friendship of a host of fools.

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Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
3 months 3 days ago
The superior man has neither anxiety...

The superior man has neither anxiety nor fear. When internal examination discovers nothing wrong, what is there to be anxious about, what is there to fear?

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 2 weeks ago
The politician may change sides so...

The politician may change sides so frequently as to find himself always in the majority, but most politicians have a preference for one party to the other, and subordinate their love of power to this preference.

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Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
3 months 2 weeks ago
My hearers, this discourse has not...

My hearers, this discourse has not wandered out into the world to look for conflict, it has not tried to get the better of anybody, it has not even tried to uphold anybody, as though there was battle without. It has spoken to you; not by way of explaining anything to you, but trying to speak secretly with you about your relationship to that secret wisdom mentioned in our text. Oh that nothing may upset you in respect to this, “neither life nor death nor things present nor things to come nor any other creature” (Romans 8:38) –not this discourse, which, though it may have profited you nothing, yet has striven for what after all is the first and the last, to help you have what the Scripture calls “faith in yourself before God.

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Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
2 months 1 week ago
Truth lives, in fact, for the...

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs 'pass,' so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.

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Lecture VI, Pragmatism's Conception of Truth
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
2 months 1 week ago
When I am furious about something,...

When I am furious about something, I sometimes beat the ground or a tree with my walking stick. But I certainly do not believe that the ground is to blame or that my beating can help anything... And all rites are of this kind.

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Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 131
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
2 months 2 weeks ago
Opinion considers the opposition of what...

Opinion considers the opposition of what is true and false quite rigid, and, confronted with a philosophical system, it expects agreement or contradiction. And in an explanation of such a system, opinion still expects to find one or the other.

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Preface, § 2
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
2 months 3 weeks ago
It's a thorny undertaking...

It is a thorny undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds, to pick out and immobilize the innumerable flutterings that agitate it.

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Ch. 6. Of Preparation, tr. E. J. Trechmann, 1927
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
3 weeks 2 days ago
Before one blames, one should always...

Before one blames, one should always find out whether one cannot excuse. To discover little faults has been always the particularity of such brains that are a little or not at all above the average. The superior ones keep quiet or say something against the whole and the great minds transform without blaming.

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K 39 Variant translation: Before we blame we should first see whether we cannot excuse.
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 2 weeks ago
Consider MacArthur and his Republican supporters....

Consider MacArthur and his Republican supporters. So limited is his intelligence and his imagination that he is never puzzled for one moment. All we have to do is to go back to the days of the Opium War. After we have killed a sufficient number of millions of Chinese, the survivors among them will perceive our moral superiority and hail MacArthur as a saviour. But let us not be one-sided. Stalin, I should say, is equally simple- minded and equally out of date. He, too, believes that if his armies could occupy Britain and reduce us all to the economic level of Soviet peasants and the political level of convicts, we should hail him as a great deliverer and bless the day when we were freed from the shackles of democracy. One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.

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Part I: Man and Nature, Ch. 1: Current Perplexities, pp. 4-5
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 1 week ago
A heart without music is like...

A heart without music is like beauty without melancholy.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
2 months 1 week ago
I work quite diligently and wish...

I work quite diligently and wish that I were better and smarter. And these both are one and the same.

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In a letter to Paul Engelmann (1917) as quoted in The Idea of Justice (2010) by Amartya Sen, p. 31
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
1 month 6 days ago
Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a...

Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.

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The First Part, Chapter 13, p. 62
Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
1 month 2 weeks ago
As one digs deeper into the...

As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?

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Letter to Ernest de Chabrol, 9 June 1831 Selected Letters, ed. Roger Boesche, UofC Press 1985, p. 39.
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
2 months 1 week ago
When He died in the Wounded...

When He died in the Wounded World He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less. Each thing, from the single grain of Dust to the strongest eldil, is the end and the final cause of all creation and the mirror in which the beam of His brightness comes to rest and so returns to Him. Blessed be He!

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Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
2 months 2 weeks ago
The rush to California, for instance,...

The rush to California, for instance, and the attitude, not merely of merchants, but of philosophers and prophets, so called, in relation to it, reflect the greatest disgrace on mankind. That so many are ready to live by luck, and so get the means of commanding the labor of others less lucky, without contributing any value to society!

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p. 487
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
2 months 1 week ago
"I never believed in God before."...

"I never believed in God before." - that I understand. But not: "I never really believed in Him before."

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p. 53e
Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
1 month 1 week 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
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 2 weeks ago
So much of modern mathematical work...

So much of modern mathematical work is obviously on the border-line of logic, so much of modern logic is symbolic and formal, that the very close relationship of logic and mathematics has become obvious to every instructed student. The proof of their identity is, of course, a matter of detail: starting with premisses which would be universally admitted to belong to logic, and arriving by deduction at results which as obviously belong to mathematics, we find that there is no point at which a sharp line can be drawn, with logic to the left and mathematics to the right. If there are still those who do not admit the identity of logic and mathematics, we may challenge them to indicate at what point, in the successive definitions and deductions of Principia Mathematica, they consider that logic ends and mathematics begins. It will then be obvious that any answer must be quite arbitrary.

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Ch. 18: Mathematics and Logic
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
3 weeks 2 days ago
Courage, garrulousness and the mob are...

Courage, garrulousness and the mob are on our side. What more do we want?

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E 32
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 1 week ago
England's genius filled all measure Of...

England's genius filled all measure Of heart and soul, of strength and pleasure, Gave to the mind its emperor, And life was larger than before: Nor sequent centuries could hit Orbit and sum of Shakespeare's wit. The men who lived with him became Poets, for the air was fame.

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Solution, ll. 35-42
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 1 week 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
Herbert A. Simon
Herbert A. Simon
3 weeks 1 day ago
By public administration is meant, in...

By public administration is meant, in common usage, the activities of the executive branches of national, state, and local governments; independent boards and commissions set up by the congress and state legislatures; government corporations, and certain agencies of a specialized character. Specifically excluded are judicial and legislative agencies within the government and nongovernmental administration.

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p. 7
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 1 week ago
In the torments of the intellect,...

In the torments of the intellect, there is a certain bearing which is to be sought in vain among those of the heart. Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety.

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Philosophical Maxims
bell hooks
bell hooks
3 weeks 6 days ago
To be in touch with senses...

To be in touch with senses and emotions beyond conquest is to enter the realm of the mysterious.

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Chapter 2, Altars of Sacrifice
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
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
3 months 2 weeks ago
The advantage of a bad memory...
The advantage of a bad memory is that one can enjoy the same good things for the first time several times.
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Philosophical Maxims
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
6 days ago
Everybody knows there is no fineness...

Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.

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Ch. 1
Philosophical Maxims
Niccolò Machiavelli
Niccolò Machiavelli
2 months 3 weeks ago
One must never…

One must never forget to look at the aim of a matter.

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Act III, scene xi
Philosophical Maxims
Diogenes of Sinope
Diogenes of Sinope
2 months 3 days ago
To the question what wine he...

To the question what wine he found pleasant to drink, he replied, "That for which other people pay."

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Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 54
Philosophical Maxims
Zoroaster
Zoroaster
2 months 4 days ago
Practice no sloth, so that the...

Practice no sloth, so that the duty and good work, which it is necessary for thee to do, may not remain undone.

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(p. 59)
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
2 months 1 week ago
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely...

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

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"The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment" (1949), p. 292 Similar statements were included in "A Reply to Professor Haldane" (1946) (see above), published posthumously.
Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
4 weeks 1 day ago
When I read the catechism of...

When I read the catechism of the Council of Trent, it seems as though I had nothing in common with the religion there set forth.

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Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
1 month 2 weeks ago
If any ask me what a...

If any ask me what a free Government is, I answer, that, for any practical purpose, it is what the people think so, - and that they, and not I, are the natural, lawful, and competent judges of this matter.

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Philosophical Maxims
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
2 months 1 week ago
I see the situation of man...

I see the situation of man in the world of planetary technicity not as an inexitricable and inescapable destiny, but I see the task of thought precisely in this, that within its own limits it helps man as such achieve a satisfactory relationship to the essence of technicity. National Socialism did indeed go in this direction. Those people, however, were far too poorly equipped for thought to arrive at a really explicit relationship to what is happening today and has been underway for the past 300 years.

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As translated by William Richardson in Risk and Meaning, Nicolas Bouleau (translated by Dené Oglesby and Martin Crossley), ed. Springer, 2011
Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
1 month 3 weeks ago
Let thy mind rule thy tongue!

Let thy mind rule thy tongue!

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Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
3 months 1 week ago
Ideas are cheap. It's only what...

Ideas are cheap. It's only what you do with them that counts.

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Philosophical Maxims
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