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Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
5 months 2 weeks ago
The charlatan takes very different shapes...

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

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"Similes, Parables and Fables" Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. 2, § 394
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 1 week ago
Tyranny is just what one can...

Tyranny is just what one can develop a taste for, since it so happens that man prefers to wallow in fear rather than to face the anguish of being himself.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 1 week ago
Compared to the refined culture of...

Compared to the refined culture of sclerotic forms and frames, which mask everything, the lyrical mode is utterly barbarian in its expression. Its value resides precisely in its savage quality: it is only blood, sincerity, and fire.

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Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
1 month 3 weeks ago
I forbid you to be cast...

I forbid you to be cast down or depressed. It is not enough if you do not shrink from work; ask for it.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
3 months 2 weeks ago
If just once....
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Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
3 months 5 days ago
No realistic, sane person goes around...

No realistic, sane person goes around Chicago without protection.

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Humboldt's Gift (1975), p. 452
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 1 week ago
To have failed in everything, always,...

To have failed in everything, always, out of a love of discouragement.

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Philosophical Maxims
George Santayana
George Santayana
4 months 5 days ago
To the mind of the ancients,...

To the mind of the ancients, who knew something of such matters, liberty and prosperity seemed hardly compatible, yet modern liberalism wants them together.

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"The Irony of Liberalism"
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
5 months 1 week ago
A command can express no more...

A command can express no more than an ought or a shall, because it is a universal, but it does not express an 'is'; and this at once makes plain its deficiency. Against such commands Jesus sets virtue, i.e., a loving disposition, which makes the content of the command superfluous and destroys its form as a command, because that form implies an opposition between a commander and something resisting the command.

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Philosophical Maxims
Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm
3 months 3 weeks ago
Exploitation and manipulation produce boredom and...

Exploitation and manipulation produce boredom and triviality; they cripple man, and all factors that make man into a psychic cripple turn him also into a sadist or a destroyer. This position will be characterized by some as "overoptimistic," "utopian," or "unrealistic." In order to appreciate the merits of such criticism a discussion of the ambiguity of hope and the nature of optimism and pessimism seems called for.

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p. 483
Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
4 months 3 weeks ago
Hear gladly!

Hear gladly!

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
2 months 3 days ago
Such souls are, in these days,...

Such souls are, in these days, getting somewhat out of humour with the world. Your very Byron, in these days, is at least driven mad; flatly refuses fealty to the world. The world with its injustices, its golden brutalities, and dull yellow guineas, is a disgust to such souls: the ray of Heaven that is in them does at least pre-doom them to be very miserable here. Yes:-and yet all misery is faculty misdirected, strength that has not yet found its way. The black whirlwind is mother of the lightning. No smoke, in any sense, but can become flame and radiance! Such soul, once graduated in Heaven's stern University, steps out superior to your guinea.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig von Mises
Ludwig von Mises
1 month 4 weeks ago
There is no means of avoiding...

There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.

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Chapter XX: Interest, Credit Expansion, The Trade Cycle, § 8 : The Monetary or Circulation Theory of the Trade Cycle
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
5 months 1 week 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
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
5 months 2 weeks ago
Covetousness is both the beginning and...

Covetousness is both the beginning and the end of the devil's alphabet- the first vice in corrupt nature that moves, and the last which dies.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
5 months 1 week ago
Of the evils most liable to...

Of the evils most liable to attend on any sort of early proficiency, and which often fatally blights its promise, my father most anxiously guarded against. This was self-conceit. He kept me, with extreme vigilance, out of the way of hearing myself praised, or of being led to make self-flattering comparisons between myself and others. From his own intercourse with me I could derive none but a very humble opinion of myself; and the standard of comparison he always held up to me, was not what other people did, but what a man could and ought to do. He completely succeeded in preserving me from the sort of influences he so much dreaded. I was not at all aware that my attainments were anything unusual at my age.

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(pp. 32-33)
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
4 months 1 week ago
...no legislator, at any period of...

...no legislator, at any period of the world, has willingly placed the seat of active power in the hands of the multitude: Because there it admits of no control, no regulation; no steady direction whatsoever. The people are the natural control on authority; but to exercise and to control together is contradictory and impossible.

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p. 441
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
6 months 1 week ago
Thus I progressed on the surface...

Thus I progressed on the surface of life, in the realm of words as it were, never in reality. All those books barely read, those friends barely loved, those cities barely visited, those women barely possessed! I went through the gestures out of boredom or absent-mindedness. Then came the human beings, they wanted to cling, but there was nothing to cling to, and that was unfortunate for them. As for me, I forgot. I never remembered anything but myself.

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Philosophical Maxims
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
1 month 2 days ago
But to return to the...

But to return to the Jewish question. Other groups and nations cultivate their individual traditions. There is no reason why we should sacrifice ours. Standardization robs life of its spice. To deprive every ethnic group of its special traditions is to convert the world into a huge Ford plant. I believe in standardizing automobiles. I do not believe in standardizing human beings. Standardization is a great peril which threatens American culture.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
5 months 1 week ago
It is also a study peculiarly...

It is also a study peculiarly adapted to an early stage in the education of philosophical students, since it does not presuppose the slow process of acquiring, by experience and reflection, valuable thoughts of their own.

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(pp. 19-20)
Philosophical Maxims
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
1 month 3 weeks ago
And the simple step of a...

And the simple step of a simple courageous man is not to partake in falsehood, not to support false actions! Let THAT enter the world, let it even reign in the world - but not with my help. But writers and artists can achieve more: they can CONQUER FALSEHOOD! In the struggle with falsehood art always did win and it always does win! Openly, irrefutably for everyone! Falsehood can hold out against much in this world, but not against art. And no sooner will falsehood be dispersed than the nakedness of violence will be revealed in all its ugliness - and violence, decrepit, will fall.

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Philosophical Maxims
Vandana Shiva
Vandana Shiva
2 months 3 weeks ago
The WTO-related events in Seattle created...

The WTO-related events in Seattle created the first experience of a rainbow politics-a successful pluralistic politics, without the working of a master mind, but with the currents and beauty that come out of free thinking. In the new politics, people have different ways of talking, but I feel the core will be living democracy and living economies, and that it will include both taking personal responsibility to make change and being part of national and international movements for change.

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Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
3 months 3 weeks ago
In his Experiment in Autobiography (1934),...

In his Experiment in Autobiography (1934), H.G. Wells pointed out that ever since the beginning of life, most creatures have been 'up against it'. Their lives are a drama of struggle against the forces of nature. Yet nowadays you can say to a man: Yes, you earn a living, you support a family, you love and hate, but -- what do you do? His real interest may be in something else -- art, science, literature, philosophy. The bird is a creature of the air, the fish is a creature of the water, and man is a creature of the mind.

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pp. 346-347
Philosophical Maxims
Max Stirner
Max Stirner
1 month 4 weeks ago
The difficulty in our education up...

The difficulty in our education up till now lies, for the most part, in the fact that knowledge did not refine itself into will, to application of itself, to pure practice. The realists felt the need and supplied it, though in a most miserable way, by cultivating idea-less and fettered "practical men." Most college students are living examples of this sad turn of events. Trained in the most excellent manner, they go on training; drilled they continue drilling.

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p. 25
Philosophical Maxims
Xunzi
Xunzi
2 months 1 week ago
Learning proceeds until death and only...

Learning proceeds until death and only then does it stop. ... Its purpose cannot be given up for even a moment. To pursue it is to be human, to give it up to be a beast.

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Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy (2001), p. 258
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
3 months 1 week ago
I would mind more if I...

I would mind more if I could claim that The Selfish Gene had become severely outmoded and superseded. Unfortunately (from one point of view) I cannot. Details have changed and factual examples burgeoned mightily. But, with an exception that I shall discuss in a moment, there is little in the book that I would rush to take back now, or apologize for.

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Arthur Cain, late Professor of Zoology at Liverpool and one of my inspiring tutors at Oxford in the sixties, described The Selfish Gene in 1976 as a 'young man's book'.
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
5 months 1 week ago
I exist, that is all, and...

I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.

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Philosophical Maxims
Peter Singer
Peter Singer
5 months 3 days ago
Human social institutions can effect the...

Human social institutions can effect the course of human evolution. Just as climate-change, food supply, predators, and other natural forces of selection have molded our nature, so too can our culture.

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Chapter 6, A New Understanding Of Ethics, p. 172
Philosophical Maxims
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut
3 months 2 weeks ago
I was taught in the sixth...

I was taught in the sixth grade that we had a standing army of just over a hundred thousand men and that the generals had nothing to say about what was done in Washington. I was taught to be proud of that and to pity Europe for having more than a million men under arms and spending all their money on airplanes and tanks. I simply never unlearned junior civics. I still believe in it. I got a very good grade.

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As quoted by James Lundquist in Kurt Vonnegut
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
1 month 1 week ago
Put an end once for all...

Put an end once for all to this discussion of what a good man should be, and be one.

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X. 16,
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
4 months 5 days ago
Wherefore I say unto you, All...

Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.

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(Matthew 12:31-32) (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
6 months 2 weeks ago
Art furnishes us with eyes and...
Art furnishes us with eyes and hands and above all the good conscience to be able to turn ourselves into such a phenomenon.
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Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
1 month 3 weeks ago
All the Good of mortals is...

All the Good of mortals is mortal.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 1 week ago
In order to deceive melancholy, you...

In order to deceive melancholy, you must keep moving. Once you stop, it wakens, if in fact it has ever dozed off.

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Philosophical Maxims
Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Bakunin
4 months 1 week ago
Unity is the great goal toward...

Unity is the great goal toward which humanity moves irresistibly. But it becomes fatal, destructive of the intelligence, the dignity, the well-being of individuals and peoples whenever it is formed without regard to liberty, either by violent means or under the authority of any theological, metaphysical, political, or even economic idea. That patriotism which tends toward unity without regard to liberty is an evil patriotism, always disastrous to the popular and real interests of the country it claims to exalt and serve. Often, without wishing to be so, it is a friend of reaction - an enemy of the revolution, i.e., the emancipation of nations and men.

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Philosophical Maxims
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
4 months 3 days ago
It must be emphasized that the...

It must be emphasized that the warrior spirit is one thing and the military spirit quite another. Militarism was unknown in the Middle Ages. The soldier signifies the degeneration of the warrior, corrupted by the industrialist. The soldier is an armed industrialist, a bourgeois who has invented gunpowder. He was organized by the state to make war on the castles. With his coming, long-distance warfare appeared, the abstract war waged by cannon and machine gun.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
5 months 1 week ago
Classics which at home are drowsily...

Classics which at home are drowsily read have a strange charm in a country inn, or in the transom of a merchant brig.

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Voyage to England
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
3 months 4 weeks ago
The intellectual world is divided into...

The intellectual world is divided into two classes - dilettantes, on the one hand, and pedants, on the other.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
5 months 1 week ago
I must plunge into the water...

I must plunge into the water of doubt again and again.

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Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 119
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
5 months 1 week ago
He would have left a Greek...

He would have left a Greek accent slanting the wrong way, and righted up a falling man.

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Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
6 months 1 week ago
Anxiety may be compared with dizziness....

Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs to dizziness. Further than this, psychology cannot and will not go. In that very moment everything is changed, and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty. Between these two moments lies the leap, which no science has explained and which no science can explain. He who becomes guilty in anxiety becomes as ambiguously guilty as it is possible to become.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
4 months 5 days ago
It is written, My house shall...

It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.

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21:13 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
5 months 3 weeks ago
It is manifest that there is...

It is manifest that there is no danger at all in the proportion or quantity of knowledge, how large soever, lest it should make it swell or out-compass itself; no, but it is merely the quality of knowledge, which, be it in quantity more or less, if it be taken without the true corrective thereof, hath in it some nature of venom or malignity, and some effects of that venom, which is ventosity or swelling. This corrective spice, the mixture whereof maketh knowledge so sovereign, is charity, which the Apostle immediately addeth to the former clause; for so he saith, "Knowledge bloweth up, but charity buildeth up".

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Book I
Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
5 months 3 weeks ago
Reason is not measured by size...

Reason is not measured by size or height, but by principle.

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Book I, ch. 12, 26.
Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
3 months 1 week 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
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
3 months 5 days ago
Human beings can lose their lives...

Human beings can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.

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Him with His Foot in His Mouth, from Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories (1984) [Penguin Classics, 1998, ISBN 0-141-18023-4], p. 11
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
1 month 1 week ago
The priests have so disfigured the...

The priests have so disfigured the simple religion of Jesus that no one who reads the sophistications they have engrafted on it, from the jargon of Plato, of Aristotle & other mystics, would conceive these could have been fathered on the sublime preacher of the sermon on the mount.

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Letter to Benjamin Waterhouse (13 October 1815). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 11, p. 492
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
5 months 2 weeks ago
To require that a so-called layman...

To require that a so-called layman should not use his own reason in religious matters, particularly since religion is to be appreciated as moral, but instead follow the appointed clergyman and thus someone else's reason, is an unjust demand because as to morals every man must account for all his doings. The clergyman will not and even cannot assume such a responsibility.

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Kant, Immanuel (1996), pages 94-95
Philosophical Maxims
Henry George
Henry George
1 month 1 week ago
Poverty is a crime. I do...

Poverty is a crime. I do not mean that it is a crime to be poor. Murder is a crime; but it is not a crime to be murdered; and a man who is in poverty, I look upon, not as a criminal in himself, so much as the victim of a crime for which others, as well perhaps as himself, are responsible.

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The Crime of Poverty, 1885
Philosophical Maxims
Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini
2 months 3 weeks ago
If I'm a cruel satirist at...

If I'm a cruel satirist at least I'm not a hyprocrite: I never judge what other people do. Neither a politician nor a priest, I never censor what others do. Neither a philospher nor a psychiatrist, I never bother trying to analyze or resolve my fears and neuroses.

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"Hypocrisy"
Philosophical Maxims
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