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Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
4 months 1 week ago
Absurd, irreducible; nothing - not even...

Absurd, irreducible; nothing - not even a profound and secret delirium of nature - could explain it. Obviously I did not know everything, I had not seen the seeds sprout, or the tree grow. But faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explained by the rotation of a straight segment around one of its extremities. But neither does a circle exist. This root, on the other hand, existed in such a way that I could not explain it. Reflections on a chestnut tree root.

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Philosophical Maxims
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
Just now
I never think of the...

I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.

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Philosophical Maxims
Max Stirner
Max Stirner
3 weeks 5 days ago
What matters the party to me?...

What matters the party to me? I shall find enough anyhow who unite with me without swearing allegiance to my flag.

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Dover 2005, p. 236
Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
3 months 3 weeks ago
Write in the sand the flaws...

Write in the sand the flaws of your friend.

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As quoted in Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists‎ (2007) by James Geary
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 1 week ago
The "social contract," in the only...

The "social contract," in the only sense in which it is not completely mythical, is a contract among conquerors, which loses its raison d'être if they are deprived of the benefits of conquest.

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Ch. 12: Powers and forms of governments
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
4 months 1 week ago
It requires twenty years….

It requires twenty years for a man to rise from the vegetable state in which he is within his mother's womb, and from the pure animal state which is the lot of his early childhood, to the state when the maturity of reason begins to appear. It has required thirty centuries to learn a little about his structure. It would need eternity to learn something about his soul. It takes an instant to kill him.

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"Man: General Reflection on Man", 1771
Philosophical Maxims
Ernest Renan
Ernest Renan
1 month 5 days ago
We aspire not to equality but...

We aspire not to equality but to domination. Countries inhabited by foreign races must become again countries of serfs, farm laborers, and factory workers. The goal is not to suppress inequities, but, rather, to amplify them and to make of them a matter of course.

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as translated by Asselin Charles, in "Colonial Discourse Since Christopher Columbus," Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 26, No. 2 (November 1995), p. 147
Philosophical Maxims
George Santayana
George Santayana
3 months 3 days ago
The highest form of vanity is...

The highest form of vanity is love of fame.

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Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
5 months 1 week ago
The military mind remains unparalleled as...

The military mind remains unparalleled as a vehicle of creative stupidity.

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Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
4 months 1 week ago
All wars are accordingly so many...

All wars are accordingly so many attempts (not in the intention of man, but in the intention of Nature) to establish new relations among states, and through the destruction or at least the dismemberment of all of them to create new political bodies, which, again, either internally or externally, cannot maintain themselves and which must thus suffer like revolutions; until finally, through the best possible civic constitution and common agreement and legislation in external affairs, a state is created which, like a civic commonwealth, can maintain itself automatically.

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Seventh Thesis
Philosophical Maxims
Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus
4 months 2 weeks ago
A speech comes alive only if...

A speech comes alive only if it rises from the heart, not if it floats on the lips.

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in The Erasmus Reader (1990), p. 130.
Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
4 months 3 weeks ago
If we are not stupid or...

If we are not stupid or insincere when we say that the good or ill of man lies within his own will, and that all beside is nothing to us, why are we still troubled?

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Book I, ch. 25, § 1.
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Boyle
Robert Boyle
6 days ago
I need not tell you, what...

I need not tell you, what complaints the more candid and judicious of the Chymists themselves are wont to make of those boasters, that confidently pretend, that they have extracted the salt or sulphur of quicksilver, when they have disguised it by additaments, wherewith it resembles the concretes, whose names are given it; whereas by a skilful and rigid examen, it may be easily enough stripped of its disguises, and made to appear again in the pristine form of running mercury. The pretended salts and sulphurs being so far from being elementary parts extracted out of the body of mercury, that they are rather... de-compound bodies, made up of the whole metal and the menstruum, or other additaments employed to disguise it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Mozi
Mozi
2 weeks 4 days ago
The wise man who has charge...

The wise man who has charge of governing the empire should know the cause of disorder before he can put it in order. Unless he knows its cause, he cannot regulate it.

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Book 4; Universal Love I
Philosophical Maxims
bell hooks
bell hooks
2 months 3 weeks ago
It is obvious that many women...

It is obvious that many women have appropriated feminism to serve their own ends, especially those white women who have been at the forefront of the movement; but rather than resigning myself to this appropriation I choose to re-appropriate the term "feminism," to focus on the fact that to be "feminist" in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
4 months 1 week ago
Every book is a quotation...

Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone-quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

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Quotation and Originality
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 1 week ago
I do not think it can...

I do not think it can be questioned that sympathy is a genuine motive, and that some people at some times are made somewhat uncomfortable by the sufferings of some other people. It is sympathy that has produced the many humanitarian advances of the last hundred years. We are shocked when we hear stories of the ill-treatment of lunatics, and there are now quite a number of asylums in which they are not ill-treated. Prisoners in Western countries are not supposed to be tortured, and when they are, there is an outcry if the facts are discovered. We do not approve of treating orphans as they are treated in Oliver Twist.

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Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
4 months 1 week ago
All our knowledge falls with the...

All our knowledge falls with the bounds of experience.

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A 146, B 185
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
4 months 5 days ago
If life becomes hard to bear...

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

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p. 53e
Philosophical Maxims
Edward Said
Edward Said
2 months 3 weeks ago
Everything I have written in these...

Everything I have written in these lectures underlines the importance to the intellectual of passionate engagement, risk, exposure, commitment to principles, vulnerability in debating and being involved in worldly causes. For example, the difference I drew earlier between a professional and an amateur intellectual rests precisely on this, that the professional claims detachment on the basis of a profession and pretends to objectivity, whereas the amateur is moved neither by reward nor by the fulfillment of an immediate career plan but by a committed engagement with ideas and values in the public sphere.

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p. 109
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
4 months 1 week ago
The trail of the human serpent...

The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything.

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Lecture II, What Pragmatism Means
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
2 months 1 week ago
For tribal man, space was the...

For tribal man, space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.

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p. 85; "Magic that Changes Mood")
Philosophical Maxims
Mencius
Mencius
1 month 2 days ago
The virtues are not poured into...

The virtues are not poured into us, they are natural. Seek, and you will find them: neglect, and you will lose them.

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Uses and Sanctions, no. 22
Philosophical Maxims
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
1 month 3 days ago
All poetry is supposed to be...

All poetry is supposed to be instructive but in an unnoticeable manner; it is supposed to make us aware of what it would be valuable to instruct ourselves in; we must deduce the lesson on our own, just as with life.

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Letter to Carl Friedrich Zelter
Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
3 months 3 weeks ago
Having departed from your house, turn...

Having departed from your house, turn not back; for the furies will be your attendants.

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Symbol 15
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 1 week ago
Fanaticism is the danger of the...

Fanaticism is the danger of the world, and always has been, and has done untold harm. I might almost say that I was fanatical against fanaticism.

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The Future of Science (1959), p. 79; also in BBC The Listener, Vol. 61 (1959), p. 505
Philosophical Maxims
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
1 month 3 weeks ago
By and large, mothers and housewives...

By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.

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Philosophical Maxims
Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry
1 week 3 days ago
It may be, then, that form...

It may be, then, that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that when we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
4 months 1 week ago
But there is a devil of...

But there is a devil of a difference between barbarians who are fit by nature to be used for anything, and civilized people who apply them selves to everything.

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Introduction, p. 25.
Philosophical Maxims
Hilary Putnam
Hilary Putnam
2 months 2 weeks ago
Truth and falsity are the most...

Truth and falsity are the most fundamental terms of rational criticism, and any adequate philosophy must give some account of these, or failing that, show that they can be dispensed with.

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"Introduction: Philosophy of language and the rest of philosophy"
Philosophical Maxims
Henry George
Henry George
1 week 2 days ago
We cannot think with precision unless...

We cannot think with precision unless in our own minds we use words with precision.

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General Introduction
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
1 week ago
You may break your heart, but...

You may break your heart, but men will still go on as before.

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VIII, 4
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 3 weeks ago
We are responsible...
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Main Content / General
Plutarch
Plutarch
3 months 3 weeks ago
A physician, after he had felt...

A physician, after he had felt the pulse of Pausanias, and considered his constitution, saying, "He ails nothing," "It is because, sir," he replied, "I use none of your physic."

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Of Pausanias the Son of Phistoanax
Philosophical Maxims
Rosa Luxemburg
Rosa Luxemburg
6 days ago
As the entire middle class, the...

As the entire middle class, the bourgeois and petty bourgeois intelligentsia, boycotted the Soviet government for months after the October Revolution and crippled the railroad, post and telegraph, and educational and administrative apparatus, and, in this fashion, opposed the workers government, naturally all measures of pressure were exerted against it. These included the deprivation of political rights, of economic means of existence, etc., in order to break their resistance with an iron fist. It was precisely in this way that the socialist dictatorship expressed itself, for it cannot shrink from any use of force to secure or prevent certain measures involving the interests of the whole.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
4 months 5 days ago
This remark provides the key to...

This remark provides the key to the problem, how much truth there is in solipsism. For what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest. The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world.

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-5.62
Philosophical Maxims
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
3 months 1 day ago
The characteristic of the hour is...

The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will. As they say in the United States: "to be different is to be indecent." The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated. And it is clear, of course, that this "everybody" is not "everybody." "Everybody" was normally the complex unity of the mass and the divergent, specialised minorities. Nowadays, "everybody" is the mass alone.

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Chap.I: The Coming Of The Masses
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel
4 months 1 day ago
If things emerged from a spaceship...

If things emerged from a spaceship which we could not be sure were machines or conscious beings, what we were wondering about would have an answer even if the things were so different from anything we were familiar with that we could never discover it. It would depend on whether there was something it was like to be them, not on whether behavioral similarities warranted our saying so. ... [W]e need ... to ask whether experience is present in [the] alien thing[s], ... whether there is something it is like to be them, and ... the answer to that question is what determines whether they are conscious.

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"Panpsychism" (1979), pp. 191-193.
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
3 weeks 4 days ago
He who does not wish to...

He who does not wish to die cannot have wished to live.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 month 1 day 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
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
2 months 3 weeks ago
Normally man's mind is composed only...

Normally man's mind is composed only of a consciousness of his immediate needs, which is to say that this consciousness at any moment can be defined as ''his awareness of his own power to satisfy those needs.'' He thinks in terms of what he intends to do in half an hour's time, a day's time, a month's time an no more. He never asks himself: what are the ''limits'' of my powers? In a sense, he is like a man who has a fortune is the bank, who never asks himself, How much money have I got, but only, Have I enough for a pound of cheese, a new tie, etc.

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Chapter Six, The Question of Identity
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
2 months 1 week ago
World War I a railway war...

World War I a railway war of centralization and encirclement. World War II a radio war of decentralization concluded by the Bomb. World War III a TV guerrilla war with no divisions between civil and military fronts.

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(p. 152)
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
4 months 1 week ago
Homeliness is almost as great a...

Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there. It is next to beauty, and a very high art.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 32
Philosophical Maxims
Nikos Kazantzakis
Nikos Kazantzakis
1 week 4 days ago
We must understand well that we...

We must understand well that we do not proceed from a unity of God to the same unity of God again. We do not proceed from one chaos to another chaos, neither from one light to another light, nor from one darkness to another darkness. What would be the value of our life then? What would be the value of all life? But we set out from an almighty chaos, from a thick abyss of light and darkness tangled. And we struggle - plants, animals, men, ideas - in this momentary passage of individual life, to put in order the Chaos within us, to cleanse the abyss, to work upon as much darkness as we can within our bodies and to transmute it into light.

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Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
3 months 6 days ago
Unconscious assumptions or opinions are the...

Unconscious assumptions or opinions are the worst enemy of woman; they can even grow into a positively demonic passion that exasperates and disgusts men, and does the woman herself the greatest injury by gradually smothering the charm and meaning of her femininity and driving it into the background. Such a development naturally ends in profound psychological disunion, in short, in a neurosis.

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P.245
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
2 months 1 week ago
To love life is to love...

To love life is to love God. Harder and more blessed than all else is to love this life in one's sufferings, in undeserved sufferings.

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Bk. XIV, ch. 15
Philosophical Maxims
Edward Said
Edward Said
2 months 3 weeks ago
The intellectual's spirit as an amateur...

The intellectual's spirit as an amateur can enter and transform the merely professional routine most of us go through into something much more lively and radical; instead of doing what one is supposed to do one can ask why one does it, who benefits from it, how can it reconnect with a personal project and original thoughts.

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p. 83
Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
3 months 6 days ago
Effort supposes resistance....

Effort supposes resistance.

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Vol. I, par. 320
Philosophical Maxims
Plato
Plato
5 months 1 week ago
I was pleased with you,...

Parmenides: I was pleased with you, Socrates, because you would not discuss the doubtful question in terms of visible objects or in relation to them, but only with reference to what we conceive most entirely by the intellect and may call ideas… But if you wish to get better training, you must do something more than that; you must consider not only what happens if a particular hypothesis is true, but also what happens if it is not true.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 1 week ago
Our words tend to conceal what...

Our words tend to conceal what is private and particular in our impressions, and to make us believe that different people live in a common world to a greater extent than is in fact the case.

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An Outline of Philosophy Ch.15 The Nature of our Knowledge of Physics, 1927
Philosophical Maxims
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