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Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 month 5 days ago
It is the medium that shapes...

It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.

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(p. 9)
Philosophical Maxims
Gaston Bachelard
Gaston Bachelard
2 months ago
To disappear into deep water or...

To disappear into deep water or to disappear toward a far horizon, to become part of depth of infinity, such is the destiny of man that finds its image in the destiny of water.

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Introduction
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 1 week ago
Instinctively we divide mankind into friends...

Instinctively we divide mankind into friends and foes - friends, towards whom we have the morality of co-operation; foes, towards whom we have that of competition. But this division is constantly changing; at one moment a man hates his business competitor, at another, when both are threatened by Socialism or by an external enemy, he suddenly begins to view him as a brother. Always when we pass beyond the limits of the family it is the external enemy which supplies the cohesive force. In times of safety we can afford to hate our neighbour, but in times of danger we must love him.

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Authority and the Individual, 1949
Philosophical Maxims
Ernst Mach
Ernst Mach
2 months 3 days ago
Not bodies produce sensations, but element-complexes...

Not bodies produce sensations, but element-complexes (sensation-complexes) constitute the bodies. When the physicist considers the bodies as the permanent reality, the `elements' as the transient appearance, he does not realise that all `bodies' are only mental symbols for element-complexes (sensation-complexes)

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p. 23, as quoted in Lenin as Philosopher: A Critical Examination of the Philosophical Basis of Leninism (1948) by Anton Pannekoek, p. 33
Philosophical Maxims
Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno
2 months 2 weeks ago
It is manifest that every soul...

It is manifest that every soul has a certain continuity with the soul of the Universe, so that it must be understood to exist and to be included not only there where it liveth and feeleth, but it is also by its essence and substance diffused throughout immensity. The power of each soul is itself somehow present afar in the Universe. It is not mixed, yet is there in some presence.

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Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
3 months 6 days ago
To be taken without consent from...

To be taken without consent from my home and friends; to lose my liberty; to undergo all those assaults on my personality which modern psychotherapy knows how to deliver; to be re-made after some pattern of "normality" hatched in a Viennese laboratory to which I never professed allegiance; to know that this process will never end until either my captors have succeeded or I have grown wise enough to cheat them with apparent success-who cares whether this is called Punishment or not? "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment"

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1949
Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
2 months 1 week ago
Bad company is as instructive as...

Bad company is as instructive as licentiousness. One makes up for the loss of one's innocence with the loss of one's prejudices.

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Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 month 3 weeks ago
When at the beginning of the...

When at the beginning of the so-called modern age, at the Renaissance, the pagan sense of religion came to life again, it took the concrete form in the knightly ideal with its codes of conduct of love and honor. But it was a paganism Christianized, baptized. "Woman - la donna - was the divinity enshrined within those savage breasts. Whosoever will investigate the memorials of primitive times will find this ideal of woman in its full force and purity; the Universe is woman.

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Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
2 months ago
Bourgeois political economy ... never gets...

Bourgeois political economy ... never gets to see man who is its real subject. It disregards the essence of man and his history and is thus in the profoundest sense not a 'science of people' but of non-people and of an inhuman world of objects and commodities.

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"The Foundations of Historical Materialism," Studies in Critical Philosophy (1972), p. 9
Philosophical Maxims
Epicurus
Epicurus
3 months 3 weeks ago
Luxurious food and drinks, in no...

Luxurious food and drinks, in no way protect you from harm. Wealth beyond what is natural, is no more use than an overflowing container. Real value is not generated by theaters, and baths, perfumes or ointments, but by philosophy.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
3 months 2 days ago
In... "The Education of Children"... Plutarch...

In... "The Education of Children"... Plutarch gives an anecdote of Theocritus, a sophist, as an example of athuroglossos... he is... "a giant in impudence"... strong not because of his reason, or his rhetorical ability... or his ability to pronounce the truth, but only because he is arrogant. ...His fourth trait is... "putting his confidence in bluster." He is confident in thorubos... the noise made by a strong voice, by a scream, a clamor, or uproar. ...The final characteristic ...his confidence in ..."ignorant outspokenness..." ... it lacks mathesis ...-learning or wisdom.

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Ref: Plutarch, "The Education of Children", Moralia (1927) Vol. 1, Tr. Frank Cole Babbit, p. 4, The Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press.
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 month 5 days ago
Privacy invasion is now one of...

Privacy invasion is now one of biggest knowledge industries.

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(p. 24)
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
3 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
Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno
2 months 2 weeks ago
The wise soul feareth not death;...

The wise soul feareth not death; rather she sometimes striveth for death, she goeth beyond to meet her. Yet eternity maintaineth her substance throughout time, immensity throughout space, universal form throughout motion.

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I 1
Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
3 months 1 week ago
In all ages of the world,...

In all ages of the world, priests have been enemies to liberty; and it is certain, that this steady conduct of theirs must have been founded on fixed reasons of interest and ambition. Liberty of thinking, and of expressing our thoughts, is always fatal to priestly power, and to those pious frauds, on which it is commonly founded; and, by an infallible connexion, which prevails among all kinds of liberty, this privilege can never be enjoyed, at least has never yet been enjoyed, but in a free government.

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Part I, Essay 9: Of The Parties of Great Britain
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine
3 months 1 week ago
It is error only, and not...

It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henri Poincaré
Henri Poincaré
2 days ago
He has begun by supposing that...

He has begun by supposing that light has a constant velocity... the same in all directions. This... could never be verified directly by experiment... The postulate... resembling the principle of sufficient reason... furnishes us with a new rule for the investigation of simultaneity.

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Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
1 month 4 days ago
They are in you and me;...

They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

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Ch. 2. The replicators
Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
2 months 4 days ago
All the evolution we know of...

All the evolution we know of proceeds from the vague to the definite.

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Vol. VI, par. 191
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
3 months 3 days ago
Wisdom is passionless. But faith by...

Wisdom is passionless. But faith by contrast is what Kierkegaard calls a passion.

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p. 53e
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine
3 months 1 week ago
There ought to be some regulation...

There ought to be some regulation with respect to the spirit of denunciation that now prevails. If every individual is to indulge his private malignancy or his private ambition, to denounce at random and without any kind of proof, all confidence will be undermined and all authority be destroyed. Calumny is a species of treachery that ought to be punished as well as any other kind of treachery. It is a private vice productive of public evils; because it is possible to irritate men into disaffection by continual calumny who never intended to be disaffected. It is therefore equally as necessary to guard against the evils of unfounded or malignant suspicion as against the evils of blind confidence. It is equally as necessary to protect the characters of public officers from calumny as it is to punish them for treachery or misconduct.

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Letter to George Jacques Danton
Philosophical Maxims
chanakya
chanakya
2 weeks 3 days ago
The wise man should restrain his...

The wise man should restrain his senses like the crane and accomplish his purpose with due knowledge of his place, time and ability.

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Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
1 month 5 days ago
A wise man rules his passions,...

A wise man rules his passions, a fool obeys them.

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Maxim 49
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
3 months 6 days ago
I do not overlook the fact...

I do not overlook the fact that there are irrationalists who love mankind, and that not all forms of irrationalism engender criminality. But I hold that he who teaches that not reason but love should rule opens up the way for those who rule by hate. (Socrates, I believe, saw something of this when he suggested that mistrust or hatred of argument is related to mistrust or hatred of man).

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Vol. 2, Ch. 24 "Oracular Philosophy and the Revolt against Reason"
Philosophical Maxims
Lucretius
Lucretius
3 months 3 weeks ago
To none is life…

To none is life given in freehold; to all on lease.

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Book III, line 971 (tr. R. E. Latham)
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 3 weeks ago
A thing, moderately good....
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Main Content / General
Boethius
Boethius
3 months 3 weeks ago
Thus, where'er the drift..

Thus, where'er the drift of hazardSeems most unrestrained to flow,Chance herself is reined and bitted,And the curb of law doth know.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
3 months 1 week ago
Capital grows in one place to...

Capital grows in one place to a huge mass in a single hand, because it has in another place been lost by many. This is centralisation proper, as distinct from accumulation and concentration.

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Vol. I, Ch. 25, Section 2, pg. 686.
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
3 months 1 week ago
I strongly suspect that most of...

I strongly suspect that most of the great knowers of Suchness paid very little attention to art.... (To a person whose transfigured and transfiguring mind can see the All in every this, the first-rateness or tenth-rateness of even a religious painting will be a matter of the most sovereign indifference.) 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
Willard van Orman Quine
Willard van Orman Quine
1 month 3 weeks ago
Our argument is not flatly circular,...

Our argument is not flatly circular, but something like it. It has the form, figuratively speaking, of a closed curve in space.

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"Two Dogmas of Empiricism", p. 26
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
4 months 4 days ago
Absolute freedom mocks at justice. Absolute...

Absolute freedom mocks at justice. Absolute justice denies freedom. To be fruitful, the two ideas must find their limits in each other. 

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"Historical Murder", as translated by Anthony Bower
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
3 months 1 week ago
It is very strange that men...

It is very strange that men should deny a creator and yet attribute to themselves the power of creating eels.

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From the Philosophic Dictionary, as quoted in The life of Pasteur, 1902
Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
4 months 1 week ago
After these matters we ought perhaps...

After these matters we ought perhaps next to discuss pleasure. For it is thought to be most intimately connected with our human nature, which is the reason why in educating the young we steer them by the rudders of pleasure and pain; it is thought, too, that to enjoy the things we ought and to hate the things we ought has the greatest bearing on virtue of character. For these things extend right through life, with a weight and power of their own in respect both to virtue and to the happy life, since men choose what is pleasant and avoid what is painful; and such things, it will be thought, we should least of all omit to discuss, especially since they admit of much dispute.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
3 months 3 days ago
It is clear that the causal...

It is clear that the causal nexus is not a nexus at all.

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Journal entry (12 October 1916), p. 84e
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
3 months 1 week ago
The man who comes back through...

The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.

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Page 191
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 1 week ago
I found one day in school...

I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: "The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair." In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.

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p. 31
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
4 months 4 days ago
Art is the activity that exalts...

Art is the activity that exalts and denies simultaneously. "No artist tolerates reality," says Nietzsche.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
2 months ago
If your brother sins against you,...

If your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault, just between the two of you. If he listens to you, you have won your brother over.

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(Matthew 18:15) (NIV)
Philosophical Maxims
Henri Poincaré
Henri Poincaré
2 days ago
A scientist worthy….

A scientist worthy of the name, above all a mathematician, experiences in his work the same impression as an artist; his pleasure is as great and of the same nature. ...we work not only to obtain the positive results which, according to the profane, constitute our one and only affection, as to experience this esthetic emotion and to convey it to others who are capable of experiencing it.

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"Notice sur Halphen," Journal de l'École Polytechnique (Paris, 1890), 60ème cahier, p. 143.
Philosophical Maxims
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
3 months 6 days ago
The only man for whom Hitler...

The only man for whom Hitler had "unqualified respect" was "Stalin the genius," and while in the case of Stalin and the Russian regime we do not... have the rich documentary material that is available for Germany, we nevertheless know since Khrushchev's speech before the Twentieth Party Congress that Stalin trusted only one man and that was Hitler.

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Part 3, Ch. 10
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
2 months 1 week ago
...out of the tomb of the...

...out of the tomb of the murdered Monarchy in France, has arisen a vast, tremendous, unformed spectre, in a far more terrific guise than any which ever yet have overpowered the imagination and subdued the fortitude of man.

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p. 7
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
1 month 3 days ago
All who have meant good work...

All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it. Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind. And even if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in mid-career, laying out vast projects, and planning monstrous foundations, flushed with hope, and their mouths full of boastful language, they should be at once tripped up and silenced: is there not something brave and spirited in such a termination? and does not life go down with a better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas?

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316
Philosophical Maxims
Hilary Putnam
Hilary Putnam
1 month 2 weeks ago
To me it seems clear that...

To me it seems clear that the descriptions of human life we find in the novels of Tolstoy or George Eliot are not mere entertainment; they teach us to perceive what goes on in social and individual life. And such descriptions require the many subtle distinctions that ordinary language has made available to us. The question of the relevance or irrelevance of "how we speak" is not just a question for philosophers, although it is that too. It is a question for philosophers because once ordinary language is laughed out of the room, philosophical theories are no longer held responsible at all to the ways we actually speak and actually live; but it is a question for more than just philosophers because, at bottom, contempt for ordinary language is contempt for all the humanities.

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"Science and Philosophy"
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
1 month 1 week ago
Armies are necessary, before all things,...

Armies are necessary, before all things, for the defense of governments from their own oppressed and enslaved subjects.

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Chapter VII, Significance of Compulsory Service
Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
3 months 3 weeks ago
For this too is a very...

For this too is a very pleasant strand woven into the Cynic's pattern of life; he must needs be flogged like an ass, and while he is being flogged he must love the men who flog him, as though he were the father or brother of them all.

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Book III, ch. 22, 54
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
4 months 4 days ago
At my age one's got to...

At my age one's got to be sincere. Lying's too much effort.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
4 months 1 week ago
But voice is a certain sound...

But voice is a certain sound of that which is animated; for nothing inanimate emits a voice; but they are said to emit a voice from similitude, as a pipe, and a lyre, and such other inanimate things, have extension, modulation, and dialect; for thus it appears, because voice, also, has these.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
3 months 1 week ago
Classical political economy nearly touches the...

Classical political economy nearly touches the true relation of things, without, however,consciously formulating it. This it cannot so long as it sticks in its bourgeois skin.

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Vol. I, Ch. 19, pg. 594.
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
2 months 1 week ago
There never, gentlemen, was a period...

There never, gentlemen, was a period in which the steadfastness of some men has been nut to so sore a trial. It is not very difficult for well-formed minds to abandon their interest; but the separation of fame and virtue is an harsh divorce. Liberty is in danger of being made unpopular to Englishmen. Contending for an imaginary power, we begin to acquire the spirit of domination, and to lose the relish of honest equality.

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Philosophical Maxims
Judith Butler
Judith Butler
1 month 1 week ago
There was a brief moment after...

There was a brief moment after 9/11 when Colin Powell said "we should not rush to satisfy the desire for revenge." It was a great moment, an extraordinary moment, because what he was actually asking people to do was to stay with a sense of grief, mournfulness, and vulnerability.

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Interview with Judith Butler. in: The Believer. May 2003
Philosophical Maxims
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