Skip to main content

Main navigation

☰ ˟
  • Home
  • Articulation
  • Contact
  • Shop
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
2 weeks 3 days ago
Pragmatism ... reflects with almost disarming...

Pragmatism ... reflects with almost disarming candor the spirit of the prevailing business culture, the very same attitude of 'being practical' as counter to which philosophical meditation as such was conceived.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 52.
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Jaspers
Karl Jaspers
2 weeks 3 days ago
The would-be climber must be able...

The would-be climber must be able to make himself liked ... please his superiors - avoid showing independence except in those matters wherein independence is expected of him by his chiefs... the winners in the race have qualities which disincline them to allow others to be their true selves. Hence the winners snub all those who aim at adequate self-expression, speaking of them as pretentious, eccentric, biased, unpractical, and measuring their achievements by insincere standards.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
2 weeks 2 days ago
All movements go...
0
⚖0
Main Content / General
Epictetus
Epictetus
2 months 1 week ago
Some things are in our control...

Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
(1).
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
2 months 3 weeks ago
Capital punishment is the most premeditated...

Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated, can be compared. For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date on which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not to be encountered in private life.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 weeks 1 day ago
The worst is not ennui nor...

The worst is not ennui nor despair but their encounter, their collision. To be crushed between the two!

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
2 months 4 days ago
God never sends evils…

God never sends evils.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Ch. 12
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
2 weeks 5 days ago
For he must rule as king...

For he must rule as king until God has put all enemies under his feet. And the last enemy, death, is to be brought to nothing.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Paul of Tarsus, 1 Corinthians 15: 25-26, NWT
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
3 weeks 1 day ago
The slave is sold once and...

The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly. The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master's interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence. This existence is assured only to the class as a whole.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
1 month 3 weeks ago
The Few assume to be the...

The Few assume to be the deputies, but they are often only the despoilers of the Many.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Pt. IV, sec. 3, ch. 3
Philosophical Maxims
bell hooks
bell hooks
1 week 3 days ago
What nationalist educators often fail to...

What nationalist educators often fail to recognize is that merely being taught by teachers who are black has not and will not solve the problem if the teachers have been socialized to internalize racist thinking.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
2 weeks 3 days ago
Hardness and softness, roughness and smoothness,...

Hardness and softness, roughness and smoothness, moonlight and sunlight present themselves in our recollection not preeminently as sensory contents but as certain kinds of symbioses, certain ways outside has of invading us and certain ways we have of meets this invasion...

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 317
Philosophical Maxims
Henri Bergson
Henri Bergson
2 weeks 5 days ago
The open society...

The open society is one that is deemed in principle to embrace all humanity.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Chapter IV
Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
2 months 1 week ago
"For I am holy." When I...

"For I am holy." When I hear these words I recognize the voice of the Saviour. But shall I take away my own? Certainly when He speaks thus He speaks in inseparable union with His body. But can I say, "I am holy"? If I mean a holiness that I have not received, I should be proud and a liar; but if I mean a holiness that I have received - as it is written: "Be ye holy because I the Lord your God am holy" (Lev. 19:2) - then let the body of Christ say these words. And let this one man, who cries from the ends of the earth, say with his Head and united with his Head: "I am holy." … That is not foolish pride, but an expression of gratitude. If you were to say that you are holy of yourselves, that would be pride; but if, as one of Christ's faithful and as a member of Christ, you say that you are not holy, you are ungrateful.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p.428
Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
2 months 1 week ago
Incomprehensible and immutable is the love...

Incomprehensible and immutable is the love wherewith God loves. He did not begin to love us only on the day we were reconciled to Him by the blood of His Son; He loved us before the world was made, that we too might become His sons together with His Only-begotten Son, long before we had any existence.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p.435
Philosophical Maxims
George Santayana
George Santayana
2 weeks 5 days ago
Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural...

Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
2 weeks 3 days ago
To-day the Enlightenment ideal has been...

To-day the Enlightenment ideal has been changed into a reality; not only in legislation, which is the mere framework of public life, but in the heart of every individual, whatever his ideas may be, and even if he be a reactionary in his ideas, that is to say, even when he attacks and castigates institutions by which those rights are sanctioned.... The sovereignty of the unqualified individual, of the human being as such, generically, has now passed from being a juridical idea or ideal to be a psychological state inherent in the average man. And note this, that when what was before an ideal becomes a component part of reality, it inevitably ceases to be an ideal. The prestige and the magic that are attributes of the ideal are volatilised.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Chap.II: The Rise Of The Historic Level
Philosophical Maxims
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
3 weeks 3 days ago
How many women thus waste life...

How many women thus waste life away the prey of discontent, who might have practised as physicians, regulated a farm, managed a shop, and stood erect, supported by their own industry, instead of hanging their heads surcharged with the dew of sensibility, that consumes the beauty to which it at first gave lustre.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Ch. 9
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
1 month 3 weeks ago
What are the earth and all...

What are the earth and all its interests beside the deep surmise which pierces and scatters them?

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1 month 3 weeks ago
Never read any book that is...

Never read any book that is not a year old.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Books
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
1 month 3 weeks ago
I have learned to seek my...

I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Attributed to John Stuart Mill in The Phrenological Journal and Science of Health, Vol. LXXXV (September 1887), p. 170
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
2 months 4 days ago
The souls of emperors and cobblers...

The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mold...The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbor creates a war betwixt princes.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Ch. 12, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Carew Hazlitt, 1877
Philosophical Maxims
Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes
1 week 5 days ago
Whereas the work is understood to...

Whereas the work is understood to be traceable to a source (through a process of derivation or "filiation"), the Text is without a source - the "author" a mere "guest" at the reading of the Text.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Proposition 5
Philosophical Maxims
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
1 month 3 weeks ago
For the lesson of such stories...

For the lesson of such stories [of resistance to Nazi atrocities] is simple and within everybody's grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror, most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that "it could happen" in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Ch. XIV
Philosophical Maxims
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
2 weeks 3 days ago
Strictly speaking, the mass, as a...

Strictly speaking, the mass, as a psychological fact, can be defined without waiting for individuals to appear in mass formation. In the presence of one individual we can decide whether he is "mass" or not. The mass is all that which sets no value on itself - good or ill - based on specific grounds, but which feels itself "just like everybody," and nevertheless is not concerned about it; is, in fact, quite happy to feel itself as one with everybody else.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Chap.I: The Coming Of The Masses
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
1 month 3 weeks ago
Instead of deciding once in three...

Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
The Civil War in France : "The Third Address", May 1871
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert A. Simon
Herbert A. Simon
5 days ago
In Administrative Behavior, bounded rationality is...

In Administrative Behavior, bounded rationality is largely characterized as a residual category - rationality is bounded when it falls short of omniscience. And the failures of omniscience are largely failures of knowing all the alternatives, uncertainty about relevant exogenous events, and inability to calculate consequences. There was needed a more positive and formal characterization of the mechanisms of choice under conditions of bounded rationality... Two concepts are central to the characterization: search and satisficing.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 502; As cited in Barros (2010, p. 464-5).
Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
1 month 1 day ago
The decisions of law courts should...

The decisions of law courts should never be printed: in the long run, they form a counterauthority to the law.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Peter Singer
Peter Singer
1 month 2 weeks ago
We are responsible not only for...

We are responsible not only for what we do but also for what we could have prevented.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Introduction (p. xv)
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
1 month 3 weeks ago
Nine-tenths of the activities of a...

Nine-tenths of the activities of a modern Government are harmful; therefore the worse they are performed, the better.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
The Problem of China (1922), Ch. XII: The Chinese Character
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton
Just now
Our design, not respecting arts, but...

Our design, not respecting arts, but philosophy, and our subject, not manual, but natural powers, we consider chiefly those things which relate to gravity, levity, elastic force, the resistance of fluids, and the like forces, whether attractive or impulsive; and therefore we offer this work as mathematical principles of philosophy; for all the difficulty of philosophy seems to consist in this - from the phenomena of motions to investigate the forces of nature, and then from these forces to demonstrate the other phenomena...

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Preface
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 week 6 days ago
It appears to me to be...

It appears to me to be indisputable that he who I am to-day derives, by a continuous series of states of consciousness, from him who was in my body twenty years ago. Memory is the basis of individual personality, just as tradition is the basis of the collective personality of a people. We live in memory, and our spiritual life is at bottom simply the effort of our memory to persist, to transform itself into hope, the effort of our past to transform itself into our future.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
3 weeks 6 days ago
There is a sort of enthusiasm...

There is a sort of enthusiasm in all projectors, absolutely necessary for their affairs, which makes them proof against the most fatiguing delays, the most mortifying disappointments, the most shocking insults; and what is severer than all, the presumptuous judgments of the ignorant upon their designs.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Volume I, p. 7
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
1 month 3 weeks ago
Death is the only thing we...

Death is the only thing we haven't succeeded in completely vulgarizing.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Eyeless in Gaza, 1936
Philosophical Maxims
Al-Ghazali
Al-Ghazali
1 month 3 days ago
Do not know the truth by...

Do not know the truth by the men, but know the truth, and then you will know who are truthful.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
III. The Classes of Seekers, p. 29.
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
3 weeks 6 days ago
The Leaders have ever since gone...to...

The Leaders have ever since gone...to propagate the principles of French Levelling and confusion, by which no house is safe from its Servants, and no Officer from his Soldiers, and no State or constitution from conspiracy and insurrection. I will not enter into the baseness and depravity of the System they adopt; but one thing I will remark, that its great Object is not, (as they pretend to delude worthy people to their Ruin) the destruction of all absolute Monarchies, but totally to root out that thing called an Aristocrate or Noblemen and Gentleman.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Letter to Lord Fitzwilliam (21 November 1791), quoted in Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith (eds.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Volume VI: July 1789-December 1791 (1967), p. 451
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1 month 3 weeks ago
Shallow men believe in luck, believe...

Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances...Strong men believe in cause and effect.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Worship
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
1 month 3 weeks ago
If in this book harsh words...

If in this book harsh words are spoken about some of the greatest among the intellectual leaders of mankind, my motive is not, I hope, the wish to belittle them. It springs rather from my conviction that, if our civilization is to survive, we must break with the habit of deference to great men. Great men may make great mistakes; and as the book tries to show, some of the greatest leaders of the past supported the perennial attack on freedom and reason. Their influence, too rarely challenged, continues to mislead those on whose defence civilization depends, and to divide them. The responsibility of this tragic and possibly fatal division becomes ours if we hesitate to be outspoken in our criticism of what admittedly is a part of our intellectual heritage. By reluctance to criticize some of it, we may help to destroy it all.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Preface to the First Edition
Philosophical Maxims
Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus
2 months 5 days ago
They [theologians] will explain to...

They [theologians] will explain to you how Christ was formed in the Virgin's womb; how accident subsists in synaxis without domicile in place. The most ordinary of them can do this. Those more fully initiated explain further whether there is an instans in Divine generation; whether in Christ there is more than a single filiation; whether 'the Father hates the Son' is a possible proposition; whether God can become the substance of a woman, of an ass, of a pumpkin, or of the devil, and whether, if so, a pumpkin could preach a sermon, or work miracles, or be crucified. And they can discover a thousand other things to you besides these. They will make you understand notions, and instants, formalities, and quiddities, things which no eyes ever saw, unless they were eyes which could see in the dark what had no existence.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
as quoted by Froude ibid.,
Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
1 week 5 days ago
Paradoxical as it may seem, a...

Paradoxical as it may seem, a Latin prose or a geometry problem, even though they are done wrong, may be of a great service one day, provided we devote the right kind of effort to them. Should the occasion arise, they can one day make us better able to give someone in affliction exactly the help required to save him, at the supreme moment of his need.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Cornel West
Cornel West
1 month 3 weeks ago
It's time for me to go...

It's time for me to go back to the great Union Theological Seminary. That's my institutional home, my brother. I can stretch out and try to be a truth teller and bear witness, still learn and listen, but also be in the middle of the Big Apple. Nothing like it... Union Theological Seminary means so much to me, because in that context I can be the full, free Black man, the Jesus-loving, free Black man, fundamentally committed to focusing on the oppressed around the world. Speaking in Too Radical for Harvard?

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Cornl West on Failed Fight for Tenure, Biden's First 50 Days & More, Democracy Now!,
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
3 weeks 6 days ago
I am aware that the age...

I am aware that the age is not what we all wish. But I am sure, that the only means of checking its precipitate degeneracy, is heartily to concur with whatever is the best in our time; and to have some more correct standard of judging what that best is, than the transient and uncertain favour of a court. If once we are able to find, and can prevail on ourselves to strengthen an union of such men, whatever accidentally becomes indisposed to ill-exercised power, even by the ordinary operation of human passions, must join with that society, and cannot long be joined, without in some degree assimilating to it. Virtue will catch as well as vice by contact; and the public stock of honest manly principle will daily accumulate. We are not too nicely to scrutinize motives as long as action is irreproachable. It is enough, (and for a worthy man perhaps too much,) to deal out its infamy to convicted guilt and declared apostacy.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
1 month 3 weeks ago
The great thing however is, in...

The great thing however is, in the show of the temporal and the transient to recognize the substance which is immanent and the eternal which is present. For the work of Reason (which is synonymous with the Idea) when considered in its own actuality, is to simultaneously enter external existence and emerge with an infinite wealth of forms, phenomena and phases - a multiplicity that envelops its essential rational kernel with a motley outer rind with which our ordinary consciousness is earliest at home. It is this rind that the Concept must penetrate before Reason can find its own inward pulse and feel it still beating even in the outward phases. But this infinite variety of circumstances which is formed in this element of externality by the light of the rational essence shining in it - all this infinite material, with its regulatory laws - is not the object of philosophy....To comprehend what is, is the task of philosophy: and what is is Reason.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Works, VII, 17.
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
1 month 3 weeks ago
We tend to believe the premises...

We tend to believe the premises because we can see that their consequences are true, instead of believing the consequences because we know the premises to be true. But the inferring of premises from consequences is the essence of induction; thus the method in investigating the principles of mathematics is really an inductive method, and is substantially the same as the method of discovering general laws in any other science.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
"The Regressive Method of Discovering the Premises of Mathematics" (1907), in Essays in Analysis (1973), pp. 273-274
Philosophical Maxims
Zoroaster
Zoroaster
1 month 2 weeks ago
Form no covetous desire, so that...

Form no covetous desire, so that the demon of greediness may not deceive thee, and the treasure of the world may not be tasteless to thee.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Democritus
Democritus
1 month 2 weeks ago
The man who is fortunate in...

The man who is fortunate in his choice of son-in-law gains a son; the man unfortunate in his choice loses his daughter also.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Freeman (1948), p. 169
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
1 month 3 weeks ago
But he, with these burthens on...

But he, with these burthens on him, planned, commenced, and completed, the History of India; and this in the course of about ten years, a shorter time than has been occupied (even by writers who had no other employment) in the production of almost any other historical work of equal bulk, and of anything approaching to the same amount of reading and research. And to this is to be added, that during the whole period, a considerable part of almost every day was employed in the instruction of his children: in the case of one of whom, myself, he exerted an amount of labour, care, and perseverance rarely, if ever, employed for a similar purpose, in endeavouring to give, according to his own conception, the highest order of intellectual education.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
(p. 4)
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
1 week 2 days ago
Direct action, having proven effective along...

Direct action, having proven effective along economic lines, is equally potent in the environment of the individual. There a hundred forces encroach upon his being, and only persistent resistance to them will finally set him free. Direct action against the authority in the shop, direct action against the authority of the law, direct action against the invasive, meddlesome authority of our moral code, is the logical, consistent method of Anarchism. Will it not lead to a revolution? Indeed, it will. No real social change has ever come about without a revolution. People are either not familiar with their history, or they have not yet learned that revolution is but thought carried into action.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
1 month 3 weeks ago
In some places the metropolis makes...

In some places the metropolis makes do with paying a clique of feudal overlords; in others, it has fabricated a fake bourgeoisie of colonized subjects in a system of divide and rule; elsewhere, it has killed two birds with one stone: the colony is both settlement and exploitation.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. xlvi
Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
2 months ago
An evil may be real, tho'...

An evil may be real, tho' its cause has no relation to us: It may be real, without being peculiar: It may be real, without shewing itself to others: It may be real, without being constant: And it may be real, without falling under the general rules. Such evils as these will not fail to render us miserable, tho' they have little tendency to diminish pride: And perhaps the most real and the most solid evils of life will be found of this nature.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Part 1, Section 6
Philosophical Maxims
  • Load More

User login

  • Create new account
  • Reset your password

Social

☰ ˟
  • Main Content
  • Philosophical Maxims

Civic

☰ ˟
  • Propositions
  • Issue / Solution

Who's new

  • Søren Kierkegaard
  • Jesus
  • Friedrich Nietzsche
  • VeXed
  • Slavoj Žižek

Who's online

There are currently 0 users online.

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia