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Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
3 months 3 days ago
Nietzsche ... does not shy from...

Nietzsche ... does not shy from conscious exaggeration and one-sided formulations of his thought, believing that in this way he can most clearly set in relief what in his vision and in his inquiry is different from the run-of-the-mill.

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p. 50
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 4 days ago
What surrounds us we endure better...

What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.

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Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
2 months 1 week ago
All became so jealous of the...

All became so jealous of the rights of their own personality that they did their very utmost to curtail and destroy them in others, and made that the chief thing in their lives. Slavery followed, even voluntary slavery; the weak eagerly submitted to the strong, on condition that the latter aided them to subdue the still weaker. Then there were saints who came to these people, weeping, and talked to them of their pride, of their loss of harmony and due proportion, of their loss of shame. They were laughed at or pelted with stones.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
3 months 1 week ago
Whatever is known to us by...

Whatever is known to us by consciousness, is known beyond possibility of question. What one sees or feels, whether bodily or mentally, one cannot but be sure that one sees or feels. No science is required for the purpose of establishing such truths; no rules of art can render our knowledge of them more certain than it is in itself. There is no logic for this portion of our knowledge.

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p. 4
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
3 months 1 week ago
All war propaganda consists, in the...

All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in substituting diabolical abstractions for human beings. Similarly, those who defend war have invented a pleasant sounding vocabulary of abstractions in which to describe the process of mass murder.

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"Pacifism and Philosophy", 1936
Philosophical Maxims
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
2 months 1 week ago
A living language can stand on...

A living language can stand on a higher level of culture in comparison with another, but it can never in itself attain that perfection of development which a dead language quite easily attains. In the latter the connotation of words is fixed, and the possibilities of suitable combinations will also gradually become exhausted. Hence, he who wishes to speak this language must speak it just as it is; but, after he has once learnt to do this, the language speaks itself in his mouth and thinks and imagines for him.

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Consequences of the Difference p. 85
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
3 months 3 weeks ago
By extensively studying all learning, and...

By extensively studying all learning, and keeping himself under the restraint of the rules of propriety, one may thus likewise not err from what is right.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 4 days ago
To detach yourself elegantly from the...

To detach yourself elegantly from the world; to give contour and grace to sadness; a solitude in style; a walk that gives cadence to memories; stepping towards the intangible; with the breath in the trembling margins of things; the past reborn in the overflow of fragrances; the smell, through which we conquer time; the contour of the invisible things; the forms of the immaterial; to deepen yourself in the intangible; to touch the world airborne by smell; aerial dialogue and gliding dissolution; to bathe in your own reflecting fragmentation...

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Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
3 months 3 days ago
Freud's fanciful pseudo-explanations (precisely because they...

Freud's fanciful pseudo-explanations (precisely because they are brilliant) perform a disservice. (Now any ass has these pictures available to use in "explaining" symptoms of an illness).

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p. 55e
Philosophical Maxims
John Gray
John Gray
2 weeks 1 day ago
There are not two kinds of...

There are not two kinds of human being, savage and civilized. There is only the human animal, forever at war with itself.

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An Old Chaos: Frozen Horses and Deserts of Brick (p. 25)
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 week 6 days ago
It is hard to have patience...
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Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
4 months 1 week ago
A genius and an Apostle are...

A genius and an Apostle are qualitatively different, they are definitions which each belong in their own spheres: the sphere of immanence, and the sphere of transcendence.

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Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 month 3 weeks ago
Seek, therefore, thyself! But in finding...

Seek, therefore, thyself! But in finding oneself, does not one find one's own nothingness? ...Carlyle answers (Past and Present, book iii, chap. xi.). "The latest Gospel in the world is, Know thy work and do it. Know thyself: long enough has that poor self of thine tormented thee; thou wilt never get to know it, I believe! Think it thy business, this of knowing thyself; thou art an unknowable individual: know what thou canst work at; and work at it, like Hercules. That will be thine better plan." ...and what is my work? - without thinking about myself, is to love God. ...And on the other hand, in loving God in myself, am I not loving myself more than God, am I not loving myself in God?

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Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton
1 month 1 week ago
It is indeed a matter of...

It is indeed a matter of great difficulty to discover, and effectually to distinguish, the true motions of particular bodies from the apparent; because the parts of that immovable space, in which those motions are performed, do by no means come under the observation of our senses. Yet the thing is not altogether desperate; for we have some arguments to guide us, partly from the apparent motions, which are the differences of the true motions; partly from the forces, which are the causes and effects of the true motions.

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Definitions - Scholium
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 months 1 week ago
No congress, nor mob, nor guillotine,...

No congress, nor mob, nor guillotine, nor fire, nor all together, can avail, to cut out, burn, or destroy the offense of superiority in persons. The superiority in him is inferiority in me.

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p. 65
Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
3 months 1 week ago
The presence of thought…

The presence of a thought is like the presence of a lover.

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Philosophical Maxims
Walter Lippmann
Walter Lippmann
4 days ago
A large plural society cannot be...

A large plural society cannot be governed without recognizing that, transcending its plural interests, there is a rational order with a superior common law.

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pp. 106-107
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 month 5 days ago
Violence is the effort to maintain...

Violence is the effort to maintain and restore a weakened psyche.

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(p. 377)
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 months 1 week ago
Yet a man may love a...

Yet a man may love a paradox, without losing either his wit or his honesty.

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"Walter Savage Landor", from The Dial, xii, 1841
Philosophical Maxims
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
2 months 5 days ago
Independence I have long considered as...

Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue; and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath.

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Dedication
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
1 month 1 week ago
All violence consists in some people...

All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do.

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The Law of Love and the Law of Violence
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 1 week ago
People seem good while they are...

People seem good while they are oppressed, but they only wish to become oppressors in their turn: life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.

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Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 17 December, 1920
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 month 6 days ago
All meaning alters with acceleration, because...

All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information.

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(p. 178-179)
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Fukuyama
Francis Fukuyama
3 days ago
The United States has been in...

The United States has been in a long term decline, with its political institutions decaying. ...The single source of that decline is ...the pervasive polarization ...within American society that has made the United States unable to meet some of the basic governance challenges that it has faced. The most recent example... has been the COVID pandemic... Wearing a mask, instead of becoming a health measure that people take to protect themselves and their loved ones, becomes as political statement... You don't wear a mask if you're a Trump supporter, and you do... if you're a Democrat. This is... not the way that... coherent nations... meet systemic challenges like a global pandemic.

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21:57
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
3 months 1 week ago
This is the terrible fix we...

This is the terrible fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again....God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from.

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Book I, Chapter 5, "We Have Cause to Be Uneasy"
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
2 months 3 days ago
True, the law is sacred to...

True, the law is sacred to the bourgeois, for it is his own composition, enacted with his consent, and for his benefit and protection. He knows that, even if an individual law should injure him, the whole fabric protects his interests; and more than all, the sanctity of the law, the sacredness of order as established by the active will of one part of society, and the passive acceptance of the other, is the strongest support of his social position. Because the English bourgeois finds himself reproduced in his law, as he does in his God, the policeman's truncheon which, in a certain measure, is his own club, has for him a wonderfully soothing power. But for the working-man quite otherwise! The working-man knows too well, has learned from too oft-repeated experience, that the law is a rod which the bourgeois has prepared for him; and when he is not compelled to do so, he never appeals to the law.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine
3 months 1 week ago
A thing, moderately good, is not...

A thing, moderately good, is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper, is always a virtue; but moderation in principle, is a species of vice.

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Philosophical Maxims
Hilary Putnam
Hilary Putnam
1 month 2 weeks ago
To me, believing that some correspondence...

To me, believing that some correspondence intrinsically just is reference (not as a result of our operational and theoretical constraints, or our intentions, but as an ultimate metaphysical fact) amounts to a magical theory of reference. Reference itself becomes what Locke called a 'substantial form' (an entity which intrinsically belongs with a certain name) on such a view. Even if one is willing to contemplate such unexplainable metaphysical facts, the epistemological problems that accompany such a metaphysical view seem insuperable. For, assuming a world of mind- independent, discourse-independent entities (this is the presupposition of the view we are discussing), there are, as we have seen, many different 'correspondences' which represent possible or candidate reference relations (infinitely many, in fact, if there are infinitely many things in the universe).

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Chap. 2 : A problem about reference
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
3 months 1 week ago
If we cut up beasts simply...

If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.

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"Vivisection" (1947), p. 227
Philosophical Maxims
Plato
Plato
4 months 5 days ago
The characters of self-restrained officials are...

The characters of self-restrained officials are exceedingly careful and just and conservative, but they lack keenness and a certain quick and active boldness. The courageous natures, on the other hand, are deficient in justice and caution in comparison with the former, but excel in boldness of action; and unless both these qualities are present it is impossible for a state to be entirely prosperous in public and private matters.

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Philosophical Maxims
Gaston Bachelard
Gaston Bachelard
2 months ago
Ideas are refined and multiplied in...

Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.

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Introduction, sect. 4
Philosophical Maxims
Cornel West
Cornel West
3 months 2 days ago
Free-market fundamentalism trivializes the concern for...

Free-market fundamentalism trivializes the concern for public interest. It puts fear and insecurity in the hearts of anxiety-ridden workers. It also makes money-driven, poll-obsessed elected officials deferential to corporate goals of profit - often at the cost of the common good. ... The free-market fundamentalism that prevails in the United States today promotes the pervasive sleepwalking of the populace. People see that the false prophets are handsomely rewarded - with money, status and access to more power. ... We are experiencing the sad gangsterization of America - an unbridled grasp at power, wealth and status.

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Cornel West: Democracy Matters in The Globalist
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
1 month 1 week ago
The workmen's revolution, with the terrors...

The workmen's revolution, with the terrors of destruction and murder, not only threatens us, but we have already been living upon its verge during the last thirty years, and it is only by various cunning devices that we have been postponing the crisis... The hatred and contempt of the oppressed people are increasing, and the physical and moral strength of the richer classes are decreasing: the deceit which supports all this is wearing out, and the rich classes have nothing wherewith to comfort themselves.

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What is to be Done (1899) p. 262
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 4 days ago
To claim you are more detached,...

To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!

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Philosophical Maxims
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Jean Jacques Rousseau
3 months 1 week ago
I remembered the way out suggested...

I remembered the way out suggested by a great princess when told that the peasants had no bread: "Well, let them eat cake".

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This passage contains a statement Qu'ils mangent de la brioche that has usually come to be attributed to Marie Antoinette; this was written in 1766, when Marie Antoinette was 10
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
1 month 3 weeks ago
The chief danger to philosophy is...

The chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence.

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Pt. V, ch. 1, sec. 1.
Philosophical Maxims
John Gray
John Gray
2 weeks 1 day ago
Humans kill one another - and...

Humans kill one another - and in some cases themselves - for many reasons, but none is more human than the attempt to make sense of their lives. More than the loss of life, they fear loss of meaning.

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In the Puppet Theatre: Roof Gardens, Feathers and Human Sacrifice (p. 87)
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
1 month 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
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
2 months 1 week ago
With a higher moral nature will...

With a higher moral nature will come a restriction on the multiplication of the inferior.

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The Principles of Biology, Vol. II (1867), Part VI: Laws of Multiplication, ch. 8: Human Population in the Future
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley
3 weeks 2 days ago
To a person uninstructed in natural...

To a person uninstructed in natural history, his country or sea-side stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall.

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On the Educational Value of the Natural History Sciences (1854) p. 29
Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
2 months 2 weeks ago
Do not even think of doing...

Do not even think of doing what ought not to be done.

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Pythagorean Ethical Sentences From Stobæus
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
1 month 2 weeks ago
Good taste is either that which...

Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason. From this we can see how useful it is to employ reason in seeking out the laws of taste.

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E 69
Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
2 months 1 week ago
First of all, this prince is...

First of all, this prince is an idiot, and, secondly, he is a fool--knows nothing of the world, and has no place in it.

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Part 4, Chapter 5
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
3 months 2 weeks ago
A wise man sees as much...

A wise man sees as much as he ought, not as much as he can.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
3 months 1 week ago
But since he has decided to...

But since he has decided to have the impossibility of living, every misfortune is an opportunity which lays this importance of living before his eyes and obliges him to decide, once again, to die.

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p. 158
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
2 months 1 week ago
A very great part of the...

A very great part of the mischiefs that vex the world arises from words.

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Letter to Richard Burke post 19 February 1792 (1792), in R. B. McDowell and William B. Todd (eds), The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, Vol. 9: I: The Revolutionary War, 1794-1797; II: Ireland. p. 647
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
3 months 1 week ago
Even if a civil society were...

Even if a civil society were to be dissolved by the consent of all its members (e.g., if a people inhabiting an island decided to separate and disperse throughout the world), the last murderer remaining in prison would first have to be executed, so that each has done to him what his deeds deserve and blood guilt does not cling to the people for not having insisted upon this punishment; for otherwise the people can be regarded as collaborators in his public violation of justice.

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Kt6:333
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
3 months 3 days ago
Our greatest stupidities may be very...

Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.

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p. 39e
Philosophical Maxims
Epicurus
Epicurus
3 months 3 weeks ago
Among the things held to be...

Among the things held to be just by law, whatever is proved to be of advantage in men's dealings has the stamp of justice, whether or not it be the same for all; but if a man makes a law and it does not prove to be mutually advantageous, then this is no longer just. And if what is mutually advantageous varies and only for a time corresponds to our concept of justice, nevertheless for that time it is just for those who do not trouble themselves about empty words, but look simply at the facts.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine
3 months 1 week ago
Contemplating the universe, the whole system...

Contemplating the universe, the whole system of creation, in this point of light, we shall discover, that all that which is called natural philosophy is properly a divine study- It is the study of God through his works - It is the best study, by which we can arrive at a knowledge of the existence, and the only one by which we can gain a glimpse of his perfection. Do we want to contemplate his power? We see it in the immensity of the Creation. Do we want to contemplate his wisdom? We see it in the unchangeable order by which the incomprehensible Whole is governed. Do we want to contemplate his munificence? We see it in the abundance with which he fills the earth. Do we want to contemplate his mercy? We see it in his not withholding that abundance even from the unthankful. In fine, do we want to know what God is?

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Search not written or printed books, but the Scripture called the Creation. A Discourse, &c. &c.
Philosophical Maxims
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