Skip to main content

Main navigation

☰ ˟
  • Home
  • Articulation
  • Contact
  • Shop
Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno
1 month 6 days 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.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
I 1
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
2 months 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.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Vol. I, Ch. 25, Section 2, pg. 686.
Philosophical Maxims
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal
2 months 1 week ago
I make no doubt... that these...

I make no doubt... that these rules are simple, artless, and natural.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month ago
You don't choose universality....
0
⚖0
Main Content / General
Plutarch
Plutarch
1 month 2 weeks ago
Being nimble and light-footed, his father...

Being nimble and light-footed, his father encouraged him to run in the Olympic race. "Yes," said he, "if there were any kings there to run with me."

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
41 Alexander
Philosophical Maxims
John Searle
John Searle
2 days ago
Descartes may have made a lot...

Descartes may have made a lot of mistakes, but he was right about this: you cannot doubt the existence of your own consciousness. That's the first feature of consciousness, it's real and irreducible. You cannot get rid of it by showing that it's an illusion in a way that you can with other standard illusions.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
2 weeks 2 days ago
I must avert here once again...

I must avert here once again to my view of the opposition that exists between individuality and personality, notwithstanding the fact that the one demands the other. Individuality is, if I may so express it, the container or thing which contains, personality the content or thing contained, or I might say that my personality is in a certain sense my comprehension, that which I comprehend or embrace within myself - which is in a certain way the whole Universe - and that my individuality is my extension; the one my infinite, the other my finite.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
1 month 4 days ago
If you want me to believe...

If you want me to believe in God, you must make me touch him.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
as quoted in Diderot and the Encyclopædists (1897) by John Morley, p. 92.
Philosophical Maxims
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
4 weeks 1 day ago
I take as my example the...

I take as my example the three notorious words, Humanity, Popularity, and Liberality. When these words are used in speaking to a German who has learnt no language but his own they are to him nothing but a meaningless noise, which has no relationship of sound to remind him of anything he knows already and so takes him completely out of his circle of observation and beyond any observation possible to him. ... Further, if in speaking to the German, instead of the words Popularity [Popularitdt] and Liberality [Liberalitat], I should use the expressions, " striving for favour with the great mob," and " not having the mind of a slave," which is how they must be literally translated, he would, to begin with, not even obtain a clear and vivid sense-image such as was certainly obtained by a Roman of old.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
The Chief Difference Between The Germans And The Other Peoples Of Teutonic Descent p. 64
Philosophical Maxims
Baruch Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza
2 months 3 days ago
God is the...

God is the Immanent Cause of all things, never truly transcendent from them.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Part I, Prop. XVIII
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
2 months 2 weeks ago
The superior man loves his soul;...

The superior man loves his soul; the inferior man loves his property.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 weeks 4 days ago
Even when he turns from religion,...

Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create false gods, he then feverishly adopts them; his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months ago
Knowledge is not so precise a...

Knowledge is not so precise a concept as is commonly thought. Instead of saying "I know this," we ought to say "I more or less know something more or less like this." It is true that this proviso is hardly necessary as regards the multiplication table, but knowledge in practical affairs has not the certainty or the precision of arithmetic. Suppose I say "democracy is a good thing": I must admit, first, that I am less sure of this than I am that two and two are four, and secondly, that "democracy" is a somewhat vague term which I cannot define precisely. We ought to say, therefore: "I am fairly certain that it is a good thing if a government has something of the characteristics that are common to the British and American Constitutions," or something of this sort. And one of the aims of education ought to be to make such a statement more effective from a platform than the usual type of political slogan.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
3 weeks 4 days ago
Wherever big industries displaced manufacture, the...

Wherever big industries displaced manufacture, the bourgeoisie developed in wealth and power to the utmost and made itself the first class of the country. The result was that wherever this happened, the bourgeoisie took political power into its own hands and displaced the hitherto ruling classes, the aristocracy, the guildmasters, and their representative, the absolute monarchy. The bourgeoisie annihilated the power of the aristocracy, the nobility, by abolishing the entailment of estates - in other words, by making landed property subject to purchase and sale, and by doing away with the special privileges of the nobility. It destroyed the power of the guildmasters by abolishing guilds and handicraft privileges. In their place, it put competition - that is, a state of society in which everyone has the right to enter into any branch of industry, the only obstacle being a lack of the necessary capital.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
2 months 1 week ago
... a penny saved is better...

... a penny saved is better than a penny earned.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
The Duty of a Husband and Wife (17 March 1539), No. 4408. LW 54:337
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
1 week 2 days ago
There are people who possess not...

There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so itself.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
D 70
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
1 month 3 weeks ago
The relation of feeling toward art...

The relation of feeling toward art and its bringing-forth can be one of production or one of reception and enjoyment.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 78
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
3 months ago
Magister Adler was deeply moved by...

Magister Adler was deeply moved by something higher, but now when he wants to express his thoughts in words, wants to communicate, he confuses the subjective with the objective, his altered subjective state with an external event, the dawning of a light upon him with the coming into existence of something new outside him, the falling of the veil from his eyes with his having had a revelation. Subjectively his emotion is carried to the extreme; he wants to select the most powerful expression to describe it and by means of a mental deception grasps the objective qualification: having had a revelation.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Democritus
Democritus
1 month 2 weeks ago
Making money is not without its...

Making money is not without its value, but nothing is baser than to make it by wrong-doing.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine
2 months 1 day ago
If a man makes the press...

If a man makes the press utter atrocious things he becomes as answerable for them as if he had uttered them by word of mouth. Mr. Jefferson has said in his inaugural speech, that "error of opinion might be tolerated, when reason was left free to combat it." This is sound philosophy in cases of error. But there is a difference between error and licentiousness.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Liberty of the Press, 1806
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
2 months ago
The position of the revolutionary party...

The position of the revolutionary party in Germany is certainly difficult at the moment, but, with some critical analysis of the circumstances, clear nevertheless. As to the "governments," it is obvious from every point of view, if only for the sake of Germany's existence, that the demand must be put to them not to remain neutral, but, as you rightly say, to be patriotic. But the revolutionary point is to be given to the affair simply by emphasising the antagonism to Russia more strongly than the antagonism against Boustrapa.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Letter to Friedrich Engels (18 May 1859), quoted in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Correspondence, 1846-1895 (1943), p. 122
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
2 months 1 week ago
But the best demonstration by far...

But the best demonstration by far is experience, if it go not beyond the actual experiment.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Aphorism 70
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months ago
An atheist, like a Christian, holds...

An atheist, like a Christian, holds that we can know whether or not there is a God. The Christian holds that we can know there is a God; the atheist, that we can know there is not. The Agnostic suspends judgment, saying that there are not sufficient grounds either for affirmation or for denial. At the same time, an Agnostic may hold that the existence of God, though not impossible, is very improbable; he may even hold it so improbable that it is not worth considering in practice. In that case, he is not far removed from atheism. His attitude may be that which a careful philosopher would have towards the gods of ancient Greece. If I were asked to prove that Zeus and Poseidon and Hera and the rest of the Olympians do not exist, I should be at a loss to find conclusive arguments. An Agnostic may think the Christian God as improbable as the Olympians; in that case, he is, for practical purposes, at one with the atheists.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
What is an Agnostic?, 1953
Philosophical Maxims
John Dewey
John Dewey
3 weeks ago
Surrender of individuality by the many...

Surrender of individuality by the many to someone who is taken to be a superindividual explains the retrograde movement of society. Dictatorships and totalitarian states, and belief in the inevitability of this or that result coming to pass are, strange as it may sound, ways of denying the reality of time and the creativeness of the individual.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
John Searle
John Searle
2 days ago
Precisely by inculcating a critical attitude,...

Precisely by inculcating a critical attitude, the "canon" served to demythologize the conventional pieties of the American bourgeoisie and provided the student with a perspective from which to critically analyze American culture and institutions. Ironically, the same tradition is now regarded as oppressive. The texts once served an unmasking function; now we are told that it is the texts which must be unmasked.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
"The Storm Over the University", The New York Review of Books, December 6, 1990
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
3 weeks 1 day ago
O ye of little faith, why...

O ye of little faith, why reason ye among yourselves, because ye have brought no bread? Do ye not yet understand, neither remember the five loaves of the five thousand, and how many baskets ye took up? Neither the seven loaves of the four thousand, and how many baskets ye took up? How is it that ye do not understand that I spake it not to you concerning bread, that ye should beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees?

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
16:8-11 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
1 month 4 weeks ago
The victory of vivisection marks a...

The victory of vivisection marks a great advance in the triumph of ruthless, non-moral utilitarianism over the old world of ethical law; a triumph in which we, as well as animals, are already the victims, and of which Dachau and Hiroshima mark the more recent achievements.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
"Vivisection" (1947), p. 228
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
2 months ago
It is impossible to pursue this...

It is impossible to pursue this nonsense any further.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
(Bastiat and Carey), p. 813 (last text page, second last line).
Philosophical Maxims
William Godwin
William Godwin
3 weeks 6 days ago
To conceive that compulsion and punishment...

To conceive that compulsion and punishment are the proper means of reformation, is the sentiment of a barbarian; civilisation and science are calculated to explode so ferocious an idea. It was once universally admitted and approved; it is now necessarily upon the decline.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Vol. 2, bk. 7, ch. 5
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
2 weeks ago
Error is the price we pay...

Error is the price we pay for progress.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Plutarch
Plutarch
1 month 2 weeks ago
Cato requested old men not to...

Cato requested old men not to add the disgrace of wickedness to old age, which was accompanied with many other evils.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Cato the Elder
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Schlegel
Friedrich Schlegel
1 month ago
Honour is the mysticism of legality....

Honour is the mysticism of legality.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Aphorism 77, of Ideas as translated in The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics (1996) edited by Frederick C. Beiser, p. 131
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 weeks 4 days ago
An anxious man constructs his terrors,...

An anxious man constructs his terrors, then installs himself within them: a stay-at-home in a yawning chasm.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
1 month 3 weeks ago
"Here is the chalk."

"Here is the chalk." This is a truth; and here and the now hereby characterize the chalk so that we emphasize by saying; the chalk, which means "this." We take a scrap of paper and we write the truth down: "Here is the chalk." We lay this written statement beside the thing of which it is the truth. After the lecture is finished both doors are opened, the classroom is aired, there will be a draft, and the scrap of paper, let us suppose, will flutter out into the corridor. A student finds it on his way to the cafeteria, reads the sentence. "Here is the chalk," and ascertains that this is not true at all. Through the draft the truth has become an untruth. Strange that a truth should depend on a gust of wind. ... We have made the truth about the chalk independent of us and entrusted it to a scrap of paper.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 29-30
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
2 months ago
It goes without saying that the...

It goes without saying that the normal durability of fixed capital is calculated on the supposition that all the conditions under which it can perform its functions normally during that time are fulfilled, just as we assume, in placing a mans life at 30 years on the average,that he will wash himself.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Volume II, Ch. VIII, p. 176-177.
Philosophical Maxims
Ernst Mach
Ernst Mach
3 weeks 4 days ago
The student of mathematics often finds...

The student of mathematics often finds it hard to throw off the uncomfortable feeling that his science, in the person of his pencil, surpasses him in intelligence,-an impression which the great Euler confessed he often could not get rid of. This feeling finds a sort of justification when we reflect that the majority of the ideas we deal with were conceived by others, often centuries ago. In a great measure it is really the intelligence of other people that confronts us in science.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Mach, Ernst. p. 196: Mathematics seems possessed of intelligence
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
1 month 4 weeks ago
Who can exhaust a man? Who...

Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man's resources?

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
1 month 4 weeks ago
A paradise of inward tranquility seems...

A paradise of inward tranquility seems to be faith's usual result.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Lectures XI, XII, and XIII, "Saintliness"
Philosophical Maxims
Theodor Adorno
Theodor Adorno
2 weeks 1 day ago
Jazz is the false liquidation of...

Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Perennial fashion - Jazz, as quoted in The Sociology of Rock (1978) by Simon Frith
Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
2 months 2 weeks ago
Cantare amantis est. Singing is of...

Singing is of a lover.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Variant translation: To sing is characteristic of the lover. 336
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
2 weeks 2 days ago
It has often been said that...

It has often been said that every man who has suffered misfortunes prefers to be himself, even with his misfortunes, rather than to be someone else without them. For unfortunate men, when they preserve their normality in their misfortune - that is to say, when they endeavor to persist in their own being - prefer misfortune to non-existence. For myself I can say that when a as a youth, and even as a child, I remained unmoved when shown the most moving pictures of hell, for even then nothing appeared to me quite so horrible as nothingness itself. It was a furious hunger of being that possessed me, an appetite for divinity, as one of our ascetics [San Juan de los Angeles] has put it.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
2 weeks ago
No period of history has ever...

No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Ch. 32, January 13, 1944.
Philosophical Maxims
Empedocles
Empedocles
1 month 2 weeks ago
But, when the elements have been...

But, when the elements have been mingled in the fashion of a man and come to the light of day, or in the fashion of the race of wild beasts or plants or birds, then men say that these come into being; and when they are separated, they call that woeful death. They call it not aright; but I too follow the custom, and call it so myself.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
fr. 9 As quoted by John Burnet, Early Greek philosophy (1908) p. 240
Philosophical Maxims
Niccolò Machiavelli
Niccolò Machiavelli
2 months 1 week ago
No circumstance is ever…

No circumstance is ever so desperate that one cannot nurture some spark of hope.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Act I, scene i
Philosophical Maxims
Democritus
Democritus
1 month 2 weeks ago
In a shared fish, there are...

In a shared fish, there are no bones.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Freeman (1948), p. 157
Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
1 month 4 days ago
Poetry must have something in it...

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
1 week 5 days ago
Faculty X is simply that latent...

Faculty X is simply that latent power in human beings possess to reach beyond the present. After all, we know perfectly well that the past is as real as the present, and that New York and Singapore and Lhasa and Stepney Green are all as real as the place I happen to be in at the moment. Yet my senses do not agree. They assure me that this place, here and now, is far more real than any other place or any other time. Only in certain moments of great inner intensity do I know this to be a lie. Faculty X is a sense of reality, the reality of other places and other times, and it is the possession of it - fragmentary and uncertain though it is - that distinguishes man from all other animals.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 59
Philosophical Maxims
Auguste Comte
Auguste Comte
1 month 4 days ago
There are three successive states of...

There are three successive states of morality answering to the three principal stages of human life; the personal, the domestic, and the social stage.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 104
Philosophical Maxims
Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch
3 weeks ago
Art is the final cunning of...

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
"Art and Eros: A Dialogue about Art", Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues (1986).
Philosophical Maxims
Lucretius
Lucretius
2 months 2 weeks ago
A thing therefore…

A thing therefore never returns to nothing.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Book I, line 248 (tr. Munro)
Philosophical Maxims
  • Load More

User login

  • Create new account
  • Reset your password

Social

☰ ˟
  • Main Feed
  • 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