Skip to main content

Main navigation

☰ ˟
  • Home
  • Articulation
  • Contact
  • Shop
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
3 months 2 days ago
The mad mob does not ask...

The mad mob does not ask how it could be better, only that it be different. And when it then becomes worse, it must change again. Thus they get bees for flies, and at last hornets for bees. Whether Soldiers Can Also Be in a State of Grace

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
1526
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
1 month 3 weeks ago
It is a general popular error...

It is a general popular error to suppose the loudest complainers for the publick to be the most anxious for its welfare.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Observations on a Late Publication on the Present State of the Nation
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
2 months 3 weeks ago
Every sensible man…

Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Examen important de milord Bolingbroke (1736): Conclusion
Philosophical Maxims
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
6 days ago
I ... understand why the saints...

I ... understand why the saints were rarely married women. I am convinced it has nothing inherently to do, as I once supposed, with chastity or children. It has primarily to do with distractions ... Women's normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life or saintly life.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Ch. 2
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 3 weeks ago
In skating over thin ice our...

In skating over thin ice our safety is our speed.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Prudence
Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
2 months 3 weeks ago
That which parents should take care...

That which parents should take care of... is to distinguish between the wants of fancy, and those of nature.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Sec. 107
Philosophical Maxims
William Godwin
William Godwin
1 month 3 weeks ago
I took some pains to convince...

I took some pains to convince you that the Whigs, as a party in the state, were of the highest value to the public welfare, and constituted the party to which a liberal-minded and enlightened man would adhere.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Letter to H. B. Rosser (7 March 1820), quoted in C. Kegan Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, Vol. II (1876), p. 263
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
2 months 3 weeks ago
They [Christians] believe that the living,...

They [Christians] believe that the living, dynamic activity of love has been going on in God forever and has created everything else. And that, by the way, is perhaps the most important difference between Christianity and all other religions: that in Christianity God is not an impersonal thing nor a static thing-not even just one person-but a dynamic pulsating activity, a life, a kind of drama, almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance ... (The) pattern of this three-personal life is ... the great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very center of reality.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Book IV, Chapter 4, "Good Infection"
Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
1 month 2 weeks ago
The entire universe is perfused with...

The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Quoted in Essays in Zoosemiotics (1990) by Thomas A. Sebeok
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
1 month 1 week ago
Suffering is admittedly one of the...

Suffering is admittedly one of the central problems of human existence; but this is because we have a suspicion that it is all for nothing. If we had a certainty about meaning, the suffering would be bearable. With no certainty of meaning, even comfort begins to feel futile.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 89
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
2 months 3 weeks ago
Philosophy is by its nature something...

Philosophy is by its nature something esoteric, neither made for the mob nor capable of being prepared for the mob.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Introduction to the Critical Journal of Philosophy, cited in W. Kaufmann, Hegel (1966), p. 56
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
2 months 3 weeks ago
You could send your soul after...

You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 2 weeks ago
Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols,...

Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 month 1 week ago
Not only are we unable to...

Not only are we unable to conceive of the full and living God as masculine simply, but we are unable to conceive of Him as individual simply, as the projection of a solitary I, an unsocial I, an I that is in reality an abstract I. My living I is an I that is really a We; my living personal I lives only in other, of other, and by other I's; I am sprung from a multitude of ancestors. I carry them within me in extract, and at the same time I carry within me, potentially, a multitude of descendants, and God, the projection of my I to the infinite - or rather I, the projection of God to the finite - must also be a multitude. Hence, in order to save the personality of God - that is to say, in order to save the living God - faith's need - the need of the feeling and the imagination - of conceiving Him and feeling Him as possessed of a certain internal multiplicity.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
2 months 2 weeks ago
[L]'âme, prison du corps. The soul...

The soul is the prison of the body.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Discipline and Punish (1977) as translated by Alan Sheridan, p. 30
Philosophical Maxims
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
1 month 1 week ago
We can define rituals as symbolic...

We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They transforming being at home to being in the world. They turn the world into a reliable place. They are to time what a home is to space. They render time habitable.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
2 months 3 weeks ago
Both in England and on the...

Both in England and on the Continent a graduated property tax (l'impôt progressif) has been advocated, on the avowed ground that the state should use the instrument of taxation as a means of mitigating the inequalities of wealth. I am as desirous as any one that means should be taken to diminish those inequalities, but not so as to relieve the prodigal at the expense of the prudent.To tax the larger incomes at a higher percentage than the smaller is to lay a tax on industry and economy; to impose a penalty on people for having worked harder and saved more than their neighbours. It is not the fortunes which are earned, but those which are unearned, that it is for the public good to place under limitation.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Book V, Chapter II
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Rorty
Richard Rorty
2 months 2 weeks ago
Rather, we heirs of Enlightenment think...

Rather, we heirs of Enlightenment think of enemies of liberal democracy like Nietzsche or Loyola as, to use Rawls's word, "mad." We do so because there is no way to see them as fellow citizens of our constitutional democracy, people whose life plans might, given ingenuity and good will, be fitted in with those of other citizens. They are crazy because the limits of sanity are set by what we can take seriously. This, in turn, is determined by our upbringing, our historical situation.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
2 months 3 weeks ago
The only fence against the world...

The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it, into which a young gentleman should be enter'd by degrees, as he can bear it; and the earlier the better, so he be in safe and skillful hands to guide him.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Sec. 94
Philosophical Maxims
Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze
1 month 3 days ago
When Nietzsche praises egoism it is...

When Nietzsche praises egoism it is always in an aggressive or polemical way, against the virtues, against the virtue of disinterestedness. But in fact egoism is a bad interpretation of the will, just as atomism is a bad interpretation of force. In order for there to be egoism it is necessary for there to be an ego.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 7
Philosophical Maxims
John Gray
John Gray
1 day ago
Cheating ageing by a low-calorie diet,...

Cheating ageing by a low-calorie diet, uploading one's mind into a super-computer, migrating into outer space ... Longing for everlasting life, humans show that they remain the death-defined animal.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Sweet Morality (p. 235)
Philosophical Maxims
Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton
2 weeks 3 days ago
There is no doubt in my...

There is no doubt in my mind that, from the third-person point of view, monarchy is the most reasonable form of government. By embodying the state in a fragile human person, it captures the arbitrariness and the givenness of political allegiance, and so transforms allegiance into affection.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
The Meaning of Conservatism: Third Edition (2001), p. 193
Philosophical Maxims
David Pearce
David Pearce
3 days ago
... our descendants may recognize that...

... our descendants may recognize that we are the sociopathic emotional primitives in the grip of an affective psychosis. Jealousy, envy, resentment, ridicule, hate, anger, disgust, spite, contempt, schadenfreude and a whole gamut of nameless but mean-spirited states we undergo each day are a toxic legacy of our Darwinian past. More commonly, perhaps, our genetic make-up ensures we simply feel indifference to the plight of all but a handful of significant others in our lives. Right now, for instance, one knows dimly at some level that there is frightful and preventable suffering in the world. Yet most of us feel no overpowering moral urgency to do anything about it.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
"Utopian Pharmacology: Mental Health in the Third Millennium MDMA and Beyond", BLTC Research, last updated 2020
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
2 months 3 weeks ago
I have at last come to...

I have at last come to the end of the Faerie Queene: and though I say "at last", I almost wish he had lived to write six books more as he had hoped to do - so much have I enjoyed it.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
On Edmund Spenser's long poem in a letter to Arthur Greeves (7 March 1916), published in The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
3 months 1 day ago
Not being able to govern events,...

Not being able to govern events, I govern myself.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Book II, Ch. 17
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 month 1 week ago
And the conversion of the other...

And the conversion of the other Don Quixote - he who was converted only to die - was possible because he was mad, and it was his madness, and not his death or his conversion that immortalized him, earning him forgiveness for this crime of having been born. Felix culpa! And neither was his madness cured, but only transformed. His death was his last knightly adventure; in dying he stormed heaven, which suffereth violence.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
3 months 2 days ago
There can be no doubt that...

There can be no doubt that the Virgin Mary is in heaven. How it happened we do not know.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Weimar edition of Martin Luther's Works (Translation by William J. Cole) Vol. 10, p. 268
Philosophical Maxims
Henri Bergson
Henri Bergson
1 month 2 weeks ago
Je dirais qu'il faut agir en...

I would say act like a man of thought and think like a man of action.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Speech at the Descartes Conference in Paris (1937) Quoted in The Forbes Scrapbook of Thoughts on the Business of Life (1950), p. 442, as "Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought."
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
4 months 3 weeks ago
We all see this....
0
⚖0
Main Content / General
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
1 month 3 weeks ago
Nothing could be more natural than...

Nothing could be more natural than the developement of the passions, nor more striking than the views of the human heart. What delicate struggles! and uncommonly pretty turns of thought!

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Mary: A Fiction
Philosophical Maxims
William Godwin
William Godwin
1 month 3 weeks ago
Simplify the social system, in the...

Simplify the social system, in the manner which every motive, but those of usurpation and ambition, powerfully recommends; render the plain dictates of justice level to every capacity; remove the necessity of implicit faith; and we may expect the whole species to become reasonable and virtuous.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Portable Enlightenment Reader, p. 477
Philosophical Maxims
Plotinus
Plotinus
3 months 1 week ago
Withdraw into yourself and look. And...

Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer. ... Cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labor to make all one glow or beauty and never cease chiseling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendor of virtue.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 3 weeks ago
We plant trees, we build stone...

We plant trees, we build stone houses, we redeem the waste, we make prospective laws, we found colleges and hospitals, for remote generations.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
1 month 2 weeks ago
Understanding being nothing else, but conception...

Understanding being nothing else, but conception caused by Speech.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
The First Part, Chapter 4, p. 17
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
3 months 3 weeks ago
To one unnamed, whose name will...

To one unnamed, whose name will one day be named, is dedicated, with this little work, the entire authorship, as it was from the beginning.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
3 months 1 day ago
Valor is stability, not of legs...

Valor is stability, not of legs and arms, but of courage and the soul.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Avicenna
Avicenna
3 months 1 week ago
Medicine considers the human body as...

Medicine considers the human body as to the means by which it is cured and by which it is driven away from health.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
3 months 2 weeks ago
Hungary conquered and in chains has...

Hungary conquered and in chains has done more for freedom and justice than any people for twenty years. But for this lesson to get through and convince those in the West who shut their eyes and ears, it was necessary, and it can be no comfort to us, for the people of Hungary to shed so much blood which is already drying in our memories. In Europe's isolation today, we have only one way of being true to Hungary, and that is never to betray, among ourselves and everywhere, what the Hungarian heroes died for, never to condone, among ourselves and everywhere, even indirectly, those who killed them. It would indeed be difficult for us to be worthy of such sacrifices.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 2 weeks ago
Existing is plagiarism.

Existing is plagiarism.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
3 months 1 week ago
Show that you know this only

Show that you know this only, how you may never either fail to get what you desire or fall into what you avoid.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Book II, ch. 1, 37
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 3 weeks ago
Life is our dictionary...

Life is our dictionary.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
par. 29
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel
2 months 2 weeks ago
That is what is meant, I...

That is what is meant, I think by the allegation that it is good simply to be alive, even if one is undergoing terrible experiences. The situation is roughly this: There are elements which, if added to one's experience, make life better; there are other elements which, if added to one's experience, make life worse. But what remains when these are set aside is not merely neutral: it is emphatically positive. Therefore life is worth living even when the bad elements of experience are plentiful, and the good ones too meager to outweigh the bad ones on their own. The additional positive weight is supplied by experience itself, rather than by any of its contents.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
"Death", p. 2. This passage not present in the 1970 version (Nous, IV, no. 1), but present in the 1979 version.
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
2 months 2 weeks ago
The public execution, then, has a...

The public execution, then, has a juridico-political function. It is a ceremonial by which a momentarily injured sovereignty is reconstituted. It restores that sovereignty by manifesting it at its most spectacular. The public execution, however hasty and everyday, belongs to a whole series of great rituals in which power is eclipsed and restored (coronation, entry of the king into a conquered city, the submission of rebellious subjects); over and above the crime that has placed the sovereign in contempt, it deploys before all eyes an invincible force. Its aim is not so much to re-establish a balance as to bring into play, as its extreme point, the dissymmetry between the subject who has dared to violate the law and the all-powerful sovereign who displays his strength.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Chapter One, The Spectacle of the Scaffold
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
3 months 3 weeks ago
It was a purely Christian satisfaction...

It was a purely Christian satisfaction to me that if ordinarily there was no one else there was one who in action tried a little to do the doctrine about loving the neighbor, alas, one who precisely by his act also received a frightful into what an illusion Christendom is and indeed, particularly later, also into how the common people let themselves be seduced by wretched journalists, whose striving and fighting for equality can only lead, if it leads to anything, since it is in the service of the lie, to making the elite, in self-defense, proud of their aloofness from the common man, and the common man brazen in his rudeness.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
3 weeks ago
Familiarity breeds contempt.

Familiarity breeds contempt.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
2 months 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
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
2 months 2 weeks ago
Logic takes care of itself; all...

Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Journal entry (13 October 1914), also in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (§ 5.47)
Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
3 weeks ago
His own character is the arbiter...

His own character is the arbiter of every one's fortune.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Maxim 283
Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
1 month 4 weeks ago
Do you see this egg? With...

Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory, every church or temple in the world. What is it, this egg, before the seed is introduced into it? An insentient mass. And after the seed has been introduced to into it? What is it then? An insentient mass. For what is the seed itself other than a crude and inanimate fluid? How is this mass to make a transition to a different structure, to sentience, to life? Through heat. And what will produce that heat in it? Motion. "Conversation Between D'Alembert and Diderot", as quoted in Selected Writings (1966) edited by Lester G. Crocker, and The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture (2004) by Louis K Dupré, p. 30 Variant translation: See this egg. It is with this that all the schools of theology and all the temples of the earth are to be overturned.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
As quoted in Diderot, Reason and Resonance (1982) by Élisabeth de Fontenay, p. 217
Philosophical Maxims
Willard van Orman Quine
Willard van Orman Quine
1 month 1 week ago
Life is agid. Life is fulgid....

Life is agid. Life is fulgid. Life is a burgeoning, a quickening of the dim primordial urge in the murky wastes of time. Life is what the least of us make most of us feel the least of us make the most of.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Quine's response in 1988 when asked his philosophy of life. (He invented the word "agid".) It makes up the entire Chapter 54 in Quine in Dialogue (2008).
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 1 users online.
  • comfortdragon

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia