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Martin Luther
Martin Luther
4 months 6 days ago
If women get tired and die...

If women get tired and die of bearing, there is no harm in that; let them die as long as they bear; they are made for that.

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-- Essays, quoted in Luther On "Woman"
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
2 months 4 weeks ago
There is, however, a limit at...

There is, however, a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue.

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Observations on a Late Publication on the Present State of the Nation (1769), volume i, p. 273
Philosophical Maxims
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
2 months 3 weeks ago
Nothing, I am sure, calls forth...

Nothing, I am sure, calls forth the faculties so much as the being obliged to struggle with the world; and this is not a woman's province in a married state. Her sphere of action is not large, and if she is not taught to look into her own heart, how trivial are her occupations and pursuits! What little arts engross and narrow her mind!

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Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), "Matrimony", p. 100
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 3 weeks ago
Only those are happy who never...

Only those are happy who never think or, rather, who only think about life's bare necessities, and to think about such things means not to think at all. True thinking resembles a demon who muddies the spring of life or a sickness which corrupts its roots. To think all the time, to raise questions, to doubt your own destiny, to feel the weariness of living, to be worn out to the point of exhaustion by thoughts and life, to leave behind you, as symbols of your life's drama, a trail of smoke and blood - all this means you are so unhappy that reflection and thinking appear as a curse causing a violent revulsion in you.

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Philosophical Maxims
Peter Singer
Peter Singer
3 months 2 weeks ago
Speciesism-the word is not an attractive...

Speciesism-the word is not an attractive one, but I can think of no better term-is a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one's own species and against those of members of other species.

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Ch. 1: All Animals Are Equal
Philosophical Maxims
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
1 month 3 weeks ago
A millennial belief in a Holy...

A millennial belief in a Holy God may have the effect of deepening the soul, but it is also obviously archaic, and modern influences would presently bring me up to date and reveal how antiquated my origins were. To turn away from those origins, however, has always seemed to me an utter impossibility. It would be a treason to my first consciousness to un-Jew myself.

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Part I, p. 26
Philosophical Maxims
John Rawls
John Rawls
3 months 3 weeks ago
A just system must generate its...

A just system must generate its own support.

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Chapter V, Section 41, p. 261
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
1 week 6 days ago
No easy way…

No easy way leads from the earth to heaven..

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line 437; (Megara).
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
4 weeks ago
The world and life are one....
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Main Content / General
Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel
3 months 2 weeks ago
It is often remarked that nothing...

It is often remarked that nothing we do now will matter in a million years. But if that is true, then by the same token, nothing that will be the case in a million years matters now.

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"The Absurd" (1971), p. 11.
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
3 months 3 weeks ago
"I wish I had never been...

"I wish I had never been born," she said. "What are we born for?" "For infinite happiness," said the Spirit. "You can step out into it at any moment..."

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Ch. 8
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
4 months 2 days ago
No society can surely be flourishing...

No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, cloath and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged.

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Chapter VIII, p. 94.
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
3 months 4 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.

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The Civil War in France : "The Third Address", May 1871
Philosophical Maxims
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal
4 months 1 week ago
All the excesses, all the violence,...

All the excesses, all the violence, and all the vanity of great men, come from the fact that they know not what they are: it being difficult for those who regard themselves at heart as equal with all men... For this it is necessary for one to forget himself, and to believe that he has some real excellence above them, in which consists this illusion that I am endeavoring to discover to you.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
3 months 3 weeks ago
Our language can be seen as...

Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.

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§ 18
Philosophical Maxims
Mozi
Mozi
6 days ago
The murder of one person is...

The murder of one person is called unrighteous and incurs one death penalty. Following this argument, the murder of ten persons will be ten times as unrighteous and there should be ten death penalties; the murder of a hundred persons will be a hundred times as unrighteous and there should be a hundred death penalties. All the gentlemen of the world know that they should condemn these things, calling them unrighteous. But when it comes to the great unrighteousness of attacking states, they do not know that they should condemn it. On the contrary, they applaud it, calling it righteous.

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Book 5: Condemnation of Offensive War I
Philosophical Maxims
Max Scheler
Max Scheler
2 months 2 weeks ago
To a lesser degree, a secret...

To a lesser degree, a secret ressentiment underlies every way of thinking which attributes creative power to mere negation and criticism. Thus modern philosophy is deeply penetrated by a whole type of thinking which is nourished by ressentiment. I am referring to the view that the "true" and the "given" is not that which is self-evident, but rather that which is "indubitable" or "incontestable," which can be maintained against doubt and criticism.

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L. Coser, trans. (1973), p. 67
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Schweitzer
Albert Schweitzer
1 week 2 days ago
True philosophy must start from the...

True philosophy must start from the most immediate and comprehensive fact of consciousness: "I am life that wants to live, in the midst of life that wants to live."

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Chapter 26 "The Civilizing Power of the Ethics of Reverence for Life"
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
4 months 2 weeks ago
To those whose talents are...

To those whose talents are above mediocrity, the highest subjects may be announced. To those who are below mediocrity, the highest subjects may not be announced.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 3 weeks ago
Though we may prefer ourselves to...

Though we may prefer ourselves to the universe, we nonetheless loathe ourselves much more than we suspect. If the wise man is so rare a phenomenon, it is because he seems unshaken by the aversion which, like all beings, he must feel for himself.

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Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
4 months 3 weeks ago
It seemed to him [Euphemius] it...

It seemed to him [Euphemius] it would be a brilliant notion to call in an outside force to fight on his behalf. This same brilliant notion has occurred to participants in civil wars uncounted times in history and it has ended in catastrophe just about every time, since those called in invariably take over for themselves. Of all history's lessons, this seems to be the plainest, and the most frequently ignored.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 3 weeks ago
A marvel that has nothing to...

A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.

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Philosophical Maxims
Alan Watts
Alan Watts
1 week 2 days ago
Running away from fear is fear;...

Running away from fear is fear; fighting pain is pain; trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought.

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Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
2 months 2 weeks ago
Only the feeble resign themselves to...

Only the feeble resign themselves to final death and substitute some other desire for the longing for personal immortality. In the strong the zeal for perpetuity overrides the doubt of realizing it, and their superabundance of life overflows upon the other side of death.

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Philosophical Maxims
Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus
4 months 1 week ago
Though I certainly deserve no ill...

Though I certainly deserve no ill treatment from mortals, yet if the insults and repulses I receive were attended with any advantage to them, I would content myself with lamenting in silence my own unmerited indignities and man's injustice.

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Philosophical Maxims
Horace
Horace
3 months 2 weeks ago
Mediocrity in poets…

Mediocrity in poets has never been tolerated by either men, or gods, or booksellers.

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Lines 372-373
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
3 months 3 weeks ago
Genet is a man-failure: he wills...

Genet is a man-failure: he wills the impossible in order to derive from the tragic grandeur of this defeat the assurance that there is something other than the possible.

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p. 213
Philosophical Maxims
Empedocles
Empedocles
3 months 2 weeks ago
A law there is….

A law there is, an oracle of Doom, Of old enacted by the assembled gods, That if a Daemon-such as live for ages- Defile himself with foul and sinful murder, He must for seasons thrice ten thousand roam Far from the Blest; such is the path I tread, I too a wanderer and exile from heaven.

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tr. Phillip H. De Lacy and Benedict Einarson. Cf. full quotation at Leonard p. 54-55 fr. 115, as paraphrased in Plutarch's Moralia
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
4 months 1 week ago
Another argument of hope may be...

Another argument of hope may be drawn from this - that some of the inventions already known are such as before they were discovered it could hardly have entered any man's head to think of; they would have been simply set aside as impossible. For in conjecturing what may be men set before them the example of what has been, and divine of the new with an imagination preoccupied and colored by the old; which way of forming opinions is very fallacious, for streams that are drawn from the springheads of nature do not always run in the old channels.

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Aphorism 109
Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
2 months 4 weeks ago
It's the great mystery of human...

It's the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
3 months 3 weeks ago
Between the fine point of the...

Between the fine point of the brush and the steely gaze, the scene is about to yield up its volume.

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Las Meninas
Philosophical Maxims
George Santayana
George Santayana
2 months 2 weeks ago
The idea of Christ is much...

The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.

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The Idea of Christ in the Gospels
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 4 weeks ago
Many agnostics (including myself) are quite...

Many agnostics (including myself) are quite as doubtful of the body as they are of the soul, but this is a long story taking one into difficult metaphysics. Mind and matter alike, I should say, are only convenient symbol in discourse, not actually existing things.

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What is an Agnostic?, 1953
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
2 months 2 weeks ago
A man, in so far as...

A man, in so far as he is an individual, may be very sharply detached from others, a sort of spiritual crustacean, and yet be very poor in differentiating content. And further, it is true on the other hand that the more personality a man has and the greater his interior riches and the more he is a society within himself, the less brusquely he is divided from his fellows.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
4 months 6 days ago
As far as physicians go, chance...

As far as physicians go, chance is more valuable than knowledge.

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Ch. 37
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Jean Jacques Rousseau
4 months 1 day ago
He thinks like a philosopher, but...

He thinks like a philosopher, but governs like a king.

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Of Frederick the Great XII
Philosophical Maxims
Al-Ghazali
Al-Ghazali
3 months 5 days ago
Knowledge that is not Infallible is...

Knowledge that is not Infallible is not certain knowledge.

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I. Introduction, p. 7.
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 months 4 weeks ago
Great men, great nations, have not...

Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.

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Fate
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
1 month 4 weeks ago
Aesthetic theories arose one hundred fifty...

Aesthetic theories arose one hundred fifty years ago among the wealthy classes of the Christian European world. ...And notwithstanding its obvious insolidity, nobody else's theory so pleased the cultured crowd or was accepted so readily and with such absence of criticism. It so suited the people of the upper classes that to this day, notwithstanding its entirely fantastic character and the arbitrary nature of its assertions, it is repeated by the educated and uneducated as though it were something indubitable and self-evident.

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Philosophical Maxims
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
3 months 3 weeks ago
There is no information about the...

There is no information about the thingness of the thing without knowledge of the kind of truth in which the thing stands. But there is no information about this truth of the thing without knowledge of the thingness of the thing whose truth is in question. Where are we to get a foothold? The ground slips away under us. Perhaps we are already close to falling into the well. At any rate the housemaids are already laughing.

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p. 27
Philosophical Maxims
John Gray
John Gray
1 month 5 days ago
Talk of secularism is meaningful when...

Talk of secularism is meaningful when it refers to the weakness of traditional religious belief or the lack of power of churches and other religious bodies. That is what is meant when we say Britain is a more secular country than the United States, and in this sense secularism is an achievable condition. But if it means a type of society in which religion is absent, secularism is a kind of contradiction, for it is defined by what it excludes. Post-Christian secular societies are formed by the beliefs they reject, whereas a society that had truly left Christianity behind would lack the concepts that shaped secular thought.

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Post-Apocalypse: After Secularism (pp. 267-8)
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
4 months 2 weeks ago
All people respect and love their...

All people respect and love their own parents and children, as well as the parents and children of others.

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Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
2 months 2 weeks ago
Apart from the fact there is...

Apart from the fact there is no normal standard of health, nobody has proved that man is necessarily cheerful by nature. And further, man, by the very fact of being man, of possessing consciousness, is, in comparison with the ass or the crab, a diseased animal. Consciousness is a disease.

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Philosophical Maxims
Martin Buber
Martin Buber
2 months 2 weeks ago
In the ice of solitude man...

In the ice of solitude man becomes most inexorably a question to himself, and just because the question pitilessly summons and draws into play his most secret life he becomes an experience to himself.

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p. 150
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 4 weeks ago
I do not think that the...

I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds. One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it.

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"The Emotional Factor"
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
1 month 3 weeks ago
They say cowardice is infectious; but...

They say cowardice is infectious; but then argument is, on the other hand, a great emboldener.

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Ch. 4, The Sea Chest.
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Schweitzer
Albert Schweitzer
1 week 2 days ago
Faith which refuses to face indisputable...

Faith which refuses to face indisputable facts is but little faith. Truth is always gain, however hard it is to accommodate ourselves to it. To linger in any kind of untruth proves to be a departure from the straight way of faith.

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p. 290
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 months 4 weeks ago
A good indignation brings out all...

A good indignation brings out all one's powers.

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1841
Philosophical Maxims
Leszek Kołakowski
Leszek Kołakowski
2 weeks 6 days ago
A modern philosopher who has never...

A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading.

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Metaphysical Horror
Philosophical Maxims
Theodor Adorno
Theodor Adorno
2 months 2 weeks ago
We are really no longer ourselves...

We are really no longer ourselves a part of nature at the moment when we notice, when we recognize, that we are a part of nature.

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Probleme der Moralphilosophie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996), p. 154; as quoted in Andrew Bowie, Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), p. 94
Philosophical Maxims
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