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Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno
1 month 2 weeks ago
After it hath been seen how...

After it hath been seen how the obstinate and the ignorant of evil disposition are accustomed to dispute, it will further be shewn how disputes are wont to conclude; although others are so wary that without losing their composure, but with a sneer, a smile, a certain discreet malice, that which they have not succeeded in proving by argument - nor indeed can it be understood by themselves - nevertheless by these tricks of courteous disdain they pretend to have proven, endeavouring not only to conceal their own patently obvious ignorance but to cast it on to the back of their adversary. For they dispute not in order to find or even to seek Truth, but for victory, and to appear the more learned and strenuous upholders of a contrary opinion. Such persons should be avoided by all who have not a good breastplate of patience.

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"Introductory Epistle : Argument of the Third Dialogue"
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
3 months 3 days ago
Sincerity is the end and beginning...

Sincerity is the end and beginning of things; without sincerity there would be nothing. On this account, the superior man regards the attainment of sincerity as the most excellent thing.

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Philosophical Maxims
Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze
3 weeks 2 days ago
A leftist government doesn't exist because...

A leftist government doesn't exist because being on the left has nothing to do with governments.

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from L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze: G comme Gauche ("Gilles Deleuze's Alphabet Book: Left-wing Politics"), 1988-1989.
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard
2 weeks 2 days ago
Watergate was thus nothing but a...

Watergate was thus nothing but a lure held out by the system to catch its adversaries-a simulation of scandal for regenerative ends.

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"The Precession of Simulacra," p. 16
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
1 week 6 days ago
The vocation of every man and...

The vocation of every man and woman is to serve other people.

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What Is To Be Done? (1886) Chap. XL
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
2 months 3 weeks ago
The value of life lies not...

The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them... Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will.

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Book I, Ch. 20
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert A. Simon
Herbert A. Simon
3 weeks 1 day ago
The techniques of the practitioner are...

The techniques of the practitioner are usually called 'synthetic'. He designs by organizing known principles and devices into larger systems.

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Simon (1945, p. 353); As cited in: Philosophy of Technology and Engineering Sciences (2009) p. 425.
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
2 months 1 week ago
You can do everything with bayonets...

You can do everything with bayonets except sit on them. If you want to preserve your power indefinitely you have to get the consent of the ruled. And this they will do partly by drugs as I foresaw in "Brave new World", and partly by these new techniques of propaganda. They will do it by bypassing the sort of rational side of man and appealing to his subconscious, and his deeper emotions, and his physiology, even, and so making him actually love his slavery. I mean I think this is the danger that actually people may be, in some ways, happy under the new regime. But they will be happy in situations when they oughtn't be happy.

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Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
1 week 2 days ago
You could read Kant by yourself,...

You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with someone else.

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Virginibus Puerisque, Ch. 1. Cornhill Magazine,
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
2 months 2 weeks ago
Communism differs from all previous movements...

Communism differs from all previous movements in that it overturns the basis of all earlier relations of production and intercourse, and for the first time consciously treats all natural premises as the creatures of hitherto existing men, strips them of their natural character and subjugates them to the power of the united individuals. Its organisation is, therefore, essentially economic, the material production of the conditions of this unity; it turns existing conditions into conditions of unity. The reality, which communism is creating, is precisely the true basis for rendering it impossible that anything should exist independently of individuals, insofar as reality is only a product of the preceding intercourse of individuals themselves.

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Vol. I, Part 4.
Philosophical Maxims
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut
2 weeks 1 day ago
Someday, someday, this crazy world will...

Someday, someday, this crazy world will have to end, And our God will take things back that He to us did lend. And if, on that sad day, you want to scold our God, Why go right ahead and scold Him. He'll just smile and nod.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 2 weeks ago
A mind does not receive truth...

A mind does not receive truth as a chest receives jewels that are put into it, but as the stomach takes up food into the system. It is no longer food, but flesh, and is assimilated. The appetite and the power of digestion measure our right to knowledge. He has it who can use it. As soon as our accumulation overruns our invention or power to use, the evils of intellectual gluttony begin,- congestion of the brain, apoplexy, and strangulation.

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"The Natural History of Intellect", p. 30
Philosophical Maxims
Novalis
Novalis
1 month 1 week ago
Lover works magic…

Love works magic. It is the final purpose Of the world story, The Amen of the universe.

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Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
1 month 1 week ago
Metaphysical assertions, however, are statements of...

Metaphysical assertions, however, are statements of the psyche, and are therefore psychological. ... Whenever the Westerner hears the word "psychological," it always sounds to him like "only psychological."

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Psyche and Symbol (1958), p. 285
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
3 weeks 2 days ago
Nothing can contribute more to peace...

Nothing can contribute more to peace of soul than the lack of any opinion whatever.

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E 11
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard
2 weeks 2 days ago
Photography and cinema contributed in large...

Photography and cinema contributed in large part to the secularization of history, to fixing it in its visible, "objective" form at the expense of the myths that once traversed it. Today cinema can place all its talent, all its technology in the service of reanimating what it itself contributed to liquidating. It only resurrects ghosts, and it itself is lost therein.

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"History: A Retro Scenario," p. 48
Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
1 month 3 weeks ago
Friends share…

Friends share all things.

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As quoted in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, "Pythagoras", Sect. 10
Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
1 week 4 days ago
Be your money's master, not its...

Be your money's master, not its slave.

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Maxim 657
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 1 week ago
Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our...

Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.

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Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 month 1 day ago
My conduct must be the best...

My conduct must be the best proof, the moral proof, of my supreme desire; and if I do not end by convincing myself, within the bounds of the ultimate and irremediable uncertainty of the truth of what I hope for, it is because my conduct is not sufficiently pure. Virtue, therefore, is not based upon dogma, but dogma upon virtue, and it is not faith that creates martyrs but martyrs who create faith. There is no security or repose - so far as security and repose are obtainable in this life, so essentially insecure and unreposeful - save in conduct that is passionately good.

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Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
3 months 3 days ago
When one cultivates to the utmost...

When one cultivates to the utmost the principles of his nature, and exercises them on the principle of reciprocity, he is not far from the path. What you do not like when done to yourself, do not do to others.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ernst Mach
Ernst Mach
1 month 1 week ago
The mental operation by which one...

The mental operation by which one achieves new concepts and which one denotes generally by the inadequate name of induction is not a simple but rather a very complicated process. Above all, it is not a logical process although such processes can be inserted as intermediary and auxiliary links. The principle effort that leads to the discovery of new knowledge is due to abstraction and imagination.

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3rd edition, p. 318ff, As quoted by Phillip Frank, Philosophy of Science: The Link Between Science and Philosophy
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 1 week ago
A self-respecting man is a man...

A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime...

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Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 week 4 days ago
The sculptural qualities of the image...

The sculptural qualities of the image dim down the purely personal identity.

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(p. 369)
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
1 week 2 days ago
Youth now flees on feathered foot....

Youth now flees on feathered foot.

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To Will H. Low, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 1 week ago
To think we could have spared...

To think we could have spared ourselves from living all that we have lived!

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Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
2 months 2 weeks ago
Howitt says of the man who...

Howitt says of the man who found the great nugget which weighed twenty-eight pounds, at the Bendigo diggings in Australia: - "He soon began to drink; got a horse, and rode all about, generally at full gallop, and, when he met people, called out to inquire if they knew who he was, and then kindly informed them that he was 'the bloody wretch that had found the nugget.' At last he rode full speed against a tree, and nearly knocked his brains out." I think, however, there was no danger of that, for he had already knocked his brains out against the nugget.

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p. 489
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
2 months 3 weeks ago
Who does not in some sort...

Who does not in some sort live to others, does not live much to himself.

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Book III, Ch. 10
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
2 months 2 weeks ago
The most violent revolutions in an...

The most violent revolutions in an individual's beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one's own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity.

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"What Pragmatism Means," Pragmatism, pp. 60-61 (1931); lectures delivered at the Lowell Institute, Boston, Massachusetts
Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
1 month 3 weeks ago
He is worst of all, that...

He is worst of all, that is malicious against his friends.

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Philosophical Maxims
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
1 month 1 week ago
I see not the shadow of...

I see not the shadow of a reason to conclude that their [the sexes'] virtues should differ in respect to their nature. In fact, how can they, if virtue has only one eternal standard? I must therefore, if I reason consequentially, as strenuously maintain that they must have the same simple direction as that there is a God.

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-26
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
4 weeks ago
In the inescapable flux, there is...

In the inescapable flux, there is something that abides; in the overwhelming permanence, there is an element that escapes into flux. Permanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can find its adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence.

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Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
2 months 2 weeks ago
Suicide may also be regarded as...

Suicide may also be regarded as an experiment - a question which man puts to Nature, trying to force her to answer. The question is this: What change will death produce in a man's existence and in his insight into the nature of things? It is a clumsy experiment to make; for it involves the destruction of the very consciousness which puts the question and awaits the answer.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 13, § 160
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
1 month 6 days ago
A new commandment I give unto...

A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.

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13:34-35 KJV
Philosophical Maxims
Antisthenes
Antisthenes
2 months 4 days ago
Pay attention to your enemies, for...

Pay attention to your enemies, for they are the first to discover your mistakes.

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§ 12
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
3 weeks 6 days ago
The real importance of Swedenborg lies...

The real importance of Swedenborg lies in the doctrines he taught, which are the reverse of the gloom and hell-fire of other breakaway sects. He rejects the notion that Jesus died on the cross to atone for the sin of Adam, declaring that God is neither vindictive nor petty-minded, and that since he is God, he doesn't need atonement. It is remarkable that this common-sense view had never struck earlier theologians. God is Divine Goodness, and Jesus is Divine Wisdom, and Goodness has to be approached through Wisdom. Whatever one thinks about the extraordinary claims of its founder, it must be acknowledged that there is something very beautiful and healthy about the Swedenborgian religion. Its founder may have not been a great occultist, but he was a great man.

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p. 280
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 1 week ago
I have all the defects of...

I have all the defects of other people yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 1 week ago
Even when nothing happens, everything seems...

Even when nothing happens, everything seems too much for me. What can be said, then, in the presence of an event, any event?

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Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
1 month 6 days ago
Man alone has the power of...

Man alone has the power of self-realization, the power to be a self-determining subject in all processes of becoming, for he alone has an understanding of potentialities and a knowledge of 'notions.' His very existence is the process of actualizing his potentialities, of molding his life according to the notions of reason.

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P. 9
Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
3 months 2 weeks ago
Perhaps then we must begin with...

Perhaps then we must begin with such facts as are known to us from individual experience. It is necessary therefore that the person who is to study, with any tolerable chance of profit, the principles of nobleness and justice and politics generally, should have received a good moral training.

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Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
2 months 2 weeks ago
The plain fact is that men's...

The plain fact is that men's minds are built, as has been often said, in water-tight compartments. Religious after a fashion, they yet have many other things in them beside their religion, and unholy entanglements and associations inevitably obtain. The basenesses so commonly charged to religion's account are thus, almost all of them, not chargeable at all to religion proper, but rather to religion's wicked practical partner, the spirit of corporate dominion. And the bigotries are most of them in their turn chargeable to religion's wicked intellectual partner, the spirit of dogmatic dominion, the passion for laying down the law in the form of an absolutely closed-in theoretic system. The ecclesiastical spirit in general is the sum of these two spirits of dominion.

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Lectures XIV and XV, "The Value of Saintliness"
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
2 months 2 weeks ago
All true metaphysics is taken from...

All true metaphysics is taken from the essential nature of the thinking faculty itself, and therefore in nowise invented, since it is not borrowed from experience, but contains the pure operations of thought, that is, conceptions and principles à priori, which the manifold of empirical presentations first of all brings into legitimate connection, by which it can become empirical knowledge, i.e. experience. ...mathematical physicists were thus quite unable to dispense with such metaphysical principles...

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Preface, Tr. Bax, 1883
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
1 week 6 days ago
The man is making preparations for...

The man is making preparations for a year, and does not know that he will die before evening. And I remembered God's second saying, "Learn what is not given to man." 'What dwells in man" I already knew. Now I learnt what is not given him. It is not given to man to know his own needs.

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Ch. XI
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 week 6 days ago
A just system...
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Main Content / General
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
1 month 2 weeks ago
No man can mortgage his injustice...

No man can mortgage his injustice as a pawn for his fidelity.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
2 months 2 weeks ago
The language of excitement is at...

The language of excitement is at best but picturesque merely. You must be calm before you can utter oracles.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 80
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 1 week ago
The more intense a spiritual leader's...

The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.

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Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
1 month 2 weeks ago
No man has received…

No man has received from nature the right to give orders to others. Freedom is a gift from heaven, and every individual of the same species has the right to enjoy it as soon as he is in enjoyment of his reason.

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Article on Political Authority, Vol. 1, (1751) as quoted in Selected Writings (1966) edited by Lester G. Crocker
Philosophical Maxims
Heraclitus
Heraclitus
3 months 3 days ago
War is the father and king...

War is the father and king of all, and has produced some as gods and some as men, and has made some slaves and some free.

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Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
3 months 1 week ago
When the throne of God is...

When the throne of God is overturned, the rebel realizes that it is now his own responsibility to create the justice, order, and unity that he sought in vain within his own condition, and in this way to justify the fall of God. Then begins the desperate effort to create, at the price of crime and murder if necessary, the dominion of man.

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Philosophical Maxims
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