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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
2 months ago
It is a matter of perfect...

It is a matter of perfect indifference where a thing originated; the only question is: "Is it true in and for itself?" Many think that by pronouncing a doctrine to be Neo-Platonic, they have ipso facto banished it from Christianity. Whether a Christian doctrine stands exactly thus or thus in the Bible, the point to which the exegetical scholars of modern times devote all their attention is not the only question. The Letter kills, the Spirit makes alive: this they say themselves, yet pervert the sentiment by taking the Understanding for the Spirit.

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Pt. III, sec. 3, ch. 2 Lectures on the History of History Vol 1 p. 344 John Sibree translation (1857), 1914
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months ago
Reason is a harmonising, controlling force...

Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.

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Ch. 1: Mysticism and Logic
Philosophical Maxims
Zoroaster
Zoroaster
1 month 2 weeks ago
Thou shouldst not become presumptuous through...

Thou shouldst not become presumptuous through much treasure and wealth; for in the end it is necessary for thee to leave all.

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Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
2 weeks 2 days ago
Religion is better described than defined...

Religion is better described than defined and better felt than described. But if there is any one definition that latterly has obtained acceptance, it is that of Schleiermacher, to the effect that religion consists in the simple feeling of a relationship of dependence upon something above us and a desire to establish relations with this mysterious power.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
1 week 5 days ago
The principle of brotherhood expounded by...

The principle of brotherhood expounded by the agitator of Nazareth preserved the germ of life, of truth and justice, so long as it was the beacon light of the few. The moment the majority seized upon it, that great principle became a shibboleth and harbinger of blood and fire, spreading suffering and disaster. The attack on the omnipotence of Rome was like a sunrise amid the darkness of the night, only so long as it was made by the colossal figures of a Huss, a Calvin, or a Luther. Yet when the mass joined in the procession against the Catholic monster, it was no less cruel, no less bloodthirsty than its enemy. Woe to the heretics, to the minority, who would not bow to its dicta. After infinite zeal, endurance, and sacrifice, the human mind is at last free from the religious phantom; the minority has gone on in pursuit of new conquests, and the majority is lagging behind, handicapped by truth grown false with age.

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Philosophical Maxims
Dante Alighieri
Dante Alighieri
2 months 1 week ago
Love and the gracious…

Love and the gracious heart are a single thing...one can no more be without the otherthan the reasoning mind without its reason.

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Chapter XVI (tr. Mark Musa)
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months ago
Both in thought and in feeling,...

Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.

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p. 167
Philosophical Maxims
Cisero
Cisero
2 months 2 weeks ago
O immortal gods!

O immortal gods! Men do not realize how great a revenue parsimony can be!

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Paradoxa Stoicorum; Paradox VI, 49
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
2 weeks ago
I now come to the second...

I now come to the second reason for the modern fading of interest in religion. Religion is the reaction of human nature to its search for God. The presentation of God under the aspect of power awakens every modern instinct of critical reaction. This is fatal; for religion collapses unless its main positions command immediacy of assent. In this respect the old phraseology is at variance with the psychology of modern civilisations. This change in psychology is largely due to science, and is one of the chief ways in which the advance of science has weakened the hold of the old religious forms of expression.

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Ch. 12: "Religion and Science", pp. 266-267
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
1 month 4 weeks ago
Farewell to the monsters…

Farewell to the monsters, farewell to the saints. Farewell to pride. All that is left is men.

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Act 10, sc. 4
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 weeks 4 days ago
Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols,...

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

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Philosophical Maxims
Averroes
Averroes
2 months 2 weeks ago
To master this instrument the religious...

To master this instrument the religious thinker must make a preliminary study of logic, just as the lawyer must study legal reasoning. This is no more heretical in the one case than in the other. And logic must be learned from the ancient masters, regardless of the fact that they were not Muslims.

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Philosophical Maxims
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
1 month 4 weeks ago
Thinking withdraws radically and for its...

Thinking withdraws radically and for its own sake from this world and its evidential nature, whereas science profits from a possible withdrawal for the sake of specific results.

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p. 56
Philosophical Maxims
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
2 weeks 6 days ago
This fighting-shy of every obligation partly...

This fighting-shy of every obligation partly explains the phenomenon, half ridiculous, half disgraceful, Of the setting-up in our days of the platform of "youth" as youth. ... In comic fashion people call themselves "young," because they have heard that youth has more rights than obligations, since it can put off the fulfilment of these latter to the Greek Kalends of maturity. ...[T]he astounding thing at present is that these take it as an effective right precisely in order to claim for themselves all those other rights which only belong to the man who has already done something.

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Chapter XV: We Arrive At The Real Question
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
4 weeks 1 day ago
...for stones, plants, and animals there...

...for stones, plants, and animals there is no God, but only for man.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham
2 months 2 days ago
All poetry is misrepresentation…

All poetry is misrepresentation.

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An Aphorism attributed to him according to John Stuart Mill (see Mill's essay On Bentham and Coleridge in Utilitarianism edt. by Mary Warnock p. 123).
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
2 months 2 weeks ago
Among the appliances to transform the...

Among the appliances to transform the people, sound and appearances are but trivial influences.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham
2 months 2 days ago
Figure to yourself the mixture of...

Figure to yourself the mixture of surprise and delight which has this instant been poured into my mind by the sound of my name, as uttered by you, in the speech just read to me out of the Morning Herald... By one and the same man, not only Parliamentary Reform, but Law Reform advocated. Advocated? and by what man? By one who, in the vulgar sense of profit and loss, has nothing to gain by it... Yes, only from Ireland could such self-sacrifice come; nowhere else: least of all in England, cold, selfish, priest-ridden, lawyer-ridden, lord-ridden, squire-ridden, soldier-ridden England, could any approach to it be found.

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Letter to Daniel O'Connell (15 July 1828) , quoted in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. X (1843), pp. 594-595
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
1 week 5 days ago
The original Golden Dawn was not...

The original Golden Dawn was not always as serious as it should have been. Mathers was a clown, and Yeats was just a romantic trying to deceive himself. Most of them were interested in personal power, and it ended up by destroying them. The aim of our group is the scientific exploration of the hidden powers of the human mind.

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p. 113
Philosophical Maxims
Theodor Adorno
Theodor Adorno
2 weeks 1 day ago
In America I was liberated from...

In America I was liberated from a certain naïve belief in culture and attained the capacity to see culture from the outside. To clarify the point: in spite of all social criticism and all consciousness of the primacy of economic factors, the fundamental importance of the mind-"Geist"-was quasi a dogma self-evident to me from the very beginning. The fact that this was not a foregone conclusion, I learned in America, where no reverential silence in the presence of everything intellectual prevailed.

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as quoted in The Origin of Negative Dialectics (Free Press: 1977), p. 187
Philosophical Maxims
Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch
3 weeks ago
Serious reflexion about one's own character...

Serious reflexion about one's own character will often induce a curious sense of emptiness; and if one knows another person well, one may sometimes intuit a similar void in him. (This is one of the strange privileges of friendship.)

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Ch. 8, p. 119
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
2 months ago
We see then, commodities are in...

We see then, commodities are in love with money, but "the course of true love never did run smooth".

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Vol. I, Ch. 3, Section 2, pg. 121.
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months ago
Either Man will abolish war, or...

Either Man will abolish war, or war will abolish Man.

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Fact and Fiction (1961), Part IV, Ch. 10: "Can War Be Abolished?", p. 276
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
2 weeks 3 days ago
Science must begin...
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Thomas Browne
Thomas Browne
1 month 5 days ago
Who will not commend the wit...

Who will not commend the wit of astrology? Venus, born out of the sea, hath her exaltation in Pisces.

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Commonplace notebooks, Part I
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Buber
Martin Buber
2 weeks 6 days ago
The realer religion is, so much...

The realer religion is, so much the more it means its own overcoming. It wills to cease to be the special domain "Religion" and wills to become life. It is concerned in the end not with specific religious acts, but with redemption from all that is specific.

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p. 34
Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
3 weeks 4 days ago
One of the most marked features...

One of the most marked features about the law of mind is that it makes time to have a definite direction of flow from past to future. ...This makes one of the great contrasts between the law of mind and the law of physical force, where there is no more distinction between the two opposite directions in time than between moving northward and moving southward.

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Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
1 month 4 weeks ago
The "through-and-through" universe seems to suffocate...

The "through-and-through" universe seems to suffocate me with its infallible impeccable all-pervasiveness. Its necessity, with no possibilities; its relations, with no subjects, make me feel as if I had entered into a contract with no reserved rights ... It seems too buttoned-up and white-chokered and clean-shaven a thing to speak for the vast slow-breathing unconscious Kosmos with its dread abysses and its unknown tides.

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Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912), Ch. 12 : Absolutism and Empiricism
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
1 month ago
Free trade is not based on...

Free trade is not based on utility but on justice.

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Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
3 weeks 1 day ago
Kierkegaard's individualistic interpretation of 'the negation...

Kierkegaard's individualistic interpretation of 'the negation of philosophy' inevitably developed a fierce opposition to Western rationalism. .... According to Kierkegaard, the individual is not the knowing but only the 'ethically existing subjectivity.' The sole reality that matters to him is his own 'ethical existence'.

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P. 263-264
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
2 months 3 days ago
When the happiness or misery of...

When the happiness or misery of others depends in any respect upon our conduct, we dare not, as self-love might suggest to us, prefer the interest of one to that of many. The man within immediately calls to us, that we value ourselves too much and other people too little, and that, by doing so, we render ourselves the proper object of the contempt and indignation of our brethren. Neither is this sentiment confined to men of extraordinary magnanimity and virtue. It is deeply impressed upon every tolerably good soldier, who feels that he would become the scorn of his companions, if he could be supposed capable of shrinking from danger, or of hesitating, either to expose or to throw away his life, when the good of the service required it.

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Chap. III.
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
2 months 3 weeks ago
We can hope that the ways...

We can hope that the ways of peace will attract the Arabic nations, for their territory and opportunities are broad enough for immeasurable advance, if the energies vented in spleen, are turned instead to a modernisation of the technology, a restoration of the soil, and a renovation of the economic, social, and political structure of those great and venerable lands.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
2 months ago
On the death of a friend,...

On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend's life also, in our own, to the world.

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February 28, 1840
Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
3 months ago
If a man knows what it...

If a man knows what it is right to do, he does not require a formal reason. And a person that has been thus trained, either possesses these first principles already, or can easily acquire them.

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Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
1 week 2 days ago
A book is a mirror…

A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out. We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already.

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E 49
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
2 months ago
Who could believe in prophecies of...

Who could believe in prophecies of Daniel or of Miller that the world would end this summer, while one milkweed with faith matured its seeds?

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 weeks 4 days ago
What anxiety when one is not...

What anxiety when one is not sure of one's doubts or wonders: are these actually doubts?

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
1 month 3 weeks ago
There is little in common between...

There is little in common between the organised parading of madness in the eighteenth century and the freedom with which madness came to the fore during the Renaissance. The earlier age had found it everywhere, an integral element of each experience, both in images and in real life dangers. During the classical period, it was also on public view, but behind bars. When it manifested itself it was at a carefully controlled distance, under the watchful eye of a reason that denied all kinship with it, and felt quite unthreatened by any hint of resemblance. Madness had become a thing to be observed, no longer the monster within, but an animal moved by strange mechanisms, more beast than man, where all humanity had long since disappeared.

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Part One: 5. The Insane
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
3 weeks 1 day ago
Thou shalt love the Lord thy...

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

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22:37-40 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Plato
Plato
2 months 3 weeks ago
There is no one who ever...

There is no one who ever acts honestly in the administration of states, nor any helper who will save any one who maintains the cause of the just.

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Philosophical Maxims
Averroes
Averroes
2 months 2 weeks ago
There is no city that is...

There is no city that is truly one other than this city that we are involved in bringing forth.

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Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
2 months 2 days ago
Natural science is throughout either a...

Natural science is throughout either a pure or an applied doctrine of motion.

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Preface, Tr. Bax, 1883
Philosophical Maxims
Diogenes of Sinope
Diogenes of Sinope
1 month 2 weeks ago
Other dogs bite their enemies…

Other dogs bite only their enemies, whereas I bite also my friends in order to save them.

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Stobaeus, iii. 13. 44
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
2 months 3 weeks ago
...there are more things to admire...

...there are more things to admire in men than to despise.

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Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
2 months 1 week ago
When speaking of the spiritual nature...

When speaking of the spiritual nature or the soul, we are referring to that which is "inner" or "new." When speaking of the bodily nature, or that which is flesh and blood, we are referring to that which is called "sensual," "outward," or "old." Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 4:16: "Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day."

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p. 51
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
1 month 4 weeks ago
Blood doubly unites us, for we...

Blood doubly unites us, for we share the same blood and we have spilled blood.

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Orestes to Electra, Act 2
Philosophical Maxims
Plutarch
Plutarch
1 month 2 weeks ago
Pyrrhus said, "If I should overcome...

Pyrrhus said, "If I should overcome the Romans in another fight, I were undone."

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47 Pyrrhus
Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
2 months 3 days ago
There is an inconvenience which attends...

There is an inconvenience which attends all abstruse reasoning. That it may silence, without convincing an antagonist, and requires the same intense study to make us sensible of its force, that was at first requisite for its invention. When we leave our closet, and engage in the common affairs of life, its conclusions seem to vanish, like the phantoms of the night on the appearance of the morning; and 'tis difficult for us to retain even that conviction, which we had attain'd with difficulty.

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Part 1, Section 1
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 weeks 4 days ago
As art sinks into paralysis, artists...

As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Browne
Thomas Browne
1 month 5 days ago
And surely, he that hath taken...

And surely, he that hath taken the true Altitude of Things, and rightly calculated the degenerate state of this Age, is not like to envy those that shall live in the next, much less three or four hundred Years hence, when no Man can comfortably imagine what Face this World will carry.

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Philosophical Maxims
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