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Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
2 months 4 days ago
...my extreme anxiety about the Object...

...my extreme anxiety about the Object of our common sollicitude and my clear and decided conviction, that there is one part of the War, which instead of being postponed and considered in a secondary light, ought to have priority over every other, and requires our most early and our most careful attention; I mean La Vendée. ... This is a War directly against Jacobinism and its principles. It strikes at the Enemy in his weakest and most vulnerable part. At La Vendée with infinitely less Charge, we may make an impression likely to be decisive. This goes to the heart of the Business.

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Letter to the Home Secretary Henry Dundas (8 October 1793), quoted in P. J. Marshall and John A. Woods (eds.)
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
4 months 6 days ago
I now myself live, in every...
I now myself live, in every detail, striving for wisdom, while I formerly merely worshipped and idolized the wise.
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Philosophical Maxims
Epicurus
Epicurus
3 months 3 weeks ago
Natural justice is a symbol or...

Natural justice is a symbol or expression of usefulness, to prevent one person from harming or being harmed by another.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Dewey
John Dewey
1 month 3 weeks ago
Even the eye that is artificially...

Even the eye that is artificially trained to see color as color, apart from things that colors qualify, cannot shut out the resonances and transfers of value.

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p. 126
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
3 months 1 week ago
There are some defeats more triumphant...

There are some defeats more triumphant than victories.

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Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
1 month 1 day ago
When Fortune is on our side,...

When Fortune is on our side, popular favor bears her company.

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Maxim 275
Philosophical Maxims
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal
3 months 2 weeks ago
There are some men who expose...

There are some men who expose themselves to damnation so foolishly by avarice, by brutality, by debauches, by violence, by excesses, by blasphemies! ...it is always a great folly for a man to expose himself to damnation... He must despise desire and its kingdom, and aspire to that kingdom of love in which all the subjects breathe nothing but love, and desire nothing but the benefits of love.

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Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
3 months 1 week ago
Methinks I am like a man,...

Methinks I am like a man, who having struck on many shoals, and having narrowly escap'd shipwreck in passing a small frith, has yet the temerity to put out to sea in the same leaky weather-beaten vessel, and even carries his ambition so far as to think of compassing the globe under these disadvantageous circumstances.

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Part 4, Section 7
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
1 month 3 weeks ago
Are ye come out as against...

Are ye come out as against a thief with swords and staves for to take me? I sat daily with you teaching in the temple, and ye laid no hold on me. But all this was done, that the scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled.

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26:55-56 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
3 months 1 week ago
The hair is the finest ornament...

The hair is the finest ornament women have. . . . I like women to let their hair fall down their back, it is a most agreeable sight.

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-- Table Talk, quoted in Luther On "Woman"
Philosophical Maxims
Lucretius
Lucretius
3 months 2 weeks ago
So potent was Religion….

So potent was Religion in persuading to do wrong.

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Book I, line 101 (tr. Alicia Stallings) H. A. J. Munro's translation: So great the evils to which religion could prompt! W. H. D. Rouse's translation: So potent was Superstition in persuading to evil deeds.
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
1 month 3 weeks ago
Outside the academic establishment, the "far-reaching...

Outside the academic establishment, the "far-reaching change in all our habits of thought" is more serious. It serves to coordinate ideas and goals with those exacted by the prevailing system, to enclose them in the system, and to repel those which are irreconcilable with the system. The reign of such a one-dimensional reality does not mean that materialism rules, and that the spiritual, metaphysical, and bohemian occupations are petering out. On the contrary, there is a great deal of "Worship together this week," "Why not try God," Zen, existentialism, and beat ways of life, etc. But such modes of protest and transcendence are no longer contradictory to the status quo and no longer negative. They are rather the ceremonial part of practical behaviorism, its harmless negation, and are quickly digested by the status quo as part of its healthy diet.

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pp. 13-14
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
1 month 2 weeks ago
Error is the price we pay...

Error is the price we pay for progress.

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Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
4 months 6 days ago
Socialism itself can hope to exist...
Socialism itself can hope to exist only for brief periods here and there, and then only through the exercise of the extremest terrorism. For this reason it is secretly preparing itself for rule through fear and is driving the word 'justice' into the heads of the half-educated masses like a nail so as to rob them of their reason... and to create in them a good conscience for the evil game they are to play.
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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 5 days ago
Freedom comes only to those who...

Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 months 4 days ago
The silent organ loudest chants The...

The silent organ loudest chants The master's requiem.

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Dirge, st. 13
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
1 month 3 days ago
All violence consists in some people...

All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do.

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The Law of Love and the Law of Violence
Philosophical Maxims
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
2 months 1 day ago
Taught from their infancy that beauty...

Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

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Ch. 3
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Buber
Martin Buber
1 month 3 weeks ago
Whoever abhors the name and fancies...

Whoever abhors the name and fancies that he is godless - when he addresses with his whole devoted being the Thou of his life that cannot be restricted by any other, he addresses God.

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Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton
1 month 1 week ago
I do not know what I...

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

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Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton (1855) by Sir David Brewster (Volume II. Ch. 27).
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
4 weeks ago
I will not be modest...
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Main Content / General
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
3 months 3 days ago
It is not only when it...

It is not only when it takes the form of physical addiction that sex is evil. It is also evil when it manifests itself as a way of satisfying the lust for power or the climber's craving for position and social distinction.

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Ch. 14, p. 358 [2012 reprint]
Philosophical Maxims
Proclus
Proclus
2 months 2 weeks ago
But after these, Pythagoras changed that...

But after these, Pythagoras changed that philosophy, which is conversant about geometry itself, into the form of a liberal doctrine, considering its principles in a more exalted manner; and investigating its theorems immaterially and intellectually; who likewise invented a treatise of such things as cannot be explained in geometry, and discovered the constitution of the mundane figures.

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Chap. IV.
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
3 months 1 week ago
When I play with my cat….

When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?

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Ch. 12 (tr. Donald M. Frame) , tr. David Wills, 2008
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
1 month 1 week ago
A handful of soldiers is always...

A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.

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E 19
Philosophical Maxims
John Dewey
John Dewey
1 month 3 weeks ago
Because rhythm is a universal scheme...

Because rhythm is a universal scheme of existence, underlying all realization of order in change, it pervades all the arts, literary, musical, plastic and architectural, as well as the dance. Since man succeeds only as he adapts his behavior to the order of nature, his achievements and victories, as they ensue upon resistance and struggle, become the matrix of all esthetic subject-matter; in some sense they constitute the common pattern of art, the ultimate conditions of form. Their cumulative orders of succession become without express intent the means by which man commemorates and celebrates the most intense and full moments of his experience. Underneath the rhythm of every art and every work of art there lies, as a substratum in the depths of the subconsciousness, the basic pattern of the relations of the live creature to his environment.

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p. 156
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
3 months 1 week ago
'T is so much to be...

T is so much to be a king, that he only is so by being so. The strange lustre that surrounds him conceals and shrouds him from us; our sight is there broken and dissipated, being stopped and filled by the prevailing light.

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Book III, Ch. 7. Of the Inconveniences of Greatness
Philosophical Maxims
Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm
1 month 2 weeks ago
Greed is a bottomless pit which...

Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.

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Ch. 4
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
3 months 3 days ago
Love may forgive all infirmities and...

Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 5 days 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.

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Philosophical Maxims
William Godwin
William Godwin
2 months 1 day ago
Ministers become a sort of miniature...

Ministers become a sort of miniature kings in their turn. Though they have the greatest opportunity of observing the impotence and unmeaningness of the character, they envy it. It is their trade perpetually to extol the dignity and importance of the master they serve; and men cannot long anxiously endeavor to convince others of the truth of any proposition without becoming half convinced themselves.

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Book V, Ch. 5
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
1 month 2 weeks ago
There is a greatness in the...

There is a greatness in the lives of those who build up religious systems, a greatness in action, in idea and in self-subordination, embodied in instance after instance through centuries of growth. There is a greatness in the rebels who destroy such systems: they are the Titans who storm heaven, armed with passionate sincerity. It may be that the revolt is the mere assertion by youth of its right to its proper brilliance, to that final good of immediate joy. Philosophy may not neglect the multifariousness of the world - the fairies dance, and Christ is nailed to the cross.

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Pt. V, ch. 1, sec. 1.
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
3 months 6 days ago
There are truths….

There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.

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Letter to François-Joachim de Pierre, cardinal de Bernis, 23 April 1764
Philosophical Maxims
Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm
1 month 2 weeks ago
I believe that the nature of...

I believe that the nature of man is a contradiction rooted in the conditions of human existence that requires a search for solutions, which in their turn create new contradictions and now the need for answers. I believe that every answer to these contradictions can really satisfy the condition of helping man to overcome the sense of separation and to achieve a sense of agreement, of unity, and of belonging. I believe that in every answer to these contradictions, man has the possibility of choosing only between going forward or going back; these choices, which are translated into specific actions, are means toward the regressing or toward the progressing of the humanity that is in us.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley
2 weeks 5 days ago
It cannot be doubted, I think,...

It cannot be doubted, I think, that Mr. Darwin has satisfactorily proved that what he terms selection, or selective modification, must occur, and does occur, in nature; and he has also proved to superfluity that such selection is competent to produce forms as distinct, structurally, as some genera even are. If the animated world presented us with none but structural differences, I should have no hesitation in saying that Mr. Darwin has demonstrated the existence of a true physical cause, amply competent to account for the origin of living species, and of man among the rest.

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Ch.2, p. 126
Philosophical Maxims
Plutarch
Plutarch
2 months 3 weeks ago
Once when Phocion had delivered an...

Once when Phocion had delivered an opinion which pleased the people,... he turned to his friend and said, "Have I not unawares spoken some mischievous thing or other?"

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55 Phocion
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months ago
Lord, give me the capacity of...

Lord, give me the capacity of never praying, spare me the insanity of all worship, let this temptation of love pass from me which would deliver me forever unto You. Let the void spread between my heart and heaven! I have no desire to people my deserts by Your presence, to tyrannize my nights by Your light, to dissolve my Siberias beneath Your sun.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 months 4 days ago
Cure the drunkard, heal the insane,...

Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debaucher of sentiment?

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p. 236
Philosophical Maxims
kalokagathia
kalokagathia
3 months 2 weeks ago
Never accept compliments...

Never accept compliments or criticism from someone you wouldn't take advice from.

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Propositions / General
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
1 month 2 weeks ago
If things are deprived of memory,...

If things are deprived of memory, they become information or commodities. They are pushed into a time-free, ahistorical place.

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Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
4 months 1 day ago
Once you've dissected a joke, you're...

Once you've dissected a joke, you're about where you are when you've dissected a frog. It's dead. Banquets of the Black Widowers (1984), p. 49; comparable to "Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind."

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Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
3 months 4 days ago
The reasons for legal intervention in...

The reasons for legal intervention in favour of children, apply not less strongly to the case of those unfortunate slaves and victims of the most brutal part of mankind, the lower animals.

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Book V, Chapter 11, Section 9
Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
4 months 4 days ago
But it is better to assume...

But it is better to assume principles less in number and finite, as Empedocles makes them to be. All philosophers... make principles to be contraries... (for Parmenides makes principles to be hot and cold, and these he demominates fire and earth) as those who introduce as principles the rare and the dense. But Democritus makes the principles to be the solid and the void; of which the former, he says, has the relation of being, and the latter of non-being. ...it is necessary that principles should be neither produced from each other, nor from other things; and that from these all things should be generated. But these requisites are inherent in the first contraries: for, because they are first, they are not from other things; and because they are contraries, they are not from each other.

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Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
3 months 1 week ago
The mind intent upon resolving as...

The mind intent upon resolving as well as compounding the concept of a composite demands and presumes boundaries in which it may acquiesce in the former as well as in the latter direction.

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Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
3 months 4 days ago
The concrete man has but one...

The concrete man has but one interest - to be right. That to him is the art of all arts, and all means are fair which help him to it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
4 weeks 1 day ago
A woman can earn her pardon...

A woman can earn her pardon for a good year of disobedience by a single adroit submission.

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The Rajah's Diamond, Story of the Bandbox.
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
3 months 2 days ago
Listen to me: a family man...

Listen to me: a family man is never a real family man. An assassin is never entirely assassin. They play a role, you understand. While a dead man, he is really dead. To be or not to be, right?

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Hugo, Act 4, sc. 6
Philosophical Maxims
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
2 months 3 days ago
Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, James,...

Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, James, Bergson all are united in one earnest attempt, the attempt to reinstate man with his high spiritual claims in a place of importance in the cosmic scheme.

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Edwin Arthur Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (1925).
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 5 days ago
The opinions that are held with...

The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder's lack of rational conviction.

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Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately. Introduction to 1961 edition of Sceptical Essays, 1961
Philosophical Maxims
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
1 month 2 weeks ago
A farewell does not dilute the...

A farewell does not dilute the presence of the past; it may make an even deeper presence.

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Philosophical Maxims
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