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Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
2 months 2 weeks ago
In the Catholic Church, especially, they...

In the Catholic Church, especially, they go into chancery, make a clean confession, give up all, and think to start again. Thus men will lie on their backs, talking about the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up.

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p. 487
Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
1 month 2 weeks ago
Your vision will become clear only...

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Without, everything seems discordant; only within does it coalesce into unity. Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakes.

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Letter to Fanny Bowditch, 22 October 1916
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
3 weeks 4 days ago
In most cases....
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Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
2 months 2 weeks ago
A reproach can only hurt if...

A reproach can only hurt if it hits the mark. Whoever knows that he does not deserve a reproach can treat it with contempt.

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Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
3 months 2 weeks ago
"My field," said Goethe, "is time."...

"My field," said Goethe, "is time." That is indeed the absurd speech. What, in fact, is the Absurd Man? He who, without negating it, does nothing for the eternal. Not that nostalgia is foreign to him. But he prefers his courage and his reasoning. The first teaches him to live without appeal and to get along with what he has; the second informs him of his limits. Assured of his temporally limited freedom, of his revolt devoid of future, and of his mortal consciousness, he lives out his adventure within the span of his lifetime.

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Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
1 month 5 days ago
We should desire neither the immortality...

We should desire neither the immortality nor the death of any human being, whoever he may be, with whom we have to do.

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p. 260
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay
1 week 1 day ago
It is surely delightful, Sir, to...

It is surely delightful, Sir, to look forward to that period when a series of liberal and prudent measures shall have delivered islands, so highly favoured by the bounty of Providence, from the curse inflicted on them by the frantic rapacity of man. Then the peasant of the Antilles will no longer crawl in listless and trembling dejection round a plantation from whose fruits he must derive no advantage, and a hut whose door yields him no protection; but, when his cheerful and voluntary labour is performed, he will return with the firm step and erect brow of a British citizen from the field which is his freehold to the cottage which is his castle.

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Speech to a meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society held in Freemasons' Tavern (25 June 1824), quoted in Report of the Committee of the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions, Volume I (1824), p. 77
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
4 weeks 1 day ago
With a pen in my hand...

With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.

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E 76
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
2 months 2 weeks ago
But let there be no misunderstanding:...

But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technological intervention, has been substituted for the soul, the illusion of theologians. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 2 weeks ago
Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only...

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry. What is best in mathematics deserves not merely to be learnt as a task, but to be assimilated as a part of daily thought, and brought again and again before the mind with ever-renewed encouragement.

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Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
2 weeks 1 day ago
Old and young, we are all...

Old and young, we are all on our last cruise.

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Crabbed Age and Youth.
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
2 weeks 3 days ago
TV is not good at covering...

TV is not good at covering single events. It needs a ritual, a rhythm, and a pattern...[TV] tends to fosters patterns rather than events.

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Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
2 months 2 weeks ago
I am sorry that my convictions...

I am sorry that my convictions do not allow me to repeat my friend's offer, said one of the others. But I have had to abandon the humanitarian and egalitarian fancies. His name was Mr. Neo-Classical.

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Pilgrim's Regress 89
Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
1 month 2 weeks ago
I go to spread the tidings,...

I go to spread the tidings, I want to spread the tidings - of what? Of the truth, for I have seen it, have seen it with my own eyes, have seen it in all its glory.

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Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
2 weeks 1 day ago
Natural selection is an extremely simple...

Natural selection is an extremely simple process, in the sense that very little machinery needs to be set up in order for it to work. Of course the effects and consequences of natural selection are complex in the extreme. But in order to set natural selection going on a real planet, all that is required is the existence of inherited information.

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Chapter 2, "Silken Fetters" (p. 68)
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
2 months 2 weeks ago
Night is falling: at dusk, you...

Night is falling: at dusk, you must have good eyesight to be able to tell the Good Lord from the Devil.

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Act 10, sc. 2
Philosophical Maxims
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
1 month 2 days ago
God functions like a stabilizer of...

God functions like a stabilizer of time.

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Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
2 months 2 weeks ago
The doctrine of the Second Coming...

The doctrine of the Second Coming has failed, so far as we are concerned, if it does not make us realize that at every moment of every year in our lives Donne's question "What if this present were the world's last night?" is equally relevant.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
2 months 3 weeks ago
What if he has borrowed the...

What if he has borrowed the matter and spoiled the form, as it oft falls out?

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Book III, Ch. 8. Of the Art of Conversation
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 2 weeks ago
For what avail the plough or...

For what avail the plough or sail, Or land or life, if freedom fail?

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Boston
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 2 weeks ago
History shows that the thinkers who...

History shows that the thinkers who mounted on the top of the ladder of questions, who set their foot on the last rung, that of the absurd, have bequeathed to posterity only an example of sterility.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 2 weeks ago
Just as we teach children to...

Just as we teach children to avoid being destroyed by motor cars if they can, so we should teach them to avoid being destroyed by cruel fanatics, and to this end we should seek to produce independence of mind, somewhat sceptical and wholly scientific, and to preserve, as far as possible, the instinctive joy of life that is natural to healthy children. This is the task of a liberal education: to give a sense of the value of things other than domination, to help create wise citizens of a free community, and through the combination of citizenship with liberty in individual creativeness to enable men to give to human life that splendour which some few have shown that it can achieve.

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Ch. 18: The Taming of Power
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 2 weeks ago
When I was 4 years old...

When I was 4 years old ... I dreamt that I'd been eaten by a wolf, and to my great surprise I was in the wolf's stomach and not in heaven.

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BBC interview on "Face to Face" (1959); The Listener, Vol. 61 (1959), p. 503
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
1 month 1 week ago
O faithless and perverse generation, how...

O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? how long shall I suffer you? bring him hither to me.

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17:17 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
1 month 2 weeks ago
The ideal form for a poem,...

The ideal form for a poem, essay, or fiction, is that which the ideal writer would evolve spontaneously. One in whom the powers of expression fully responded to the state of feeling, would unconsciously use that variety in the mode of presenting his thoughts, which Art demands.

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Pt. II, sec. 4, "The Ideal Writer"
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 month 6 days ago
Like monarchy, monotheism had a martial...

Like monarchy, monotheism had a martial origin. "It is only on the march and it time of war," says Robertson Smith in The Prophets of Israel, "that a nomad people feels any urgent need of a central authority, and so it came about that in the first beginnings of national organization, centering in the sanctuary of the ark, Israel was thought of mainly as a host of Jehovah. the very name of Israel is martial, and means 'God (El) fighteth,' and Jehovah in the Old Testament is Iahwé Cebāôth - the Jehovah of the armies of Israel. It was on the battlefield that Jehovah's presence was most clearly realized; but in primitive nations the leader in time of war is also the natural judge in time of peace."

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Philosophical Maxims
René Descartes
René Descartes
2 months 3 weeks ago
In order to seek truth, it...

In order to seek truth, it is necessary once in the course of our life, to doubt, as far as possible, of all things.

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Descartes, René (1644). Principles of Philosophy.
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard
3 weeks 1 day ago
Driving is a spectacular form of...

Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated. Admittedly, there is the primal shock of the deserts and the dazzle of California, but when this is gone, the secondary brilliance of the journey begins, that of the excessive, pitiless distance, the infinity of anonymous faces and distances, or of certain miraculous geological formations, which ultimately testify to no human will, while keeping intact an image of upheaval. This form of travel admits of no exceptions: when it runs up against a known face, a familiar landscape, or some decipherable message, the spell is broken: the amnesic, ascetic, asymptotic charm of disappearance succumbs to affect and worldly semiology.

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Vanishing Point (pp. 9-10)
Philosophical Maxims
Theodor Adorno
Theodor Adorno
1 month 5 days ago
In a world that has been...

In a world that has been thoroughly permeated by the structures of the social order, a world that so overpowers every individual that scarcely any option remains but to accept it on its own terms, such naiveté reproduces itself incessantly and disastrously. What people have forced upon them by a boundless apparatus, which they themselves constitute and which they are locked into, virtually eliminates all natural elements and becomes "nature" to them.

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p. 12
Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
1 month 2 weeks ago
The Protestant churches generally hold that...

The Protestant churches generally hold that the elements of the sacrament are flesh and blood only in a tropical sense; they nourish our souls as meat and the juice of it would our bodies. But the Catholics maintain that they are literally just that; although they possess all the sensible qualities of wafer-cakes and diluted wine. But we can have no conception of wine except what may enter into a belief, either -

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Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
3 months 2 weeks ago
"In the light, the earth remains...

"In the light, the earth remains our first and our last love. Our brothers are breathing under the same sky as we; justice is a living thing. Now is born that strange joy which helps one live and die, and which we shall never again postpone to a later time."

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Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
2 weeks 1 day ago
Think about the two qualities that...

Think about the two qualities that a virus, or any sort of parasitic replicator, demands of a friendly medium, the two qualities that make cellular machinery so friendly towards parasitic DNA, and that make computers so friendly towards computer viruses. These qualities are, firstly, a readiness to replicate information accurately, perhaps with some mistakes that are subsequently reproduced accurately; and, secondly, a readiness to obey instructions encoded in the information so replicated.

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Philosophical Maxims
Herbert A. Simon
Herbert A. Simon
4 weeks ago
The function of knowledge in the...

The function of knowledge in the decision-making process is to determine which consequences follow upon which of the alternative strategies. It is the task of knowledge to select from the whole class of possible consequences a more limited subclass, or even (ideally) a single set of consequences correlated with each strategy.

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p. 78.
Philosophical Maxims
Vandana Shiva
Vandana Shiva
3 days ago
Many conflicts within Third World countries...

Many conflicts within Third World countries are related to the practice of exploiting resources faster than nature can renew them or diverting them away from where people need them. Dams in every society have become major sources of conflict. As water scarcity grows, neighbors, families turn against each other.

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Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
1 month 2 weeks ago
Opinion is ultimately determined by the...

Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, and not by the intellect.

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Pt. IV, Ch. 30 : General Considerations
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay
1 week 1 day ago
Wherever literature consoles sorrow, or assuages...

Wherever literature consoles sorrow, or assuages pain,-wherever it brings gladness to eyes which fail with wakefulness and tears, and ache for the dark house and the long sleep,-there is exhibited, in its noblest form, the immortal influence of Athens.

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p. 179
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
3 months 2 weeks ago
Between God and man there is...

Between God and man there is and remains an eternal, essential, qualitative difference. The paradoxical relationship (which, quite rightly, cannot be thought, but only believed) appears when God appoints a particular man to divine authority, in relation, be it carefully noted, to that which has entrusted to him.

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Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
2 weeks 5 days ago
The slaves of our times are...

The slaves of our times are not all those factory and workshop hands only who must sell themselves completely into the power of the factory and foundry-owners in order to exist, but nearly all the agricultural laborers are slaves, working, as they do, unceasingly to grow another's corn on another's field, and gathering it into another's barn; or tilling their own fields only in order to pay to bankers the interest on debts they cannot get rid of. And slaves also are all the innumerable footmen, cooks, porters, housemaids, coachmen, bathmen, waiters, etc., who all their life long perform duties most unnatural to a human being, and which they themselves dislike.

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Chapter 8: Slavery Exists Among Us
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
2 months 2 weeks ago
In reality, the labourer belongs to...

In reality, the labourer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital.

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Vol. I, Ch. 23, pg. 633.
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 2 weeks ago
At different degrees, everything is pathology,...

At different degrees, everything is pathology, except for indifference.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
2 months 2 weeks ago
The utilitarian morality does recognise in...

The utilitarian morality does recognise in human beings the power of sacrificing their own greatest good for the good of others. It only refuses to admit that the sacrifice is itself a good. A sacrifice which does not increase, or tend to increase, the sum total of happiness, it considers as wasted. The only self-renunciation which it applauds, is devotion to the happiness, or to some of the means of happiness, of others; either of mankind collectively, or of individuals within the limits imposed by the collective interests of mankind.

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Ch. 2
Philosophical Maxims
Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch
1 month 1 week ago
The only satisfied rationalists today are...

The only satisfied rationalists today are blinkered scientists or Marxists.

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Ch. 7, p. 113
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
3 months 1 week ago
In archery we have something...

In archery we have something like the way of the superior man. When the archer misses the center of the target, he turns round and seeks for the cause of his failure in himself.

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Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
3 months 2 weeks ago
People don't stop things they enjoy...

People don't stop things they enjoy doing just because they reach a certain age. They don't stop playing tennis just because they turn 40, they don't stop with sex just because they turn 40; they keep it up as long as they can if they enjoy it, and learning will be the same thing.

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Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 month 6 days ago
Shall we not perhaps be told,...

Shall we not perhaps be told, on the other hand, that if the sinner suffers an eternal punishment, it is because he does not cease to sin? - for the damned sin without ceasing. This however is no solution to the problem, which derives all its absurdity from the fact that punishment has been conceived as vindictiveness or vengeance, not as correction, and has been conceived after the fashion of barbarous peoples. And in the same way hell has been conceived as a sort of police institution, necessary in order to put fear into the world. And the worst of it is that it no longer intimidates, and therefore will have to be shut up.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
2 months 2 weeks ago
Compared with the greatest poets, he...

Compared with the greatest poets, he may be said to be the poet of unpoetical natures, possessed of quiet and contemplative tastes. But unpoetical natures are precisely those which require poetic cultivation. This cultivation Wordsworth is much more fitted to give, than poets who are intrinsically far more poets than he.

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(p. 149)
Philosophical Maxims
Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno
1 month 3 weeks ago
This whole which is visible in...

This whole which is visible in different ways in bodies, as far as formation, constitution, appearance, colors and other properties and common qualities, is none other than the diverse face of the same substance - a changeable, mobile face, subject to decay, of an immobile, permanent and eternal being.

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As translated by Paul Harrison
Philosophical Maxims
Gottfried Leibniz
Gottfried Leibniz
2 months 3 weeks ago
There are two kinds of truths….

There are two kinds of truths: those of reasoning and those of fact. The truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible; the truths of fact are contingent and their opposites are possible.

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La monadologie (33).
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
1 month 3 days ago
For the kingdom of heaven is...

For the kingdom of heaven is with us today.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
2 weeks 3 days ago
Marx shared with economists then and...

Marx shared with economists then and since the inability to make his concepts include innovational processes. It is one thing to spot a new product but quite another to observe the invisible new environments generated by the action of the product on a variety of pre-existing social grounds.

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(p. 63)
Philosophical Maxims
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