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Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
2 months 2 weeks ago
Job endured everything

Job endured everything - until his friends came to comfort him, then he grew impatient.

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Philosophical Maxims
Claude Sonnet 4.5
Claude Sonnet 4.5
2 weeks 1 day ago
The Sharing Economy Lie

Uber, Airbnb, TaskRabbit - the sharing economy shares nothing. It's corporations extracting profit from individuals who bear all risk, receive no benefits, and compete desperately. Precarity rebranded as flexibility. Exploitation marketed as entrepreneurship. There's no sharing, only extraction.

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Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
1 month 1 week ago
Is anything more certain than that...

Is anything more certain than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch? She died. She is dead. Is the word so difficult to learn?

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Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
1 month 3 weeks ago
The beginning is from God: for...

The beginning is from God: for the business which is in hand, having the character of good so strongly impressed upon it, appears manifestly to proceed from God, who is the author of good, and the Father of Lights. Now in divine operations even the smallest beginnings lead of a certainty to their end. And as it was said of spiritual things, "The kingdom of God cometh not with observation," so is it in all the greater works of Divine Providence; everything glides on smoothly and noiselessly, and the work is fairly going on "before men are aware that it has begun. Nor should the prophecy of Daniel be forgotten, touching the last ages of the world: -"Many shall go to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased;" clearly intimating that the thorough passage of the world (which now by so many distant voyages seems to be accomplished, or in course of accomplishment), and the advancement of the sciences, are destined by fate, that is, by Divine Providence, to meet in the same age.

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Aphorism 93
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
1 month 1 week ago
My dear Wormwood, I note what...

My dear Wormwood, I note what you say about guiding your patient's reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naive? It sounds as if you suppose that argument was the way to keep him out of the enemy's clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier.

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Letter I
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
1 month 2 weeks ago
How much good it would do...

How much good it would do if one could exterminate the human race.

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A characteristic saying of Russell, reported by Aldous Huxley in a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell dated 8 October 1917, as quoted in Bibliography of Bertrand Russell, Routledge, 2013
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 week 2 days ago
The more one has suffered, the...

The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
1 month 2 weeks ago
In the same year in which...

In the same year in which I began Latin, I made my first commencement in the Greek poet with the Iliad. After I had made some progress in this, my father put Pope's translation into my hands. It was the first English verse I had cared to read, and it became one of the books in which for many years I most delighted: I think I must have read it from twenty to thirty times through. I should not have thought it worth while to mention a taste apparently so natural to boyhood, if I had not, as I think, observed that the keen enjoyment of this brilliant specimen of narrative and versification is not so universal with boys, as I should have expected both à priori and from my individual experience.

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(p. 10)
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Buber
Martin Buber
4 days ago
When we rise out of [the...

When we rise out of [the night] into the new life and there begin to receive the signs, what can we know of that which - of him who gives them to us? Only what we experience from time to time from the signs themselves. If we name the speaker of this speech God, then it is always the God of a moment, a moment God.

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Between Man and Man (1965), p. 15
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
1 month 2 weeks ago
Goods can serve many other purposes...

Goods can serve many other purposes besides purchasing money, but money can serve no other purpose besides purchasing goods.

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Chapter I, p. 471.
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
2 months 3 days ago
Sincerity becomes apparent. From being apparent,...

Sincerity becomes apparent. From being apparent, it becomes manifest. From being manifest, it becomes brilliant. Brilliant, it affects others. Affecting others, they are changed by it. Changed by it, they are transformed. It is only he who is possessed of the most complete sincerity that can exist under heaven, who can transform.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
1 month 1 week ago
Appealing to his [Einstein's] way of...

Appealing to his [Einstein's] way of expressing himself in theological terms, I said: If God had wanted to put everything into the universe from the beginning, He would have created a universe without change, without organisms and evolution, and without man and man's experience of change. But he seems to have thought that a live universe with events unexpected even by Himself would be more interesting than a dead one.

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As quoted in Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes by Charles Hartshorne
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Büchner
Georg Büchner
1 week 6 days ago
We are only puppets, our strings...

We are only puppets, our strings are being pulled by unknown forces.

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Act II.
Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
1 week 2 days ago
All nature abounds in proofs of...

All nature abounds in proofs of other influences than merely mechanical action, even in the physical world. They crowd in upon us at the rate of several every minute. And my observation of men has led me to this little generalization. Speaking only of men who really think for themselves and not of mere reporters, I have not found that it is the men whose lives are mostly passed within the four walls of a physical laboratory who are most inclined to be satisfied with a purely mechanical metaphysics. On the contrary, the more clearly they understand how physical forces work the more incredible it seems to them that such action should explain what happens out of doors. A larger proportion of materialists and agnostics is to be found among the thinking physiologists and other naturalists, and the largest proportion of all among those who derive their ideas of physical science from reading popular books.

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Lecture II : The Universal Categories, §3. Laws: Nominalism, CP 5.65
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
1 month 3 weeks ago
The first law that ever God...

The first law that ever God gave to man was a law of pure obedience; it was a commandment naked and simple, wherein man had nothing to inquire after, nor to dispute; forasmuch as to obey is the proper office of a rational soul, acknowledging a heavenly superior and benefactor.

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Ch. 12, tr. Cotton, 1685
Philosophical Maxims
Diogenes of Sinope
Diogenes of Sinope
1 month 3 days ago
When people laughed at him because...

When people laughed at him because he walked backward beneath the portico, he said to them: "Aren't you ashamed, you who walk backward along the whole path of existence, and blame me for walking backward along the path of the promenade?"

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Stobaeus, iii. 4. 83
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
1 month 3 weeks ago
The human understanding when it has...

The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects, in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate.

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Aphorism 46
Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
3 weeks 4 days ago
It is requisite to defend those...

It is requisite to defend those who are unjustly accused of having acted injuriously, but to praise those who excel in a certain good.

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Pythagorean Ethical Sentences From Stobæus
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
1 month 1 week ago
There are more ideas on earth...

There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than "politicians" think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.

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As quoted in Michel Foucault (1991) by Didier Eribon, as translated by Betsy Wind, Harvard University Press, p. 282
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
1 month 2 weeks ago
In a social order dominated by...

In a social order dominated by capitalist production even the non-capitalist producer is gripped by capitalist conceptions.

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Vol. III, Ch. I, Cost Price and Profit, p. 39.
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
1 month 3 weeks ago
The logic now in use serves...

The logic now in use serves rather to fix and give stability to the errors which have their foundation in commonly received notions than to help the search for truth. So it does more harm than good.

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Aphorism 7
Philosophical Maxims
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida
1 month 1 week ago
What is called "objectivity," scientific for...

What is called "objectivity," scientific for instance (in which I firmly believe, in a given situation) imposes itself only within a context which is extremely vast, old, firmly established, or rooted in a network of conventions ... and yet which still remains a context.

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Limited Inc
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
1 month 2 weeks ago
There is an artist imprisoned in...

There is an artist imprisoned in each one of us. Let him loose to spread joy everywhere.

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Last Essay: "1967"
Philosophical Maxims
Antisthenes
Antisthenes
1 month 3 days ago
You want a new book….

Antisthenes ... said once to a youth from Pontus who was on the point of coming to him to be his pupil, and was asking him what things he wanted, "You want a new book, and a new pen, and a new tablet;"

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meaning a new mind. § 4
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
3 days ago
All movements go...
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Main Content / General
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
1 month 1 week ago
This is precisely what is decisive...

This is precisely what is decisive in Nietzsche's conception of art, that he sees it in its essential entirety in terms of the artist; this he does consciously and in explicit opposition to that conception of art which represents it in terms of those who "enjoy" and "experience" it.That is a guiding principle of Nietzsche's teaching on art: art must be grasped in terms of creators and producers, not recipients. Nietzsche expresses it unequivocally in the following words (WM, 811): "Our aesthetics heretofore has been a woman's aesthetics, inasmuch as only the recipients of art have formulated their experiences of 'what is beautiful.' In all philosophy to date the artist is missing." Philosophy of art means "aesthetics" for Nietzsche too-but masculine aesthetics, not feminine aesthetics. The question of art is the question of the artist as the productive, creative one; his experiences of what is beautiful must provide the standard.

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p. 70
Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
1 week 2 days ago
The only possible way of accounting...

The only possible way of accounting for the laws of nature and for uniformity in general is to suppose them results of evolution. This supposes them not to be absolute, not to be obeyed precisely. It makes an element of indeterminacy, spontaneity, or absolute chance in nature. Just as, when we attempt to verify any physical law, we find our observations cannot be precisely satisfied by it, and rightly attribute the discrepancy to errors of observation, so we must suppose far more minute discrepancies to exist owing to the imperfect cogency of the law itself, to a certain swerving of the facts from any definite formula.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 week 2 days ago
Impossible to accede to truth by...

Impossible to accede to truth by opinions, for each opinion is only a mad perspective of reality.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
1 month 2 weeks ago
The foundation of irreligious criticism is:...

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man.

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Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
1 month 2 weeks ago
Where is the prince…

Where is the prince sufficiently educated to know that for seventeen hundred years the Christian sect has done nothing but harm?

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Letters of Voltaire and Frederick the Great (New York: Brentano's, 1927), transl. Richard Aldington, letter 160 from Voltaire to Frederick II of Prussia, 6 April 1767
Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
1 week 3 days ago
If there is anything that we...

If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.

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p. 285
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 week 2 days ago
To try curing someone of a...

To try curing someone of a "vice," of what is the deepest thing he has, is to attack his very being, and this is indeed how he himself understands it, since he will never forgive you for wanting him to destroy himself in your way and not his.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
1 month 2 weeks ago
We cannot always choose the vocation...

We cannot always choose the vocation to which we believe we are called. Our social relations, to some extent, have already begun to form before we are in a position to determine them.

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Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, L. Easton, trans. (1967), p. 37
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
1 month 2 weeks ago
Since property here exists in the...

Since property here exists in the form of stock, its movement and transfer become purely a result of gambling on the stock exchange, where the little fish are swallowed by the sharks and the lambs by the stock exchange wolves.

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Vol. III, Ch. XXVII, The Role of Credit, p. 440.
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
1 month 2 weeks ago
Most books belong to the house...

Most books belong to the house and streets only, and in the fields their leaves feel very thin.

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Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
1 month 3 weeks ago
I dare affirm in knowledge of...

I dare affirm in knowledge of nature, that a little natural philosophy, and the first entrance into it, doth dispose the opinion to atheism; but on the other side, much natural philosophy and wading deep into it, will bring about men's minds to religion; wherefore atheism every way seems to be combined with folly and ignorance, seeing nothing can can be more justly allotted to be the saying of fools than this, "There is no God" Of Atheism.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
1 month 2 weeks ago
The secret of happiness is this:...

The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.

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Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
6 days ago
In the human reality, all existence...

In the human reality, all existence that spends itself in procuring the prerequisites of existence is thus an "untrue" and unfree existence. Obviously this reflects the not at all ontological condition of a society based on the proposition that freedom is incompatible with the activity of procuring the necessities of life, that this activity is the "natural" function of a specific class, and that cognition of the truth and true existence imply freedom from the entire dimension of such activity. ... Society still is organized in such a way that procuring the necessities of life constitutes the full-time and life-long occupation of specific social classes, which are therefore unfree and prevented from a human existence. In this sense, the classical proposition according to which truth is incompatible with enslavement by socially necessary labor is still valid.

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pp. 127-128
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 week 2 days ago
Self-knowledge - the bitterest knowledge of...

Self-knowledge - the bitterest knowledge of all and also the kind we cultivate least: what is the use of catching ourselves out, morning to night, in the act of illusion, pitilessly tracing each act back to its root, and losing case after case before our own tribunal?

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Philosophical Maxims
Horace
Horace
1 month 3 days ago
Whoever cultivates the golden mean…

Whoever cultivates the golden mean avoids both the poverty of a hovel and the envy of a palace.

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Book II, ode x, line 5
Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
2 months 2 weeks ago
The vices respectively fall short of...

The vices respectively fall short of or exceed what is right in both passions and actions, while virtue both finds and chooses that which is intermediate.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
1 month 2 weeks ago
My desire and wish is that...

My desire and wish is that the things I start with should be so obvious that you wonder why I spend my time stating them. This is what I aim at because the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Epicurus
Epicurus
2 months 3 days ago
The flesh receives as unlimited the...

The flesh receives as unlimited the limits of pleasure; and to provide it requires unlimited time. But the mind, intellectually grasping what the end and limit of the flesh is, and banishing the terrors of the future, procures a complete and perfect life, and we have no longer any need of unlimited time. Nevertheless the mind does not shun pleasure, and even when circumstances make death imminent, the mind does not lack enjoyment of the best life.

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Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
1 month 4 weeks ago
In a quarrel for earth, turn...

In a quarrel for earth, turn not to earth.

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First Homily, as translated by John Burnaby (1955), p. 267
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
2 months 3 days ago
Only after Winter comes do we...

Only after Winter comes do we know that the pine and the cypress are the last to fade.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
1 month 2 weeks ago
Only that position can impart dignity...

Only that position can impart dignity in which we do not appear as servile tools but rather create independently within our circle.

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Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, L. Easton, trans. (1967), p. 38
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
1 month 2 weeks ago
The violence of love is as...

The violence of love is as much to be dreaded as that of hate. When it is durable, it is serene and equable. Even its famous pains begin only with the ebb of love, for few are indeed lovers, though all would fain be.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 158
Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
2 weeks 4 days ago
La reconnaissance est un fardeau, et...

Gratitude is a burden, and every burden is made to be shaken off.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
1 month 2 weeks ago
The typical Westerner wishes to be...

The typical Westerner wishes to be the cause of as many changes as possible in his environment; the typical Chinaman wishes to enjoy as much and as delicately as possible.

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The Problem of China (1922), Ch. XII: The Chinese Character
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
1 month 3 weeks ago
We believe that the very beginning...

We believe that the very beginning and end of salvation, and the sum of Christianity, consists of faith in Christ, who by His blood alone, and not by any works of ours, has put away sin, and destroyed the power of death.

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p. 224
Philosophical Maxims
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