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St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
3 months 1 day ago
Charity is no substitute for justice...

Charity is no substitute for justice withheld.

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As quoted in Majority of One (1957) by Sydney J. Harris, p. 283
Philosophical Maxims
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
1 month 6 days ago
Whatever be the substance which takes...

Whatever be the substance which takes possession of such a soul, it will produce the same result, and will change into a pretext for not conforming to any concrete purpose. If it appears as reactionary or anti-liberal it will be in order to affirm that the salvation of the State gives a right to level down all other standards, and to manhandle one's neighbour, above all if one's neighbour is an outstanding personality. But the same happens if it decides to act the revolutionary; the apparent enthusiasm for the manual worker, for the afflicted and for social justice, serves as a mask to facilitate the refusal of all obligations, such as courtesy, truthfulness and, above all, respect or esteem for superior individuals. ... As regards other kinds of Dictatorship, we have seen only too well how they flatter the mass-man, by trampling on everything that appeared to be above the common level.

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Chapter XV: We Arrive At The Real Question
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 1 week ago
For a long while I have...

For a long while I have lived with the notion that I was the most normal being that ever existed. This notion gave me the taste, even the passion for being unproductive: what was the use of being prized in a world inhabited by madmen, a world mired in mania and stupidity? For whom was one to bother, and to what end? It remains to be seen if I have quite freed myself from this certitude, salvation in the absolute, ruin in the immediate.

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Philosophical Maxims
Richard Rorty
Richard Rorty
2 months 6 days ago
It is no more evident that...

It is no more evident that democratic institutions are to be measured by the sort of person they create than that they are to be measured against divine commands. ... Even if the typical character types of liberal democracies are bland, calculating, petty, and unheroic, the prevalence of such people may be a reasonable price to pay for political freedom.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 2 weeks ago
I trust a good deal to...

I trust a good deal to common fame, as we all must. If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.

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February 1855
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
2 months 2 weeks ago
A proud man is always looking...

A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.

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Book III, Chapter 8, "The Great Sin"
Philosophical Maxims
Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton
1 week 1 day ago
An international socialism is the stated...

An international socialism is the stated ideal of most socialists; an international liberalism is the unstated tendency of the liberal. To neither system is it thinkable that men live, not by universal aspirations but by local attachments; not by a "solidarity" that stretches across the globe from end to end, but by obligations that are understood in terms which separate men from most of their fellows-in terms such as national history, religion, language, and the customs that provide the basis of legitimacy.

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How to be a Non-Liberal, Anti-Socialist Conservative, Intercollegiate Review: A Journal of Scholarship and Opinion
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine
2 months 2 weeks ago
We live to improve, or we...

We live to improve, or we live in vain.

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Address and Declaration at a Select Meeting of the Friends of Universal Peace and Liberty (August 20, 1791) p. 5
Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
1 week 6 days ago
An agreeable companion on a journey...

An agreeable companion on a journey is as good as a carriage.

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Maxim 143
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Jaspers
Karl Jaspers
1 month 6 days ago
Man, if he is to remain...

Man, if he is to remain man, must advance by way of consciousness. There is no road leading backward. ... We can no longer veil reality from ourselves by renouncing self-consciousness without simultaneously excluding ourselves from the historical course of human existence.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 week 6 days ago
I neither approve nor disapprove. I...

I neither approve nor disapprove. I merely try to understand. Sexual freedom is as natural to newly tribalized youth as drugs.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
2 months 2 weeks ago
There is an almost universal tendency,...

There is an almost universal tendency, perhaps an inborn tendency, to suspect the good faith of a man who holds opinions that differ from our own opinions. ... It obviously endangers the freedom and the objectivity of our discussion if we attack a person instead of attacking an opinion or, more precisely, a theory.

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"The Importance of Critical Discussion" in On the Barricades: Religion and Free Inquiry in Conflict (1989) by Robert Basil
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
1 week 5 days ago
It's obvious that in an intelligent...

It's obvious that in an intelligent educated audience such as this university, I stress this university. Who saw fit to give them accreditation? At Randolph-Macon Woman's College, (23 October 2006) Broadcasted by C-SPAN2

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 week 5 days ago
It is as if thinking....
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Main Content / General
Voltaire
Voltaire
2 months 2 weeks ago
All philosophical sects…

All philosophical sects have run aground on the reef of moral and physical ill. It only remains for us to confess that God, having acted for the best, had not been able to do better.

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"Power, Omnipotence," Dictionnaire philosophique, 1785-1789
Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
1 month 2 weeks ago
Égalité is an expression of envy....

Égalité is an expression of envy. It means, in the real heart of every Republican, " No one shall be better off than I am;" and while this is preferred to good government, good government is impossible.

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Conversation with Nassau William Senior, 22 May 1850 Nassau, p. 94
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
1 month 1 week ago
Go into the village over against...

Go into the village over against you, and straightway ye shall find an ass tied, and a colt with her: loose them, and bring them unto me. And if any man say ought unto you, ye shall say, The Lord hath need of them; and straightway he will send them. All this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying, Tell ye the daughter of Sion, Behold, thy King cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass.

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21:2-5 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
1 month 1 week ago
The same, without such opinion, DESPAIRE....

The same, without such opinion, DESPAIRE.

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The First Part, Chapter 6, p. 25
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
2 months 2 weeks ago
Everything is a subject on which...

Everything is a subject on which there is not much to be said.

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Studies in Words (1960), ch. 2
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
1 week 4 days ago
Mankind was never so happily inspired...

Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.

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An Inland Voyage (1878).
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 2 weeks ago
I shall keep it [the manuscript]...

I shall keep it [the manuscript] by me until the end of May for purposes of revision, and of adding malicious foot-notes.

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Letter to W. W. Norton, 17 February, 1931
Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
1 month 1 week ago
The meaning and design of a...

The meaning and design of a problem seem not to lie in its solution, but in our working at it incessantly.

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p. 103
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
3 months 2 weeks ago
It says nothing against the ripeness...
It says nothing against the ripeness of a spirit that it has a few worms.
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Philosophical Maxims
Georg Büchner
Georg Büchner
1 month 2 weeks ago
A good man with a good...

A good man with a good conscience doesn't walk so fast.

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Scene X.
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
1 week 4 days ago
Age may have one side, but...

Age may have one side, but assuredly Youth has the other. There is nothing more certain than that both are right, except perhaps that both are wrong. Let them agree to differ; for who knows but what agreeing to differ may not be a form of agreement rather than a form of difference?

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Crabbed Age and Youth.
Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
3 months 2 weeks 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
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
2 months 2 weeks ago
The wraith of Sigmund said. "You...

The wraith of Sigmund said. "You know what this is, I suppose. Religious melancholia. Stop while there is time. If you dive, you dive into insanity."

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Pilgrim's Regress 168
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
3 months 1 week ago
He tried to recall what he...

He tried to recall what he had read about the disease. Figures floated across his memory, and he recalled that some thirty or so great plagues known to history had accounted for nearly a hundred million deaths. But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one actually sees him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard
2 weeks 4 days ago
This realistic image, however, does not...

This realistic image, however, does not catch at all what really is, but what should not be - death and misery - what should not exist, from our moral and humanistic point of view. And at the same time making an aesthetic and commercial, perfectly immoral use and abuse of this misery. Images that actually testify, behind their pretended "objectivity", of a deep denial of the real, and of an equal denial of the image - assigned to present what does not even want to be represented, assigned to the rape of the real by burglary.

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Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
2 months 2 weeks ago
He advanced toward me without moving...

He advanced toward me without moving his hat, or making the least inclination of his body; but there appeared more real politeness in the open, humane air of his countenance, than in drawing one leg behind the other, and carrying that in the hand which is made to be worn on the head. "Friend," said he, "I perceive thou art a stranger, if I can do thee any service thou hast only to let me know it." "Sir," I replied, bowing my body, and sliding one leg toward him, as is the custom with us, "I flatter myself that my curiosity, which you will allow to be just, will not give you any offence, and that you will do me the honor to inform me of the particulars of your religion." "The people of thy country," answered the Quaker, "are too full of their bows and their compliments; but I never yet met with one of them who had so much curiosity as thyself. Come in and let us dine first together."

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Voltaire's account of meeting the Quaker Andrew Pit
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
2 months 2 weeks ago
Matter is indeed infinitely and incredibly...

Matter is indeed infinitely and incredibly refined. To anyone who has ever looked on the face of a dead child or parent the mere fact that matter could have taken for a time that precious form, ought to make matter sacred ever after. It makes no difference what the principle of life may be, material or immaterial, matter at any rate co-operates, lends itself to all life's purposes. That beloved incarnation was among matter's possibilities.

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Lecture III, Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
2 months 2 weeks ago
Each of the parts of philosophy...

Each of the parts of philosophy is a philosophical whole, a circle rounded and complete in itself. In each of these parts, however, the philosophical Idea is found in a particular specificality or medium. The single circle, because it is a real totality, bursts through the limits imposed by its special medium, and gives rise to a wider circle. The whole of philosophy in this way resembles a circle of circles. The Idea appears in each single circle, but, at the same time, the whole Idea is constituted by the system of these peculiar phases, and each is a necessary member of the organisation.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
2 months 2 weeks ago
Because machines could be made progressively...

Because machines could be made progressively more and more efficient, Western man came to believe that men and societies would automatically register a corresponding moral and spiritual improvement. Attention and allegiance came to be paid, not to Eternity, but to the Utopian future. External circumstances came to be regarded as more important than states of mind about external circumstances, and the end of human life was held to be action, with contemplation as a means to that end. These false and historically, aberrant and heretical doctrines are now systematically taught in our schools and repeated, day in, day out, by those anonymous writers of advertising copy who, more than any other teachers, provide European and American adults with their current philosophy of life. And so effective has been the propaganda that even professing Christians accept the heresy unquestioningly and are quite unconscious of its complete incompatibility with their own or anybody else's religion.

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Philosophical Maxims
Novalis
Novalis
1 month 1 week ago
The true Poet is all-knowing; he...

The true Poet is all-knowing; he is an actual world in miniature.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay
4 days ago
Men are never so likely to...

Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they discuss it freely.

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p. 248
Philosophical Maxims
Theodor Adorno
Theodor Adorno
1 month 1 day ago
We cannot think any true thought...

We cannot think any true thought unless we want the true. Thinking is itself an aspect of practice.

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p. 45
Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
1 month 1 week ago
It is ...easy to be certain....

It is ...easy to be certain. One has only to be sufficiently vague.

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Vol. IV, par. 237
Philosophical Maxims
Peter Singer
Peter Singer
2 months 6 days ago
People do not feel in any...

People do not feel in any way ashamed or guilty about spending money on new clothes or a new car instead of giving it to famine relief. (Indeed, the alternative does not occur to them.) This way of looking at the matter cannot be justified. When we buy new clothes not to keep ourselves warm but to look "well-dressed" we are not providing for any important need. We would not be sacrificing anything significant if we were to continue to wear our old clothes, and give the money to famine relief. By doing so, we would be preventing another person from starving. It follows from what I have said earlier that we ought to give money away, rather than spend it on clothes which we do not need to keep us warm. To do so is not charitable, or generous. Nor is it the kind of act which philosophers and theologians have called "supererogatory" - an act which it would be good to do, but not wrong not to do. On the contrary, we ought to give the money away, and it is wrong not to do so.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ernst Mach
Ernst Mach
1 month 1 week ago
There is no problem in all...

There is no problem in all mathematics that cannot be solved by direct counting. But with the present implements of mathematics many operations can be performed in a few minutes which without mathematical methods would take a lifetime.

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p. 197; On mathematics and counting.
Philosophical Maxims
George Santayana
George Santayana
1 month 1 week ago
When Socrates and his two great...

When Socrates and his two great disciples composed a system of rational ethics they were hardly proposing practical legislation for mankind...They were merely writing an eloquent epitaph for their country.

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Philosophical Maxims
Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton
1 week 1 day ago
Many Britons...feel strongly about something which...

Many Britons...feel strongly about something which was once called "the alien wedge". And surely it cannot be doubted, even by those who profess allegiance to the "multicultural society", that our society, unlike America, is not of that kind, and therefore that immigration cannot be an object of merely passive contemplation on the part of the present citizenship. There is perhaps no greater sign of the strength of liberalism (a strength which issues, not from popular consensus, but from the political power of the liberal elite) than that it has made it impossible for any but the circumlocutory to argue that the English, the Scots and the Welsh have a prior claim to the benefits of the civilization that their ancestors created, which entitles them to reserve its benefits for themselves.

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The Meaning of Conservatism: Third Edition (2001), p. 62
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 month 2 days ago
And this God, the living God,...

And this God, the living God, your God, our God, is in me, is in you, lives in us, and we live and move and have our being in Him. And he is in us by virtue of the hunger, the longing, which we have for Him, He is Himself creating the longing for Himself.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay
4 days 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
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
2 months 2 weeks ago
You can hardly convince a man...

You can hardly convince a man of an error in a lifetime, but must content yourself with the reflection that the progress of science is slow. If he is not convinced, his grandchildren may be.

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Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Schlegel
Friedrich Schlegel
1 month 2 weeks ago
The divine origin of man, as...

The divine origin of man, as taught by Vedanta, IS continually inculcated, to stimulate his efforts to return, to animate him in the struggle, and incite him to consider a reunion and reincorporation with Divinity as the one primary object of every action and reaction. Even the loftiest philosophy of the European, the idealism of reason as it is set forth by the Greek philosophers, appears in comparison with the abundant light and vigor of Oriental idealism like a feeble Promethean spark in the full flood of heavenly glory of the noonday sun, faltering and feeble and ever ready to be extinguished.

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quoted in Londhe, S. (2008). A tribute to Hinduism: Thoughts and wisdom spanning continents and time about India and her culture. New Delhi: Pragun Publication.
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
2 months 3 weeks ago
The obliteration of the evil hath...

The obliteration of the evil hath been practised by two means, some kind of redemption or expiation of that which is past, and an inception or account de novo for the time to come. But this part seemeth sacred and religious, and justly; for all good moral philosophy (as was said) is but a handmaid to religion.

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Book II, xxii, 14
Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
1 month 1 week 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
Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus
2 months 3 weeks ago
I have no patience with those...

I have no patience with those who say that sexual excitement is shameful and that venereal stimuli have their origin not in nature, but in sin. Nothing is so far from the truth. As if marriage, whose function cannot be fulfilled without these incitements, did not rise above blame. In other living creatures, where do these incitements come from? From nature or from sin? From nature, of course. It must borne in mind that in the apetites of the body there is very little difference between man and other living creatures. Finally, we defile by our imagination what of its own nature is fair and holy. If we were willing to evaluate things not according to the opinion of the crowd, but according to nature itself, how is it less repulsive to eat, chew, digest, evacuate, and sleep after the fashion of dumb animals, than to enjoy lawful and permitted carnal relations?

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In Praise of Marriage (1519), in Erasmus on Women (1996) Erika Rummel
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
1 month 2 weeks ago
Hegel determines and presents only the...

Hegel determines and presents only the most striking differences of various religions, philosophies, time and peoples, and in a progressive series of stages, but he ignores all that is common and identical in all of them. ... His system knows only subordination and succession; coordination and coexistence are unknown to it.

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Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), p. 54
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
2 months 2 weeks ago
The South may keep her pine-apples,...

The South may keep her pine-apples, and we will be content with our strawberries, which are, as it were, pine-apples with "going a-strawberrying" stirred into them, infinitely enhancing their flavor.

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Philosophical Maxims
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