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Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 month 4 weeks ago
Little can be hoped for from...

Little can be hoped for from a ruler... who has not at some time or other been preoccupied, even if only confusedly, with the first beginning and ultimate end of all things, and above all of man, with the "why" of his origin and the "wherefore" of his destiny.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
2 months 4 days ago
A naturall foole that could never...

A naturall foole that could never learn by heart the order of numerall words, as one, two, and three, may observe every stroak of the Clock, and nod to it, or say one, one, one; but can never know what houre it strikes.

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The First Part, Chapter 4, p. 14
Philosophical Maxims
Walter Lippmann
Walter Lippmann
1 week 1 day ago
It requires wisdom to understand wisdom:...

It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.

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Ch. XV: "The Moralist in an Unbelieving World", §2, p. 324.
Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
3 months 1 week ago
One can forget everything…

One can forget everything, everything, only not oneself, one's own being.

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Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
3 months 2 weeks ago
II. The tax which each individual...

II. The tax which each individual is bound to pay ought to be certain, and not arbitrary.

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Chapter II, Part II, p. 892.
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
3 months 1 week ago
To hold a pen…

To hold a pen is to be at war.

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Letter to Jeanne-Grâce Bosc du Bouchet, comtesse d'Argental (4 October 1748)
Philosophical Maxims
Walter Lippmann
Walter Lippmann
1 week 1 day ago
There are no conventions, no tabus,...

There are no conventions, no tabus, no gods, no priests, princes, fathers, or revelations which they must accept. ... The prison door is wide open. They stagger out into trackless space under a blinding sun.

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Preface
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
1 month 1 week ago
The most important person is the...

The most important person is the one you are with in this moment.

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p. 206
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 1 week ago
It is a great force, and...

It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition.

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Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
2 months 1 week ago
The bourgeoisie is charitable out of...

The bourgeoisie is charitable out of self-interest; it gives nothing outright, but regards its gifts as a business matter, makes a bargain with the poor, saying: "If I spend this much upon benevolent institutions, I thereby purchase the right not to be troubled any further, and you are bound thereby to stay in your dusky holes and not to irritate my tender nerves by exposing your misery. You shall despair as before, but you shall despair unseen."

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Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
3 months 3 weeks ago
If you would be a good...

If you would be a good reader, read; if a writer, write.

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Book II, ch. 18, 1.
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
4 months 1 day ago
No matter how busy you may...

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 month 1 week ago
Paradox is the technique for seizing...

Paradox is the technique for seizing the conflicting aspects of any problem. Paradox coalesces or telescopes various facets of a complex process in a single instant.

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(p. 106)
Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
3 months 3 weeks ago
Know, first, who you are, and...

Know, first, who you are, and then adorn yourself accordingly.

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Book III, ch. 1, 25.
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley
3 weeks 6 days ago
I really have no claim to...

I really have no claim to rank myself among fatalistic, materialistic, or atheistic philosophers. Not among fatalists, for I take the conception of necessity to have a logical, and not a physical foundation; not among materialists, for I am utterly incapable of conceiving the existence of matter if there is no mind in which to picture that existence; not among atheists, for the problem of the ultimate cause of existence is one which seems to me to be hopelessly out of reach of my poor powers. Of all the senseless babble I have ever had occasion to read, the demonstrations of these philosophers who undertake to tell us all about the nature of God would be the worst, if they were not surpassed by the still greater absurdities of the philosophers who try to prove that there is no God.

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Philosophical Maxims
Mencius
Mencius
3 days ago
Those who are humane achieve glory....

Those who are humane achieve glory. Those who are inhumane suffer disgrace.

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2A:4
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
4 months 1 week ago
Believe me, there is no such...

Believe me, there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory...Everything is forgotten, even great love.

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Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 month 4 weeks 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
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
1 month 1 week ago
It would be deeply depressing if...

It would be deeply depressing if the only way children could get moral values was from religion. Either from scripture, and God knows we don't want them to get it from scripture, I mean, just look at scripture. Or, from being afraid of God, being intimidated by God. Anybody who is good for only those two reasons is not really being good at all. Why not teach children things like the Golden Rule, do as you would be done by, how would you like it if other children did that to you, so why do you do it to them... I think it's depressing that anybody should suggest that you actually need God in order to be moral. I would hope that our morals come from a better source than that, and therefore they are genuinely moral rather than based on outmoded scripture, or based on fear.

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BBC,
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 1 week ago
I am displeased with everything. If...

I am displeased with everything. If they made me God, I would immediately resign.

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Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
1 month 1 week ago
Perpetual devotion to what a man...

Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.

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An Apology for Idlers.
Philosophical Maxims
Novalis
Novalis
2 months 1 week ago
If the world is a precipitation...

If the world is a precipitation of human nature, so to speak, then the divine world is a sublimation of the same. Both occur in one act. No precipitation without sublimation. What goes lost there in agility, is won here.

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Fragment No. 96
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 1 week ago
In the past, there was a...

In the past, there was a small leisure class and a larger working class. The leisure class enjoyed advantages for which there was no basis in social justice; this necessarily made it oppressive, limited its sympathies, and caused it to invent theories by which to justify its privileges.

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Ch. 1: In Praise of Idleness, p. 13
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
3 months 2 weeks ago
The force of the word World,...

The force of the word World, as commonly used, of itself falls in with us. For no one will attribute accidents to the World as parts, but as determinations, states; hence the so-called world of the ego, unrestrained by the single substance and its accidents, is not very appositely called a World, unless, perhaps, an imaginary one.

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Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
2 months 1 week ago
The slave is sold once and...

The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly. The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master's interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence. This existence is assured only to the class as a whole.

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Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
3 months 1 week ago
The safest road to Hell is...

The safest road to Hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

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Letter XII
Philosophical Maxims
William Godwin
William Godwin
2 months 1 week ago
Nothing can be of more importance...

Nothing can be of more importance than to separate prejudice and mistake on the one hand from reason and demonstration on the other.

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Book III, Ch.1
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
2 days ago
My father's education was altogether of...

My father's education was altogether of the worst and most limited. I believe he was never more than three months at any school. What he learned there showed what he might have learned. A solid knowledge of arithmetic, a fine antique handwriting - these, with other limited practical etceteras, were all the things he ever heard mentioned as excellent. He had no room to strive for more.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 1 week ago
I found one day in school...

I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: "The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair." In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.

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p. 31
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Hölderlin
Friedrich Hölderlin
2 months 1 week ago
He who has thought…

He who has thought most deeply loves what is most alive.

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Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
2 months 4 days ago
Technical progress and more comfortable living...

Technical progress and more comfortable living permit the systematic inclusion of libidinal components into the realm of commodity production and exchange. But no matter how controlled the mobilization of instinctual energy may be (it sometimes amounts to a scientific management of libido), no matter how much it may serve as a prop for the status quo-it is also gratifying to the managed individuals, just as racing the outboard motor, pushing the power lawn mower, and speeding the automobile are fun.

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p. 75
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
1 month 3 weeks ago
There certainly is self division. The...

There certainly is self division. The man who watches a woman undressing has the red eyes of an ape; yet the man who sees two young lovers, really alone for the first time, who brings out all the pathos, the tenderness and uncertainty when he tells about it, is no brute; he is very much human. And the ape and the man exist in one body; and when the ape's desires are about to be fulfilled, he disappears and is succeeded by the man, who is disgusted with the ape's appetite.

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Chapter one, The Country of the Blind
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
1 month 1 week ago
Despite the fact that the doctors...

Despite the fact that the doctors treated him, bled him, and gave him medicines to drink, he recovered.

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[sometimes quoted as "Though the doctors treated him, let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he nevertheless recovered."] Bk. XV, ch. 12
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
3 months 1 week ago
Perseus wore a magic cap that...

Perseus wore a magic cap that the monsters he hunted down might not see him.We draw the magic cap down over eyes and ears as a make-believe that there are no monsters.

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Author's prefaces to the First Edition.
Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
2 months 1 week ago
Dreams, as we all know, are...

Dreams, as we all know, are very queer things: some parts are presented with appalling vividness, with details worked up with the elaborate finish of jewellery, while others one gallops through, as it were, without noticing them at all, as, for instance, through space and time. Dreams seem to be spurred on not by reason but by desire, not by the head but by the heart, and yet what complicated tricks my reason has played sometimes in dreams, what utterly incomprehensible things happen to it!

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Philosophical Maxims
Democritus
Democritus
3 months 1 day ago
A sensible man takes pleasure in...

A sensible man takes pleasure in what he has instead of pining for what he has not.

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Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
4 months 1 day ago
All things are nourished together without...

All things are nourished together without their injuring one another. The courses of the seasons, and of the sun and moon, are pursued without any collision among them. The smaller energies are like river currents; the greater energies are seen in mighty transformations. It is this which makes heaven and earth so great.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 1 week ago
A distant enemy is always preferable...

A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.

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Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
3 months 1 week ago
Two Chinamen visiting Europe went to...

Two Chinamen visiting Europe went to the theatre for the first time. One of them occupied himself with trying to understand the theatrical machinery, which he succeeded in doing. The other, despite his ignorance of the language, sought to unravel the meaning of the play. The former is like the astronomer, the latter the philosopher.

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Vol. 2 "On Various Subjects" as translated in Essays and Aphorisms (1970), as translated by R. J. Hollingdale
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Rorty
Richard Rorty
3 months 2 days ago
Kripke tries to sober us up...

Kripke tries to sober us up by denying that meaning determines reference. Rather, we name things by confronting them and baptising them, not by creating them out of a list of qualities. Names are not, pace Russell, shorthand for such lists. They are not abbreviations for descriptions, but (in Kripke's coinage) 'rigid designators' - that is, they would name the same things in any possible world, including worlds in which their bearers did not have the properties we, in this world, use to identify them.

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Kripke versus Kant. Lrb.com, september 1980.
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Schlegel
Friedrich Schlegel
2 months 1 week ago
Whoever hasn't yet arrived at the...

Whoever hasn't yet arrived at the clear realization that there might be a greatness existing entirely outside his own sphere and for which he might have absolutely no feeling; whoever hasn't at least felt obscure intimations concerning the approximate location of this greatness in the geography of the human spirit: that person either has no genius in his own sphere, or else he hasn't been educated to the level of the classic.

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Lucinde and the Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991), "Critical Fragments," § 36
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 1 week ago
This avidity alone....
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Main Content / General
Aristotle
Aristotle
4 months 1 week ago
If there is some end of...

If there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake, clearly this must be the good. Will not knowledge of it, then, have a great influence on life? Shall we not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what we should? If so, we must try, in outline at least, to determine what it is.

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Philosophical Maxims
Leszek Kołakowski
Leszek Kołakowski
4 days ago
Karl Marx was born at Trier...

Karl Marx was born at Trier on 5 May 1818, the child of Jewish parents with a long rabbinical tradition on both sides. His grandfathers were rabbis; his father, a well-to-do lawyer, changed his first name from Herschel to Heinrich and adopted Protestantism, which in Prussia was a necessary condition of professional and cultural emancipation.

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(pg. 96)
Philosophical Maxims
Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm
1 month 3 weeks ago
Care and responsibility are constituent elements...

Care and responsibility are constituent elements of love, but without respect for and knowledge of the beloved person, love deteriorates into domination and possessiveness. Respect is not fear and awe; it denotes, in accordance with the root of the word (respicere = to look at), the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his individuality and uniqueness. To respect a person is not possible without knowing him; care and responsibility would be blind if they were not guided by the knowledge of the person's individuality.

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Ch. 3; in Ch. 2 of his later work The Art of Loving (1956) a similar statement is made :
Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
2 months 1 week ago
They showed me their trees, and...

They showed me their trees, and I could not understand the intense love with which they looked at them; it was as though they were talking with creatures like themselves. And perhaps I shall not be mistaken if I say that they conversed with them. Yes, they had found their language, and I am convinced that the trees understood them. They looked at all Nature like that - at the animals who lived in peace with them and did not attack them, but loved them, conquered by their love. They pointed to the stars and told me something about them which I could not understand, but I am convinced that they were somehow in touch with the stars, not only in thought, but by some living channel.

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Philosophical Maxims
Georg Büchner
Georg Büchner
2 months 1 week ago
Revolution is like the daughters of...

Revolution is like the daughters of Pelias: it cuts humanity to pieces in order to rejuvenate it.

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Act II.
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 1 week ago
Since it is difficult to approve...

Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our 'fellow men', the question which comes to mind is invariably the same: how does he keep from killing himself?

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Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
1 month 3 weeks ago
Affectation is a very good word...

Affectation is a very good word when someone does not wish to confess to what he would none the less like to believe of himself.

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F 149
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 1 week ago
Wherever one finds oneself inclined to...

Wherever one finds oneself inclined to bitterness, it is a sign of emotional failure: a larger heart, and a greater self-restraint, would put a calm autumnal sadness in the place of the instinctive outcry of pain.

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The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell: Contemplation and Action, 1902-1914, ed. Richard A. Rempel, Andrew Brink and Margaret Moran (Routledge, 1993
Philosophical Maxims
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