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Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
3 months 1 week ago
Public life is a situation of...

Public life is a situation of power and energy; he trespasses against his duty who sleeps upon his watch, as well as he that goes over to the enemy.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
4 months 1 week ago
I see that sensible men and...

I see that sensible men and conscientious men all over the world were of one religion.

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The Preacher
Philosophical Maxims
Montesquieu
Montesquieu
3 months ago
I write to thee on this...

I write to thee on this subject, friend, because I am angry at a book which I have just left, which is so large, that it seems to contain universal science, but it hath almost split my head, without teaching me anything.

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No. 66.
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
3 months 5 days ago
He that is not on my...

He that is not on my side is against me, and he that does not gather with me scatters.

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12:30, New World Translation
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
4 months 1 week ago
The past is the luxury of...

The past is the luxury of proprietors.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
4 months 1 week ago
It is for the sake of...

It is for the sake of order that I seduced Clytemnestra, for the sake of order that I killed my king. I wanted for order to rule and that it rule through me. I have lived without desire, without love, without hope: I made order. Oh! terrible and divine passion!

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Aegistheus, Act 2
Philosophical Maxims
Horace
Horace
4 months 3 days ago
Then take, good sir…

Then take, good sir, your pleasure while you may; With life so short 'twere wrong to lose a day.

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Book II, satire viii, line 96 (trans. Conington)
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
4 months 1 week ago
It is a great art to...

It is a great art to saunter.

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April 26, 1841
Philosophical Maxims
Emperor Julian
Emperor Julian
3 weeks 1 day ago
Come then, and let us celebrate...

Come then, and let us celebrate in the best way we can the anniversary festival which the imperial city is keeping by sacrifices, with unusual splendour. And yet I feel how difficult it is for the human mind even to form a conception of that Sun who is not visible to the sense, if our notion of Him is to be derived from the Sun that is visible; but to express the same in language, however inadequately, is, perhaps, beyond the capability of man! To fitly explain His glory, I am very well aware, is a thing impossible; in lauding it, however, mediocrity seems the highest point to which human eloquence is able to attain.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
4 months 2 weeks ago
Truly man is….

Truly man is a marvellously vain, diverse, and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgement on him.

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Ch. 1. That Men by various Ways arrive at the same End (tr. Donald M. Frame)Cotton, rev. W. Hazlitt, 1842
Philosophical Maxims
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
4 months 1 week ago
The trouble with Eichmann was precisely...

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied - as had been said at Nuremberg over and over again by the defendants and their counsels - that this new type of criminal, who is in actual fact hostis generis humani, commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong.

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Epilogue
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
2 months 2 weeks ago
Political ideals must...
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Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
2 months 1 week ago
Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly...

Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons.

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p. 97
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Nozick
Robert Nozick
1 month 2 weeks ago
One persistent strand in utopian thinking,...

One persistent strand in utopian thinking, as we have often mentioned, is the feeling that there is some set of principles obvious enough to be accepted by all men of good will, precise enough to give unambiguous guidance in particular situations, clear enough so that all will realize its dictates, and complete enough to cover all problems which actually arise. Since I do not assume that there are such principles, I do not presume that the political realm will whither away. The messiness of the details of a political apparatus and the details of how it is to be controlled and limited do not fit easily into one's hopes for a sleek, simple utopian scheme.

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Ch. 10 : A Framework for Utopia; Utopian Means and Ends, p. 330
Philosophical Maxims
William Whewell
William Whewell
1 week 5 days ago
When common words are appropriated as...

When common words are appropriated as technical terms, their meaning may be modified, and must be rigorously fixed.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Searle
John Searle
2 months 2 weeks ago
Whatever is referred to must exist....

Whatever is referred to must exist. Let us call this the axiom of existence.

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P. 77.
Philosophical Maxims
Emperor Julian
Emperor Julian
3 weeks 1 day ago
To what purpose, pray, exist all...

To what purpose, pray, exist all these things that be born? Whence come male and female? Whence the difference in kind of all things that be, amongst visible species, unless there be certain pre-existing and previously established Reasons and Causes subsisting beforehand, in the nature of a pattern? With regard to which, though we are dull of sight, yet let us strive to clear away the mist from the eyes of the soul.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Jean Jacques Rousseau
4 months 2 weeks ago
Let us not forget what befits...

Let us not forget what befits our present state in the pursuit of vain fancies. Mankind has its place in the sequence of things; childhood has its place in the sequence of human life; the man must be treated as a man and the child as a child. Give each his place, and keep him there. Control human passions according to man's nature; that is all we can do for his welfare. The rest depends on external forces, which are beyond our control.

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Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
4 months 1 week ago
As the brain-changes are continuous, so...

As the brain-changes are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream.

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Ch. 9
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 months 1 week ago
I don't need any support, advice,...

I don't need any support, advice, or compassion, because even if I am the most ruinous man, I still feel so powerful, so strong and fierce. For I am the only one that lives without hope.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
4 months 1 week ago
Society undergoes continual changes; it is...

Society undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is Christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For everything that is given something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet; he has a fine Geneva watch, but cannot tell the hour by the sun.

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p. 243
Philosophical Maxims
Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch
3 months 5 days ago
The novel, the novel proper that...

The novel, the novel proper that is, is about people's treatment of each other, and so it is about human values.

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Ch. 10, p. 138
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 2 weeks ago
The scientific attitude of mind involves...

The scientific attitude of mind involves a sweeping away of all other desires in the interests of the desire to know-it involves suppression of hopes and fears, loves and hates, and the whole subjective emotional life, until we become subdued to the material, able to see it frankly, without preconceptions, without bias, without any wish except to see it as it is, and without any belief that what it is must be determined by some relation, positive or negative, to what we should like it to be, or to what we can easily imagine it to be.

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Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
5 months 2 weeks ago
I may live for thirty years,...

I may live for thirty years, or perhaps forty, or maybe just one day: therefore I have resolved to use this day, or whatever I have to say in these thirty years or whatever I have to say this one day I may have to live - I have resolved to use it in such a way that if not one day in my whole past life has been used well, this one by the help of God will be.

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Philosophical Maxims
B. F. Skinner
B. F. Skinner
1 month 1 week ago
We shouldn't teach great books; we...

We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.

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As quoted in B. F. Skinner : The Man and His Ideas (1968) by Richard Isadore Evans, p. 73
Philosophical Maxims
Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Bakunin
3 months 1 week ago
All religions, with their gods, their...

All religions, with their gods, their demigods, and their prophets, their messiahs and their saints, were created by the credulous fancy of men who had not attained the full development and full possession of their faculties. Consequently, the religious heaven is nothing but a mirage in which man, exalted by ignorance and faith, discovers his own image, but enlarged and reversed - that is, divinized. The history of religion, of the birth, grandeur, and decline of the gods who have succeeded one another in human belief, is nothing, therefore, but the development of the collective intelligence and conscience of mankind.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henry George
Henry George
1 week 5 days ago
But there is another form of...

But there is another form of monopoly, far more general and far more insidious. The accumulation of large amounts of capital under consolidated control creates a new kind of power-essentially different from the power of increase. Increase is constructive in its nature. Power from accumulation is destructive. It is often exercised with reckless disregard, not only to industry but to the personal rights of individuals. A railroad approaches a small town as a highwayman approaches his victim. "Agree to our terms or we will bypass your town" is as effective a threat as "your money or your life." As robbers unite to plunder and divide the spoils, the trunk lines of railroads unite to raise rates and pool their earnings. The public is then forced to pay the cost of the whole maneuver, as the vanquished are forced to pay the cost of their own enslavement by a conquering army.

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Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
4 months 1 week ago
The truth remains that, after adolescence...

The truth remains that, after adolescence has begun, "words, words, words," must constitute a large part, and an always larger part as life advances, of what the human being has to learn.

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"The Acquisition of Ideas"
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
5 months 2 weeks ago
...and woe betide fateful curiosity should...
...and woe betide fateful curiosity should it ever succeed in peering through a crack in the chamber of consciousness, out and down into the depths, and thus gain an intimation of the fact that humanity, in the indifference of its ignorance, rests on the pitiless, the greedy, the insatiable, the murderous clinging in dreams, as it were, to the back of a tiger.
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Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
4 months 1 week ago
Of course God knew what would...

Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently He thought it worth the risk.

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Book II, Chapter 3, "The Shocking Alternative"
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
4 months 1 week ago
I am my world.

I am my world.

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(The microcosm.) (5.63) Original German: Ich bin meine welt (Der Mikrokosmos.)
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
3 days ago
I do not think that...

I do not think that religion is the most important element. We are held together rather by a body of tradition, handed down from father to son, which the child imbibes with his mother's milk. The atmosphere of our infancy predetermines our idiosyncrasies and predilections.

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In response to a question about whether religion is the tie holding the Jews together.
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
4 months 1 week 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
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
4 months 1 week ago
You can put this another way...

You can put this another way by saying that while in other sciences the instruments you use are things external to yourself (things like microscopes and telescopes), the instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man's self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred-like the Moon seen through a dirty telescope. That is why horrible nations have horrible religions: they have been looking at God through a dirty lens.

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Book IV, Chapter 2, "The Three-personal God"
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
4 months 2 weeks ago
All natural capacities of a creature...

All natural capacities of a creature are destined to evolve completely to their natural end. First Thesis Variant translations: All natural capacities of a creature are destined sooner or later to be developed completely and in conformity with their end. All natural capacities of a creature are destined to develop themselves completely and to their purpose.

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Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
5 months 1 week ago
One does not decide the truth...

One does not decide the truth of a thought according to whether it is right-wing or left-wing.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 month 4 days ago
The Hero as Divinity, the Hero...

The Hero as Divinity, the Hero as Prophet, are productions of old ages; not to be repeated in the new. They presuppose a certain rudeness of conception, which the progress of mere scientific knowledge puts an end to. There needs to be, as it were, a world vacant, or almost vacant of scientific forms, if men in their loving wonder are to fancy their fellow-man either a god or one speaking with the voice of a god. Divinity and Prophet are past.

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Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
4 months 3 weeks ago
Faith ever says, "If Thou wilt,"...

Faith ever says, "If Thou wilt," not "If Thou canst."

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p. 241
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
2 months 1 week ago
I heard what you were saying....

I heard what you were saying. You - you know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.

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Cameo appearance as himself in Woody Allen's 1977 film Annie Hall
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
4 months 1 week ago
If you can speak what you...

If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.

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Philosophical Maxims
Sydney Smith
Sydney Smith
3 weeks 6 days ago
What would life be without arithmetic,...

What would life be without arithmetic, but a scene of horrors?

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Vol. II, letter to Miss Lucie Austin (22 July 1835), p. 364
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
2 months 1 week ago
People try to do all sorts...

People try to do all sorts of clever and difficult things to improve life instead of doing the simplest, easiest thing-refusing to participate in activities that make life bad.

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p. 210
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
2 months 3 weeks ago
Prejudices are so to speak the...

Prejudices are so to speak the mechanical instincts of men: through their prejudices they do without any effort many things they would find too difficult to think through to the point of resolving to do them.

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A 58
Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
2 months 4 weeks ago
One of the most exquisite pleasures...

One of the most exquisite pleasures of human love - to serve the loved one without his knowing it - is only possible, as regards the love of God, through atheism.

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Last Notebook (1942) p. 84
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
4 months 1 week ago
I believe that the advance of...

I believe that the advance of science depends upon the free competition of thought, and thus upon freedom, and that it must come to an end if freedom is destroyed (though it may well continue for some time in some fields, especially in technology).

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Ch. 10 "Corroboration, or How a Theory Stands up to Tests", section 85: The Path of Science, p. 279, note 2.
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
5 months 2 weeks ago
In all the flat, lethargic, dull...

In all the flat, lethargic, dull moments, when the sensate dominates a person, to him Christianity is a madness because it is incommensurate with any finite wherefore. But then what good is it? Answer: Be quiet, it is the absolute. And that is how it must be presented, consequently as, that is, it must appear as madness to the sensate person. And therefore it is true, so true, and also in another sense so true when the sensible person in the situation of contemporaneity (see II A) censoriously says of Christ, “He is literally nothing”-quite so, for he is the absolute. Christianity is an absolute. Christianity came into the world as the absolute, not, humanly speaking, for comfort; on the contrary, it continually speaks about how the Christian must suffer or about how a person in order to become and remain a Christian must endure sufferings that he consequently can avoid simply by refraining from becoming a Christian.

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Philosophical Maxims
Alan Watts
Alan Watts
3 weeks 3 days ago
Listen intently to a voice singing...

Listen intently to a voice singing without words. It may charm you into crying, force you to dance, fill you with rage, or make you jump for joy. You can't tell where the music ends and the emotions begin, for the whole thing is a kind of music-the voice playing on your nerves as the breath plays on a flute. All experience is just that, except that its music has many more dimensions than sound. It vibrates in the dimensions of sight, touch, taste, and smell, and in the intellectual dimension of symbols and words-all evoking and playing upon each other.

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p. 95
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
5 months 2 weeks ago
It is the duty of the...

It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. Human understanding has vulgarly occupied itself with nothing but understanding, but if it would only take the trouble to understand itself at the same time it would simply have to posit the paradox.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
4 months 1 week ago
Where there is a lull of...

Where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up. But the truth blows right on over it, nevertheless, and at length blows it down.

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p. 494
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine
4 months 2 weeks ago
Contemplating the universe, the whole system...

Contemplating the universe, the whole system of creation, in this point of light, we shall discover, that all that which is called natural philosophy is properly a divine study- It is the study of God through his works - It is the best study, by which we can arrive at a knowledge of the existence, and the only one by which we can gain a glimpse of his perfection. Do we want to contemplate his power? We see it in the immensity of the Creation. Do we want to contemplate his wisdom? We see it in the unchangeable order by which the incomprehensible Whole is governed. Do we want to contemplate his munificence? We see it in the abundance with which he fills the earth. Do we want to contemplate his mercy? We see it in his not withholding that abundance even from the unthankful. In fine, do we want to know what God is?

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Search not written or printed books, but the Scripture called the Creation. A Discourse, &c. &c.
Philosophical Maxims
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