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Simone Weil
Simone Weil
1 month 6 days ago
Art is the symbol of the...

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

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The Pre-War Notebook (1933-1939), published in First and Last Notebooks (1970) edited by Richard Rees
Philosophical Maxims
Isaiah Berlin
Isaiah Berlin
1 month 1 week ago
What has been shown by Machiavelli,...

What has been shown by Machiavelli, who is often (like Nietzsche) congratulated for tearing off hypocritical masks, brutally revealing the truth, and so on, is not that men profess one thing and do another (although no doubt he shows this too) but that when they assume that the two ideals are compatible, or perhaps are even one and the same ideal, and do not allow this assumption to be questioned, they are guilty of bad faith (as the existentialists call it, or of "false consciousness," to use a Marxist formula) which their actual behavior exhibits. Machiavelli calls the bluff not just of official morality-the hypocrisies of ordinary life-but of one of the foundations of the central Western philosophical tradition, the belief in the ultimate compatibility of all genuine values. His own withers are unwrung. He has made his choice. He seems wholly unworried by, indeed scarcely aware of, parting company with traditional Western morality.

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Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
2 months 4 weeks ago
In the same manner as we...

In the same manner as we are cautioned by religion to show our faith by our works we may very properly apply the principle to philosophy, and judge of it by its works; accounting that to be futile which is unproductive, and still more so, if instead of grapes and olives it yield but the thistle and thorns of dispute and contention.

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Aphorism 73
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
5 days ago
It is better...
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Main Content / General
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
1 month 5 days ago
In training a child to activity...

In training a child to activity of thought, above all things we must beware of what I will call "inert ideas"-that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilised, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.In the history of education, the most striking phenomenon is that schools of learning, which at one epoch are alive with a ferment of genius, in a succeeding generation exhibit merely pedantry and routine. The reason is, that they are overladen with inert ideas. Education with inert ideas is not only useless: it is, above all things, harmful.

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Philosophical Maxims
bell hooks
bell hooks
1 month 4 days ago
"But many of us seek community...

But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.

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All About Love: New Visions, 1999
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
2 months 3 weeks ago
His reputation will go…

His reputation will go on increasing because scarcely anyone reads him.

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"Dante", 1765
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
2 months 4 weeks ago
My appetite comes to me while...

My appetite comes to me while eating.

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Book III, Ch. 9. Of Vanity
Philosophical Maxims
A. J. Ayer
A. J. Ayer
1 month 2 weeks ago
The ground for taking ignorance to...

The ground for taking ignorance to be restrictive of freedom is that it causes people to make choices which they would not have made if they had seen what the realization of their choices involved.

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"The Concept of Freedom".
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
2 months 3 weeks ago
Morality is not properly the doctrine...

Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 2 weeks ago
A third illusion haunts us, that...

A third illusion haunts us, that a long duration, as a year, a decade, a century, is valuable. But an old French sentence says, "God works in moments," - "En peu d'heure Dieu labeure." We ask for long life, but 't is deep life, or grand moments, that signify. Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical. Life is unnecessarily long. Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance, - what ample borrowers of eternity they are! Life culminates and concentrates; and Homer said, "The Gods ever give to mortals their appointed share of reason only on one day."

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Works and Days
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
2 weeks 2 days ago
Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' is...

Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' is really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable. The universe is populated by stable things. The universe is populated by stable things. A stable thing is a collection of atoms that is permanent enough or common enough to deserve a name. It may be a unique collection of atoms, such as the Matterhorn, that lasts long enough to be worth naming. Or it may be a class of entities, such as rain drops, that come into existence at a sufficiently high rate to deserve a collective name, even if any one of them is short-lived.

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Ch. 2. The replicators
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 2 weeks ago
Without God, everything is nothingness; and...

Without God, everything is nothingness; and with God? Supreme nothingness.

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Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
2 months 3 weeks ago
Corn is a necessary, silver is...

Corn is a necessary, silver is only a superfluity.

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Chapter XI, Part III, (First Period) p. 223.
Philosophical Maxims
Epicurus
Epicurus
3 months 1 week ago
Of our desires some are natural...

Of our desires some are natural and necessary, others are natural but not necessary; and others are neither natural nor necessary, but are due to groundless opinion.

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Philosophical Maxims
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
1 month 1 week ago
The significance of God, cause, number,...

The significance of God, cause, number, substance or soul consists, as James asserts, in nothing but the tendency of the given concept to make us act or think. If the world should reach a point at which it ceases to care not only about such metaphysical entities but also about murders perpetrated behind closed frontiers or simply in the dark, one would have to conclude that the concepts of such murders have no meaning, that they represent no 'distinct ideas' or truths, since they do not make any 'sensible difference to anybody.

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describing the pragmatist view, pp. 46-47.
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
2 months 2 weeks ago
I believe that...

I believe that political power also exercises itself through the mediation of a certain number of institutions that seem to have nothing in common with political power, that have the appearance of being independent, but are not.

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Debate with Noam Chomsky, École Supérieure de Technologie à Eindhoven, November 1971
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Buber
Martin Buber
1 month 1 week ago
The Thou encounters me by grace...

The Thou encounters me by grace - it cannot be found by seeking. But that I speak the basic word to it is a deed of my whole being, is my essential deed.

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Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
1 month 2 weeks ago
The development of the human mind...

The development of the human mind has practically extinguished all feelings, except a few sporadic kinds, like sound, colors, smells, warmth, etc., which now appear to be disconnected and separate.

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Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
2 months 3 weeks ago
Every faculty in one man is...

Every faculty in one man is the measure by which he judges of the like faculty in another. I judge of your sight by my sight, of your ear by my ear, of your reason by my reason, of your resentment by my resentment, of your love by my love. I neither have, nor can have, any other way of judging about them.

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Section I, Chap. III.
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
1 month 1 week ago
What, could ye not watch with...

What, could ye not watch with me one hour? Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.

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26:40-41 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
1 month 3 weeks ago
People talk sometimes of a bestial...

People talk sometimes of a bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that's all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it.

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Philosophical Maxims
kalokagathia
kalokagathia
3 months 6 days ago
Never accept compliments...

Never accept compliments or criticism from someone you wouldn't take advice from.

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Propositions / General
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
2 weeks 6 days ago
People understand the meaning of eating...

People understand the meaning of eating lies in the nourishment of the body only when they cease to consider that the object of that activity is pleasure. ...People understand the meaning of art only when they cease to consider that the aim of that activity is beauty, i.e., pleasure.

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Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
2 weeks 4 days ago
Be your money's master, not its...

Be your money's master, not its slave.

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Maxim 657
Philosophical Maxims
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
1 month 1 week ago
The history of the Roman Empire...

The history of the Roman Empire is also the history of the uprising of the Empire of the Masses, who absorb and annul the directing minorities and put themselves in their place. Then, also, is produced the phenomenon of agglomeration, of "the full." For that reason, as Spengler has very well observed, it was necessary, just as in our day, to construct enormous buildings. The epoch of the masses is the epoch of the colossal.

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Chap.II: The Rise Of The Historic Level
Philosophical Maxims
Cornel West
Cornel West
2 months 2 weeks ago
To be a Christian - a...

To be a Christian - a follower of Jesus Christ - is to love wisdom, love justice, and love freedom.

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(p172)
Philosophical Maxims
George Santayana
George Santayana
1 month 1 week ago
In the Gospels, for instance, we...

In the Gospels, for instance, we sometimes find the kingdom of heaven illustrated by principles drawn from observation of this world rather than from an ideal conception of justice; ... They remind us that the God we are seeking is present and active, that he is the living God; they are doubtless necessary if we are to keep religion from passing into a mere idealism and God into the vanishing point of our thought and endeavour.

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Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900), p. 54
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
2 months 3 weeks ago
"You're a bitter man," said Candide....

"You're a bitter man," said Candide. "That's because I've lived," said Martin.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
2 months 3 weeks ago
We are obviously heading for revolution-something...

We are obviously heading for revolution-something I have never once doubted since 1850. The first act will include a by no means gratifying rehash of the stupidities of '48-'49. However, that's how world history runs its course, and one has to take it as one finds it.

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Letter to Ludwig Kugelmann (28 December 1862), quoted in The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Volume 41. Letters 1860-64 (2010), p. 437
Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
2 months 3 weeks ago
To understand political power aright, and...

To understand political power aright, and derive from it its original, we must consider what estate all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of Nature, without asking leave or depending upon the will of any other man.

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Second Treatise of Government, Ch. II, sec. 4
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
2 months 3 weeks ago
Unbelievers

Unbelievers (so called) as well as of believers, there are many species, including almost every variety of moral type. But the best among them, as no one who has had opportunities of really knowing them will hesitate to affirm (believers rarely have that opportunity), are more genuinely religious, in the best sense of the word religion, than those who exclusively arrogate to themselves the title.

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(pp. 45-46)
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 3 weeks ago
Not to be absolutely certain is,...

Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality. 

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"Don't Be Too Certain!"
Philosophical Maxims
Zoroaster
Zoroaster
2 months 1 week ago
By Thy perfect Intelligence, O MazdaThou...

By Thy perfect Intelligence, O MazdaThou didst first create us having bodies and spiritual consciences,And by Thy Thought gave our selves the power of thought, word, and deed.Thus leaving us free to choose our faith at our own will.

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Ahunuvaiti Gatha; Yasna 31, 11.
Philosophical Maxims
John Rawls
John Rawls
2 months 2 weeks ago
Many conservative writers have contended that...

Many conservative writers have contended that the tendency to equality in modern social movements is the expression of envy. In this way they seek to discredit this trend, attributing it to collectively harmful impulses.

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Chapter IX, Section 82, p. 538
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
2 months 3 weeks ago
If there were only one religion...

If there were only one religion in England there would be danger of despotism, if there were two they would cut each other's throats, but there are thirty, and they live in peace and happiness.

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Letters on England, letter 6, "On the Presbyterians" Trans. Leonard Tancock (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1980): p. 41, published first in English in 1733.
Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
2 months 3 weeks ago
Look round the world: contemplate the...

Look round the world: contemplate the whole and every part of it: You will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines, which again admit of subdivisions, to a degree beyond what human senses and faculties can trace and explain. All these various machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy, which ravishes into admiration all men, who have ever contemplated them. The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles exactly, though it much exceeds, the productions of human contrivance; of human design, thought, wisdom, and intelligence.

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Philo to Cleanthes, Part II
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
2 months 2 weeks ago
The public execution is to be...

The public execution is to be understood not only as a judicial, but also as a political ritual. It belongs, even in minor cases, to the ceremonies by which power is manifested.

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Chapter One, The body of the condemned
Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
1 month 2 weeks ago
The third category of which I...

The third category of which I come now to speak is precisely that whose reality is denied by nominalism. For although nominalism is not credited with any extraordinarily lofty appreciation of the powers of the human soul, yet it attributes to it a power of originating a kind of ideas the like of which Omnipotence has failed to create as real objects, and those general conceptions which men will never cease to consider the glory of the human intellect must, according to any consistent nominalism, be entirely wanting in the mind of Deity.

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Lecture II : The Universal Categories, §3. Laws: Nominalism, CP 5.62
Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
2 months 3 weeks ago
To be a philosopher, that is...

To be a philosopher, that is to say, a lover of wisdom (for wisdom is nothing but truth), it is not enough for a man to love truth, in so far as it is compatible with his own interest, with the will of his superiors, with the dogmas of the church, or with the prejudices and tastes of his contemporaries; so long as he rests content with this position, he is only a philautos, not a philosophos [a lover of self, not a lover of wisdom]. For this title of honor is well and wisely conceived precisely by its stating that one should love the truth earnestly and with one's whole heart, and thus unconditionally and unreservedly, above all else, and, if need be, in defiance of all else. Now the reason for this is the one previously stated that the intellect has become free, and in this state it does not even know or understand any other interest than that of truth.

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E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, pp. 21-22
Philosophical Maxims
Horace
Horace
2 months 1 week ago
Brave men...

Brave men were living before Agamemnon. 

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Book IV, ode ix, line 25
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
2 months 3 weeks ago
Who could believe in prophecies of...

Who could believe in prophecies of Daniel or of Miller that the world would end this summer, while one milkweed with faith matured its seeds?

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Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
1 month 1 week ago
In conditions of private property ......

In conditions of private property ... "life-activity" stands in the service of property instead of property standing the service of free life-activity.

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"The Foundations of Historical Materialism," Studies in Critical Philosophy (1972), p. 32
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
2 months 2 weeks ago
It appears then, that capitalist production...

It appears then, that capitalist production comprises conditions independent of good or bad will, conditions which permit the working-class to enjoy that relative prosperity only momentarily, and at that always only as the harbinger of a coming crisis.

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Vol. II, Ch. XX, p. 415.
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
1 month 1 week ago
If anyone comes to Me and...

If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple.

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14:26
Philosophical Maxims
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut
3 weeks 1 day ago
Generally speaking, espionage offers each spy...

Generally speaking, espionage offers each spy an opportunity to go crazy in a way he finds irresistible.

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Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
2 weeks 2 days ago
There are circumstances in which even...

There are circumstances in which even the least energetic of mankind learn to behave with vigour and decision; and the most cautious forget their prudence and embrace foolhardy resolutions.

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The Rajah's Diamond, Story of the Bandbox.
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
1 month 3 days ago
The most disheartening tendency common among...

The most disheartening tendency common among readers is to tear out one sentence from a work, as a criterion of the writer's ideas or personality.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 3 weeks ago
I wish to propose for the...

I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.

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Ch. 1: The Value of Scepticism
Philosophical Maxims
Nikolai Berdyaev
Nikolai Berdyaev
1 month 6 days ago
It must be recognized that man...

It must be recognized that man in his limited and relative earthly life is capable of bringing about the beautiful and the valuable only when he believes in another life, unlimited, absolute, eternal. That is a law of his being. A contact with this mortal life exclusive of any other ends in the wearing-away of effective energy and a self-satisfaction that makes one useless and superficial. Only the spiritual man, striking his roots deep in infinite and eternal life, can be a true creator. But Humanism denied the spiritual man, handed over the eternal to the temporal, and took its stand by the natural man within the limited confines of the earth.

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p. 34
Philosophical Maxims
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