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Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
5 months 5 days 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
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
3 months 2 weeks ago
Do we write books so that...

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

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E 65
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas
5 months 3 weeks ago
If man of himself could in...

If man of himself could in a perfect manner know all things visible and invisible, it would indeed be foolish to believe what he does not see. But our manner of knowing is so weak that no philosopher could perfectly investigate the nature of even one little fly.

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Prologue (trans. Joseph B. Collins)
Philosophical Maxims
Novalis
Novalis
4 months 2 days ago
There is, properly speaking, no Misfortune...

There is, properly speaking, no Misfortune in the world. Happiness and Misfortune stand in continual balance. Every Misfortune is, as it were, the obstruction of a stream, which, after overcoming this obstruction, but bursts through with the greater force.

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Philosophical Maxims
bell hooks
bell hooks
3 months 2 weeks ago
Feminism in the United States has...

Feminism in the United States has never emerged from the women who are most victimized by sexist oppression; women who are daily beaten down, mentally, physically, and spiritually-women who are powerless to change their condition in life. They are a silent majority. A mark of their victimization is that they accept their lot in life without visible question, without organized protest, without collective anger or rage.

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p. 1.
Philosophical Maxims
Henri Poincaré
Henri Poincaré
1 month 4 weeks ago
When an astronomer tells me that...

When an astronomer tells me that some stellar phenomenon, which his telescope reveals to him at this moment, happened... fifty years ago... I... ask... how he has measured the velocity of light.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
3 months 2 days ago
The invention of printing did away...

The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property.

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(p. 122)
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
3 months 2 weeks ago
Station, power, wealth-how inadequate they have...

Station, power, wealth-how inadequate they have proved! How useless and insecure!

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Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
5 months 4 days ago
Both of us victims of the...

Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Grey Life.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
6 months 5 days ago
If, then, in the sphere of...

If, then, in the sphere of action there is some one end which we desire for its own sake, and for the sake of which we desire every thing else; and if we do not choose every thing for the sake of something else, for this would go on without limit, and our desire would be idle and futile, it is clear that this must be the supreme good, and the best thing of all.

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Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
5 months 1 week ago
Men are not astonish'd at...

Men are not astonish'd at the operations of their own reason, at the same time, that they admire the instinct of animals, and find a difficulty in explaining it, merely because it cannot be reduc'd to the very same principles. Reason is nothing but a wonderful and unintelligible instinct in our souls.

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Part 3, Section 16
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months ago
Not content with real sufferings, the...

Not content with real sufferings, the anxious man imposes imaginary ones on himself; he is a being for whom unreality exists, must exist; otherwise where would he obtain the ration of torment his nature demands?

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Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
3 months 2 weeks ago
The aim of science is to...

The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, "Seek simplicity and distrust it."

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The Concept of Nature (1919), Chapter VII, p.143.
Philosophical Maxims
Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale
3 months 2 weeks ago
I agree as to the doubtful...

I agree as to the doubtful value of competitive examination. The qualities which you really want, viz., self-control, self-reliance, habits of accurate thought, integrity and what you generally call trustworthiness, are not decided by competitive examination, which test little else than the memory.

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Letter to Lord Stanley (May 17, 1857), published in Florence Nightingale on Wars and the War Office: Collected Works of Florence Nightingale. Vol. 15 (2011), edited by Lynn McDonald, p. 265.
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
5 months 5 days ago
The prospect for the human race...

The prospect for the human race is sombre beyond all precedent. Mankind are faced with a clear-cut alternative: either we shall all perish, or we shall have to acquire some slight degree of common sense. A great deal of new political thinking will be necessary if utter disaster is to be averted.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
3 months 3 weeks ago
The Value or WORTH of a...

The Value or WORTH of a man, is as of all other things, his Price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his Power...

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The First Part, Chapter 10, p. 42
Philosophical Maxims
Plato
Plato
6 months 2 days ago
Wonder is the feeling of a...

Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Gray
John Gray
2 months 1 week ago
Blair has been the modern man...

Blair has been the modern man he claims to be: for him, a sense of subjective certainty is all that is needed for an action to be right. If deception is needed to realise the providential design, it cannot be truly deceitful.

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Neoconned!: How Blair took New Labour for a ride, The Independent
Philosophical Maxims
Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale
3 months 2 weeks ago
Newton's law is nothing but the...

Newton's law is nothing but the statistics of gravitation, it has no power whatever. Let us get rid of the idea of power from law altogether. Call law tabulation of facts, expression of facts, or what you will; anything rather than suppose that it either explains or compels.

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Suggestions for Thought : Selections and Commentaries (1994), edited by Michael D. Calabria and Janet A. MacRae, p. 41
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
1 month 4 days ago
History has informed us that bodies...

History has informed us that bodies of men, as well as individuals, are susceptible of the spirit of tyranny.

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Philosophical Maxims
David Pearce
David Pearce
2 months 1 week ago
A lot of people recoil from...

A lot of people recoil from the word "drugs" - which is understandable given today's noxious street drugs and their uninspiring medical counterparts. Yet even academics and intellectuals in our society typically take the prototypical dumb drug, ethyl alcohol. If it's socially acceptable to take a drug that makes you temporarily happy and stupid, then why not rationally design drugs to make people perpetually happier and smarter? Presumably, in order to limit abuse-potential, one would want any ideal pleasure drug to be akin - in one limited but important sense - to nicotine, where the smoker's brain finely calibrates its optimal level: there is no uncontrolled dose-escalation.

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"The Abolitionist Project", Talks given at the FHI (Oxford University) and the Charity International Happiness Conference, 2007
Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
5 months 2 weeks ago
If you believe what you like...

If you believe what you like in the gospels, and reject what you don't like, it is not the gospel you believe, but yourself.

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Earliest attribution found in Who Said That?: More than 2,500 Usable Quotes and Illustrations (1995) by George Sweeting. Online sources always attribute the quote to Augustine, but never specify in which of his works it is to be found.
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
5 months 1 week ago
I bequeath my soul to God...

I bequeath my soul to God (...). My body to be buried obscurely. For my name and memory, I leave it to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and the next age.

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His Will, 1626
Philosophical Maxims
Theodor Adorno
Theodor Adorno
3 months 2 weeks ago
The thesis of the identity of...

The thesis of the identity of concept and thing is in general the vital nerve of idealist thought, and indeed traditional thought in general. ... Negative dialectics as critique means above all criticism of precisely this claim to identity.

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p. 20
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
3 months 2 weeks ago
If it were true what in...

If it were true what in the end would be gained? Nothing but another truth. Is this such a mighty advantage? We have enough old truths still to digest, and even these we would be quite unable to endure if we did not sometimes flavor them with lies.

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E 10
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
3 months 3 weeks ago
May not the absolute and perfect...

May not the absolute and perfect eternal happiness be an eternal hope, which would die if it were realized? Is it possible to be happy without hope? And there is no place for hope once possession has been realized, for hope, desire, is killed by possession. May it not be, I say, that all souls grow without ceasing, some in a greater measure than others, but all having to pass some time through the same degree of growth, whatever that degree may be, and yet without ever arriving at the infinite, at God, to whom they continually approach? Is not eternal happiness an eternal hope, with its eternal nucleus of sorrow in order that happiness shall not be swallowed up in nothingness?

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Philosophical Maxims
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
4 months 2 days ago
It is the preservation of the...

It is the preservation of the species, not of individuals, which appears to be the design of Deity throughout the whole of nature.

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Letter 22
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
3 months 2 days ago
What began as a "Romantic reaction"...

What began as a "Romantic reaction" towards organic wholeness may or may not have hastened the discovery of electro-magnetic waves. But certainly the electro-magnetic discoveries have recreated the simultaneous "field" in all human affairs so that the human family now exists under conditions of a "global village." We live in a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums. So that concern with the "primitive" today is as banal as nineteenth-century concern with "progress," and as irrelevant to our problems. The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

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(p. 36)
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
3 months 3 weeks ago
The kingdom of heaven is like...

The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field: Which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof.

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13:31-32 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
4 months 1 week ago
Pithy sentences are like sharp nails...

Pithy sentences are like sharp nails which force truth upon our memory.

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As quoted in A Dictionary of Thoughts : Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations (1908) by Tryon Edwards, p. 338
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
5 months 3 days ago
For Genet, Beauty will be the...

For Genet, Beauty will be the offensive weapon that will enable him to beat the just on their own ground: that of value.

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p. 405
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months ago
Speech and silence. We feel safer...

Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.

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Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
3 months 3 weeks ago
Hegel's philosophy revolved about the universality...

Hegel's philosophy revolved about the universality of reason; it was a rational system with its every part (the subjective as well as the objective spheres) integrated into a comprehensive whole. Marx shows that capitalist society first put such a universality into practice.

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P. 286-287
Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
3 months 2 weeks ago
Every time that a man has,...

Every time that a man has, with a pure heart, called upon Osiris, Dionysus, Buddha, the Tao, etc., the Son of God has answered him by sending the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit has acted upon his soul, not by inciting him to abandon his religious tradition, but by bestowing upon him light - and in the best of cases the fullness of light - in the heart of that same religious tradition. ... It is, therefore, useless to send out missions to prevail upon the peoples of Asia, Africa or Oceania to enter the Church.

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Section 8
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
5 months 3 days ago
There is one thing, and only...

There is one thing, and only one, in the whole universe which we know more about than we could learn from external observation. That one thing is Man. We do not merely observe men, we are men. In this case we have, so to speak, inside information; we are in the know.

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Book I, Chapter 4, "What Lies behind the Law"
Philosophical Maxims
René Descartes
René Descartes
5 months 1 week ago
No more useful inquiry can be...

No more useful inquiry can be proposed than that which seeks to determine the nature and the scope of human knowledge. ... This investigation should be undertaken once at least in his life by anyone who has the slightest regard for truth, since in pursuing it the true instruments of knowledge and the whole method of inquiry come to light. But nothing seems to me more futile than the conduct of those who boldly dispute about the secrets of nature ... without yet having ever asked even whether human reason is adequate to the solution of these problems.

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Rules for the Direction of the Mind in Key Philosophical Writings (1997), pp. 29-30
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
5 months 3 weeks ago
Being in humaneness is good....

Being in humaneness is good. If we select other goodness and thus are far apart from humaneness, how can we be the wise? The opening phrase of this chapter after which the chapter is named in Chinese.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 2 weeks ago
The intolerant can....
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Main Content / General
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
3 months 2 days ago
All forms of violence are quests...

All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live on the frontier, you have no identity. You're a nobody.

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Philosophical Maxims
Gottfried Leibniz
Gottfried Leibniz
5 months 1 week ago
The love of God consists in...

The love of God consists in an ardent desire to procure the general welfare, and reason teaches me that there is nothing which contributes more to the general welfare of mankind than the perfection of reason.

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Closing sentence of the Preface to the general science (1677) (in P. Wiener (ed.), Leibniz Selections, Macmilland Press Ltd, 1951).
Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
3 months 2 weeks ago
Paradoxical as it may seem, a...

Paradoxical as it may seem, a Latin prose or a geometry problem, even though they are done wrong, may be of a great service one day, provided we devote the right kind of effort to them. Should the occasion arise, they can one day make us better able to give someone in affliction exactly the help required to save him, at the supreme moment of his need.

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Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
3 months 2 days ago
The fear of death is more...

The fear of death is more to be dreaded than death itself.

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Maxim 511
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months ago
To tell the truth, I couldn't...

To tell the truth, I couldn't care less about the relativity of knowledge, simply because the world does not deserve to be known.

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Philosophical Maxims
Nikos Kazantzakis
Nikos Kazantzakis
1 month 5 days ago
Your first duty, in completing your...

Your first duty, in completing your service to your race, is to feel within you all your ancestors. Your second duty is to throw light on their onrush and to continue their work. Your third duty is to pass on to your son the great mandate to surpass you.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
5 months 1 week ago
Marriage, a market which has nothing...

Marriage, a market which has nothing free but the entrance.

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Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
6 months 1 day ago
He discovered the cruel paradox by...

He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love — first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

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Philosophical Maxims
William Whewell
William Whewell
1 month 4 days ago
Discovery depends upon the previous cultivation...

Discovery depends upon the previous cultivation or natural clearness of the appropriate Idea, and therefore no discovery is the work of accident.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
5 months 4 days ago
Explore, and explore, and explore. Be...

Explore, and explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatise yourself, nor accept another's dogmatism. Why should you renounce your right to traverse the star-lit deserts of truth, for the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board. Make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread, and if not store of it, yet such as shall not take away your property in all men's possessions, in all men's affections, in art, in nature, and in hope.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months ago
No one should forget: Eros alone...

No one should forget: Eros alone can fulfill life; knowledge, never. Only Eros makes sense; knowledge is empty infinity; - for thoughts, there is always time; life has its time; there is no thought that comes too late; any desire can become a regret.

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Philosophical Maxims
Georg Büchner
Georg Büchner
4 months 4 days ago
The life of the wealthy is...

The life of the wealthy is one long Sunday.

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Philosophical Maxims
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