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William James
William James
4 months 1 week ago
I will now confess my own...

I will now confess my own utopia. I devoutly believe in the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of some sort of socialistic equilibrium. The fatalistic view of the war function is to me nonsense, for I know that war-making is due to definite motives and subject to prudential checks and reasonable criticisms, just like any other form of enterprise. And when whole nations are the armies, and the science of destruction vies in intellectual refinement with the science of production, I see that war becomes absurd and impossible from its own monstrosity. Extravagant ambitions will have to be replaced by reasonable claims, and nations must make common cause against them.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
4 months 1 week ago
What we do is to bring...

What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.

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§ 116
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
4 months 1 week ago
You can't be reluctant to give...

You can't be reluctant to give up your lie and still tell the truth.

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p. 44e
Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
3 months 2 weeks ago
In countries where associations are free,...

In countries where associations are free, secret societies are unknown. In America there are factions, but no conspiracies.

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Chapter XII.
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
2 weeks ago
I like the dreams of the...

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past, - so good night!

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Letter to John Adams
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert A. Simon
Herbert A. Simon
2 months 3 weeks ago
The true line is not between...

The true line is not between "hard" natural science and "soft" social sciences, but between precise science limited to highly abstract and simple phenomena in the laboratory and inexact science and technology dealing with complex problems in the real world.

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p. 302.
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
2 months 3 weeks ago
For Jung, the 'psychic world' (i.e....

For Jung, the 'psychic world' (i.e. the world of the mind) was an independent reality, and it was possible to travel there and make the acquaintance of its inhabitants.

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p. 164
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
3 months 1 week ago
Unlike private enterprise which quickly modifies...

Unlike private enterprise which quickly modifies its actions to meet emergencies - unlike the shopkeeper who promptly finds the wherewith to satisfy a sudden demand - unlike the railway company which doubles its trains to carry a special influx of passengers; the law-made instrumentality lumbers on under all varieties of circumstances at its habitual rate. By its very nature it is fitted only for average requirements, and inevitably fails under unusual requirements.

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Vol. 3, Ch. VII, Over-Legislation
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
2 months 1 week ago
In many ways an artistic nature...

In many ways an artistic nature unfits a man for practical existence.

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A Lodging for the Night.
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
2 weeks ago
The bank mania is one of...

The bank mania is one of the most threatening of these imitations. It is raising up a moneyed aristocracy in our country which has already set the government at defiance, and although forced at length to yield a little on this first essay of their strength, their principles are unyielded and unyielding. These have taken deep root in the hearts of that class from which our legislators are drawn, and the sop to Cerberus from fable has become history. Their principles lay hold of the good, their pelf of the bad, and thus those whom the Constitution had placed as guards to its portals, are sophisticated or suborned from their duties.

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Letter to Josephus B. Stuart (May 10, 1817) ME 15:112; reported in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb (1904), vol. 15, p. 112
Philosophical Maxims
Democritus
Democritus
4 months 4 days ago
Verily we know nothing. Truth is...

Verily we know nothing. Truth is buried deep.

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(Another translation: "Of truth we know nothing, for truth is in a well." Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers R.D. Hicks, Ed.)
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
3 months 2 weeks ago
Justice is itself the great standing...

Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
4 months 2 weeks ago
Dreams are the touchstones of our...

Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 3 weeks ago
I'll admit....

I'll admit, I was a naive globalist. I still believe in the ideal, but, I realize that those that hated the idea so much are the authors of the problem they see in it.

Now, I understand clearly, those that author the problem that makes globalization near impossible are also the ones who insist it will never work, nevertheless, human necessity remains a monolith and universal.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
3 months 6 days ago
Jesus said to His disciples, "Compare...

Jesus said to His disciples, "Compare me to someone and tell Me whom I am like." Simon Peter said to Him, "You are like a righteous angel." Matthew said to Him, "You are like a wise philosopher." Thomas said to Him, "Master, my mouth is wholly incapable of saying whom You are like." Jesus said, "I am not your master. Because you have drunk, you have become intoxicated by the bubbling spring which I have measured out." And He took him and withdrew and told him three things. When Thomas returned to his companions, they asked him, "What did Jesus say to you?" Thomas said to them, "If I tell you one of the things which he told me, you will pick up stones and throw them at me; a fire will come out of the stones and burn you up."

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Philosophical Maxims
Joseph de Maistre
Joseph de Maistre
1 week 4 days ago
What are we, weak and blind...

What are we, weak and blind human beings! And what is that flickering light we call Reason? When we have calculated all the probabilities, questioned history, satisfied every doubt and special interest, we may still embrace only a deceptive shadow rather than the truth. What decree has He pronounced on the king, on his dynasty, on his family, on France, and on Europe? Where and when will the troubles end, and by how many misfortunes must we purchase our tranquillity? Is it to build that He has overthrown, or are our hardships to last forever? Alas! A dark cloud hides the future and no eye can penetrate its shadows.

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Chapter VIII, p. 76
Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
5 months 2 weeks ago
It is impossible for motion to...

It is impossible for motion to subsist without place, and void, and time.

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Philosophical Maxims
Lucretius
Lucretius
4 months 4 weeks ago
Cease therefore to be…

Cease therefore to be dismayed by the mere novelty and so to reject reason from your mind with loathing: weigh the questions rather with keen judgment and if they seem to you to be true, surrender, or if the thing is false, gird yourself to the encounter.

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Book II, lines 1040-1043 (tr. Munro)
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
5 months 1 week ago
Science fiction offers its writers chances...

Science fiction offers its writers chances of embarrassment that no other form of fiction does.

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Philosophical Maxims
Montesquieu
Montesquieu
3 months ago
There are only two cases in...

There are only two cases in which war is just: first, in order to resist the aggression of an enemy, and second, in order to help an ally who has been attacked.

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No. 95. (Usbek writing to Rhedi)
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
5 months 1 week ago
Then we understand that rebellion cannot...

Then we understand that rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love. Those who find no rest in God or in history are condemned to live for those who, like themselves, cannot live; in fact, for the humiliated.

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Philosophical Maxims
Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry
1 week 6 days ago
The ecological teaching of the Bible...

The ecological teaching of the Bible is simply inescapable: God made the world because He wanted it made. He thinks the world is good, and He loves it. It is His world; He has never relinquished title to it. And He has never revoked the conditions, bearing on His gift to us of the use of it, that oblige us to take excellent care of it.

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God and Country
Philosophical Maxims
Lucretius
Lucretius
4 months 4 weeks ago
Never trust her at any time….

Never trust her at any time, when the calm sea shows her false alluring smile.

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Book II, lines 557-559 (tr. Rouse)
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
2 months 3 days ago
Tis only from...
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Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
5 months 2 weeks ago
I will not by suppression, or...

I will not by suppression, or by performing tricks, try to produce the impression that the ordinary Christianity in the land and the Christianity of the New Testament are alike. "What Do I Want?"

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Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
2 months 3 weeks ago
Anarchism is the only philosophy which...

Anarchism is the only philosophy which brings to man the consciousness of himself; which maintains that God, the State, and society are non-existent, that their promises are null and void, since they can be fulfilled only through man's subordination.

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Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
4 months 2 weeks ago
There is no art which one...

There is no art which one government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people.

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Chapter II, Part II, Appendix to Articles I and II.
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
3 months 6 days ago
The sun will be darkened, and...

The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken. They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky, with power and great glory... I tell you the truth, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.

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24:29-34 (NIV)
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
2 weeks ago
It has always been denied by...

It has always been denied by the republican party in this country, that the Constitution had given the power of incorporation to Congress. On the establishment of the Bank of the United States, this was the great ground on which that establishment was combated; and the party prevailing supported it only on the argument of its being an incident to the power given them for raising money.

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Letter to Dr. Maese, 1809. ME 12:231
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
4 weeks ago
A trifling debt…

A trifling debt makes a man your debtor; a large one makes him an enemy.

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Line 11.
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
4 months 1 week ago
Freud's fanciful pseudo-explanations (precisely because they...

Freud's fanciful pseudo-explanations (precisely because they are brilliant) perform a disservice. (Now any ass has these pictures available to use in "explaining" symptoms of an illness).

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p. 55e
Philosophical Maxims
Nikos Kazantzakis
Nikos Kazantzakis
2 weeks ago
Every man has his own circle...

Every man has his own circle composed of trees, animals, men, ideas, and he is in duty bound to save this circle. He, and no one else. If he does not save it, he cannot be saved. These are the labors each man is given and is in duty bound to complete before he dies. He may not otherwise be saved. For his own soul is scattered and enslaved in these things about him, in trees, in animals, in men, in ideas, and it is his own soul he saves by completing these labors.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
4 months 1 week ago
For man holds his ground only...

For man holds his ground only by surpassing himself, in the same sense in which it is said that one ceases to love if one does not love increasingly everyday.

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p. 238
Philosophical Maxims
Max Stirner
Max Stirner
4 weeks 1 day ago
It would be foolish to assert...

It would be foolish to assert that there is no power above mine. Only the attitude that I take toward it will be quite another than that of the religious age: I shall be the enemy of every higher power, while religion teaches us to make it our friend and be humble toward it.

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Dover 2005, p. 184
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
4 months 1 week ago
Every intrusion of the spirit that...

Every intrusion of the spirit that says, "I'm as good as you" into our personal and spiritual life is to be resisted just as jealously as every intrusion of bureaucracy or privilege into our politics. Hierarchy within can alone preserve egalitarianism without. Romantic attacks on democracy will come again. We shall never be safe unless we already understand in our hearts all that the anti-democrats can say, and have provided for it better than they. Human nature will not permanently endure flat equality if it is extended from its proper political field into the more real, more concrete fields within. Let us wear equality; but let us undress every night.

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Philosophical Maxims
Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch
3 months 5 days ago
The sin of pride may be...

The sin of pride may be a small or a great thing in someone's life, and hurt vanity a passing pinprick or a self-destroying or even murderous obsession. Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.

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The Philosopher's Pupil (1983) p. 76.
Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
3 months 2 weeks ago
Men sometimes submit to shame, to...

Men sometimes submit to shame, to tyranny, to conquest, but they never long suffer anarchy. There is no people so barbarous that they escape this general law of humanity.

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Second letter on Algeria (1837), Travels in Algeria p. 38
Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
2 months 1 week ago
The greatest of empires, is the...

The greatest of empires, is the empire over one's self.

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Maxim 891
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
4 months 1 week ago
The criticism of the reformers was...

The criticism of the reformers was directed not so much at the weakness or cruelty of those in authority, as at a bad economy of power.

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Chapter Two, pp.. 79
Philosophical Maxims
John Dewey
John Dewey
3 months 5 days ago
The color is of the object...

The color is of the object and the object in all its qualities is expressed through color. For it is objects that glows- gems and sunlight; and it is objects that are splendid- crowns, robes, sunlight. Except as they express objects, through being the significant color-quality of materials of ordinary experience, colors effect only transient excitations.

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p. 212
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
3 months 6 days ago
It is not for you to...

It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power. But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.

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1:7-8 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
4 months 2 weeks ago
I have in this treatise followed...

I have in this treatise followed the mathematical method, if not with all strictness, at least imitatively, not in order, by a display of profundity, to procure a better reception for it, but because I believe such a system to be quite capable of it, and that perfection may in time be obtained by a cleverer hand, if stimulated by this sketch, mathematical investigators of nature should find it not unimportant to treat the metaphysical portion, which anyway cannot be got rid of, as a special fundamental department of general physics, and to bring it into unison with the mathematical doctrine of motion.

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Preface, Tr. Bax, 1883
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
4 months 2 weeks ago
We do not count a man's...

We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count.

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Old Age
Philosophical Maxims
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
3 months 1 week ago
I: My consciousness of the object...

I: My consciousness of the object is only a yet unrecognised consciousness of my production of the representation of an object. Of this production I know no more than that it is I who produce, and thus is all consciousness no more than a consciousness of myself, and so far perfectly comprehensible. Am I in the right? Spirit. Perfectly so ; but whence then is derived the necessity and universality thou hast ascribed to these propositions, to that of causality for instance?

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Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p. 47
Philosophical Maxims
Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry
1 week 6 days ago
Wars have never made peace or...

Wars have never made peace or preserved it or fostered its ideals. To have peace you must make peace with your enemy. To make peace only with your friends is to avoid the issue, and to permit a great principle to become absurd. Far from making peace, wars invariably serve as classrooms and laboratories where men and techniques and states of mind are prepared for the next war.

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"A Statement against the War in Vietnam"
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
2 weeks ago
I congratulate you, my dear friend,...

I congratulate you, my dear friend, on the law of your state for suspending the importation of slaves, and for the glory you have justly acquired by endeavoring to prevent it forever. This abomination must have an end, and there is a superior bench reserved in heaven for those who hasten it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Alan Watts
Alan Watts
3 weeks 4 days ago
There is nothing wrong with meditating...

There is nothing wrong with meditating just to meditate, in the same way that you listen to music just for the music. If you go to concerts to "get culture" or to improve your mind, you will sit there as deaf as a doorpost.

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p. 90
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
4 months 2 weeks ago
The question of the principle of...

The question of the principle of the form of the intelligible world turns, therefore, upon making apparent in what manner it is possible for several substances to be in mutual commerce, and for this reason to pertain to the same whole, which is called world. We do not here consider the world, let it be understood, as to matter, that is, as to the nature of the substances of which it consists, whether they be material or immaterial, but as to form, that is to say, how among several things taken separately a connection, and among them all, totality can have place.

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Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
3 months 1 week ago
True science is distinctively the study...

True science is distinctively the study of useless things. For the useful things will get studied without the aid of scientific men.

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Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
2 months 1 week ago
The assertion that art may be...

The assertion that art may be good art and at the same time incomprehensible to a great number of people is extremely unjust, and its consequences are ruinous to art itself...it is the same as saying some kind of food is good but most people can't eat it.

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Philosophical Maxims
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