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Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay
3 weeks 2 days ago
His imagination resembled the wings of...

His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to run, though not to soar.

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p. 223
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
4 months 5 days ago
When one merely states that one...

When one merely states that one has many subscribers and keeps on saying it, then one gets many; just as when one sheep goes to water, the next one also goes, and when it is continually said of a large flock of sheep that they go hither and yon to water, then the rest must also go, so people believe that it must be the demand of the times, that for the sake of use and custom, they must also subscribe.

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Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
2 months 5 days ago
I decline the election. - It...

I decline the election. - It has ever been my rule through life, to observe a proportion between my efforts and my objects. I have never been remarkable for a bold, active, and sanguine pursuit of advantages that are personal to myself.

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Speech at Bristol on declining the poll (9 September 1780), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II (1855), p. 170
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
3 months 4 days ago
I am well aware of how...

I am well aware of how anarchic much of what I say may sound. Expressing myself thus abstractly and briefly, I may seem to despair of the very notion of truth. But I beseech you to reserve your judgment until we see it applied to the details which lie before us. I do indeed disbelieve that we or any other mortal men can attain on a given day to absolutely incorrigible and unimprovable truth about such matters of fact as those with which religions deal. But I reject this dogmatic ideal not out of a perverse delight in intellectual instability. I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly.

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Lectures XIV and XV, "The Value of Saintliness"
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
3 months 1 week ago
It would be an unsound fancy...

It would be an unsound fancy and self-contradictory to expect that things which have never yet been done can be done except by means which have never yet been tried.

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Aphorism 6
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
3 months 4 days ago
Worry means always and invariably inhibition...

Worry means always and invariably inhibition of associations and loss of effective power. Of course, the sovereign cure for worry is religious faith; and this, of course, you also know. The turbulent billows of the fretful surface leave the deep parts of the ocean undisturbed, and to him who has a hold on vaster and more permanent realities the hourly vicissitudes of his personal destiny seem relatively insignificant things. The really religious person is accordingly unshakable and full of equanimity, and calmly ready for any duty that the day may bring forth.

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"The Gospel of Relaxation"
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
1 month 2 weeks ago
Crowley wanted to be a magician...

Crowley wanted to be a magician because he wanted power -- power over other people.

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p. 157
Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
4 months 5 days ago
The roots of education ... are...

The roots of education ... are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.

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Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
1 month ago
Evidence is the only good reason...

Evidence is the only good reason to believe anything.

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Interview shown in AlJazeera ,
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley
2 weeks 6 days ago
The great tragedy of Science -...

The great tragedy of Science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

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Presidential Address at the British Association, "Biogenesis and abiogenesis" (1870); later published in Collected Essays, Vol. 8, p. 229
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
1 month 2 weeks ago
Nothing would prove more disastrous to...

Nothing would prove more disastrous to our ideas, we contended, than to neglect the effect of the internal upon the external, of the psychological motives and needs upon existing institutions.

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(p. 402)
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
3 months ago
You must always be puzzled by...

You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded.

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Conversation of 1947 or 1948
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 month 3 weeks ago
True science teaches…

True science teaches, above all, to doubt and be ignorant.

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Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
2 months ago
Every interpretation is hypothetical, for it...

Every interpretation is hypothetical, for it is a mere attempt to read an unfamiliar text. An obscure dream, taken by itself, can rarely be interpreted with any certainty, so that I attach little importance to the interpretation of single dreams. With a series of dreams we can have more confidence in our interpretations, for the later dreams correct the mistakes we have made m handling those that went before. We are also better able, in a dream series, to recognize the important contents and basic themes.

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p. 14
Philosophical Maxims
Empedocles
Empedocles
2 months 3 weeks ago
Fortunate is he who…

Fortunate is he who has acquired a wealth of divine understanding, but wretched the one whose interest lies in shadowy conjectures about divinities.

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fr. 132
Philosophical Maxims
Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno
2 months 1 week ago
Those wise men knew God to...

Those wise men knew God to be in things, and Divinity to be latent in Nature, working and glowing differently in different subjects and succeeding through diverse physical forms, in certain arrangements, in making them participants in her, I say, in her being, in her life and intellect.

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As translated by Arthur Imerti
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 5 days ago
Love is something far more than...

Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.

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Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
2 months 5 days ago
Russia was a slave in Europe...

Russia was a slave in Europe but would be a master in Asia.

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As quoted in "Dilemmas of Empire 1850-1918: Power, Territory, Identity" by Dominic Livien in Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 34, No.2 (April 1999), pp. 180
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
3 weeks 3 days ago
Eternal vigilance...
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Main Content / General
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
2 months 1 week ago
There are three principal means of...

There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge available to us: observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination. Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound, and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined; and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common.

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No. 15
Philosophical Maxims
Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton
3 weeks 6 days ago
Never in the history of the...

Never in the history of the world have there been so many migrants. And almost all of them are migrating from regions where nationality is weak or non-existent to the established nation states of the West. They are not migrating because they have discovered some previously dormant feeling of love or loyalty towards the nations in whose territory they seek a home. On the contrary, few of them identify their loyalties in national terms and almost none of them in terms of the nation where they settle. They are migrating in search of citizenship which is the principal gift of national jurisdictions, and the origin of the peace, law, stability and prosperity that still prevail in the West.

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Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
4 months 2 days ago
A robot may not injure a...

A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

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Philosophical Maxims
David Pearce
David Pearce
1 week 6 days ago
Humans are prone to status quo...

Humans are prone to status quo bias. So let's do a thought-experiment. Imagine we stumble across an advanced civilisation that has abolished predation, disease, famine, and all the horrors of primitive Darwinian life. The descendants of archaic lifeforms flourish unmolested in their wildlife parks - free living, but not "wild". Should we urge scrapping their regime of compassionate stewardship of the living world - and a return to asphyxiation, disembowelling and being eaten alive? Or is a happy biosphere best conserved intact? Reply to "Should humans wipe out all carnivorous animals so the succeeding generations of herbivores can live in peace?"

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, Quora, 16 Jun. 2018
Philosophical Maxims
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal
3 months 2 weeks ago
Rules for Axioms. I. Not to...

Rules for Axioms. I. Not to omit any necessary principle without asking whether it is admittied, however clear and evident it may be. II. Not to demand, in axioms, any but things that are perfectly evident in themselves.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
3 months 3 days ago
With despair, true optimism begins: the...

With despair, true optimism begins: the optimism of the man who expects nothing, who knows he has no rights and nothing coming to him, who rejoices in counting on himself alone and in acting alone for the good of all.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
3 months 4 days ago
Never give children a chance of...

Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very beginning that all living is relationship. Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village and in the country around it. Rub it in.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida
2 months 4 weeks ago
How can one be late to...

How can one be late to the end of history? A question for today. It is serious because it obliges one to reflect again, as we have been doing since Hegel, on what happens and deserves the name of event, after history; it obliges one to wonder if the end of history is but the end of a certain concept of history.

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Injunctions of Marx
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
3 months 1 week ago
Nothing is terrible except….

Nothing is terrible except fear itself.

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De Augmentis Scientiarum, Book II, "Fortitudo"
Philosophical Maxims
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
1 month 2 weeks ago
Power is not opposed to freedom....

Power is not opposed to freedom. It is precisely freedom that distinguishes power from violence or coercion.

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Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
2 months 1 week ago
In America, conscription is unknown; men...

In America, conscription is unknown; men are enlisted for payment. Compulsory recruitment is so alien to the ideas and so foreign to the customs of the people of the United States that I doubt whether they would ever dare to introduce it into their law.

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Chapter XIII.
Philosophical Maxims
Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus
3 months 1 week ago
Animals destitute of reason live with...

Animals destitute of reason live with their own kind in a state of social amity. Elephants herd together; sheep and swine feed in flocks; cranes and crows take their flight in troops; storks have their public meetings to consult previously to their emigration, and feed their parents when unable to feed themselves; dolphins defend each other by mutual assistance; and everybody knows, that both ants and bees have respectively established by general agreement, a little friendly community.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
1 month 2 weeks ago
What would become of the rich,...

What would become of the rich, if not for the poor? What would become of these idle, parasitic ladies, who squander more in a week than their victims earn in a year, if not for the eighty million wage-workers? Equality, who ever heard of such a thing?

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Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
1 month 2 weeks ago
If people should ever start to...

If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger.

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C 54 Variant translation: If all mankind were suddenly to practice honesty, many thousands of people would be sure to starve.
Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
1 month 2 days ago
For a good cause…

For a good cause, wrongdoing is virtuous.

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Maxim 207
Philosophical Maxims
Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale
1 month 2 weeks ago
Asceticism is the trifling of an...

Asceticism is the trifling of an enthusiast with his power, a puerile coquetting with his selfishness or his vanity, in the absence of any sufficiently great object to employ the first or overcome the last.

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Letter (5 September 1857), quoted in The Life of Florence Nightingale (1913) by Edward Tyas Cook, p. 369
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
1 month 3 weeks ago
Domination has its own aesthetics, and...

Domination has its own aesthetics, and democratic domination has its democratic aesthetics.

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p. 65
Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
3 months 1 week ago
What a noble privilege is it...

What a noble privilege is it of human reason to attain the knowledge of the supreme Being; and, from the visible works of nature, be enabled to infer so sublime a principle as its supreme Creator? But turn the reverse of the medal. Survey most nations and most ages. Examine the religious principles, which have, in fact, prevailed in the world. You will scarcely be persuaded, that they are any thing but sick men's dreams: Or perhaps will regard them more as the playsome whimsies of monkies in human shape, than the serious, positive, dogmatical asseverations of a being, who dignifies himself with the name of rational.

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Part XV - General corollary
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
4 months 5 days ago
I have just now come from...

I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away - yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit ----------- and wanted to shoot myself.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
3 months ago
I sit astride life like a...

I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.

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p. 36e
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine
3 months 6 days ago
It is the nature and intention...

It is the nature and intention of a constitution to prevent governing by party, by establishing a common principle that shall limit and control the power and impulse of party, and that says to all parties, thus far shalt thou go and no further. But in the absence of a constitution, men look entirely to party; and instead of principle governing party, party governs principle.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Gray
John Gray
1 week 4 days ago
Human knowledge increases, while human irrationality...

Human knowledge increases, while human irrationality stays the same. Scientific inquiry may be an embodiment of reason, but what such inquiry demonstrates is that humans are not rational animals. The fact that humanists refuse to accept the demonstration only confirms its truth.

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An Old Chaos: Humanism and Flying Saucers (p. 81)
Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
3 months 2 weeks ago
The superfluities of the rich are...

The superfluities of the rich are the necessaries of the poor. They who possess superfluities, possess the goods of others.

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Patrologia Latina, vol. 37, p. 1922
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months ago
The flesh spreads, further and further,...

The flesh spreads, further and further, like a gangrene upon the surface of the globe. It cannot impose limits upon itself, it continues to be rife despite its rebuffs, it takes its defeats for conquests, it has never learned anything. It belongs above all to the realm of the Creator, and it is indeed in the flesh that He has projected His maleficent instincts.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
3 months 6 days ago
Though the managing ourselves well in...

Though the managing ourselves well in this part of our behavior has the name good-breeding, as if a peculiar effect of education; yet... young children should not be much perplexed about it... Teach them humility, and to be good-natur'd, if you can, and this sort of manners will not be wanting; civility being in truth nothing but a care not to shew any slighting or contempt of any one in conversation.

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Sec. 145
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
3 months 1 week ago
To expect, indeed, that the freedom...

To expect, indeed, that the freedom of trade should ever be entirely restored in Great Britain, is as absurd as to expect that an Oceana or Utopia should never be established in it.

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Chapter II, p. 505.
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
3 months 5 days ago
Nothing makes the earth seem so...

Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 95
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
1 month 2 weeks ago
(Gardner) writes about various kinds of...

(Gardner) writes about various kinds of cranks with the conscious superiority of the scientist, and in most cases one can share his sense of the victory of reason. But after half a dozen chapters this non-stop superiority begins to irritate; you begin to wonder about the standards that make him so certain he is always right. He asserts that the scientist, unlike the crank, does his best to remain open-minded. So how can he be so sure that no sane person has ever seen a flying saucer, or used a dowsing rod to locate water? And that all the people he disagrees with are unbalanced fanatics? A colleague of the positivist philosopher A. J. Ayer once remarked wryly "I wish I was as certain of anything as he seems to be about everything." Martin Gardner produces the same feeling.

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pp. 2-3
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
3 months 6 days ago
A single part of…

A single part of physics occupies the lives of many men, and often leaves them dying in uncertainty.

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"A Madame la Marquise du Châtelet, Avant-Propos," Eléments de Philosophie de Newton, 1738
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
3 months 3 days ago
All-powerful god, who am I but...

All-powerful god, who am I but the fear that I inspire in others?

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King Aegistheus to Jupiter, Act 2
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Owen
Robert Owen
4 weeks ago
The end of government is to...

The end of government is to make the governed and the governors happy. That government then is thebest, which in practice produces the greatest happiness to the greatest number; including those who govern, and those who obey.

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Essay Fourth, The Principles of the Former Essays Applied to Government
Philosophical Maxims
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