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Plutarch
Plutarch
1 month 3 weeks ago
Lycurgus the Lacedæmonian brought long hair...

Lycurgus the Lacedæmonian brought long hair into fashion among his countrymen, saying that it rendered those that were handsome more beautiful, and those that were deformed more terrible. To one that advised him to set up a democracy in Sparta, "Pray," said Lycurgus, "do you first set up a democracy in your own house."

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57 Lycurgus
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
2 months 3 days ago
Tell him to live by yes...

Tell him to live by yes and no - yes to everything good, no to everything bad.

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As quoted in The Thought and Character of William James (1935) by Ralph Barton Perry, Vol. II, ch. 91
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
2 months 2 days ago
It is not the same thing....

It is not the same thing. You are perhaps not lying, but you are not telling the truth.

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Act 1
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
4 weeks 1 day ago
Abolish competition and replace it with...

Abolish competition and replace it with association.

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Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
2 months 1 week ago
The value of money is in...

The value of money is in proportion to the quantity of the necessaries of life which it will purchase.

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Chapter II, Part II, Article IV.
Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
2 weeks 5 days ago
Religion in so far as it...

Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith; and in this sense atheism is a purification. I have to be an atheist with that part of myself which is not made for God. Among those in whom the supernatural part of themselves has not been awakened, the atheists are right and the believers wrong.

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"Faiths of Meditation; Contemplation of the divine" as translated in The Simone Weil Reader (1957) edited by George A. Panichas, p. 417
Philosophical Maxims
Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus
2 months 1 week ago
This world, the whole of the...

This world, the whole of the planet called earth, is the common country of all who live and breathe upon it.

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Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
2 months 2 weeks ago
Certainly He says this for me,...

Certainly He says this for me, for thee, for this other man, since He bears His body, the Church. Unless you imagine, brethren, that when He said: My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass away from (Matt. 26:39), it was the Lord that feared to die. . . . But Paul longed to die, that he might be with Christ. What? The Apostle desires to die, and Christ Himself should fear death? What can this mean, except that He bore our infirmity in Himself, and uttered these words for those who are in His body and still fear death? It is from these that the voice came; it was the voice of His members, not of the Head. When He said, My soul is sorrowful unto death (Matt. 26:38), He manifested Himself in thee, and thee in Himself. And when He said, My God, my God, why has Thou forsaken Me? (Matt. 27:46), the words He uttered on the cross were not His own, but ours.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 4 days ago
Every natural fact is a symbol...

Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.

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Language
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month ago
What an incitation to hilarity, hearing...

What an incitation to hilarity, hearing the word goal while following a funeral procession!

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Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
2 months 3 days ago
I became my own only when...

I became my own only when I gave myself to Another.

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Letters of C. S. Lewis (17 July 1953), para. 2, p. 251 - as reported in The Quotable Lewis (1989), p. 334
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 day ago
Man works when he is partially...

Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 4 days ago
But genius looks forward: the eyes...

But genius looks forward: the eyes of men are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates.

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par. 18
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
2 months 1 week ago
A strong memory is commonly coupled...

A strong memory is commonly coupled with infirm judgment.

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Ch. 9. Of Liars, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Carew Hazlitt, 1877
Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
1 month 4 days ago
Every man has some reminiscences which...

Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away. That is, one can even say that the more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind.

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Part 1, Chapter 11
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month ago
I believe in the salvation of...

I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide . . .

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Philosophical Maxims
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Jean Jacques Rousseau
2 months 6 days ago
There as here, passions are the...

There as here, passions are the motive of all action, but they are livelier, more ardent, or merely simpler and purer, thereby assuming a totally different character. All the first movements of nature are good and right.

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First Dialogue; translated by Judith R. Bush, Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
2 months 3 weeks ago
When a country is well...

When a country is well governed, poverty and a mean condition are things to be ashamed of. When a country is ill governed, riches and honor are things to be ashamed of.

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Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
2 months 1 week ago
...it is the peculiar and perpetual...

...it is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human understanding to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives...

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Aphorism 46
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 4 days ago
The world at present is obsessed...

The world at present is obsessed by the conflict of rival ideologies, and one of the apparent causes of conflict is the desire for the victory of our own ideology and the defeat of the other. I do not think that the fundamental motive here has much to do with ideologies. I think the ideologies are merely a way of grouping people, and that the passions involved are merely those which always arise between rival groups. Ideologies, in fact, are one of the methods by which herds are created, and the psychology is much the same however the herd may have been generated.

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Philosophical Maxims
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
2 weeks 3 days ago
Historical time knows no lasting present.

Historical time knows no lasting present.

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Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
2 months 1 week ago
Nobody ever saw a dog make...

Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog.

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Chapter II, p. 14.
Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
1 month 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
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 4 days ago
Heroism feels and never reasons and...

Heroism feels and never reasons and therefore is always right.

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Heroism
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
1 month 3 days ago
If there be an order in...

If there be an order in which the human race has mastered its various kinds of knowledge, there will arise in every child an aptitude to acquire these kinds of knowledge in the same order. So that even were the order intrinsically indifferent, it would facilitate education to lead the individual mind through the steps traversed by the general mind. But the order is not intrinsically indifferent; and hence the fundamental reason why education should be a repetition of civilization in little.

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Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
2 months 1 week ago
As to love our neighbour as...

As to love our neighbour as we love ourselves is the great law of Christianity, so it is the great precept of nature to love ourselves only as we love our neighbour, or what comes to the same thing, as our neighbour is capable of loving us. Section I, Chap. V.

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Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
2 weeks 5 days ago
At the bottom of the heart...

At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being.The good is the only source of the sacred. There is nothing sacred except the good and what pertains to it.

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p. 51
Philosophical Maxims
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
2 months 3 days ago
To expect truth to come from...

To expect truth to come from thinking signifies that we mistake the need to think with the urge to know.

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p. 61
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
3 months ago
The aim of art, the aim...

The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily.

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Philosophical Maxims
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
2 weeks 3 days ago
The reason that people take selfies...

The reason that people take selfies is not narcissism. Rather, it is inner emptiness. There is no meaning to stabilize the ego. Faced with its inner emptiness, the ego constantly produces itself.

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Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
2 months 2 weeks ago
To the rational being only the...

To the rational being only the irrational is unendurable, but the rational is endurable.

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Variant translation: To a reasonable creature, that alone is insupportable which is unreasonable; but everything reasonable may be supported. Book I, ch. 2,1.
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
3 months 1 day ago
Religion is more conservative than any...

Religion is more conservative than any other aspect of human life.

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Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
3 months 4 days ago
It is as useless for a...

It is as useless for a person to want first of all to decide the externals and after that the fundamentals as it is for a cosmic body, thinking to form itself, first of all to decide the nature of its surface, to what bodies it should turn its light, which its dark side, without first letting the harmony of centrifugal and centripetal forces realize its existence and letting the rest come of itself. One must learn to know oneself before knowing anything else (gnothi seauton). Not until a person has inwardly understood himself and then sees the course he is to take does his life gain peace and meaning.

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Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
2 months 6 days ago
The more we devote ourselves to...

The more we devote ourselves to observing animals and their behaviour, the more we love them, on seeing how gready they care for their young; in such a context, we cannot even contemplate cruelty to a wolf. Leibnitz put the grub he had been observing back on the tree with its leaf, lest he should be guilty of doing any harm to it. It upsets a man to destroy such a creature for no reason, and this tenderness is subsequently transferred to man.

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Part II, pp. 212-213
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
2 months 4 days ago
It seems to me that the...

It seems to me that the god that is commonly worshipped in civilized countries is not at all divine, though he bears a divine name, but is the overwhelming authority and respectability of mankind combined. Men reverence one another, not yet God. If I thought that I could speak with discrimination and impartiality of the nations of Christendom, I should praise them, but it tasks me too much. They seem to be the most civil and humane, but I may be mistaken.

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Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
3 weeks 5 days ago
To those who hold abstractly to...

To those who hold abstractly to Hegel's political philosophy, Hobhouse replies that the very fact of class society, the patent influence of class interests on the state, renders it impossible to designate the state as expressive of the real will of individuals as a whole. 'Wherever a community is governed by one class or one race, the remaining class or race is permanently in the position of having to take what it can get.'

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P. 396
Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
2 months 2 weeks ago
Look now, this is the starting...

Look now, this is the starting point of philosophy: the recognition that different people have conflicting opinions, the rejection of mere opinion so that it comes to be viewed with mistrust, an investigation of opinion to determine whether it is rightly held, and the discovery of a standard of judgement, comparable to the balance that we have devised for the determining of weights, or the carpenter's rule for determining whether things are straight or crooked.

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Book II, ch. 11, 13.
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
2 months 4 days ago
Truth never turns to rebuke falsehood;...

Truth never turns to rebuke falsehood; her own straightforwardness is the severest correction.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 264
Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
2 months 1 week ago
How can you worship leeks and...

How can you worship leeks and onions? we shall suppose a SORBONNIST to say to a priest of SAIS. If we worship them, replies the latter; at least, we do not, at the same time, eat them. But what strange object of adoration are cats and monkeys? says the learned doctor. They are at least as good as the relics or rotten bones of martyrs, answers his no less learned antagonist. Are you not mad, insists the Catholic, to cut one another's throat about the preference of a cabbage or a cucumber? Yes, says the pagan; I allow it, if you will confess, that those are still madder, who fight about the preference among volumes of sophistry, ten thousand of which are not equal in value to one cabbage or cucumber.

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Part XII - With regard to doubt or conviction
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
3 months 6 days ago
I now myself live, in every...
I now myself live, in every detail, striving for wisdom, while I formerly merely worshipped and idolized the wise.
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Philosophical Maxims
John Searle
John Searle
6 days ago
There is one mistake we got...

There is one mistake we got to avoid, and that is the mistake of supposing that if you simulate it, you duplicate it. This is a deep mistake embedded in our popular culture - that simulation is equivalent to duplication, but of course it isn't. A perfect simulation of the brain - say, on a computer - would no longer thereby be conscious than a perfect simulation of a rainstorm on a weather-predicting computer will leave us all wet.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 week 1 day ago
In forming a store...
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Main Content / General
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
2 months 2 days ago
Do not allow your dreams of...

Do not allow your dreams of a beautiful world to lure you away from the claims of men who suffer here and now. Our fellow men have a claim to our help; no generation must be sacrificed for the sake of future generations, for the sake of an ideal of happiness that may never be realised.

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Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
1 week 6 days ago
There exists a species of transcendental...

There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.

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F 84
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
2 months 4 days ago
There are but few points in...

There are but few points in which the English, as a people, are entitled to the moral pre-eminence with which they are accustomed to compliment themselves at the expense of other nations: but, of these points, perhaps the one of greatest importance is, that the higher classes do not lie, and the lower, though mostly habitual liars, are ashamed of lying. To run any risk of weakening this feeling, a difficult one to create, or, when once gone, to restore, would be a permanent evil too great to be incurred for so very temporary a benefit as the ballot would confer, even on the most exaggerated estimate necessity.

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Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform (1859), pp. 48-49
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
1 month 3 days ago
Influences of various kinds conspire to...

Influences of various kinds conspire to increase corporate action and decrease individual action. And the change is being on all sides aided by schemers, each of whom thinks only of his pet plan and not at all of the general reorganization which his plan, joined with others such, are working out. It is said that the French Revolution devoured its own children. Here, an analogous catastrophe seems not unlikely. The numerous socialistic changes made by Act of Parliament, joined with the numerous others presently to be made, will by-and-by be all merged in State-socialism-swallowed in the vast wave which they have little by little raised."But why is this change described as 'the coming slavery'?," is a question which many will still ask. The reply is simple. All socialism involves slavery.

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Philosophical Maxims
Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus
2 months 1 week ago
The world thought well of my...

The world thought well of my schoolmaster guardian, because he was neither a liar, nor a scamp, nor a gambler; but he was coarse, avaricious, and ignorant; he knew nothing beyond the confused lessons which he taught to his classes. He imagined that in forcing a youth to become a monk he would be offering a sacrifice acceptable to God. He used to boast of the many victims which he devoted annually to Dominic and Francis and Benedict.

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As quoted in Life and Letters of Erasmus: Lectures Delivered at Oxford 1893-4 (1899) by James Anthony Froude
Philosophical Maxims
Ian Hacking
Ian Hacking
1 week 4 days ago
A single observation that is inconsistent...

A single observation that is inconsistent with some generalization points to the falsehood of the generalization, and thereby 'points to itself'.

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Chapter 4, Evidence, p. 34.
Philosophical Maxims
Democritus
Democritus
1 month 3 weeks ago
There are two forms of knowledge,...

There are two forms of knowledge, one genuine, one obscure. To the obscure belong all of the following: sight, hearing, smell, taste, feeling. The other form is the genuine, and is quite distinct from this. [And then distinguishing the genuine from the obscure, he continues:] Whenever the obscure [way of knowing] has reached the minimum sensibile of hearing, smell, taste, and touch, and when the investigation must be carried farther into that which is still finer, then arises the genuine way of knowing, which has a finer organ of thought.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas
2 months 3 weeks ago
The highest perfection of human life...

The highest perfection of human life consists in the mind of man being detached from care, for the sake of God.

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III, 130, 3
Philosophical Maxims
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