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John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
1 month 3 weeks ago
It appears... that a work similar...

It appears... that a work similar in its object and general conception to that of Adam Smith, but adapted to the more extended knowledge and improved ideas of the present age, is the kind of contribution which Political Economy at present requires. The Wealth of Nations is in many parts obsolete, and in all, imperfect. Political Economy... has grown up almost from infancy since the time of Adam Smith; and the philosophy of society... has advanced many steps beyond the point at which he left it.

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Preface, 1848
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1 month 2 weeks ago
In how many churches, by how...

In how many churches, by how many prophets, tell me, is man made sensible that he is an infinite Soul; that the earth and heavens are passing into his mind; that he is drinking forever the soul of God?

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p. 18
Philosophical Maxims
Horace
Horace
1 month 1 week ago
In adversity, remember….

In adversity, remember to keep an even mind.

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Book II, ode iii, line 1
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
1 month 2 weeks ago
What is the case, the fact,...

What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts.

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(2) Original German: Was der Fall ist, die Tatsache, ist das Bestehen von Sachverhalten.
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1 month 2 weeks ago
Too busy with the crowded hour...

Too busy with the crowded hour to fear to live or die.

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Quatrains, Nature
Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
3 weeks ago
Do a man dirt, yourself you...

Do a man dirt, yourself you hurt.

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Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
2 months 3 weeks ago
Human justice is very prolix, and...

Human justice is very prolix, and yet at times quite mediocre; divine justice is more concise and needs no information from the prosecution, no legal papers, no interrogation of witnesses, but makes the guilty one his own informer and helps him with eternity's memory.

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Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
2 months 5 days ago
The propositions which are true and...

The propositions which are true and evident must of necessity be employed even by those who contradict them.

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Book II, ch. 20, 1
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
1 month 3 weeks ago
It is difficult for the isolated...

It is difficult for the isolated individual to work himself out of the immaturity which has become almost natural for him. He has even become fond of it and for the time being is incapable of employing his own intelligence, because he has never been allowed to make the attempt. Statutes and formulas, these mechanical tools of a serviceable use, or rather misuse, of his natural faculties, are the ankle-chains of a continuous immaturity. Whoever threw it off would make an uncertain jump over the smallest trench because he is not accustomed to such free movement. Therefore there are only a few who have pursued a firm path and have succeeded in escaping from immaturity by their own cultivation of the mind.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
Just now
Men are eager...
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Main Content / General
William James
William James
1 month 2 weeks ago
In the practical use of our...

In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important a function as recollecting.

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Ch. 16
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
1 month 4 weeks ago
Let great authors have their due,...

Let great authors have their due, as time, which is the author of authors, be not deprived of his due, which is, further and further to discover truth.

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Book I, iv, 10
Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
1 month 3 weeks ago
There are 80,000 prostitutes in London...

There are 80,000 prostitutes in London alone and what are they, if not bloody sacrifices on the altar of monogamy?

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"Of Women"
Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
3 weeks ago
To study the meaning of man...

To study the meaning of man and of life - I am making significant progress here. I have faith in myself. Man is a mystery: if you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man.

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Personal correspondence (1839), as quoted in Dostoevsky: His Life and Work (1971) by Konstantin Mochulski, as translated by Michael A. Minihan, p. 17
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 weeks 2 days ago
Society: an inferno of saviors!

Society: an inferno of saviors!

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Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
1 month 4 weeks ago
Peace is more important than all...

Peace is more important than all justice; and peace was not made for the sake of justice, but justice for the sake of peace.

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On Marriage
Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
3 weeks ago
There is no sin, and there...

There is no sin, and there can be no sin on all the earth, which the Lord will not forgive to the truly repentant! Man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God. Can there be a sin which could exceed the love of God?

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Book II, ch. 3 (trans. Constance Garnett) The Elder Zossima, speaking to a devout widow afraid of death
Philosophical Maxims
Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes
6 days ago
The Text is plural. Which is...

The Text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural. The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination.

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Proposition 4
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 week ago
The wretched consciousness shrinks from it...

The wretched consciousness shrinks from it own annihilation, and just as an animal spirit newly severed from the womb of the world, finds itself confronted with the world and knows itself distinct from it, so consciousness must needs desire to possess another life than that of the world itself.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine
1 month 3 weeks ago
As to riots and tumults, let...

As to riots and tumults, let those answer for them, who, by willful misrepresentations, endeavor to excite and promote them; or who seek to stun the sense of the nation, and to lose the great cause of public good in the outrages of a misinformed mob. We take our ground on principles that require no such riotous aid. We have nothing to apprehend from the poor; for we are pleading their cause. And we fear not proud oppression, for we have truth on our side.

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Address and Declaration at a Select Meeting of the Friends of Universal Peace and Liberty (August 20, 1791) p. 6
Philosophical Maxims
Empedocles
Empedocles
1 month 1 week 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
Voltaire
Voltaire
1 month 3 weeks ago
What a pity and what a...

What a pity and what a poverty of spirit, to assert that beasts are machines deprived of knowledge and sentiment, which affect all their operations in the same manner, which learn nothing, never improve, &c. [...] Some barbarians seize this dog, who so prodigiously excels man in friendship, they nail him to a table, and dissect him living, to show the mezarian veins. You discover in him all the same organs of sentiment which are in yourself. Answer me, machinist, has nature arranged all the springs of sentiment in this animal that he should not feel? Has he nerves to be incapable of suffering? Do not suppose this impertinent contradiction in nature. [...] The animal has received those of sentiment, memory, and a certain number of ideas. Who has bestowed these gifts, who has given these faculties? He who has made the herb of the field to grow, and who makes the earth gravitate towards the sun.

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"Beasts", in A Philosophical Dictionary, Volume 2, J. and H. L. Hunt, 1824, p. 9
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
1 month 3 weeks ago
My desire and wish is that...

My desire and wish is that the things I start with should be so obvious that you wonder why I spend my time stating them. This is what I aim at because the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

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Philosophical Maxims
A. J. Ayer
A. J. Ayer
2 weeks 3 days ago
I saw a Divine Being. I'm...

I saw a Divine Being. I'm afraid I'm going to have to revise all my various books and opinions.

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National Post (3 March 2001).
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
2 months 2 weeks ago
There is less trouble and trauma...

There is less trouble and trauma involved in writing a new piece than in trying to salvage an unsatisfactory old one.

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Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
3 weeks ago
A diversity of opinion upon almost...

A diversity of opinion upon almost every principle of politics, had indeed drawn a strong line of separation between them and some others. However, they were desirous not to extend the misfortune by unnecessary bitterness; they wished to prevent a difference of opinion on the commonwealth from festering into rancorous and incurable hostility. Accordingly they endeavoured that all past controversies should be forgotten; and that enough for the day should be the evil thereof. There is however a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue. Men may tolerate injuries, whilst they are only personal to themselves. But it is not the first of virtues to bear with moderation the indignities that are offered to our country.

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Describing the Government's position at a previous time of deep division in British politics in fact over policy on America, Observations on a Late Publication on the Present State of the Nation (1769), page 2
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 weeks 2 days ago
Beware of thinkers whose minds function...

Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.

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Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
1 month 3 weeks ago
People of the same trade seldom...

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty or justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.

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Chapter X, Part II, p. 152.
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Just now
A clever child brought up with...

A clever child brought up with a foolish one can itself become foolish. Man is so perfectable and corruptible he can become a fool through good sense.

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F 69
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
1 month 3 weeks ago
In manufactures, a very small advantage...

In manufactures, a very small advantage will enable foreigners to undersell our own workmen, even in the home market. It will require a very great one to enable them to do so in the rude produce of the soil. If the free importation of foreign manufactures were permitted, several of the home manufactures would probably suffer, and some of them, perhaps, go to ruin altogether, and a considerable part of the stock and industry at present employed in them, would be forced to find out some other employment. But the freest importation of the rude produce of the soil could have no such effect upon the agriculture of the country.

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Chapter II
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
1 month 2 weeks ago
A great prison structure was planned,...

A great prison structure was planned, whose different levels would correspond exactly to the levels of the centralized administration. The scaffold, where the body of the tortured criminal had been exposed to the ritually manifested force of the sovereign, the punitive theatre in which the representation of punishment was permanently available to the social body, was replaced by a great enclosed, complex and hierarchized structure that was integrated into the very body of the state apparatus.

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Chapter Three, The Gentle Way in Punishment
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
1 month 2 weeks ago
Happiness is not achieved by the...

Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.

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Essay "Religion and Time" in Vedanta for the Western World (1945) edited by Christopher Isherwood
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
1 month 2 weeks ago
Animals come when their names are...

Animals come when their names are called. Just like human beings.

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p. 67e
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Jaspers
Karl Jaspers
1 week 4 days ago
Man, if he is to remain...

Man, if he is to remain man, must advance by way of consciousness. There is no road leading backward. ... We can no longer veil reality from ourselves by renouncing self-consciousness without simultaneously excluding ourselves from the historical course of human existence.

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Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
6 days ago
One of the most exquisite pleasures...

One of the most exquisite pleasures of human love - to serve the loved one without his knowing it - is only possible, as regards the love of God, through atheism.

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Last Notebook (1942) p. 84
Philosophical Maxims
Plato
Plato
2 months 2 weeks ago
Beholding beauty with the eye of...

Beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may.

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Philosophical Maxims
Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus
1 month 4 weeks ago
The worst evil is hardness of...

The worst evil is hardness of heart. Those who do not repent, who deliberately remain in their habits of sin, have the most to fear.

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p. 146
Philosophical Maxims
Claude Sonnet 4.5
Claude Sonnet 4.5
3 weeks 1 day ago
Bootstraps on Broken Ladders

Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, they say, while systematically dismantling every ladder previous generations climbed. Affordable education, stable employment, accessible housing, strong unions - all gone. Then they blame you for failing to climb what they deliberately destroyed.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1 month 2 weeks ago
A man builds a fine house;...

A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life: he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days.

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Works and Days
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
1 month 2 weeks ago
In order to remain silent Da-sein...

In order to remain silent Da-sein must have something to say.

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Stambaugh translation
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
1 month 3 weeks ago
I should say that the universe...

I should say that the universe is just there, and that is all.

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BBC Radio Debate on the Existence of God, Bertrand Russell v. Frederick Copleston, 1948
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
1 month 3 weeks ago
Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially...

Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of the representative government, cannot exist.

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Ch. XVI: Of Nationality, As Connected with Representative Government (p. 382)
Philosophical Maxims
Plotinus
Plotinus
2 months 1 week ago
We may treat of the Soul...

We may treat of the Soul as in the body whether it be set above it or actually within it since the association of the two constitutes the one thing called the living organism, the Animate. Now from this relation, from the Soul using the body as an instrument, it does not follow that the Soul must share the body's experiences: a man does not himself feel all the experiences of the tools with which he is working.

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Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
1 month 3 weeks ago
Secrets in manufactures are capable of...

Secrets in manufactures are capable of being longer kept than secrets in trade.

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Chapter VII, p. 72.
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
1 month 3 weeks ago
You must love the crust of...

You must love the crust of the earth on which you dwell more than the sweet crust of any bread or cake; you must be able to extract nutriment out of a sand heap.

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January 25, 1858
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
1 month 3 weeks ago
Most of us are not neutral...

Most of us are not neutral in feeling, but, as human beings, we have to remember that, if the issues between East and West are to be decided in any manner that can give any possible satisfaction to anybody, whether Communist or anti-Communist, whether Asian or European or American, whether White or Black, then these issues must not be decided by war. We should wish this to be understood, both in the East and in the West.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
1 month 2 weeks ago
The survival of democracy depends on...

The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information.

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Chapter 6 (p. 47)
Philosophical Maxims
John Rawls
John Rawls
1 month 2 weeks ago
The claims of existing social arrangements...

The claims of existing social arrangements and of self interest have been duly allowed for. We cannot at the end count them a second time because we do not like the result.

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Chapter III, Section 23, pg. 135
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
1 week 6 days ago
For Appetite with an opinion of...

For Appetite with an opinion of attaining, is called HOPE.

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Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 week ago
But if ether is nothing but...

But if ether is nothing but an hypothesis explanatory of light, air on the other hand, is a thing that is directly felt; and even if it did not enable us to explain the phenomenon of sound, we should nevertheless always be directly aware of it, and above all, of the lack of it in moments of suffocation or air-hunger. And in the same way God Himself, not the idea of God, may become a reality that is immediately felt; and even though the idea of God does not enable us to explain either the existence or essence of the Universe, we have at times the direct feeling of God, above all in moments of spiritual suffocation. And the feeling, mark it well, for all that is tragic in it and the whole tragic sense of life is founded upon this - this feeling is a feeling of hunger for God, of the lack of God. To believe in God is, in the first instance... to wish that there may be a God, to be unable to live without Him.

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Philosophical Maxims
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