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Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 1 week ago
To understand the actual world as...

To understand the actual world as it is, not as we should wish it to be, is the beginning of wisdom.

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Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
4 months 2 weeks ago
As the strata of the earth...

As the strata of the earth preserve in succession the living creatures of past epochs, so the shelves of libraries preserve in succession the errors of the past and their expositions, which like the former were very lively and made a great commotion in their own age but now stand petrified and stiff in a place where only the literary palaeontologist regards them.

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Vol. 2 "On Books and Writing" as translated in Essays and Aphorisms (1970), as translated by R. J. Hollingdale
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
3 weeks 6 days ago
A good judge…

A good judge condemns wrongful acts, but does not hate them.

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De Ira (On Anger): Book 1, cap. 16, line 6.
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 month 3 days ago
For this also we will honour...

For this also we will honour the poor Manchester Insurrection, and augur well of it. A deep unspoken sense lies in these strong men,- inconsiderable, almost stupid, as all they can articulate of it is. Amid all violent stupidity of speech, a right noble instinct of what is doable and what is not doable never forsakes them: the strong inarticulate men and workers, whom Fact patronises; of whom, in all difficulty and work whatsoever, there is good augury!

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Philosophical Maxims
Will Durant
Will Durant
1 month 2 days ago
Sixty years ago I knew everything....

Sixty years ago I knew everything. Now I know nothing. Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

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Quoted in "Teachers: The Essence of the Centuries", Time magazine, 13 August 1965
Philosophical Maxims
Heraclitus
Heraclitus
5 months 2 days ago
Time is a game played beautifully...

Time is a game played beautifully by children.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
4 months 1 week ago
In place of the bourgeois society,...

In place of the bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, shall we have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

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Section 2, paragraph 72 (last paragraph).
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
1 week 5 days ago
I had rather be shut up...

I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage with my books, my family and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post, which any human power can give.

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Letter to Alexander Donald
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
3 months 5 days ago
Can the children of the bridechamber...

Can the children of the bridechamber mourn, as long as the bridegroom is with them? but the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken from them, and then shall they fast. No man putteth a piece of new cloth unto an old garment, for that which is put in to fill it up taketh from the garment, and the rent is made worse. Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved.

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9:15-17 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
2 months 5 days ago
Writers, poets, painters, musicians, philosophers, political...

Writers, poets, painters, musicians, philosophers, political thinkers, to name only a few of the categories affected, must woo their readers, viewers, listeners, from distraction. To this we must add, for simple realism demands it, that these same writers, painters, etc., are themselves the children of distraction. As such, they are peculiarly qualified to approach the distracted multitudes. They will have experienced the seductions as well as the destructiveness of the forces we have been considering here. This is the destructive element in which we do not need to be summoned to immerse ourselves, for we were born to it.

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The Distracted Public (1990), p. 167
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas
5 months ago
A hymn is the praise of...

A hymn is the praise of God with song; a song is the exultation of the mind dwelling on eternal things, bursting forth in the voice.

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Commentary on the Psalms (c. 1273), Introduction
Philosophical Maxims
Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry
1 week 5 days ago
If you know even as little...

If you know even as little history as I do, it is hard not to doubt the efficacy of modern war as a solution to any problem except that of retribution - the "justice" of exchanging one damage for another.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
4 months 1 week ago
The meaning of a question is...

The meaning of a question is the method of answering it: then what is the meaning of 'Do two men really mean the same by the word "white"?' Tell me how you are searching, and I will tell you what you are searching for.

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Philosophical Remarks (1991), Part III (27), pp.66-67
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
3 months 3 weeks ago
A dog cannot...
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Main Content / General
Susan Neiman
Susan Neiman
2 months 3 days ago
Any ethics that needs religion is...

Any ethics that needs religion is bad ethics, and any religion that tries to do so is bad religion. Of course, there are plenty of both around.

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Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
2 months 3 weeks ago
Doubt must be no more than...

Doubt must be no more than vigilance, otherwise it can become dangerous.

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F 53
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
2 months 3 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
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard
2 months 2 weeks ago
The Marxist critique is only a...

The Marxist critique is only a critique of capital, a critique coming from the heart of the middle and petit bourgeois classes, for which Marxism has served for a century as a latent ideology.... The Marxist seeks a good use of economy. Marxism is therefore only a limited petit bourgeois critique, one more step in the banalization of life toward the "good use" of the social!

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Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 15 (1987) "When Bataille Attacked the Metaphysical Principle of Economy"
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 month 3 days ago
Men's hearts ought not to be...

Men's hearts ought not to be set against one another; but set with one another, and all against the Evil Thing only.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
4 months 1 week ago
And the cost of a thing...

And the cost of a thing it will be remembered as the amount of life it requires to be exchanged for it.

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After December 6, 1845
Philosophical Maxims
Mencius
Mencius
1 month 4 days ago
Those who are humane achieve glory....

Those who are humane achieve glory. Those who are inhumane suffer disgrace.

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2A:4
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
5 months 1 week ago
Let's not beat around the bush;...

Let's not beat around the bush; I love life, that's my real weakness. I love it so much that I am incapable of imagining what is not life.

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Philosophical Maxims
Susan Neiman
Susan Neiman
2 months 3 days ago
Whenever you say anything good about...

Whenever you say anything good about East Germany, immediately somebody jumps up and says, "My God, you're a Stalinist..." I'm not defending everything about it, of course. But I laboured on the chapter that talks about the east. I fact-checked it; I had somebody else fact-check it. I knew that I was going to get a lot of flak for that. But in the beginning, East Germany did a better job. They just did.

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From an interview with Alex Clark, as cited in "Nazism, slavery, empire: can countries learn from national evil?", The Guardian
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
4 months 1 week ago
Everything is a subject on which...

Everything is a subject on which there is not much to be said.

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Studies in Words (1960), ch. 2
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
4 months 1 week ago
Ignore death up to the last...

Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?

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Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
4 months 2 weeks ago
I doubt not but one great...

I doubt not but one great reason why many children abandon themselves wholly to silly sports, and trifle away all their time insipidly, is, because they have found their curiosity baulk'd, and their inquiries neglected. But had they been treated with more kindness and respect, and their questions answered, as they should, to their satisfaction; I doubt not but that they would have taken more pleasure in learning, and improving their knowledge, wherein there would still be newness and variety, which is what they are delighted with, than in returning over and over to the same play and play-things.

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Sec. 118
Philosophical Maxims
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
3 months 3 days ago
As one advances in life, one...

As one advances in life, one realises more and more that the majority of men - and of women - are incapable of any other effort than that strictly imposed on them as a reaction to external compulsion. And for that reason, the few individuals we have come across who are capable of a spontaneous and joyous effort stand out isolated, monumentalised, so to speak, in our experience. These are the select men, the nobles, the only ones who are active and not merely reactive, for whom life is a perpetual striving, an incessant course of training. Training = askesis. These are the ascetics.

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Chap. VII: Noble Life And Common Life, Or Effort And Inertia
Philosophical Maxims
Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry
1 week 5 days ago
When the possessions and households of...

When the possessions and households of citizens are no longer honored by the acts, as well as the principles, of their government, then the concentration camp ceases to be one of the possibilities of human nature and becomes one of its likelihoods.

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The Landscaping of Hell : Strip-Mine Morality
Philosophical Maxims
Arnold J. Toynbee
Arnold J. Toynbee
1 month 3 weeks ago
We have been Godlike in our...

We have been Godlike in our planned breeding of our domesticated plants and animals, but we have been rabbitlike in our unplanned breeding of ourselves.

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Man and Hunger: The Perspectives of History, entered into the Congressional Record by Senator Ernest Gruening
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
1 week 5 days ago
I cannot live without books. Letter...

I cannot live without books.

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Letter to John Adams
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
4 months 1 week ago
Man exists for his own sake...

Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the state.

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November 15, 1839
Philosophical Maxims
Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham
4 months 2 weeks ago
Of corruption, the principal and direct...

Of corruption, the principal and direct use is, to engage the representatives of the people to betray their trust, and sell themselves and the people to the universal corrupter-the monarch, in his capacity of corrupter-general.

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Constitutional Code (written between 1820 and 1832), quoted in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. XVII (1841), p. 76
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
2 months 1 week ago
Bless Madison Ave for restoring the...

Bless Madison Ave for restoring the magical art of the cavemen to suburbia.

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(p. 130)
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
2 months 1 week ago
What I can't understand is why...

What I can't understand is why you can't see the extraordinary beauty of the idea that life started from nothing - that is such a staggering, elegant, beautiful thing, why would you want to clutter it up with something so messy as a God?

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" During his conversation with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, as quoted in The Telegraph, in 2012-02-24. In "Richard Dawkins: I can't be sure God does not exist"
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine
4 months 2 weeks ago
An army of principles will penetrate...

An army of principles will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot; it will succeed where diplomatic management would fall: it is neither the Rhine, the Channel, nor the ocean that can arrest its progress: it will march on the horizon of the world, and it will conquer.

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Means by Which the Fund Is to Be Created
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
2 months 1 week ago
People try to do all sorts...

People try to do all sorts of clever and difficult things to improve life instead of doing the simplest, easiest thing-refusing to participate in activities that make life bad.

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p. 210
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
3 months 1 week ago
The Republican form of government is...

The Republican form of government is the highest form of government; but because of this it requires the highest type of human nature - a type nowhere at present existing.

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Vol. 3, Ch. XV, The Americans
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
2 months 3 weeks ago
Once we know our weaknesses they...

Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.

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D 5
Philosophical Maxims
Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch
3 months 4 days ago
Serious reflexion about one's own character...

Serious reflexion about one's own character will often induce a curious sense of emptiness; and if one knows another person well, one may sometimes intuit a similar void in him. (This is one of the strange privileges of friendship.)

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Ch. 8, p. 119
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
3 months 1 week ago
I am aware that the age...

I am aware that the age is not what we all wish. But I am sure, that the only means of checking its precipitate degeneracy, is heartily to concur with whatever is the best in our time; and to have some more correct standard of judging what that best is, than the transient and uncertain favour of a court. If once we are able to find, and can prevail on ourselves to strengthen an union of such men, whatever accidentally becomes indisposed to ill-exercised power, even by the ordinary operation of human passions, must join with that society, and cannot long be joined, without in some degree assimilating to it. Virtue will catch as well as vice by contact; and the public stock of honest manly principle will daily accumulate. We are not too nicely to scrutinize motives as long as action is irreproachable. It is enough, (and for a worthy man perhaps too much,) to deal out its infamy to convicted guilt and declared apostacy.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
4 months 1 week ago
One of the most difficult of...

One of the most difficult of the philosopher's tasks is to find out where the shoe pinches.

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p. 61
Philosophical Maxims
Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry
1 week 5 days ago
The most alarming sign of the...

The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war, but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and less wasteful.

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Peaceableness Toward Enemies
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
2 months 1 week ago
Computers can do better than ever...

Computers can do better than ever what needn't be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly.

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(p. 109)
Philosophical Maxims
Dante Alighieri
Dante Alighieri
4 months 3 weeks ago
Love and the gracious…

Love and the gracious heart are a single thing...one can no more be without the otherthan the reasoning mind without its reason.

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Chapter XVI (tr. Mark Musa)
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
4 months 1 week ago
There is no information about the...

There is no information about the thingness of the thing without knowledge of the kind of truth in which the thing stands. But there is no information about this truth of the thing without knowledge of the thingness of the thing whose truth is in question. Where are we to get a foothold? The ground slips away under us. Perhaps we are already close to falling into the well. At any rate the housemaids are already laughing.

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p. 27
Philosophical Maxims
Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini
1 month 3 weeks ago
The public has lost the habit...

The public has lost the habit of movie-going because the cinema no longer possesses the charm, the hypnotic charisma, the authority it once commanded. The image it once held for us all - that of a dream we dreamt with our eyes open - has disappeared. Is it still possible that one thousand people might group together in the dark and experience the dream that a single individual has directed?

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"Decline of Cinema"
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
2 days ago
The most simple picture one...

The most simple picture one can form about the creation of an empirical science is along the lines of an inductive method. Individual facts are selected and grouped together such that their lawful connection becomes clearly apparent. ... The truly great advances in our understanding of nature originated in a manner almost diametrically opposed to induction. The intuitive grasp of the essentials or a large complex of facts leads the scientist to the postulation of a hypothetical basic law, or several such basic laws. From the basic laws (system of axioms) he derives his conclusions as completely as possible in a purely logically deductive manner. These conclusions, derived from the basic laws (and often only after time-consuming developments and calculations), can then be compared to experience, and in this manner provide criteria for the justification of the assumed basic law.

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[https://web.archive.org/web/20150119033423/http://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol7-trans/124 "Induction and Deduction in Physics"], Berliner Tageblatt, 25 December 1919.
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
1 week 5 days ago
There can be no safer deposit...

There can be no safer deposit on earth than the Treasury of the United States.

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Letter to Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette (1825) ME 19:281
Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
3 months 2 weeks ago
For the first time in sixty...

For the first time in sixty years, the priests, the old aristocracy and the people met in a common sentiment-a feeling of revenge, it is true, and not of affection; but even that is a great thing in politics, where a community of hatred is almost always the foundation of friendships.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
2 months 3 weeks ago
The average mind is slow in...

The average mind is slow in grasping a truth, but when the most thoroughly organized, centralized institution, maintained at an excessive national expense, has proven a complete social failure, the dullest must begin to question its right to exist. The time is past when we can be content with our social fabric merely because it is "ordained by divine right," or by the majesty of the law.

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Philosophical Maxims
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