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Albert Camus
Albert Camus
3 months 3 weeks ago
In every rebellion is to be...

In every rebellion is to be found the metaphysical demand for unity, the impossibility of capturing it, and the construction of a substitute universe.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
2 months 3 weeks ago
Philosophy stands in the same relation...

Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.

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The German Ideology, International Publishers, ed. Chris Arthur, p. 103.
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
3 months 3 weeks ago
When the imagination sleeps, words are...

When the imagination sleeps, words are emptied of their meaning: a deaf population absent-mindedly registers the condemnation of a man. ... there is no other solution but to speak out and show the obscenity hidden under the verbal cloak.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
4 months 3 weeks ago
Lenin saying things that seem true....
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Main Content / General
Aristotle
Aristotle
3 months 3 weeks ago
Again, it is possible to fail...

Again, it is possible to fail in many ways (for evil belongs to the class of the unlimited ... and good to that of the limited), while to succeed is possible only in one way (for which reason also one is easy and the other difficult—to miss the mark easy, to hit it difficult); for these reasons also, then, excess and defect are characteristic of vice, and the mean of virtue; For men are good in but one way, but bad in many.

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Philosophical Maxims
David Pearce
David Pearce
4 days ago
All moral tradeoffs are messy. However,...

All moral tradeoffs are messy. However, on some fairly modest ethical assumptions, when a severe and irreconcilable conflict of interests occurs, then the interests of the more sentient take precedence over the less sentient. This rule of thumb holds regardless of the age, race or species of the victim. Reply to "Why is David Pearce a vegan and a negative utilitarian given industrial agriculture's decimation of insect populations and, therefore, suffering the greater number of insects than farm animals? Shouldn't insects outweigh farm animals?

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, Quora, 3 Sept. 2019
Philosophical Maxims
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
1 month 3 weeks ago
The more I see of the...

The more I see of the world, the more I am convinced that civilisation is a blessing not sufficiently estimated by those who have not traced its progress; for it not only refines our enjoyments, but produces a variety which enables us to retain the primitive delicacy of our sensations. Without the aid of the imagination all the pleasures of the senses must sink into grossness, unless continual novelty serve as a substitute for the imagination, which, being impossible, it was to this weariness, I suppose, that Solomon alluded when he declared that there was nothing new under the sun!

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Letter 2
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 3 weeks ago
Obscenity is whatever happens to shock...

Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.

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Quoted in Look (New York, 23 February 1954). Cf. Russell (1928), Sceptical Essays
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley
1 week 4 days ago
Science ... commits suicide when it...

Science ... commits suicide when it adopts a creed.

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"The Darwin Memorial"
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
2 months 3 weeks ago
The logical picture of the facts...

The logical picture of the facts is the thought.

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(3) Original German: Das logische Bild der Tatsachen ist der Gedanke.
Philosophical Maxims
Thales of Miletus
Thales of Miletus
2 months 1 week ago
Do not ask who started it....

Do not ask who started it.

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Finish it A Dictionary of Thoughts (1908) by Tryon Edwards, p. 234
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
2 months 3 weeks ago
One might say: art shows us...

One might say: art shows us the miracles of nature. It is based on the concept of the miracles of nature.

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Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
2 months 3 weeks ago
"And I say also this. I...

"And I say also this. I do not think the forest would be so bright, nor the water so warm, nor love so sweet, if there were no danger in the lakes."

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Hyoi, p. 76
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
1 month 2 weeks ago
Judge not, and ye shall not...

Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven: Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again.

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(Luke 6:37-38) (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
2 months 4 weeks ago
'Tis only from the selfishness and...

Tis only from the selfishness and confin'd generosity of men, along with the scanty provision nature has made for his wants, that justice derives its origin.

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Part 2, Section 2
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
3 weeks 4 days ago
The slaves of our times are...

The slaves of our times are not all those factory and workshop hands only who must sell themselves completely into the power of the factory and foundry-owners in order to exist, but nearly all the agricultural laborers are slaves, working, as they do, unceasingly to grow another's corn on another's field, and gathering it into another's barn; or tilling their own fields only in order to pay to bankers the interest on debts they cannot get rid of. And slaves also are all the innumerable footmen, cooks, porters, housemaids, coachmen, bathmen, waiters, etc., who all their life long perform duties most unnatural to a human being, and which they themselves dislike.

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Chapter 8: Slavery Exists Among Us
Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
2 months 3 weeks ago
If you punish him for what...

If you punish him for what he sees you practise yourself, he... will be apt to interpret it the peevishness and arbitrary imperiousness of a father, who, without any ground for it, would deny his son the liberty and pleasure he takes himself.

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Sec. 71
Philosophical Maxims
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
1 week 1 day ago
I mean to lead a simple...

I mean to lead a simple life, to choose a simple shell I can carry easily - like a hermit crab. But I do not. I find that my frame of life does not foster simplicity. My husband and five children must make their way in the world. The life I have chosen as a wife and mother entrains a whole caravan of complications.

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Philosophical Maxims
Epicurus
Epicurus
3 months 2 weeks ago
A true friend will partake of...

A true friend will partake of the wants and sorrows of his friend, as if they were his own; if he be in want, he will relieve him; if he be in prison, he will visit him; if he be sick, he will come to him; nay-situations may occur, in which he would not scruple to die for him. It cannot then be doubted, that friendship is one of the most useful means of procuring a secure, tranquil, and happy life.

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Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
3 weeks 2 days ago
The fear of death is more...

The fear of death is more to be dreaded than death itself.

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Maxim 511
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
2 months 3 weeks ago
The secret of being….

The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.

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"Sixième discours: sur la nature de l'homme," Sept Discours en Vers sur l'Homme, 1738
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
1 month 1 week ago
The evolutionary urge drives man to...

The evolutionary urge drives man to seek for intenser forms of fulfillment, since his basic urge is for more life, more consciousness, and this contentment has an air of stagnation that the healthy mind rejects. (This recognition lies at the centre of my own 'outsider theory': that there are human beings to whom comfort means nothing, but whose happiness consists in following an obscure inner-drive, an 'appetite for reality'.)

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p. 32
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 3 weeks ago
We boil at different degrees. Eloquence

We boil at different degrees.

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Eloquence
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
3 weeks 2 days ago
Radio provides a speed-up of information...

Radio provides a speed-up of information that also causes acceleration in other media. It certainly contracts the world to village size and creates insatiable village tastes for gossip, rumour, and personal malice.

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(p. 24)
Philosophical Maxims
Plato
Plato
3 months 3 weeks ago
I shall assume that your silence...

I shall assume that your silence gives consent.

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Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
3 months 1 week ago
He who disdained not to assume...

He who disdained not to assume us unto Himself, did not disdain to take our place and speak our words, in order that we might speak His words.

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p.421
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay
2 weeks ago
That is the best government which...

That is the best government which desires to make the people happy, and knows how to make them happy.

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p. 160
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
1 month 3 weeks ago
A very great part of the...

A very great part of the mischiefs that vex the world arises from words.

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Letter to Richard Burke post 19 February 1792 (1792), in R. B. McDowell and William B. Todd (eds), The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, Vol. 9: I: The Revolutionary War, 1794-1797; II: Ireland. p. 647
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
1 month 2 weeks ago
In the form of the oeuvre,...

In the form of the oeuvre, the actual circumstances are placed in another dimension where the given reality shows itself as that which it is. Thus it tells the truth about itself; its language ceases to be that of deception, ignorance, and submission. Fiction calls the facts by their name and their reign collapses; fiction subverts everyday experience and shows it to be mutilated and false.

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p. 62
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
3 weeks 2 days ago
The audience, as ground, shapes and...

The audience, as ground, shapes and controls the work of art.

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p. 48
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 3 weeks ago
Life is too full of death...

Life is too full of death for death to be able to add anything to it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 month 1 week ago
More than a century ago, in...

More than a century ago, in 1804, in Letter XC of that series that constitutes the immense monody of his Obermann, Sénancour wrote the words which I have put at the head of this chapter - and of all the spiritual descendants of the patriarchal Rousseau, Sénancour was the most profound and intense; of all the men of heart and feeling that France has produced, not excluding Pascal, he was the most tragic. "Man is perishable. That may be; but let us perish resisting, and if it is nothingness that awaits us, do not let us so act that it shall be a just fate." Change this sentence from it negative to the positive form - "And if it is nothingness that awaits us, let us so act that it shall be an unjust fate" - and you get the firmest basis of action for the man who cannot or will not be a dogmatist.

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Philosophical Maxims
Peter Singer
Peter Singer
2 months 2 weeks ago
I am a utilitarian. I am...

I am a utilitarian. I am also a vegetarian. I am a vegetarian because I am a utilitarian.

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Utilitarianism and Vegetarianism, Philosophy & Public Affairs, 9(4): 325 (1980).
Philosophical Maxims
George Santayana
George Santayana
1 month 2 weeks ago
Only the dead have seen the...

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

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"Tipperary"
Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
1 month 3 weeks ago
A dream! What is a dream?...

A dream! What is a dream? And is not our life a dream? I will say more. Suppose that this paradise will never come to pass (that I understand), yet I shall go on preaching it. And yet how simple it is: in one day, in one hour everything could be arranged at once! The chief thing is to love others like yourself, that's the chief thing, and that's everything; nothing else is wanted - you will find out at once how to arrange it all. And yet it's an old truth which has been told and retold a billion times - but it has not formed part of our lives! The consciousness of life is higher than life, the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness - that is what one must contend against. And I shall. If only everyone wants it, it can be arranged at once.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
3 months 3 days ago
I live from day to day,...

I live from day to day, and content myself with having enough to meet my present and ordinary needs; for the extraordinary, all the provision in the world could not suffice.

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Ch. 14
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Hölderlin
Friedrich Hölderlin
1 month 3 weeks ago
I call on Fate to give...

I call on Fate to give me back my soul.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 3 weeks ago
A regret understood by no one:...

A regret understood by no one: the regret to be a pessimist. It's not easy to be on the wrong foot with life

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Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
1 month 3 weeks ago
Our studies of sexual life, originating...

Our studies of sexual life, originating in Vienna and in England, are matched or surpassed by Hindu teachings on this subject... Psychoanalysis itself and the lines of thought to which it gives rise-surely a distinctly Western development-are only a beginner's attempt compared to what is an immemorial art in the East.

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quoted in Georg Feuerstein, Subhash Kak, and David Frawley. - In search of the cradle of civilization _ new light on ancient India-Quest Books
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard
4 weeks ago
The simulacrum now hides, not the...

The simulacrum now hides, not the truth, but the fact that there is none, that is to say, the continuation of Nothingness.

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Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
3 weeks ago
Falling in love is the one...

Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our trite and reasonable world. The effect is out of all proportion with the cause. Two persons, neither of them, it may be, very amiable or very beautiful, meet, speak a little, and look a little into each other's eyes. That has been done a dozen or so of times in the experience of either with no great result. But on this occasion all is different. They fall at once into that state in which another person becomes to us the very gist and centrepoint of God's creation, and demolishes our laborious theories with a smile; in which our ideas are so bound up with the one master-thought that even the trivial cares of our own person become so many acts of devotion, and the love of life itself is translated into a wish to remain in the same world with so precious and desirable a fellow-creature.

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Virginibus Puerisque, Ch. 3.
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
1 month 2 weeks ago
The concept of freedom, as the...

The concept of freedom, as the Philosophy of Right has shown, follows the pattern of free ownership. As a result, the history of the world that Hegel looks out upon exalts and enshrines the history of the middle-class, which based itself on this pattern. There is a stark truth in Hegel's strangely certain announcement that history has reached its end. But it announces the funeral of a class, not of history.

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P. 227
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
2 months 3 weeks ago
But when they have realized that...

But when they have realized that it [society] rejects them forever, they themselves assume the ostracism of which they are victims so as not to leave the initiative to their oppressors.

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p. 65-6
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
1 month 1 week ago
Station, power, wealth-how inadequate they have...

Station, power, wealth-how inadequate they have proved! How useless and insecure!

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Philosophical Maxims
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
1 month 3 weeks 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
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
1 month 1 week ago
If you say to someone who...

If you say to someone who has ears to hear: "What you are doing to me is not just," you may touch and awaken at its source the spirit of attention and love. But it is not the same with words like, "I have the right..." or "you have no right to..." They evoke a latent war and awaken the spirit of contention.

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p. 63
Philosophical Maxims
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal
3 months 1 week ago
The art of persuasion consists as...

The art of persuasion consists as much in that of pleasing as in that of convincing, so much more are men governed by caprice than by reason!

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Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
2 months 3 weeks ago
The Beatific Vision, Sat Chit Ananda,...

The Beatific Vision, Sat Chit Ananda, Being-Awareness-Bliss-for the first time I understood, not on the verbal level, not by inchoate hints or at a distance, but precisely and completely what those prodigious syllables referred to. And then I remembered a passage I had read in one of Suzuki's essays. "What is the Dharma-Body of the Buddha?" ('"the Dharma-Body of the Buddha" is another way of saying Mind, Suchness, the Void, the Godhead.) The question is asked in a Zen monastery by an earnest and bewildered novice. And with the prompt irrelevance of one of the Marx Brothers, the Master answers, "The hedge at the bottom of the garden." "And the man who realizes this truth," the novice dubiously inquires, "what, may I ask, is he?" Groucho gives him a whack over the shoulders with his staff and answers, "A golden-haired lion."

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Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
2 months 3 weeks ago
Persons of genius, it is true,...

Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow. Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom.

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Ch. III: Of Individuality, As One of the Elements of Well-Being
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 3 weeks ago
To try curing someone of a...

To try curing someone of a "vice," of what is the deepest thing he has, is to attack his very being, and this is indeed how he himself understands it, since he will never forgive you for wanting him to destroy himself in your way and not his.

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Philosophical Maxims
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