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William Whewell
William Whewell
3 weeks 4 days ago
The idea of living beings as...

The idea of living beings as subject to 'disease' includes a recognition of a Final Cause in organization; for disease is a state in which the vital forces do not attain their 'proper ends'.

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Philosophical Maxims
Nikos Kazantzakis
Nikos Kazantzakis
3 weeks 5 days ago
You are not a miserable and...

You are not a miserable and momentary body; behind your fleeting mask of clay, a thousand-year-old face lies in ambush. Your passions and your thoughts are older than your heart or brain.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Dewey
John Dewey
3 months 2 weeks ago
Surrender of individuality by the many...

Surrender of individuality by the many to someone who is taken to be a superindividual explains the retrograde movement of society. Dictatorships and totalitarian states, and belief in the inevitability of this or that result coming to pass are, strange as it may sound, ways of denying the reality of time and the creativeness of the individual.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
5 months 3 days ago
So it is with minds. Unless...

So it is with minds. Unless you keep them busy with some definite subject that will bridle and control them, they throw themselves in disorder hither and yon in the vague field of imagination. ..And there is no mad or idle fancy that they do no bring forth in the agitation.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
3 weeks 1 day ago
"Earth loves the rain, the proud...

"Earth loves the rain, the proud sky loves to give it." The whole world loves to create futurity. I say then to the world, "I share your love." Is this not the source of the phrase, "This loves to happen"?

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X, 21
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
2 months 3 weeks ago
Radio affects most intimately, person-to-person, offering...

Radio affects most intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener. That is the immediate aspect of radio. A private experience. The subliminal depths of radio are charged with the resonating echoes of tribal horns and antique drums. This is inherent in the very nature of this medium, with its power to turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber.

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(p. 261)
Philosophical Maxims
Sydney Smith
Sydney Smith
1 month 1 week ago
No furniture so charming as books....

No furniture so charming as books.

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Vol. I, ch. 9, p. 289
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
3 months 5 days ago
Do we write books so that...

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

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E 65
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
3 weeks 1 day ago
Then what should we work for?...

Then what should we work for? Only this: proper understanding; unselfish action; truthful speech. A resolve to accept whatever happens as necessary and familiar, flowing like water from that same source and spring.

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(Hays translation) IV, 33
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
4 months 3 weeks ago
I appeal to the philosophers of...

I appeal to the philosophers of all countries to unite and never again mention Heidegger or talk to another philosopher who defends Heidegger. This man was a devil. I mean, he behaved like a devil to his beloved teacher, and he has a devilish influence on Germany. ... One has to read Heidegger in the original to see what a swindler he was.

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As quoted in "At 90, and Still Dynamic : Revisiting Sir Karl Popper and Attending His Birthday Party" by Eugene Yue-Ching Ho, in Intellectus 23
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
1 month 1 week ago
For the love of bustle…

For love of bustle is not industry - it is only the restlessness of a hunted mind.

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Line 5.
Philosophical Maxims
Henri Poincaré
Henri Poincaré
1 month 2 weeks ago
We do not have and cannot...

We do not have and cannot have any means of discovering whether or not we are carried along in a uniform motion of translation.

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L'état actuel et l'avenir de la physique mathematique
Philosophical Maxims
Peter Singer
Peter Singer
4 months 2 weeks ago
We do not have to make...

We do not have to make self- sacrifice a necessary element of altruism. We can regard people as altruists because of the kind of interests they have rather than because they are sacrificing their interests.

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Chapter 9: Altruism and Happiness (p. 103)
Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
3 months 3 weeks ago
We know as little of a...

We know as little of a supreme being as of Matter. But there is as little doubt of the existence of a supreme being as of Matter. The world beyond is reality, and experiential fact. We only don't understand it.

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Letter to Morton Kelsey (1958) as quoted by Morton Kelsey, Myth, History & Faith: The Mysteries of Christian Myth & Imagination (1974) Ch.VIII
Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
3 months 1 week ago
We should have with each person...

We should have with each person the relationship of one conception of the universe to another conception of the universe, and not to a part of the universe.

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p. 129
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
4 months 3 weeks ago
I call this Divine humility because...

I call this Divine humility because it is a poor thing to strike our colours to God when the ship is going down under us; a poor thing to come to Him as a last resort, to offer up "our own" when it is no longer worth keeping. If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is "nothing better" now to be had.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
5 months 3 weeks ago
While both are dear, Piety requires...

While both are dear, Piety requires us to honor truth above our friends.

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Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
3 months 1 week ago
You cannot think without abstractions; accordingly,...

You cannot think without abstractions; accordingly, it is of the utmost importance to be vigilant in critically revising your modes of abstraction. It is here that philosophy finds its niche as essential to the healthy progress of society. It is the critic of abstractions. A civilisation which cannot burst through its current abstractions is doomed to sterility.

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Ch. 4: "The Eighteenth Century", pp. 82-83
Philosophical Maxims
Antonio Negri
Antonio Negri
1 month 3 weeks ago
Empire is emerging today as the...

Empire is emerging today as the center that supports the globalization of productive networks and casts its widely inclusive net to try to envelop all power relations within its world order - and yet at the same time it deploys a powerful police function against the new barbarians and the rebellious slaves who threaten its order.

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Philosophical Maxims
William Whewell
William Whewell
3 weeks 4 days ago
All hypotheses respecting the manner in...

All hypotheses respecting the manner in which the elements of inorganic bodies are arranged in space, must be constructed with regard to the general facts of crystallization.

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Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
5 months 3 weeks ago
To the contemporary, Christ can only...

To the contemporary, Christ can only say: I will offer myself as a sacrifice for the sins of the world and for yours also. Is this easier to believe now than when he has done it, has offered himself? Or is the comfort greater because of his saying that he will do it than it is because of his having done it? There is no greater love than this, that someone lays down his life for another, but when is it easier to believe, and when is the comfort greater: when the loving one says he will do it, or when he has done it?

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Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
5 months 3 weeks 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
4 months 3 weeks ago
The problems are dissolved in the...

The problems are dissolved in the actual sense of the word - like a lump of sugar in water.

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Ch. 9 : Philosophy, p. 183
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
3 months 3 weeks ago
God, I have said, is the...

God, I have said, is the fulfiller, or the reality, of the human desires for happiness, perfection, and immortality. From this it may be inferred that to deprive man of God is to tear the heart out of his breast. But I contest the premises from which religion and theology deduce the necessity and existence of God, or of immortality, which is the same thing. I maintain that desires which are fulfilled only in the imagination, or from which the existence of an imaginary being is deduced, are imaginary desires, and not the real desires of the human heart; I maintain that the limitations which the religious imagination annuls in the idea of God or immortality, are necessary determinations of the human essence, which cannot be dissociated from it, and therefore no limitations at all, except precisely in man's imagination.

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Lecture XXX, Atheism alone a Positive View
Philosophical Maxims
Nikos Kazantzakis
Nikos Kazantzakis
3 weeks 5 days ago
The wife of my God is...

The wife of my God is matter; they wrestle with each other, they laugh and weep, they cry out in the nuptial bed of flesh. They spawn and are dismembered. They fill sea, land, and air with species of plants, animals, men, and spirits. This primordial pair embraces, is dismembered, and multiplies in every living creature. All the concentrated agony of the Universe bursts out in every living thing. God is imperiled in the sweet ecstasy and bitterness of flesh. But he shakes himself free, he leaps out of brains and loins, then clings to new brains and new loins until the struggle for liberation again breaks out from the beginning.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
3 weeks 1 day ago
Find time still to be learning...

Find time still to be learning somewhat good, and give up being desultory.

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Meditations. ii. 7.
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
3 months 2 weeks ago
All movements go...
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Julien Offray de La Mettrie
Julien Offray de La Mettrie
3 weeks 2 days ago
We must admit, with the same...

We must admit, with the same frankness, that we are ignorant whether matter has in itself the faculty of feeling, or only the power of acquiring it by those modifications or forms to which matter is susceptible; for it is true that this faculty of feeling appears only in organic bodies.This is then another new faculty which might exist only potentially in matter, like all the others which have been mentioned; and this was the hypothesis of the ancients, whose philosophy, full of insight and penetration, deserves to be raised above the ruins of the philosophy of the moderns.

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Ch. VI Concerning the Sensitive Faculty of Matter
Philosophical Maxims
Gaston Bachelard
Gaston Bachelard
3 months 2 weeks ago
Man is an imagining being. Ch....

Man is an imagining being.

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Ch. 2, sect. 10
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine
4 months 3 weeks ago
If we take a survey of...

If we take a survey of ages and of countries, we shall find the women, almost - without exception - at all times and in all places, adored and oppressed. Man, who has never neglected an opportunity of exerting his power, in paying homage to their beauty, has always availed himself of their weakness He has been at once their tyrant and their slave.

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Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
5 months 4 days ago
For a man to love again...

For a man to love again where he is loved, it is the charity of publicans contracted by mutual profit and good offices; but to love a man's enemies is one of the cunningest points of the law of Christ, and an imitation of the divine nature.

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Of The Exaltation of Charity
Philosophical Maxims
Isaiah Berlin
Isaiah Berlin
3 months 2 weeks ago
I am normally said to be...

I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with my activity. Political liberty in this sense is simply the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others. If I am prevented by others from doing what I could otherwise do, I am to that degree unfree; and if this area is contracted by other men beyond a certain minimum, I can be described as being coerced, or, it may be, enslaved. Coercion is not, however, a term that covers every form of inability. If I say that I am unable to jump more than ten feet in the air, or cannot read because I am blind, or cannot understand the darker pages of Hegel, it would be eccentric to say that I am to that degree enslaved or coerced. Coercion implies the deliberate interference of other human beings within the area in which I could otherwise act.

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Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
4 months 3 weeks ago
I want to have her back...

I want to have her back as an ingredient in the restoration of my past. Could I have wished her anything worse? Having got once through death, to come back and then, at some later date, have all her dying to do all over again? They call Stephen the first martyr. Hadn't Lazarus the rawer deal?

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Philosophical Maxims
Gottlob frege
Gottlob frege
3 months 2 weeks ago
The ideal of strictly scientific method...

The ideal of strictly scientific method in mathematics which I have tried to realise here, and which perhaps might be named after Euclid I should like to describe in the following way... The novelty of this book does not lie in the content of the theorems but in the development of the proofs and the foundations on which they are based... With this book I accomplish an object which I had in view in my Begriffsschrift of 1879 and which I announced in my Grundlagen der Arithmetik. I am here trying to prove the opinion on the concept of number that I expressed in the book last mentioned.

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Vol. 1. pp. 137-140, as cited in: Ralph H. Johnson (2012), Manifest Rationality: A Pragmatic Theory of Argument, p. 87
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
2 weeks 1 day ago
I believe with Schopenhauer: We...

I believe with Schopenhauer: We can do what we wish, but we can only wish what we must. Practically, I am, nevertheless, compelled to act as if freedom of the will existed. If I wish to live in a civilized community, I must act as if man is a responsible being. I know that philosophically a murderer is not responsible for his crime; nevertheless, I must protect myself from unpleasant contacts. I may consider him guiltless, but I prefer not to take tea with him.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Gray
John Gray
2 months 2 days ago
Hayek's blind spot with regard to...

Hayek's blind spot with regard to politics was clear in the early 1980s when the first Thatcher government, in an attempt to reduce inflation and bring the public finances closer to a balanced budget, was raising interest rates and cutting public spending. As he had done during the 1930s, Hayek attacked these policies as not being severe enough. It would be better, he told me in a conversation we had around this time, if Thatcher imposed a more drastic contraction on the economy so that the wage-setting power of the trade unions could be broken. He appeared unfazed by unemployment, which was already higher (more than three million people) than at any time since the 1930s, and would rise much further if his recommendations were accepted.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
3 weeks 4 days ago
I have no fear that the...

I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master. Could the contrary of this be proved, I should conclude either that there is no god, or that he is a malevolent being.

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Letter to David Hartley
Philosophical Maxims
Arnold J. Toynbee
Arnold J. Toynbee
2 months 1 week ago
I don't believe a committee can...

I don't believe a committee can write a book. ... It can, oh, govern a country, perhaps. But I don't believe it can write a book.

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Interviewed by Christopher Wright (1955). Printed in James Nelson (ed.) Wisdom: Conversations with the Elder Wise Men of Our Day (New York: Norton, 1958) p. 208
Philosophical Maxims
Plato
Plato
5 months 3 weeks ago
How natural it is that those...

How natural it is that those who have spent a long time in the study of philosophy appear ridiculous when they enter the courts of law as speakers. Those who have knocked about in courts and the like from their youth up seem to me, when compared with those who have been brought up in philosophy and similar pursuits, to be as slaves in breeding compared with freemen. The latter always have leisure, and they talk at their leisure in peace; and they do not care at all whether their talk is long or short, if only they attain the truth. But the men of the other sort are always in a hurry and the other party in the suit does not permit them to talk about anything they please.

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Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
3 months 1 week ago
Meditation on the chance which led...

Meditation on the chance which led to the meeting of my mother and father is even more salutary than meditation on death.

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p. 277
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
3 weeks 4 days ago
Of all the systems of morality,...

Of all the systems of morality, ancient or modern, which have come under my observation, none appear to me so pure as that of Jesus. He who follows this steadily need not, I think, be uneasy, although he cannot comprehend the subtleties and mysteries erected on his doctrines by those who, calling themselves his special followers and favorites, would make him come into the world to lay snares for all understandings but theirs. These metaphysical heads, usurping the judgment seat of God, denounce as his enemies all who cannot perceive the Geometrical logic of Euclid in the demonstrations of St. Athanasius, that three are one, and one is three; and yet that the one is not three nor the three one.

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Letter to William Canby
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley
2 months 1 week ago
It cannot be doubted, I think,...

It cannot be doubted, I think, that Mr. Darwin has satisfactorily proved that what he terms selection, or selective modification, must occur, and does occur, in nature; and he has also proved to superfluity that such selection is competent to produce forms as distinct, structurally, as some genera even are. If the animated world presented us with none but structural differences, I should have no hesitation in saying that Mr. Darwin has demonstrated the existence of a true physical cause, amply competent to account for the origin of living species, and of man among the rest.

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Ch.2, p. 126
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
1 month 1 week ago
All the Good of mortals is...

All the Good of mortals is mortal.

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Philosophical Maxims
George Santayana
George Santayana
3 months 2 weeks ago
Persons who feel themselves to be...

Persons who feel themselves to be exiles in this world-and what noble mind, from Empedocles down, has not had that feeling?-are mightily inclined to believe themselves citizens of another.

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pp. 39-40
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
3 months 1 week ago
We find here the final application...

We find here the final application of the doctrine of objective immortality. Throughout the perishing occasions in the life of each temporal Creature, the inward source of distaste or of refreshment, the judge arising out of the very nature of things, redeemer or goddess of mischief, is the transformation of Itself, everlasting in the Being of God. In this way, the insistent craving is justified - the insistent craving that zest for existence be refreshed by the ever-present, unfading importance of our immediate actions, which perish and yet live for evermore.

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Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
5 months 3 weeks ago
The saddest aspect of life right...

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

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Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
1 month 1 week ago
He that owns himself has lost...

He that owns himself has lost nothing. But how few men are blessed with ownership of self!

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 3 weeks ago
The greatest challenge to any thinker...

The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.

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Attributed to Russell in Crainer's The Ultimate Book of Business Quotations (1997), p. 258
Philosophical Maxims
Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm
3 months 1 week ago
The successful revolutionary is a statesman,...

The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.

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Ch. 7
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
4 months 3 weeks ago
Yet a man may love a...

Yet a man may love a paradox, without losing either his wit or his honesty.

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"Walter Savage Landor", from The Dial, xii, 1841
Philosophical Maxims
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