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C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
2 months ago
My argument against God was that...

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?

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Book II, Chapter 1, "The Rival Conceptions of God"
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
3 weeks 2 days ago
Why do ye also transgress the...

Why do ye also transgress the commandment of God by your tradition? For God commanded, saying, Honour thy father and mother: and, He that curseth father or mother, let him die the death. But ye say, Whosoever shall say to his father or his mother, It is a gift, by whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me; And honour not his father or his mother, he shall be free. Thus have ye made the commandment of God of none effect by your tradition. Ye hypocrites, well did Esaias prophesy of you, saying, This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me. But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.

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15:3-9 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
2 months 1 day ago
I regard utility as the ultimate...

I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being.

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Ch. 1: Introductory
Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
1 month 1 week ago
There is geometry in the humming...

There is geometry in the humming of the strings. There is music in the spacings of the spheres.

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As quoted in the preface of the book entitled Music of the Spheres by Guy Murchie
Philosophical Maxims
Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno
1 month 1 week ago
To a body of infinite size...

To a body of infinite size there can be ascribed neither centre nor boundary... Thus the Earth no more than any other world is at the centre.

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Philosophical Maxims
Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus
2 months 1 week ago
Once we have tasted the sweetness...

Once we have tasted the sweetness of what is spiritual, the pleasures of the world will have no attraction for us. If we disregard the shadows of things, then we will penetrate their inner substance.

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Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
2 months 1 week ago
Superstition, idolatry, and hypocrisy have ample...

Superstition, idolatry, and hypocrisy have ample wages, but truth goes a-begging.

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53
Philosophical Maxims
Niccolò Machiavelli
Niccolò Machiavelli
2 months 1 week ago
It is not titles that make...

It is not titles that make men illustrious, but men who make titles illustrious.

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Book 3, Ch. 38
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
2 weeks 3 days ago
Martyrs create faith, faith does not...

Martyrs create faith, faith does not create martyrs.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 1 week ago
Justice respects man...
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Main Content / General
William James
William James
2 months ago
If you say that this is...

If you say that this is absurd, that we cannot be in love with everyone at once, I merely point out to you that, as a matter of fact, certain persons do exist with an enormous capacity for friendship and for taking delight in other people's lives; and that such person know more of truth than if their hearts were not so big. The vice of ordinary Jack and Jill affection is not its intensity, but its exclusions and its jealousies. Leave those out, and you see that the ideal I am holding up before you, however impracticable to-day, yet contains nothing intrinsically absurd.

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"What Makes a Life Significant?"
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
2 months ago
Every story of conversion is the...

Every story of conversion is the story of a blessed defeat.

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Foreword to Joy Davidman's Smoke on the Mountain, 1954
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
2 months 1 day ago
The happiness which forms the utilitarian...

The happiness which forms the utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct, is not the agent's own happiness, but that of all concerned. As between his own happiness and that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator. In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. To do as one would be done by, and to love one's neighbour as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality.

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Ch. 2
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
2 months ago
There can be no difference anywhere...

There can be no difference anywhere that doesn't make a difference elsewhere - no difference in abstract truth that doesn't express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere and somewhen.

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Lecture II, What Pragmatism Means
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
2 months ago
All mortals tend to turn into...

All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.

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Letter X
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
1 month 3 weeks ago
I would really like to slow...

I would really like to slow down the speed of reading with continual punctuation marks. For I would like to be read slowly. (As I myself read.)

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p. 77e
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
1 month ago
Evil perpetually tends to disappear. Part...

Evil perpetually tends to disappear.

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Part I, Ch. 2 : The Evanescence of Evil, § 2
Philosophical Maxims
Ernst Mach
Ernst Mach
3 weeks 5 days ago
I know of nothing more terrible...

I know of nothing more terrible than the poor creatures who have learned too much. Instead of the sound powerful judgement which would probably have grown up if they had learned nothing, their thoughts creep timidly and hypnotically after words, principles and formulae, constantly by the same paths. What they have acquired is a spider's web of thoughts too weak to furnish sure supports, but complicated enough to provide confusion.

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On the Relative Educational Value of the Classics and the Mathematico-Physical Sciences in Colleges and High Schools, an address in (16 April 1886)
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
2 months ago
The advance of liberalism, so-called, in...

The advance of liberalism, so-called, in Christianity, during the past fifty years, may fairly be called a victory of healthy-mindedness within the church over the morbidness with which the old hell-fire theology was more harmoniously related. We have now whole congregations whose preachers, far from magnifying our consciousness of sin, seem devoted rather to making little of it. They ignore, or even deny, eternal punishment, and insist on the dignity rather than on the depravity of man. They look at the continual preoccupation of the old-fashioned Christian with the salvation of his soul as something sickly and reprehensible rather than admirable; and a sanguine and 'muscular' attitude, which to our forefathers would have seemed purely heathen, has become in their eyes an ideal element of Christian character. I am not asking whether or not they are right, I am only pointing out the change.

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Lectures IV and V, "The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness"
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
2 months ago
The hatefulness of a hated person...

The hatefulness of a hated person is "real"-in hatred you see men as they are; you are disillusioned; but the loveliness of a loved person is merely a subjective haze concealing a "real" core of sexual appetite or economic association. Wars and poverty are "really" horrible; peace and plenty are mere physical facts about which men happen to have certain sentiments.

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Letter XXX
Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
2 months 4 days ago
Look round this universe. What an...

Look round this universe. What an immense profusion of beings, animated and organised, sensible and active! You admire this prodigious variety and fecundity. But inspect a little more narrowly these living existences, the only beings worth regarding. How hostile and destructive to each other! How insufficient all of them for their own happiness! How contemptible or odious to the spectator! The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind Nature, impregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children!

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Philo to Cleanthes, Part XI
Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
2 months 2 days 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
Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Bakunin
4 weeks ago
My dignity as a man, my...

My dignity as a man, my human right which consists of refusing to obey any other man, and to determine my own acts in conformity with my convictions is reflected by the equally free conscience of all and confirmed by the consent of all humanity. My personal freedom, confirmed by the liberty of all, extends to infinity. The materialistic conception of freedom is therefore a very positive, very complex thing, and above all, eminently social, because it can be realized only in society and by the strictest equality and solidarity among all men.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas
2 months 2 weeks ago
Now what has been said about...

Now what has been said about the Jews is also to be understood about Cahorsins, and anyone else depending upon the depravity of usury.

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art. 4
Philosophical Maxims
Edward Said
Edward Said
1 week 6 days ago
Ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously...

Ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied.

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Philosophical Maxims
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
4 weeks ago
The preposterous distinction of rank, which...

The preposterous distinction of rank, which render civilization a curse, by dividing the world between voluptuous tyrants and cunning envious dependents, corrupt, almost equally, every class of people, because respectability is not attached to the discharge of the relative duties of life, but to the station, and when the duties are not fulfilled, the affections cannot gain sufficient strength to fortify the virtue of which they are the natural reward. Still there are some loop-holes out of which a man may creep, and dare to think and act for himself; but for a woman it is an herculean task, because she has difficulties peculiar to her sex to overcome, which require almost super-human powers.

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Ch. 9
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
2 months 1 day ago
I now saw, that a science...

I now saw, that a science is either deductive or experimental, according as, in the province it deals with, the effects of causes when conjoined, are or are not the sums of the effects which the same causes produce when separate. It followed that politics must be a deductive science. It thus appeared, that both Macaulay and my father were wrong; the one in assimilating the method of philosophising in politics to the purely experimental method of chemistry; while the other, though right in adopting a deductive method, had made a wrong selection of one, having taken as the type of deduction, not the appropriate process, that of the deductive branches of natural philosophy, but the inappropriate one of pure geometry, which, not being a science of causation at all, does not require or admit of any summing-up of effects.

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(pp. 160-161)
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
3 weeks 2 days ago
Society is eliminating the prerogatives and...

Society is eliminating the prerogatives and privileges of feudal. aristocratic culture together with its content. The fact that the transcending truths of the fine arts, the aesthetics of life and thought, were accessible only to the few wealthy and educated was the fault of a repressive society. But this fault is not corrected by paperbacks, general education, long-playing records, and the abolition of formal dress in the theater and concert hall. The cultural privileges expressed the injustice of freedom, the contradiction between ideology and reality, the separation of intellectual from material productivity; but they also provided a protected realm in which the tabooed truths could survive in abstract integrity-remote from the society which suppressed them.

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pp. 64-65
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
2 months 2 weeks ago
There is nothing more visible than...

There is nothing more visible than what is secret, and nothing more manifest than what is minute. Therefore the superior man is watchful over himself, when he is alone.

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Philosophical Maxims
Diogenes of Sinope
Diogenes of Sinope
1 month 3 weeks ago
If you are to be kept...

If you are to be kept right, you must possess either good friends or red-hot enemies. The one will warn you, the other will expose you.

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Plutarch, Moralia, 74C
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
1 month 4 weeks ago
...the prisoner's dreams is the guard's...

...the prisoner's dreams is the guard's spirituality.

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p. 400
Philosophical Maxims
Porphyry
Porphyry
1 month 2 weeks ago
The utility of a science which...

The utility of a science which enables men to take cognizance of the travellers on the mind's highway, and excludes those disorderly interlopers, verbal fallacies, needs but small attestation. Its searching penetration by definition alone, before which even mathematical precision fails, would especially commend it to those whom the abstruseness of the study does not terrify, and who recognise the valuable results which must attend discipline of mind. Like a medicine, though not a panacea for every ill, it has the health of the mind for its aim, but requires the determination of a powerful will to imbibe its nauseating yet wholesome influence: it is no wonder therefore that puny intellects, like weak stomachs, abhor and reject it.

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Introduction to Aristotle's Organon, as translated by Octavius Freire Owen (1853), p. v
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 1 day ago
The activity of to-day and the...

The activity of to-day and the assurance of to-morrow.

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p. 215
Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
2 months 4 days ago
His character does not appear more...

His character does not appear more extraordinary and unusual by the mixture of so much absurdity with so much penetration, than by his tempering such violent ambition, and such enraged fanaticism with so much regard to justice and humanity.

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Volume III, Chapter LXI; referring to Oliver Cromwell
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
2 months 2 days ago
The best government is a benevolent...

The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination.

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Attributed to Voltaire in Likharev, K.K. (2021). On Government and Politics. In: Likharev, K.K. (eds) Essential Quotes for Scientists and Engineers.
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
2 months 4 days ago
The annual labour of every nation...

The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniences of life which it annually consumes.

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Introduction and Plan of the Work, p. 1.
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
1 month ago
Hegel ... proceeds abstractly from the...

Hegel ... proceeds abstractly from the pre-existence of the intellect. ... He does not appeal to the intellect within us.

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Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), p. 68
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
1 month 3 weeks ago
In everything well known something worthy...

In everything well known something worthy of thought still lurks.

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p. xxxix
Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
3 months 1 day ago
For legislators make the citizens good...

For legislators make the citizens good by forming habits in them, and this is the wish of every legislator, and those who do not effect it miss their mark, and it is in this that a good constitution differs from a bad one.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
2 months 1 week ago
Fame and tranquility can never be...

Fame and tranquility can never be bedfellows.

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Book I, Ch. 39
Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
2 months 4 days ago
The heroes in paganism correspond exactly...

The heroes in paganism correspond exactly to the saints in popery, and holy dervises in MAHOMETANISM. The place of, HERCULES, THESEUS, HECTOR, ROMULUS, is now supplied by DOMINIC, FRANCIS, ANTHONY, and BENEDICT. Instead of the destruction of monsters, the subduing of tyrants, the defence of our native country; whippings and fastings, cowardice and humility, abject submission and slavish obedience, are become the means of obtaining celestial honours among mankind.

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Part X - With regard to courage or abasement
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
2 months 1 week ago
There is another ground of hope...

There is another ground of hope that must not be omitted. Let men but think over their infinite expenditure of understanding, time, and means on matters and pursuits of far less use and value; whereof, if but a small part were directed to sound and solid studies, there is no difficulty that might not be overcome.

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Aphorism 111
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
2 months 4 weeks ago
The job of science will never...

The job of science will never be done, it will just sink deeper and deeper into never-ending complexity.

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Philosophical Maxims
Avicenna
Avicenna
2 months 2 weeks ago
Those who deny the first principle...

Those who deny the first principle should be flogged or burned until they admit that it is not the same thing to be burned and not burned, or whipped and not whipped.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
2 months 1 day ago
Surplus value is exactly equal to...

Surplus value is exactly equal to surplus labour; the increase of the one [is] exactly measured by the diminution of necessary labour.

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Notebook III, The Chapter on Capital, p. 259.
Philosophical Maxims
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
3 weeks ago
The metaphor is perhaps one of...

The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. All our other faculties keep us within the realm of the real, of what is already there. The most we can do is to combine things or to break them up. The metaphor alone furnishes an escape; between the real things, it lets emerge imaginary reefs, a crop of floating islands. A strange thing, indeed, the existence in man of this mental activity which substitutes one thing for another - from an urge not so much to get at the first as to get rid of the second.

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"Taboo and Metaphor"
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 1 day ago
The hopes which inspire communism are,...

The hopes which inspire communism are, in the main, as admirable as those instilled by the Sermon on the Mount, but they are held as fanatically and are as likely to do as much harm.

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Part I, The Present Condition of Russia, Ch. 1: What Is Hoped From Bolshevism
Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
2 months 2 days ago
The little honesty that exists among...

The little honesty that exists among authors is discernible in the unconscionable way they misquote from the writings of others.

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Philosophical Maxims
Plutarch
Plutarch
1 month 2 weeks ago
Phocion compared the speeches of Leosthenes...

Phocion compared the speeches of Leosthenes to cypress-trees. "They are tall," said he, "and comely, but bear no fruit."

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56 Phocion
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
2 months ago
No concrete test of what is...

No concrete test of what is really true has ever been agreed upon.

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"The Will to Believe" p. 15
Philosophical Maxims
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