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John Rawls
John Rawls
4 months 1 day ago
Intuitionism is not constructive, perfectionism is...

Intuitionism is not constructive, perfectionism is unacceptable.

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Chapter I, Section 9, pg. 52
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
4 months 2 days ago
The mere word 'design' by itself...

The mere word 'design' by itself has no consequences and explains nothing. It is the barrenest of principles. The old question of whether there is design is idle. The real question is what is the world, whether or not it have a designer - and that can be revealed only by the study of all nature's particulars.

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Lecture III, Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered
Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
2 months 2 weeks ago
La force qui tue est une...

The might which kills outright is an elementary and coarse form of might. How much more varied in its devices; how much more astonishing in its effects is that other which does not kill; or which delays killing.

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in The Simone Weil Reader, p. 155
Philosophical Maxims
John Gray
John Gray
1 month 1 week ago
Ichthyophils imagine that human beings want...

Ichthyophils imagine that human beings want a life in which they can make their own choices. But what if they can be fulfilled only by a life in which they follow each other? The majority who obey the fashion of the day may be acting on a secret awareness that they lack the potential for a truly individual existence. Liberalism - the ichthyophil variety, at any rate - teaches that everyone yearns to be free. Herzen's experience of the abortive European revolutions of 1848 led him to doubt that this was so. It was because of his disillusionment that he criticized Mill so sharply. But if it is true that Mill was deluded in thinking that everyone loves freedom, it may also be true that without this illusion there would be still less freedom in the world. The charm of a liberal way of life is that it enables most people to renounce their freedom unknowingly.

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An Old Chaos: Ichthyophils and Liberals (p. 62)
Philosophical Maxims
William Whewell
William Whewell
2 days ago
In 'voluntary' motions, Sensations produce Actions,...

In 'voluntary' motions, Sensations produce Actions, and the connexion is made by means of Ideas: in 'reflected' motions, the connexion neither seems to be nor is made by means of Ideas: in 'instinctive' motions, the connexion is such as requires Ideas, but we cannot believe the Ideas to exist.

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Philosophical Maxims
Georg Büchner
Georg Büchner
3 months 3 days ago
That is a long word: forever!...

That is a long word: forever!

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Act I.
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
4 months 1 week ago
Nothing prints more lively in our...

Nothing prints more lively in our minds than something we wish to forget.

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Book II, Ch. 12
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
2 months 1 week ago
I have remarked very clearly that...

I have remarked very clearly that I am often of one opinion when I am lying down and of another when I am standing up.

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F 73
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
2 months 2 weeks ago
The period of the actual revolution,...

The period of the actual revolution, the so-called transitory stage, must be the introduction, the prelude to the new social conditions. It is the threshold to the NEW LIFE, the new HOUSE OF MAN AND HUMANITY. As such it must be of the spirit of the new life, harmonious with the construction of the new edifice.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
4 months 1 week ago
How many valiant men we have...

How many valiant men we have seen to survive their own reputation!

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Ch. 16
Philosophical Maxims
Leszek Kołakowski
Leszek Kołakowski
3 weeks 4 days ago
It would be silly, of course,...

It would be silly, of course, to be either 'for' or 'against' modernity tout court, not only because it is pointless to try to stop the development of technology, science, and economic rationality, but because both modernity and antimodernity may be expressed in barbarous and antihuman terms.

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"Modernity on Endless Trial"
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley
1 month 2 weeks ago
A small beginning has led us...

A small beginning has led us to a great ending. If I were to put the bit of chalk with which we started into the hot but obscure flame of burning hydrogen, it would presently shine like the sun. It seems to me that this physical metamorphosis is no false image of what has been the result of our subjecting it to a jet of fervent, though nowise brilliant, thought to-night. It has become luminous, and its clear rays, penetrating the abyss of the remote past, have brought within our ken some stages of the evolution of the earth. And in the shifting "without haste, but without rest" of the land and sea, as in the endless variation of the forms assumed by living beings, we have observed nothing but the natural product of the forces originally possessed by the substance of the universe.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 4 weeks ago
Imaginary pains are by far the...

Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.

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Philosophical Maxims
Robert Nozick
Robert Nozick
1 month 6 days ago
Utopia is a meta-utopia: the environment...

Utopia is a meta-utopia: the environment in which Utopian experiments may be tried out; the environment in which people are free to do their own thing; the environment which must, to a great extent, be realized first if more particular Utopian visions are to be realized stably.

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Ch. 10 : A Framework for Utopia; The Framework, p. 312
Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
4 months 5 days ago
The beauty or uncomeliness of many...

The beauty or uncomeliness of many things, in good and ill breeding, will be better learnt, and make deeper impressions on them, in the examples of others, than from any rules or instructions can be given about them.

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Sec. 82
Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
2 months ago
A cock has great….

A cock has great influence on his own dunghill.

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Maxim 357
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton
2 months 6 days ago
I can calculate the motions of...

I can calculate the motions of erratic bodies, but not the madness of a multitude.

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As quoted in "Mammon and the Money Market", in The Church of England Quarterly Review (1850), p. 142
Philosophical Maxims
Jerry Fodor
Jerry Fodor
Just now
The data that can bear on...

The data that can bear on the confirmation of perceptual hypotheses includes, in the general case, considerably less than the organism may know.

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p. 69
Philosophical Maxims
Gaston Bachelard
Gaston Bachelard
2 months 3 weeks ago
Words ... are little houses, each...

Words ... are little houses, each with its cellar and garret. Common sense lives on the ground floor, always ready to engage in 'foreign commerce' on the same level as the others, as the passers-by, who are never dreamers. To go upstairs in the word house is to withdraw step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream, it is losing oneself in the distant corridors of an obscure etymology, looking for treasures that cannot be found in words. To mount and descend in the words themselves-this is a poet's life. To mount too high or descend too low is allowed in the case of poets, who bring earth and sky together.

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Ch. 6
Philosophical Maxims
Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes
2 months 2 weeks ago
When I was a student I...

When I was a student I was assigned "Mythologies" and "A Lover's Discourse," by Roland Barthes, and felt at once that something momentous had happened to me, that I had met a writer who had changed my course in life somehow; and looking back now, I think he did.

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Zadie Smith Interview
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
4 months 2 days ago
The Bhagavad-Gita is perhaps the most...

The Bhagavad-Gita is perhaps the most systematic scriptural statement of the Perennial Philosophy. To a world at war, a world that, because it lacks the intellectual and spiritual prerequisites to peace, can only hope to patch up some kind of precarious armed truce, it stands pointing, clearly and unmistakably, to the only road of escape from the self-imposed necessity of self-destruction.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
4 months 3 days ago
Everything intercepts us from ourselves...

Everything intercepts us from ourselves.

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1833
Philosophical Maxims
John Dewey
John Dewey
2 months 3 weeks ago
In all ranges of experience, externality...

In all ranges of experience, externality of means defines the mechanical.

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p. 206
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert A. Simon
Herbert A. Simon
2 months 1 week ago
Definition of design = Everyone designs...

Definition of design = Everyone designs who devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. The intellectual activity that produces material artifacts is no different fundamentally from the one that prescribes remedies for a sick patient or the one that devises a new sales plan for a company or a social welfare policy for a state.

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p. 130.
Philosophical Maxims
Judith Butler
Judith Butler
2 months 5 days ago
Nonviolence has now to be understood...

Nonviolence has now to be understood less as a moral position adopted by individuals in relation to a field of possible action than as a social and political practice undertaken in concert, culminating in a form of resistance to systemic forms of destruction coupled with a commitment to world building that honors global interdependency of the kind that embodies ideals of economic, social, and political freedom and equality.

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p. 20
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
4 months 3 weeks ago
It is only he who is...

It is only he who is possessed of the most complete sincerity that can exist under heaven, who can give its full development to his nature. Able to give its full development to his own nature, he can do the same to the nature of other men. Able to give its full development to the nature of other men, he can give their full development to the natures of animals and things. Able to give their full development to the natures of creatures and things, he can assist the transforming and nourishing powers of Heaven and Earth. Able to assist the transforming and nourishing powers of Heaven and Earth, he may with Heaven and Earth form a ternion.

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Philosophical Maxims
George Santayana
George Santayana
2 months 3 weeks ago
The pint would call the quart...

The pint would call the quart a dualist, if you tried to pour the quart into him.

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p. 60
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 4 weeks ago
One cannot live without motives. I...

One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.

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Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
4 months 5 days ago
The sham cause in physical influence...

The sham cause in physical influence consists in rashly assuming that the commerce of substance and transitive forces is sufficiently knowable from their mere existence. Hence it is not so much a system as rather the neglect of all philosophical system as a superfluity in the argument. Freeing the concept from this defect, we shall have a species of commerce alone deserving to be called real, and from which the whole constituting the world merits being called real, and not ideal or imaginary.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
3 months 3 weeks ago
The most defenseless tenderness and the...

The most defenseless tenderness and the bloodiest of powers have a similar need of confession. Western man has become a confessing animal.

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Vol. I, p. 59
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
2 months 2 days ago
The vocation of every man and...

The vocation of every man and woman is to serve other people.

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What Is To Be Done? (1886) Chap. XL
Philosophical Maxims
Nikos Kazantzakis
Nikos Kazantzakis
3 days ago
In order to succeed, we must...

In order to succeed, we must first believe that we can.

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Michael Korda, in Success! (1977), p. 284
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
3 months 3 days ago
Flattery corrupts both the receiver and...

Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver.

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Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
4 months 2 days ago
The stronghold of the determinist argument...

The stronghold of the determinist argument is the antipathy to the idea of chance...This notion of alternative possibility, this admission that any one of several things may come to pass is, after all, only a roundabout name for chance.

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The Dilemma of Determinism (1884) p.153
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 3 days ago
To fear love is to fear...

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
4 months 3 days ago
Alike in the highest regions of...

Alike in the highest regions of speculation and in the smaller practical concerns of daily life, her mind was the same perfect instrument, piercing to the very heart and marrow of the matter; always seizing the essential idea or principle. The same exactness and rapidity of operation, pervading as it did her sensitive as well as her mental faculties, would, with her gifts of feeling and imagination, have fitted her to be a consummate artist, as her fiery and tender soul and her vigorous eloquence would certainly have made her a great orator, and her profound knowledge of human nature and discernment and sagacity in practical life, would, in the times when such a carrière was open to women, have made her eminent among the rulers of mankind. Her intellectual gifts did but minister to a moral character at once the noblest and the best balanced which I have ever met with in life.

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(pp. 186-187)
Philosophical Maxims
bell hooks
bell hooks
2 months 2 weeks ago
Feminism in the United States has...

Feminism in the United States has never emerged from the women who are most victimized by sexist oppression; women who are daily beaten down, mentally, physically, and spiritually-women who are powerless to change their condition in life. They are a silent majority. A mark of their victimization is that they accept their lot in life without visible question, without organized protest, without collective anger or rage.

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p. 1.
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
2 months 2 days ago
Art is a human activity having...

Art is a human activity having for its purpose the transmission to others of the highest and best feelings to which men have risen.

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Ch. 8
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
4 months 3 days ago
[My father] impressed upon me from...

[My father] impressed upon me from the first, that the manner in which the world came into existence was a subject on which nothing was known: that the question, "Who made me?" cannot be answered, because we have no experience or authentic information from which to answer it; and that any answer only throws the difficulty a step further back, since the question immediately presents itself, "Who made God?"

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(pp. 42-43)
Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
3 months 1 week ago
It is the dissimilarities and inequalities...

It is the dissimilarities and inequalities among men which give rise to the notion of honor; as such differences become less, it grows feeble; and when they disappear, it will vanish too.

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Book Three, Chapter XVIII.
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 3 days ago
If throughout your life you abstain...

If throughout your life you abstain from murder, theft, fornication, perjury, blasphemy, and disrespect toward your parents, your church, and your king, you are conventionally held to deserve moral admiration even if you have never done a single kind or generous or useful action. This very inadequate notion of virtue is an outcome of taboo morality, and has done untold harm.

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p. 32
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 week 2 days ago
Raise your eyes....
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Main Content / General
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
4 months 4 weeks ago
Metaphysical rebellion is a claim, motivated...

Metaphysical rebellion is a claim, motivated by the concept of a complete unity, against the suffering of life and death and a protest against the human condition both for its incompleteness, thanks to death, and its wastefulness, thanks to evil.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henri Poincaré
Henri Poincaré
3 weeks 5 days ago
It is often said that experiments...

It is often said that experiments should be made without preconceived ideas. That is impossible. Not only would it make every experiment fruitless, but even if we wished to do so, it could not be done. Every man has his own conception of the world, and this he cannot so easily lay aside. We must, for example, use language, and our language is necessarily steeped in preconceived ideas.

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Ch. IX: Hypotheses in Physics, Tr. George Bruce Halsted
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
2 months 1 week 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
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
4 months 3 days ago
The hearing ear is always found...

The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue.

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Race
Philosophical Maxims
Emmanuel Levinas
Emmanuel Levinas
2 months 4 weeks ago
Fear for the Other, fear for...

Fear for the Other, fear for the other man's death is my fear, but is in no way an individual's taking fright.

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The Levinas reader by Levinas, Emmanuel p. 84
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
2 days ago
Paper is poverty,... it is only...

Paper is poverty,... it is only the ghost of money, and not money itself.

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Letter to Colonel Edward Carrington (27 May 1788) ME 7:36
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
1 month 4 weeks ago
The patient typically finds himself impelled...

The patient typically finds himself impelled by some deep, inner conviction that something is true, or right, or virtuous: a conviction that doesn't seem to owe anything to evidence or reason, but which, nevertheless, he feels as totally compelling and convincing. We doctors refer to such a belief as "faith".

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Philosophical Maxims
Zeno of Citium
Zeno of Citium
3 months 2 weeks ago
We have two ears and one...

We have two ears and one mouth, so we should listen more than we say.

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As quoted in Diogenes Laërtius Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, vii. 23.
Philosophical Maxims
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