Skip to main content

Main navigation

☰ ˟
  • Home
  • Articulation
  • Contact
  • Shop
Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton
Just now
Hayek's theory of evolutionary rationality shows...

Hayek's theory of evolutionary rationality shows how traditions and customs (those surrounding sexual relations, for example) might be reasonable solutions to complex social problems, even when, and especially when, no clear rational grounds can be provided to the individual for obeying them. These customs have been selected by the ''invisible hand'' of social reproduction, and societies that reject them will soon enter the condition of ''maladaptation,'' which is the normal prelude to extinction.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Hayek and conservatism, in Edward Feser (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hayek
Philosophical Maxims
Plato
Plato
3 months 4 days ago
I do see one large and...

I do see one large and grievous kind of ignorance, separate from the rest, and as weighty as all the other parts put together. Thinking that one knows a thing when one does not know it. Through this, I believe, all the mistakes of the mind are caused in all of us.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
2 months 1 week ago
A people that sells its own children…

A people that sells its own children is more condemnable than the buyer; this commerce demonstrates our superiority; he who gives himself a master was born to have one.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Essai sur les Moeurs et l'Espit des Nations (1753)
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
4 weeks 1 day ago
Keep on, then, seeking first the...

Keep on, then, seeking first the Kingdom and his righteousness, and all these other things will be added to you. So never be anxious about the next day, for the next day will have its own anxieties. Each day has enough of its own troubles.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Matthew 6:33-34, New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
3 weeks 3 days ago
Proceeding from ourselves, from our own...

Proceeding from ourselves, from our own human consciousness, the only consciousness which we feel from within and in which feeling is identical with being, we attribute some sort of consciousness, more or less dim, to all living things, and even to the stones themselves, for they also live. And the evolution of organic beings is simply the struggle to realize fullness of consciousness through suffering, a continual aspiration to be others without ceasing to be themselves, to break and yet to preserve their proper limits.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
2 months 3 weeks ago
I too have sworn heedlessly and...

I too have sworn heedlessly and all the time, I have had this most repulsive and death-dealing habit. I'm telling your graces; from the moment I began to serve God, and saw what evil there is in forswearing oneself, I grew very afraid indeed, and out of fear I applied the brakes to this old, old, habit.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
180:10:1
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
2 months 1 week ago
Our minds thus grow in spots;...

Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can. We patch and tinker more than we renew. The novelty soaks in; it stains the ancient mass; but it is also tinged by what absorbs it.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Lecture V, Pragmatism and Common Sense
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Browne
Thomas Browne
1 month 1 week ago
Time which antiquates Antiquities, and hath...

Time which antiquates Antiquities, and hath an art to make dust of all things.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Chapter V
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Rorty
Richard Rorty
1 month 3 weeks ago
Rather, we heirs of Enlightenment think...

Rather, we heirs of Enlightenment think of enemies of liberal democracy like Nietzsche or Loyola as, to use Rawls's word, "mad." We do so because there is no way to see them as fellow citizens of our constitutional democracy, people whose life plans might, given ingenuity and good will, be fitted in with those of other citizens. They are crazy because the limits of sanity are set by what we can take seriously. This, in turn, is determined by our upbringing, our historical situation.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
2 months 5 days ago
Freedom is what you do….

Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel
1 month 3 weeks ago
Ethics increases the range of what...

Ethics increases the range of what it is about ourselves that we can will-extending it from our actions to the motives and character traits and dispositions from which they arise. We want to be able to will the sources of our actions down to the very bottom.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 135.
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
2 months 2 weeks ago
Wonder is the foundation of all...

Wonder is the foundation of all philosophy, research is the means of all learning, and ignorance is the end.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
3 weeks 2 days ago
It is because of my wretchedness...

It is because of my wretchedness that I am "I." It is on account of the wretchedness of the universe that, in a sense, God is "I" (that is to say a person).

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 83
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 1 week ago
It is easy to live for...

It is easy to live for others; everybody does. I call on you to live for yourselves.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
May 3, 1845
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
2 months 1 week ago
There must be something solemn, serious,...

There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse. It is precisely as being solemn experiences that I wish to interest you in religious experiences. ... The divine shall mean for us only such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor a jest.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Lecture II, "Circumscription of the Topic"
Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
2 months 3 weeks ago
Men are disturbed, not by things,...

Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
(5). (Enchiridion 5)
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
2 weeks ago
That which parents...
0
⚖0
Main Content / General
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
2 months 1 week ago
Instead of noble men, let us...

Instead of noble men, let us have noble villages of men. If it is necessary, omit one bridge over the river, round a little there and throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Editorial, Andhra Granthalayam, vol. 1, no. 2 (1939) p. 6
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
3 weeks 3 days ago
The very same reason which one...

The very same reason which one man may regard as a motive for taking care to prolong his life may be regarded by another man as a motive for shooting himself.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
2 months 1 week ago
Very similar were the views expressed...

Very similar were the views expressed by Raymundus of Sabunde or Sabeyde, a Spaniard of the fifteenth century, and professor at Toulouse about the year 1437. In his theologia natural is, which he handled in a speculative spirit, he dealt with the Nature of things, and with the revelation of God in Nature and in the history of the God-man. He sought to prove to unbelievers the Being, the trinity, the incarnation, the life, and the revelation of God in Nature, and in the history of the God-man, basing his arguments on Reason. From the contemplation of Nature he rises to God; and in the same way he reaches morality from; observation of man's inner nature. This purer and simpler style must be set off against the other, if we are to do justice to the Scholastic theologians in their turn.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History Vol 3 1837 translated by ES Haldane and Francis H. Simson) first translated 1896 P. 91-92
Philosophical Maxims
Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes
3 weeks 2 days ago
By reducing any quality to quantity,...

By reducing any quality to quantity, myth economizes intelligence: it understands reality more cheaply.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 153
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 1 week ago
Our great democracies still tend to...

Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Part III: Man and Himself, Ch. 16: Ideas Which Have Become Obsolete, p. 158
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 1 week ago
The best lightning-rod for your protection...

The best lightning-rod for your protection is your own spine.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 236
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
2 months 1 week ago
The product of mental labor -...

The product of mental labor - science - always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Addenda, "Relative and Absolute Surplus Value" in Economic Manuscripts, 1861-63
Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
3 weeks 2 days ago
Love is not consolation, it is...

Love is not consolation, it is light.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
As quoted in Simone Weil (1954) by Eric Walter Frederick Tomlin, p. 47
Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
1 month 3 days ago
We do not know whether Hitler...

We do not know whether Hitler is going to found a new Islam. (He is already on the way; he is like Mohammed. The emotion in Germany is Islamic; warlike and Islamic. They are all drunk with a wild god.)

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
The Symbolic Life - in The Collected Works: The Symbolic Life. Miscellaneous Writings (1977), p. 281
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
2 days ago
Man is a creature who lives...

Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Virginibus Puerisque, Ch. 2.
Philosophical Maxims
A. J. Ayer
A. J. Ayer
1 month 3 days ago
There is philosophy, which is about...

There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis - about the meaning of what we say - and there is all of this ... all of life.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Emphasizing his views on philosophy as something abstract and separate from normal life to Isaiah Berlin, in the early 1930s, as quoted in A.J. Ayer: A Life (1999) by Ben Rogers, p. 2.
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
2 days ago
I regard you with an indifference...

I regard you with an indifference closely bordering on aversion.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
The Rajah's Diamond, Story of the House with the Green Blinds.
Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
2 months 1 week 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.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Volume III, Chapter LXI; referring to Oliver Cromwell
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 3 days ago
Self-pity is not as sterile as...

Self-pity is not as sterile as we suppose. Once we feel its mere onset, we assume a thinker's attitude, and come to think of it, we come to think!

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas
2 months 1 day ago
The bourgeois public sphere may be...

The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 27
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
4 weeks 1 day ago
The society which projects and undertakes...

The society which projects and undertakes the technological transformation of nature alters the base of domination by gradually replacing personal dependence (of the slave on the master, the serf on the lord of the manor, the lord on the donor of the fief, etc.) with dependence on the "objective order of things" (on economic laws, the market etc.).

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 144
Philosophical Maxims
Heraclitus
Heraclitus
2 months 3 weeks ago
Greater fates gain greater rewards.

Greater fates gain greater rewards.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
2 months 1 week ago
Everything which is demanded is by...

Everything which is demanded is by that fact a good.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
"The Will to Believe" p. 205
Philosophical Maxims
Plato
Plato
3 months 4 days ago
The whole business of the kingly...

The whole business of the kingly weaving is comprised in this and this alone: in never allowing the self-restrained characters to be separated from the courageous, but in weaving them together by common beliefs and honors and dishonors and opinions and interchanges of pledges, thus making of them a smooth and, as we say, well-woven fabric, and then entrusting to them in common forever the offices of the state.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
1 month 3 days ago
The entire universe is perfused with...

The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Quoted in Essays in Zoosemiotics (1990) by Thomas A. Sebeok
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
3 months 3 days ago
All systems of morality are based...

All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly. It is ready to pay up. In other words, there may be responsible persons, but there are no guilty ones, in its opinion. At very most, such a mind will consent to use past experience as a basis for its future actions.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 3 days ago
The skepticism which fails to contribute...

The skepticism which fails to contribute to the ruin of our health is merely an intellectual exercise.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
2 weeks 6 days ago
In the mid nineteenth century, the...

In the mid nineteenth century, the typical murderer was a drunken illiterate; a hundred years later the typical murderer regards himself as a thinking man.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Introductory Essay, p. xiv
Philosophical Maxims
Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno
1 month 1 week ago
The infinity of All ever bringing...

The infinity of All ever bringing forth anew, and even as infinite space is around us, so is infinite potentiality, capacity, reception, malleability, matter.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
I 1 as translated in Giordano Bruno : His Life and Thought with annotated translation of his work On the Infinite Universe and Worlds (1950) by Dorothea Waley Singer
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Owen
Robert Owen
Just now
My life was not useless; I...

My life was not useless; I gave important truths to the world, and it was only for want of understanding that they were disregarded. I have been ahead of my time.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Deathbed statement (November 1858), in response to a church minister who asked if he regretted wasting his life on fruitless projects; as quoted in Harold Hill : A People's History
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
2 months 1 day ago
Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought as...

Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought as a fish exists in water; that is, it ceases to breathe anywhere else.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
As quoted by David Macey, The lives of Michel Foucault (1993) p. 177. Citing 'Les Intellectuels et le Pouvoir', Le'Arc 49, 1972, pp. 3-10.
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
4 weeks 1 day ago
By MANNERS, I mean not here...

By MANNERS, I mean not here Decency of behaviour; as how one man should salute another, or how a man should wash his mouth, or pick his teeth before company, and such other points of the Small Morals; But those qualities of mankind that concern their living together in Peace and Unity. To which end we are to consider that the Felicity of this life consisteth not in the repose of a mind satisfied. For there is no such Finis ultimus (utmost aim) nor Summum Bonum (greatest good) as is spoken of in the books of the old Moral Philosophers. Nor can a man any more live whose desires are at an end than he whose Senses and Imaginations are at a stand.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
The First Part, Chapter 11, p. 47
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 3 days ago
In relation to any act of...

In relation to any act of life, the mind acts as a killjoy.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale
2 weeks 5 days ago
Poetry and imagination begin life. A...

Poetry and imagination begin life. A child will fall on its knees on the gravel walk at the sight of a pink hawthorn in full flower, when it is by itself, to praise God for it.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
2 months 2 weeks ago
To say that the cross emblazoned...

To say that the cross emblazoned with the papal coat of arms, and set up by the indulgence preachers, is equal in worth to the cross of Christ is blasphemy.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Thesis 79
Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
2 months 3 weeks ago
Bad times, hard times, this is...

Bad times, hard times, this is what people keep saying; but let us live well, and times shall be good. We are the times: Such as we are, such are the times.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
80:8
Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
1 month 1 week ago
The more man ascends through the...

The more man ascends through the past, and the more he launches into the future, the greater he will be, and all these philosophers and ministers and truth-telling men who have fallen victims to the stupidity of nations, the atrocities of priests, the fury of tyrants, what consolation was left for them in death? This: That prejudice would pass, and that posterity would pour out the vial of ignominy upon their enemies. O Posterity! Holy and sacred stay of the unhappy and the oppressed; thou who art just, thou who art incorruptible, thou who findest the good man, who unmaskest the hypocrite, who breakest down the tyrant, may thy sure faith, thy consoling faith never, never abandon me!

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
As quoted in "Diderot" in The Great Infidels (1881) by Robert Green Ingersoll; The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll Vol. III (1900), p. 367
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 1 week ago
The whole conception of God is...

The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past, or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
"What We Must Do"
Philosophical Maxims
  • Load More

User login

  • Create new account
  • Reset your password

Social

☰ ˟
  • Main Feed
  • Philosophical Maxims

Civic

☰ ˟
  • Propositions
  • Issue / Solution

Who's new

  • Søren Kierkegaard
  • Jesus
  • Friedrich Nietzsche
  • VeXed
  • Slavoj Žižek

Who's online

There are currently 1 users online.
  • comfortdragon

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia