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Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
4 months 6 days ago
Even a single hair casts its...

Even a single hair casts its shadow.

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Maxim 228
Philosophical Maxims
Rosa Luxemburg
Rosa Luxemburg
2 months 4 days ago
The self-discipline of the Social Democracy...

The self-discipline of the Social Democracy is not merely the replacement of the authority of bourgeois rulers with the authority of a socialist central committee. The working class will acquire the sense of the new discipline, the freely assumed self-discipline of the Social Democracy, not as a result of the discipline imposed on it by the capitalist state, but by extirpating, to the last root, its old habits of obedience and servility.

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Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy
Philosophical Maxims
Iamblichus
Iamblichus
2 months 6 days ago
The Pythagoreans called the monad "intellect"...

The Pythagoreans called the monad "intellect" because they thought that intellect was akin to the One; for among the virtues, they likened the monad to moral wisdom; for what is correct is one. And they called it "being," "cause of truth," "simple," "paradigm," "order," "concord," "what is equal among the greater and the lesser," "the mean between intensity and slackness," "moderation in plurality," "the instant now in time," and moreover they call it "ship," "chariot," "friend," "life," "happiness."

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On the Monad
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
4 months 4 days ago
It is the mark of a...

It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in the retrospect. We should have been cut-throats to do otherwise. And there's an end. We ought to know distinctly that we are damned for what we do wrong; but when we have done right, we have only been gentlemen, after all. There is nothing to make a work about.

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"Reflections and Remarks on Human Life", VI: Right and Wrong, published in Works: Letters and Miscellanies of Robert Louis Stevenson -- Sketches, Criticisms, Etc. (1895), p. 628.
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
7 months 6 days ago
There is less trouble and trauma...

There is less trouble and trauma involved in writing a new piece than in trying to salvage an unsatisfactory old one.

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Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
4 months 3 weeks ago
The combination of these two facts...

The combination of these two facts - the longing in the depth of the heart for absolute good, and the power, though only latent, of directing attention and love to a reality beyond the world and of receiving good from it - constitutes a link which attaches every man without exception to that other reality. Whoever recognizes that reality recognizes also that link. Because of it, he holds every human being without any exception as something sacred to which he is bound to show respect. This is the only possible motive for universal respect towards all human beings. Whatever formulation of belief or disbelief a man may choose to make, if his heart inclines him to feel this respect, then he in fact also recognizes a reality other than this world's reality. Whoever in fact does not feel this respect is alien to that other reality also.

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Philosophical Maxims
Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus
6 months 2 weeks ago
Do not be guilty of possessing...

Do not be guilty of possessing a library of learned books while lacking learning yourself.

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Letter to Christian Northoff (1497), as translated in Collected Works of Erasmus (1974), p. 115
Philosophical Maxims
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
2 months 2 weeks ago
From time immemorial man has been...

From time immemorial man has been made in such a way that his vision of the world, so long as it has not been instilled under hypnosis, his motivations and scale of values, his actions and intentions are determined by his personal and group experience of life.

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Philosophical Maxims
Judith Butler
Judith Butler
4 months 1 week ago
Perhaps the promise of phallus is...

Perhaps the promise of phallus is always dissatisfying in some way.

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"The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary" (1993), later published in The Judith Butler Reader (2004) edited by Sarah Salih with Judith Butler
Philosophical Maxims
John Gray
John Gray
3 months 2 weeks ago
In ancient Europe, Stoics asserted that...

In ancient Europe, Stoics asserted that a slave could be freer than a master who suffers from self-division. In China, Daoists imagined a type of sage who responded to the flow of events without weighing alternatives. Disciples of monotheistic faiths have believed something similar: freedom, they say, is obeying God's will. What those who follow these traditions want most is not any kind of freedom of choice. Instead, what they long for is freedom from choice.

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The Faith of Puppets: The Freedom of the Marionette (p. 6-7)
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
6 months 1 week ago
Nature made women mature early and...

Nature made women mature early and had them demand gentle and polite treatment from men, so that they would find themselves imperceptibly fettered by a child due to their own magnanimity; and they would find themselves brought, if not quite to morality itself, then at least to that which cloaks it, moral behavior, which is the preparation and introduction to morality.

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Kant, Immanuel (1996), pages 219-220
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
7 months 6 days ago
I make no secret about being...

I make no secret about being Jewish ... I just think it's more important to be human and to have a human heritage; and I think it is wrong for anyone to feel that there is anything special about any one heritage of whatever kind. It is delightful to have the human heritage exist in a thousand varieties, for it makes for greater interest, but as soon as one variety is thought to be more important than another, the groundwork is laid for destroying them all.

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Philosophical Maxims
Susan Neiman
Susan Neiman
3 months 4 weeks ago
French schoolchildren can be proud to...

French schoolchildren can be proud to become citizens of the country that gave the world the Declaration of the Rights of Man; need they be told that it was disregarded a few years after it inspired the revolution in Haiti, whose leader, Toussaint Louverture, was consigned to death in a French prison?

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Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
5 months 1 week ago
When one compares the talents one...

When one compares the talents one has with those of a Leibniz, one is tempted to throw away one's books and go die quietly in the dark of some forgotten corner.

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Oeuvres complètes, vol. 7, p. 678
Philosophical Maxims
chanakya
chanakya
3 months 2 weeks ago
It is better to live under...

It is better to live under a tree in a jungle inhabited by tigers and elephants, to maintain oneself in such a place with ripe fruits and spring water, to lie down on grass and to wear the ragged barks of trees than to live amongst one's relations when reduced to poverty.

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Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
6 months 1 week ago
Every time a man is begotten...

Every time a man is begotten and born, the clock of human life is wound up anew to repeat once more its same old tune that has already been played innumerable times, movement by movement and measure by measure, with insignificant variations.

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Vol. I, Ch. 4, The World As Will: Second Aspect, as translated by Eric F. J. Payne (1958) p. 322
Philosophical Maxims
B. F. Skinner
B. F. Skinner
3 months 4 days ago
The real question is not whether...

The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.

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Contingencies of Reinforcement: A Theoretical Analysis
Philosophical Maxims
William Kingdon Clifford
William Kingdon Clifford
2 months 1 week ago
The name philosopher, which meant originally...

The name philosopher, which meant originally 'lover of wisdom,' has come in some strange way to mean a man who thinks it is his business to explain everything in a certain number of large books. It will be found, I think, that in proportion to his colossal ignorance is the perfection and symmetry of the system which he sets up; because it is so much easier to put an empty room tidy than a full one.

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As quoted by A. D'Abro, The Evolution of Scientific Thought from Newton to Einstein
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
6 months 1 week ago
Man is a rational animal -...

Man is a rational animal - so at least I have been told. Throughout a long life, I have looked diligently for evidence in favor of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it, though I have searched in many countries spread over three continents. Often paraphrased as "It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this."

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Philosophical Maxims
Baruch Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza
6 months 1 week ago
Truth is a standard…

Truth is a standard both of itself and of falsity.

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Part II, Prop. XLIII, Scholium
Philosophical Maxims
Sir Thomas Browne
Sir Thomas Browne
5 months 2 weeks ago
I am in no way facetious,...

I am in no way facetious, nor disposed for the mirth and galliardize of company, yet in one dream I can compose a whole Comedy, behold the action, apprehend the jests, and laugh myself awake at the conceits thereof.

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Section 11
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
6 months 4 days ago
"To stamp becoming with the character...

"To stamp becoming with the character of being-that is the supreme will to power." (WM 617) This suggests that becoming only is if it is grounded in being as being: "That everything recurs is the closest approximation of a world of becoming to one of being."

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p. 19
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
6 months 4 days ago
The aspects of things that are...

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something - because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. - And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.

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§ 129
Philosophical Maxims
Nikos Kazantzakis
Nikos Kazantzakis
2 months 1 week ago
The bodies breathe, feed, store up...

The bodies breathe, feed, store up strength, and then in an erotic moment are shattered, are spent and drained utterly, that they may bequeath their spirit to their sons. What spirit? The drive upward!

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Philosophical Maxims
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
6 months 1 week ago
What makes it so plausible to...

What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

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On Revolution (1963), ch. 2
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
2 months 4 weeks ago
No Dilettantism in this Mahomet; it...

No Dilettantism in this Mahomet; it is a business of Reprobation and Salvation with him, of Time and Eternity: he is in deadly earnest about it! Dilettantism, hypothesis, speculation, a kind of amateur-search for Truth, toying and coquetting with Truth: this is the sorest sin. The root of all other imaginable sins. It consists in the heart and soul of the man never having been open to Truth; - "living in a vain show." Such a man not only utters and produces falsehoods, but is himself a falsehood. The rational moral principle, spark of the Divinity, is sunk deep in him, in quiet paralysis of life-death.

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Philosophical Maxims
Judith Butler
Judith Butler
4 months 1 week ago
We are not yet speaking about...

We are not yet speaking about equality if we have not yet spoken about equal grievability, or the equal attribution of grievability. Grievability is a defining feature of equality. Those whose grievability is not assumed are those who suffer inequality-unequal value.

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p. 108
Philosophical Maxims
Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm
4 months 2 weeks ago
Man's life cannot "be lived" by...

Man's life cannot "be lived" by repeating the pattern of his species; he must live. Man is the only animal that can be bored, that can be discontented, that can feel evicted from paradise. Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve and from which he cannot escape. He cannot go back to the prehuman state of harmony with nature; he must proceed to develop his reason until he becomes the master of nature, and of himself.

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Ch. 3 "Human Nature and Character
Philosophical Maxims
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
4 months 3 weeks ago
Power is not opposed to freedom....

Power is not opposed to freedom. It is precisely freedom that distinguishes power from violence or coercion.

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Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
6 months 1 week ago
Consider the Koran... this wretched book...

Consider the Koran... this wretched book was sufficient to start a world-religion, to satisfy the metaphysical need of countless millions for twelve hundred years, to become the basis of their morality and of a remarkable contempt for death, and also to inspire them to bloody wars and the most extensive conquests. In this book we find the saddest and poorest form of theism. Much may be lost in translation, but I have not been able to discover in it one single idea of value.

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E. Payne, trans., Vol. II, Ch. XVII: On Man's Need for Metaphysics
Philosophical Maxims
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
5 months 1 week ago
History is mere Empiricism; it has...

History is mere Empiricism; it has only facts to communicate, and all its proofs are founded upon facts alone. To attempt to rise to Primeval History on this foundation of fact, or to argue by this means how such or such a thing might have been, and then to take for granted that it has been so in reality,is to stray beyond the limits of History, and produce an a priori History; just as the Philosophy of Nature, referred to in our preceding lecture, endeavoured to find an a priori Science of Physics.

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p. 140
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
7 months 6 days ago
Science fiction offers its writers chances...

Science fiction offers its writers chances of embarrassment that no other form of fiction does.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
5 months 4 days ago
We must live, you used to...

We must live, you used to say, as if we were never going to die. - Didn't you know that's how everyone lives, including those obsessed with Death?

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
2 months 4 weeks ago
The Hero as Divinity, the Hero...

The Hero as Divinity, the Hero as Prophet, are productions of old ages; not to be repeated in the new. They presuppose a certain rudeness of conception, which the progress of mere scientific knowledge puts an end to. There needs to be, as it were, a world vacant, or almost vacant of scientific forms, if men in their loving wonder are to fancy their fellow-man either a god or one speaking with the voice of a god. Divinity and Prophet are past.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
6 months 1 week ago
There is no virtue they should...

There is no virtue they should be excited to, nor fault they should be kept from, which I do not think they may be convinced of; but it must be by such reasons as their age and understandings are capable of, and those propos'd always in very few and plain words.

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Sec. 81
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
4 months 3 weeks ago
The student of the history of...

The student of the history of progressive thought is well aware that every idea in its early stages has been misrepresented, and the adherents of such ideas have been maligned and persecuted...The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man's right to his body, or woman's right to her soul. If, then, from time immemorial, the New has met with opposition and condemnation, why should my beliefs be exempt from a crown of thorns?

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
6 months 2 weeks ago
Amongst so many borrowed things, I...

Amongst so many borrowed things, I am glad if I can steal one, disguising and altering it for some new service.

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Book III, Ch. 12. Of Physiognomy
Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
5 months 2 weeks ago
In this theater of man's life...

In this theater of man's life it is reserved only for God and angels to be lookers on.

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Francis Bacon, in The Advancement of Learning (1605) Book II, xx, 8.
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
5 months 4 days ago
To conceive a thought - just...

To conceive a thought - just one, but one that would tear the universe to pieces.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 week 5 days ago
The value of many.....
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Main Content / General
John Dewey
John Dewey
5 months 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
John Dewey
John Dewey
5 months ago
The recurrence of relations-not of elements-in...

The recurrence of relations-not of elements-in different contexts, which constitutes transposition is qualitative and hence directly experienced in perception.

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p. 219
Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
6 months 1 week ago
All men are liable to error;...

All men are liable to error; and most men are, in many points, by passion or interest, under temptation to it.

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Book IV, Ch. 20, sec. 17
Philosophical Maxims
Will Durant
Will Durant
2 months 4 weeks ago
Children and fools speak the truth;...

Children and fools speak the truth; and somehow they find happiness in their sincerity.

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Ch. 1 : Our life begins
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
5 months 4 days ago
To found a family. I think...

To found a family. I think it would have been easier for me to found an empire.

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Philosophical Maxims
Hilary Putnam
Hilary Putnam
4 months 2 weeks ago
In closing, I can only apologize...

In closing, I can only apologize for not having given any positive account of either mathematical truth or mathematical necessity. I can only say that I have not given such an account because I think that the search for such an account is a fundamental mistake. It is not that there is nothing special about mathematics; it is that, in my opinion, the investigation of mathematics must presuppose and not seek to account for the truth of mathematics. But this is the beginning of another paper and not the end of this one.

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"Truth and necessity in mathematics"
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
2 months 5 days ago
When thou art offended at any...

When thou art offended at any man's fault, forthwith turn to thyself and reflect in what manner thou doest error thyself... For by attending to this thou wilt quickly forget thy anger, if this consideration is also added, that the man is compelled; for what else could he do? or, if thou art able, take away from him the compulsion.

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X, 30
Philosophical Maxims
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
5 months 1 week ago
There is but One Principle that...

There is but One Principle that proceeds from God; and thus, in consequence of the unity of the Power, it is possible for each Individual to schematise his World of Sense in accordance with the law of that original harmony; - and every Individual, under the condition of being found on the way towards the recognition of the Imperative, must so schematise it. I might say: - Every Individual can and must, under the given condition, construct the True World of Sense, - for this indeed has beyond the universal and formal laws above deduced, no other Truth and Reality than this universal harmony.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
2 months 5 days ago
Be not as one that hath...

Be not as one that hath ten thousand years to live; death is nigh at hand: while thou livest, while thou hast time, be good.

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Meditations. iv. 17.
Philosophical Maxims
bell hooks
bell hooks
4 months 3 weeks ago
Today's fashion magazines may carry an...

Today's fashion magazines may carry an article about the dangers of anorexia while bombarding its readers with images of emaciated young bodies representing the height of beauty and desirability.

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As quoted in Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (2014), p.34
Philosophical Maxims
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