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Henri Poincaré
Henri Poincaré
4 weeks 1 day ago
There is no science apart from...

There is no science apart from the general. It may even be said that the very object of the exact sciences is to spare us these direct verifications.

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Ch. I. (1905) Tr. George Bruce Halstead
Philosophical Maxims
Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch
2 months 3 weeks ago
The chief requirement of the good...

The chief requirement of the good life... is to live without any image of oneself.

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The Bell (1958), ch. 9; 2001, p. 119.
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Boyle
Robert Boyle
1 day ago
Epicurus... supposes not only all mixt...

Epicurus... supposes not only all mixt bodies, but all others to be produced by the various and casual occursions of atoms, moving themselves to and fro by an internal principle in the immense or rather infinite vacuum.

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Carneades speaking
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
4 months 1 week ago
Every man bears...

Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.

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Ch. 2
Philosophical Maxims
Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus
4 months 2 weeks ago
As to the people; in all...

As to the people; in all these countries the greater part of the people certainly detest war, and most devoutly wish for peace. A very few of them, indeed, whose unnatural happiness depends upon the public misery, may wish for war; but be it yours to decide, whether it is equitable or not, that the unprincipled selfishness of such wretches should have more weight than the anxious wishes of all good men united.

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Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
4 months 1 week ago
Even if a civil society were...

Even if a civil society were to be dissolved by the consent of all its members (e.g., if a people inhabiting an island decided to separate and disperse throughout the world), the last murderer remaining in prison would first have to be executed, so that each has done to him what his deeds deserve and blood guilt does not cling to the people for not having insisted upon this punishment; for otherwise the people can be regarded as collaborators in his public violation of justice.

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Kt6:333
Philosophical Maxims
Vandana Shiva
Vandana Shiva
1 month 2 weeks ago
Those least responsible for climate change...

Those least responsible for climate change are worst affected by it.

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Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 6 days ago
New truth is often uncomfortable, especially...

New truth is often uncomfortable, especially to the holders of power; nevertheless, amid the long record of cruelty and bigotry, it is the most important achievement of our intelligent but wayward species.

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Religion and Science (1935), Ch. X: Conclusion
Philosophical Maxims
Judith Butler
Judith Butler
2 months 1 week ago
To say that a life is...

To say that a life is grievable is to claim that a life, even before it is lost, is, or will be, worthy of being grieved on the occasion of its loss; the life has value in relation to mortality. One treats a person differently if one brings the sense of the grievability of the other to one's ethical bearing toward the other. If an other's loss would register as a loss, would be marked and mourned, and if the prospect of loss is feared, and precautions are thus taken to safeguard that life from harm or destruction, then our very ability to value and safeguard a life depends upon an ongoing sense of its grievability-the conjectured future of a life as an indefinite potential that would be mourned were it cut short or lost.

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p. 75
Philosophical Maxims
Ian Hacking
Ian Hacking
2 months 1 week ago
Much early alchemy seems to have...

Much early alchemy seems to have been adventure. You heated and mixed and burnt and pounded and to see what would happen. An adventure might suggest an hypothesis that can subsequently be tested, but adventure is prior to theory.

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Chapter 4, Evidence, p. 36.
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
5 days ago
To preserve the freedom of the...

To preserve the freedom of the human mind then and freedom of the press, every spirit should be ready to devote itself to martyrdom; for as long as we may think as we will, and speak as we think, the condition of man will proceed in improvement. The generation which is going off the stage has deserved well of mankind for the struggles it has made, and for having arrested the course of despotism which had overwhelmed the world for thousands and thousands of years. If there seems to be danger that the ground they have gained will be lost again, that danger comes from the generation your contemporary. But that the enthusiasm which characterizes youth should lift its parricide hands against freedom and science would be such a monstrous phenomenon as I cannot place among possible things in this age and country.

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Letter to William Green Mumford
Philosophical Maxims
Novalis
Novalis
3 months 2 days ago
The true Poet is all-knowing; he...

The true Poet is all-knowing; he is an actual world in miniature.

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Philosophical Maxims
Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry
5 days ago
We need to confront honestly the...

We need to confront honestly the issue of scale. Bigness has a charm and a drama that are seductive, especially to politicians and financiers; but bigness promotes greed, indifference, and damage, and often bigness is not necessary. You may need a large corporation to run an airline or to manufacture cars, but you don't need a large corporation to raise a chicken or a hog. You don't need a large corporation to process local food or local timber and market it locally.

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"Compromise, Hell!"
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
2 months 3 days ago
At the speed of light there...

At the speed of light there is no sequence; everything happens at the same instant.

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Philosophical Maxims
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
1 month 2 weeks ago
There are no signposts in the...

There are no signposts in the sky to show a man has passed that way before. There are no channels marked. The flier breaks each second into new uncharted seas.

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North to the Orient (1935) Ch. 1
Philosophical Maxims
chanakya
chanakya
1 month 2 weeks ago
We should always speak what would...

We should always speak what would please the man of whom we expect a favour, like the hunter who sings sweetly when he desires to shoot a deer.

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Philosophical Maxims
Heraclitus
Heraclitus
4 months 3 weeks ago
War is the father and king...

War is the father and king of all: some he has made gods, and some men; some slaves and some free.

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Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
4 months 1 week ago
Every sensible man…

Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror.

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Examen important de milord Bolingbroke (1736): Conclusion
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
4 months 5 days ago
The economic concept of value does...

The economic concept of value does not occur in antiquity.

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Notebook VII, The Chapter on Capital, p. 696.
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
2 days ago
Does anything genuinely beautiful need supplementing?...

Does anything genuinely beautiful need supplementing? No more than justice does-or truth, or kindness, or humility. Are any of those improved by being praised? Or damaged by contempt? Is an emerald suddenly flawed if no one admires it? Or gold, or ivory, or purple? Lyres? Knives? Flowers? Bushes?

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(Hays translation) IV, 20
Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
4 months 6 days ago
We, on the contrary, now send...

We, on the contrary, now send to the Brahmans English clergymen and evangelical linen-weavers, in order out of sympathy to put them right, and to point out to them that they are created out of nothing, and that they ought to be grateful and pleased about it. But it is Just the same as if we fired a bullet at a cliff. " In India, our religions wIll never at any time take root; the ancient wisdom of the human race will not be supplanted by the events in Galilee. On the contrary, Indian Wisdom flows back to Europe, and will produce a fundamental change in our knowledge and thought.

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Schopenhauer, Arthur The world as will and representation. Translated from the German by E. F. J. Payne. New York, Dover Publications [c1969 - Volume I, & 63 p. 356-357. quoted in Londhe, S. (2008).
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
2 months 3 weeks ago
O faithless and perverse generation, how...

O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? how long shall I suffer you? bring him hither to me.

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17:17 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 months 1 day ago
The premonition of madness is complicated...

The premonition of madness is complicated by the fear of lucidity in madness, the fear of the moments of return and reunion, when the intuition of disaster is so painful that it almost provokes a greater madness. One would welcome chaos if one were not afraid of lights in it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
4 months 1 week ago
The most profound joy has more...

The most profound joy has more of gravity than of gaiety in it.

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Book II, Ch. 20
Philosophical Maxims
William Kingdon Clifford
William Kingdon Clifford
5 days ago
By scientific thought we mean the...

By scientific thought we mean the application of past experience to new circumstances by means of an observed order of events. By saying that this order of events is exact we mean that it is exact enough to correct experiments by, but we do not mean that it is theoretically or absolutely exact, because we do not know. The process of inference [is] in itself an assumption of uniformity, and... as the known exactness of the uniformity became greater, the stringency of the inference [is] increased. By saying that the order of events is reasonable we do not mean that everything has a purpose, or that everything can be explained, or that everything has a cause; for neither of these is true. But we mean that to every reasonable question there is an intelligible answer, which either we or posterity may know by the exercise of scientific thought.

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155-156.
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 months 1 day ago
The poor maidservant who used to...

The poor maidservant who used to say that she only believed in God when she had a toothache puts all theologians to shame.

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Philosophical Maxims
bell hooks
bell hooks
2 months 2 weeks ago
My thoughts have been shaped by...

My thoughts have been shaped by the conviction that feminism must become a mass based political movement if it is to have a revolutionary, transformative impact on society.

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p. xiii.
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Buber
Martin Buber
2 months 3 weeks ago
To win a truly great life...

To win a truly great life for the people of Israel, a great peace is necessary, not a fictitious peace, the dwarfish peace that is no more than a feeble intermission, but a true peace with the neighboring peoples, which alone can render possible a common development of this portion of the earth as the vanguard of the awakening Near East.

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"Our Reply" (September 1945), as published in A Land of Two Peoples : Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs (1983) edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr, p. 178
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
4 months 5 days ago
Since the state must necessarily provide...

Since the state must necessarily provide subsistence for the criminal poor while undergoing punishment, not to do the same for the poor who have not offended is to give a premium on crime.

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Book V, Chapter XI, §13
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 6 days ago
For my part, while I am...

For my part, while I am as convinced a Socialist as the most ardent Marxian, I do not regard Socialism as a gospel of proletarian revenge, nor even, primarily, as a means of securing economic justice. I regard it primarily as an adjustment to machine production demanded by considerations of common sense, and calculated to increase the happiness, not only of proletarians, but of all except a tiny minority of the human race.

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Ch. 7: The Case for Socialism
Philosophical Maxims
Edward Said
Edward Said
2 months 2 weeks ago
It isn't at all a matter...

It isn't at all a matter of being optimistic, but rather of continuing to have faith in the ongoing and literally unending process of emancipation and enlightenment that, in my opinion, frames and gives direction to the intellectual vocation.

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Preface to 25th anniversary edition of Orientalism (1994), p. xv
Philosophical Maxims
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
2 months 3 weeks ago
The quality of the human that...

The quality of the human that precludes identifying the individual with the class is 'metaphysical' and has no place in empiricist epistemology. The pigeon hole into which a man is shoved circumscribes his fate.

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p. 23.
Philosophical Maxims
Julius Evola
Julius Evola
1 week 6 days ago
The blood of the heroes is...

The blood of the heroes is closer to God than the ink of the philosophers and the prayers of the faithful.

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Philosophical Maxims
Francis Fukuyama
Francis Fukuyama
1 month ago
So this is something... we see...

So this is something... we see happening... in the war in Ukraine. A lot of people raise the question, "Why are Ukrainians resisting the Russian invasion as ferociously as they are?" and there's been a little bit of a debate over whether this is due to the fact that Ukrain is democratic, a liberal democracy, and Russia is not, or whether it's simply a fight over sovereignty... I think that that's a false dichotomy because you really don't fight for liberalism as an abstract principle. You fight for it as it is embedded in... your nation... From my... frequent visits to Ukraine... I believe... that's what's really going on, that Ukrainians want their sovereignty, but the reason they want it so desperately is that they want to have a free Ukraine and not Putin's Ukraine, not a... centralized dictatorship, and that's why they're willing to fight so tenaciously.

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25:44:00
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 week 2 days ago
The ontological concept....
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Voltaire
Voltaire
4 months 1 week ago
Define your terms…

Define your terms, you will permit me again to say, or we shall never understand one another.

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"Miracles", 1764
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
5 months 2 days ago
I don't believe in flying saucers......

I don't believe in flying saucers... The energy requirements of interstellar travel are so great that it is inconceivable to me that any creatures piloting their ships across the vast depths of space would do so only in order to play games with us over a period of decades.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
4 months 5 days ago
Man exists for his own sake...

Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the state.

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November 15, 1839
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
2 months 2 weeks ago
Nothing is more impressive than the...

Nothing is more impressive than the fact that as mathematics withdrew increasingly into the upper regions of ever greater extremes of abstract thought, it returned back to earth with a corresponding growth of importance for the analysis of concrete fact. ...The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact.

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Ch. 2: "Mathematics as an Element in the History of Thought", p. 46
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
4 months ago
I believe it might interest...

I believe it might interest a philosopher, one who can think himself, to read my notes. For even if I have hit the mark only rarely, he would recognize what targets I had been ceaselessly aiming at.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
4 months ago
Someone who knows too much finds...

Someone who knows too much finds it hard not to lie.

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p. 64e
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
2 months 1 day ago
To this day, and in quarters...

To this day, and in quarters where they should know better, Darwinism is widely regarded as a theory of 'chance'.It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that, if Darwinism were really a theory of chance, it couldn't work. You don't need to be a mathematician or physicist to calculate that an eye or a haemoglobin molecule would take from here to infinity to self-assemble by sheer higgledy-piggledy luck. Far from being a difficulty peculiar to Darwinism, the astronomic improbability of eyes and knees, enzymes and elbow joints and the other living wonders is precisely the problem that any theory of life must solve, and that Darwinism uniquely does solve.

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Chapter 3, "The Message from the Mountain" (p. 77)
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
5 months 6 days ago
Old age realizes the dreams of...

Old age realizes the dreams of youth: look at Dean Swift; in his youth he built an asylum for the insane, in his old age he was himself an inmate.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
2 months 3 days ago
It is experience, rather than understanding,...

It is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behaviour.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
3 months 4 weeks ago
The problem is not to discover...

The problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of one's sex, but, rather, to use one's sexuality henceforth to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships. And, no doubt, homosexuality is not a form of desire but something desirable. Therefore, we have to work at becoming homosexuals.

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"Friendship as a Way of Life," interview in Gai pied, April 1981, as translated in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth (1994), pp. 135-136
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
4 months 4 days ago
'The Spirit of the Age wishes...

The Spirit of the Age wishes to allow argument and not to allow argument. ... If anyone argues with them they say that he is rationalizing his own desires, and therefore need not be answered. But if anyone listens to them they will then argue themselves to show that their own doctrines are true. ... You must ask them whether any reasoning is valid or not. If they say no, then their own doctrines, being reached by reasoning, fall to the ground. If they say yes, then they will have to examine your arguments and refute them on their merits: for if some reasoning is valid, for all they know, your bit of reasoning may be one of the valid bits.'

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Pilgrim's Regress 63
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
3 weeks 5 days ago
It is a most earnest thing...

It is a most earnest thing to be alive in this world; to die is not sport for a man. Man's life never was a sport to him; it was a stern reality, altogether a serious matter to be alive!

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Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
3 months 5 days ago
Strange incongruities....

Strange incongruities must ever perplex those, who confound the unhappiness of civil dissensions with the crime of treason.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
2 months 1 day ago
4 ways...

4 ways: Agnosticism, Relativism, Amorality, Morality. 

1) I don't know. 2) Everybody is different. 3) Do whatever you can. 4) Do what you should.

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Philosophical Maxims
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
3 months 5 days ago
The plea of anger or of...

The plea of anger or of drunkenness - as having placed the criminal for the moment beyond the control of his reason - relieves him from the charge of premeditated and malicious intent; but a rational legislation will rather provide more severe than milder punishment for such cases, particularly if such a state of mind is habitual with the accused; for a single unlawful act may well constitute an exception from an otherwise blameless life. But a person who pleads, "I habitually get so angry or so drunk as not to be any longer master of my senses!" confesses thereby that he changes himself into a beast on a fixed principle, and that he is, therefore, not fit to live among rational beings.

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P. 351
Philosophical Maxims
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