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Montesquieu
Montesquieu
1 month 1 week ago
Christians are beginning to lose the...

Christians are beginning to lose the spirit of intolerance which animated them: experience has shown the error of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and of the persecution of those Christians in France whose belief differed a little from that of the king. They have realized that zeal for the advancement of religion is different from a due attachment to it; and that in order to love it and fulfill its behests, it is not necessary to hate and persecute those who are opposed to it.

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No. 60. (Usbek writing to Ibben)
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Schlegel
Friedrich Schlegel
1 month 3 weeks ago
The doctrine of the transmigration of...

The doctrine of the transmigration of souls was indigenous to India and was brought into Greece by Pythagoras.

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quoted in Londhe, S. (2008). A tribute to Hinduism: Thoughts and wisdom spanning continents and time about India and her culture. New Delhi: Pragun Publication.
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
1 month 3 weeks ago
It is no longer a question...

It is no longer a question anywhere of inventing interconnections from out of our brains, but of discovering them in the facts.

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Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
2 months 3 weeks ago
A man will be imprisoned in...

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push it.

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p. 42e
Philosophical Maxims
bell hooks
bell hooks
1 month 1 week ago
Open, honest, truth-telling individuals value privacy....

Open, honest, truth-telling individuals value privacy. We all need spaces where we can be alone with thoughts and feelings - where we can experience healthy psychological autonomy and can choose to share when we want to.

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All About Love: New Visions
Philosophical Maxims
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
1 month 1 week ago
Depression is a narcissistic malady.

Depression is a narcissistic malady.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine
2 months 4 weeks ago
Why has the Revolution of France...

Why has the Revolution of France been stained with crimes, which the Revolution of the United States of America was not? Men are physically the same in all countries; it is education that makes them different. Accustom a people to believe that priests or any other class of men can forgive sins, and you will have sins in abundance.

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Worship and Church Bells, 1797
Philosophical Maxims
Niccolò Machiavelli
Niccolò Machiavelli
3 months 4 days ago
This return of Republics back to...

This return of Republics back to their principles also results from the simple virtue of one man, without depending on any law that excites him to any execution: none the less, they are of such influence and example that good men desire to imitate him, and the wicked are ashamed to lead a life contrary to those examples.

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Book 3, Ch. 1
Philosophical Maxims
John Dewey
John Dewey
1 month 2 weeks ago
The animating purpose of James was,...

The animating purpose of James was, on the other hand, primarily moral and artistic. It is expressed in his phrase, "block universe," employed as a term of adverse criticism. Mechanism and idealism were abhorrent to him because they both hold to a closed universe in which there is no room for novelty and adventure. Both sacrifice individuality and all the values, moral and aesthetic, which hang upon individuality; for according to absolute idealism, as to mechanistic materialism, the individual is simply a part determined by the whole of which he is a part. Only a philosophy of pluralism, of genuine indetermination, and of change which is real and intrinsic gives significance to individuality. It alone justifies struggle in creative activity and gives opportunity for the emergence of the genuinely new.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
2 months 4 weeks ago
The next thing is by gentle...

The next thing is by gentle degrees to accustom children to those things they are too much afraid of. But here great caution is to be used, that you do not make too much haste, nor attempt this cure too early, for fear lest you increase the mischief instead of remedying it.

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Sec. 115
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
2 months 3 weeks ago
The condemned man found himself transformed...

The condemned man found himself transformed into a hero by the sheer extend of his widely advertised crimes, and sometimes the affirmation of his belated repentance. Against the law, against the rich, the powerful, the magistrates, the constabulary or the watch, against taxes and their collectors, he appeared to have waged a struggle with which one all too easily identified. The proclamation of these crimes blew up to epic proportions the tiny struggle that passed unperceived in everyday life. If the condemned man was shown to be repentant, accepting the verdict, asking both God and man for forgiveness for his crimes, it was as if he had come through some process of purification: he died, in his own way, like a saint.

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Chapter One: The Spectacle of the scaffold, pp. 67
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
2 months 3 weeks ago
Our elucidations of the preliminary concept...

Our elucidations of the preliminary concept of phenomenology show that its essential character does not consist in its actuality as a philosophical "movement." Higher than actuality stands possibility. We can understand phenomenology solely by seizing upon it as a possibility.

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Introduction: The Exposition of the Question of the Meaning of Being (Stambaugh translation)
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 3 weeks ago
There is no one whose death...

There is no one whose death I have not longed for, at one moment or another.

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Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
2 months 3 weeks ago
In modern eyes, precious though wars...

In modern eyes, precious though wars may be they must not be waged solely for the sake of the ideal harvest. Only when forced upon one, is a war now thought permissible. It was not thus in ancient times. The earlier men were hunting men, and to hunt a neighboring tribe, kill the males, loot the village and possess the females, was the most profitable, as well as the most exciting, way of living. Thus were the more martial tribes selected, and in chiefs and peoples a pure pugnacity and love of glory came to mingle with the more fundamental appetite for plunder. Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to plunder; but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors. Showing war's irrationality and horror is of no effect on him. The horrors make the fascination. War is the strong life; it is life in extremis; war taxes are the only ones men never hesitate to pay, as the budgets of all nations show us.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 3 weeks ago
But where is the antidote for...

But where is the antidote for lucid despair, perfectly articulated, proud, and sure? All of us are miserable, but how many know it? The consciousness of misery is too serious a disease to figure in an arithmetic of agonies or in the catalogues of the Incurable. It belittles the prestige of hell, and converts the slaughterhouses of time into idyls. What sin have you committed to be born, what crime to exist? Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle. . .

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Philosophical Maxims
Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch
1 month 2 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
Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek
7 months 2 days ago
The cynical subject

In the Critique of Cynical Reasoning, a great bestseller in Germany (Sloterdijk, 1983), Peter Sloterdijk puts forward the thesis that ideology's dominant mode of functioning is cynical which renders impossible - or, more precisely, vain - the classical critical-ideological procedure. The cynical subject is quite aware of the distance between the ideological mask and the social reality, but he none the less still insists upon the mask.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
2 months 3 weeks ago
Philosophy may in no way interfere...

Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it.

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§ 124
Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
3 months 1 week ago
Christ is not valued at all...

Christ is not valued at all unless He be valued above all.

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p. 395
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
2 months 4 weeks ago
I am an investigator by inclination....

I am an investigator by inclination. I feel a great thirst for knowledge and an impatient eagerness to advance, also satisfaction at each progressive step. There was a time when I thought that all this could constitute the honor of humanity, and I despised the mob, which knows nothing about it. Rousseau set me straight. This dazzling excellence vanishes; I learn to honor men, and would consider myself much less useful than common laborers if I did not believe that this consideration could give all the others a value, to establish the rights of humanity.

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Part III : Selection on Education from Kant's other Writings, Ch. I Pedagogical Fragments, # 55
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
1 month 2 weeks ago
Ye do err, not knowing the...

Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven. But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.

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22:29-32 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
3 months 3 weeks ago
I do not know, my listener,...

I do not know, my listener, what your crime, your guilt, your sins are, but surely we are all more or less of the guilt of loving only little. Take comfort, then, in these words just as I take comfort in them.

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Philosophical Maxims
David Pearce
David Pearce
5 days ago
It is hard to imagine an...

It is hard to imagine an experience more horrific than being eaten alive. Most of us would prefer not to imagine what it must feel like. Note that the photographer here had to persuade the park ranger to violate the park rules and put the baby elephant out of his misery.By analogy, suppose it were lawful to visit Third World countries for photoshoots but illegal to "interfere" and help a stricken human baby. Is there a fundamental difference between "ethical" intervention to help humans and "sentimental" pleas to "interfere" and help non-humans? Should we encourage the preservation of life-forms such as the hyena in their current guise? Or do the value judgements underlying the "science" of conservation biology need to be re-examined?

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"Hyenas Eat Baby Elephant Alive: The Case for Intervention"
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
2 months 3 weeks ago
The man described for us, whom...

The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence...the soul is the effect and instrument of political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
3 months 4 days ago
Let no man..

Let no man be ashamed to speak what he is not ashamed to think.

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Book III, Ch. 4
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 3 weeks ago
Nor mourn the unalterable Days That...

Nor mourn the unalterable Days That Genius goes and Folly stays.

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In Memoriam E. B. E., st. 9
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
2 months 3 weeks ago
The South has conquered nothing -...

The South has conquered nothing - but a graveyard.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida
2 months 3 weeks ago
As soon as we cease to...

As soon as we cease to believe in such an engineer and in a discourse which breaks with the received historical discourse, and as soon as we admit that every finite discourse is bound by a certain bricolage and that the engineer and the scientist are also species of bricoleurs, then the very idea of bricolage is menaced and the difference in which it took on its meaning breaks down.

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"Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," Writing and Difference, tr. w/ intro & notes by Alan Bass. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago, 1978. p. 285
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
2 months 3 weeks ago
No production without a need. But...

No production without a need. But consumption reproduces the need.

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Introduction, p. 12.
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 day ago
I am as firmly...
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Main Content / General
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
3 weeks 5 days ago
Those attacks upon language and religion...

Those attacks upon language and religion in Poland, the Baltic provinces, Alsace, Bohemia, upon the Jews in Russia, in every place that such acts of violence occur-in what name have they been, and are they, perpetrated? In none other than the name of that patriotism which you defend. Ask our savage Russifiers of Poland and the Baltic provinces, ask the persecutors of the Jews, why they act thus. They will tell you it is in defence of their native religion and language; they will tell you that if they do not act thus, their religion and language will suffer-the Russians will be Polonised, Teutonised, Judaised.

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A Reply to Criticisms
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
3 months 3 weeks ago
Who is to blame but her...

Who is to blame but her and the third factor, from whence no one knows, which moved me with its stimulus and transformed me? After all, what I have done is praised in others.-Or is becoming a poet my compensation? I reject all compensation, I demand my rights-that is, my honor. I did not ask to become one, I will not buy it at this price. – Or if I am guilty, then I certainly should be able to repent of my guilt and make it good again. Tell me how. On top of that, must I perhaps repent that the world plays with me as a child plays with a beetle?-Or is it perhaps best to forget the whole thing? Forget-indeed, I shall have ceased to be if I forget it. Or what kind of life would it be if along with my beloved I have lost honor and pride and lost them in such a way that no one knows how it happened, for which reason I can never retrieve them again? Shall I allow myself to be shoved out in this manner? Why, then, was I shoved in?

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Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
2 months 3 weeks ago
I believe Buddhism to be a...

I believe Buddhism to be a simplification of Hinduism and Islam to be a simplification of Xianity.

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Letter to Sheldon Vanauken (14 December 1950), quoted in Sleuthing C. S. Lewis (2001) by Kathryn Ann Lindskoog, p. 393
Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
3 months 1 week ago
Do you suppose that you can...

Do you suppose that you can do the things you do now, and yet be a philosopher? Do you suppose that you can eat in the same fashion, drink in the same fashion, give way to anger and to irritation, just as you do now?

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Book III, ch. 15, 10 (= Enchiridion 29, 10).
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
1 month 2 weeks ago
Hereby it is manifest, that during...

Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that conditions called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man.

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The First Part, Chapter 13, p. 62
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
3 months 3 weeks ago
Self-education is, I firmly believe, the...

Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
3 months 3 weeks ago
Concerning the generation of animals akin...

Concerning the generation of animals akin to them, as hornets and wasps, the facts in all cases are similar to a certain extent, but are devoid of the extraordinary features which characterize bees; this we should expect, for they have nothing divine about them as the bees have.

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Philosophical Maxims
Gaston Bachelard
Gaston Bachelard
1 month 2 weeks ago
The repose of sleep refreshes only...

The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being. Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms. In the morning we must sweep out the shadows.

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Ch. 2, sect. 3
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
2 months 3 weeks ago
The speaker with whom I was...

The speaker with whom I was most struck, though I dissented from nearly every word he said, was Thirlwall, the historian, since Bishop of St. David's, then a Chancery barrister, unknown except by a high reputation for eloquence acquired at the Cambridge Union before the era of Austin and Macaulay. His speech was in answer to one of mine. Before he had uttered ten sentences, I set him down as the best speaker I had ever heard, and I have never since heard any one whom I placed above him.

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(p. 125)
Philosophical Maxims
Ptahhotep
Ptahhotep
2 months 2 weeks ago
Be a craftsman in speech that...

Be a craftsman in speech that thou mayest be strong, for the strength of one is the tongue, and speech is mightier than all fighting.

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Translated by J. H. Breasted, The Dawn of Conscience (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1933) p. 131
Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
2 months 1 day ago
Justice is the end of government....

Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been, and ever will be, pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.

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Chapter XV.
Philosophical Maxims
Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch
1 month 2 weeks ago
Love is the extremely difficult realisation...

Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.

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"The Sublime and the Good", in the Chicago Review, Vol. 13 Issue 3 (Autumn 1959) p. 51.
Philosophical Maxims
William Godwin
William Godwin
1 month 3 weeks ago
Ministers become a sort of miniature...

Ministers become a sort of miniature kings in their turn. Though they have the greatest opportunity of observing the impotence and unmeaningness of the character, they envy it. It is their trade perpetually to extol the dignity and importance of the master they serve; and men cannot long anxiously endeavor to convince others of the truth of any proposition without becoming half convinced themselves.

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Book V, Ch. 5
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 3 weeks ago
I don't need any support, advice,...

I don't need any support, advice, or compassion, because even if I am the most ruinous man, I still feel so powerful, so strong and fierce. For I am the only one that lives without hope.

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Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton
1 month ago
It seems to me, that if...

It seems to me, that if the matter of our sun and planets and all the matter of the universe, were evenly scattered throughout all the heavens, and every particle had an innate gravity towards all the rest, and the whole of space throughout which this matter was scattered was but finite, the matter on [toward] the outside of this space would, by its gravity, tend towards all the matter on the inside, and, by consequence, fall down into the middle of the whole space, and there compose one great spherical mass. But if the matter was evenly disposed throughout an infinite space it could never convene into one mass; but some of it would convene into one mass and some into another, so as to make an infinite number of great masses, scattered at great distances from one another throughout all that infinite space.

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Four Letters to Bentley (1692) first letter
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 3 weeks ago
The real, the unique misfortune...

The real, the unique misfortune: to see the light of day. A disaster which dates back to aggressiveness, to the seed of expansion and rage within origins, to the tendency to the worst which first shook them up.

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Philosophical Maxims
Antisthenes
Antisthenes
2 months 2 weeks ago
Being asked what learning is…..

Being asked what learning is the most necessary, he replied, "How to get rid of having anything to unlearn.

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" § 7
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Büchner
Georg Büchner
1 month 3 weeks ago
How many women does one need...

How many women does one need to sing the scale of love all the way up and down?

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Act I.
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
1 month 1 week ago
Those who have a spark of...

Those who have a spark of self-respect left, prefer open defiance, prefer crime to the emaciated, degraded position of poverty.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
2 months 4 weeks ago
There cannot any one moral Rule...

There cannot any one moral Rule be propos'd, whereof a Man may not justly demand a Reason.

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Book I, Ch. 3, sec. 4
Philosophical Maxims
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