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Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
1 week 6 days ago
So that in the first place,...

So that in the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of Power after power, that ceaseth only in Death. And the cause of this is not always that a man hopes for a more intensive delight than he has already attained to, or that he cannot be content with a moderate power: but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more.

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The First Part, Chapter 11, p. 47
Philosophical Maxims
Anaxagoras
Anaxagoras
1 month 1 week ago
The Greeks follow a wrong usage...

The Greeks follow a wrong usage in speaking of coming into being and passing away; for nothing comes into being or passes away, but there is mingling and separation of things that are. So they would be right to call coming into being mixture, and passing away separation.

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Frag. B 17, quoted in John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy, (1920), Chapter 6.
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Just now
He who says he hates every...

He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery.

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K 41
Philosophical Maxims
Auguste Comte
Auguste Comte
3 weeks 4 days ago
Language forms a kind of wealth,...

Language forms a kind of wealth, which all can make use of at once without causing any diminution of the store, and which thus admits a complete community of enjoyment; for all, freely participating in the general treasure, unconsciously aid in its preservation.

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Volume II, p. 213
Philosophical Maxims
William Godwin
William Godwin
2 weeks 4 days ago
The benefit of the governed is...

The benefit of the governed is made to lie on one side and the benefit of the governors on the other.

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Book III, Chapter 9
Philosophical Maxims
Niccolò Machiavelli
Niccolò Machiavelli
1 month 4 weeks ago
A prince who is not wise...

A prince who is not wise himself will never take good advice.

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The Prince (1513), Ch. 23; translated by W. K. Marriot
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
3 weeks ago
I considerd a general War against...

I considerd a general War against Jacobins and Jacobinism, as the only possible chance of saving Europe, (and England as included in Europe) from a truly frightful revolution. ... It is my Protest against the delusion, by which some have been taught to look upon this Jacobin contest at home as an ordinary party squabble about place or Patronage; and to regard this Jacobin War abroad as a common War about Trade, or Territorial Boundaries, or about a political Balance of power among Rival or jealous States.

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Letter to the Duke of Portland (29 September 1793), quoted in P. J. Marshall and John A. Woods (eds.)
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
1 month 3 weeks ago
Have patience awhile; slanders are not...

Have patience awhile; slanders are not long-lived. Truth is the child of time; erelong she shall appear to vindicate thee.

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As quoted in Gems of Thought (1888) edited by Charles Northend
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
1 month 2 weeks ago
I know. I know that I...

I know. I know that I shall never again meet anything or anybody who will inspire me with passion. You know, it's quite a job starting to love somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment, in the very beginning, when you have to jump across a precipice: if you think about it you don't do it. I know I'll never jump again.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
1 month 2 weeks ago
Suso has even left a diagrammatic...

Suso has even left a diagrammatic picture of the relations subsisting between Godhead, triune God and creatures. In this very curious and interesting drawing a chain of manifestation connects the mysterious symbol of the Divine Ground with the three Persons of the Trinity, and the Trinity in turn is connected in a descending scale with angels and human beings. These last, as the drawing vividly shows, may make one of two choices. They can either live the life of the outer man, the life of the separative selfhood; in which case they are lost (for, in the words of the Theologia Germanica, "nothing burns in hell but the self"). Or else they can identify themselves with the inner man, in which case it becomes possible for them, as Suso shows, to ascend again, through unitive knowledge, to the Trinity and even, beyond the Trinity, to the ultimate Unity of the Divine Ground.

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Philosophical Maxims
Plutarch
Plutarch
1 month 1 week ago
When Eudæmonidas heard a philosopher arguing...

When Eudæmonidas heard a philosopher arguing that only a wise man can be a good general, "This is a wonderful speech," said he; "but he that saith it never heard the sound of trumpets."

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62 Eudæmonidas
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 week ago
A terrible thing is intelligence. It...

A terrible thing is intelligence. It tends to death as memory tends to stability. The living, the absolutely unstable, the absolutely individual, is strictly unintelligible. Logic tends to reduce everything to identities and genera, to each representation having no more than one self-same content in whatever place, time or relation it may occur to us. And there is nothing that remains for two successive moments of its existence. My idea of God is different each time that I conceive it. Identity, which is death, is the goal of the intellect. The mind seeks what is dead, for what is living escapes it; it seeks to congeal the flowing stream in blocks of ice; it seeks to arrest it. In order to analyze a body it is necessary to extenuate or destroy it. In order to understand anything it is necessary to kill it, to lay it out rigid in the mind.

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Philosophical Maxims
Georg Büchner
Georg Büchner
2 weeks 6 days ago
Raise your eyes and count the...

Raise your eyes and count the small gang of your oppressors who are only strong through the blood they suck from you and through your arms which you lend them unwillingly.

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Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
1 month 2 weeks ago
No concrete test of what is...

No concrete test of what is really true has ever been agreed upon.

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"The Will to Believe" p. 15
Philosophical Maxims
Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale
2 days ago
Though he made a joke when...

Though he made a joke when asked to do the right thing, he always did it. He was so much more in earnest than he appeared. He did not do himself justice.

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On Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, as quoted in Victorian England : Aspects of English and Imperial History, 1837-1901 (1973) by Lewis Charles Bernard Seaman, p. 108
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 weeks 2 days ago
Anyone who speaks in the name...

Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor.

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Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
1 month 3 weeks ago
Beauty is no quality in things...

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others.

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Part I, Essay 23: Of The Standard of Taste
Philosophical Maxims
Averroes
Averroes
2 months 1 week ago
Philosophers do not claim that God...

Philosophers do not claim that God does not know particulars; they rather claim that He does not know them the way humans do. God knows particulars as their Creator whereas humans know them as a privileged creations of God might know them.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henri Bergson
Henri Bergson
1 week 6 days ago
The spectacle of what religions have...

The spectacle of what religions have been in the past, of what certain religions still are to-day, is indeed humiliating for human intelligence. What a farrago of error and folly!'

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Chapter II : Static Religion
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
1 month 4 weeks ago
Let us not flutter too high,...

Let us not flutter too high, but remain by the manger and the swaddling clothes of Christ, in whom dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.

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50
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Buber
Martin Buber
1 week 4 days ago
The concept of guilt is found...

The concept of guilt is found most powerfully developed even in the most primitive communal forms which we know: ... the man is guilty who violates one of the original laws which dominate the society and which are mostly derived from a divine founder; the boy who is accepted into the tribal community and learns its laws, which bind him thenceforth, learns to promise; this promise is often given under the sign of death, which is symbolically carried out on the boy, with a symbolical rebirth.

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p. 178
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Browne
Thomas Browne
3 weeks 5 days ago
A Dialogue between two Infants in...

A Dialogue between two Infants in the womb concerning the state of this world, might handsomely illustrate our ignorance of the next, whereof methinks we yet discourse in Plato's Den, and are but Embryon Philosophers.

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Chapter IV
Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
2 months 6 days ago
Christ's whole body groans in pain....

Christ's whole body groans in pain. Until the end of the world, when pain will pass away, this man groans and cries to God. And each one of us has part in the cry of that whole body. Thou didst cry out in thy day, and thy days have passed away; another took thy place and cried out in his day. Thou here, he there, and another there. The body of Christ ceases not to cry out all the day, one member replacing the other whose voice is hushed. Thus there is but one man who reaches unto the end of time, and those that cry are always His members.

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p.423
Philosophical Maxims
William Godwin
William Godwin
2 weeks 4 days ago
A common mortal periodically selected by...

A common mortal periodically selected by his fellow-citizens to watch over their own interests, can never be supposed to possess this stupendous virtue.

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Book III, Chapter 9
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
1 month 3 weeks ago
The application of algebra to geometry......

The application of algebra to geometry... far more than any of his metaphysical speculations, has immortalized the name of Descartes, and constitutes the greatest single step ever made in the progress of the exact sciences.

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An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (1865) as quoted in 5th ed. (1878) p. 617.
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1 month 2 weeks ago
The stars awaken a certain reverence,...

The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood.

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Nature
Philosophical Maxims
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
2 weeks 6 days ago
Humanity may endure the loss of...

Humanity may endure the loss of everything: all its possessions may be torn away without infringing its true dignity; - all but the possibility of improvement.

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"The Vocation of the Scholar" (1794), as translated by William Smith, in The Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889), Vol. I, Lecture IV, p. 188.
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
3 weeks 4 days ago
Each man is....
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Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 week ago
And thus the soul pities God...

And thus the soul pities God and feels itself pitied by him; loves Him and feels loved by Him, sheltering its misery in the bosom of the eternal and infinite misery, which, in eternalizing itself and infinitizing itself, is the supreme happiness itself.

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Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
1 month 3 weeks ago
Nature has pointed out a mixed...

Nature has pointed out a mixed kind of life as most suitable to the human race, and secretly admonished them to allow none of these biases to draw too much, so as to incapacitate them for other occupations and entertainments. Indulge your passion for science, says she, but let your science be human, and such as may have a direct reference to action and society. Abstruse thought and profound researches I prohibit, and will severely punish, by the pensive melancholy which they introduce, by the endless uncertainty in which they involve you, and by the cold reception which your pretended discoveries shall meet with, when communicated. Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.

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Section 1 : Of The Different Species of Philosophy
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
1 month 3 weeks ago
Political Economy regards the proletarian ......

Political Economy regards the proletarian ... like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being. It leaves this to criminal law, doctors, religion, statistical tables, politics, and the beadle. ... (1) What is the meaning, in the development of mankind, of this reduction of the greater part of mankind to abstract labor? (2) What mistakes are made by the piecemeal reformers, who either want to raise wages and thereby improve the situation of the working class, or - like Proudhon - see equality of wages as the goal of social revolution?.

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First Manuscript - Wages of Labour, p. 6.
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
2 months 2 weeks ago
Query: How to contrive not to...

Query: How to contrive not to waste one's time? Answer: By being fully aware of it all the while. Ways in which this can be done: By spending one's days on an uneasy chair in a dentist's waiting room; by remaining on one's balcony all a Sunday afternoon; by travelling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by queueing at the box-office of theatres and then not booking a seat.

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Philosophical Maxims
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal
2 months 3 days ago
All the excesses, all the violence,...

All the excesses, all the violence, and all the vanity of great men, come from the fact that they know not what they are: it being difficult for those who regard themselves at heart as equal with all men... For this it is necessary for one to forget himself, and to believe that he has some real excellence above them, in which consists this illusion that I am endeavoring to discover to you.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 weeks 2 days ago
Were we to undertake an exhaustive...

Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence.

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Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
3 weeks 4 days ago
Jews are angry and brutish people,...

Jews are angry and brutish people, vile and vulgar men, slaves worthy of the yoke [Talmudism] which you bear... Go, take back your books and remove yourselves from me. [ The Talmud ] taught the Jews to steal the goods of Christians, to regard them as savage beasts, to push them over the precipice... to kill them with impunity and to utter every morning the most horrible imprecations against them.

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See The Jews: A History, Second Edition, by John Efron, Steven Weitzman and Matthias Lehmann
Philosophical Maxims
John Dewey
John Dewey
1 week 5 days ago
Genuine time, if it exists as...

Genuine time, if it exists as anything else except the measure of motions in space, is all one with the existence of individuals as individuals, with the creative, with the occurrence of unpredictable novelties. Everything that can be said contrary to this conclusion is but a reminder that an individual may lose his individuality, for individuals become imprisoned in routine and fall to the level of mechanisms. Genuine time then ceases to be an integral element of their being. Our behavior becomes predictable, because it is but an external rearrangement of what went before.

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Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
2 months 2 weeks ago
There is no fate that can...

There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn. If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning.

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Philosophical Maxims
George Santayana
George Santayana
1 week 6 days ago
Never since the heroic days of...

Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master.

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"The British Character"
Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
1 month 3 weeks ago
To free a man from error...

To free a man from error is to give, not to take away. Knowledge that a thing is false is a truth. Error always does harm; sooner or later it will bring mischief to the man who harbors it. Then give up deceiving people; confess ignorance of what you don't know, and leave everyone to form his own articles of faith for himself. Perhaps they won't turn out so bad, especially as they'll rub one another's corners down, and mutually rectify mistakes. The existence of many views will at any rate lay a foundation of tolerance. Those who possess knowledge and capacity may betake themselves to the study of philosophy, or even in their own persons carry the history of philosophy a step further.

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"Religion: A Dialogue." Variant translation: To free a man from error does not mean to take something from him, but to give him something.
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
1 month 3 weeks ago
Enthusiasm is supernatural serenity. Pearls of...

Enthusiasm is supernatural serenity.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 74
Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
2 weeks 3 days ago
It is a woman's outstanding characteristic...

It is a woman's outstanding characteristic that she can do anything for the love of a man. But those women who can achieve something important for the love of a thing are most exceptional, because this does not really agree with their nature. Love for a thing is a man's prerogative. But since masculine and feminine elements are united in our human nature, a man can live in the feminine part of himself, I and a woman in her masculine part. None the less the feminine element in man is only something in the background, as is the masculine element in woman. If one lives out the opposite sex in oneself one is living in one's own background, and one's real individuality suffers. A man should live as a man and a woman as a woman.

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P. 243
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Just now
Much reading has brought upon us...

Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism.

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F 144
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
2 months 3 weeks ago
It is not enough to prove...
It is not enough to prove something, one has also to seduce or elevate people to it. That is why the man of knowledge should learn how to speak his wisdom: and often in such a way that it sounds like folly!
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Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 week ago
The work of charity, of the...

The work of charity, of the love of God, is to endeavor to to liberate God from brute matter, to endeavor to give consciousness to everything, to spiritualize or universalize everything; it is to dream that the very rocks may find a voice and work in accordance with the spirit of this dream; it is to dream that everything that exists may become conscious, that the Word may become life.

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Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Just now
If people should ever start to...

If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger.

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C 54 Variant translation: If all mankind were suddenly to practice honesty, many thousands of people would be sure to starve.
Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
2 weeks 3 days ago
The great decisions of human life...

The great decisions of human life have as a rule far more to do with the instincts and other mysterious unconscious factors than with conscious will and well-meaning reasonableness. The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. Each of us carries his own life-form-an indeterminable form which cannot be superseded by any other.

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p. 69
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
3 days ago
Thinking men and women the world...

Thinking men and women the world over are beginning to realize that patriotism is too narrow and limited a conception to meet the necessities of our time.

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Philosophical Maxims
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
1 month 3 weeks ago
That man should think of God...

That man should think of God as nothingness must at first sight seem astonishing, must appear to us a most peculiar idea. But, considered more closely, this determination means that God is absolutely nothing determined. He is the Undetermined; no determinateness of any kind pertains to God; He is the Infinite. This is equivalent to saying that God is the negation of all particularity.

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Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Lectures on the philosophy of religion, together with a work on the proofs of the existence of God. Vol 2 Translated from the 2d German ed. 1895 Ebenezer Brown Speirs 1854-1900, and J Burdon Sanderson p. 51
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
1 month 2 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
William Godwin
William Godwin
2 weeks 4 days ago
The pistol and dagger may as...

The pistol and dagger may as easily be made the auxiliaries of vice, as of virtue.

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Book IV, "Of Tyrannicide"
Philosophical Maxims
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