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Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
3 months 3 weeks ago
It appears to me to be...

It appears to me to be indisputable that he who I am to-day derives, by a continuous series of states of consciousness, from him who was in my body twenty years ago. Memory is the basis of individual personality, just as tradition is the basis of the collective personality of a people. We live in memory, and our spiritual life is at bottom simply the effort of our memory to persist, to transform itself into hope, the effort of our past to transform itself into our future.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
5 months 2 days ago
Science does not rest upon solid...

Science does not rest upon solid bedrock. The bold structure of its theories arises, as it were, above a swamp. It is like a building erected on piles. The piles are driven down from above into the swamp, but not down to any natural or 'given' base; and if we stop driving the piles deeper, it is not because we have reached firm ground. We simply stop when we are satisfied that the piles are firm enough to carry the structure, at least for the time being.

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Ch. 5 "The Problem of the Empirical Basis", Section 30: Theory and Experiment, p. 94.
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
6 months 6 days ago
This is the mistake which I...
This is the mistake which I seem to make eternally, that I imagine the sufferings of others as far greater than they really are. Ever since my childhood, the proposition, my greatest dangers lie in pity, has been confirmed again and again.
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Philosophical Maxims
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
2 months 3 weeks ago
Everybody needs his memories. They keep...

Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.

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Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970) [Penguin Classics, 2004, ISBN 0-142-43783-2], p. 156
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig von Mises
Ludwig von Mises
1 month 2 weeks ago
Credit expansion can bring about a...

Credit expansion can bring about a temporary boom. But such a fictitious prosperity must end in a general depression of trade, a slump.

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Philosophical Maxims
Nikos Kazantzakis
Nikos Kazantzakis
1 month 4 days ago
One day our Sodom and Gomorrah...

One day our Sodom and Gomorrah would be trampled by some all-powerful foot, and this world which laughed, reveled, and forgot God would be transformed, in its turn, into a Dead Sea. At the end of every period God's foot comes along in this way and tramples the cities of the overindulged belly, the overdeveloped mind. I felt afraid (Sometimes it seems to me that this world is another Sodom and Gomorrah just before God's passage above it. I think the terrible foot can already be heard approaching).

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Jerusalem, Ch. 20, p. 249
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
5 months 1 week ago
Among civilized and thriving nations, on...

Among civilized and thriving nations, on the contrary, though a great number of people do no labor at all, many of whom consume the produce of ten times, frequently of a hundred times more labour than the greater part of those who work; yet the produce of the whole labour of the society is so great, that all are often abundantly supplied, and a workman, even of the lowest and poorest order, if he is frugal and industrious, may enjoy a greater share of the necessaries and conveniencies of life than it is possible for any savage to acquire.

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Introduction and Plan of the Work, p. 2.
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Jean Jacques Rousseau
5 months 1 week ago
I have entered on an enterprise...

I have entered on an enterprise which is without precedent, and will have no imitator. I propose to show my fellows a man as nature made him, and this man shall be myself.

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Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
4 months 4 days ago
It cannot but happen that those...

It cannot but happen that those individuals whose functions are most out of equilibrium with the modified aggregate of external forces, will be those to die; and that those will survive whose functions happen to be most nearly in equilibrium with the modified aggregate of external forces. But this survival of the fittest, implies multiplication of the fittest. Out of the fittest thus multiplied, there will, as before, be an overthrowing of the moving equilibrium wherever it presents the least opposing force to the new incident force.

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The Principles of Biology, Vol. I (1864), Part III: The Evolution of Life, Ch. 7: Indirect Equilibration
Philosophical Maxims
chanakya
chanakya
2 months 1 week 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
Jesus
Jesus
3 months 3 weeks ago
Are ye come out as against...

Are ye come out as against a thief with swords and staves for to take me? I sat daily with you teaching in the temple, and ye laid no hold on me. But all this was done, that the scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled.

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26:55-56 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
6 months 1 day ago
We face eternity now. We have...

We face eternity now. We have no universe left, no outside phenomena, no emotions, no passions. Nothing but ourselves and thought. We face an eternity of introspection, when all through history we have never known what to do with ourselves on a rainy Sunday.

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Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
5 months 1 week ago
It may indeed be doubted, whether...

It may indeed be doubted, whether butcher's meat is any where a necessary of life. Grain and other vegetables, with the help of milk, cheese, and butter, or oil, where butter is not to be had, it is known from experience, can, without any butcher's meat, afford the most plentiful, the most wholesome, the most nourishing, and the most invigorating diet.

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Chapter II, Part II, Appendix to Articles I and II.
Philosophical Maxims
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
3 months 3 weeks ago
Scientific truth is characterized by its...

Scientific truth is characterized by its exactness and the certainty of its predictions. But these admirable qualities are contrived by science at the cost of remaining on a plane of secondary problems. leaving intact the ultimate and decisive questions. ... Yet science is but a small part of the human mind and organism. Where it stops, man does not stop.

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p. 13
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay
2 months 3 weeks ago
The conformation of his mind was...

The conformation of his mind was such that whatever was little seemed to him great, and whatever was great seemed to him little. Serious business was a trifle to him, and trifles were his serious business.

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'Horace Walpole', The Edinburgh Review (October 1833), quoted in T. B. Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to The Edinburgh Review, Vol. II (1843), p. 99
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
5 months 5 days ago
I don't care for the applause...

I don't care for the applause one gets by saying what others are thinking; I want actually to change people's thoughts. Power over people's minds is the main personal desire of my life; and this sort of power is not acquired by saying popular things.

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Letter to Lucy Martin Donnelly, February 10, 1916
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
5 months 3 days ago
As long as this deliberate refusal...

As long as this deliberate refusal to understand things from above, even where such understanding is possible, continues, it is idle to talk of any final victory over materialism.

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Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
5 months 3 days ago
To be taken without consent from...

To be taken without consent from my home and friends; to lose my liberty; to undergo all those assaults on my personality which modern psychotherapy knows how to deliver; to be re-made after some pattern of "normality" hatched in a Viennese laboratory to which I never professed allegiance; to know that this process will never end until either my captors have succeeded or I have grown wise enough to cheat them with apparent success-who cares whether this is called Punishment or not? "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment"

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1949
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
3 months 1 week ago
A book is a mirror…

A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out. We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already.

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E 49
Philosophical Maxims
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal
5 months 2 weeks ago
The mind must not be forced;...

The mind must not be forced; artificial and constrained manners fill it with foolish presumption, through unnatural elevation and vain and ridiculous inflation, instead of solid and vigorous nutriment.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley
2 months 2 weeks ago
Education is the instruction of the...

Education is the instruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature, under which name I include not merely things and their forces, but men and their ways; and the fashioning of the affections and of the will into an earnest and loving desire to move in harmony with those laws. For me, education means neither more nor less than this. Anything which professes to call itself education must be tried by this standard, and if it fails to stand the test, I will not call it education, whatever may be the force of authority, or of numbers, upon the other side.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
5 months 3 days ago
At least two thirds of our...

At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice, and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.

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Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, 1952
Philosophical Maxims
Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno
4 months 1 week ago
I understand Being in all and...

I understand Being in all and over all, as there is nothing without participation in Being, and there is no being without Essence. Thus nothing can be free of the Divine Presence.

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As quoted in "Giordano Bruno" - Theosophy Vol. 26, No. 8
Philosophical Maxims
A. J. Ayer
A. J. Ayer
4 months ago
There never comes a point where...

There never comes a point where a theory can be said to be true. The most that one can claim for any theory is that it has shared the successes of all its rivals and that it has passed at least one test which they have failed.

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Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (1982) p. 133.
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
5 months 5 days ago
Suppose atomic bombs had reduced the...

Suppose atomic bombs had reduced the population of the world to one brother and one sister, should they let the human race die out? I do not know the answer, but I do not think it can be in the affirmative merely on the ground that incest is wicked.

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p. 47
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
5 months 4 days ago
I should as soon think of...

I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.

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Books
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
3 months 2 weeks ago
What so impressed me on that...

What so impressed me on that first reading was the self-containedness of Tolkien's world. I suppose there are a few novelists who have created worlds that are uniquely their own -- Faulkner, for example, or Dickens. But since their world is fairly close to the actual world, it cannot really be called a unique creation. The only parallel that occurs to me is the Wagner Ring cycle, that one can only enter as if taking a holiday on a strange planet.

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pp. 8-9
Philosophical Maxims
John Rawls
John Rawls
5 months 3 days ago
I have tried to set forth...

I have tried to set forth a theory that enables us to understand and to assess these feelings about the primacy of justice. Justice as fairness is the outcome: it articulates these opinions and supports their general tendency.

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Chapter IX, Section 87, p. 586
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
3 weeks 3 days ago
Without disarmament there can be...

Without disarmament there can be no lasting peace. On the contrary, the continuation of military armaments in their present extent will with certainty lead to new catastrophies...For the creation of this public opinion in favor of disarmament every person living shares the responsibility, through ever deed and every word.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
1 month 4 days ago
I believe the Indian then to...

I believe the Indian then to be in body and mind equal to the white man.

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Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
4 months ago
Feeling which has not yet emerged...

Feeling which has not yet emerged into immediate consciousness is already affectible and already affected. In fact, this is habit, by virtue of which an idea is brought up into the present consciousness by a bond that has already been established between it and another idea while it was still in futuro.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
3 months 3 weeks ago
I am the way and the...

I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

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14:06
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
4 months 4 weeks ago
The world and life are one....

The world and life are one.

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(5.621) Original German: Die Welt und das Leben sind Eins.
Philosophical Maxims
Heraclitus
Heraclitus
5 months 3 weeks ago
Men are at variance with the...

Men are at variance with the one thing with which they are in the most unbroken communion, the reason that administers the whole universe.

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Philosophical Maxims
René Descartes
René Descartes
5 months 1 week ago
Good sense is, of all things….

Good sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed; for every one thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that those even who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already possess.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
5 months 4 days ago
History is not like some individual...

History is not like some individual person, which uses men to achieve its ends. History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends.

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The Holy Family, Ch. VI (1845).
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
5 months 3 days ago
I am responsible for everything ......

I am responsible for everything ... except for my very responsibility, for I am not the foundation of my being. Therefore everything takes place as if I were compelled to be responsible. I am abandoned in the world ... in the sense that I find myself suddenly alone and without help, engaged in a world for which I bear the whole responsibility without being able, whatever I do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for an instant.

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Part 4, Chapter 1, III
Philosophical Maxims
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
2 months 3 weeks ago
Tocqueville predicted that in democratic countries...

Tocqueville predicted that in democratic countries the public would demand larger and larger doses of excitement and increasingly stronger stimulants from its writers. He probably did not expect that public to dramatize itself so extensively, to make the world scene everybody's theatre, or, in the developed countries, to take to alcohol and drugs in order to get relief from the horrors of ceaseless intensity, the torment of thrills and distractions. A great many writers have done little more than meet the mounting demand for thrills. I think that this demand has, in the language of marketing, peaked.

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The Distracted Public
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Owen
Robert Owen
2 months 3 weeks ago
The will of man has no...

The will of man has no power whatever over his opinions; he must, and ever did, and ever will, believe what has been, is, or may be impressed on his mind by his predecessors, and the circumstances which surround him.

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Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
5 months 5 days ago
Christianity taught only what the whole...

Christianity taught only what the whole of Asia knew already long before and even better.

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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
Carl Schmitt
Carl Schmitt
1 month 3 days ago
Liberalism, with its contradictions and compromises,...

Liberalism, with its contradictions and compromises, existed for Donoso Cortés only in that short interim period in which it was possible to answer the question "Christ or Barabbas?" with a proposal to adjourn or appoint a commission of investigation.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emperor Julian
Emperor Julian
1 month 1 week ago
I think he who knows himself...

I think he who knows himself will know accurately, not the opinion of others about him, but what he is in reality... he ought to discover within himself what is right for him to do and not learn it from without...

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Oration to the Cynic Heracleios
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
3 months 3 weeks ago
Yes, yes, I see it all!...

Yes, yes, I see it all! - an enormous social activity, a mighty civilization, a profuseness of science, of art, of industry, of morality, and afterwords, when we have filled the world with industrial marvels, with great factories, with roads, museums and libraries, we shall fall exhausted at the foot of it all, and it will subsist - for whom? Was man made for science or was science made for man?

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Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
5 months 6 days ago
Superstition is to religion…

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy, the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.

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"Whether it is useful to maintain the people in superstition," Treatise on Toleration, 1763
Philosophical Maxims
Henry George
Henry George
1 month 3 days ago
The progress of civilization necessitates the...

The progress of civilization necessitates the giving of greater and greater attention and intelligence to public affairs. And for this reason I am convinced that we make a great mistake in depriving one sex of voice in public matters, and that we could in no way so increase the attention, the intelligence and the devotion which may be brought to the solution of social problems as by enfranchising our women.

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Ch. 21 : Conclusion
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
5 months 1 week ago
You must not murder. (Exodus 20:13)...

You must not murder. (Exodus 20:13) Q. What does this mean? A. We should fear and love God so that we may not hurt or harm our neighbor in his body, but help and befriend him in every bodily need [in every need and danger of life and body].

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Philosophical Maxims
Max Scheler
Max Scheler
3 months 3 weeks ago
The "old maid" with her repressed...

The "old maid" with her repressed cravings for tenderness, sex, and propagation, is rarely quite free of ressentiment. What we call "prudery," in contrast with true modesty, is but one of the numerous variants of sexual ressentiment. The habitual behavior of many old maids, who obsessively ferret out all sexually significant events in their surroundings in order to condemn them harshly, is nothing but sexual gratification transformed into ressentiment satisfaction. Thus the criticism accomplishes the very thing it pretends to condemn.

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L. Coser, trans. (1973), pp. 61-62
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
2 months ago
It is true...
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Main Content / General
Judith Butler
Judith Butler
3 months 6 days ago
To subdue destruction is one of...

To subdue destruction is one of the most important affirmations of which we are capable in this world. It is the affirmation of this life, bound up with yours, and with the realm of the living: an affirmation caught up with a potential for destruction and its countervailing force.

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p. 65
Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
5 months 1 week ago
A propensity to hope and joy...

A propensity to hope and joy is real riches: One to fear and sorrow, real poverty.

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Part I, Essay 18: The Sceptic
Philosophical Maxims
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