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John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
3 months 4 weeks ago
Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially...

Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of the representative government, cannot exist.

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Ch. XVI: Of Nationality, As Connected with Representative Government (p. 382)
Philosophical Maxims
Novalis
Novalis
2 months 3 weeks ago
Now to Some it appears not...

Now to Some it appears not at all worth while to follow out the endless divisions of Nature; and moreover a dangerous undertaking, without fruit and issue. As we can never reach, say they, the absolutely smallest grain of material bodies, never find their simplest compartments, since all magnitude loses itself, forwards and backwards, in infinitude; so likewise is it with the species of bodies and powers; here too one comes on new species, new combinations, new appearances, even to infinitude. These seem only to stop, continue they, when our diligence tires; and so it is spending precious time with idle contemplations and tedious enumerations; and this becomes at last a true delirium, a real vertigo over the horrid Deep.

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Philosophical Maxims
Montesquieu
Montesquieu
2 months 2 weeks ago
It is a paralogism to say,...

It is a paralogism to say, that the good of the individual should give way to that of the public; this can never take place, except when the government of the community, or, in other words, the liberty of the subject is concerned; this does not affect such cases as relate to private property, because the public good consists in everyone's having his property, which was given him by the civil laws, invariably preserved.

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Book XXVI, Chapter 15.
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
3 months 3 weeks ago
In the tragedies of the early...

In the tragedies of the early seventeenth century, madness too provided the dénouement, but it did so in liberating the truth. It still opened onto language, to a renewed form of speech, that of explanation and of the real regained. The most it could ever be was the penultimate moment of tragedy. Not the closing moment, as in Andromaque, where no truth appears, other than, in Delirium, the truth of a passion that finds its fullest, most perfect expression in madness.

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Part Two: 2. The Transcendence of Delirium
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
5 months ago
Everything which distinguishes man from the...
Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept. For something is possible in the realm of these schemata which could never be achieved with the vivid first impressions: the construction of a pyramidal order according to castes and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, and clearly marked boundaries, a new world, one which now confronts that other vivid world of first impressions as more solid, more universal, better known, and more human than the immediately perceived world, and thus as the regulative and imperative world.
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Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
3 months 3 weeks ago
A thing forgotten on one day...

A thing forgotten on one day will be remembered on the next. Something we have made the most strenuous efforts to recall, but all in vain, will, soon after... saunter into the mind... The sphere of possible recollection may be wider than we think, and... apparent oblivion is no proof against possible recall under other conditions.

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Ch. 16
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
1 month 3 weeks ago
However many ways there may be...

However many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead.

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Chapter 1 "Explaining the Very Improbable"
Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
2 months 4 weeks ago
I think that the principal and...

I think that the principal and most basic spiritual need of the Russian People is the need for suffering, incessant and unslakeable suffering, everywhere and in everything. I think the Russian People have been infused with this need to suffer from time immemorial. A current of martyrdom runs through their entire history, and it flows not only from external misfortunes and disasters but springs from the very heart of the People themselves. There is always an element of suffering even in the happiness of the Russian People, and without it their happiness is incomplete.

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A Writer's Diary, Vol. 1: 1873-1876 (1994), pp. 161-162
Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
2 months 3 weeks ago
The secret is that only that...

The secret is that only that which can destroy itself is truly alive.

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Psychology and Alchemy
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
1 month 3 weeks ago
There is no spirit-driven life force,...

There is no spirit-driven life force, no throbbing, heaving, pullulating, protoplasmic, mystic jelly. Life is just bytes and bytes and bytes of digital information.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 months 3 weeks ago
His heart was as great as...

His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.

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Greatness
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 3 weeks ago
One disgust, then another...

One disgust, then another - to the point of losing the use of speech and even of the mind...The greatest exploit of my life is to be still alive.

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Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
4 months 4 weeks ago
Once in his early youth a...

Once in his early youth a man allowed himself to be so far carried away in an overwrought irresponsible state as to visit a prostitute. It is all forgotten. Now he wants to get married. Then anxiety stirs. He is tortured day and night with the thought that he might possibly be a father, that somewhere in the world there could be a created being who owed his life to him. He cannot share his secret with anyone; he does not even have any reliable knowledge of the fact. –For this reason the incident must have involved a prostitute and taken place in the wantonness of youth; had it been a little infatuated or an actual seduction, it would be hard to imagine that he could know nothing about it, but now this this very ignorance is the basis of his agitated torment. On the other hand, precisely because of the rashness of the whole affair, his misgivings do not really start until he actually falls in love.

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Philosophical Maxims
Novalis
Novalis
2 months 3 weeks ago
We are on a mission: we...

We are on a mission: we are called to the cultivation of the earth.

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Fragment No. 32
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine
3 months 4 weeks ago
And the final event to himself...

And the final event to himself has been, that, as he rose like a rocket, he fell like the stick.

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On Edmund Burke's reactions to the American and French revolutions.
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
2 months 1 week ago
The human body is an instrument...

The human body is an instrument for the production of art in the life of the human soul.

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p. 349.
Philosophical Maxims
Julius Evola
Julius Evola
5 days ago
In our opinion, the task of...

In our opinion, the task of a far-sighted policy of the Third Reich ought to have been that of seeking every possible means to obtain at least the neutrality of the western nations so as to have free hands for a devestating attack exclusively against the Soviet Union-but that would have required the shrewdness and genius of a Metternich.

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pp. 81-82
Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
3 months 4 weeks ago
Just as the witticism brings two...

Just as the witticism brings two very different real objects under one concept, the pun brings two different concepts, by the assistance of accident, under one word.

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Volume I, Book I
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 3 weeks ago
The multiplication of our kind borders...

The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.

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Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
1 month 3 weeks ago
We've reached a truly remarkable situation:...

We've reached a truly remarkable situation: a grotesque mismatch between the American intelligentsia and the American electorate. A philosophical opinion about the nature of the universe which is held by the vast majority of top American scientists, and probably the majority of the intelligentsia generally, is so abhorrent to the American electorate that no candidate for popular election dare affirm it in public. If I'm right, this means that high office in the greatest country in the world is barred to the very people best qualified to hold it: the intelligentsia, unless they are prepared to lie about their beliefs. To put it bluntly American political opportunities are heavily loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest.

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Richard Dawkins on militant atheism,
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
3 months 4 weeks ago
Don't think money does everything or...

Don't think money does everything or you are going to end up doing everything for money.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
2 months 1 week ago
The STATE IDEA, the authoritarian principle,...

The STATE IDEA, the authoritarian principle, has been proven bankrupt by the experience of the Russian Revolution. If I were to sum up my whole argument in one sentence I should say: The inherent tendency of the State is to concentrate, to narrow, and monopolize all social activities; the nature of revolution is, on the contrary, to grow, to broaden, and disseminate itself in ever-wider circles. In other words, the State is institutional and static; revolution is fluent, dynamic. These two tendencies are incompatible and mutually destructive. The State idea killed the Russian Revolution and it must have the same result in all other revolutions, unless the libertarian idea prevail.

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Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
1 month 3 weeks ago
It would be deeply depressing if...

It would be deeply depressing if the only way children could get moral values was from religion. Either from scripture, and God knows we don't want them to get it from scripture, I mean, just look at scripture. Or, from being afraid of God, being intimidated by God. Anybody who is good for only those two reasons is not really being good at all. Why not teach children things like the Golden Rule, do as you would be done by, how would you like it if other children did that to you, so why do you do it to them... I think it's depressing that anybody should suggest that you actually need God in order to be moral. I would hope that our morals come from a better source than that, and therefore they are genuinely moral rather than based on outmoded scripture, or based on fear.

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BBC,
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
3 months 4 weeks ago
Aeschylus had a clear eye for...

Aeschylus had a clear eye for the commonest things. His genius was only an enlarged common sense. He adverts with chaste severity to all natural facts. His sublimity is Greek sincerity and simpleness, naked wonder which mythology had not helped to explain... Whatever the common eye sees at all and expresses as best it may, he sees uncommonly and describes with rare completeness. The multitude that thronged the theatre could no doubt go along with him to the end... The social condition of genius is the same in all ages. Aeschylus was undoubtedly alone and without sympathy in his simple reverence for the mystery of the universe.

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January 29, 1840
Philosophical Maxims
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
1 month 1 week ago
I wonder why I bother to...

I wonder why I bother to tell the truth when people ask me what I think of this and that and how I feel about this and that. I get so complicated and introspective that people often don't understand and are frankly puzzled and (naturally enough) bored. So why bother! It would be so much easier to say what they expected you to, and everything would be easy and pleasant.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 4 weeks ago
"I don't want to! Why should...

"I don't want to! Why should I?" "Because more people will be happier if you do than if you don't." "So what? I don't care about other people." "You should." "But why?" "Because more people will be happier if you do than if you don't."

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Dialogue between Russell and his daughter Katharine, as quoted in My Father - Bertrand Russell, 1975
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
2 months 2 weeks ago
Is this fight against history part...

Is this fight against history part of the fight against a dimension of the mind in which centrifugal faculties and forces might develop-faculties and forces that might hinder the total coordination of the individual with the society? Remembrance of the Fast may give rise to dangerous insights, and the established society seems to be apprehensive of the subversive contents of memory. Remembrance is a mode of dissociation from the given facts, a mode of "mediation" which breaks, for short moments, the omnipresent power of the given facts. Memory recalls the terror and the hope that passed. Both come to life again.

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p. 98
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
2 months 1 week ago
The art of progress is to...

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.

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Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
1 month 3 weeks ago
No doubt some of your cousins...

No doubt some of your cousins and great-uncles died in childhood, but not a single one of your ancestors did. Ancestors just don't die young!

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Ch. 3. Immortal Coils
Philosophical Maxims
Charles Fourier
Charles Fourier
3 weeks 2 days ago
To speak frankly, the family bond...

To speak frankly, the family bond in the civilizee regime' causes fathers to desire the death of their children and children to desire the death of their fathers.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 4 weeks ago
A process which led from the...

A process which led from the amœba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress - though whether the amœba would agree with this opinion is not known.

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Ch. 1: Mysticism and Logic
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
4 months 3 weeks ago
I am an atheist, out and...

I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 3 weeks ago
To tell the truth, I couldn't...

To tell the truth, I couldn't care less about the relativity of knowledge, simply because the world does not deserve to be known.

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Philosophical Maxims
Montesquieu
Montesquieu
2 months 2 weeks ago
I can assure you that no...

I can assure you that no kingdom has ever had as many civil wars as the kingdom of Christ.

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No. 29. (Rica writing to Ibben)
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 months 3 weeks ago
It makes a great difference in...

It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence whether a man be behind it or no.

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p. 261
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
2 weeks 4 days ago
Human beings have....
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Main Content / General
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
1 week 5 days ago
The one is ready even to...

The one is ready even to sacrifice itself for the good of others, the other to plunge into peril provided it drags others with it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
2 months 1 week ago
With the sense of sight, the...

With the sense of sight, the idea communicates the emotion, whereas, with sound, the emotion communicates the idea, which is more direct and therefore more powerful.

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Ch. 29, June 10, 1943.
Philosophical Maxims
John Rawls
John Rawls
3 months 3 weeks ago
Justice does not require that men...

Justice does not require that men must stand idly by while others destroy the basis of their existence.

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Chapter IV, Section 35, p. 218
Philosophical Maxims
John Dewey
John Dewey
2 months 2 weeks ago
Because rhythm is a universal scheme...

Because rhythm is a universal scheme of existence, underlying all realization of order in change, it pervades all the arts, literary, musical, plastic and architectural, as well as the dance. Since man succeeds only as he adapts his behavior to the order of nature, his achievements and victories, as they ensue upon resistance and struggle, become the matrix of all esthetic subject-matter; in some sense they constitute the common pattern of art, the ultimate conditions of form. Their cumulative orders of succession become without express intent the means by which man commemorates and celebrates the most intense and full moments of his experience. Underneath the rhythm of every art and every work of art there lies, as a substratum in the depths of the subconsciousness, the basic pattern of the relations of the live creature to his environment.

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p. 156
Philosophical Maxims
Democritus
Democritus
3 months 2 weeks ago
Education is an ornament for the...

Education is an ornament for the prosperous, a refuge for the unfortunate.

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Freeman (1948), p. 161
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
2 months 1 week ago
Faculty X is simply that latent...

Faculty X is simply that latent power in human beings possess to reach beyond the present. After all, we know perfectly well that the past is as real as the present, and that New York and Singapore and Lhasa and Stepney Green are all as real as the place I happen to be in at the moment. Yet my senses do not agree. They assure me that this place, here and now, is far more real than any other place or any other time. Only in certain moments of great inner intensity do I know this to be a lie. Faculty X is a sense of reality, the reality of other places and other times, and it is the possession of it - fragmentary and uncertain though it is - that distinguishes man from all other animals.

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p. 59
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
2 months 2 weeks ago
And, being assembled together with them,...

And, being assembled together with them, commanded them that they should not depart from Jerusalem, but wait for the promise of the Father, which, saith he, ye have heard of me. For John truly baptized with water; but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days hence.

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1:4-5 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
2 months 2 weeks ago
If thou wilt be perfect, go...

If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.

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19:21 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
4 months 5 days ago
The Virgin Mary remains in the...

The Virgin Mary remains in the middle between Christ and humankind. For in the very moment he was conceived and lived, he was full of grace. All other human beings are without grace, both in the first and second conception. But the Virgin Mary, though without grace in the first conception, was full of grace in the second ... whereas other human beings are conceived in sin, in soul as well as in body, and Christ was conceived without sin in soul as well as in body, the Virgin Mary was conceived in body without grace but in soul full of grace.

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As quoted in Anderson, H. George; Stafford, J. Francis; Burgess, Joseph A., eds. (1992). The One Mediator, The Saints, and Mary. Lutherans and Catholics in Dialogue. VIII. Minneapolis: Augsburg. ISBN 0-8066-2579-1., p. 236
Philosophical Maxims
Horace
Horace
3 months 2 weeks ago
The covetous man….

The covetous man is ever in want.

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Book I, epistle ii, line 56
Philosophical Maxims
Edward Said
Edward Said
2 months 1 week ago
Theory is taught so as to...

Theory is taught so as to make the student believe that he or she can become a Marxist, a feminist, an Afrocentrist, or a deconstructionist with about the same effort and commitment required in choosing items from a menu.

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Chap 4, Sect 2
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 month 3 weeks ago
When you move into a new...

When you move into a new area, a new territory and learn a new language, the language is not a new subject, it is an environment, it is total.

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(p. 105)
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel
3 months 2 weeks ago
Consciousness is what makes the mind-body...

Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.

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p. 165.
Philosophical Maxims
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
1 month 2 weeks ago
A good American makes propaganda for...

A good American makes propaganda for whatever existence has forced him to become.

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"Cousins," from Him With His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories (1984), p. 263
Philosophical Maxims
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