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Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
1 month 6 days ago
You are doing an excellent thing….

You are doing an excellent thing, one which will be wholesome for you, if, as you write me, you are persisting in your effort to attain sound understanding; it is foolish to pray for this when you can acquire it from yourself. We do not need to uplift our hands towards heaven, or to beg the keeper of a temple to let us approach his idol's ear, as if in this way our prayers were more likely to be heard. A god is near you, with you, and in you. This is what I mean, Lucilius: there sits a holy spirit within us, one who marks our good and bad deeds, and is our a guardian.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
3 months 4 days ago
The history of the American kings...

The history of the American kings of capital and authority is the history of repeated crimes, injustice, oppression, outrage, and abuse, all aiming at the suppression of individual liberties and the exploitation of the people. A vast country, rich enough to supply all her children with all possible comforts, and insure well-being to all, is in the hands of a few, while the nameless millions are at the mercy of ruthless wealth gatherers, unscrupulous lawmakers, and corrupt politicians.The reign of these kings is holding mankind in slavery, perpetuating poverty and disease, maintaining crime and corruption; it is fettering the spirit of liberty, throttling the voice of justice, and degrading and oppressing humanity. It is engaged in continual war and slaughter, devastating the country and destroying the best and finest qualities of man; it nurtures superstition and ignorance, sows prejudice and strife, and turns the human family into a camp of Ishmaelites.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
4 months 3 weeks ago
Every poet has trembled on the...

Every poet has trembled on the verge of science.

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July 18, 1852
Philosophical Maxims
Willard van Orman Quine
Willard van Orman Quine
3 months 1 week ago
Life is agid. Life is fulgid....

Life is agid. Life is fulgid. Life is a burgeoning, a quickening of the dim primordial urge in the murky wastes of time. Life is what the least of us make most of us feel the least of us make the most of.

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Quine's response in 1988 when asked his philosophy of life. (He invented the word "agid".) It makes up the entire Chapter 54 in Quine in Dialogue (2008).
Philosophical Maxims
Lucretius
Lucretius
5 months 5 days ago
But if one should…

But if one should guide his life by true principles, man's greatest riches is to live on a little with contented mind; for a little is never lacking.

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Book V, lines 1117-1119 (tr. Rouse)
Philosophical Maxims
Plato
Plato
5 months 2 weeks ago
We certainly must contend by every...

We certainly must contend by every argument against him who does away with knowledge or reason or mind and then makes any dogmatic assertion about anything. The philosopher, who pays the highest honor to these things, must necessarily, as it seems, because of them refuse to accept the theory of those who say the universe is at rest, whether as a unity or in many forms, and must also refuse utterly to listen to those who say that being is universal motion; he must say that being and the universe consist of both.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
3 months 1 week ago
Look at the birds of the...

Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them.

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Matthew 6:26 (NKJV)
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
4 months 3 weeks ago
All honour to those who can...

All honour to those who can abnegate for themselves the personal enjoyment of life, when by such renunciation they contribute worthily to increase the amount of happiness in the world; but he who does it, or professes to do it, for any other purpose, is no more deserving of admiration than the ascetic mounted on his pillar. He may be an inspiriting proof of what men can do, but assuredly not an example of what they should.

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Ch. 2
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
4 months 3 weeks ago
We boil at different degrees....

We boil at different degrees.

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Eloquence
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Fukuyama
Francis Fukuyama
1 month 2 weeks ago
In situations of de facto diversity,...

In situations of de facto diversity, attempts to impose a single way of life on an entire population is a formula for dictatorship.

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Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
2 months 3 weeks ago
The Quakers sent me books, from...

The Quakers sent me books, from which I learnt how they had, years ago, established beyond doubt the duty for a Christian of fulfilling the command of non-resistance to evil by force, and had exposed the error of the Church's teaching in allowing war and capital punishment.

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Chapter I, The Doctrine of Non-resistance to Evil by Force has been Professed by a Minority of Men from the Very Foundation of Christianity
Philosophical Maxims
Alan Watts
Alan Watts
1 month 2 days ago
Speaking as of today, I do...

Speaking as of today, I do not consider it intellectually respectable to be a partisan in matters of religion. I see religion as I see such other basic fascinations as art and science, in which there is room for many different approaches, styles, techniques, and opinions. Thus I am not formally a committed member of any creed or sect and hold no particular religious view or doctrine as absolute. I deplore missionary zeal, and consider excessive dedication to and advocacy of any particular religion, as either the best or the only true way, an almost irreligious arrogance. Yet my work and my life are fully concerned with religion, and the mystery of being is my supreme fascination, though, as a shameless mystic, I am more interested in religion as feeling and experience than as conception and theory.

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p. 61
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
3 months 5 days ago
It belongs to the self-respect of...

It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment.

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Ch. 12: "Religion and Science", p. 258
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 1 week ago
Our bodies are....
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Novalis
Novalis
3 months 2 weeks ago
Nature is an Æolian Harp, a...

Nature is an Æolian Harp, a musical instrument; whose tones again are keys to higher strings in us.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 3 weeks ago
The people who are regarded as...

The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others.

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Ch. 8: Eastern and Western Ideals of Happiness
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
3 months 1 day ago
The most perfect ape cannot draw...

The most perfect ape cannot draw an ape; only man can do that; but, likewise, only man regards the ability to do this as a sign of superiority.

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J 115
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
3 months 5 days ago
That knowledge which adds greatness to...

That knowledge which adds greatness to character is knowledge so handled as to transform every phase of immediate experience.

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Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
4 months 2 weeks ago
I am trying here to prevent...

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would be either a lunatic-on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg-or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

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Book II, Chapter 3, "The Shocking Alternative"
Philosophical Maxims
Georges Sorel
Georges Sorel
1 month 1 day ago
Mussolini is a man no less...

Mussolini is a man no less extraordinary than Lenin. He, too, is a political genius, of a greater reach than all the statesmen of the day, with the only exception of Lenin...

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As quoted in The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution: The Origins of Ideological Polarization in the 20th Century, Jacob L. Talmon, University of California Press (1981) p. 451.
Philosophical Maxims
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal
5 months 4 days ago
The source of the errors of...

The source of the errors of these two sects, is in not having known that the state of man at the present time differs from that of his creation; so that the one, remarking some traces of his first greatness and being ignorant of his corruption, has treated nature as sound and without need of redemption, which leads him to the height of pride; whilst the other, feeling the present wretchedness and being ignorant of the original dignity, treats nature as necessarily infirm and irreparable, which precipitates it into despair of arriving at real good, and thence into extreme laxity.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
2 months 2 weeks ago
Environments work us over and remake...

Environments work us over and remake us. It is man who is the content of and the message of the media, which are extensions of himself. Electronic man must know the effects of the world he has made above all things.

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(p. 90)
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Buber
Martin Buber
3 months 1 week ago
Life, in that it is life,...

Life, in that it is life, necessarily entails justice.

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"Politics and Morality" in Be'ayot (April 1945), as published in A Land of Two Peoples : Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs (1983) edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr, p. 169
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
2 weeks 4 days ago
Thou sufferest justly: for thou choosest...

Thou sufferest justly: for thou choosest rather to become good to-morrow than to be good to-day.

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VIII, 22
Philosophical Maxims
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
3 months 1 week ago
Man does not exercise his thought...

Man does not exercise his thought because he finds it amusing, but because, obliged as he is to live immersed in the world and to force his way among things, he finds himself under the necessity of organizing his psychic activities, which are not very different from those of the anthropoid, in the form of thought - which is what the animal does not do.

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p. 28
Philosophical Maxims
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
3 months 3 weeks ago
I take as my example the...

I take as my example the three notorious words, Humanity, Popularity, and Liberality. When these words are used in speaking to a German who has learnt no language but his own they are to him nothing but a meaningless noise, which has no relationship of sound to remind him of anything he knows already and so takes him completely out of his circle of observation and beyond any observation possible to him. ... Further, if in speaking to the German, instead of the words Popularity [Popularitdt] and Liberality [Liberalitat], I should use the expressions, " striving for favour with the great mob," and " not having the mind of a slave," which is how they must be literally translated, he would, to begin with, not even obtain a clear and vivid sense-image such as was certainly obtained by a Roman of old.

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The Chief Difference Between The Germans And The Other Peoples Of Teutonic Descent p. 64
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
3 months 1 week ago
“What man among you with 100...

“What man among you with 100 sheep, on losing one of them, will not leave the 99 behind in the wilderness and go after the lost one until he finds it? And when he has found it, he puts it on his shoulders and rejoices. And when he gets home, he calls his friends and his neighbors together, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.' I tell you that in the same way, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous ones who have no need of repentance.

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Luke 15: 4-7
Philosophical Maxims
Mencius
Mencius
1 month 1 week ago
He who exerts his mind to...

He who exerts his mind to the utmost knows his nature.

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7A:1, as translated by Wing-tsit Chan in A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (1963), p. 62
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Jean Jacques Rousseau
4 months 3 weeks ago
Virtue is a state of war…

Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it means one always has some battle to wage against oneself.

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Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (French), Sixième partie, Lettre VII Réponse (1761) Julie, or The New Heloise (English), Part Six, Letter VII Response, pg 560
Philosophical Maxims
Joseph de Maistre
Joseph de Maistre
2 weeks 5 days ago
Man is an enigma whose knot...

Man is an enigma whose knot has not ceased to occupy observers. The contradictions that he contains astonish reason and impose silence on it. So what is this inconceivable being who carries within him powers that clash and who is obliged to hate himself in order to esteem himself?

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Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
5 months 2 weeks ago
Start with a planet like the...

Start with a planet like the earth, with a complement of simple compounds bound to exist upon it, add the energy of a nearby sun, and you are bound to end with nucleic acids. You can't avoid it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
4 months 3 days ago
By the air which I breathe,...

By the air which I breathe, and by the water which I drink, I will not endure to be blamed on account of this discourse.

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As reported by Heraclides Ponticus (c. 360 BC), and Diogenes Laërtius, in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, "Pythagoras", Sect. 6, in the translation of C. D. Yonge
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
3 months 1 week ago
Jesus answered: "Believe me, Barnabas that...

Jesus answered: "Believe me, Barnabas that I cannot weep as much as I ought. For if men had not called me God, I should have seen God here as he will be seen in paradise, and should have been safe not to fear the day of judgment. But God knows that I am innocent, because never have I harboured thought to be held more than a poor slave. No, I tell you that if I had not been called God I should have been carried into paradise when I shall depart from the world, whereas now I shall not go thither until the judgment. Now you see if I have cause to weep."

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Ch. 112
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard
2 months 3 weeks ago
People no longer look at each...

People no longer look at each other, but there are institutes for that. They no longer touch each other, but there is contactotherapy. They no longer walk, but they go jogging, etc. Everywhere one recycles lost faculties, or lost bodies, or lost sociality, or the lost taste for food.

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"The Precession of Simulacra," p. 13
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 3 weeks ago
One must care about a world...

One must care about a world one will not see.

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Attributed to Russell in The Wordsworth Dictionary of Quotations (1997), p. 450, and in Robertson's Dictionary of Quotations (1998), p. 362, but no specific source is given.
Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
3 months 1 week ago
The might which kills...

The might which kills outright is an elementary and coarse form of might. How much more varied in its devices; how much more astonishing in its effects is that other which does not kill; or which delays killing.

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in The Simone Weil Reader, p. 155
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay
2 months 1 week ago
At last I have attained true...

At last I have attained true glory. As I walked through Fleet Street the day before yesterday, I saw a copy of Hume at a bookseller's window with the following label: "Only 2l. 2s. Hume's History of England in eight volumes, highly valuable as an introduction to Macaulay." I laughed so convulsively that the other people who were staring at the books took me for a poor demented gentleman.

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Alas for poor David! Journal entry (8 March 1849), quoted in George Otto Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, Volume II (1876), p. 253
Philosophical Maxims
Jerry Fodor
Jerry Fodor
2 weeks 5 days ago
If people differ in an absolutely...

If people differ in an absolutely general way in their estimations of epistemic relevance, and if we follow the holism of meaning and individuate intentional states by way of the totality of their epistemic bonds, the consequence will be that two people (or, for that matter, two temporal sections of the same person) will never be in the same intentional state. Therefore, two people can never be subsumed under the same intentional generalizations. And, therefore, intentional generalization can never be successful. And, therefore again, there is no hope for an intentional psychology.

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Fodor & E. Lepore (1992) Holism: A Shopper's Guide, Blackwell.
Philosophical Maxims
Novalis
Novalis
3 months 2 weeks ago
I shall in no time forget...

I shall in no time forget that moment. We felt as if we had had in our souls a clear passing glimpse into this wondrous World.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
4 months 3 weeks ago
If I negate powdered wigs, I...

If I negate powdered wigs, I am still left with unpowdered wigs.

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Philosophical Maxims
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
4 months 3 weeks ago
The first remark we have to...

The first remark we have to make, and which - though already presented more than once - cannot be too often repeated when the occasion seems to call for it, - is that what we call principle, aim, destiny, or the nature and idea of Spirit, is something merely general and abstract. Principle - Plan of Existence - Law - is a hidden, undeveloped essence, which as such - however true in itself - is not completely real.

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Philosophical Maxims
William Whewell
William Whewell
3 weeks ago
When common words are appropriated as...

When common words are appropriated as technical terms, their meaning may be modified, and must be rigorously fixed.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 months 2 weeks ago
Long before physics or psychology were...

Long before physics or psychology were born, pain disintegrated matter, and affliction the soul.

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Philosophical Maxims
Alan Watts
Alan Watts
1 month 2 days ago
To be free from convention is...

To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it. It is to be able to use it as an instrument instead of being used by it.

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p. 11
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
4 months 3 weeks ago
There are moments of sentimental and...

There are moments of sentimental and mystical experience. . . that carry an enormous sense of inner authority and illumination with them when they come. But they come seldom, and they do not come to everyone; and the rest of life makes either no connection with them, or tends to contradict them more than it confirms them. Some persons follow more the voice of the moment in these cases, some prefer to be guided by the average results. Hence the sad discordancy of so many of the spiritual judgments of human beings; a discordancy which will be brought home to us acutely enough before these lectures end.

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Lecture I, "Religion and Neurology"
Philosophical Maxims
Georges Sorel
Georges Sorel
1 month 1 day ago
Sorel the Dreyfusard eventually developed into...

Sorel the Dreyfusard eventually developed into a bitter anti-semite, calling upon Europe to defend itself against the Jewish peril in the same way as America fought the Yellow peril; he blamed the Chekist terror on the Jewish members of the Bolshevik party.

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Jacob Talmon, "The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution: The Origins of Ideological Polarization in the 20th Century ", University of California Press, 1981, p. 474
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
1 week 4 days ago
I do not believe in...

I do not believe in a God who maliciously or arbitrarily interferes in the personal affairs of mankind. My religion consists of a humble admiration for the vast power which manifests itself in that small part of the universe which our poor, weak minds can grasp!

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Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
4 months 2 weeks ago
Do you think that I count...

Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.

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Act 10, sc. 2
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
3 months 4 days ago
This in turn suggests an answer...

This in turn suggests an answer to our question: what happened between the birth of De Sade and the birth of Krafft-Ebbing? The rise of the novel taught Europe to use its imagination. And when imagination was applied to sex, the result was the rise of pornography -- and of "sexual perversion."

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p. 86
Philosophical Maxims
Cato the Younger
Cato the Younger
4 months 1 week ago
Nay, men, if any of you...

Nay, men, if any of you had heeded what I was ever foretelling and advising, ye would now neither be fearing a single man nor putting your hopes in a single man.

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Quoted by Plutarch, Life of Cato the Younger, 52 Bernadotte Perrin, ed. Plutarch's Lives, Vol. 8, LCL 100 (1919), pp. 247, 361
Philosophical Maxims
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