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Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
Just now
Or, if you enjoy living with...

Or, if you enjoy living with Greeks also, spend your time with Socrates and with Zeno: the former will show you how to die if it be necessary; the latter how to die before it is necessary. Live with Chrysippus, with Posidonius: they will make you acquainted with things earthly and things heavenly; they will bid you work hard over something more than neat turns of language and phrases mouthed forth for the entertainment of listeners; they will bid you be stout of heart and rise superior to threats. The only harbour safe from the seething storms of this life is scorn of the future, a firm stand, a readiness to receive Fortune's missiles full in the breast, neither skulking nor turning the back.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 1 week ago
That history just unfolds, independently of...

That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
1 month 4 weeks ago
Needless to say, I am not...

Needless to say, I am not opposed to woman suffrage on the conventional ground that she is not equal to it. I see neither physical, psychological, nor mental reasons why woman should not have the equal right to vote with man. But that can not possibly blind me to the absurd notion that woman will accomplish that wherein man has failed. If she would not make things worse, she certainly could not make them better. To assume, therefore, that she would succeed in purifying something which is not susceptible of purification, is to credit her with supernatural powers. Since woman's greatest misfortune has been that she was looked upon as either angel or devil, her true salvation lies in being placed on earth; namely, in being considered human, and therefore subject to all human follies and mistakes. Are we, then, to believe that two errors will make a right? Are we to assume that the poison already inherent in politics will be decreased, if women were to enter the political arena?

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Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
3 months 2 weeks ago
The animals are much more content...

The animals are much more content with mere existence than we are; the plants are wholly so; and man is so according to how dull and insensitive he is. The animal's life consequently contains less suffering but also less pleasure than the human's, the direct reason being that on the one hand it is free from care and anxiety and the torments that attend them, but on the other is without hope and therefore has no share in that anticipation of a happy future which, together with the enchanting products of the imagination which accompany it, is the source of most of our greatest joys and pleasures. The animal lacks both anxiety and hope because its consciousness is restricted to what is clearly evident and thus to the present moment: the animal is the present incarnate.

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Vol. 2 "On the Suffering of the World" as translated in Essays and Aphorisms (1970), as translated by R. J. Hollingdale
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 week ago
We shall either learn to know...

We shall either learn to know a Hero, a true Governor and Captain, somewhat better, when we see him; or else go on to be forever governed by the Unheroic;-had we ballot-boxes clattering at every street-corner, there were no remedy in these.

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Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
1 month 3 weeks ago
The Greeks possessed a knowledge of...

The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.

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F 44
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
4 months 2 weeks ago
The Sophist demonstrates that everything is...

The Sophist demonstrates that everything is true and nothing is true.

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Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
4 months 1 day ago
Thus, in this universal catastrophe, the...

Thus, in this universal catastrophe, the sufferings of Christians have tended to their moral improvement, because they viewed them with eyes of faith.

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I, 9
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
2 months 2 weeks ago
The Africans had that claim on...

The Africans had that claim on our humanity which could not be resisted, whatever might have been advanced by an hon. gentleman in defence of the property of the planters.

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Speech in the House of Commons (12 May 1789), quoted in The Parliamentary History of England, From the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, Vol. XXVIII (1816), column 98
Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
4 months 1 day ago
Thou hast made us for Thyself,...

Thou hast made us for Thyself, and the heart never resteth till it findeth rest in Thee.

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p. 515
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
3 months 3 weeks ago
But the best demonstration by far...

But the best demonstration by far is experience, if it go not beyond the actual experiment.

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Aphorism 70
Philosophical Maxims
Theodor Adorno
Theodor Adorno
2 months 1 day ago
The conflicts that tear society apart...

The conflicts that tear society apart resemble the distinction between the concept and the particular facts subordinated to it. ... Whatever refuses to abide by the unity imposed by the principle of dominion manifests itself not as something indifferent to that principle, but as an infringement of logic: as a contradiction.

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p. 169
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
2 months 1 week ago
The real field of knowledge is...

The real field of knowledge is not the given fact about things as they are, but the critical evaluation of them as a prelude to passing beyond their given form. Knowledge deals with appearances in order to get beyond them. .... The concept of reality has thus turned into the concept of possibility. The real is not yet 'actual,' but is at first only the possibility of an actual.

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P. 145
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
3 months 2 weeks ago
I have no knowledge of myself...

I have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself.

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B 158
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
3 months 2 weeks ago
This year, or this month, or,...

This year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.

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Book I, Chapter 1, "The Law of Human Nature"
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
3 months 2 weeks ago
The wraith of Sigmund said. "You...

The wraith of Sigmund said. "You know what this is, I suppose. Religious melancholia. Stop while there is time. If you dive, you dive into insanity."

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Pilgrim's Regress 168
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
2 months 2 days ago
There are, in fact, people who...

There are, in fact, people who appear to think only with the brain, or with whatever may be the specific thinking organ; while others think with all the body and all the soul, with the blood, with the marrow of the bones, with the heart, with the lungs, with the belly, with the life. And the people who think only with the brain develop into definition-mongers; they become the professionals of thought.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 months 2 weeks ago
There are two laws discrete Not...

There are two laws discrete Not reconciled, Law for man, and law for thing.

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Ode: Inscribed to W. H. Channing, st. 9
Philosophical Maxims
Zoroaster
Zoroaster
3 months 6 days ago
Choose a wife who is of...

Choose a wife who is of character, because that one is good who in the end is more respected.

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(p. 60)
Philosophical Maxims
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut
1 month 2 weeks ago
I have wanted to give Iraq...

I have wanted to give Iraq a lesson in democracy - because we're experienced with it, you know. And, in democracy, after a hundred years, you have to let your slaves go. And, after a hundred and fifty years, you have to let your women vote. And, at the beginning of democracy, is that quite a bit of genocide and ethnic cleansing is quite okay. And that's what's going on now.

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Interviewed by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
2 months 2 days ago
Yes perhaps, as the Sage says,...

Yes perhaps, as the Sage says, "nothing worthy of proving can be proven, nor yet disproven"; but can we restrain that instinct which urges man to wish to know, and above all to wish to know the things which conduce to life, to eternal life? Eternal life, not eternal knowledge as the Alexandrian gnostic said. For living is one thing and knowing is another; and... perhaps there is an opposition between the two that we may say that everything vital is anti-rational, not merely irrational, and that everything rational is anti-vital. And this is the basis of the tragic sense of life.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
4 months 2 weeks ago
But voice is a certain sound...

But voice is a certain sound of that which is animated; for nothing inanimate emits a voice; but they are said to emit a voice from similitude, as a pipe, and a lyre, and such other inanimate things, have extension, modulation, and dialect; for thus it appears, because voice, also, has these.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine
3 months 2 weeks ago
It was the excess to which...

It was the excess to which imaginary systems of religion had been carried, and the intolerance, persecutions, burnings, and massacres, they occasioned, that first induced certain persons to propagate infidelity; thinking, that upon the whole, that it was better not to believe at all, than to believe a multitude of things and complicated creeds, that occasioned so much mischief in the world. But those days are past, persecution has ceased, and the antidote then set up against it has no longer even the shadow of apology. We profess, and we proclaim in peace, the pure, unmixed, comfortable, and rational belief of a God, as manifested to us in the universe. We do this without any apprehension of that belief being made a cause of persecution as other beliefs have been, or of suffering persecution ourselves. To God, and not to man, are all men to account for their belief.

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A Discourse, &c. &c.
Philosophical Maxims
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
3 months 2 weeks ago
Before mass leaders seize the power...

Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.

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On "alternate facts"
Philosophical Maxims
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida
3 months 1 week ago
Deconstruction never had meaning or interest...

Deconstruction never had meaning or interest, at least in my eyes, than as a radicalization, that is to say, also within the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism.

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Specters of Marx. Routledge, 1994. p. 115
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Fukuyama
Francis Fukuyama
1 week 3 days ago
Experience suggests that if men cannot...

Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy. p. 330

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Philosophical Maxims
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
1 month 1 week ago
There is no need to make...

There is no need to make an inventory of the times. It is demoralizing to describe ourselves to ourselves yet again. It is especially hard on us since we believe (as we have been educated to believe) that history has formed us and that we are all mini-summaries of the present age.

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Mozart: An Overture (1992), pp. 13-14
Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
4 months 1 day ago
The mind itself, its love [of...

The mind itself, its love [of itself] and its knowledge [of itself] are a kind of trinity.

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(Cambridge: 2002), Book 9, Chapter 4, Section 4, p. 27
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
1 month 1 week ago
Youth is wholly experimental. Letter to...

Youth is wholly experimental.

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Letter to a Young Gentleman Scribner's Magazine (September 1888).
Philosophical Maxims
Vandana Shiva
Vandana Shiva
4 weeks 1 day ago
I believe Gandhi is the only...

I believe Gandhi is the only person who knew about real democracy - not democracy as the right to go and buy what you want, but democracy as the responsibility to be accountable to everyone around you. Democracy begins with freedom from hunger, freedom from unemployment, freedom from fear, and freedom from hatred. To me, those are the real freedoms on the basis of which good human societies are based.

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1998
Philosophical Maxims
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
2 months 1 week ago
Affection requires a firmer foundation than...

Affection requires a firmer foundation than sympathy, and few people have a principle of action sufficiently stable to produce rectitude of feeling; for in spite of all the arguments I have heard to justify deviations from duty, I am persuaded that even the most spontaneous sensations are more under the direction of principle than weak people are willing to allow.

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Letter 17
Philosophical Maxims
Diogenes of Sinope
Diogenes of Sinope
3 months 6 days ago
He lit a lamp in broad...

He lit a lamp in broad daylight and said, as he went about, "I am looking for a human."

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Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 41. This line is frequently translated as "I am looking for an honest man."
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
1 month 2 weeks ago
A man can live and be...

A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral.

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Writings on Civil Disobedience and Nonviolence
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
3 months 2 weeks ago
Capitalist production does not exist at...

Capitalist production does not exist at all without foreign commerce.

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Vol. II, Ch. XX, p. 474 (See also...David Ricardo, The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, Ch. VII, p. 81).
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
2 months 2 days ago
I must avert here once again...

I must avert here once again to my view of the opposition that exists between individuality and personality, notwithstanding the fact that the one demands the other. Individuality is, if I may so express it, the container or thing which contains, personality the content or thing contained, or I might say that my personality is in a certain sense my comprehension, that which I comprehend or embrace within myself - which is in a certain way the whole Universe - and that my individuality is my extension; the one my infinite, the other my finite.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
3 months 2 weeks ago
A sound mind in a sound...

A sound mind in a sound body, is a short but full description of a happy state in this world.

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Sec. 1
Philosophical Maxims
John Gray
John Gray
3 weeks 1 day ago
I may not be as unambiguously...

I may not be as unambiguously hostile to capitalism as many people are, but what I don't like about it is the commodification of personal experiences, it turns everyone into actors.

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Quoted in Will Self, "John Gray: Forget everything you know," The Independent
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
3 months 2 weeks ago
The qualities most useful to ourselves...

The qualities most useful to ourselves are, first of all, superior reason and understanding, by which we are capable of discerning the remote consequences of all our actions, and of foreseeing the advantage or detriment which is likely to result from them: and secondly, self-command, by which we are enabled to abstain from present pleasure or to endure present pain, in order to obtain a greater pleasure or to avoid a greater pain in some future time. In the union of those two qualities consists the virtue of prudence, of all the virtues that which is most useful to the individual.

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Chap. II.
Philosophical Maxims
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
2 months 2 weeks ago
Among other men Reason awakes in...

Among other men Reason awakes in another form-as the impulse towards Personal Freedom, which, although it never opposes the mild rule of the inward Instinct which it loves, yet rises in rebellion against the pressure of a stranger Instinct which has usurped its rights; and in this awakening it breaks the chains,-not of Reason as Instinct itself, but of the Instinct of foreign natures clothed in the garb of external power.

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p. 8
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
3 months 2 weeks ago
An increase in the productivity of...

An increase in the productivity of labour means nothing more than that the same capital creates the same value with less labour, or that less labour creates the same product with more capital.

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Notebook IV, The Chapter on Capital, p. 308.
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
3 months 3 weeks ago
Once conform, once do what others...

Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul.

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Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
4 months 1 week ago
The direction of the world overwhelms...

The direction of the world overwhelms me at this time. In the long run, all the continents (yellow, black and brown) will spill over onto Old Europe. They are hundreds and hundreds of millions. They are hungry and they are not afraid to die. We no longer know how to die or how to kill. We could preach, but Europe believes in nothing. So, we must wait for the year 1000 or a miracle. For my part, I find it harder and harder to live before a wall.

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Philosophical Maxims
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
1 week 1 day ago
The artist may be well advised...

The artist may be well advised to keep his work to himself till it is completed, because no one can readily help him or advise him with it...but the scientist is wiser not to withhold a single finding or a single conjecture from publicity.

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Essay on Experimentation
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas
4 months 4 days ago
If man of himself could in...

If man of himself could in a perfect manner know all things visible and invisible, it would indeed be foolish to believe what he does not see. But our manner of knowing is so weak that no philosopher could perfectly investigate the nature of even one little fly.

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Prologue (trans. Joseph B. Collins)
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 month 1 week ago
Pornography and violence are by-products of...

Pornography and violence are by-products of societies in which private identity has been...destroyed by sudden environmental change.

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Letter to Clare Westcott, November 26 1975. Letters of Marshall McLuhan, p. 514
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
Just now
Accept in an unruffled spirit that...

Accept in an unruffled spirit that which is inevitable.

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Philosophical Maxims
Vandana Shiva
Vandana Shiva
4 weeks 1 day ago
When Bill Gates pours money into...

When Bill Gates pours money into Africa for feeding the poor in Africa and preventing famine, he's pushing the failed Green Revolution, he's pushing chemicals, pushing GMOs, pushing patterns.

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On Bill Gate's philanthropic activities, from "Bill Gates is continuing the work of Monsanto, Vandana Shiva tells France24" France24
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
2 months ago
When they have...
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Main Content / General
William James
William James
3 months 2 weeks ago
If belief consists in an emotional...

If belief consists in an emotional reaction of the entire man on an object, how can we believe at will? We cannot control our emotions.... But gradually our will can lead us to the same results by a very simple method: we need only in cold blood act as if the thing in question were real, and keep acting as if it were real, and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real. It will become so knit with habit and emotion that our interests in it will be those which characterize belief.

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Ch. 21
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
2 months 1 week ago
It is more blessed to give...

It is more blessed to give than to receive.

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Acts 20:35b
Philosophical Maxims
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