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Voltaire
Voltaire
4 months 1 week ago
A minister of state…

A minister of state is excusable for the harm he does when the helm of government has forced his hand in a storm; but in the calm he is guilty of all the good he does not do.

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Le Siècle de Louis XIV, ch. VI: "État de la France jusqu'à la mort du cardinal Mazarin en 1661" (1752)
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
4 months 1 week ago
It is not only when it...

It is not only when it takes the form of physical addiction that sex is evil. It is also evil when it manifests itself as a way of satisfying the lust for power or the climber's craving for position and social distinction.

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Ch. 14, p. 358 [2012 reprint]
Philosophical Maxims
Judith Butler
Judith Butler
2 months 1 week ago
Guilt has to be understood not...

Guilt has to be understood not only as a way of checking one's own destructiveness, but as a mechanism for safeguarding the life of the other, one that emerges from our own need and dependency, from a sense that this life is not a life without another life. Indeed, when it turns into a safeguarding action, I am not sure it should still be called "guilt." If we do still use that term, we could conclude that "guilt" is strangely generative or that its productive form is reparation.

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p. 93
Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
2 months 1 week ago
We may with advantage at times...

We may with advantage at times forget what we know.

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Maxim 234
Philosophical Maxims
Joseph de Maistre
Joseph de Maistre
1 week 2 days ago
Either every imaginable institution is founded...

Either every imaginable institution is founded on a religious concept or it is only a passing phenomenon. Institutions are strong and durable to the degree that they are, so to speak, deified. Not only is human reason, or what is ignorantly called philosophy, incapable of supplying these foundations, which with equal ignorance are called superstitious, but philosophy is, on the contrary, an essentially disruptive force.

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Chapter V, p. 41
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert A. Simon
Herbert A. Simon
2 months 2 weeks ago
The techniques of the practitioner are...

The techniques of the practitioner are usually called 'synthetic'. He designs by organizing known principles and devices into larger systems.

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Simon (1945, p. 353); As cited in: Philosophy of Technology and Engineering Sciences (2009) p. 425.
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Schelling
Friedrich Schelling
3 months 1 week ago
The end of the philosophical dialogue...

The end of the philosophical dialogue lies in itself; it can never serve a purpose outside of itself. Just as a sculptor does not cease to be a work of art even if it lies at the bottom of the sea, so indeed every work of philosophy endures, even if uncomprehended in its own time. One would be grateful if it were merely a matter of incomprehension. Instead, the work is usually refitted and appropriated by various entities-some playing the part of the opponent; others, that of the proponent.

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P.3-4
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
4 months 1 week ago
The good is the idea, or...

The good is the idea, or unity of the conception of the will with the particular will. Abstract right, well-being, the subjectivity of consciousness, and the contingency of external reality, are in their independent and separate existences superseded in this unity, although in their real essence they are contained in it and preserved. This unity is realized freedom, the absolute final cause of the world. Addition.-Every stage is properly the idea, but the earlier steps contain the idea only in more abstract form. The I, as person, is already the idea, although in its most abstract guise. The good is the idea more completely determined; it is the unity of the conception of will with the particular will. It is not something abstractly right, but has a real content, whose substance constitutes both right and well-being.

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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Right translated by SW Dyde Queen's University Canada 1896 p. 123
Philosophical Maxims
Gottlob frege
Gottlob frege
3 months 3 days ago
Gottlob Frege created modern logic including...

Gottlob Frege created modern logic including "for all," "there exists," and rules of proof. Leibniz and Boole had dealt only with what we now call "propositional logic" (that is, no "for all" or "there exists"). They also did not concern themselves with rules of proof, since their aim was to reach truth by pure calculation with symbols for the propositions. Frege took the opposite track: instead of trying to reduce logic to calculation, he tried to reduce mathematics to logic, including the concept of number.

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Michael J. Beeson, "The Mechanization of Mathematics," in Alan Turing: Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker2004
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
1 day ago
The really good music, whether...

The really good music, whether of the East or of the West, cannot be analyzed.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay
2 months ago
There is surely no contradiction in...

There is surely no contradiction in saying that a certain section of the community may be quite competent to protect the persons and property of the rest, yet quite unfit to direct our opinions, or to superintend our private habits.

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p. 246
Philosophical Maxims
Nikos Kazantzakis
Nikos Kazantzakis
1 week 5 days ago
At every moment of crisis an...

At every moment of crisis an array of men risk their lives in the front ranks as standard-bearers of God to fight and take upon themselves the whole responsibility of the battle. Once long ago it was the priests, the kings, the noblemen, or the burghers who created civilizations and set divinity free. Today God is the common worker made savage by toil and rage and hunger

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 week 4 days ago
The global village....
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Main Content / General
Epictetus
Epictetus
4 months 3 weeks ago
Look now, this is the starting...

Look now, this is the starting point of philosophy: the recognition that different people have conflicting opinions, the rejection of mere opinion so that it comes to be viewed with mistrust, an investigation of opinion to determine whether it is rightly held, and the discovery of a standard of judgement, comparable to the balance that we have devised for the determining of weights, or the carpenter's rule for determining whether things are straight or crooked.

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Book II, ch. 11, 13.
Philosophical Maxims
Nikos Kazantzakis
Nikos Kazantzakis
1 week 5 days ago
"Since we cannot change reality, let...

"Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality," says one of my favorite Byzantine mystics. I did this when a child; I do it now as well in the most creative moments of my life.

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"The Son", Ch. 4, p. 45
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Buber
Martin Buber
3 months 2 days ago
Before his death, Rabbi Zusya said,...

Before his death, Rabbi Zusya said, "In the coming world, they will not ask me: 'Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me: 'Why were you not Zusya?'"

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Tales of the Hasidim (1947), 1991 Ebook edition, p.251, as quoted in Jewish Currents.
Philosophical Maxims
John Dewey
John Dewey
3 months 2 days ago
Art is not the possession of...

Art is not the possession of the few who are recognized writers, painters, musicians; it is the authentic expression of any and all individuality. Those who have the gift of creative expression in unusually large measure disclose the meaning of the individuality of others to those others. In participating in the work of art, they become artists in their activity. They learn to know and honor individuality in whatever form it appears. The fountains of creative activity are discovered and released. The free individuality which is the source of art is also the final source of creative development in time.

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Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
2 months 1 week ago
The compassionate are not rich; therefore,...

The compassionate are not rich; therefore, the rich are not compassionate.

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p. 89
Philosophical Maxims
George Santayana
George Santayana
3 months 3 days ago
They [the wise spirits of antiquity...

They [the wise spirits of antiquity in the first circle of Dante's Inferno] are condemned, Dante tells us, to no other penalty than to live in desire without hope, a fate appropriate to noble souls with a clear vision of life.

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Obiter Scripta
Philosophical Maxims
Henri Poincaré
Henri Poincaré
1 month 5 days ago
Mathematicians do not study…

Mathematicians do not study objects, but the relations between objects; to them it is a matter of indifference if these objects are replaced by others, provided that the relations do not change. Matter does not engage their attention, they are interested in form alone.

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Ch. II: Dover abridged edition (1952), p. 20
Philosophical Maxims
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
3 weeks 1 day ago
Ivanov came to quite the same...

Ivanov came to quite the same conclusion, though life supplied him with quite different material to think about. He puts it like this: many lives have a mystical sense, but not everyone reads it right; more often than not it is given to us in cryptic form, and when we fail to decipher it we despair because our lives seem meaningless... the secret of a great life is often a man's success in deciphering the mysterious symbols vouchsafed to him, understanding them, and so learning to walk in the true path.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 1 week ago
...You could take up the line...

...You could take up the line that some of the gnostics took up - a line which I often thought was a very plausible one - that as a matter of fact this world that we know was made by the devil at a moment when God was not looking. There is a good deal to be said for that, and I am not concerned to refute it.

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"The Moral Arguments for Deity"
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Büchner
Georg Büchner
3 months 1 week ago
Murder begins where self-defense ends. Act...

Murder begins where self-defense ends.

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Act I.
Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
2 months 3 weeks ago
Une âme ... n'est pas faite...

The soul was not made to dwell in a thing; and when forced to it, there is no part of that soul but suffers violence.

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in The Simone Weil Reader, p. 155
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
4 months 1 week ago
The best is the enemy of the good.

The best is the enemy of the good.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
4 months 1 week ago
If a man own land, the...

If a man own land, the land owns him.

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Wealth
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 1 week ago
The church is in its major...

The church is in its major part an opponent still of progress and improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering in the world, because it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness; and when you say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all. "What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy."

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"How The Churches Have Retarded Progress"
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
2 months 1 week ago
With Gutenberg Europe enters the technological...

With Gutenberg Europe enters the technological phase of progress, when change itself becomes the archetypal norm of social life.

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(p. 177)
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
2 months 1 week ago
It is a very helpful insight...

It is a very helpful insight to say we are vehicles for our DNA, we are hosts for DNA parasites which are our genes. Those are insights which help us to understand an aspect of life. But it's emotive to say, that's all there is to it, we might as well give up going to Shakespeare plays and give up listening to music and things, because that's got nothing to do with it. That's an entirely different subject.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
1 week 4 days ago
All, too, will bear in mind...

All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression. Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things.

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Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
2 months 1 week ago
It seems as if marriage were...

It seems as if marriage were the royal road through life, and realised, on the instant, what we have all dreamed on summer Sundays when the bells ring, or at night when we cannot sleep for the desire of living. They think it will sober and change them. Like those who join a brotherhood, they fancy it needs but an act to be out of the coil and clamour for ever. But this is a wile of the devil's. To the end, spring winds will sow disquietude, passing faces leave a regret behind them, and the whole world keep calling and calling in their ears. For marriage is like life in this - that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.

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Virginibus Puerisque, Ch. 1.
Philosophical Maxims
Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry
1 week 4 days ago
It is impossible to care for...

It is impossible to care for each other more or differently than we care for the earth. This last statement becomes obvious enough when it is considered that the earth is what we all have in common, that it is what we are made of and what we live from, and that we therefore cannot damage it without damaging those with whom we share it. But I believe it goes farther and deeper than that. There is an uncanny resemblance between our behavior toward each other and our behavior toward the earth. Between our relation to our own sexuality and our relation to the reproductivity of the earth, for instance, the resemblance is plain and strong. By some connection we do not recognize, the willingness to exploit one becomes the willingness to exploit the other.

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The Unsettling of America (1977), Chapter Seven : The Body and the Earth
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
2 months 1 week ago
Some teachers of mankind - as...

Some teachers of mankind - as Plato... the first Christians, the orthodox Muslims, and the Buddhists - have gone so far as to repudiate art. ...[They consider it] so highly dangerous in its power to infect people against their wills, that mankind will lose far less by banishing all art than by tolerating each and every art. ...such people were wrong in repudiating all art, for they denied that which cannot be denied - one of the indispensable means of communication, without which mankind could not exist. ...Now there is only fear, lest we should be deprived of any pleasures art can afford, so any type of art is patronized. And I think the last error is much grosser than the first and that its consequences are far more harmful.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
4 months 1 week ago
It is the slowest pulsation which...

It is the slowest pulsation which is the most vital. The hero will then know how to wait, as well as to make haste. All good abides with him who waiteth wisely.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 273
Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
3 months 3 weeks ago
Neither will the horse be adjudged...

Neither will the horse be adjudged to be generous, that is sumptuously adorned, but the horse whose nature is illustrious; nor is the man worthy who possesses great wealth, but he whose soul is generous.

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Pythagorean Ethical Sentences From Stobæus
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
4 months 1 week ago
Why do I think that we,...

Why do I think that we, the intellectuals, are able to help? Simply because we, the intellectuals, have done the most terrible harm for thousands of years. Mass murder in the name of an idea, a doctrine, a theory, a religion - that is all our doing, our invention: the invention of the intellectuals. If only we would stop setting man against man - often with the best intentions - much would be gained. Nobody can say that it is impossible for us to stop doing this.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 month 2 days ago
All the gifted souls, of every...

All the gifted souls, of every rank, who are born to you in this generation. These are appointed, by the true eternal "divine right" which will never become obsolete, to be your governors and administrators; and precisely as you employ them, or neglect to employ them, will your State be favored of Heaven or disfavored. This noble young soul, you can have him on either of two conditions; and on one of them, since he is here in the world, you must have him. As your ally and coadjutor; or failing that, as your natural enemy: which shall it be? I consider that every Government convicts itself of infatuation and futility, or absolves and justifies itself before God and man, according as it answers this question.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley
1 month 3 weeks ago
The man of science who commits...

The man of science who commits himself to even one statement which turns out to be devoid of good foundation loses somewhat of his reputation among his fellows, and if he be guilty of the same error often he loses not only his intellectual, but his moral standing among them. For it is justly felt that errors of this kind have their root rather in the moral than in the intellectual nature.

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The Evidence of the Miracle of the Resurrection
Philosophical Maxims
Sydney Smith
Sydney Smith
3 weeks 5 days ago
It is true that every increase...

It is true that every increase of knowledge may possibly render depravity more depraved, as well as it may increase the strength of virtue. It is in itself only power; and its value depends on its application.

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"Female Education" (review of Thomas Broadhurst, Advice to Young Ladies on the Improvement of Mind, 1808), in The Edinburgh Review, No. 30 (January 1810), p. 314
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Fukuyama
Francis Fukuyama
1 month 6 days ago
If you look at the sociology...

If you look at the sociology of populism in the United States, it is tied most closely to population density, which... is correlated... to these types of cultural differences... to belief... in traditional cultural values, in family, in religion and the like, and conversely to... belief in immigration and diversity as strengths... This is the fundamental division that's taken hold of the United States. It has been augmented by technology because the internet has succeeded in... destroying every other source of authority that used to filter news and facts and information that... formed the basis of a democratic ability to have political discourse.

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25:32
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
4 months 2 weeks ago
I have here only made a...

I have here only made a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the thread that ties them together.

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Book III, Ch. 12. Of Physiognomy
Philosophical Maxims
Plato
Plato
5 months 1 week ago
The orators

The orators and the despots have the least power in their cities since they do nothing that they wish to do, practically speaking, though they do whatever they think to be best.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 1 week ago
If the Russians still adhered to...

If the Russians still adhered to the Greek Orthodox religion, if they had instituted parliamentary government, and if they had a completely free press which daily vituperated us, then - provided they still had armed forces as powerful as they have now - we should still hate them if they gave us ground for thinking them hostile.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 1 week ago
In the visible world, the Milky...

In the visible world, the Milky Way is a tiny fragment; within this fragment, the solar system is an infinitesimal speck, and of this speck our planet is a microscopic dot. On this dot, tiny lumps of impure carbon and water, of complicated structure, with somewhat unusual physical and chemical properties, crawl about for a few years, until they are dissolved again into the elements of which they are compounded. They divide their time between labour designed to postpone the moment of dissolution for themselves and frantic struggles to hasten it for others of their kind.

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Dreams and Facts, 1919
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
5 months 1 week ago
What must be remembered in any...

What must be remembered in any case is that secret complicity that joins the logical and the everyday to the tragic.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
4 months 1 week ago
In doing Good, I lose myself...

In doing Good, I lose myself in Being, I abandon my particularity, I become a universal subject.

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p. 77
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
2 months 3 weeks ago
The chief error in philosophy is...

The chief error in philosophy is overstatement.

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Pt. I, ch. 1, sec. 1.
Philosophical Maxims
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal
4 months 3 weeks ago
If it is pleasing to observe...

If it is pleasing to observe in nature her desire to paint God in all his works, in which we see some traces of him because they are his images, how much more just is it to consider in the productions of minds the efforts which they make to imitate the essential truth, even in shunning it, and to remark wherein they attain it and wherein they wander from it, as I have endeavored to do in this study.

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Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
2 months 3 weeks ago
La force, c'est ce qui fait...

Might is that which makes a thing of anybody who comes under its sway. When exercised to the full, it makes a thing of man in the most literal sense, for it makes him a corpse.

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in The Simone Weil Reader, p. 153
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
2 months 1 week ago
The man is making preparations for...

The man is making preparations for a year, and does not know that he will die before evening. And I remembered God's second saying, "Learn what is not given to man." 'What dwells in man" I already knew. Now I learnt what is not given him. It is not given to man to know his own needs.

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Ch. XI
Philosophical Maxims
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