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Max Scheler
Max Scheler
1 month 3 weeks ago
When we cannot obtain a thing,...

When we cannot obtain a thing, we comfort ourselves with the reassuring thought that it is not worth nearly as much as we believed.

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L. Coser, trans. (1973), p. 73
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
3 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
William James
William James
3 months 5 days ago
Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best...

Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.

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Lectures IV and V, "The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness"
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
3 months 5 days ago
In vain I sought relief from...

In vain I sought relief from my favourite books; those memorials of past nobleness and greatness from which I had always hitherto drawn strength and animation. I read them now without feeling, or with the accustomed feeling minus all its charm; and I became persuaded, that my love of mankind, and of excellence for its own sake, had worn itself out. I sought no comfort by speaking to others of what I felt. If I had loved any one sufficiently to make confiding my griefs a necessity, I should not have been in the condition.

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(pp. 134-135)
Philosophical Maxims
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
2 months 5 days ago
The Divine Existence (Daseyn),-his Existence, I...

The Divine Existence (Daseyn),-his Existence, I say, which, according to the distinction already laid down, is his (Manifestation and Revelation of himself-is absolute- only through itself, and of necessity, LIGHT:-namely, y the inward and spiritual Light. This Light, left to itself, separates and divides itself into an infinite multiplicity of individual rays; and in this way, in these individual rays, becomes estranged from itself and its | original source. But this same Light may also again concentrate itself from out this separation, and conceive and comprehend itself as One, as that which it is in itself,-the Existence and Revelation of God; remaining indeed, even in this conception, that which it is in its form,-Light; but yet in this condition, and even by means of this very condition, announcing it-to self as having no real Being in itself, but as only the, Existence and Self-Manifestation of God.

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p. 78
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
1 month 2 weeks ago
The natural impulse of the primitive...

The natural impulse of the primitive man to strike back, to avenge a wrong, is out of date. Instead, the civilized man, stripped of courage and daring, has delegated to an organized machinery the duty of avenging his wrongs, in the foolish belief that the State is justified in doing what he no longer has the manhood or consistency to do.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
3 months 4 days ago
Maybe this world is another planet's...

Maybe this world is another planet's Hell.

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As quoted in Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time (1979) by Laurence J. Peter, p. 239 Point Counter Point (New York: The Modern Library, 1928), Chapter XVII, p. 263
Philosophical Maxims
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
3 months 4 days ago
To expect truth to come from...

To expect truth to come from thinking signifies that we mistake the need to think with the urge to know.

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p. 61
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel
2 months 3 weeks ago
In speaking of the fear of...

In speaking of the fear of religion, I don't mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something much deeper-namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.

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The Last Word, Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 130-131.
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 months 5 days ago
The most advanced nations are always...

The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most.

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Civilization
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
2 months 5 days ago
But like the desire for eternal...

But like the desire for eternal life, the desire for omniscience and absolute perfection is merely an imaginary desire; and, as history and daily experience prove, the supposed human striving for unlimited knowledge and perfection is a myth. Man has no desire to know everything; he only wants to know the things to which he is particularly drawn.

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Lecture XXX, Atheism alone a Positive View
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay
3 weeks 2 days ago
The gallery in which the reporters...

The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm.

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Hallam', The Edinburgh Review (September 1828), quoted in T. B. Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to The Edinburgh Review, Vol. I (1843), p. 210
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 6 days ago
Whatever bitterness and hate may be...

Whatever bitterness and hate may be found in the movements which we are to examine, it is not bitterness or hate, but love, that is their mainspring. It is difficult not to hate those who torture the objects of our love. Though difficult, it is not impossible; but it requires a breadth of outlook and a comprehensiveness of understanding which are not easy to preserve amid a desperate contest. If ultimate wisdom has not always been preserved by Socialists and Anarchists, they have not differed in this from their opponents; and in the source of their inspiration they have shown themselves superior to those who acquiesce ignorantly or supinely in the injustices and oppressions by which the existing system is preserved.

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Introduction, p. 10.
Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
3 months 2 weeks ago
For what is a child? Ignorance....

For what is a child? Ignorance. What is a child? Want of instruction. For where a child has knowledge, he is no worse than we are.

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Book II, ch. 1, 16
Philosophical Maxims
Judith Butler
Judith Butler
1 month 1 week ago
There was a brief moment after...

There was a brief moment after 9/11 when Colin Powell said "we should not rush to satisfy the desire for revenge." It was a great moment, an extraordinary moment, because what he was actually asking people to do was to stay with a sense of grief, mournfulness, and vulnerability.

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Interview with Judith Butler. in: The Believer. May 2003
Philosophical Maxims
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
2 months 2 days ago
The more I see of the...

The more I see of the world, the more I am convinced that civilisation is a blessing not sufficiently estimated by those who have not traced its progress; for it not only refines our enjoyments, but produces a variety which enables us to retain the primitive delicacy of our sensations. Without the aid of the imagination all the pleasures of the senses must sink into grossness, unless continual novelty serve as a substitute for the imagination, which, being impossible, it was to this weariness, I suppose, that Solomon alluded when he declared that there was nothing new under the sun!

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Letter 2
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
1 month 4 days ago
It occurred to him that what...

It occurred to him that what had appeared perfectly impossible before, namely that he had not spent his life as he should have done, might after all be true. It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false. He tried to defend all those things to himself and suddenly felt the weakness of what he was defending.

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Ch. XI
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 6 days ago
The question of "unreality," which confronts...

The question of "unreality," which confronts us at this point, is a very important one. Misled by grammar, the great majority of those logicians who have dealt with this question have dealt with it on mistaken lines. They have regarded grammatical form as a surer guide in analysis than, in fact, it is. And they have not known what differences in grammatical form are important.

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Ch. 16: Descriptions
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 week 3 days ago
It is hard to have patience...
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Main Content / General
Arnold J. Toynbee
Arnold J. Toynbee
2 weeks 3 days ago
The difference between a Humanist and...

The difference between a Humanist and a lunatic is in fact one of degree.

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Vol. 9
Philosophical Maxims
John Searle
John Searle
1 month 1 week ago
You need to know at least...

You need to know at least one foreign language well enough so that you can read the best literature that that language has produced in the original, and so you carry on a reasonable conversation and have dreams in that language. There are several reasons why this is crucial, but the most important is perhaps this: you can never understand one language until you understand at least two.

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Philosophical Maxims
Empedocles
Empedocles
2 months 3 weeks ago
The sight of both eyes…

The sight of both eyes becomes one.

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fr. 88
Philosophical Maxims
Ernst Mach
Ernst Mach
2 months 1 day ago
There was a loud echo of...

There was a loud echo of Hume in Mach's work, as both emphasized the tangibility of all knowledge-ultimately, all knowledge is based in the senses. Mach also emphasized the internal nature of all knowledge, in that it is experienced in the mind. Finally, he emphasized the importance of quantitative and mathematical methods and models to understand sensory experience.

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Alan Ebenstein, Hayek's Journey" The Mind of Friedrich Hayek (2003), Ch. 10 : Epistemology, Psychology, and Methodology
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
3 months 1 week ago
Confidence in another man's virtue is...

Confidence in another man's virtue is no light evidence of a man's own, and God willingly favors such a confidence.

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Book I, Ch. 14
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas
3 months 3 weeks ago
The highest perfection of human life...

The highest perfection of human life consists in the mind of man being detached from care, for the sake of God.

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III, 130, 3
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
1 month 1 day ago
The old land is still the...

The old land is still the true love, the others are but pleasant infidelities.

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Pt. I, ch. IV
Philosophical Maxims
Susan Neiman
Susan Neiman
3 weeks 4 days ago
French schoolchildren can be proud to...

French schoolchildren can be proud to become citizens of the country that gave the world the Declaration of the Rights of Man; need they be told that it was disregarded a few years after it inspired the revolution in Haiti, whose leader, Toussaint Louverture, was consigned to death in a French prison?

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Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
1 month 2 weeks ago
One simple method is to take...

One simple method is to take a pen or pencil and hold it up against a blank wall or ceiling. Now concentrate on the pen as if it is the most important thing in the world. Then allow your sense to relax, so you see the pen against the background of the wall. Concentrate again. Relax again. Keep on doing this until you become aware of the ability to focus attention at will. You will find that this unaccustomed activity of the will is tiring; it produces a sense of strain behind the eyes. My own perception is that if you persist, in spite of the strain, the result is acute discomfort, followed by a sudden immense relief - the 'peak experience'.

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p. 33
Philosophical Maxims
Baruch Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza
3 months 1 week ago
This I know, that between finite...

This I know, that between finite and infinite there is no comparison; so that the difference between God and the greatest and most excellent created thing is no less than the difference between God and the least created thing.

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Letter to Hugo Boxel (October 1674) The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza (1891) Tr. R. H. M. Elwes, Vol. 2, Letter 58 (54).
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
3 months 4 days ago
I exist, that is all, and...

I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
3 months 1 week ago
There must then be something that...

There must then be something that is better, and that must be God. When you see a stately and stupendous edifice, though you do not know who is the owner of it, you would yet conclude it was not built for rats. And this divine structure, that we behold of the celestial palace, have we not reason to believe that it is the residence of some possessor, who is much greater than we?

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Ch. 12, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Carew Hazlitt, 1877
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
3 months 4 days ago
In a world, man must create...

In a world, man must create his own essence: it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he gradually defines himself.

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Philosophical Maxims
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
2 months 2 days ago
Nothing, I am sure, calls forth...

Nothing, I am sure, calls forth the faculties so much as the being obliged to struggle with the world; and this is not a woman's province in a married state. Her sphere of action is not large, and if she is not taught to look into her own heart, how trivial are her occupations and pursuits! What little arts engross and narrow her mind!

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Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), "Matrimony", p. 100
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
1 month 2 weeks ago
It has been said of old,...

It has been said of old, all roads lead to Rome. In paraphrased application to the tendencies of our day, it may truly be said that all roads lead to the great social reconstruction. The economic awakening of the workingman, and his realization of the necessity for concerted industrial action; the tendencies of modern education, especially in their application to the free development of the child; the spirit of growing unrest expressed through, and cultivated by, art and literature, all pave the way to the Open Road.

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Philosophical Maxims
bell hooks
bell hooks
1 month 2 weeks ago
To counter the fixation on a...

To counter the fixation on a rhetoric of victimhood, black folks must engage in a discourse of self-determination.

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Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
1 month 2 weeks ago
When we are lulled into somnolence...

When we are lulled into somnolence by lack of challenge every molehill tends to become a mountain, every minor inconvenience an intolerable imposition. For a self-chosen reality tends to become a prison. The factors that protect and insulate civilized man can easily end by suffocating him unless he possesses a high degree of self-discipline, the 'highly developed vital sense' that Shaw speaks of. And since clever and sensitive people are inclined to lack self-discipline, a high degree of culture usually involves a high degree of pessimism. This is what has happened to Western civilisation over the past two centuries. It explains why so many distinguished artists, writers and musicians have taken such a negative view of the human situation.

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Introduction, p. xiii
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
3 months 5 days ago
We do not live for idle...

We do not live for idle amusement. I would not run round a corner to see the world blow up.

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p. 491
Philosophical Maxims
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
1 month 3 weeks ago
Thought must be judged by something...

Thought must be judged by something that is not thought, by its effect on production or its impact on social conduct, as art today is being ultimately gauged in every detail by something that is not art, be it box-office or propaganda value.

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describing the pragmatist view, p. 51.
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley
2 weeks 6 days ago
Science has taught... me to be...

Science has taught... me to be careful how I adopt a view which jumps with my preconceptions, and to require stronger evidence for such belief than for one to which I was previously hostile. My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonise with my aspirations.

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Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
1 month 4 days ago
Condemn me if you choose -...

Condemn me if you choose - I do that myself, - but condemn me, and not the path which I am following, and which I point out to those who ask me where, in my opinion, the path is.

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"Letter to N.N.," quoted by Havelock Ellis in "The New Spirit" (1892) p. 226
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine
3 months 1 week ago
We live to improve, or we...

We live to improve, or we live in vain.

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Address and Declaration at a Select Meeting of the Friends of Universal Peace and Liberty (August 20, 1791) p. 5
Philosophical Maxims
Henri Bergson
Henri Bergson
1 month 3 weeks ago
Intuition is a method of feeling...

Intuition is a method of feeling one's way intellectually into the inner heart of a thing to locate what is unique and inexpressible in it.

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Quoted in Georgia O'Keeffe, 1887-1986 : Flowers in the Desert (2000) by Britta Benke, p. 28
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
3 months 3 days ago
One of the ideas I had...

One of the ideas I had discussed in The Poverty of Historicism was the influence of a prediction upon the event predicted. I had called this the "Oedipus effect", because the oracle played a most important role in the sequence of events which led to the fulfilment of its prophecy. ... For a time I thought that the existence of the Oedipus effect distinguished the social from the natural sciences. But in biology, too-even in molecular biology-expectations often play a role in bringing about what has been expected.

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Page 29
Philosophical Maxims
Vandana Shiva
Vandana Shiva
2 weeks 4 days 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
Cornel West
Cornel West
2 months 4 weeks ago
To be a Christian - a...

To be a Christian - a follower of Jesus Christ - is to love wisdom, love justice, and love freedom.

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(p172)
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
4 months 6 days ago
If God stops a man on...

If God stops a man on the road, and calls him with a revelation and sends him armed with divine authority among men, they say to him; from whom dost thou come? He answers: from God. But now God cannot help his messenger physically like a king, who gives him soldiers or policemen, or his ring or his signature, which is known to all; in short, God cannot help men by providing them with physical certainty that an Apostle is an Apostle-which would, moreover, be nonsense. Even miracles, if the Apostle has that gift, give no physical certainty; for the miracle is the object of faith.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley
2 weeks 6 days ago
For myself I say deliberately, it...

For myself I say deliberately, it is better to have a millstone tied round the neck and be thrown into the sea than to share the enterprises of those to whom the world has turned, and will turn, because they minister to its weaknesses and cover up the awful realities which it shudders to look at.

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Aphorism #367, in Aphorisms and Reflections (1907) edited by Henrietta A. Huxley, his widow
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Browne
Thomas Browne
2 months 1 week ago
I could be content that we...

I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpetuate the world without this trivial and vulgar act of coition; It is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life, nor is there anything that will more deject his cooled imagination, when he shall consider what an odd and unworthy piece of folly he hath committed.

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Section 9
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
2 months 5 days ago
You had that action and counteraction...

You had that action and counteraction which, in the natural and in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers draws out the harmony of the universe.

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Volume iii, p. 277
Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
2 months 1 day ago
Loneliness does not come from having...

Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.

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p.356
Philosophical Maxims
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