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Rosa Luxemburg
Rosa Luxemburg
1 month 5 days ago
Plausible as the idea of the...

Plausible as the idea of the United States of Europe as a peace arrangement may seem to some at first glance, it has on closer examination not the least thing in common with the method of thought and the standpoint of social democracy . . . At the present stage of development of the world market and of world economy, the conception of Europe as an isolated economic unit is a sterile concoction of the brain. Europe no more forms a special unit within world economy than does Asia or America.

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Philosophical Maxims
Julius Evola
Julius Evola
1 month 2 weeks ago
Immortality is the privilege of the...

Immortality is the privilege of the few, and, according to the Aryan conception, specifically the privilege of heroes. Continuing to live - not as a shadow, but as a demigod - is reserved to those which a special spiritual action has elevated from the one nature to the other.

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p. 102
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
5 months 1 week ago
The eye may see for the...

The eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind.

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Philosophical Maxims
Porphyry
Porphyry
4 months 3 weeks ago
So people should abstain from other...

So people should abstain from other animals just as they should from the human.

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4, 9, 6
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
6 months 1 week ago
The man who is guided by...
The man who is guided by concepts and abstractions only succeeds by such means in warding off misfortune, without ever gaining any happiness for himself from these abstractions. And while he aims for the greatest possible freedom from pain, the intuitive man, standing in the midst of a culture, already reaps from his intuition a harvest of continually inflowing illumination, cheer, and redemption in addition to obtaining a defense against misfortune. To be sure, he suffers more intensely, when he suffers; he even suffers more frequently, since he does not understand how to learn from experience and keeps falling over and over again into the same ditch.
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Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
5 months 1 week ago
The sneaking arts of underling tradesmen...

The sneaking arts of underling tradesmen are thus erected into political maxims for the conduct of a great empire; for it is the most underling tradesmen only who make it a rule to employ chiefly their own customers. A great trader purchases his good always where they are cheapest and best, without regard to any little interest of this kind.

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Chapter III, Part II, p. 530.
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
5 months 1 week ago
Conformity to nature has no connection...

Conformity to nature has no connection whatever with right and wrong. The idea can never be fitly introduced into ethical discussions at all, except, occasionally and partially, into the question of degrees of culpability. To illustrate this point, let us consider the phrase by which the greatest intensity of condemnatory feeling is conveyed in connection with the idea of nature - the word "unnatural." That a thing is unnatural, in any precise meaning which can be attached to the word, is no argument for its being blamable; since the most criminal actions are to a being like man not more unnatural than most of the virtues.

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page 62; Broadview Press, page 102
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 5 days ago
I have all the defects of...

I have all the defects of other people yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
5 months 1 week 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
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
5 months 1 week ago
It is asserted that beasts have...

It is asserted that beasts have no rights; the illusion is harboured that our conduct, so far as they are concerned, has no moral significance, or, as it is put in the language of these codes, that "there are no duties to be fulfilled towards animals." Such a view is one of revolting coarseness, a barbarism of the West, whose source is Judaism. In philosophy, however, it rests on the assumption, despite all evidence to the contrary, of the radical difference between man and beast,-a doctrine which, as is well known, was proclaimed with more trenchant emphasis by Descartes than by any one else: it was indeed the necessary consequence of his mistakes.

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Part III, Ch. VIII, 7, p. 218
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Simmel
Georg Simmel
1 month 2 weeks ago
I understand the task of sociology...

I understand the task of sociology to be description and determination of the historical-psychological origin of those forms in which interactions take place between human beings. The totality of these interactions, springing from the most diverse impulses, directed toward the most diverse objects, and aiming at the most diverse ends, constitutes "society."

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p. 167
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
4 weeks 1 day ago
Besides agreeing with the aims...

Besides agreeing with the aims of vegetarianism for aesthetic and moral reasons, it is my view that a vegetarian manner of living by its purely physical effect on the human temperament would most beneficially influence a lot of mankind.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
4 months 2 days ago
And whereas many men, by accident...

And whereas many men, by accident unevitable, become unable to maintain themselves by their labour; they ought not to be left to the Charity of private persons; but to be provided for, (as far-forth as the necessities of Nature require,) by the Lawes of the Common-wealth. For as it is Unchariablenesse in any man, to neglect the impotent; so it is in the Soveraign of a Common-wealth, to expose them to the hazard of such uncertain Charity.

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The Second Part, Chapter 30, p. 181
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
5 months 1 week ago
Philosophy seems to me on the...

Philosophy seems to me on the whole a rather hopeless business.

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Letter to Gilbert Murray, December 28, 1902
Philosophical Maxims
Julius Evola
Julius Evola
1 month 2 weeks ago
In our opinion, the task of...

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

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pp. 81-82
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
5 months 1 week ago
Who lives longer? the man who...

Who lives longer? the man who takes heroin for two years and dies, or a man who lives on roast beef, water and potatoes 'till 95? One passes his 24 months in eternity. All the years of the beefeater are lived only in time.

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The Shortcut: 20 Stories To Get You From Here To There (2006) by Kevin A Fabiano, p. 179
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
3 months 2 weeks ago
The most dangerous untruths are truths...

The most dangerous untruths are truths moderately distorted.

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H 7 Variant translation: The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted.
Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
4 months 2 weeks ago
Poetry must have something in it...

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.

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Philosophical Maxims
Horace
Horace
4 months 4 weeks ago
Into the middle things…

Into the middle things.

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Line 148
Philosophical Maxims
Nikos Kazantzakis
Nikos Kazantzakis
1 month 1 week ago
We do not struggle for ourselves,...

We do not struggle for ourselves, nor for our race, not even for humanity. We do not struggle for Earth, nor for ideas. All these are the precious yet provisional stairs of our ascending God, and they crumble away as soon as he steps upon them in his ascent. In the smallest lightning flash of our lives, we feel all of God treading upon us, and suddenly we understand: if we all desire it intensely, if we organize all the visible and invisible powers of earth and fling them upward, if we all battle together like fellow combatants eternally vigilant - then the Universe might possibly be saved. It is not God who will save us - it is we who will save God, by battling, by creating, and by transmuting matter into spirit.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
1 month 1 week ago
It is between fifty and sixty...

It is between fifty and sixty years since I read it, and I then considered it merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherences of our own nightly dreams. ... what has no meaning admits no explanation.

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Letter to General Alexander Smyth, on the book of Revelation (or The Apocalypse of St. John the Divine)
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
5 months 1 week ago
Absurd, irreducible; nothing - not even...

Absurd, irreducible; nothing - not even a profound and secret delirium of nature - could explain it. Obviously I did not know everything, I had not seen the seeds sprout, or the tree grow. But faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explained by the rotation of a straight segment around one of its extremities. But neither does a circle exist. This root, on the other hand, existed in such a way that I could not explain it. Reflections on a chestnut tree root.

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Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
3 months 3 weeks ago
The philosophy of the soul of...

The philosophy of the soul of my people appears to me as an expression of an inward tragedy analogous to the tragedy of the soul of Don Quixote, as the expression of conflict between what the world is as scientific reason shows it to be and what we wish that it might be, as our religious faith affirms it to be. And in this philosophy is to be found the explanation of what is usually said about us - namely, that we are fundamentally irreducible to Kultur - or in other words, that we refuse to submit to it. No, Don Quixote does not resign himself either to the world, or to science or logic, or to art or esthetics, or to morality or ethics.

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Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
5 months 1 week ago
I freely admit that the remembrance...

I freely admit that the remembrance of David Hume was the very thing that many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave a completely different direction to my researches in the field of speculative philosophy.

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Philosophical Maxims
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
2 months 3 weeks ago
There are no signposts in the...

There are no signposts in the sky to show a man has passed that way before. There are no channels marked. The flier breaks each second into new uncharted seas.

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North to the Orient (1935) Ch. 1
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
1 month 6 days ago
Today I escaped from anxiety. Or...

Today I escaped from anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions-not outside.

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(Hays translation) IX, 13
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
1 month 1 week ago
The Constitution of the United States...

The Constitution of the United States asserts that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty.

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Letter to Justice William Johnson
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
1 month 6 days ago
For thus it is, men of...

For thus it is, men of Athens, in truth: wherever a man has placed himself thinking it is the best place for him, or has been placed by a commander, there in my opinion he ought to stay and to abide the hazard, taking nothing into the reckoning, either death or anything else, before the baseness of deserting his post.

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VII, 45
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
5 months 1 week ago
The silent organ loudest chants The...

The silent organ loudest chants The master's requiem.

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Dirge, st. 13
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
3 months 1 week ago
Money is a corporate image depending...

Money is a corporate image depending on society for its institutional status.

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(p. 133)
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
3 months 1 week ago
To recognize this clearly is enough...

To recognize this clearly is enough to drive a man out of his senses or to make him shoot himself. And this is just what does happen, and especially often among military men. A man need only come to himself for an instant to be impelled inevitably to such an end.

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Chapter V, Contradiction Between our Life and our Christian Conscience
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
3 months 1 week ago
Science is meaningless because it gives...

Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: 'what shall we do and how shall we live.

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Quoted by Max Weber in his lecture "Science as a Vocation"; in Lynda Walsh (2013)
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
5 months 1 week ago
Great geniuses have the shortest biographies....

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.

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Plato; or, The Philosopher
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
1 month 3 weeks ago
No man expects…

No man expects such exact fidelity as a traitor.

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De Ira (On Anger): Book 2, cap. 28, line 7.
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
3 months 1 week ago
By words one transmits thoughts to...

By words one transmits thoughts to another, by means of art, one transmits feelings.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine
5 months 1 week ago
So monstrous is the making and...

So monstrous is the making and keeping them slaves at all, abstracted from the barbarous usage they suffer, and the many evils attending the practice; as selling husbands away from wives, children from parents, and from each other, in violation of sacred and natural ties; and opening the way for adulteries, incests, and many shocking consequences, for all of which the guilty Masters must answer to the final Judge.

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Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Schlegel
Friedrich Schlegel
4 months 1 week ago
There is no….

There is no self-knowledge except historical self-knowledge. No one knows what he is if he doesn't know what his contemporaries are.

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"Ideas," Lucinde and the Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991), § 139
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
5 months 1 week ago
An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance...

An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing: "There is very little difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very important." This distinction seems to me to go to the root of the matter.

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"The Importance of Individuals"
Philosophical Maxims
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
4 months 1 week ago
It is impossible for any man,...

It is impossible for any man, when the most favourable circumstances concur, to acquire sufficient knowledge and strength of mind to discharge the duties of a king, entrusted with uncontrolled power; how then must they be violated when his very elevation is an insuperable bar to the attainment of either wisdom or virtue; when all the feelings of a man are stifled by flattery, and reflection shut out by pleasure! Surely it is madness to make the fate of thousands depend on the caprice of a weak fellow creature, whose very station sinks him NECESSARILY below the meanest of his subjects! But one power should not be thrown down to exalt another--for all power intoxicates weak man; and its abuse proves, that the more equality there is established among men, the more virtue and happiness will reign in society.

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Ch. 1
Philosophical Maxims
René Descartes
René Descartes
5 months 2 weeks ago
No more useful inquiry can be...

No more useful inquiry can be proposed than that which seeks to determine the nature and the scope of human knowledge. ... This investigation should be undertaken once at least in his life by anyone who has the slightest regard for truth, since in pursuing it the true instruments of knowledge and the whole method of inquiry come to light. But nothing seems to me more futile than the conduct of those who boldly dispute about the secrets of nature ... without yet having ever asked even whether human reason is adequate to the solution of these problems.

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Rules for the Direction of the Mind in Key Philosophical Writings (1997), pp. 29-30
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
5 months 1 week ago
There are those who blame the...

There are those who blame the Press, but in this I think they are mistaken. The Press is such as the public demands, and the public demands bad newspapers because it has been badly educated.

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p. 133
Philosophical Maxims
Horace
Horace
4 months 4 weeks ago
Look round and round….

Look round and round the man you recommend, for yours will be the shame should he offend.

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Book I, epistle xviii, line 76 (translated by John Conington).
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
5 months 4 days ago
The circle of day and night...

The circle of day and night is the law of the classical world: the most restricted but most demanding of the necessities of the world, the most inevitable but the simplest of the legislations of nature.This was a law that excluded all dialectics and all reconciliation, consequently laying the foundations for the smooth unity of knowledge as well as the uncompromising division of tragic existence. It reigns on a world without darkness, which knows neither effusiveness nor the gentle charms of lyricism. All is waking or dreams, truth or error, the light of being or the nothingness of shadow.

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Part Two: 2. The Transcendence of Delirium
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
5 months 1 week ago
I am sorry to say that...

I am sorry to say that at the moment I am so busy as to be convinced that life has no meaning whatever... I do not see that we can judge what would be the result of the discovery of truth, since none has hitherto been discovered.

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Letter to Will Durant, 20 June, 1931
Philosophical Maxims
Thales of Miletus
Thales of Miletus
4 months 3 weeks ago
Water is the first principle of...

Water is the first principle of everything.

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As quoted in Aristotle, Metaphysics, 983b
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
5 months 1 week ago
Most boys or youths who have...

Most boys or youths who have had much knowledge drilled into them, have their mental capacities not strengthened, but over-laid by it. They are crammed with mere facts, and with the opinions or phrases of other people, and these are accepted as a substitute for the power to form opinions of their own: and thus the sons of eminent fathers, who have spared no pains in their education, so often grow up mere parroters of what they have learnt, incapable of using their minds except in the furrows traced for them. Mine, however, was not an education of cram. My father never permitted anything which I learnt to degenerate into a mere exercise of memory. He strove to make the understanding not only go along with every step of the teaching, but, if possible, precede it. Anything which could be found out by thinking I never was told, until I had exhausted my efforts to find it out for myself.

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(p. 31)
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
5 months 1 week ago
Space is employed as the type...

Space is employed as the type even of the concept of time itself, representing it by a line, and its limits - moments - by points. Time, on the other had, approaches more to a universal and rational concept, comprising under its relations all things whatsoever, to wit, space itself, and besides, those accidents which are not comprehended in the relations of space, such as the thoughts of the soul. Again, time, besides this, though it certainly does not dictate the laws of reason, yet constitutes the principal conditions tinder favor of which the mind compares its notions according to the laws of reason. Thus, I cannot judge what is impossible except by predicating a and not-a of the same subject at the same time.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
4 months 5 days ago
To this I answer...
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Main Content / General
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
3 months 3 weeks ago
Phenomenology is not a philosophy; it...

Phenomenology is not a philosophy; it is a philosophical method, a tool. It is like an adjustable spanner that can be used for dismantling a refrigerator or a car, or used for hammering in nails, or even for knocking somebody out.

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p. 92
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
5 months 5 days ago
Frazer's account of the magical and...

Frazer's account of the magical and religious views of mankind is unsatisfactory; it makes these views look like errors.

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Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 119
Philosophical Maxims
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