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Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
7 months 3 days ago
I bequeath my soul to God...

I bequeath my soul to God (...). My body to be buried obscurely. For my name and memory, I leave it to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and the next age.

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His Will, 1626
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Rorty
Richard Rorty
6 months 2 weeks ago
I think of the course of...

I think of the course of human history as a long, swelling, increasingly polyphonic poem - a poem that leads up to nothing save itself. When the species is extinct, "human nature's total message" will not be a set of propositions, but a set of vocabularies - the more, and the more various, the better.

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Response to Hartshorne in 'Rorty and Pragmatism, The Philosopher Responds to his Critics', p. 33
Philosophical Maxims
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
6 months 3 weeks ago
It was mathematics, the non-empirical science...

It was mathematics, the non-empirical science par excellence, wherein the mind appears to play only with itself, that turned out to be the science of sciences, delivering the key to those laws of nature and the universe that are concealed by appearances.

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p. 7
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
6 months 3 weeks ago
By necessity, by proclivity, and by...

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.

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Quotation and Originality
Philosophical Maxims
John Rawls
John Rawls
6 months 3 weeks ago
The extreme nature of dominant-end views...

The extreme nature of dominant-end views is often concealed by the vagueness and ambiguity of the end proposed.

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Chapter IX, Section 83, p. 554
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
6 months 3 weeks ago
China has been long one of...

China has been long one of the richest, that is, one of the most fertile, best cultivated, most industrious, and most populous countries in the world. It seems, however, to have been long stationary. Marco Polo, who visited it more than five hundred years ago, describes its cultivation, industry, and populousness, almost in the same terms in which they are described by travellers in the present times.

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Chapter VIII, p. 86.
Philosophical Maxims
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
5 months 3 weeks ago
Till society is very differently constituted,...

Till society is very differently constituted, parents, I fear, will still insist on being obeyed, because they will be obeyed, and constantly endeavour to settle that power on a Divine right, which will not bear the investigation of reason.

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Ch. 11
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
6 months 3 weeks ago
Physics is mathematical not because we...

Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little: it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.

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An Outline of Philosophy Ch.15 The Nature of our Knowledge of Physics, 1927
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
7 months 2 weeks ago
The rest of the story, to...

The rest of the story, to Grand's thinking, was very simple. The common lot of married couples. You get married, you go on loving a bit longer, you work. And you work so hard that it makes you forget to love.

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Philosophical Maxims
Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek
10 months 4 weeks ago
Take the risk and have a position

I believe in clear-cut positions. I think that the most arrogant position is this apparent, multidisciplinary modesty of "what I am saying now is not unconditional, it is just a hypothesis," and so on. It really is a most arrogant position. I think that the only way to be honest and expose yourself to criticism is to state clearly and dogmatically where you are. You must take the risk and have a position.

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Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
5 months 3 days ago
The fly that doesn't want to...

The fly that doesn't want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on the fly-swatter.

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J 70 Variant translation: The fly that does not want to be swatted is safest if it sits on the fly-swat.
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
7 months 3 weeks ago
Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind...
Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself, in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them. They are deeply immersed in illusions and in dream images; their eyes merely glide over the surface of things and see "forms." Variant translation: The constant fluttering around the single flame of vanity is so much the rule and the law that almost nothing is more incomprehensible than how an honest and pure urge for truth could make its appearance among men.
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Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
6 months 3 weeks ago
There's only one corner of the...

There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.

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Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
7 months 3 weeks ago
So it happens at times that...

So it happens at times that a person believes that he has a world-view, but that there is yet one particular phenomenon that is of such a nature that it baffles the understanding, and that he explains differently and attempts to ignore in order not to harbor the thought that this phenomenon might overthrow the whole view, or that his reflection does not possess enough courage and resolution to penetrate the phenomenon with his world-view.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
5 months 2 weeks ago
One cannot live without motives. I...

One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
2 months 4 weeks ago
Friendship receives its real....
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Main Content / General
Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham
6 months 3 weeks ago
That which has no existence cannot...

That which has no existence cannot be destroyed - that which cannot be destroyed cannot require anything to preserve it from destruction. Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense - nonsense upon stilts. But this rhetorical nonsense ends in the old strain of mischievous nonsense for immediately a list of these pretended natural rights is given, and those are so expressed as to present to view legal rights. And of these rights, whatever they are, there is not, it seems, any one of which any government can, upon any occasion whatever, abrogate the smallest particle. The often-quoted phrase 'nonsense upon stilts' is often modernised to 'nonsense on stilts'.

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Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
5 months 2 weeks ago
The liberating force of technology-the instrumentalization...

The liberating force of technology-the instrumentalization of things-turns into ... the instrumentalization of man.

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p. 159
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
2 months 3 weeks ago
I never consider a difference of...

I never consider a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.

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As quoted in The Life and Writings of Thomas Jefferson : Including All of His Important Utterances on Public Questions (1900) by Samuel E. Forman, p. 429
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
7 months 1 week ago
The man of virtue makes...

The man of virtue makes the difficulty to be overcome his first business, and success only a subsequent consideration: this may be called perfect virtue.

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Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
7 months 3 days ago
Again, we should notice the force,...

Again, we should notice the force, effect, and consequences of inventions, which are nowhere more conspicuous than in those three which were unknown to the ancients; namely, printing, gunpowder, and the compass. For these three have changed the appearance and state of the whole world; first in literature, then in warfare, and lastly in navigation: and innumerable changes have been thence derived, so that no empire, sect, or star, appears to have exercised a greater power and influence on human affairs than these mechanical discoveries.

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Aphorism 129
Philosophical Maxims
Baruch Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza
6 months 3 weeks ago
Man can, indeed, act contrarily to...

Man can, indeed, act contrarily to the decrees of God, as far as they have been written like laws in the minds of ourselves or the prophets, but against that eternal decree of God, which is written in universal nature, and has regard to the course of nature as a whole, he can do nothing.

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Ch. 2, Of Natural Right
Philosophical Maxims
Alan Watts
Alan Watts
3 months 4 days ago
So in this idea, then, everybody...

So in this idea, then, everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality. Not God in a politically kingly sense, but God in the sense of being the self, the deep-down basic whatever there is. And you're all that, only you're pretending you're not. And it's perfectly OK to pretend you're not, to be perfectly convinced, because this is the whole notion of drama.

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The Nature of Consciousness; also published as What Is Reality?
Philosophical Maxims
Sir Thomas Browne
Sir Thomas Browne
5 months 4 weeks ago
Were the happiness of the next...

Were the happiness of the next world as closely apprehended as the felicities of this, it were a martyrdom to live.

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Chapter IV
Philosophical Maxims
Julius Evola
Julius Evola
3 months 2 days 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
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
6 months 3 weeks ago
No one ever told me that...

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. First line.

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Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
6 months 3 weeks ago
Opinion is like a pendulum and...

Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the centre of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.

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Vol. 2 "Further Psychological Observations" as translated in Essays and Aphorisms (1970), as translated by R. J. Hollingdale
Philosophical Maxims
Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas
6 months 2 weeks ago
This investigation aims to analyze the...

This investigation aims to analyze the type "bourgeois public sphere". Its particular approach is required, to begin with, by the difficulties specific to an object whose complexity precludes exclusive reliance on the specialized methods of a single discipline. Rather, the category. "public sphere" must be investigated within the broad field formerly reflected in the perspective of the traditional science of "politics."' When particular social-scientific discipline, this object disintegrates. The problems that result from fusing aspects of sociology and economics, of constitutional law and political science, and of social and intellectual history are obvious: given the present state of differentiation and specialization in the social sciences, scarcely anyone will be able to master several, let alone all, of these disciplines.

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p.xvii
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
5 months 3 days ago
Much reading has brought upon us...

Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism.

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F 144
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
5 months 2 weeks ago
From the moment when labour can...

From the moment when labour can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolized, i.e., from the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital, from that moment, you say individuality vanishes.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
6 months 3 weeks ago
The bitterest tragic element in life...

The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.

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"The Tragic", p. 217. From The Dial (April 1844) p. 515
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
4 months 3 weeks ago
When I started life Hegelianism was...

When I started life Hegelianism was the basis of everything: it was in the air, found expression in magazine and newspaper articles, in novels and essays, in art, in histories, in sermons, and in conversation. A man unacquainted with Hegel had no right to speak: he who wished to know the truth studied Hegel. Everything rested on him; and suddenly forty years have gone by and there is nothing left of him, he is not even mentioned - as though he had never existed. And what is most remarkable is that, like pseudo-Christianity, Hegelianism fell not because anyone refuted it, but because it suddenly became evident that neither the one nor the other was needed by our learned, educated world.

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Chapter XXIX
Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
5 months 1 week ago
Liberty, taking the word in its...

Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose.

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Ch. 3, Liberty
Philosophical Maxims
John Herschel
John Herschel
3 months 3 days ago
Science is the knowledge of many,...

Science is the knowledge of many, orderly and methodically digested and arranged, so as to become attainable by one.

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Philosophical Maxims
Julius Evola
Julius Evola
3 months 2 days ago
The fundamental principle underlying all justifications...

The fundamental principle underlying all justifications of war, from the point of view of human personality, is 'heroism'. War, it is said, offers man the opportunity to awaken the hero who sleeps within him. War breaks the routine of comfortable life; by means of its severe ordeals, it offers a transfiguring knowledge of life, life according to death. The moment the individual succeeds in living as a hero, even if it is the final moment of his earthly life, weighs infinitely more on the scale of values than a protracted existence spent consuming monotonously among the trivialities of cities. From a spiritual point of view, these possibilities make up for the negative and destructive tendencies of war, which are one-sidedly and tendentiously highlighted by pacifist materialism. War makes one realise the relativity of human life and therefore also the law of a 'more-than-life', and thus war has always an anti-materialist value, a spiritual value.

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p. 21
Philosophical Maxims
Hilary Putnam
Hilary Putnam
5 months 1 day ago
I think part of the appeal…

I think part of the appeal of mathematical logic is that the formulas look mysterious - you write backward Es!

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Putnam as quoted in: Julian Baggini, Jeremy Stangroom (2005) What Philosophers Think. p. 233
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
5 months 2 weeks ago
Sooner or later, each desire must...

Sooner or later, each desire must encounter its lassitude: its truth . . .

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Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig von Mises
Ludwig von Mises
3 months 1 week ago
The only certain fact about Russian...

The only certain fact about Russian affairs under the Soviet regime with regard to which all people agree is: that the standard of living of the Russian masses is much lower than ... the paragon of capitalism, the United States of America. If we were to regard the Soviet regime as an experiment, we would have to say that the experiment has clearly demonstrated the superiority of capitalism and the inferiority of socialism.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
3 months 2 weeks ago
No nobler feeling than this of...

No nobler feeling than this of admiration for one higher than himself dwells in the breast of man. It is to this hour, and at all hours, the vivifying influence in man's life.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
6 months 3 weeks ago
Homeliness is almost as great a...

Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there. It is next to beauty, and a very high art.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 32
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
6 months 3 weeks ago
Undeterred by this examination, the French...

Undeterred by this examination, the French Revolution gave rise to ideas which led beyond the ideas of the entire old world order. The revolutionary movement which began in 1789 in the Cercle Social, which in the middle of its course had as its chief representatives Leclerc and Roux, and which finally with Babeuf's conspiracy was temporarily defeated, gave rise to the communist idea which Babeuf's friend Buonarroti re-introduced in France after the Revolution of 1830. This idea, consistently developed, is the idea of the new world order.

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Chapter 6, 3
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
6 months 3 weeks ago
For it was my master who...

For it was my master who taught me not only how very little I knew but also that any wisdom to which I might ever aspire could consist only in realizing more fully the infinity of my ignorance.

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Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
5 months 4 weeks ago
Do you see this egg? With...

Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory, every church or temple in the world. What is it, this egg, before the seed is introduced into it? An insentient mass. And after the seed has been introduced to into it? What is it then? An insentient mass. For what is the seed itself other than a crude and inanimate fluid? How is this mass to make a transition to a different structure, to sentience, to life? Through heat. And what will produce that heat in it? Motion. "Conversation Between D'Alembert and Diderot", as quoted in Selected Writings (1966) edited by Lester G. Crocker, and The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture (2004) by Louis K Dupré, p. 30 Variant translation: See this egg. It is with this that all the schools of theology and all the temples of the earth are to be overturned.

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As quoted in Diderot, Reason and Resonance (1982) by Élisabeth de Fontenay, p. 217
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
3 months 2 weeks ago
For the whole Past, as I...

For the whole Past, as I keep repeating, is the possession of the Present; the Past had always something true, and is a precious possession. In a different time, in a different place, it is always some other side of our common Human Nature that has been developing itself. The actual True is the sum of all these; not any one of them by itself constitutes what of Human Nature is hitherto developed. Better to know them all than misknow them. "To which of these Three Religions do you specially adhere?" inquires Meister of his Teacher. "To all the Three!" answers the other: "To all the Three; for they by their union first constitute the True Religion."

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Philosophical Maxims
Ptahhotep
Ptahhotep
6 months 2 weeks ago
If you are well-to-do and can...

If you are well-to-do and can maintain your household, love your wife in your home according to good custom...Make her happy while you are alive, for she is land profitable to her lord.

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Maxim no. 21.
Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
5 months 3 weeks ago
Man grows used to everything, the...

Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel.

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Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
3 months 1 week ago
I may become a poor man;...

I may become a poor man; I shall then be one among many. I may be exiled; I shall then regard myself as born in the place to which I shall be sent. They may put me in chains. What then? Am I free from bonds now? Behold this clogging burden of a body, to which nature has fettered me! "I shall die," you say; you mean to say "I shall cease to run the risk of sickness; I shall cease to run the risk of imprisonment; I shall cease to run the risk of death."

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
5 months 2 weeks ago
Existence would be a quite impracticable...

Existence would be a quite impracticable enterprise if we stopped granting importance to what has none.

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Philosophical Maxims
Leszek Kołakowski
Leszek Kołakowski
3 months 2 weeks ago
There is no idea so obscure...

There is no idea so obscure that someone could not come to regard it as self-evident.

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Chapter Seven, Pragmatism and Positivism, p. 156
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
7 months 1 day ago
I have greater confidence in my...

I have greater confidence in my wife and my pupils than I have in Christ.

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Philosophical Maxims
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