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Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus
4 months 2 weeks ago
Let me mention another requirement for...

Let me mention another requirement for a better understanding of Holy Scripture. I would suggest that you read those commentators who do not stick so closely to the literal sense. The ones I would recommend most highly after St. Paul himself are Origen, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine. Too many of our modern theologians are prone to a literal interpretation, which they subtly misconstrue.

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p.37
Philosophical Maxims
Will Durant
Will Durant
3 weeks 4 days ago
India was the motherland of our...

India was the motherland of our race, and Sanskrit the mother of Europe's languages: she was the mother of our philosophy; mother, through the Arabs, of much of our mathematics; mother, through the Buddha, of the ideals embodied in Christianity; mother, through the village community, of self-government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henri Poincaré
Henri Poincaré
4 weeks 1 day ago
Point set topology is a disease...

Point set topology is a disease from which the human race will soon recover.

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Quoted in D MacHale, Comic Sections
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
4 months 1 week ago
Labour not after riches first, and...

Labour not after riches first, and think thou afterwards wilt enjoy them. He who neglecteth the present moment, throweth away all that he hath. As the arrow passeth through the heart, while the warrior knew not that it was coming; so shall his life be taken away before he knoweth that he hath it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
2 months 1 day ago
It would be deeply depressing if...

It would be deeply depressing if the only way children could get moral values was from religion. Either from scripture, and God knows we don't want them to get it from scripture, I mean, just look at scripture. Or, from being afraid of God, being intimidated by God. Anybody who is good for only those two reasons is not really being good at all. Why not teach children things like the Golden Rule, do as you would be done by, how would you like it if other children did that to you, so why do you do it to them... I think it's depressing that anybody should suggest that you actually need God in order to be moral. I would hope that our morals come from a better source than that, and therefore they are genuinely moral rather than based on outmoded scripture, or based on fear.

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BBC,
Philosophical Maxims
Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus
4 months 2 weeks ago
He that gives quickly….

He that gives quickly gives twice.

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Adagia, 1508
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
2 months 1 day ago
As a liberal I would hesitate...

As a liberal I would hesitate to propose a blanket ban on any style of dress because of the implications for individual liberty and freedom of choice.

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As quoted in Richard Dawkins causes outcry after likening the burka to a bin liner (10 August 2010), The Telegraph.
Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
3 months 1 week ago
I think that democratic communities have...

I think that democratic communities have a natural taste for freedom: left to themselves, they will seek it, cherish it, and view any privation of it with regret. But for equality, their passion is ardent, insatiable, incessant, invincible: they call for equality in freedom; and if they cannot obtain that, they still call for equality in slavery.

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Book Two, Chapter I.
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
4 months 6 days ago
There is a physical relation between...

There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities.

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Vol. I, Ch. 1, Section 4, pg. 83.
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
4 months 4 days ago
There is no history of mankind,...

There is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world. But this, I hold, is an offence against every decent conception of mankind. It is hardly better than to treat the history of embezzlement or of robbery or of poisoning as the history of mankind. For the history of power politics is nothing but the history of international crime and mass murder (including it is true, some of the attempts to suppress them). This history is taught in schools, and some of the greatest criminals are extolled as heroes. 

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Vol 2, Ch. 25 "Has History any Meaning?" Variant: There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world.
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
4 months 1 day ago
A religious symbol does not rest...

A religious symbol does not rest on any opinion. And error belongs only with opinion. One would like to say: This is what took place here; laugh, if you can.

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Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 123
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
3 months 1 day ago
I forsook the company and the...

I forsook the company and the dinner-parties, the port-wine and champagne of the middle-classes, and devoted my leisure-hours almost exclusively to the intercourse with plain working men; I am both glad and proud of having done so. Glad, because thus I was induced to spend many a happy hour in obtaining a knowledge of the realities of life-many an hour, which else would have been wasted in fashionable talk and tiresome etiquette; proud, because thus I got an opportunity of doing justice to an oppressed and calumniated class of men who with all their faults and under all the disadvantages of their situation, yet command the respect of every one but an English money-monger.

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p. 27
Philosophical Maxims
Gottlob frege
Gottlob frege
2 months 4 weeks ago
A judgment, for me is not...

A judgment, for me is not the mere grasping of a thought, but the admission of its truth.

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Gottlob Frege (1892). On Sense and Reference, note 7.
Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
2 months 3 days ago
Learn to see in another's calamity...

Learn to see in another's calamity the ills which you should avoid.

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Maxim 120
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
2 months 3 weeks ago
And why be scandalized by the...

And why be scandalized by the infallibility of a man, of the Pope? What difference does it make whether it be a book that is infallible - the Bible, or a society of men - the Church, or a single man? Does it make any essential change in the rational difficulty? And since the infallibility of a book or of a society of men is not more rational than that of a single man, this supreme offense to the eyes of reason has to be postulated.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
2 months 3 days ago
The new media are not bridges...

The new media are not bridges between man and nature - they are nature...The new media are not ways of relating us to the old world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.

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Media as the New Nature, 1969, p. 14
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
2 months 1 day ago
Moral philosophers say things like, 'What...

Moral philosophers say things like, 'What is actually wrong with cannibalism?' There are two ways of responding to that: one is to shrink back in horror and say, 'Cannibalism! Cannibalism! We can't talk about cannibalism!' The other is to say, 'Well, actually, what is wrong with cannibalism?' Then you work it out and you tease it out and you decide yes, actually, cannibalism is wrong, but for the following reasons. So I'd like to think that my moral values at least partly come from reasoning. Trying to suppress the gut reaction as much as possible.

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Interview with Sophie Elmhirst (2015),
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 months 1 day ago
To be or not to be...Neither...

To be or not to be...Neither one nor the other.

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Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
4 months 1 week ago
There is not a negro from...

There is not a negro from the coast of Africa who does not, in this respect, possess a degree of magnanimity which the soul of his sordid master is too often scarce capable of conceiving. Fortune never exerted more cruelly her empire over mankind, than when she subjected those nations of heroes to the refuse of the jails of Europe, to wretches who possess the virtues neither of the countries which they come from, nor of those which they go to, and whose levity, brutality, and baseness, so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished.

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Chap. II.
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
5 days ago
Nothing is troublesome that we do...

Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly.

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Philosophical Maxims
Peter Singer
Peter Singer
3 months 3 weeks ago
September 11, 2001, was just another...

September 11, 2001, was just another day for most of the world's desperately poor people, so presumably close to 30,000 children under five died from these causes on that day-about ten times the number of victims of the terrorist attacks. The publication of these figures did not lead to an avalanche of money for UNICEF or other aid agencies helping to reduce infant mortality. In the year 2000 Americans made private donations for foreign aid of all kinds totaling about $4 per person in extreme poverty, or roughly $20 per family. New Yorkers who were living in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001, whether wealthy or not, were able to receive an average of $5,300 per family. The distance between these amounts encapsulates the way in which, for many people, the circle of concern for others stops at the boundaries of their own country-if it extends even that far.

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Chapter 5: One Community (p. 176)
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
4 months 1 day ago
Religion is, as it were, the...

Religion is, as it were, the calm bottom of the sea at its deepest point, which remains calm however high the waves on the surface may be.

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p. 53e
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
2 months 4 weeks ago
It is written again, Thou shalt...

It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.

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4:7 (KJV) Said to Satan. The reference is to Deuteronomy 6:16, "Ye shall not tempt the Lord your God, as ye tempted him in Massah." (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Heraclitus
Heraclitus
4 months 3 weeks ago
Character is destiny....

Character is destiny.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
4 months 5 days ago
Poetry teaches the enormous force of...

Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.

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Parnassus (1874) Preface
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
4 months 1 day ago
You could attach prices to ideas....

You could attach prices to ideas. Some cost a lot some little. ... And how do you pay for ideas? I believe: with courage.

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p. 60e
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
4 months 3 weeks ago
The superior man honors his virtuous...

The superior man honors his virtuous nature, and maintains constant inquiry and study, seeking to carry it out to its breadth and greatness, so as to omit none of the more exquisite and minute points which it embraces, and to raise it to its greatest height and brilliancy, so as to pursue the course of the Mean. He cherishes his old knowledge, and is continually acquiring new. He exerts an honest, generous earnestness, in the esteem and practice of all propriety. Thus, when occupying a high situation he is not proud, and in a low situation he is not insubordinate. When the kingdom is well governed, he is sure by his words to rise; and when it is ill governed, he is sure by his silence to command forbearance to himself.

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Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
3 months 5 days ago
Evolution is definable as a change...

Evolution is definable as a change from an incoherent homogeneity to a coherent heterogeneity, accompanying the dissipation of motion and integration of matter.

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Pt. II, The Knowable; Ch. XV, The Law of Evolution (continued)
Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
3 months 2 days ago
The unconscious is not just evil...

The unconscious is not just evil by nature, it is also the source of the highest good: not only dark but also light, not only bestial, semihuman, and demonic but superhuman, spiritual, and, in the classical sense of the word, "divine."

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The Practice of Psychotherapy, p. 364
Philosophical Maxims
Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini
1 month 2 weeks ago
What is an artist? A provincial...

What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one... It's this in-between that I'm calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one - which is really the realm of the artist.

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Every Time We Say Goodbye in Sight and Sound [London]
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
2 months 3 weeks ago
Progress usually comes from the barbarian,...

Progress usually comes from the barbarian, and there is nothing more stagnant than the philosophy of the philosophers and the theology of the theologians.

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Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
2 months 3 weeks ago
We can know only one thing...

We can know only one thing about God - that he is what we are not. Our wretchedness alone is an image of this. The more we contemplate it, the more we contemplate him.

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p. 216
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
4 months 4 days ago
Listen to me: a family man...

Listen to me: a family man is never a real family man. An assassin is never entirely assassin. They play a role, you understand. While a dead man, he is really dead. To be or not to be, right?

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Hugo, Act 4, sc. 6
Philosophical Maxims
Leszek Kołakowski
Leszek Kołakowski
4 weeks ago
When I collect my experiences, I...

When I collect my experiences, I notice that fascist is a person who holds one of the following beliefs (by way of example): 1) That people should wash themselves, rather than go dirty; 2) that freedom of the press in America is preferable to the ownership of the whole press by one ruling party; 3) that people should not be jailed for their opinions. both communist and anti-communist - 4), that racial criteria, in favour of either whites or blacks, are inadvisable in admission to Universities; 5 ) that torture is condemnable, no matter who applies it. (Roughly speaking "fascist" was the same as "liberal".) Fascist was, by definition, a person who happened to have been in jail in a communist country. The refugees from Czechoslovakia in 1968 were sometimes met in Germany by very progressive and absolutely revolutionary leftists with placards saying "fascism will not pass".

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My Correct Views on Everything
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
4 months 1 week ago
We refuse to have our conscience...

We refuse to have our conscience bound by any work or law, so that by doing this or that we should be righteous, or leaving this or that undone we should be damned.

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Chapter 2
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
2 days ago
Wipe out the imagination. Stop pulling...

Wipe out the imagination. Stop pulling the strings. Confine thyself to the present. ...Divide and distribute every object into the causal [formal] and the material. ...Let the wrong which is done by a man stay there where the wrong was done.

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VII, 29
Philosophical Maxims
Plutarch
Plutarch
3 months 3 weeks ago
Philip being arbitrator betwixt two wicked...

Philip being arbitrator betwixt two wicked persons, he commanded one to fly out of Macedonia and the other to pursue him.

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36 Philip
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
4 months 4 days ago
I became my own only when...

I became my own only when I gave myself to Another.

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Letters of C. S. Lewis (17 July 1953), para. 2, p. 251 - as reported in The Quotable Lewis (1989), p. 334
Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
3 months 1 day ago
Suppose a surface to be part...

Suppose a surface to be part red and part blue; so that every point on it is either red or blue, and of course, no part can be both red and blue. What then, is the color of the surface in the immediate neighborhood of the point. ...it follows that the boundary is half red and half blue. In like manner, we find it necessary to hold that consciousness essentially occupies time... Thus, the present is half past and half time to come. ...Take another case: the velocity of a particle at any instant of time is its mean velocity during an infinitesimal instant in which that time is consumed. Just so, my immediate feeling is my feeling through an infinitesimal duration containing the present instant.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
2 months ago
It is the duty...
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Main Content / General
Xunzi
Xunzi
1 month 2 days ago
The straightening board was created because...

The straightening board was created because of warped wood, and the plumb line came into being because of things that are not straight. Rulers are established and ritual and rightness are illuminated because the nature is evil.

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Sources of Chinese Tradition (1999), vol. 1, p. 182
Philosophical Maxims
Rosa Luxemburg
Rosa Luxemburg
1 day ago
I suppose I must be out...

I suppose I must be out of sorts to feel everything so deeply. Sometimes, however, it seems to me that i am not really a human being at all, but like a bird or a beast in human form. I feel so much more at home even in a scrap of garden like the one here, and still more in the meadows when the grass is humming with bees than - at one of the our party congresses.

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Prison Letter, (May 12, 1917), Rosa Luxemburg Speaks
Philosophical Maxims
Charles Fourier
Charles Fourier
1 month 1 day ago
Woman is degraded and made to...

Woman is degraded and made to believe that nature destined her exclusively to menial domestic labors, which in the combined order will be so abridged as to be performed without oppression to either sex.

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The Theory of Social Organization
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
2 months 1 day ago
This is still the strangest thing...

This is still the strangest thing in all man's travelling, that he should carry about with him incongruous memories.

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Pt. II, ch. III.
Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
4 months 1 week ago
If a big diamond is cut...

If a big diamond is cut up into pieces, it immediately loses its value as a whole; or if an army is scattered or divided into small bodies, it loses all its power; and in the same way a great intellect has no more power than an ordinary one as soon as it is interrupted, disturbed, distracted, or diverted; for its superiority entails that it concentrates all its strength on one point and object, just as a concave mirror concentrates all the rays of light thrown upon it. Noisy interruption prevents this concentration. This is why the most eminent intellects have always been strongly averse to any kind of disturbance, interruption and distraction, and above everything to that violent interruption which is caused by noise; other people do not take any particular notice of this sort of thing.

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On Noise
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
2 months 4 weeks ago
The transition from philosophy to the...

The transition from philosophy to the domain of state and society had been an intrinsic part of Hegel's system.

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P. 251
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
5 days ago
The basis of our government being...

The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.

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Letter to Colonel Edward Carrington (16 January 1787) Lipscomb & Bergh ed. 6:57 Compare letter to John Norvell (11 June 1807), below.
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
4 months 5 days ago
Nature magically suits the man to...

Nature magically suits the man to his fortunes, by making these the fruit of his character.

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Fate
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
5 months 6 days ago
Old age realizes the dreams of...

Old age realizes the dreams of youth: look at Dean Swift; in his youth he built an asylum for the insane, in his old age he was himself an inmate.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
4 months 6 days ago
We are told that a utilitarian...

We are told that a utilitarian will be apt to make his own particular case an exception to moral rules, and, when under temptation, will see a utility in the breach of a rule, greater than he will see in its observance. But is utility the only creed which is able to furnish us with excuses for evil doing, and means of cheating our own conscience? They are afforded in abundance by all doctrines which recognise as a fact in morals the existence of conflicting considerations; which all doctrines do, that have been believed by sane persons. It is not the fault of any creed, but of the complicated nature of human affairs, that rules of conduct cannot be so framed as to require no exceptions, and that hardly any kind of action can safely be laid down as either always obligatory or always condemnable.

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Ch. 2
Philosophical Maxims
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