Skip to main content

Main navigation

☰ ˟
  • Home
  • Articulation
  • Contact
  • Shop
Aristotle
Aristotle
4 months 2 weeks ago
Now men seem, not unreasonably, to...

Now men seem, not unreasonably, to form their notions of the supreme good and of happiness from the lives of men.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 1 week ago
It is a great force, and...

It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
3 months 1 week ago
The Geschick of being: a child...

The Geschick of being: a child that plays... Why does it play, the great child of the world-play Heraclitus brought into view in the aiôn? It plays, because it plays. The "because" withers away in the play. The play is without "why." It plays since it plays. It simply remains a play: the most elevated and the most profound. But this "simply" is everything, the one, the only... The question remains whether and how we, hearing the movements of this play, play along and accommodate ourselves to the play.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
The Principle of Reason (1955-1956) as translated by Reginald Lilly
Philosophical Maxims
Vandana Shiva
Vandana Shiva
4 weeks ago
There is, I think, a spontaneous...

There is, I think, a spontaneous resurgence of thinking that centers on protection of life, celebrating life, enjoying life as both our highest duty and our most powerful form of resistance against a violent and brutal system that globalizes not just trade, but fascism, and denies civil liberties and freedoms.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
3 months 2 weeks ago
Value, therefore, does not stalk about...

Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Vol. I, Ch. 1, Section 4, pg. 85.
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
3 months 2 weeks ago
Two things fill the mind with...

Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Translated by Lewis White Beck Two things fill the heart with renewed and increasing awe and reverence the more often and the more steadily that they are meditated on: the starry skies above me and the moral law inside me.
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 month 1 week ago
It is the medium that shapes...

It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
(p. 9)
Philosophical Maxims
Arnold J. Toynbee
Arnold J. Toynbee
3 weeks 6 days ago
Societies, not states, are 'the social...

Societies, not states, are 'the social atoms' with which students of history have to deal.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Vol. 1
Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
3 months 2 weeks ago
'Tis certainly a kind of indignity...

Tis certainly a kind of indignity to philosophy, whose sovereign authority ought every where to be acknowledg'd, to oblige her on every occasion to make apologies for her conclusions, and justify herself to every particular art and science, which may be offended at her.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Part 4, Section 5
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
4 months 1 week ago
When a war breaks out, people...

When a war breaks out, people say: "It's too stupid; it can't last long." But though the war may well be "too stupid," that doesn't prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
4 months 4 days ago
Being in humaneness is good....

Being in humaneness is good. If we select other goodness and thus are far apart from humaneness, how can we be the wise? The opening phrase of this chapter after which the chapter is named in Chinese.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
3 months 2 weeks ago
But though empires, like all the...

But though empires, like all the other works of men, have all hitherto proved mortal, yet every empire aims at immortality.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Chapter II, Part II, p. 896.
Philosophical Maxims
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
3 weeks 6 days ago
Only in growth, reform, and change,...

Only in growth, reform, and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
The Wave of the Future
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Schlegel
Friedrich Schlegel
2 months 2 weeks ago
Romantic poetry ... recognizes as its...

Romantic poetry ... recognizes as its first commandment that the will of the poet can tolerate no law above itself.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Philosophical Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991) § 116
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
4 months 1 week ago
The military mind remains unparalleled as...

The military mind remains unparalleled as a vehicle of creative stupidity.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
1 month 4 weeks ago
In the study of ideas, it...

In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as if it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasoning grasps at straws for premises and floats on gossamer for deductions.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 91.
Philosophical Maxims
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
2 months 1 week ago
I am a strange compound of...

I am a strange compound of weakness and resolution! However, if I must suffer, I will endeavour to suffer in silence. There is certainly a great defect in my mind - my wayward heart creates its own misery - Why I am made thus I cannot tell; and, till I can form some idea of the whole of my existence, I must be content to weep and dance like a child - long for a toy, and be tired of it as soon as I get it.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Undated letter to Joseph Johnson (October? 1792), published in The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft (2004), edited by Janet Todd, p. 206.
Philosophical Maxims
Judith Butler
Judith Butler
1 month 2 weeks ago
There is no gender identity behind...

There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very "expressions" that are said to be its results.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
Philosophical Maxims
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
1 month 4 weeks ago
Promising, committment, and fidelity, for instance,...

Promising, committment, and fidelity, for instance, are genuinely temporal practices.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Owen
Robert Owen
1 month 1 week ago
My life was not useless; I...

My life was not useless; I gave important truths to the world, and it was only for want of understanding that they were disregarded. I have been ahead of my time.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Deathbed statement (November 1858), in response to a church minister who asked if he regretted wasting his life on fruitless projects; as quoted in Harold Hill : A People's History
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
2 months 1 week ago
Gentile himself call his doctrine 'absolute...

Gentile himself call his doctrine 'absolute formalism': there is no; 'matter' apart from the pure 'form' of acting. 'The only matter there is in the spiritual act is the form itself, as activity.'

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
P. 407
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
3 months 1 week ago
What do I know about God...

What do I know about God and the purpose of life? I know that this world exists. That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field. That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning. This meaning does not lie in it but outside of it. That life is the world. That my will penetrates the world. That my will is good or evil. Therefore that good and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world. The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God. And connect with this the comparison of God to a father. To pray is to think about the meaning of life.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Journal entry (11 June 1916), p. 72e and 73e
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
3 months 3 weeks ago
Jews hate the name of Christ...

Jews hate the name of Christ and have a secret and innate rancor against the people among whom they live.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
See Silent Truth by Mark Edwards
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
4 months 2 weeks 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.
0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
3 months 2 weeks ago
Speed, it seems to me, provides...

Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Wanted, A New Pleasure
Philosophical Maxims
Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale
1 month 3 weeks ago
A girl, if she has any...

A girl, if she has any pride, is so ashamed of having anything she wishes to say out of the hearing of her own family, she thinks it must be something so very wrong, that it is ten to one, if she have the opportunity of saying it, that she will not. And yet she is spending her life, perhaps, in dreaming of accidental means of unrestrained communion.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
3 months 1 week ago
I can't imagine a man really...

I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Letter to Arthur Greeves (February 1932) - in They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914-1963) (1979), p. 439
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
1 month 3 weeks ago
Society creates the victims that it...

Society creates the victims that it afterwards vainly attempts to get rid of.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
1 month 1 week ago
I am extremely pleased by Daniel...

I am extremely pleased by Daniel Fincke's article, which says exactly what I SHOULD have said and, to my regret, didn't make sufficiently clear in my Reason Rally speech. The best way to summarise it would be to modify the quotation from Johann Hari. Johann said, "I respect you too much to respect your ridiculous beliefs". From now on, my version will be, "I respect you too much to accept that you really believe anything so ridiculous as you claim. Please either defend those beliefs and explain why they are not ridiculous, or else declare that you do not hold them and publicly disown the church to which you claim loyalty."

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
comment on Daniel Fincke (2 April 2012), "In Defense of Dawkins's Reason Rally Speech", RichardDawkins.net, retrieved on 1 May 2012
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
3 months 3 weeks ago
The human understanding is moved by...

The human understanding is moved by those things most which strike and enter the mind simultaneously and suddenly, and so fill the imagination; and then it feigns and supposes all other things to be somehow, though it cannot see how, similar to those few things by which it is surrounded.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Aphorism 47
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
3 months 1 week ago
The safest road to Hell is...

The safest road to Hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Letter XII
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
4 months 1 week ago
The absurd is the essential concept...

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 month 1 week ago
Literacy, in translating man out of...

Literacy, in translating man out of the closed world of tribal depth and resonance, gave man an eye for an ear and ushered him into a visual open world of specialized and divided consciousness.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
3 months 2 weeks ago
If I had had more time,...

If I had had more time, this letter would have been shorter.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Written by Voltaire in an over-long letter to a friend, quoted to A. P. Martinich in Philosophical Writing: An Introduction, Note to the Second Edition, 1996
Philosophical Maxims
Novalis
Novalis
2 months 1 week ago
Man consists in Truth. If he...

Man consists in Truth. If he exposes Truth, he exposes himself. If he betrays Truth, he betrays himself. We speak not here of lies, but of acting against Conviction.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 1 week ago
What a judgment upon the living,...

What a judgment upon the living, if it is true, as has been maintained, that what dies has never existed!

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
1 month 4 weeks ago
Barbusse has shown us that the...

Barbusse has shown us that the Outsider is a man who cannot live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeois, accepting what he sees and touches as reality.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Chapter one, The Country of the Blind
Philosophical Maxims
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida
3 months 1 week ago
How can one be late to...

How can one be late to the end of history? A question for today. It is serious because it obliges one to reflect again, as we have been doing since Hegel, on what happens and deserves the name of event, after history; it obliges one to wonder if the end of history is but the end of a certain concept of history.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Injunctions of Marx
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
2 months 1 week ago
It is a universal revolution and...

It is a universal revolution and will, accordingly, have a universal range.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
6 days ago
He who first shortened the labor...

He who first shortened the labor of copyists by device of movable types was disbanding hired armies, and cashiering most kings and senates, and creating a whole new democratic world: he had invented the art of printing.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Bk. I, ch. 5.
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
4 months 4 days ago
You [a disciple], shall I...

You [a disciple], shall I teach you about knowledge? What you know, you know, what you don't know, you don't know. This is true knowledge.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
3 months 3 weeks ago
Nothing is so firmly…

Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Ch. 31. Of Divine Ordinances, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Hazlitt, 1842
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Rorty
Richard Rorty
3 months 5 days ago
The encouragement of light-mindedness about traditional...

The encouragement of light-mindedness about traditional philosophical topics serves the same purposes as does the encouragement of light-mindedness about traditional theological topics. Like the rise of large market economies, the increase in literacy, the proliferation of artistic genres, and the insouciant pluralism of contemporary culture, such philosophical superficiality and light-mindedness helps along the disenchantment of the world. It helps make the world's inhabitants more pragmatic, more tolerant, more liberal, more receptive to the appeal of instrumental rationality.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
David Wood
David Wood
3 weeks 2 days ago
To recognize a difficulty is not...

To recognize a difficulty is not to solve it.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Chapter 1, The Faces of Silence, p. 9
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
2 weeks 5 days ago
A new word....
0
⚖0
Main Content / General
Friedrich Schlegel
Friedrich Schlegel
2 months 2 weeks ago
Religion is usually nothing but a...

Religion is usually nothing but a supplement to or even a substitute for education, and nothing is religious in the strict sense which is not a product of freedom.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
"Selected Aphorisms from the Athenaeum (1798)", Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, trans. (Pennsylvania University Press:1968) #233
Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
1 month 1 week ago
Fortune is not satisfied with inflicting...

Fortune is not satisfied with inflicting one calamity.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Maxim 274
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
2 months 2 weeks ago
All evil results from the non-adaptation...

All evil results from the non-adaptation of constitution to conditions. This is true of everything that lives. Does a shrub dwindle in poor soil, or become sickly when deprived of light, or die outright if removed to a cold climate? it is because the harmony between its organization and its circumstances has been destroyed.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Part I, Ch. 2 : The Evanescence of Evil, § 1
Philosophical Maxims
Antonio Negri
Antonio Negri
1 week 3 days ago
The contradictory conceptual couple, identity and...

The contradictory conceptual couple, identity and difference, is not the adequate framework for understanding the organization of the multitude. Instead we are a multiplicity of singular forms of life and at the same time share a common global existence. The anthropology of the multitude is an anthropology of singularity and commonality.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
127
Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
2 months 3 weeks ago
Honor Wisdom; and deny it not...

Honor Wisdom; and deny it not to them that would learn; and shew it unto them that dispraise it! Sow not the sea fields!

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
  • Load More

User login

  • Create new account
  • Reset your password

Social

☰ ˟
  • Main Feed
  • Philosophical Maxims

Civic

☰ ˟
  • Propositions
  • Issue / Solution

Who's new

  • Søren Kierkegaard
  • Jesus
  • Friedrich Nietzsche
  • VeXed
  • Slavoj Žižek

Who's online

There are currently 0 users online.

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia