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Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch
6 months ago
The cry of equality pulls everyone...

The cry of equality pulls everyone down.

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Quoted in The Observer September 13, 1987.
Philosophical Maxims
Charles Fourier
Charles Fourier
4 months 5 days ago
Wisdom, virtue, morality, all these have...

Wisdom, virtue, morality, all these have fallen out of fashion: everybody worships at the shrine of commerce.

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The Theory of the Four Movements (1808), G. Jones, ed. (1966), p. 269
Philosophical Maxims
David Pearce
David Pearce
4 months 2 weeks ago
The functional regions of the brain...

The functional regions of the brain which subserve physical agony, the "pain centres", and the mainly limbic substrates of emotion, appear in phylogenetic terms to be remarkably constant in the vertebrate line. The neural pathways involving serotonin, the periaquaductal grey matter, bradykinin, dynorphin, ATP receptors, the major opioid families, substance P etc all existed long before hominids walked the earth. Not merely is the biochemistry of suffering disturbingly similar where not effectively type-identical across a wide spectrum of vertebrate (and even some invertebrate) species. It is at least possible that members of any species whose members have more pain cells exhibiting greater synaptic density than humans sometimes suffer more atrociously than we do, whatever their notional "intelligence".

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1.9 The Taste of Depravity
Philosophical Maxims
Joseph de Maistre
Joseph de Maistre
3 months 6 days ago
This makes me think that the...

This makes me think that the French Revolution is a great epoch and that its consequences, in all kinds of ways, will be felt far beyond the time of its explosion and the limits of its birthplace.

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Chapter II, p. 21
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
7 months 1 week ago
Of all the animals kept by...

Of all the animals kept by the farmer, the labourer, the instrumentum vocale, was,thenceforth, the most oppressed, the worst nourished, the most brutally treated.

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Vol. I, Ch. 25, Section 4(e), pg. 742.
Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
7 months 3 weeks ago
I became evil for no reason....

I became evil for no reason. I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved the self-destruction, I loved my fall, not the object for which I had fallen but my fall itself. My depraved soul leaped down from your firmament to ruin. I was seeking not to gain anything by shameful means, but shame for its own sake.

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II, 4
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
6 months 5 days ago
The more you are a victim...

The more you are a victim of contradictory impulses, the less you know which to yield to. To lack character - precisely that and nothing more.

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Philosophical Maxims
Arnold J. Toynbee
Arnold J. Toynbee
4 months 3 weeks ago
There is no such thing as...

There is no such thing as gratitude in international politics.

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Abridgement of Vols. 7-10 by D. C. Somervell
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
6 months 4 days ago
The first act by virtue of...

The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society-the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society-this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a State. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not "abolished." It dies out.

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Socialism, Utopian and Scientific
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Jean Jacques Rousseau
7 months 1 week ago
I love liberty…

I love liberty, and I loathe constraint, dependence, and all their kindred annoyances. As long as my purse contains money it secures my independence, and exempts me from the trouble of seeking other money, a trouble of which I have always had a perfect horror; and the dread of seeing the end of my independence, makes me proportionately unwilling to part with my money. The money that we possess is the instrument of liberty, that which we lack and strive to obtain is the instrument of slavery.

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Philosophical Maxims
Theodor Adorno
Theodor Adorno
5 months 3 weeks ago
Hegel ... destroyed the illusion of...

Hegel ... destroyed the illusion of the subject's being-in-itself and showed that the subject is itself an aspect of social objectivity. ... However, ... we must ask this question: is this objectivity which we have shown to be a necessary condition and which subsumes abstract subjectivity in fact the higher factor? Does it not rather remain precisely what Hegel reproached it with being in his youth, namely pure externality, the coercive collective? Does not the retreat to this supposedly higher authority signify the regression of the subject, which had earlier won its freedom only with the greatest efforts, with infinite pains?

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p. 16
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
8 months 1 week ago
For as only one thing is...

For as only one thing is necessary, and as the theme of the talk is the willing of only one thing: hence the consciousness before God of one's eternal responsibility to be an individual is that one thing necessary.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
8 months 1 week ago
The first philosophers, in investigating the...

The first philosophers, in investigating the truth and the nature of things, wandered, as if led by ignorance, into a certain... path. Hence, they say that no being is either generated or corrupted, because it is necessary that what is generated should be generated either from being or non-being: but both these are impossible; for neither can being be generated, since it already is; and from nothing, nothing can be generated... And thus... they said that there were not many things, but that being alone had a subsistence. ...the ancient philosophers ...through this ignorance added so much to their want of knowledge, as to fancy that nothing else was generated or had a being; but they subverted all generation.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Searle
John Searle
5 months 1 week ago
It seems to me obvious that...

It seems to me obvious that infants and many animals that do not in any ordinary sense have a language or perform speech acts nonetheless have Intentional states. Only someone in the grip of a philosophical theory would deny that small babies can literally be said to want milk and that dogs want to be let out or believe that their master is at the door.

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P. 5.
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
7 months 4 days ago
A philosopher is a man who...

A philosopher is a man who has to cure many intellectual diseases in himself before he can arrive at the notions of common sense.

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p. 44e
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
4 months ago
The barrenest of all mortals is...

The barrenest of all mortals is the sentimentalist.

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Characteristics.
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
7 months 3 days ago
Homosexuality appears as one of the...

Homosexuality appears as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.

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Vol I: La volonté de savoir
Philosophical Maxims
Charles Fourier
Charles Fourier
4 months 5 days ago
Marriage and dependent children are a...

Marriage and dependent children are a trap for the people! Morality carefully hides this distressing truth from us because it knows no remedy for the evil. But I , who bring a remedy must not dissimulate the woes from fathers, and I must not dissimulate from society its radical vice of pushing seven-eighths of all families into evil practices through poverty.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
7 months 1 week ago
Thee will find out in time...

Thee will find out in time that I have a great love of professing vile sentiments, I don't know why, unless it springs from long efforts to avoid priggery.

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Letter to Alys Pearsall Smith (1894). Smith was a Quaker, thus the archaic use of "Thee" in this and other letters to her.
Philosophical Maxims
Willard van Orman Quine
Willard van Orman Quine
5 months 3 weeks ago
As an empiricist I continue to...

As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries-not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.

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"Two Dogmas of Empiricism"
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
7 months 1 week ago
Let me suggest a theme for...

Let me suggest a theme for you: to state to yourself precisely and completely what that walk over the mountains amounted to for you, - returning to this essay again and again, until you are satisfied that all that was important in your experience is in it. Give this good reason to yourself for having gone over the mountains, for mankind is ever going over a mountain. Don't suppose that you can tell it precisely the first dozen times you try, but at 'em again, especially when, after a sufficient pause, you suspect that you are touching the heart or summit of the matter, reiterate your blows there, and account for the mountain to yourself. Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.

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Letter to Harrison Blake, November 16, 1857
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
7 months 1 week ago
Never read any book that is...

Never read any book that is not a year old.

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Books
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
6 months 5 days ago
Skepticism is an exercise in defascination.

Skepticism is an exercise in defascination.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
7 months 1 week ago
Freedom of Men under Government is,...

Freedom of Men under Government is, to have a standing Rule to live by, common to every one of that Society, and made by the Legislative Power erected in it; a Liberty to follow my own Will in all things, where the Rule prescribes not; and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, Arbitrary Will of another Man: as Freedom of Nature is, to be under no other restraint but the Law of Nature.

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Second Treatise of Civil Government, Ch. IV, sec. 21
Philosophical Maxims
Alan Watts
Alan Watts
3 months 2 weeks ago
Now I'm sure that most of...

Now I'm sure that most of you know the old story about the astronaut, who went far out into space, and was asked on his return whether he'd been to heaven and seen God. And he said: "Yes". And so they said to him: "Well, what about God?" And he said: "She's Black".

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The Nature of God
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
7 months 1 week ago
"What is meant by saying that...

"What is meant by saying that my choice of which way to walk home after the lecture is ambiguous and matter of chance?...It means that both Divinity Avenue and Oxford Street are called but only one, and that one either one, shall be chosen.

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The Dilemma of Determinism (1884) p.155
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton
5 months 1 week ago
Bullialdus wrote that all force respecting...

Bullialdus wrote that all force respecting the Sun as its center & depending on matter must be reciprocally in a duplicate ratio of the distance from the center.

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Letter to Edmund Halley (June 20, 1686) quoted in I. Bernard Cohen and George E. Smith, ed.s, The Cambridge Companion to Newton (2002) p. 204
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
3 months 3 weeks ago
"You will have less money." Yes,...

"You will have less money." Yes, and less trouble. "Less influence." Yes, and less envy.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
5 months 1 week ago
Color is not so much a...

Color is not so much a visual as a tactile medium.

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Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
7 months 1 week 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
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
8 months 5 days ago
...there are more things to admire...

...there are more things to admire in men than to despise.

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Philosophical Maxims
Albert Schweitzer
Albert Schweitzer
3 months 2 weeks ago
May the men who hold the...

May the men who hold the destiny of peoples in their hands, studiously avoid anything that might cause the present situation to deteriorate and become even more dangerous. May they take to heart the words of the Apostle Paul: "If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men." These words are valid not only for individuals, but for nations as well. May these nations, in their efforts to maintain peace, do their utmost to give the spirit time to grow and to act.

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Philosophical Maxims
Lin Yutang
Lin Yutang
3 months 2 weeks ago
If the early Chinese people had...

If the early Chinese people had any chivalry, it was manifested not toward women and children, but toward old people. That feeling of chivalry found clear expression in Mencius in some such saying as, "The people with gray hair should not be seen carrying burdens on the street," which was expressed as the final goal of good government.

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p. 193
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
7 months 4 days ago
Resting on your laurels is as...

Resting on your laurels is as dangerous as resting when you are walking in the snow. You doze off and die in your sleep.

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p. 35e
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
7 months 1 week ago
The virtues of society are the...

The virtues of society are the vices of the saints.

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Circles
Philosophical Maxims
John Dewey
John Dewey
6 months ago
There can be no movement toward...

There can be no movement toward a consummating close unless there is a progressive massing of values, a cumulative effect. This result cannot exist without conservation of the import of what has gone before. Moreover, to secure the needed continuity, the accumulated experience must be such as to create suspense and anticipation of resolution. Accumulation is at the same time preparation, as with each phase of the growth of a living embryo. Only that is carried on which is led to; otherwise there is arrest and a break. For this reason consummation is relative; instead of occurring once for all at a given point, it is recurrent. The final end is anticipated by rhythmic pauses, while that end is final only in an external way. For as we turn from reading a poem or novel or seeing a picture the effect presses forward in further experiences, even if only subconsciously.

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p. 143
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
6 months 5 days ago
He who has never envied the...

He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama. 

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p. 178, first American edition
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
6 months 5 days ago
Ambition is a drug that makes...

Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.

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Philosophical Maxims
Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm
5 months 3 weeks ago
Man's main task in life is...

Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.

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Ch. 4 "Problems of Humanistic Ethics"
Philosophical Maxims
Protagoras
Protagoras
6 months 3 weeks ago
You, Socrates, began by saying that...

You, Socrates, began by saying that virtue can't be taught, and now you are insisting on the opposite, trying to show that all things are knowledge, justice, soundness of mind, even courage, from which it would follow that virtue most certainly can be taught.

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As quoted in Protagoras by Plato
Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
5 months 6 days ago
Never promise more than you can...

Never promise more than you can perform.

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Maxim 528
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
2 months 1 week ago
The nature is pleased....
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Main Content / General
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
7 months 1 week ago
A man must always live by...

A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon most occasions be somewhat more, otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation.

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Chapter VIII, p. 81.
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
3 months 6 days ago
The nature of the All moved...

The nature of the All moved to make the universe.

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VII, 75
Philosophical Maxims
Lin Yutang
Lin Yutang
3 months 2 weeks ago
What is patriotism but love of...

What is patriotism but love of the good things we ate in our childhood? I have said elsewhere that the loyalty to Uncle Sam is the loyalty to doughnuts and ham and sweet potatoes and the loyalty to the German Vaterland is the loyalty to Pfannkuchen and Christmas Stollen. As for international understanding, I feel that macaroni has done more for our appreciation of Italy than Mussolini... in food, as in death, we feel the essential brotherhood of mankind.

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Ch. IV : On Having A Stomach, p. 46
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley
4 months 3 weeks ago
If the brutes have consciousness and...

If the brutes have consciousness and no souls, then it is clear that, in them, consciousness is a direct function of material changes; while, if they possess immaterial subjects of consciousness, or souls, then, as consciousness is brought into existence only as the consequence of molecular motion of the brain, it follows that it is an indirect product of material changes. The soul stands related to the body as the bell of a clock to the works, and consciousness answers to the sound which the bell gives out when it is struck.

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Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
5 months 3 weeks ago
If a captive mind is unaware...

If a captive mind is unaware of being in prison, it is living in error. If it has recognized the fact, even for the tenth of a second, and then quickly forgotten it in order to avoid suffering, it is living in falsehood. Men of the most brilliant intelligence can be born, live and die in error and falsehood. In them, intelligence is neither a good, nor even an asset. The difference between more or less intelligent men is like the difference between criminals condemned to life imprisonment in smaller or larger cells. The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his large cell.

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p. 69
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
6 months 1 day ago
The people are led to find...

The people are led to find in the productive apparatus the effective agent of thought and action to which their personal thought and action can and must be surrendered. And in this transfer, the apparatus also assumes the role of a moral agent.

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Conscience is absolved by reification. p. 79
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
3 months 1 week ago
To constrain the brute force of...

To constrain the brute force of the people, the European governments deem it necessary to keep them down by hard labor, poverty and ignorance, and to take from them, as from bees, so much of their earnings, as that unremitting labor shall be necessary to obtain a sufficient surplus to sustain a scanty and miserable life.

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Letter to Justice William Johnson
Philosophical Maxims
Allan Bloom
Allan Bloom
3 months 2 weeks ago
We witness a strange inversion: on...

We witness a strange inversion: on the one hand, the endeavor to turn the social contract into a less calculating and more feeling connection among its members; on the other hand, the endeavor to turn the erotic relationship into a contractual one.

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p. 15.
Philosophical Maxims
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