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Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal
1 month 3 weeks ago
Whilst in speaking of human things,...

Whilst in speaking of human things, we say that it is necessary to know them before we can love them...the saints on the contrary say in speaking of divine things that it is necessary to love them in order to know them, and that we only enter truth through charity.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
1 month 1 week ago
A proposition is completely logically analyzed...

A proposition is completely logically analyzed if its grammar is made completely clear: no matter what idiom it may be written or expressed in...

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Philosophical Remarks (1930), Part I (1)
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
1 month 3 weeks ago
Not being able to govern events,...

Not being able to govern events, I govern myself.

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Book II, Ch. 17
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
1 month 2 weeks ago
Apart from logical cogency, there is...

Apart from logical cogency, there is to me something a little odd about the ethical valuations of those who think that an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent Deity, after preparing the ground by many millions of years of lifeless nebulae, would consider Himself adequately rewarded by the final emergence of Hitler and Stalin and the H-bomb. 

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Preface
Philosophical Maxims
Al-Ghazali
Al-Ghazali
2 weeks 6 days ago
The proximity between the counterfeit and...

The proximity between the counterfeit and the good coin does not make the good coin counterfeit nor the counterfeit good. In the same way the proximity between truth and falsehood does not make truth falsehood nor falsehood truth.

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III. The Classes of Seekers, p. 33.
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
2 months 1 week ago
Milton Ashe is not the type...

Milton Ashe is not the type to marry a head of hair and a pair of eyes.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
1 month 2 weeks ago
Do not be too moral. You...

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 177
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
1 week 6 days ago
That by any series of changes...

That by any series of changes a protozoon should ever become a mammal, seems to those who are not familiar with zoology, and who have not seen how clear becomes the relationship between the simplest and the most complex forms when intermediate forms are examined, a very grotesque notion. Habitually, looking at things rather in their statical aspect than in their dynamical aspect, they never realize the fact that, by small increments of modification, any amount of modification may in time be generated.

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Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
2 months 3 days ago
To give one's self earnestly...

To give one's self earnestly to the duties due to men, and, while respecting spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them, may be called wisdom.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
1 month 2 weeks ago
Ideas do not exist….

Ideas do not exist separately from language.

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Notebook I, The Chapter on Money, p. 83.
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
2 months 2 weeks ago
Once in his early youth a...

Once in his early youth a man allowed himself to be so far carried away in an overwrought irresponsible state as to visit a prostitute. It is all forgotten. Now he wants to get married. Then anxiety stirs. He is tortured day and night with the thought that he might possibly be a father, that somewhere in the world there could be a created being who owed his life to him. He cannot share his secret with anyone; he does not even have any reliable knowledge of the fact. –For this reason the incident must have involved a prostitute and taken place in the wantonness of youth; had it been a little infatuated or an actual seduction, it would be hard to imagine that he could know nothing about it, but now this this very ignorance is the basis of his agitated torment. On the other hand, precisely because of the rashness of the whole affair, his misgivings do not really start until he actually falls in love.

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Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
1 month 2 weeks ago
Methinks I am like a man,...

Methinks I am like a man, who having struck on many shoals, and having narrowly escap'd shipwreck in passing a small frith, has yet the temerity to put out to sea in the same leaky weather-beaten vessel, and even carries his ambition so far as to think of compassing the globe under these disadvantageous circumstances.

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Part 4, Section 7
Philosophical Maxims
Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek
5 months 2 weeks ago
You are the buyer of your own life

They are trying as directly as possible to sell you experiences, i.e. what you are able to do with the car, not the car as a product itself. An extreme example of this is this existing economic marketing concept, which basically evaluates the value of you as a potential consumer of your own life. Like how much are you worth, in the sense of all you will spend to buy back your own life as a certain quality life. You will spend so much in doctors, so much in beauty, so much in transcendental meditation, so much for music, and so on. What you are buying is a certain image and practice of your life. So what is your market potential, as a buyer of your own life in this sense?

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
1 month 2 weeks ago
Self-respect will keep a man from...

Self-respect will keep a man from being abject when he is in the power of enemies, and will enable him to feel that he may be in the right when the world is against him.

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Authority and the Individual (1949), p. 59
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
1 month 3 weeks ago
Since I would rather make of...

Since I would rather make of him an able man than a learned man, I would also urge that care be taken to choose a guide with a well-made rather than a well-filled head.

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Ch. 26. On the Education of Children
Philosophical Maxims
Plato
Plato
2 months 1 week ago
They do not know the penalty...

They do not know the penalty of unrighteousness, which is the thing they most ought to know. For it is not what they think it is scourgings and death, which they sometimes escape entirely when they have done wrong but a penalty which it is impossible to escape. Two patterns, my friend, are set up in the world, the divine, which is most blessed, and the godless, which is most wretched, and their silliness and extreme foolishness blind them to the fact that through their unrighteous acts they are made like the one and unlike the other. They therefore pay the penalty for this by living a life that conforms to the pattern they resemble.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
1 month 2 weeks ago
Mystery is delightful, but unscientific, since...

Mystery is delightful, but unscientific, since it depends upon ignorance.

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The Analysis of Mind (1921), Lecture I: Recent Criticisms of "Consciousness"
Philosophical Maxims
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
1 week 6 days ago
All life, Omnipotent Father, is thy...

All life, Omnipotent Father, is thy life! and the eye of religion alone penetrates to the realms of truth and beauty. I am related to thee, and what I behold around me is related to me; all is full of animation, and looks towards me with bright spiritual eyes, and speaks with spirit voices to my heart.

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Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p.125
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
Just now
Shall we not perhaps be told,...

Shall we not perhaps be told, on the other hand, that if the sinner suffers an eternal punishment, it is because he does not cease to sin? - for the damned sin without ceasing. This however is no solution to the problem, which derives all its absurdity from the fact that punishment has been conceived as vindictiveness or vengeance, not as correction, and has been conceived after the fashion of barbarous peoples. And in the same way hell has been conceived as a sort of police institution, necessary in order to put fear into the world. And the worst of it is that it no longer intimidates, and therefore will have to be shut up.

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Philosophical Maxims
Peter Singer
Peter Singer
1 month 4 days ago
Becoming a vegetarian is not merely...

Becoming a vegetarian is not merely a symbolic gesture. Nor is it an attempt to isolate oneself from the ugly realities of the world, to keep oneself pure and so without responsibility for the cruelty and carnage all around. Becoming a vegetarian is a highly practical and effective step one can take toward ending both the killing of nonhuman animals and the infliction of suffering upon them.

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Ch. 4: Becoming a Vegetarian
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1 month 2 weeks ago
What would we really know the...

What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body; - show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and the shop, the plough, and the ledger, referred to the like cause by which light undulates and poets sing; - and the world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order; there is no trifle; there is no puzzle; but one design unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench.

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par. 40
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
1 week 6 days ago
Religion is the dream of the...

Religion is the dream of the human mind. But even in dreams we do not find ourselves in emptiness or in heaven, but on earth, in the realm of reality; we only see real things in the entrancing splendor of imagination and caprice, instead of in the simple daylight of reality and necessity.

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Preface to Second Edition
Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
2 weeks ago
I could never stand more than...

I could never stand more than three months of dreaming at a time without feeling an irresistible desire to plunge into society. To plunge into society meant to visit my superior, Anton Antonich Syetochkin. He was the only permanent acquaintance I have had in my life, and I even wonder at the fact myself now. But I even went to see him only when that phase came over me, and when my dreams had reached such a point of bliss that it became essential to embrace my fellows and all mankind immediately. And for that purpose I needed at least one human being at hand who actually existed. I had to call on Anton Antonich, however, on Tuesday - his at-home day; so I always had to adjust my passionate desire to embrace humanity so that it might fall on a Tuesday.

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Part 2, Chapter 2
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
Just now
Neither is the longing for immortality...

Neither is the longing for immortality saved, but rather dissolved and submerged, by agnosticism, or the doctrine of the unknowable. ...The unknowable, if it is something more than the merely hitherto unknown, is but a purely negative concept, a concept of limitation. And upon this foundation no human feeling can be built up.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
2 months 2 weeks ago
Hope is the dream of a...

Hope is the dream of a waking man.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 day ago
I don't believe...
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Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
1 month 2 weeks ago
Perhaps I am more than usually...

Perhaps I am more than usually jealous with respect to my freedom. I feel that my connection with and obligation to society are still very slight and transient. Those slight labors which afford me a livelihood, and by which it is allowed that I am to some extent serviceable to my contemporaries, are as yet commonly a pleasure to me, and I am not often reminded that they are a necessity. So far I am successful. But I foresee, that, if my wants should be much increased, the labor required to supply them would become a drudgery. If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure, that, for me, there would be nothing left worth living for. I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage.

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p. 486
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
1 month 1 week ago
Freud's fanciful pseudo-explanations (precisely because they...

Freud's fanciful pseudo-explanations (precisely because they are brilliant) perform a disservice. (Now any ass has these pictures available to use in "explaining" symptoms of an illness).

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p. 55e
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
1 month 1 week ago
If in this book harsh words...

If in this book harsh words are spoken about some of the greatest among the intellectual leaders of mankind, my motive is not, I hope, the wish to belittle them. It springs rather from my conviction that, if our civilization is to survive, we must break with the habit of deference to great men. Great men may make great mistakes; and as the book tries to show, some of the greatest leaders of the past supported the perennial attack on freedom and reason. Their influence, too rarely challenged, continues to mislead those on whose defence civilization depends, and to divide them. The responsibility of this tragic and possibly fatal division becomes ours if we hesitate to be outspoken in our criticism of what admittedly is a part of our intellectual heritage. By reluctance to criticize some of it, we may help to destroy it all.

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Preface to the First Edition
Philosophical Maxims
Plato
Plato
2 months 1 week ago
Your pride has been too much...

Your pride has been too much for the pride of your admirers; they were numerous and high-spirited, but they have all run away, overpowered by your superior force of character; not one of them remains. And I want you to understand the reason why you have been too much for them. You think that you have no need of them or of any other man, for you have great possessions and lack nothing, beginning with the body, and ending with the soul. Socrates speaking to Alcibiades

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Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
2 months 1 week ago
It is the nature of science...

It is the nature of science that answers automatically pose new and more subtle questions.

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Philosophical Maxims
Niccolò Machiavelli
Niccolò Machiavelli
1 month 3 weeks ago
It is truly a marvelous thing...

It is truly a marvelous thing to consider to what greatness Athens arrived in the space of one hundred years after she freed herself from the tyranny of Pisistratus; but, above all, it is even more marvelous to consider the greatness Rome reached when she freed herself from her kings. The reason is easy to understand, for it is the common good and not private gain that makes cities great. Yet, without a doubt, this common good is observed only in republics, for in them everything that promotes it is practised, and however much damage it does to this or that private individual, those who benefit from the said common good are so numerous that they are able to advance in spite of the inclination of the few citizens who are oppressed by it.

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Book 2, Chapter 2
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
1 month 1 week ago
Do you think that I count...

Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.

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Act 10, sc. 2
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
1 month 2 weeks ago
Nature made women mature early and...

Nature made women mature early and had them demand gentle and polite treatment from men, so that they would find themselves imperceptibly fettered by a child due to their own magnanimity; and they would find themselves brought, if not quite to morality itself, then at least to that which cloaks it, moral behavior, which is the preparation and introduction to morality.

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Kant, Immanuel (1996), pages 219-220
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
1 month 1 week ago
A critique is not a matter...

A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest.

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"Practicing criticism, or, is it really important to think?", interview by Didier Eribon, May 30-31, 1981, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture, ed. L. Kriztman (1988), p. 155
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 week 3 days ago
What we want is not freedom...

What we want is not freedom but its appearances. It is for these simulacra that man has always striven. And since freedom, as has been said, is no more than a sensation, what difference is there between being free and believing ourselves free?

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Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
1 month 2 weeks ago
Fear is in almost all cases...

Fear is in almost all cases a wretched instrument of government, and ought in particular never to be employed against any order of men who have the smallest pretensions to independency.

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Chapter I, Part III, p. 862.
Philosophical Maxims
John Rawls
John Rawls
1 month 1 week ago
Intuitionism is not constructive, perfectionism is...

Intuitionism is not constructive, perfectionism is unacceptable.

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Chapter I, Section 9, pg. 52
Philosophical Maxims
Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno
2 weeks 6 days ago
The infinity of All ever bringing...

The infinity of All ever bringing forth anew, and even as infinite space is around us, so is infinite potentiality, capacity, reception, malleability, matter.

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I 1 as translated in Giordano Bruno : His Life and Thought with annotated translation of his work On the Infinite Universe and Worlds (1950) by Dorothea Waley Singer
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Buber
Martin Buber
4 days ago
As the oil is in the...

As the oil is in the olive, so is the teshuvah, repentance, hidden within sin.

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p. 44
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
1 month 3 weeks ago
I speak the truth, not my...

I speak the truth, not my fill of it, but as much as I dare speak; and I dare to do so a little more as I grow old.

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Ch. 2
Philosophical Maxims
George Santayana
George Santayana
6 days ago
Our dignity is not in what...

Our dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand.

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p. 50
Philosophical Maxims
Novalis
Novalis
1 week 4 days ago
Building worlds is not enough for...

Building worlds is not enough for the deeper urging mind; but a loving heart sates the striving spirit.

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Fragment No. 91
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
Just now
"God does not think, He creates;...

"God does not think, He creates; He does not exist, He is eternal," wrote Kierkegaard (Afslutende uvidenskabelige Efterskrift); but perhaps it is more exact to say with Mazzini, the mystic of the Italian city, that "God is great because his thought is action" (Ai giovani d'Italila), because with Him to think is to create, and He gives existence to that which exists in His thought by the mere fact of thinking it, and the impossible is unthinkable by God. It is not written in the Scriptures that God creates with His word - that is to say, with His thought - and that by this, by His Word, He made everything that exists? And what God has once made does He ever forget? May it not be that all the thoughts that have ever passed through the Supreme Consciousness still subsist therein? In Him, who is eternal, is not all existence eternalized?

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Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
1 month 2 weeks ago
Marriage is encouraged in China, not...

Marriage is encouraged in China, not by the profitableness of children, but by the liberty of destroying them.

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Chapter VIII, p. 87.
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 week 3 days ago
If a man has not, by...

If a man has not, by the time he is 30, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism, I don't know if he is to be admired or scorned - a saint or a corpse.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
1 month 2 weeks ago
Poetry is the mysticism of mankind.

Poetry is the mysticism of mankind.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
1 month 2 weeks ago
A European who goes to New...

A European who goes to New York and Chicago sees the future... when he goes to Asia he sees the past.

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Ch. 8: Eastern and Western Ideals of Happiness
Philosophical Maxims
Cornel West
Cornel West
1 month 1 week ago
The authority of science ... promotes...

The authority of science ... promotes and encourages the activity of observing, comparing, measuring and ordering the physical characteristics of human bodies.... Cartesian epistemology and classical ideals produced forms of rationality, scientificity and objectivity that, though efficacious in the quest for truth and knowledge, prohibited the intelligibility and legitimacy of black equality.... In fact, to "think" such an idea was to be deemed irrational, barbaric or mad.

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Prophesy Deliverance!
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
1 month 2 weeks ago
Even the death of Friends will...

Even the death of Friends will inspire us as much as their lives. They will leave consolation to the mourners, as the rich leave money to defray the expenses of their funerals, and their memories will be incrusted over with sublime and pleasing thoughts, as monuments of other men are overgrown with moss; for our Friends have no place in the graveyard.

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Philosophical Maxims
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