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Auguste Comte
Auguste Comte
7 months 2 weeks ago
The principal means of realizing it...

The principal means of realizing it will be the formation of an alliance between philosophers and the working classes, for which both are alike prepared by the negative and positive progress of the last five centuries. The direct object of their combined action will be to set in motion the force of Public Opinion.

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p. 153
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
8 months 1 week ago
God can make good use of...

God can make good use of all that happens, but the loss is real.

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Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
8 months 2 weeks ago
I maintain that in every special...

I maintain that in every special natural doctrine only so much science proper is to be met with as mathematics; for... science proper, especially of nature, requires a pure portion, lying at the foundation of the empirical, and based upon à priori knowledge of natural things. ...the conception should be constructed. But the cognition of the reason through construction of conceptions is mathematical. A pure philosophy of nature in general, namely, one that only investigates what constitutes a nature in general, may thus be possible without mathematics; but a pure doctrine of nature respecting determinate natural things (corporeal doctrine and mental doctrine), is only possible by means of mathematics; and as in every natural doctrine only so much science proper is to be met with therein as there is cognition à priori, a doctrine of nature can only contain so much science proper as there is in it of applied mathematics.

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Preface, Tr. Ernest Belfort Bax, 1883
Philosophical Maxims
Max Stirner
Max Stirner
4 months 4 weeks ago
The workers have the most enormous...

The workers have the most enormous power in their hands, and if one day they became truly aware of it and used it, then nothing could resist them; they would only have to stop work and look upon the products of work as their own and enjoy them. This is the meaning of the labor unrest that is looming here and there. The state is founded on the-slavery of labor. If labor becomes free, the state is lost.

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Landstreicher 2017, p. 133
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
8 months 1 week ago
The logical picture of the facts...

The logical picture of the facts is the thought.

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(3) Original German: Das logische Bild der Tatsachen ist der Gedanke.
Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
7 months 3 weeks ago
To use Virtue is perfect blessedness.

To use Virtue is perfect blessedness.

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Philosophical Maxims
Albert Schweitzer
Albert Schweitzer
4 months 3 weeks ago
To the question whether I am...

To the question whether I am a pessimist or an optimist, I answer that my knowledge is pessimistic, but my willing and hoping are optimistic.

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Epilogue, p. 242
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
7 months 1 week ago
Impossible to spend sleepless nights and...

Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.

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Philosophical Maxims
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
6 months 6 days ago
All human accomplishment has the same...

All human accomplishment has the same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination. It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!

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Henderson the Rain King (1959) [Viking/Penguin, 1984, ISBN 0-140-07269-1], ch. XVIII, p. 271
Philosophical Maxims
Sydney Smith
Sydney Smith
4 months 4 weeks ago
I am old, but I certainly...

I am old, but I certainly have not that sign of old age, extolling the past at the expense of the present.

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Vol. I, ch. 11, p. 437
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
7 months 6 days ago
The spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs...

The spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the control.

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p. 8
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Nozick
Robert Nozick
5 months 2 weeks ago
From each as they choose, to...

From each as they choose, to each as they are chosen.

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Ch. 7 : Distributive Justice, Section I, Patterning, p. 160
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
7 months 6 days ago
What is exalted among men is...

What is exalted among men is an abomination in the sight of God.

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16:15 ESV
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
6 months 3 weeks ago
Art is naturally concerned with man...

Art is naturally concerned with man in his existential aspect, not in his scientific aspect. For the scientist, questions about man's stature and significance, suffering and power, are not really scientific questions; consequently he is inclined to regard art as an inferior recreation. Unfortunately, the artist has come to accept the scientist's view of himself. The result, I contend, is that art in the twentieth century - literary art in particular - has ceased to take itself seriously as the primary instrument of existential philosophy. It has ceased to regard itself as an instrument for probing questions of human significance. Art is the science of human destiny. Science is the attempt to discern the order that underlies the chaos of nature; art is the attempt to discern the order that underlies the chaos of man. At its best, it evokes unifying emotions; it makes the reader see the world momentarily as a unity.

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p. 214
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
8 months 2 weeks ago
To choose one sock from each...

To choose one sock from each of infinitely many pairs of socks requires the Axiom of Choice, but for shoes the Axiom is not needed.

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As quoted in Williams' Weighing the Odds: A Course in Probability and Statistics (2001), p. 498
Philosophical Maxims
John Searle
John Searle
6 months 2 weeks ago
You need to know enough of...

You need to know enough of the natural sciences so that you are not a stranger in the world.

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Philosophical Maxims
Nikos Kazantzakis
Nikos Kazantzakis
4 months 2 weeks ago
Nothing exists! Neither life nor death....

Nothing exists! Neither life nor death. I watch mind and matter hunting each other like two nonexistent erotic phantasms - merging, begetting, disappearing - and I say: "This is what I want!" I know now: I do not hope for anything. I do not fear anything, I have freed myself from both the mind and the heart, I have mounted much higher, I am free. This is what I want. I want nothing more. I have been seeking freedom.

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This passage was used for Kazantzakis' epitaph: "Δεν ελπίζω τίποτα, δε φοβούμαι τίποτα, είμαι λεύτερος." I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.
Philosophical Maxims
Henri Poincaré
Henri Poincaré
5 months 1 week ago
One need only open the eyes...

One need only open the eyes to see that the conquests of industry which have enriched so many practical men would never have seen the light, if these practical men alone had existed and if they had not been preceded by unselfish devotees who died poor, who never thought of utility, and yet had a guide far other than caprice.As Mach says, these devotees have spared their successors the trouble of thinking.

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Author's Essay Prefatory to the Translation: "The Choice of Facts," p.4
Philosophical Maxims
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
7 months 4 days ago
Whoever desires to live among men...

Whoever desires to live among men has to obey their laws-this is what the secular morality of Western civilization comes down to. ... Rationality in the form of such obedience swallows up everything, even the freedom to think.

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p. 29.
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
2 months 5 days ago
Never give children....
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Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
6 months 1 week ago
He sleeps well who knows not...

He sleeps well who knows not that he sleeps ill.

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Maxim 77
Philosophical Maxims
Novalis
Novalis
7 months 1 week ago
The normal present connects the past...

The normal present connects the past and the future through limitation. Contiguity results, crystallization by means of solidification. There also exists, however, a spiritual present that identifies past and future through dissolution, and this mixture is the element, the atmosphere of the poet.

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Fragment No. 109
Philosophical Maxims
Hilary Putnam
Hilary Putnam
6 months 3 weeks ago
What I am saying, then, is...

What I am saying, then, is that elements of what we call "language" or "mind" penetrate so deeply into what we call "reality" that the very project of representing ourselves as being "mappers" of something "language-independent" is fatally compromised from the very start. Like Relativism, but in a different way, Realism is an impossible attempt to view the world from Nowhere. In this situation it is a temptation to say, "So we make the world," or "our language makes up the world," or "our culture makes up the world"; but this is just another form of the same mistake. If we succumb, once again we view the world-the only world we know-as a product. One kind of philosopher views it as a product from a raw material: Unconceptualized Reality. The other views it as a creation ex nihilo. But the world isn't a product. It's just the world.

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"Realism with a Human Face"
Philosophical Maxims
Rosa Luxemburg
Rosa Luxemburg
4 months 1 week ago
As the entire middle class, the...

As the entire middle class, the bourgeois and petty bourgeois intelligentsia, boycotted the Soviet government for months after the October Revolution and crippled the railroad, post and telegraph, and educational and administrative apparatus, and, in this fashion, opposed the workers government, naturally all measures of pressure were exerted against it. These included the deprivation of political rights, of economic means of existence, etc., in order to break their resistance with an iron fist. It was precisely in this way that the socialist dictatorship expressed itself, for it cannot shrink from any use of force to secure or prevent certain measures involving the interests of the whole.

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Philosophical Maxims
B. F. Skinner
B. F. Skinner
5 months 1 week ago
It has always been the task...

It has always been the task of formal education to set up behavior which would prove useful or enjoyable later in a student's life.

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As quoted in Performance-based Assessment for Middle and High School Physical Education (2002) by Jacalyn Lea Lund and Mary Fortman Kirk, p. 165
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
8 months 3 weeks ago
This misplacing hath caused a deficience,...

This misplacing hath caused a deficience, or at least a great improficience in the sciences themselves. For the handling of final causes, mixed with the rest in physical inquiries, hath intercepted the severe and diligent inquiry of all real and physical causes, and given men the occasion to stay upon these satisfactory and specious causes, to the great arrest and prejudice of further discovery. For this I find done not only by Plato, who ever anchoreth upon that shore, but by Aristotle, Galen, and others which do usually likewise fall upon these flats of discoursing causes.

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Book VII, 7
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
8 months 1 week ago
I will now confess my own...

I will now confess my own utopia. I devoutly believe in the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of some sort of socialistic equilibrium. The fatalistic view of the war function is to me nonsense, for I know that war-making is due to definite motives and subject to prudential checks and reasonable criticisms, just like any other form of enterprise. And when whole nations are the armies, and the science of destruction vies in intellectual refinement with the science of production, I see that war becomes absurd and impossible from its own monstrosity. Extravagant ambitions will have to be replaced by reasonable claims, and nations must make common cause against them.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
5 months 5 days ago
"By what method or methods can...

"By what method or methods can the able men from every rank of life be gathered, as diamond-grains from the general mass of sand: the able men, not the sham-able;-and set to do the work of governing, contriving, administering and guiding for us!" It is the question of questions. All that Democracy ever meant lies there: the attainment of a truer and truer Aristocracy, or Government again by the Best.

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Philosophical Maxims
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
6 months 6 days ago
I discovered that rejections are not...

I discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, "To hell with you."

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Quoted in "Feeling Rejected? Join Updike, Mailer, Oates..." by Barbara Bauer and Robert F. Moss, New York Times (21 July 1985), section 7, page 1, column 1
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
4 months 1 week ago
Whenever you suffer pain, keep in...

Whenever you suffer pain, keep in mind that it's nothing to be ashamed of and that it can't degrade your guiding intelligence, nor keep it from acting rationally and for the common good. And in most cases you should be helped by the saying of Epicurus, that pain is never unbearable or unending, so you can remember these limits and not add to them in your imagination. Remember too that many common annoyances are pain in disguise, such as sleepiness, fever and loss of appetite. When they start to get you down, tell yourself you are giving in to pain.

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VII. 64:280
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
8 months 2 weeks ago
I think if I had met...

I think if I had met him [Lenin] without knowing who he was, I should not have guessed that he was a great man; he struck me as too opinionated and narrowly orthodox. His strength comes, I imagine, from his honesty, courage, and unwavering faith-religious faith in the Marxian gospel, which takes the place of the Christian martyr's hopes of Paradise, except that it is less egotistical... I went to Russia a Communist; but contact with those who have no doubts has intensified a thousandfold my own doubts, not as to Communism in itself, but as to the wisdom of holding a creed so firmly that for its sake men are willing to inflict widespread misery.

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Part I, Ch. 3: Lenin, Trotsky and Gorky
Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
9 months 2 weeks ago
And happiness is thought to depend...

And happiness is thought to depend on leisure; for we are busy that we may have leisure, and make war that we may live in peace.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
8 months 1 week ago
Admit it, it is your youth...

Admit it, it is your youth that you regret, more even than your crime; it is my youth you hate, even more than my innocence.

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Electra to her mother Clytemnestra, Act 1
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
6 months 1 week ago
The discarnate TV user lives in...

The discarnate TV user lives in a world between fantasy and dream, and is in a typically hypnotic state, which is the ultimate form and level of participation.

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"A Last Look at the Tube." New York Magazine, 17 March 1978, p. 45-48
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard
6 months 2 weeks ago
In cloning, the Father and the...

In cloning, the Father and the Mother have disappeared, not in the service of an aleatory liberty of the subject, but in the service of a matrix called code.

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"Clone Story," p. 96
Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
7 months 3 weeks ago
Wish not the thing, which thou...

Wish not the thing, which thou mayest not obtain!

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Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
6 months 4 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
Emperor Julian
Emperor Julian
4 months 3 weeks ago
Must we then speak of this...

Must we then speak of this subject also: and shall we write concerning things that are not to be told, and shall we publish things not to be divulged, and secrets not to be spoken aloud? Who indeed is Attis or Gallos; who the Mother of the Gods; what is the reason of this rule of Chastity; moreover for what cause has such an institution been established among us from remote antiquity; handed down to us indeed from the most ancient of the Phrygians, but accepted in the first place by the Greeks - and those not the vulgar herd, but the Athenians - taught by the event that they had not done well in ridiculing him that was performing the rites of the Great Mother. For they are said to have insulted and driven off the Gallos, as one who was making innovations in religion: because they did not understand the character of the goddess, or how that she was the very "Deo", "Rhea," and " "Demeter" so much honoured amongst them themselves.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
4 months 1 week ago
People try to get away from...

People try to get away from it all-to the country, to the beach, to the mountains. You always wish that you could too. Which is idiotic: you can get away from it anytime you like. By going within. Nowhere you can go is more peaceful-more free of interruptions-than your own soul.

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(Hays translation) IV, 4
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
7 months 1 week ago
Once the first radical attack on...

Once the first radical attack on private property has been launched, the proletariat will find itself forced to go ever further, to concentrate increasingly in the hands of the state all capital, all agriculture, all transport, all trade. All the foregoing measures are directed to this end; and they will become practicable and feasible, capable of producing their centralizing effects to precisely the degree that the proletariat, through its labor, multiplies the country's productive forces.

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Philosophical Maxims
William Godwin
William Godwin
7 months 1 week ago
The first authentic record on this...

The first authentic record on this subject (alchemy) is an edict of Diocletian, about 300 years after Christ, ordering a diligent search to be made in Egypt for all the ancient books which treated of the art of making gold and silver, that they might be consigned to the flames. This edict necessarily presumes a certain antiquity to the pursuit; and fabulous history has recorded Solomon, Pythagoras, and Hermes among its distinguished votaries.

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Quoted by H.P. Blavatsky, in Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology, Vol. I, (1877) (p. 504)
Philosophical Maxims
Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei
5 months 1 week ago
Among all the great men who...

Among all the great men who have philosophized about this remarkable effect, I am more astonished at Kepler than at any other. Despite his open and acute mind, and though he has at his fingertips the motions attributed to the earth, he nevertheless lent his ear and his assent to the moon's dominion over the waters, to occult properties, and to such puerilities.

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In regard to Kepler's belief of the moon affecting the tides of the Earth, p. 328
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
8 months 2 weeks ago
There are, besides, eternal truths, such...

There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.

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Section 2, paragraph 63
Philosophical Maxims
Baruch Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza
8 months 2 weeks ago
I pass, at length, to the...

I pass, at length, to the third and perfectly absolute dominion, which we call democracy.

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Ch. 11, Of Democracy
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
8 months 3 weeks ago
But by far the greatest obstacle...

But by far the greatest obstacle to the progress of science and to the undertaking of new tasks and provinces therein is found in this - that men despair and think things impossible.

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Aphorism 92
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay
6 months 2 days ago
Soon fades the spell, soon comes...

Soon fades the spell, soon comes the night: Say will it not be then the same, Whether we played the black or white,Whether we lost or won the game?

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Sermon in a Churchyard, st. 8 (1825), quoted in The Miscellaneous Writings of Lord Macaulay, Vol. II (1860), p. 390
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
8 months 2 weeks ago
[L]ike Coleridge, he might plead as...

[L]ike Coleridge, he might plead as a set-off that he had been to many persons, through his conversation, a source not only of much instruction but of great elevation of character. On me his influence was most salutary. It was moral in the best sense. He took a sincere and kind interest in me, far beyond what could have been expected towards a mere youth from a man of his age, standing, and what seemed austerity of character. There was in his conversation and demeanour a tone of high-mindedness which did not show itself so much, if the quality existed as much, in any of the other persons with whom at that time I associated. My intercourse with him was the more beneficial, owing to his being of a different mental type from all other intellectual men whom I frequented...

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(pp. 75-76)
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
9 months 1 week ago
Can one be a saint without...

Can one be a saint without God?, that's the problem, in fact the only problem, I'm up against today.

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Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
7 months 2 weeks ago
The stupider one is, the closer...

The stupider one is, the closer one is to reality. The stupider one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence wriggles and hides itself. Intelligence is a knave, but stupidity is honest and straightforward.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
4 months 1 week ago
If man reflects on the changes...

If man reflects on the changes and transformations which follow one another like wave after wave and their rapidity, he will despise everything which is perishable.

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IX, 28
Philosophical Maxims
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