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Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
2 months 2 weeks ago
This same Man-of-Letters Hero must be…

This same Man-of-Letters Hero must be regarded as our most important modern person. He, such as he may be, is the soul of all.

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Philosophical Maxims
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
1 month 2 weeks ago
I do not think that...

I do not think that religion is the most important element. We are held together rather by a body of tradition, handed down from father to son, which the child imbibes with his mother's milk. The atmosphere of our infancy predetermines our idiosyncrasies and predilections.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
1 month 3 weeks ago
No carelessness in your actions. No...

No carelessness in your actions. No confusion in your words. No imprecision in your thoughts. (Hays translation) Be not careless in deeds, nor confused in words, nor rambling in thought.

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VIII, 51
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
5 months 3 weeks ago
If you are tired of the...

If you are tired of the real landscape, look at it in a mirror. By putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves. This book applies the treatment not only to bread or apple but to good and evil, to our endless perils, our anguish, and our joys. By dipping them in myth we see them more clearly.

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Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
3 months 3 weeks ago
Human vanity cherishes the absurd notion...

Human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.

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Chapter 3 "Accumulating Small Change" (p. 50)
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
5 months 3 weeks ago
The collective name for the ripe...

The collective name for the ripe fruits of religion in a character is Saintliness. The saintly character is the character for which spiritual emotions are the habitual centre of the personal energy; and there is a certain composite photograph of universal saintliness, the same in all religions, of which the features can easily be traced.

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Lectures XI, XII, AND XIII : "Saintliness"
Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
5 months 4 weeks ago
Descartes is rightly regarded as the...

Descartes is rightly regarded as the father of modern philosophy primarily and generally because he helped the faculty of reason to stand on its own feet by teaching men to use their brains in place whereof the Bible, on the one hand, and Aristotle, on the other, had previously served.

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E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 3
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
5 months 3 weeks ago
My thinking is first and last...

My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing.

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Sometimes paraphrased as "Thinking is for doing", perhaps originally by S.T. Fiske (1992) Ch. 22
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
6 months 4 weeks ago
The reason I cannot really say...

The reason I cannot really say that I positively enjoy nature is that I do not quite realize what it is that I enjoy. A work of art, on the other hand, I can grasp. I can - if I may put it this way - find that Archimedian point, and as soon as I have found it, everything is readily clear for me. Then I am able to pursue this one main idea and see how all the details serve to illuminate it.

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Philosophical Maxims
B. F. Skinner
B. F. Skinner
2 months 3 weeks ago
It is a mistake to suppose...

It is a mistake to suppose that the whole issue is how to free man. The issue is to improve the way in which he is controlled.

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"I have been misunderstood" An interview with B.F.Skinner, Center Magazine (March/April 1972), pp. 63
Philosophical Maxims
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
4 months 1 week ago
However, the disappearance of domination does...

However, the disappearance of domination does not entail freedom. Instead, it makes freedom and constraint coincide. Thus, the achievement-subject gives itself over to compulsive freedom--that is, to the free constraint of maximizing achievement. Excess work and performance escalate into auto-exploitation.

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Source: Page 11
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
6 months 5 days ago
If you press me to say…

If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than it was because he was he, and I was I. Variants: If a man urge me to tell wherefore I loved him, I feel it cannot be expressed but by answering: Because it was he, because it was myself. If a man should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I find it could no otherwise be expressed, than by making answer: because it was he, because it was I.

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Ch. 28
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
5 months 3 weeks ago
Tout existant naît sans raison, se...

Tout existant naît sans raison, se prolonge par faiblesse et meurt par rencontre. Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 3 weeks ago
Once we begin to want, we...

Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
5 months 4 weeks ago
I once received a letter from...

I once received a letter from an eminent logician, Mrs. Christine Ladd Franklin, saying that she was a solipsist, and was surprised that there were no others. Coming from a logician, this surprise surprised me.

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Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948), Part III, chapter II, "Solipsism", p. 196
Philosophical Maxims
Democritus
Democritus
5 months 2 weeks ago
A sensible man takes pleasure in...

A sensible man takes pleasure in what he has instead of pining for what he has not.

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Philosophical Maxims
Walter Lippmann
Walter Lippmann
2 months 3 weeks ago
Love, in spite of the romantics,...

Love, in spite of the romantics, is not self-sustaining; it endures only when the lovers love many things together, and not merely each other.

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Ch. XIV: "Love in the Great Society", §6, pp. 308-309
Philosophical Maxims
Julien Offray de La Mettrie
Julien Offray de La Mettrie
1 month 3 weeks ago
Whatever the virtue may be, from...

Whatever the virtue may be, from whatever source it may come, it is worthy of esteem... Mind, beauty, wealth, nobility, although the children of chance, all have their own value, as skill, learning and virtue have theirs.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
2 months 2 weeks ago
Examine the man who lives in...

Examine the man who lives in misery because he does not shine above other men; who goes about producing himself, pruriently anxious about his gifts and claims; struggling to force everybody, as it were begging everybody for God's sake, to acknowledge him a great man, and set him over the heads of men! Such a creature is among the wretchedest sights seen under this sun. A great man? A poor morbid prurient empty man; fitter for the ward of a hospital, than for a throne among men. I advise you to keep out of his way. He cannot walk on quiet paths; unless you will look at him, wonder at him, write paragraphs about him, he cannot live. It is the emptiness of the man, not his greatness. Because there is nothing in himself, he hungers and thirsts that you would find something in him. In good truth, I believe no great man, not so much as a genuine man who had health and real substance in him of whatever magnitude, was ever much tormented in this way.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
5 months 4 weeks ago
We later learned that all the...

We later learned that all the nineteen passengers in the non-smoking compartment had been killed. When the plane had hit the water a hole had been made in the plane and the water had rushed in. I had told a friend at Oslo who was finding me a place that he must find me a place where I could smoke, remarking jocularly, 'If I cannot smoke, I shall die'. Unexpectedly, this turned out to be true.

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Philosophical Maxims
Zoroaster
Zoroaster
5 months 2 weeks ago
The resolute one who moved by...

The resolute one who moved by the principles of Thy FaithExtends the prosperity of order to his neighbors And works the land the evil now hold desolate, Earns through Righteousness, the Blessed Recompense Thy Good Mind has promised in Thy Kingdom of Heaven.

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Spenta Mainyu Gatha; Yasna 50, 3.
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 3 weeks ago
Anxiety - or the fanaticism of...

Anxiety - or the fanaticism of the worst.

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Philosophical Maxims
Arnold J. Toynbee
Arnold J. Toynbee
3 months 1 week ago
The equation of religion with belief...

The equation of religion with belief is rather recent.

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Christianity Among the Religions of the World (New York: Scribner's, 1957) p. 7
Philosophical Maxims
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
4 months 2 weeks ago
The direction of society has been...

The direction of society has been taken over by a type of man who is not interested in the principles of civilisation. Not of this or that civilisation but - from what we can judge to-day - of any civilisation. ...The type of man dominant to-day is a primitive one, a Naturmensch rising up in the midst of a civilised world.

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Chap.IX: The Primitive and the Technical
Philosophical Maxims
Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry
1 month 3 weeks ago
Let me say and not mourn:...

Let me say and not mourn: the world lives in the death of speech and sings there.

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The Silence
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
4 months 4 weeks ago
The Whigs of this day have...

The Whigs of this day have before them, in this Appeal, their constitutional ancestors: They have the doctors of the modern school. They will choose for themselves. The author of the Reflections has chosen for himself. If a new order is coming on, and all the political opinions must pass away as dreams, which our ancestors have worshipped as revelations, I say for him, that he would rather be the last (as certainly he is the least) of that race of men, than the first and greatest of those who have coined to themselves Whig principles from a French die, unknown to the impress of our fathers in the constitution.

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p. 476
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
5 months 3 weeks ago
A house sold by A to...

A house sold by A to B does not wander from one place to another, although it circulates as a commodity.

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Vol. II, Ch. VI, p. 152.
Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
4 months 3 weeks ago
...the relatively unconscious man driven by...

...the relatively unconscious man driven by his natural impulses because, imprisoned in his familiar world, he clings to the commonplace, the obvious, the probable, the collectively valid, using for his motto: 'Thinking is difficult. Therefore, let the herd pronounce judgement.'

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Frequently misquoted as "Thinking is difficult, that's why most people judge" and close variants. Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky. (1959), C.G. Jung, R.F.C. Hull (translator) (Princeton Press, 1979, ISBN 9780691018225
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 3 weeks ago
Basically-I speak of life as it...

Basically-I speak of life as it is and not of abstract philosophical constructs-life is only bearable because one does not go to the end; doing something is only possible when one has particular illusions and that holds also for friendships, for everything.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
3 months 6 days ago
No one is so....
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Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
4 months 2 weeks ago
The march, as ever, is toward...

The march, as ever, is toward the future, and he who marches is getting there, even though he march walking backwards. And who knows if that is not the better way!...

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel
5 months 2 weeks ago
Our own experience provides the basic...

Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one's arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one's mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one's feet in an attic. Insofar as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task.

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p. 169.
Philosophical Maxims
Horace
Horace
5 months 2 weeks ago
We rarely find anyone….

We rarely find anyone who can say he has lived a happy life, and who, content with his life, can retire from the world like a satisfied guest.

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Book I, satire i, line 117
Philosophical Maxims
Vandana Shiva
Vandana Shiva
3 months 1 week ago
There is a strong affinity between...

There is a strong affinity between the forces of empire and a politics of hate that justifies policies of domination and exclusion. So long as people's attention is focused on fear and hatred of foreigners or members of a particular religious group, such as Muslims, they are distracted from organizing to deal with the system of institutional domination and exploitation that is the real source of their insecurity.

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Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
3 months 3 weeks ago
I am very conscious that you...

I am very conscious that you can't condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. Just as we don't look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can't find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today.

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Giles Whittell, "The world according to Richard Dawkins" (2013-09-07), The Times
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
1 month 3 weeks ago
Ridicule is the only weapon which...

Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus.

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Letter to Francis Adrian Van der Kemp (30 July 1816), denouncing the doctrine of the Trinity.
Philosophical Maxims
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
2 months 1 week ago
Woe to that nation whose literature...

Woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against "freedom of print", it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory. The nation ceases to be mindful of itself, it is deprived of its spiritual unity, and despite a supposedly common language, compatriots suddenly cease to understand one another Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory.

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Variant translation, as quoted in TIME
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
5 months 3 weeks ago
When we have chosen the vocation...

When we have chosen the vocation in which we can contribute most to humanity, burdens cannot bend us because they are only sacrifices for all. Then we experience no meager, limited, egotistic joy, but our happiness belongs to millions, our deeds live on quietly but eternally effective, and glowing tears of noble men will fall on our ashes.

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Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, L. Easton, trans. (1967), p. 39
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
3 months 3 weeks ago
Environments are not just containers, but...

Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.

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American scholar, Volume 35, 1965, p. 200
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard
4 months ago
Dying is nothing. You have to...

Dying is nothing. You have to know how to disappear. Dying comes down to a biological chance and that is of no consequence. Disappearing is of a far higher order of necessity. You must not leave it to biology to decide when you will disappear. To disappear is to pass into an enigmatic state which is neither life nor death. Some animals know how to do this, as do savages, who withdraw while still alive, from the sight of their own people.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
5 months 4 weeks ago
We need not suppose that when...

We need not suppose that when po+B40wer resides in an exclusive class, that class will knowingly and deliberately sacrifice the other classes to themselves: it suffices that, in the absence of its natural defenders, the interest of the excluded is always in danger of being overlooked: and, when looked at, is seen with very different eyes from those of the persons whom it directly concerns.

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Ch. III: The Ideally Best Polity
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
5 months 4 weeks ago
I have been merely oppressed by...

I have been merely oppressed by the weariness and tedium and vanity of things lately: nothing stirs me, nothing seems worth doing or worth having done: the only thing that I strongly feel worth while would be to murder as many people as possible so as to diminish the amount of consciousness in the world. These times have to be lived through: there is nothing to be done with them.

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Letter to Gilbert Murray, March 21, 1903
Philosophical Maxims
Sydney Smith
Sydney Smith
2 months 1 week ago
It is always right that a...

It is always right that a man should be able to render a reason for the faith that is within him.

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Vol. I, ch. 3, p. 91
Philosophical Maxims
Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm
4 months 1 week ago
To hope means to be ready...

To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime.

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Philosophical Maxims
Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Bakunin
4 months 3 weeks ago
If there is a devil in...

If there is a devil in human history, that devil is the principle of command. It alone, sustained by the ignorance and stupidity of the masses, without which it could not exist, is the source of all the catastrophes, all the crimes, and all the infamies of history.

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On the Program of the Alliance (1871), in Bakunin on Anarchy (1971), translated and edited by Sam Dolgoff Variant translation: If there is a devil in history, it is the power principle.
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
4 months 2 weeks ago
No man is bound by the...

No man is bound by the words themselves, either to kill himselfe, or any other man.

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The Second Part, Chapter 21, p. 112
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
5 months 3 weeks ago
Man is always separated from what...

Man is always separated from what he is by all the breadth of the being which he is not. He makes himself known to himself from the other side of the world and he looks from the horizon toward himself to recover his inner being.

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Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
4 months 1 week ago
The power of God is the...

The power of God is the worship He inspires. The worship of God is not a rule of safety - it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. The death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure.

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Ch. 12: "Religion and Science", pp. 268-269
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
2 months 1 week ago
You do not know where death...

You do not know where death awaits you; so be ready for it everywhere.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
5 months 4 weeks ago
All the time that he can...

All the time that he can spare from the adornment of his person, he devotes to the neglect of his duties.

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Of Sir Richard Jebb, Some Cambridge Dons of the Nineties, 1956
Philosophical Maxims
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