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Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
5 months 1 week ago
He is dead, and my hatred...

He is dead, and my hatred has died with him.

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Electra, before the dead Aegistheus, Act 2
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
1 month 1 week ago
I am conscious that an equal...

I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property..a means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise.

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Letter to James Madison
Philosophical Maxims
Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus
5 months 3 weeks ago
Animals only follow their natural instincts;...

Animals only follow their natural instincts; but man, unless he has experienced the influence of learning and philosophy, is at the mercy of impulses that are worse than those of a wild beast. There is no beast more savage and dangerous than a human being who is swept along by the passions of ambition, greed, anger, envy, extravagance, and sensuality.

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Translated by Beert C. Verstraete as On Education for Children, in The Erasmus Reader (University of Toronto Press: 1990), p. 73
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 1 week ago
Religion comforts us for the defeat...

Religion comforts us for the defeat of our will to power. It adds new worlds to ours, and thus brings us hope of new conquests and new victories. We are converted to religion out of fear of suffocating within the narrow confines of this world.

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Philosophical Maxims
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal
5 months 3 weeks ago
It is not among extraordinary and...

It is not among extraordinary and fantastic things that excellence is to be found, of whatever kind it may be. We rise to attain it and become removed from it: it is oftenest necessary to stoop for it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
3 months 3 weeks ago
...I pray to God to make...

...I pray to God to make me free of God.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
1 month 1 week ago
And you can also commit injustice...

And you can also commit injustice by doing nothing.

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(Hays translation) IX, 5
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
4 months 1 week ago
Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass...

Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour, and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.

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Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
1 month 3 weeks ago
Press on, therefore, as you have...

Press on, therefore, as you have begun; perhaps you will be led to perfection, or to a point which you alone understand is still short of perfection.

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Philosophical Maxims
Democritus
Democritus
5 months 2 days ago
A life without a holiday is...

A life without a holiday is like a long journey without an inn to rest at.

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Philosophical Maxims
Alan Watts
Alan Watts
1 month 3 weeks ago
We do not "come into" this...

We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated "egos" inside bags of skin.

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Inside Information
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
5 months 2 weeks ago
Observe, observe perpetually.

Observe, observe perpetually.

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Philosophical Maxims
David Pearce
David Pearce
2 months 3 weeks ago
In future, nerve cell responsiveness to...

In future, nerve cell responsiveness to naturally occurring endogenous opioids can be increased via receptor enrichment in the brain too. In principle, we can modulate their lifelong "overexpression", intermittently heightened (or gently diminished) by whatever kinds of personal and environmental contingencies we judge fit. Both functionally and anatomically, our reward pathways can be made "bigger and better". But intelligent emotional self-mastery will involve re-engineering the mind-brain so we derive the most intense rewards from activities we deem most lastingly worthwhile: i.e. prioritising our higher-order desires over legacy first-order appetites. Natural selection has "encephalised" our emotions to benefit our genes. Rational agents can "re-encephalise" our emotions to benefit us.

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Utopian Neuroscience, BLTC Research, 2019
Philosophical Maxims
Antisthenes
Antisthenes
5 months 2 days ago
It's better to fight….

It is better to fight with a few good men against all the wicked, than with many wicked men against a few good men.

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§ 5
Philosophical Maxims
John Gray
John Gray
2 months 2 weeks ago
Before Christianity suicide was not in...

Before Christianity suicide was not in any way troubling. Our lives were our own, and when we tired of them we were at liberty to end them. One might think that as Christianity has declined, this freedom would be reclaimed. Instead secular creeds have sprung up, in which each person's life belongs to everyone else. To hand back the gift of life because it does not please is still condemned as a kind of blasphemy, though the offended deity is now humanity instead of God.

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Sweet Morality (p. 231-2)
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
4 months 1 week 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
6 months 2 days ago
When I walk along with...

When I walk along with two others, they may serve me as my teachers. I will select their good qualities and follow them, their bad qualities and avoid them.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
5 months 1 week ago
Suppose atomic bombs had reduced the...

Suppose atomic bombs had reduced the population of the world to one brother and one sister, should they let the human race die out? I do not know the answer, but I do not think it can be in the affirmative merely on the ground that incest is wicked.

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p. 47
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
3 months 1 week ago
With Gutenberg Europe enters the technological...

With Gutenberg Europe enters the technological phase of progress, when change itself becomes the archetypal norm of social life.

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(p. 177)
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
5 months 1 week ago
The pivot round which the religious...

The pivot round which the religious life... revolves, is the interest of the individual in his private personal destiny. Religion, in short, is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism. The gods believed in-whether by crude savages or by men disciplined intellectually-agree with each other in recognizing personal calls. Religious thought is carried on in terms of personality, this being, in the world of religion, the one fundamental fact. To-day, quite as much as at any previous age, the religious individual tells you that the divine meets him on the basis of his personal concerns.

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Lecture XX, "Conclusions"
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley
2 months 4 weeks ago
Education is the instruction of the...

Education is the instruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature, under which name I include not merely things and their forces, but men and their ways; and the fashioning of the affections and of the will into an earnest and loving desire to move in harmony with those laws. For me, education means neither more nor less than this. Anything which professes to call itself education must be tried by this standard, and if it fails to stand the test, I will not call it education, whatever may be the force of authority, or of numbers, upon the other side.

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Philosophical Maxims
bell hooks
bell hooks
3 months 3 weeks ago
Popular escapist fiction enchants adult readers...

Popular escapist fiction enchants adult readers without challenging them to be educated for critical consciousness.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
5 months 1 week ago
A great man quotes bravely, and...

A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word just as good.

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Quotation and Originality
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Nozick
Robert Nozick
2 months 2 weeks ago
It goes without saying that any...

It goes without saying that any persons may attempt to unite kindred spirits, but, whatever their hopes and longings, none have the right to impose their vision of unity upon the rest.

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Ch. 10 : A Framework for Utopia; The Framework as Utopian Common Ground, p. 325
Philosophical Maxims
Judith Butler
Judith Butler
3 months 2 weeks ago
Possibility is not a luxury; it...

Possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread. Undoing Gender.

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Psychology Press. 2004. p. 29. ISBN 978-0-415-96922-2.
Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
6 months 1 week ago
There is only one way to...

There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing and be nothing.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 1 week ago
To think is to submit to...

To think is to submit to the whims and commands of an uncertain health.

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Philosophical Maxims
Sydney Smith
Sydney Smith
1 month 3 weeks ago
I never read a book before...

I never read a book before reviewing it: it prejudices a man so.

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Reported in Bon-Mots of Sydney Smith and R. Brinsley Sheridan, edited by Walter Jerrold with grotesques by Aubrey Beardsley (London: J. M. Dent and Company, 1893), p. 24
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
1 month 1 week ago
To the existence of banks of...

To the existence of banks of discount for cash... there can be no objection, because there can be no danger of abuse, and they are a convenience both to merchants and individuals. I think they should even be encouraged, by allowing them a larger than legal interest on short discounts, and tapering thence, in proportion as the term of discount is lengthened, down to legal interest on those of a year or more. Even banks of deposit, where cash should be lodged, and a paper acknowledgment taken out as its representative, entitled to a return of the cash on demand, would be convenient for remittances, travelling persons, etc. But, liable as its cash would be to be pilfered and robbed, and its paper to be fraudulently re-issued, or issued without deposit, it would require skilful and strict regulation.

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ME 13:431
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
5 months 1 week ago
It's not the experience that happens...

It's not the experience that happens to you: it's what you do with the experience that happens to you.

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Attributed to Russell in Slaby's Sixty Ways to Make Stress Work for You, 1987
Philosophical Maxims
Leszek Kołakowski
Leszek Kołakowski
2 months 4 days ago
... Marx and Bakunin were engaged...

... Marx and Bakunin were engaged in a conflict in which it is hard to distinguish political from personal animosities. Marx did his best to persuade everybody that Bakunin was only using the International for his private ends, and in March 1870 he circulated a confidential letter to this effect. He also saw the hand of Bakunin (whom he never met after 1864) on every occasion when his own policies were opposed in the International. Bakunin, for his part, not only combated Marx's political programme but, as he often wrote, regarded Marx as a disloyal, revengeful man, obsessed with power and determined to impose his own despotic authority on the whole revolutionary movement. Marx, he said, had all the merits and defects of the Jewish character; he was highly intelligent and deeply read, but an inveterate doctrinaire and fantastically vain, an intriguer and morbidly envious of all who, like Lassalle, had cut a more important figure than himself in public life.

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(pp. 247-8)
Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
4 months 1 week ago
I am a sick man…

I am a sick man... I am a wicked man. An unattractive man.

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Part 1, Chapter 1
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
2 months 2 days ago
A punishment that....
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Karl Marx
Karl Marx
5 months 1 week ago
The economic concept of value does...

The economic concept of value does not occur in antiquity.

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Notebook VII, The Chapter on Capital, p. 696.
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
5 months 2 weeks ago
No fixed capital can yield any...

No fixed capital can yield any revenue but by means of a circulating capital.

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Chapter I, p. 311.
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
3 months 1 week ago
The invention of printing did away...

The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property.

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(p. 122)
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
5 months 1 week ago
The sublime is excited in me...

The sublime is excited in me by the great stoical doctrine, Obey thyself.

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p. 14
Philosophical Maxims
Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm
3 months 3 weeks ago
Chronic boredom - compensated or uncompensated...

Chronic boredom - compensated or uncompensated - constitutes one of the major psychopathological phenomena in contemporary technotronic society, although it is only recently that it has found some recognition.

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p. 273
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
4 months 1 week ago
Volumes might be written upon the...

Volumes might be written upon the impiety of the pious.

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Pt. I, The Unknowable; Ch. V, The Reconciliation
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
5 months 1 week ago
I have often thought that the...

I have often thought that the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: "This is the real me!"

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To his wife, Alice Gibbons James, 1878
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
5 months 2 weeks ago
To call out for the hand...

To call out for the hand of the enemy is a rather extreme measure, yet a better one, I think, than to remain in continual fever over an accident that has no remedy. But since all the precautions that a man can take are full of uneasiness and uncertainty, it is better to prepare with fine assurance for the worst that can happen, and derive some consolation from the fact that we are not sure that it will happen.

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Ch. 25
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
5 months 1 week ago
England has to fulfill a double...

England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating - the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia... When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch... and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.

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"The Future Results of British Rule in India," New York Daily Tribune, 08 August 1853
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
4 months 4 days ago
But this priviledge, is allayed by...

But this priviledge, is allayed by another; and that is, by the priviledge of Absurdity; to which no living creature is subject, but man only.

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The First Part, Chapter 5, p. 20
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
5 months 1 week ago
Knowledge is in the end...

Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
2 months 3 days ago
His Religion is not an easy...

His Religion is not an easy one: with rigorous fasts, lavations, strict complex formulas, prayers five times a day, and abstinence from wine, it did not "succeed by being an easy religion." As if indeed any religion, or cause holding of religion, could succeed by that! It is a calumny on men to say that they are roused to heroic action by ease, hope of pleasure, recompense, - sugar-plums of any kind, in this world or the next! In the meanest mortal there lies something nobler.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 1 week ago
We live in the false as...

We live in the false as long as we have not suffered. But when we begin to suffer, we enter the truth only to regret the false.

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Philosophical Maxims
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
4 months 1 week ago
The Age of Empty Freedom ......

The Age of Empty Freedom ... does not know that man must first through labour, industry, and art, learn how to know; but it has a certain fixed standard for all conceptions, and an established Common Sense of Mankind always ready and at hand, innate within itself and there present without trouble on its part;-and those conceptions and this Common Sense are to it the measure of the efficient and the real. It has this great advantage over the Age of Science, that it knows all things without having learned anything; and can pass judgment upon whatever comes before it at once and without hesitation,-without needing any preliminary evidence:-'That which I do not immediately comprehend by the conceptions which dwell within me, is nothing,'-says Empty Freedom.

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p. 20
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley
2 months 4 weeks ago
I do not advocate burning your...

I do not advocate burning your ship to get rid of the cockroaches.

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Said in reference to those who wished to abolish all religious teaching, rather than freeing state education from Church controls, in Critiques and Addresses (1873) p. 90
Philosophical Maxims
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
3 months 5 days ago
Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent...

Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent public is wonderfully patient with them, continues to read them, and endures disappointment after disappointment, waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy, social theory, and what it cannot hear from pure science. Out of the struggle at the center has come an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.

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Nobel Prize lecture
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
2 months 3 days ago
To a shower of gold most...

To a shower of gold most things are penetrable.

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Pt. I, Bk. III, ch. 7.
Philosophical Maxims
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