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Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
5 months 3 weeks ago
How many worthy men have we...

How many worthy men have we seen survive their own reputation!

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Book II, Ch. 16. Of Glory
Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
5 months 3 weeks ago
This freedom from absolute, arbitrary power,...

This freedom from absolute, arbitrary power, is so necessary to, and closely joined with a man's preservation, that he cannot part with it, but by what forfeits his preservation and life together: for a man, not having the power of his own life, cannot, by compact, or his own consent, enslave himself to any one, nor put himself under the absolute, arbitrary power of another, to take away his life, when he pleases.

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Second Treatise of Civil Government, Ch. IV, sec. 23
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
5 months 2 weeks ago
But the man is a humbug...

But the man is a humbug - a vulgar, shallow, self-satisfied mind, absolutely inaccessible to the complexities and delicacies of the real world. He has the journalist's air of being a specialist in everything, of taking in all points of view and being always on the side of the angels: he merely annoys a reader who has the least experience of knowing things, of what knowing is like. There is not two pence worth of real thought or real nobility in him. But he isn't dull.

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Part of a diary entry dated "Wednesday-Wednesday 9-16 July", 1924, regarding Thomas Babington Macaulay
Philosophical Maxims
Hermann Weyl
Hermann Weyl
2 months ago
After Riemann had made known his...

After Riemann had made known his discoveries, mathematicians busied themselves with working out his system of geometrical ideas formally; chief among these were Christoffel, Ricci, and Levi-Civita. Riemann... clearly left the real development of his ideas in the hands of some subsequent scientist whose genius as a physicist could rise to equal flights with his own as a mathematician. After a lapse of seventy years this mission has been fulfilled by Einstein.

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Ch. 2 "The Metrical Continuum"
Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
5 months 1 day ago
None but God is wise…

None but God is wise.

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As quoted in The Diegesis (1829) by Robert Taylor, p. 219
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
5 months 3 weeks ago
In manufactures, a very small advantage...

In manufactures, a very small advantage will enable foreigners to undersell our own workmen, even in the home market. It will require a very great one to enable them to do so in the rude produce of the soil. If the free importation of foreign manufactures were permitted, several of the home manufactures would probably suffer, and some of them, perhaps, go to ruin altogether, and a considerable part of the stock and industry at present employed in them, would be forced to find out some other employment. But the freest importation of the rude produce of the soil could have no such effect upon the agriculture of the country.

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Chapter II
Philosophical Maxims
Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch
4 months 1 week ago
We can only learn to love...

We can only learn to love by loving.

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The Bell (1958), ch. 19; 2001, p. 219.
Philosophical Maxims
Will Durant
Will Durant
2 months 1 week ago
As we find a place in...

As we find a place in the economic world the rebellion of youth subsides; we disapprove of earthquakes when our feet are on the earth. We forget then the radicalism then in a gentle liberalism - which is radicalism softened with the consciousness of a bank account.

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Ch. 3 : On Middle Age
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
2 months 1 week ago
Every candid eye, I think, will...

Every candid eye, I think, will read the Koran far otherwise than so. It is the confused ferment of a great rude human soul; rude, untutored, that cannot even read; but fervent, earnest, struggling vehemently to utter itself in words. With a kind of breathless intensity he strives to utter himself; the thoughts crowd on him pell-mell: for very multitude of things to say, he can get nothing said. The meaning that is in him shapes itself into no form of composition, is stated in no sequence, method, or coherence;-they are not shaped at all, these thoughts of his; flung out unshaped, as they struggle and tumble there, in their chaotic inarticulate state.

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Philosophical Maxims
Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch
4 months 1 week ago
A bad review is even less...

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

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Quoted in The Times (6 July 1989).
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
2 months 1 week ago
I knew Robert Burns, and I...

I knew Robert Burns, and I knew my father. Yet were you to ask me which had the greater natural faculty, I might perhaps actually pause before replying. Burns had an infinitely wider education, my father a far wholesomer. Besides, the one was a man of musical utterance; the other wholly a man of action, with speech subservient thereto. Never, of all the men I have seen, has one come personally in my way in whom the endowment from nature and the arena from fortune were so utterly out of all proportion. I have said this often, and partly know it. As a man of speculation - had culture ever unfolded him - he must have gone wild and desperate as Burns; hut he was a man of conduct, and work keeps all right. What strange shapable creatures we are!

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Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
6 months 2 weeks ago
All systems of morality are based...

All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly. It is ready to pay up. In other words, there may be responsible persons, but there are no guilty ones, in its opinion. At very most, such a mind will consent to use past experience as a basis for its future actions.

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Philosophical Maxims
Walter Lippmann
Walter Lippmann
2 months 2 weeks ago
The facts we see depend on...

The facts we see depend on where we are placed, and the habits of our eyes.

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Ch. VI: "Stereotypes", p. 80
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
3 months 2 weeks ago
It is generally characteristic of arms...

It is generally characteristic of arms races, including human ones, that although all would be better off if none of them escalated, so long as one of them escalates none can afford not to.

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Chapter 7 "Constructive Evolution" (p. 184)
Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
5 months 3 weeks ago
Where danger shews it self, apprehension...

Where danger shews it self, apprehension cannot, without stupidity, be wanting; where danger is, sense of danger should be; and so much fear as should keep us awake, and excite our attention, industry, and vigour; but not to disturb the calm use of our reason, nor hinder the execution of what that dictates.

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Sec. 115
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
2 months 1 week ago
The battling Reformer too is, from...

The battling Reformer too is, from time to time, a needful and inevitable phenomenon. Obstructions are never wanting: the very things that were once indispensable furtherances become obstructions; and need to be shaken off, and left behind us,-a business often of enormous difficulty.

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Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
5 months 4 weeks ago
The world's a bubble, and the...

The world's a bubble, and the life of man Less than a span.

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Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
4 months 5 days ago
In order to be exercised, the...

In order to be exercised, the intelligence requires to be free to express itself without control by any authority. There must therefore be a domain of pure intellectual research, separate but accessible to all, where no authority intervenes. The human soul has need of some solitude and privacy and also of some social life.The human soul has need of both personal property and collective property.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Gray
John Gray
2 months 3 weeks ago
No doubt markets transmit information in...

No doubt markets transmit information in the way that Hayek claimed. But what reason is there to believe that - unlike any other social institution - they have a built-in capacity to correct their mistakes? History hardly supports the supposition. Moods of irrational exuberance and panic can, and often do, swamp the price-discovery functions of markets.

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Philosophical Maxims
Nikolai Berdyaev
Nikolai Berdyaev
4 months 6 days ago
We used to pay too little...

We used to pay too little attention to utopias, or even disregard them altogether, saying with regret they were impossible of realisation. Now indeed they seem to be able to be brought about far more easily than we supposed, and we are actually faced by an agonising problem of quite another kind: how can we prevent their final realisation? ... Utopias are more realisable than those 'realist politics' that are only the carefully calculated policies of office-holders, and towards utopias we are moving. But it is possible that a new age is already beginning, in which cultured and intelligent people will dream of ways to avoid ideal states and to get back to a society that is less 'perfect' and more free.

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pp. 187-188. Aldous Huxley used this passage (in French translation) as the epigraph to Brave New World.
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
5 months 2 weeks ago
"They would say," he answered, "that...

"They would say," he answered, "that you do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience."

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Ch. 7 : The Pendragon, section 2
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
5 months 3 weeks ago
Man is forming thousands of ridiculous...

Man is forming thousands of ridiculous relations between himself and God.

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Ch. 12
Philosophical Maxims
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
4 months 3 days ago
Disciplinary society is still governed by...

Disciplinary society is still governed by no. Its negativity produces madmen and criminals. In contrast, achievement society creates depressives and losers.

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Source: Page 8
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley
3 months 5 days ago
I now propose briefly to... set...

I now propose briefly to... set forth, in a form intelligible to those who possess no special acquaintance with anatomical science, the chief facts upon which all conclusions respecting the nature and the extent of the bonds which connect man with the brute world must be based: I shall then indicate the one immediate conclusion which, in my judgment, is justified by those facts, and I shall finally discuss the bearing of that conclusion upon the hypotheses which have been entertained respecting the Origin of Man.

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Ch.2, p. 74
Philosophical Maxims
Montesquieu
Montesquieu
4 months 6 days ago
Oh, how empty is praise when...

Oh, how empty is praise when it reflects back to its origin!

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No. 50. (Rica writing to * * *)
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
4 months 2 weeks ago
You have theories enough concerning the...

You have theories enough concerning the Rights of Men. It may not be amiss to add a small degree of attention to their Nature and disposition.

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Letter to Charles-Jean-François Depont (November 1789), quoted in Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith (eds.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Volume VI: July 1789-December 1791 (1967), p. 46
Philosophical Maxims
Antonio Negri
Antonio Negri
2 months 2 weeks ago
The contradictory conceptual couple, identity and...

The contradictory conceptual couple, identity and difference, is not the adequate framework for understanding the organization of the multitude. Instead we are a multiplicity of singular forms of life and at the same time share a common global existence. The anthropology of the multitude is an anthropology of singularity and commonality.

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127
Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
4 months 2 weeks ago
As the mathematics are now understood,...

As the mathematics are now understood, each branch - or, if you please, each problem, - is but the study of the relations of a collection of connected objects, without parts, without any distinctive characters, except their names or designating letters. These objects are commonly called points; but to remove all notion of space relations, it may be better to name them monads. The relations between these points are mere complications of two different kinds of elementary relations, which may be termed immediate connection and immediate non-connection. All the monads except as serve as intermediaries for the connections have distinctive designations.

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p. 268
Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
3 months 2 weeks ago
Have courage, or cunning, when you...

Have courage, or cunning, when you deal with an enemy.

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Maxim 156
Philosophical Maxims
Lucretius
Lucretius
6 months 4 days ago
What is food to one...

What is food to one, is to others bitter poison.

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Book IV, line 637 (reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations) Compare: "What's one man's poison, signor, / Is another's meat or drink", Beaumont and Fletcher, Love's Cure (1647), Act III, scene 2
Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
6 months 2 weeks ago
But voice is a certain sound...

But voice is a certain sound of that which is animated; for nothing inanimate emits a voice; but they are said to emit a voice from similitude, as a pipe, and a lyre, and such other inanimate things, have extension, modulation, and dialect; for thus it appears, because voice, also, has these.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
5 months 2 weeks ago
The rich man... is always sold...

The rich man... is always sold to the institution which makes him rich.

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Philosophical Maxims
Democritus
Democritus
5 months 1 week ago
Strength of body is nobility in...

Strength of body is nobility in beasts of burden, strength of character is nobility in men.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
5 months 2 weeks ago
Frazer's account of the magical and...

Frazer's account of the magical and religious views of mankind is unsatisfactory; it makes these views look like errors.

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Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 119
Philosophical Maxims
Cornel West
Cornel West
5 months 2 weeks ago
In situations of sparse resources along...

In situations of sparse resources along with degraded self-images and depoliticized sensibilities, one avenue for poor people is in existential rebellion and anarchic expression. The capacity to produce social chaos is the last resort of desperate people.

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The Role of Law in Progressive Politics in Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America
Philosophical Maxims
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
4 months 1 week ago
Spontaneous social action will be broken...

Spontaneous social action will be broken up over and over again by State intervention; no new seed will be able to fructify. Society will have to live for the State, man for the governmental machine. And as, after all, it is only a machine whose existence and maintenance depend on the vital supports around it, the State, after sucking out the very marrow of society, will be left bloodless, a skeleton, dead with that rusty death of machinery, more gruesome than the death of a living organism. Such was the lamentable fate of ancient civilisation. ... Already in the times of the Antonines (IInd Century), the State overbears society with its anti-vital supremacy. Society begins to be enslaved, to be unable to live except in the service of the State. The whole of life is bureaucratised. What results? The bureaucratisation of life brings about its absolute decay in all orders.

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Chapter XIII: The Greatest Danger, The State
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
6 months 2 weeks ago
It is surely better to be...

It is surely better to be wronged than to do wrong.

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Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
5 months 2 weeks ago
So long as antimilitarists propose no...

So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation.

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The Moral Equivalent of War
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
5 months 3 weeks ago
To those who inquire as to...

To those who inquire as to the purpose of mathematics, the usual answer will be that it facilitates the making of machines, the travelling from place to place, and the victory over foreign nations, whether in war or commerce. ... The reasoning faculty itself is generally conceived, by those who urge its cultivation, as merely a means for the avoidance of pitfalls and a help in the discovery of rules for the guidance of practical life.

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Philosophical Maxims
Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Bakunin
4 months 2 weeks ago
Not official revolutionary commissars in any...

Not official revolutionary commissars in any sort of sashes, but rather revolutionary propagandists are to be dispatched into all the provinces and communes and particularly among the peasants who cannot be revolutionised by principles, nor by the decrees of any dictatorship, but only by the act of revolution itself, that is to say, by the consequences that will inevitably ensure in every commune from complete cessation of the legal and official existence of the state.

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Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
5 months 3 weeks ago
To say that the cross emblazoned...

To say that the cross emblazoned with the papal coat of arms, and set up by the indulgence preachers, is equal in worth to the cross of Christ is blasphemy.

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Thesis 79
Philosophical Maxims
William Kingdon Clifford
William Kingdon Clifford
1 month 2 weeks ago
We ought not to teach to...

We ought not to teach to little children, as a known fact, that which is not a known fact.

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[Lectures and essays (1879), vol. 2, p. 294]
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
5 months 2 weeks ago
His heart was as great as...

His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.

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Greatness
Philosophical Maxims
Niccolò Machiavelli
Niccolò Machiavelli
5 months 3 weeks ago
A prudent man…

A prudent man should always follow in the path trodden by great men and imitate those who are most excellent.

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The Prince (1513), Ch. 6; translated by Luigi Ricci
Philosophical Maxims
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
4 months 2 weeks ago
The rights and duties of man...

The rights and duties of man thus simplified, it seems almost impertinent to attempt to illustrate truths that appear so incontrovertible: yet such deeply rooted prejudices have clouded reason, and such spurious qualities have assumed the name of virtues, that it is necessary to pursue the course of reason as it has been perplexed and involved in error, by various adventitious circumstances, comparing the simple axiom with casual deviations.Men, in general, seem to employ their reason to justify prejudices, which they have imbibed, they cannot trace how, rather than to root them out. The mind must be strong that resolutely forms its own principles; for a kind of intellectual cowardice prevails which makes many men shrink from the task, or only do it by halves. Yet the imperfect conclusions thus drawn, are frequently very plausible, because they are built on partial experience, on just, though narrow, views.

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Ch. 1
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
4 months 1 week ago
Ye fools, did not he that...

Ye fools, did not he that made that which is without make that which is within also?

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11:40 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
3 months 3 weeks ago
The world would...
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Main Content / General
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 2 weeks ago
We are so lonely in life...

We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.

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Philosophical Maxims
Horace
Horace
5 months 1 week ago
Into the middle things…

Into the middle things.

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Line 148
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
6 months 3 weeks ago
So far no one had had...
So far no one had had enough courage and intelligence to reveal me to my dear Germans. My problems are new, my psychological horizon frighteningly comprehensive, my language bold and clear; there may well be no books written in German which are richer in ideas and more independent than mine.
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Philosophical Maxims
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