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Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
3 months 2 weeks ago
Newspapers are the second hand of...

Newspapers are the second hand of history. This hand, however, is usually not only of inferior metal to the other hands, it also seldom works properly.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 19, § 233
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
4 months 1 week 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
Henri Poincaré
Henri Poincaré
1 week 5 days ago
Every definition…

Every definition implies an axiom, since it asserts the existence of the object defined. The definition then will not be justified, from the purely logical point of view, until we have proved that it involves no contradiction either in its terms or with the truths previously admitted.

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Part II. Ch. 2 : Mathematical Definitions and Education, p. 131
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 2 weeks ago
Everything exists; nothing exists. Either formula...

Everything exists; nothing exists. Either formula affords a like serenity. The man of anxiety, to his misfortune, remains between them, trembling and perplexed, forever at the mercy of a nuance, incapable of gaining a foothold in the security of being or in the absence of being.

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Philosophical Maxims
Democritus
Democritus
3 months 1 week ago
Throw moderation to the winds, and...

Throw moderation to the winds, and the greatest pleasures bring the greatest pains.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
8 months 1 week ago
A common goal...
Issue:

Because of subgrouping, physical separation, different types of genetics and other cultural factors, as well as limited isolation people subjectively deviate from their universal human necessity. They become aware of it when they are exposed to difference regularly.

Solution:

With controlled information delivery, as well as a clear ideological goal like universality, we can clear away the noise of chaos to understand deterministic goals directly.

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Issue / Solution / General
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
4 months 2 weeks ago
If I were to imagine a...

If I were to imagine a girl deeply in love and some man who wanted to use all his reasoning powers and knowledge to ridicule her passion, well, there's surely no question of the enamoured girl having to choose between keeping her wealth and being ridiculed. No, but if some extremely cool and calculating man calmly told the young girl, "I will explain to you what love is," and the girl admitted that everything he told her was quite correct, I wonder if she wouldn't choose his miserable common sense rather than her wealth?

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
3 months 2 weeks ago
The immediate aim of the Communists...

The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties: Formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.

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Section 2 paragraph 7.
Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
2 months 4 days ago
We do not obtain the most...

We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them. Man cannot discover them by his own powers, and if he sets out to seek for them he will find in their place counterfeits of which he will be unable to discern falsity.

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Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
3 months 2 weeks ago
The heart of Christianity is a...

The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact.

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"Myth Became Fact", 1944
Philosophical Maxims
Will Durant
Will Durant
1 week 1 day ago
Nothing in all literature is so...

Nothing in all literature is so depressing as the "Dissertations" of the slave [Epictetus], unless it be the "Meditations" of the Emperor [Marcus Aurelius] ...[after some excerpts from the two books]..... In such passages we feel the proximity of Christianity and its dauntless martyrs; indeed were not the Christian ethic of self-denial, the Christian political ideal of an almost communistic brotherhood of man, and the Christian eschatology of the final conflagration of all the world, fragments of Stoic doctrine floating on the stream of thought? In Epictetus the Greco-Roman soul has lost its paganism, and is ready for a new faith".

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Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
3 months ago
Tell not abroad what thou intendest...

Tell not abroad what thou intendest to do; for if thou speed not, thou shalt be mocked!

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Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
3 months 2 weeks ago
New opinions are always suspected, and...

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.

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Dedicatory epistle, as quoted in Fred R Shapiro (2006). The Yale Book of Quotations. Yale University Press. p. 468. ISBN 0-300-10798-6.
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
3 days ago
Quid opus est partes deflere? Tota...

What need is there to weep over parts of life?

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The whole of it calls for tears. Translated by J. W. Basore
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
4 months 2 weeks ago
Let us suppose that a man...

Let us suppose that a man believes in eternal life on Christ's word. In that case he believes without any fuss about being profound and searching and philosophical and racking his brains.

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Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
1 month 4 weeks ago
Ideas too are a life and...

Ideas too are a life and a world.

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F 70
Philosophical Maxims
Thales of Miletus
Thales of Miletus
3 months ago
Time is the wisest…

Time is the wisest of all things that are; for it brings everything to light.

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As quoted in Diogenes Laërtius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, I, 35
Philosophical Maxims
Max Scheler
Max Scheler
2 months 1 week ago
The highest and ultimate personality values...

The highest and ultimate personality values are declared to be independent of contrasts like rich and poor, healthy and sick, etc. The world had become accustomed to considering the social hierarchy, based on status, wealth, vital strength, and power, as an exact image of the ultimate values of morality and personality. The only way to disclose the discovery of anew and higher sphere of being and life, of the "kingdom of God" whose order is independent of that worldly and vital hierarchy, was to stress the vanity of the old values in this higher order.

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L. Coser, trans. (1961), p. 98
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 month 2 weeks ago
The content or time-clothing of any...

The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture.

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(p. 168)
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 week 2 days ago
And so in City after City,...

And so in City after City, street-barricades are piled, and truculent, more or less murderous insurrection begins; populace after populace rises, King after King capitulates or absconds; and from end to end of Europe Democracy has blazed up explosive, much higher, more irresistible and less resisted than ever before; testifying too sadly on what a bottomless volcano, or universal powder-mine of most inflammable mutinous chaotic elements, separated from us by a thin earth-rind, Society with all its arrangements and acquirements everywhere, in the present epoch, rests! The kind of persons who excite or give signal to such revolutions-students, young men of letters, advocates, editors, hot inexperienced enthusiasts, or fierce and justly bankrupt desperadoes, acting everywhere on the discontent of the millions and blowing it into flame,-might give rise to reflections as to the character of our epoch. Never till now did young men, and almost children, take such a command in human affairs.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
3 months 3 weeks ago
It's a thorny undertaking...

It is a thorny undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds, to pick out and immobilize the innumerable flutterings that agitate it.

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Ch. 6. Of Preparation, tr. E. J. Trechmann, 1927
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
3 days ago
Live among men…

Live among men as if God beheld you; speak with God as if men were listening.

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Line 5.
Philosophical Maxims
Henri Poincaré
Henri Poincaré
1 week 5 days ago
Now what is science? ...it is...

Now what is science? ...it is before all a classification, a manner of bringing together facts which appearances separate, though they are bound together by some natural and hidden kinship. Science, in other words, is a system of relations. ...it is in relations alone that objectivity must be sought. ...it is relations alone which can be regarded as objective.External objects... are really objects and not fleeting and fugitive appearances, because they are not only groups of sensations, but groups cemented by a constant bond. It is this bond, and this bond alone, which is the object in itself, and this bond is a relation.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Jean Jacques Rousseau
3 months 3 weeks ago
I remembered the way out suggested...

I remembered the way out suggested by a great princess when told that the peasants had no bread: "Well, let them eat cake".

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This passage contains a statement Qu'ils mangent de la brioche that has usually come to be attributed to Marie Antoinette; this was written in 1766, when Marie Antoinette was 10
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
3 months 2 weeks ago
What are the earth and all...

What are the earth and all its interests beside the deep surmise which pierces and scatters them?

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Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
2 months 5 days ago
Not without reason did he who...

Not without reason did he who had the right to do so speak of the foolishness of the cross. Foolishness, without a doubt, foolishness. And the American humorist, Oliver Wendell Holmes, was not altogether wide of the mark in making one of the characters in his ingenious conversations say that he thought better of those who were confined in a lunatic asylum on account of religious mania than of those who, while professing the same religious principles, kept their wits and appeared to enjoy life very well outside the asylums. But those who are at large, are they not really, thanks to God, mad too? Are there not mild madnesses, which not only permit us to mix with our neighbors without danger to society, but which rather enable us to do so, for by means of them we are able to attribute a meaning and finality to life and society?

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Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 month 2 weeks ago
Another theme of the Wake that...

Another theme of the Wake that helps in the understanding of the paradoxical shift from cliché to archetype is "pastimes are past times". The dominant technologies of one age become the games and pastimes of a later age. In the twentieth century the number of past times that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of doubleness and interplay since this kind of hendiadys-dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy.

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(p.99)
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
4 months 2 weeks ago
Even before the bomb, one did...

Even before the bomb, one did not breathe too easily in this tortured world. Now we are given a new source of anguish; it has all the promise of being our greatest anguish ever. There can be no doubt that humanity is being offered its last chance. Perhaps this is an occasion for the newspapers to print a special edition. More likely, it should be cause for a certain amount of reflection and a great deal of silence.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 week 2 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
Novalis
Novalis
2 months 2 weeks ago
The ideal of Morality has no...

The ideal of Morality has no more dangerous rival than the ideal of highest Strength, of most powerful life; which also has been named (very falsely as it was there meant) the ideal of poetic greatness. It is the maximum of the savage; and has, in these times, gained, precisely among the greatest weaklings, very many proselytes. By this ideal, man becomes a Beast-Spirit, a Mixture; whose brutal wit has, for weaklings, a brutal power of attraction.

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Philosophical Maxims
Francis Fukuyama
Francis Fukuyama
1 week 6 days ago
Fundamentally we are highly social creatures....

Fundamentally we are highly social creatures. We feel a big sense of anomie and discomfort when we are isolated from our fellow human beings. …We seek community in different ways. There's a right wing... and... a left wing version of this.

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15:58
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
2 months 2 weeks ago
Men are qualified for civil liberty...

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites, - in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity, - in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption, - in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 months 2 weeks ago
Talents differ; all is well and...

Talents differ; all is well and wisely put; If I cannot carry forests on my back, Neither can you crack a nut.

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Fable
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 2 weeks ago
What pride to discover that nothing...

What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.

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Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
1 month 2 weeks ago
There's nothing nonsensical about saying that...

There's nothing nonsensical about saying that what would evolve if Darwinian selection has its head is something that you don't want to happen. And I could easily imagine trying to go against Darwinism.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
3 months 2 weeks ago
I am not virtuous. Our sons...

I am not virtuous. Our sons will be if we shed enough blood to give them the right to be.

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Act 3, sc. 5
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 2 days ago
Children should from...
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Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus
3 months 3 weeks ago
He that gives quickly….

He that gives quickly gives twice.

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Adagia, 1508
Philosophical Maxims
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal
4 months 1 day ago
All men are almost led to...

All men are almost led to believe not of proof, but by attraction. This way is base, ignoble, and irrelevant; every one therefore disavows it. Each one professes to believe and even to love nothing but what he knows to be worthy of belief and love.

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Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
2 months 5 days ago
The most authentic Catholic ethic, monastic...

The most authentic Catholic ethic, monastic asceticism, is an ethic of eschatology, directed to the salvation of the individual soul rather than to the maintenance of society. And in the cult of virginity may there not perhaps be a certain obscure idea that to perpetuate ourselves in others hinders our own personal perpetuation?

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Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
1 month 2 weeks ago
He and his tyrannicide! I am...

He and his tyrannicide! I am in a mad fury about these explosions. If that is the new world! Damn O'Donovan Rossa; damn him behind and before, above, below, and roundabout; damn, deracinate, and destroy him, root and branch, self and company, world without end. Amen. I write that for sport if you like, but I will pray in earnest, O Lord, if you cannot convert, kindly delete him!

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Letter to Sidney Colvin, 2 August 1881. Quoted in Terrorism and Literature Chapter 12 - "Parliament Is Burning" by Deaglán Ó Donghaile ISBN 9781316987292
Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
4 months 3 days ago
Every habit and faculty is confirmed...

Every habit and faculty is confirmed and strengthened by the corresponding actions, that of walking by walking, that of running by running.

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Book II, ch. 18, 1
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
8 months 1 week ago
Survive in such a way...

Survive in such a way that you avoid limiting others who are also trying to survive. We all live in limited systems. This is the core of ethics.

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Propositions / General
Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze
1 month 4 weeks ago
There's no need to fear or...

There's no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.

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from Postscript on the Societies of Control
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 2 weeks ago
The observer, when he seems to...

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.

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An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940), Introduction, p. 15
Philosophical Maxims
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
1 month 1 week ago
When we read the best nineteenth-...

When we read the best nineteenth- and twentieth-century novelists, we soon realize that they are trying in a variety of ways to establish a definition of human nature, to justify the continuation of life as well as the writing of novels.

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"The Sealed Treasure" (1960), p. 60
Philosophical Maxims
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
2 months 1 week ago
The philosopher will ask himself ......

The philosopher will ask himself ... if the criticism we are now suggesting is not the philosophy which presses to the limit that criticism of false gods which Christianity has introduced into our history.

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p. 47
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley
1 month 4 days ago
Within the last fifty years, the...

Within the last fifty years, the extraordinary growth of every department of physical science has spread among us mental food of so nutritious and stimulating a character that a new ecdysis seems imminent.

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Ch.2, p. 73
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine
3 months 2 weeks ago
They show as little Reason as...

They show as little Reason as Conscience who put the matter by with saying - "Men, in some cases, are lawfully made Slaves, and why may not these?" So men, in some cases, are lawfully put to death, deprived of their goods, without their consent; may any man, therefore, be treated so, without any conviction of desert? Nor is this plea mended by adding-"They are set forth to us as slaves, and we buy them without farther inquiry, let the sellers see to it." Such men may as well join with a known band of robbers, buy their ill-got goods, and help on the trade; ignorance is no more pleadable in one case than the other; the sellers plainly own how they obtain them. But none can lawfully buy without evidence that they are not concurring with Men-Stealers; and as the true owner has a right to reclaim his goods that were stolen, and sold; so the slave, who is proper owner of his freedom, has a right to reclaim it, however often sold.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida
3 months 1 week ago
At the point at which the...

At the point at which the concept of différance, and the chain attached to it, intervenes, all the conceptual oppositions of metaphysics (signifier/signified; sensible/intelligible; writing/speech; passivity/activity; etc.)- to the extent that they ultimately refer to the presence of something present (for example, in the form of the identity of the subject who is present for all his operations, present beneath every accident or event, self-present in its "living speech," in its enunciations, in the present objects and acts of its language, etc.)- become non pertinent. They all amount, at one moment or another, to a subordination of the movement of différance in favor of the presence of a value or a meaning supposedly antecedent to différance, more original than it, exceeding and governing it in the last analysis. This is still the presence of what we called above the "transcendental signified.

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p. 29
Philosophical Maxims
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