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Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
4 months 1 day ago
May we not say, perhaps, that...

May we not say, perhaps, that the evil man is annihilated because he wished to be annihilated, or that he did not wish strongly enough to eternalize himself because he was evil? May we say that it is not believing in the other life which causes a man to be good, but rather that being good causes him believe in it? And what is being good and being evil? These states belong to the sphere of ethics, not of religion; or rather, does not the doing good though being evil pertain to ethics, and the being good [forgivable] though doing evil, to religion?

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Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
6 months 4 days ago
If you would govern a...

If you would govern a state of a thousand chariots (a small-to-middle-size state), you must pay strict attention to business, be true to your word, be economical in expenditure and love the people. You should use them according to the seasons.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
5 months 3 weeks ago
An untempted woman cannot boast of...

An untempted woman cannot boast of her chastity.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 1 week ago
My faculty for disappointment surpasses understanding....

My faculty for disappointment surpasses understanding. It is what lets me comprehend Buddha, but also what keeps me from following him.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ernest Renan
Ernest Renan
2 months 1 week ago
You may take great comfort from...

You may take great comfort from the fact that suffering inwardly for the sake of truth proves abundantly that one loves it and marks one out as being of the elect.

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Saint Sulpice and the Hidden God.
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
5 months 2 weeks ago
Indeed, history is nothing more…

Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.

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L'Ingénu, ch.10 (1767) Quoted in The End, part 13 of A Series of Unfortunate Events
Philosophical Maxims
Nikos Kazantzakis
Nikos Kazantzakis
1 month 2 weeks ago
I felt that human partitions -...

I felt that human partitions - bodies, brains, and souls - were capable of being demolished, and that humanity might return again, after frightfully bloody wandering, to its primeval, divine oneness. In this condition, there is no such thing as "me", "you", and "he"; everything is a unity and this unity is a profound mystic intoxication in which death loses its scythe and ceases to exist. Separately, we die one by one, but all together we are immortal. Like prodigal sons, after so much hunger, thirst, and rebellion, we spread our arms and embrace our two parents: heaven and earth.

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Liberty, Ch. 12, p. 105
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
2 months 5 days ago
The work we desire and prize...

The work we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
2 months 5 days ago
Our English careers to born genius...

Our English careers to born genius are twofold. There is the silent or unlearned career of the Industrialisms, which are very many among us; and there is the articulate or learned career of the three professions, Medicine, Law (under which we may include Politics), and the Church. Your born genius, therefore, will first have to ask himself, Whether he can hold his tongue or cannot? True, all human talent, especially all deep talent, is a talent to do, and is intrinsically of silent nature; inaudible, like the Sphere Harmonies and Eternal Melodies, of which it is an incarnated fraction.

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Philosophical Maxims
Martin Buber
Martin Buber
4 months 5 days ago
The prophet is appointed to oppose...

The prophet is appointed to oppose the king, and even more: history.

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BBC radio broadcast (1962), as quoted in The Great Thoughts (1984) by George Seldes
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
1 month 1 week ago
"Those who have forgotten where the...

"Those who have forgotten where the road leads." "They are at odds with what is all around them"-the all-directing logos. And "they find alien what they meet with every day."

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(Hays translation) IV, 46
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine
5 months 2 weeks ago
A thing, moderately good, is not...

A thing, moderately good, is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper, is always a virtue; but moderation in principle, is a species of vice.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
3 months 3 weeks ago
An army and navy represents the...

An army and navy represents the people's toys.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
3 months 1 week ago
The young today cannot follow narrative...

The young today cannot follow narrative but they are alert to drama. They cannot bear description but they love landscape and action.

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Letter to Harold Adam Innis (14 March 1951), published in Essential McLuhan (1995), edited by Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, p. 74
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
5 months 1 week ago
This is precisely what is decisive...

This is precisely what is decisive in Nietzsche's conception of art, that he sees it in its essential entirety in terms of the artist; this he does consciously and in explicit opposition to that conception of art which represents it in terms of those who "enjoy" and "experience" it.That is a guiding principle of Nietzsche's teaching on art: art must be grasped in terms of creators and producers, not recipients. Nietzsche expresses it unequivocally in the following words (WM, 811): "Our aesthetics heretofore has been a woman's aesthetics, inasmuch as only the recipients of art have formulated their experiences of 'what is beautiful.' In all philosophy to date the artist is missing." Philosophy of art means "aesthetics" for Nietzsche too-but masculine aesthetics, not feminine aesthetics. The question of art is the question of the artist as the productive, creative one; his experiences of what is beautiful must provide the standard.

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p. 70
Philosophical Maxims
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
4 months 5 days ago
Men have been released from concentration...

Men have been released from concentration camps who have taken over the jargon of their jailers and with cold reason and mad consent (the price, as it were, of their survival) tell their story as if it could not have been otherwise than it was, contending that they have not been treated so badly after all.

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p. 45.
Philosophical Maxims
Henri Poincaré
Henri Poincaré
2 months 1 week ago
Logic teaches…

Logic teaches us that on such and such a road we are sure of not meeting an obstacle; it does not tell us which is the road that leads to the desired end. For this, it is necessary to see the end from afar, and the faculty which teaches us to see is intuition. Without it, the geometrician would be like a writer well up in grammar but destitute of ideas.

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Part II. Ch. 2 : Mathematical Definitions and Education, p. 130
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
5 months 1 week ago
I entered the Communist Party because...

I entered the Communist Party because its cause was just and I will leave it when it ceases to be just.

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Hugo to Hoederer, Act 5, sc. 3
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 1 week ago
Better to be an animal than...

Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
5 months 2 weeks ago
I suppose you imagined I was...

I suppose you imagined I was so insanely in love with you that I could commit any folly. When will you women understand that one isn't insanely in love? All one asks for is a quiet life, which you won't allow one to have. I don't know what the devil ever induced me to marry you. It was all a damned stupid, practical joke. And now you go about saying I'm a murderer. I won't stand it.

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The Gioconda smile, in Mortal Coils, 1921
Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
4 months 2 weeks ago
They (the emperors) frequently abused their...

They (the emperors) frequently abused their power arbitrarily to deprive their subjects of property or of life: their tyranny was extremely onerous to the few, but it did not reach the greater number; .. But it would seem that if despotism were to be established amongst the democratic nations of our days it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and more mild, it would degrade men without tormenting them.

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Book Four, Chapter VI.
Philosophical Maxims
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
5 months 1 week ago
Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional,...

Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality.

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p. 4
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
5 months 2 weeks ago
In our science and philosophy, even,...

In our science and philosophy, even, there is commonly no true and absolute account of things. The spirit of sect and bigotry has planted its hoof amid the stars. You have only to discuss the problem, whether the stars are inhabited or not, in order to discover it.

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p. 490
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
5 months 3 weeks ago
We may search long to find...

We may search long to find where God is, but we shall find Him in those who keep the words of Christ. For the Lord Christ saith, " If any man love me, he will keep my words; and we will make our abode with him."

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p. 278
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
5 months 1 week ago
Who can exhaust a man? Who...

Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man's resources?

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 1 week ago
We are afraid of the enormity...

We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henri Bergson
Henri Bergson
4 months 1 week ago
Intuition is a method of feeling...

Intuition is a method of feeling one's way intellectually into the inner heart of a thing to locate what is unique and inexpressible in it.

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Quoted in Georgia O'Keeffe, 1887-1986 : Flowers in the Desert (2000) by Britta Benke, p. 28
Philosophical Maxims
Julien Offray de La Mettrie
Julien Offray de La Mettrie
1 month 1 week ago
The mind, like the body, has...

The mind, like the body, has its contagious diseases and its scurvy. …We catch everything from those with whom we come in contact; their gestures, their accent, etc.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine
5 months 2 weeks ago
It is the nature and intention...

It is the nature and intention of a constitution to prevent governing by party, by establishing a common principle that shall limit and control the power and impulse of party, and that says to all parties, thus far shalt thou go and no further. But in the absence of a constitution, men look entirely to party; and instead of principle governing party, party governs principle.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
5 months 2 weeks ago
Good and evil, reward and punishment,...

Good and evil, reward and punishment, are the only motives to a rational creature: these are the spur and reins whereby all mankind are set on work, and guided.

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Sec. 54
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
6 months 2 weeks ago
Knowledge more than a Means.
Knowledge more than a Means. Also without this passion I refer to the passion for knowledge, science would be furthered: science has hitherto increased and grown up without it. The good faith in science, the prejudice in its favour, by which States are at present dominated (it was even the Church formerly), rests fundamentally on the fact that the absolute inclination and impulse has so rarely revealed itself in it, and that science is regarded not as a passion, but as a condition and an "ethos." Indeed, amour-plaisir of knowledge (curiosity) often enough suffices, amour-vanity suffices, and habituation to it, with the afterthought of obtaining honour and bread; it even suffices for many that they do not know what to do with a surplus of leisure, except to continue reading, collecting, arranging, observing and narrating; their "scientific impulse" is their ennui.
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Philosophical Maxims
Sydney Smith
Sydney Smith
1 month 4 weeks ago
Every rock in the ocean where...

Every rock in the ocean where a cormorant can perch is occupied by our troops - has a governor, deputy-governor, storekeeper, and deputy-storekeeper - and will soon have an archdeacon and a bishop. Military colleges, with thirty-four professors, educating seventeen ensigns per annum, being half an ensign for each professor, with every species of nonsense, athletic, sartorial, and plumigerous.

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Catholics, published in The Edinburgh Review (1827). See The Works of the Rev. Sydney Smith. 2. 1859. p. 123.
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
5 months 2 weeks ago
Ideas do not exist….

Ideas do not exist separately from language.

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Notebook I, The Chapter on Money, p. 83.
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
5 months 2 weeks ago
Though love repine, and reason chafe,...

Though love repine, and reason chafe, There came a voice without reply, - "'T is man's perdition to be safe When for the truth he ought to die."

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Sacrifice
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
3 months 3 weeks ago
What most clearly characterizes true freedom...

What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment.

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L 49
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 1 week ago
There exists, I grant you, a...

There exists, I grant you, a clinical depression, upon which certain remedies occasionally have effect; but there exists another kind, a melancholy underlying our very outbursts of gaiety and accompanying us everywhere, without leaving us alone for a single moment. And there is nothing that can rid us of this lethal omnipresence: the self forever confronting itself.

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Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
3 months 2 weeks ago
A real mother, who knows the...

A real mother, who knows the will of God by experience, will prepare her children also to fulfil it. Such a mother will suffer if she sees her child overfed, effeminate, and dressed-up, for she knows that these things will make it difficult for it to fulfil the will of God which she recognizes.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
5 days ago
War as the most.....
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Antonio Negri
Antonio Negri
2 months 1 week ago
The so-called communism of capital, that...

The so-called communism of capital, that is, its drive toward an ever more extensive socialization of labor, points ambiguously toward the communism of the multitude.

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Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Schlegel
Friedrich Schlegel
4 months 2 weeks ago
The divine origin of man, as...

The divine origin of man, as taught by Vedanta, IS continually inculcated, to stimulate his efforts to return, to animate him in the struggle, and incite him to consider a reunion and reincorporation with Divinity as the one primary object of every action and reaction. Even the loftiest philosophy of the European, the idealism of reason as it is set forth by the Greek philosophers, appears in comparison with the abundant light and vigor of Oriental idealism like a feeble Promethean spark in the full flood of heavenly glory of the noonday sun, faltering and feeble and ever ready to be extinguished.

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quoted in Londhe, S. (2008). A tribute to Hinduism: Thoughts and wisdom spanning continents and time about India and her culture. New Delhi: Pragun Publication.
Philosophical Maxims
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
4 months 2 weeks ago
The Doctrine of Knowledge, apart from...

The Doctrine of Knowledge, apart from all special and definite knowing, proceeds immediately upon Knowledge itself, in the essential unity in which it recognises Knowledge as existing; and it raises this question in the first place - How this Knowledge can come into being, and what it is in its inward and essential Nature? The following must be apparent: - There is but One who is absolutely by and through himself, - namely, God; and God is not the mere dead conception to which we have thus given utterance, but he is in himself pure Life. He can neither change nor determine himself in aught within himself, nor become any other Being; for his Being contains within it all his Being and all possible Being, and neither within him nor out of him can any new Being arise.

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Philosophical Maxims
Max Stirner
Max Stirner
2 months ago
That the individual is of himself...

That the individual is of himself a world's history, and possesses his property in the rest of the world's history, goes beyond what is Christian. To the Christian the world's history is the higher thing, because it is the history of Christ or 'man'; to the egoist only his history has value, because he wants to develop only himself not the mankind-idea, not God's plan, not the purposes of Providence, not liberty, and the like. He does not look upon himself as a tool of the idea or a vessel of God, he recognizes no calling, he does not fancy that he exists for the further development of mankind and that he must contribute his mite to it, but he lives himself out, careless of how well or ill humanity may fare thereby.

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Cambridge 1995, p. 323
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 1 week ago
Every thought derives from a thwarted...

Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.

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Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
5 months 2 weeks ago
No society can surely be flourishing...

No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, cloath and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged.

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Chapter VIII, p. 94.
Philosophical Maxims
Alan Watts
Alan Watts
1 month 3 weeks ago
This mysterious something has been called...

This mysterious something has been called God, the Absolute, Nature, Substance, Energy, Space, Ether, Mind, Being, the Void, the Infinite-names and ideas which shift in popularity and respectabilitywith the winds of intellectual fashion, of considering the universe intelligent or stupid, superhuman or subhuman, specific or vague. All of them might be dismissed as nonsense-noises if the notion of an underlying Ground of Being were no more than a product of intellectual speculation. But these names are often used to designate the content of a vivid and almost sensorily concrete experience-the "unitive" experience of the mystic, which, with secondary variations, is found in almost all cultures at all times. This experience is the transformed sense of self which I was discussing in the previous chapter, though in "naturalistic" terms, purified of all hocus-pocus about mind, soul, spirit, and other intellectually gaseous words.

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p. 104-105
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
6 months 4 days ago
Chi Wan thought thrice, and...

Chi Wan thought thrice, and then acted. When the Master was informed of it, he said, "Twice may do."

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Philosophical Maxims
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
4 months 5 days ago
Even to-day, in spite of some...

Even to-day, in spite of some signs which are making a tiny breach in that sturdy faith, even to-day, there are few men who doubt that motorcars will in five years' time be more comfortable and cheaper than to-day. They believe in this as they believe that the sun will rise in the morning. The metaphor is an exact one. For, in fact, the common man, finding himself in a world so excellent, technically and socially, believes that it has been produced by nature, and never thinks of the personal efforts of highly-endowed individuals which the creation of this new world presupposed. Still less will he admit the notion that all these facilities still require the support of certain difficult human virtues, the least failure of which would cause the rapid disappearance of the whole magnificent edifice.... These traits together make up the well-known psychology of the spoilt child. Chap.

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VI: The Dissection Of The Mass-Man Begins
Philosophical Maxims
Nikos Kazantzakis
Nikos Kazantzakis
1 month 2 weeks ago
You are not free. Myriad invisible...

You are not free. Myriad invisible hands hold your hands and direct them. When you rise in anger, a great-grandfather froths at your mouth; when you make love, an ancestral caveman growls with lust; when you sleep, tombs open in your memory till your skull brims with ghosts.

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Philosophical Maxims
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
3 months 3 weeks ago
God functions like a stabilizer of...

God functions like a stabilizer of time.

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Philosophical Maxims
chanakya
chanakya
2 months 3 weeks ago
Lakshmi, the Goddess of wealth, comes...

Lakshmi, the Goddess of wealth, comes of Her own accord where fools are not respected, grain is well stored up, and the husband and wife do not quarrel.

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Philosophical Maxims
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