Skip to main content

Main navigation

☰ ˟
  • Home
  • Articulation
  • Contact
  • Shop
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
1 week ago
From the same it proceedeth,that men...

From the same it proceedeth,that men gives different names, to one and the same thing, from the difference of their own passions: As they that approve a private opinion, call it Opinion; but they that mislike it, Haeresie: and yet haeresie signifies no more than private opinion; but has only agreater tincture of choler.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
The First Part, Chapter 11, p. 50
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
1 week ago
So that every Crime is a...

So that every Crime is a sinne; but not every sinne a Crime.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
The Second Part, Chapter 27, p. 151
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
3 months 1 week ago
Well, some get lucky sometimes...
0
⚖0
Main Content / General
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
1 month 1 week ago
Everyone is the other, and no...

Everyone is the other, and no one is himself. The they, which supplies the answer to the who of everyday Da-sein, is the nobody to whom every Da-sein has always already surrendered itself, in its being-among-one-another.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Stambaugh translation
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
1 month 1 week ago
Every questioning is a seeking. Every...

Every questioning is a seeking. Every seeking takes its direction beforehand from what is sought. Questioning is a knowing search for beings in their thatness and whatness.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Introduction: The Exposition of the Question of the Meaning of Being (Stambaugh translation)
Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
1 month 4 weeks ago
Whatever moral rules you have deliberately...

Whatever moral rules you have deliberately proposed to yourself abide by them as they were laws, and as if you would be guilty of impiety by violating any of them. Don't regard what anyone says of you, for this, after all, is no concern of yours. How long, then, will you put off thinking yourself worthy of the highest improvements and follow the distinctions of reason? You have received the philosophical theorems, with which you ought to be familiar, and you have been familiar with them. What other master, then, do you wait for, to throw upon that the delay of reforming yourself?... Let whatever appears to be the best be to you an inviolable law.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
(50).
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1 month 2 weeks ago
No man can have society upon...

No man can have society upon his own terms. If he seeks it, he must serve it too.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
1833
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
2 months 2 weeks ago
Forgetting our intentions is the most...
Forgetting our intentions is the most frequent of all acts of stupidity.
0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
2 months 1 week ago
The best way to describe anyone...

The best way to describe anyone is to give an example of the kind of thing he would do.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Isaiah Berlin
Isaiah Berlin
6 days ago
To confuse our own constructions and...

To confuse our own constructions and inventions with eternal laws or divine decrees is one of the most fatal delusions of men. 

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Essays in Honour of E. H. Carr (1974) edited by Chimen Abramsky, p. 9
Philosophical Maxims
Epicurus
Epicurus
2 months 4 days ago
It is impossible for a man...

It is impossible for a man who secretly violates the terms of the agreement not to harm or be harmed to feel confident that he will remain undiscovered, even if he has already escaped ten thousand times; for until his death he is never sure that he will not be detected.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Jean Jacques Rousseau
1 month 2 weeks ago
Two conflicting types of educational systems...

Two conflicting types of educational systems spring from these conflicting aims. One is public and common to many, the other private and domestic. If you wish to know what is meant by public education, read Plato's Republic. Those who merely judge books by their titles take this for a treatise on politics, but it is the finest treatise on education ever written. In popular estimation the Platonic Institute stands for all that is fanciful and unreal. For my own part I should have thought the system of Lycurgus far more impracticable had he merely committed it to writing. Plato only sought to purge man's heart; Lycurgus turned it from its natural course. The public institute does not and cannot exist, for there is neither country nor patriot. The very words should be struck out of our language. The reason does not concern us at present, so that though I know it I refrain from stating it.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes
Just now
By reducing any quality to quantity,...

By reducing any quality to quantity, myth economizes intelligence: it understands reality more cheaply.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 153
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
1 month 2 weeks ago
If you want good laws…

If you want good laws, burn those you have and make new ones.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
"Laws", 1765
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
1 month 3 weeks ago
We were halves throughout, and to...

We were halves throughout, and to that degree that, methinks, by outliving him I defraud him of his part.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Ch. 27. Of Friendship, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Hazlitt, 1842
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
1 month 2 weeks ago
Thus our duties to animals are...

Thus our duties to animals are indirectly duties to humanity.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Part II, p. 213
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Browne
Thomas Browne
2 weeks 6 days ago
Time which antiquates Antiquities, and hath...

Time which antiquates Antiquities, and hath an art to make dust of all things.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Chapter V
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 week 3 days ago
When we know what words are...

When we know what words are worth, the amazing thing is that we try to say anything at all, and that we manage to do so. This requires, it is true, a supernatural nerve.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
1 month 2 weeks ago
Good nature is, of all moral...

Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle. Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for the others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish for ever.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Ch. 1: In Praise of Idleness
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
1 month 2 weeks ago
I conceive that the description so...

I conceive that the description so often given of a Benthamite, as a mere reasoning machine, though extremely inapplicable to most of those who have been designated by that title, was during two or three years of my life not altogether untrue of me. ...There is nothing very extraordinary in this fact: no youth of the age I then was, can be expected to be more than one thing, and this was the thing I happened to be. Ambition and desire of distinction, I had in abundance; and zeal for what I thought the good of mankind was my strongest sentiment, mixing with and colouring all others. But my zeal was as yet little else, at that period of my life, than zeal for speculative opinions. It had not its root in genuine benevolence, or sympathy with mankind; though these qualities held their due place in my ethical standard. Nor was it connected with any high enthusiasm for ideal nobleness.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
(pp. 109-110)
Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
1 week 4 days ago
When one is not understood one...

When one is not understood one should as a rule lower one's voice, because when one really speaks loudly enough and is not heard, it is because people do not want to hear. One had better begin to mutter to oneself, then they get curious.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Nietzsche's Zarathustra (1988), p. 30
Philosophical Maxims
Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham
1 month 2 weeks ago
Liberty therefore not being more fit...

Liberty therefore not being more fit than other words in some of the instances in which it has been used, and not so fit in others, the less the use that is made of it the better. I would no more use the word liberty in my conversation when I could get another that would answer the purpose, than I would brandy in my diet, if my physician did not order me: both cloud the understanding and inflame the passions.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Jeremy Bentham, quoted in P. J. Kelly, Utilitarianism and Distributive Justice: Jeremy Bentham and the Civil Law, Oxford, 1990, p. 96
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
1 month 2 weeks ago
POLITICAL economy, considered as a branch...

POLITICAL economy, considered as a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator, proposes two distinct objects: first, to provide a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people, or more properly to enable them to provide such a revenue or subsistence for themselves; and secondly, to supply the state or commonwealth with a revenue sufficient for the public services. It proposes to enrich both the people and the sovereign.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Introduction, p. 459.
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
1 month 1 week ago
What is now common to all...

What is now common to all men is a mere abstract universal, an H.C.F. [Highest Common Factor], and Man's conquest of himself means simply the rule of the Conditioners over the conditioned human material, the world of post-humanity which, some knowingly and some unknowingly, nearly all men in all nations are at present labouring to produce.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
2 months 1 week ago
We get into the habit of...

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 week 3 days ago
Crime in full glory consolidates authority...

Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
2 months ago
Do not despair: one thief was...

Do not despair: one thief was saved. Do not presume: one thief was damned.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Attributed to St. Augustine in The Repentance of Robert Greene, Master of Arts (1592) by Robert Greene.
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
1 month 1 week ago
To sum up all these steps,...

To sum up all these steps, each of which is very lengthy and complex, we will have put the game of truth back in the network of constraints and dominations. Truth, I should say rather, the system of truth and falsity, will have revealed the face it turned away from us for so long and which is that of its violence.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 4
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
2 months 1 week ago
There is more to a science...

There is more to a science fiction story than the science it contains.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
1 week 5 days ago
You know I am not born...

You know I am not born to tread in the beaten track - the peculiar bent of my nature pushes me on.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Letter to Everina Wollstonecraft
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
1 month 1 week ago
What all these people are doing...

What all these people are doing is not aggressive; they are inventing new possibilities of pleasure with strange parts of their body - through the eroticization of the body. I think it's ... a creative enterprise, which has as one of its main features what I call the desexualization of pleasure.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
In reference to Sadism and Masochism, as quoted in Who's Who in Contemporary Gay & Lesbian History: From World War II to the Present Day (2001) by Robert Aldrich and Gary Wotherspoon
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
1 week ago
To those who hold abstractly to...

To those who hold abstractly to Hegel's political philosophy, Hobhouse replies that the very fact of class society, the patent influence of class interests on the state, renders it impossible to designate the state as expressive of the real will of individuals as a whole. 'Wherever a community is governed by one class or one race, the remaining class or race is permanently in the position of having to take what it can get.'

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
P. 396
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
1 month 1 week ago
The chief function of the disciplinary...

The chief function of the disciplinary power is to 'train', rather than to select and to levy; or, no doubt, to train in order to levy and select all the more. It does not link forces together in order to reduce them; it seeks to bind them together in such a way as to multiply and use them.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Part Three, The Means of Correct Training
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
1 month 1 week ago
In the darkest region of the...

In the darkest region of the political field the condemned man represents the symmetrical, inverted figure of the king.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
2 months 1 week ago
Korell is that frequent phenomenon in...

Korell is that frequent phenomenon in history: the republic whose ruler has every attribute of the absolute monarch but the name. It therefore enjoyed the usual despotism unrestrained even by those two moderating influences in the legitimate monarchies: regal, honor and court etiquette.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Theodor Adorno
Theodor Adorno
Just now
Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im...

Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
E. Jephcott, trans. (1974), § 18
Philosophical Maxims
Democritus
Democritus
1 month 4 days ago
I would rather discover one cause...

I would rather discover one cause than gain the kingdom of Persia.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Freeman (1948), p. 155
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
1 month 2 weeks ago
All wars are accordingly so many...

All wars are accordingly so many attempts (not in the intention of man, but in the intention of Nature) to establish new relations among states, and through the destruction or at least the dismemberment of all of them to create new political bodies, which, again, either internally or externally, cannot maintain themselves and which must thus suffer like revolutions; until finally, through the best possible civic constitution and common agreement and legislation in external affairs, a state is created which, like a civic commonwealth, can maintain itself automatically.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Seventh Thesis
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
1 month 2 weeks ago
Man's greatest concern is to know...

Man's greatest concern is to know how he shall properly fill his place in the universe and correctly understand what he must be in order to be a man.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Part III : Selection on Education from Kant's other Writings, Ch. I Pedagogical Fragments, # 53
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
2 months 1 week ago
Man cannot do without beauty, and...

Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard. It steels itself to attain the absolute and authority; it wants to transfigure the world before having exhausted it, to set it to rights before having understood it. Whatever it may say, our era is deserting this world.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
1 month 3 weeks ago
If thou shalt aspire after the...

If thou shalt aspire after the glorious acts of men, thy working shall be accompanied with compunction and strife, and thy remembrance followed with distaste and upbraidings; and justly doth it come to pass towards thee, O man, that since thou, which art God's work, doest him no reason in yielding him well-pleasing service, even thine own works also should reward thee with the like fruit of bitterness.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Of The Works Of God and Man
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
1 month 3 weeks ago
The human understanding is of its...

The human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds. And though there be many things in nature which are singular and unmatched, yet it devises for them parallels and conjugates and relatives which do not exist. Hence the fiction that all celestial bodies move in perfect circles, spirals and dragons being (except in name) utterly rejected.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Aphorism 45
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1 month 2 weeks ago
The horseman serves the horse, The...

The horseman serves the horse, The neatherd serves the neat, The merchant serves the purse, The eater serves his meat; 'Tis the day of the chattel, Web to weave, and corn to grind; Things are in the saddle, And ride mankind.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Ode: Inscribed to W. H. Channing, st. 7
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
1 month 2 weeks ago
The significance of that 'absolute commandment',...

The significance of that 'absolute commandment', know thyself - whether we look at it in itself or under the historical circumstances of its first utterance - is not to promote mere self-knowledge in respect of the particular capacities, character, propensities, and foibles of the single self. The knowledge it commands means that of man's genuine reality - of what is essentially and ultimately true and real - of spirit as the true and essential being.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
1 month 2 weeks ago
So much of modern mathematical work...

So much of modern mathematical work is obviously on the border-line of logic, so much of modern logic is symbolic and formal, that the very close relationship of logic and mathematics has become obvious to every instructed student. The proof of their identity is, of course, a matter of detail: starting with premisses which would be universally admitted to belong to logic, and arriving by deduction at results which as obviously belong to mathematics, we find that there is no point at which a sharp line can be drawn, with logic to the left and mathematics to the right. If there are still those who do not admit the identity of logic and mathematics, we may challenge them to indicate at what point, in the successive definitions and deductions of Principia Mathematica, they consider that logic ends and mathematics begins. It will then be obvious that any answer must be quite arbitrary.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Ch. 18: Mathematics and Logic
Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
1 month 2 weeks ago
Religion, which should most distinguish us...

Religion, which should most distinguish us from the beasts, and ought most particularly elevate us, as rational creatures, above brutes, is that wherein men often appear most irrational, and more senseless than beasts.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Book IV, Ch. 18
Philosophical Maxims
Horace
Horace
1 month 4 days ago
What odds does it make to...

What odds does it make to the man who lives within Nature's bounds, whether he ploughs a hundred acres or a thousand?

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Book I, satire i, line 48
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
2 months 2 weeks ago
Socrates did not stop with a...

Socrates did not stop with a philosophical consideration of mankind; he addressed himself to each one individually, wrested everything from him, and sent him away empty-handed.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
George Santayana
George Santayana
1 week ago
Our dignity is not in what...

Our dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 50
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
1 month 2 weeks ago
The man who employs either his...

The man who employs either his labour or his stock in a grater variety of ways than his situation renders necessary, can never hurt his neighbour by underselling him. He may hurt himself, and he generally does so. Jack of all trades will never be rich, says the proverb. But the law ought always to trust people with the care of their own interest, as in their local situations they must generally be able to judge better of it than the legislator can do.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Chapter V, Digression, p. 572.
Philosophical Maxims
  • Load More

User login

  • Create new account
  • Reset your password

Social

☰ ˟
  • Main Content
  • Philosophical Maxims

Civic

☰ ˟
  • Propositions
  • Issue / Solution

Who's new

  • Søren Kierkegaard
  • Jesus
  • Friedrich Nietzsche
  • VeXed
  • Slavoj Žižek

Who's online

There are currently 0 users online.

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia