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Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
3 months 1 week ago
Existentialism is nothing else but an...

Existentialism is nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position. Its intention is not in the least that of plunging men into despair. And if by despair one means as the Christians do - any attitude of unbelief, the despair of the existentialists is something different. Existentialism is not atheist in the sense that it would exhaust itself in demonstrations of the non-existence of God. It declares, rather, that even if God existed that would make no difference from its point of view. Not that we believe God does exist, but we think that the real problem is not that of His existence; what man needs is to find himself again and to understand that nothing can save him from himself, not even a valid proof of the existence of God. In this sense existentialism is optimistic. It is a doctrine of action, and it is only by self-deception, by confining their own despair with ours that Christians can describe us as without hope.

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p. 56
Philosophical Maxims
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
1 month 3 weeks ago
Logos is powerless without the force...

Logos is powerless without the force of eros.

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Philosophical Maxims
Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton
1 month 3 days ago
An international socialism is the stated...

An international socialism is the stated ideal of most socialists; an international liberalism is the unstated tendency of the liberal. To neither system is it thinkable that men live, not by universal aspirations but by local attachments; not by a "solidarity" that stretches across the globe from end to end, but by obligations that are understood in terms which separate men from most of their fellows-in terms such as national history, religion, language, and the customs that provide the basis of legitimacy.

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How to be a Non-Liberal, Anti-Socialist Conservative, Intercollegiate Review: A Journal of Scholarship and Opinion
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 month 3 weeks ago
Jesus said that God was not...

Jesus said that God was not the God of the dead, but of the living. And the other life is not, in fact, thinkable to us except under the same forms as those of this earthly and transitory life.

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Philosophical Maxims
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
1 month 3 weeks ago
Pornography completes the deritualization of love.

Pornography completes the deritualization of love.

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Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
1 month 1 week ago
There are some remedies worse than...

There are some remedies worse than the disease.

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Maxim 301
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 months 1 week ago
In fact, it is as difficult...

In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

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Quotation and Originality
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 month 3 weeks ago
And the soul, my soul at...

And the soul, my soul at least, longs for something else, not absorption, not quietude, not peace, not appeasement, it longs ever to approach and never to arrive, it longs for the never-ending longing, for an eternal hope which is eternally renewed but never wholly fulfilled. And together with all this, it longs for an eternal lack of something and an eternal suffering. A suffering, a pain, thanks to which it grows without ceasing in consciousness and longing. Do not write upon the gate of heaven that sentence which Dante placed over the threshold of hell, Lasciate ogni speranza! [Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate: All hope abandon, ye who enter in] Do not destroy time!

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Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
1 month 1 week ago
It is a very hard undertaking...

It is a very hard undertaking to seek to please everybody.

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Maxim 675
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
2 months 1 week ago
A great profusion of things, which...

A great profusion of things, which are splendid or valuable in themselves, is magnificent. The starry heaven, though it occurs so very frequently to our view, never fails to excite an idea of grandeur. This cannot be owing to the stars themselves, separately considered. The number is certainly the cause. The apparent disorder augments the grandeur, for the appearance of care is highly contrary to our idea of magnificence. Besides, the stars lie in such apparent confusion, as makes it impossible on ordinary occasions to reckon them. This gives them the advantage of a sort of infinity.

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Part II Section XIII
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
1 month 3 weeks ago
With the sense of sight, the...

With the sense of sight, the idea communicates the emotion, whereas, with sound, the emotion communicates the idea, which is more direct and therefore more powerful.

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Ch. 29, June 10, 1943.
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 1 week ago
The secret of happiness is this:...

The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 day ago
I say, it is the everlasting...

I say, it is the everlasting privilege of the foolish to be governed by the wise; to be guided in the right path by those who know it better than they. This is the first "right of man;" compared with which all other rights are as nothing.

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Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
2 months 6 days ago
Feeling which has not yet emerged...

Feeling which has not yet emerged into immediate consciousness is already affectible and already affected. In fact, this is habit, by virtue of which an idea is brought up into the present consciousness by a bond that has already been established between it and another idea while it was still in futuro.

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Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
1 month 1 week ago
Each visitor performed the ceremony of...

Each visitor performed the ceremony of greeting this old aunt whom not one of them knew, not one of them wanted to know, and not one of them cared about; Anna Pávlovna observed these greetings with mournful and solemn interest and silent approval. The aunt spoke to each of them in the same words, about their health and her own, and the health of Her Majesty, "who, thank God, was better today." And each visitor, though politeness prevented his showing impatience, left the old woman with a sense of relief at having performed a vexatious duty and did not return to her the whole evening.

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Bk. I, Ch. II
Philosophical Maxims
Max Scheler
Max Scheler
2 months ago
Whenever convictions are not arrived at...

Whenever convictions are not arrived at by direct contact with the world and the objects themselves, but indirectly through a critique of the opinions of others, the processes of thinking are impregnated with ressentiment. The establishment of "criteria" for testing the correctness of opinions then becomes the most important task. Genuine and fruitful criticism judges all opinions with reference to the object itself. Ressentiment criticism, on the contrary, accepts no "object" that has not stood the test of criticism.

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L. Coser, trans. (1973), pp. 67-68
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
4 months 1 week ago
The question is asked in ignorance,...

The question is asked in ignorance, by one who does not even know what can have led him to ask it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 6 days ago
Nothing proves that we are more...

Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.

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Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
2 months 1 week ago
Every pleasure raises the tide of...

Every pleasure raises the tide of life; every pain lowers the tide of life.

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Ch. 6, The Biological View
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
5 months 1 week ago
Well, some get lucky sometimes...
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Main Content / General
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 month 3 weeks ago
Not only are we unable to...

Not only are we unable to conceive of the full and living God as masculine simply, but we are unable to conceive of Him as individual simply, as the projection of a solitary I, an unsocial I, an I that is in reality an abstract I. My living I is an I that is really a We; my living personal I lives only in other, of other, and by other I's; I am sprung from a multitude of ancestors. I carry them within me in extract, and at the same time I carry within me, potentially, a multitude of descendants, and God, the projection of my I to the infinite - or rather I, the projection of God to the finite - must also be a multitude. Hence, in order to save the personality of God - that is to say, in order to save the living God - faith's need - the need of the feeling and the imagination - of conceiving Him and feeling Him as possessed of a certain internal multiplicity.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 1 week ago
Many of the actions by which...

Many of the actions by which men have become rich are far more harmful to the community than the obscure crimes of poor men, yet they go unpunished because they do not interfere with the existing order.

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Ch. V: Government and Law
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Browne
Thomas Browne
2 months 2 weeks ago
I thanke God for my happy...

I thanke God for my happy Dreams|dreames, as I doe for my good rest, for there is a satisfaction in them unto reasonable desires, and such as can be content with a fit of happinesse; and surely it is not a melancholy conceite to thinke we are all asleepe in this world, and that the conceits of this life are as meare dreames to those of the next, as the Phantasmes of the night, to the conceit of the day. There is an equall delusion in both, and the one doth but seeme to bee the embleme or picture of the other;

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Section 12
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
3 months 2 weeks ago
In the same manner as we...

In the same manner as we are cautioned by religion to show our faith by our works we may very properly apply the principle to philosophy, and judge of it by its works; accounting that to be futile which is unproductive, and still more so, if instead of grapes and olives it yield but the thistle and thorns of dispute and contention.

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Aphorism 73
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
2 months 3 days ago
Go into the city to such...

Go into the city to such a man, and say unto him, The Master saith, My time is at hand; I will keep the passover at thy house with my disciples.

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26:18 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
3 months 1 week ago
Real culture lives by sympathies and...

Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdain - under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core.

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The Social Value of the College-Bred
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Browne
Thomas Browne
2 months 2 weeks ago
But man is a Noble Animal,...

But man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing Nativities and Deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting Ceremonies of Bravery, in the infamy of his nature. Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us.

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Chapter V
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
4 months 1 week ago
Science is a systematic method for...

Science is a systematic method for studying and working out those generalizations that seem to describe the behavior of the universe. It could exist as a purely intellectual game that would never affect the practical life of human beings either for good or evil, and that was very nearly the case in ancient Greece, for instance. Technology is the application of scientific findings to the tools of everyday life, and that application can be wise or unwise, useful or harmful. Very often, those who govern technological decisions are not scientists and know little about science.

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Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
2 months 3 days ago
The range of socially permissible and...

The range of socially permissible and desirable satisfaction is greatly enlarged, but through this satisfaction, the Pleasure Principle is reduced-deprived of the claims which are irreconcilable with the established society. Pleasure, thus adjusted, generates submission.

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p. 75
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
3 months 1 week ago
If things are ever to move...

If things are ever to move upward, some one must take the first step, and assume the risk of it. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try non-resistance as the saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods will or will not succeed.

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Lectures XIV and XV, "The Value of Saintliness"
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Browne
Thomas Browne
2 months 2 weeks ago
Obstinacy in a bad cause, is...

Obstinacy in a bad cause, is but constancy in a good.

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Section 25
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
3 months 1 week ago
Most human beings have an almost...

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

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"Variations on a Philosopher" in Themes and Variations, 1950
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 month 1 week ago
Any loss of identity prompts people...

Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction.

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Letter to Clare Westcott, November 26 1975. Letters of Marshall McLuhan, p. 514
Philosophical Maxims
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
2 months ago
No criticism can be brought against...

No criticism can be brought against a branch of technical science from outside; no thought fitted out with the knowledge of a period and setting its course by definite historical aims could have anything to say to the specialist. Such thought and the critical, dialectical element it communicates to the process of cognition, thereby maintaining conscious connection between that process and historical life, do not exist for empiricism; nor do the associated categories, such as the distinction between essence and appearance, identity in change, and rationality of ends, indeed, the concept of man, of personality, even of society and class taken in the sense that presupposes specific viewpoints and directions of interest.

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p. 145.
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 6 days ago
The deepest and most organic death...

The deepest and most organic death is death in solitude, when even light becomes a principle of death. In such moments you will be severed from life, from love, smiles, friends and even from death. And you will ask yourself if there is anything besides the nothingness of the world and your own nothingness.

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Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
3 months 1 week ago
All the interests of my reason,...

All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?

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B 832-833
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
3 months 2 weeks ago
The souls of emperors and cobblers...

The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mold...The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbor creates a war betwixt princes.

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Ch. 12, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Carew Hazlitt, 1877
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
3 months 1 week ago
Capital is money: Capital is commodities....

Capital is money: Capital is commodities. [...] For the movement, in the course of which it adds surplus-value, is its own movement, its expansion, therefore, is automatic expansion. Because it is value, it has acquired the occult quality of being able to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.

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Vol. I, Ch. 2, pg. 171.
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
1 month 3 weeks ago
Art is thought, and thought only...

Art is thought, and thought only gives the world an appearance of order to anyone weak enough to be convinced by its show.

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Chapter one, The Country of the Blind
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
3 months 6 days ago
Death is not an event in...

Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.

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Philosophical Maxims
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
3 months 1 week ago
That man should think of God...

That man should think of God as nothingness must at first sight seem astonishing, must appear to us a most peculiar idea. But, considered more closely, this determination means that God is absolutely nothing determined. He is the Undetermined; no determinateness of any kind pertains to God; He is the Infinite. This is equivalent to saying that God is the negation of all particularity.

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Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Lectures on the philosophy of religion, together with a work on the proofs of the existence of God. Vol 2 Translated from the 2d German ed. 1895 Ebenezer Brown Speirs 1854-1900, and J Burdon Sanderson p. 51
Philosophical Maxims
Theodor Adorno
Theodor Adorno
1 month 3 weeks ago
The jargon of authenticity ... is...

The jargon of authenticity ... is a trademark of societalized chosenness, ... sub-language as superior language.

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pp. 5-6
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
3 months 1 week ago
Men go to a fire for...

Men go to a fire for entertainment. When I see how eagerly men will run to a fire, whether in warm or in cold weather, by day or by night, dragging an engine at their heels, I'm astonished to perceive how good a purpose the level of excitement is made to serve.

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June, 1850
Philosophical Maxims
Plutarch
Plutarch
2 months 3 weeks ago
Once when Phocion had delivered an...

Once when Phocion had delivered an opinion which pleased the people,... he turned to his friend and said, "Have I not unawares spoken some mischievous thing or other?"

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55 Phocion
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
3 months 1 week ago
The normal process of life contains...

The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which insane melancholy is filled with, moments in which radical evil gets its innings and takes its solid turn. The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait till you arrive there yourself! ... Here on our very hearths and in our gardens the infernal cat plays with the panting mouse, or holds the hot bird fluttering in her jaws. Crocodiles and rattlesnakes and pythons are at this moment vessels of life as real as we are; their loathsome existence fills every minute of every day that drags its length along; and whenever they or other wild beasts clutch their living prey, the deadly horror which an agitated melancholiac feels is the literally right reaction on the situation.

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Lectures VI and VII, "The Sick Soul"
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
3 months 2 weeks ago
It is not possible to run...

It is not possible to run a course aright when the goal itself has not been rightly placed.

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Aphorism 81
Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
1 month 1 week ago
The bow too tensely strung is...

The bow too tensely strung is easily broken.

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Maxim 388
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
3 months 6 days ago
"Everything is already there in...." How...

"Everything is already there in...." How does it come about that [an] arrow points? Doesn't it seem to carry in it something besides itself? - "No, not the dead line on paper; only the psychical thing, the meaning, can do that." - That is both true and false. The arrow points only in the application that a living being makes of it.

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§ 454
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 month 3 weeks ago
There may be a rationalist who...

There may be a rationalist who has never wavered in his conviction of the mortality of the soul, and there may be a vitalist who has never wavered in his faith in immortality; but at the most this would prove that just as there are natural monstrosities, so there are those who are stupid as regards heart and feeling, however great their intelligence, and those who are stupid intellectually, however great their virtue. But, in normal cases, I cannot believe those who assure me that never, not in a fleeting moment, not in the hours of direst loneliness and grief, has this murmur of uncertainty breathed upon their consciousness.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ernst Mach
Ernst Mach
2 months 6 days ago
The aim of research is the...

The aim of research is the discovery of the equations which subsist between the elements of phenomena.

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p. 205; On aim of research.
Philosophical Maxims
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