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Democritus
Democritus
1 month 2 weeks ago
He who intends to enjoy life...

He who intends to enjoy life should not be busy about many things, and in what he does should not undertake what exceeds his natural capacity. On the contrary, he should have himself so in hand that even when fortune comes his way, and is apparently ready to lead him on to higher things, he should put her aside and not o'erreach his powers. For a being of moderate size is safer than one that bulks too big.

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Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
4 weeks 1 day ago
The supporters of the Development Hypothesis......

The supporters of the Development Hypothesis... can show that any existing species-animal or vegetable-when placed under conditions different from its previous ones, immediately begins to undergo certain changes fitting it for the new conditions. They can show that in successive generations these changes continue; until, ultimately, the new conditions become the natural ones. They can show that in cultivated plants, in domesticated animals, and in the several races of men, such alterations have taken place. They can show that the degrees of difference so produced are often, as in dogs, greater than those on which distinctions of species are in other cases founded.

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Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
2 months 3 weeks ago
It is no one's privilege to...

It is no one's privilege to despise another. It is only a hard-won right after long experience.

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Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
2 months 3 weeks ago
I believe that every human being...

I believe that every human being with a physically normal brain can learn a great deal and can be surprisingly intellectual. I believe that what we badly need is social approval of learning and social rewards for learning.We can all be members of the intellectual elite and then, and only then, will a phrase like "America's right to know" and, indeed, any true concept of democracy, have any meaning.

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Philosophical Maxims
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
4 weeks 1 day ago
By means of the new education...

By means of the new education we want to mould the Germans into a corporate body, which shall be stimulated and animated in all its individual members by the same interest.

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Introduction p. 15
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
1 month 4 weeks ago
This year, or this month, or,...

This year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.

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Book I, Chapter 1, "The Law of Human Nature"
Philosophical Maxims
Henri Bergson
Henri Bergson
3 weeks 1 day ago
People talk, indeed, of a "primitive...

People talk, indeed, of a "primitive mentality", as, for example, to-day that of the inferior races, and in days gone by that of humanity in general, at whose door the responsibility for superstition should be laid.

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Chapter II : Static Religion
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
1 month 4 weeks ago
He [the devil] always sends errors...

He [the devil] always sends errors into the world in pairs-pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse. You see why, of course? He relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one. But do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through between both errors. We have no other concern than that with either of them.

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Book IV, chapter 6, "Two Notes"
Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
3 months ago
The ancient philosophers... all of them...

The ancient philosophers... all of them assert that the elements, and those things which are called by them principles, are contraries, though they establish them without reason, as if they were compelled to assert this by truth itself. They differ, however... that some of them assume prior, and others posterior principles; and some of them things more known according to reason, but others such as are more known according to sense: for some establish the hot and the cold, others the moist and the dry, others the odd and the even, and others strife and friendship, as the causes of generation. ...in a certain respect they assert the same things, and speak differently from each other. They assert different things... but the same things, so far as they speak analogously. For they assume principles from the same co-ordination; since, of contraries, some contain, and others are contained.

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Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
3 months 2 days ago
Is Wagner a human being at...
Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches - he has made music sick.
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Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
2 months ago
It would be worth the while...

It would be worth the while to look closely into the eye which has been open and seeing at such hours, and in such solitudes, its dull, yellowish, greenish eye. Methinks my own soul must be a bright invisible green.

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Philosophical Maxims
Gottfried Leibniz
Gottfried Leibniz
2 months 3 days ago
As regards the objection that possibles...

As regards the objection that possibles are independent of the decrees of God I grant it of actual decrees (although the Cartesians do not at all agree to this), but I maintain that the possible individual concepts involve certain possible free decrees; for example, if this world was only possible, the individual concept of a particular body in this world would involve certain movements as possible, it would also involve the laws of motion, which are the free decrees of God; but these, also, only as possibilities. Because, as there are an infinity of possible worlds, there are also an infinity of laws, certain ones appropriate to one; others, to another, and each possible individual of any world involves in its concept the laws of its world.

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(May, 1686) as quoted in George R. Montgomery, Tr., "Correspondence between Leibniz and Arnauld," Leibniz: Discourse on metaphysics; correspondence with Arnauld, and Monadology (1916) VIII, p. 108
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
2 weeks 2 days 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
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1 month 4 weeks ago
Never read any book that is...

Never read any book that is not a year old.

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Books
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
1 week 2 days ago
So-called professional mathematicians have, in their...

So-called professional mathematicians have, in their reliance on the relative incapacity of the rest of mankind, acquired for themselves a reputation for profundity very similar to the reputation for sanctity possessed by theologians.

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K 52
Philosophical Maxims
Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm
1 week 4 days ago
The same polarity of the male...

The same polarity of the male and female principle exists in nature; not only, as is obvious in animals and plants, but in the polarity of the two fundamental functions, that of receiving and penetrating. It is the polarity of earth and rain, of the river and the ocean, of night and day, of darkness and light, of matter and spirit.

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Ch. 2
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
2 months 3 weeks ago
The world evades us because it...

The world evades us because it becomes itself again. That stage scenery masked by habit becomes what it is. It withdraws at a distance from us.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
2 months ago
Private property has made us so...

Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it - when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., - in short, when it is used by us. Although private property itself again conceives all these direct realizations of possession as means of life, and the life which they serve as means is the life of private property - labour and conversion into capital. In place of all these physical and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses - the sense of having. The human being had to be reduced to this absolute poverty in order that he might yield his inner wealth to the outer world.

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p. 87, The Marx-Engels Reader
Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
1 month 1 week ago
Power is the near neighbour of...

Power is the near neighbour of necessity.

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As quoted in Aurea Carmina (8) by Hierocles of Alexandria, as translated in Dictionary of Quotations (1906) by Thomas Benfield Harbottle, p. 356
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
2 months 2 weeks ago
Listen widely to remove your...

Listen widely to remove your doubts and be careful when speaking about the rest and your mistakes will be few. See much and get rid of what is dangerous and be careful in acting on the rest and your causes for regret will be few. Speaking without fault, acting without causing regret: 'upgrading' consists in this.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 weeks 4 days ago
Reality is a creation of our...

Reality is a creation of our excesses.

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Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
1 month ago
All government - indeed, every human...

All government - indeed, every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act - is founded on compromise and barter.

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Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
2 months 1 day ago
Clever tyrants are never….

Clever tyrants are never punished.

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Mérope, act V, scene V, 1743
Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
1 month ago
Pain and suffering are always inevitable...

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on Earth.

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Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
2 months 3 weeks ago
Science doesn't purvey absolute truth. Science...

Science doesn't purvey absolute truth. Science is a mechanism. It's a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature. It's a system for testing your thoughts against the universe and seeing whether they match. And this works, not just for the ordinary aspects of science, but for all of life. I should think people would want to know that what they know is truly what the universe is like, or at least as close as they can get to it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Bakunin
3 weeks 6 days ago
All religions are cruel, all founded...

All religions are cruel, all founded on blood; for all rest principally on the idea of sacrifice - that is, on the perpetual immolation of humanity to the insatiable vengeance of divinity.

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Philosophical Maxims
Herbert A. Simon
Herbert A. Simon
1 week 1 day ago
The techniques of the practitioner are...

The techniques of the practitioner are usually called 'synthetic'. He designs by organizing known principles and devices into larger systems.

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Simon (1945, p. 353); As cited in: Philosophy of Technology and Engineering Sciences (2009) p. 425.
Philosophical Maxims
Edward Said
Edward Said
1 week 5 days ago
I retain my faith in the...

I retain my faith in the humanist tradition, that it's possible to deal with discrepant experiences truthfully without resolving into simple things like only women should write about women, only Chicanos should write about Chicanos, only Latinos should write about Latinos... I think that's the most damaging crime, and misapprehension of what I'm saying. That's why they debate all these things and they trace them back to me and people say 'you did that!' Absolutely not. I'm talking from a universalistic, if you like cosmopolitan point of view to which I adhere and which is the only way the world makes sense to me. I don't believe in the politics of identity, although in many ways paradoxically I seem to be the father of identity politics, but it's a thing I totally disbelieve in because I realise the damage that identities have done.

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Interview with Michaël Zeeman for Leven en Werken
Philosophical Maxims
John Searle
John Searle
2 days ago
Precisely by inculcating a critical attitude,...

Precisely by inculcating a critical attitude, the "canon" served to demythologize the conventional pieties of the American bourgeoisie and provided the student with a perspective from which to critically analyze American culture and institutions. Ironically, the same tradition is now regarded as oppressive. The texts once served an unmasking function; now we are told that it is the texts which must be unmasked.

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"The Storm Over the University", The New York Review of Books, December 6, 1990
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
2 months 3 weeks ago
Radiation, unlike smoking, drinking, and overeating,...

Radiation, unlike smoking, drinking, and overeating, gives no pleasure, so the possible victims object.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
6 days ago
Being at one...
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Main Content / General
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 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
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
2 months 3 days ago
II. The tax which each individual...

II. The tax which each individual is bound to pay ought to be certain, and not arbitrary.

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Chapter II, Part II, p. 892.
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
3 weeks 1 day ago
The radical empiricist onslaught ... provides...

The radical empiricist onslaught ... provides the methodological justification for the debunking of the mind by the intellectuals-a positivism which, in its denial of the transcending elements of Reason, forms the academic counterpart of the socially required behavior.

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p. 13
Philosophical Maxims
Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale
1 week 4 days ago
You ask me why I do...

You ask me why I do not write something... I think one's feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions and into actions which bring results.

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Letter to a friend, quoted in The Life of Florence Nightingale (1913) by Edward Tyas Cook, p. 94
Philosophical Maxims
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida
1 month 3 weeks ago
It is also the becoming-space of...

It is also the becoming-space of the spoken chain - which has been called temporal or linear; a becoming-space which makes possible both writing and every correspondence between speech and writing, every passage from one to the other.The activity or productivity connoted by the a of différance refers to the generative movement in the play of differences. The latter are neither fallen from the sky nor inscribed once and for all in a closed system, a static structure that a synchronic and taxonomic operation could exhaust. Differences are the effects of transformations, and from this vantage the theme of différance is incompatible with the static, synchronic, taxonomic, ahistoric motifs in the concept of structure.

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p. 28
Philosophical Maxims
John Dewey
John Dewey
3 weeks ago
Form may then be defined as...

Form may then be defined as the operation of forces that carry the experience of an event, object, scene, and situation to its own integral fulfillment.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 weeks 4 days ago
By virtue of depression, we recall...

By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.

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Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
2 weeks 1 day ago
If you say to someone who...

If you say to someone who has ears to hear: "What you are doing to me is not just," you may touch and awaken at its source the spirit of attention and love. But it is not the same with words like, "I have the right..." or "you have no right to..." They evoke a latent war and awaken the spirit of contention.

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p. 63
Philosophical Maxims
Plutarch
Plutarch
1 month 2 weeks ago
Be ruled by time, the wisest...

Be ruled by time, the wisest counsellor of all.

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Pericles (Tr. Dryden and Clough)
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
3 weeks 1 day ago
The happy consciousness is shaky enough-a...

The happy consciousness is shaky enough-a thin surface over fear, frustration, and disgust.

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p. 76
Philosophical Maxims
Judith Butler
Judith Butler
1 day ago
Nonviolence is perhaps best described as...

Nonviolence is perhaps best described as a practice of resistance that becomes possible, if not mandatory, precisely at the moment when doing violence seems most justified and obvious. In this way, it can be understood as a practice that not only stops a violent act, or a violent process, but requires a form of sustained action, sometimes aggressively pursued. So, one suggestion I will make is that we can think of nonviolence not simply as the absence of violence, or as the act of refraining from committing violence, but as a sustained commitment, even a way of rerouting aggression for the purposes of affirming ideals of equality and freedom.

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p. 27
Philosophical Maxims
Avicenna
Avicenna
2 months 2 weeks ago
Medicine considers the human body as...

Medicine considers the human body as to the means by which it is cured and by which it is driven away from health.

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Philosophical Maxims
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
2 weeks 6 days ago
This grave dissociation of past and...

This grave dissociation of past and present is the generic fact of our time and the cause of the suspicion, more or less vague, which gives rise to the confusion characteristic of our present-day existence. We feel that we actual men have suddenly been left alone on the earth; that the dead did not die in appearance only but effectively; that they can no longer help us. Any remains of the traditional spirit have evaporated. Models, norms, standards are no use to us. We have to solve our problems without any active collaboration of the past, in full actuality, be they problems of art, science, or politics. The European stands alone, without any living ghosts by his side; like Peter Schlehmil he has lost his shadow. This is what always happens when midday comes.

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"The Dehumanisation of Art"; Ortega y Gasset later used this passage in The Revolt of the Masses (1929), quoting it in Ch. III: The Height Of The Times
Philosophical Maxims
Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Bakunin
3 weeks 6 days ago
No theory, no ready-made system, no...

No theory, no ready-made system, no book that has ever been written will save the world. I cleave to no system. I am a true seeker.

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As quoted in Michael Bakunin (1937) by E.H. Carr, p. 175
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
2 months 3 weeks ago
If one thing goes without saying,...

If one thing goes without saying, almost anything can.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
3 weeks 1 day ago
Another parable put he forth unto...

Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man which sowed good seed in his field: But while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way. But when the blade was sprung up, and brought forth fruit, then appeared the tares also. So the servants of the householder came and said unto him, Sir, didst not thou sow good seed in thy field? from whence then hath it tares? He said unto them, An enemy hath done this. The servants said unto him, Wilt thou then that we go and gather them up? But he said, Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn.

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13:24-30 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Thales of Miletus
Thales of Miletus
1 month 1 week ago
Place is the greatest thing….

Place is the greatest thing, as it contains all things.

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As quoted in Diogenes Laërtius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, I, 35
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
2 months 1 week ago
Every rich man is avaricious, in...

Every rich man is avaricious, in my opinion.

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Ch. 14
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
3 months 2 days ago
It is mere illusion and pretty...
It is mere illusion and pretty sentiment to expect much from mankind if he forgets how to make war. And yet no means are known which call so much into action as a great war, that rough energy born of the camp, that deep impersonality born of hatred, that conscience born of murder and cold-bloodedness, that fervor born of effort of the annihilation of the enemy, that proud indifference to loss, to one's own existence, to that of one's fellows, to that earthquake-like soul-shaking that a people needs when it is losing its vitality.
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Philosophical Maxims
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