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Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
1 week 3 days ago
It is sometimes expedient to forget...

It is sometimes expedient to forget who we are.

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Maxim 233
Philosophical Maxims
Plato
Plato
3 months 1 week ago
Democracy does not contain any force...

Democracy does not contain any force which will check the constant tendency to put more and more on the public payroll. The state is like a hive of bees in which the drones display, multiply and starve the workers so the idlers will consume the food and the workers will perish.

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Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Hölderlin
Friedrich Hölderlin
1 month 1 week ago
What is the wisdom of a...

What is the wisdom of a book compared with the wisdom of an angel?

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas
3 months ago
It is on account neither of...

It is on account neither of God's weakness nor ignorance that evil comes into the world, but rather it is due to the order of his wisdom and the greatness of his goodness that diverse grades of goodness occur in things, many of which would be lacking if no evil were permitted. Indeed, the good of patience would not exist without the evil of persecution; nor the good of preservation of life in a lion if not for the evil of the destruction of the animals on which it lives.

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q. 3, art. 6, ad 4
Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
2 months 2 weeks ago
It is asserted that beasts have...

It is asserted that beasts have no rights; the illusion is harboured that our conduct, so far as they are concerned, has no moral significance, or, as it is put in the language of these codes, that "there are no duties to be fulfilled towards animals." Such a view is one of revolting coarseness, a barbarism of the West, whose source is Judaism. In philosophy, however, it rests on the assumption, despite all evidence to the contrary, of the radical difference between man and beast,-a doctrine which, as is well known, was proclaimed with more trenchant emphasis by Descartes than by any one else: it was indeed the necessary consequence of his mistakes.

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Part III, Ch. VIII, 7, p. 218
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 week 3 days ago
Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is...

Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful.

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The less identity, the more violence. "Violence in the media." Canadian Forum. Volume 56, 1976, p. 9
Philosophical Maxims
Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus
2 months 3 weeks ago
But plants, though they have not...

But plants, though they have not powers of perception, yet, as they have life, certainly approach very nearly to those things which are endowed with sentient faculties. What then is so completely insensible as stony substance? yet even in this, there appears to be a desire of union. Thus the loadstone attracts iron to it, and holds it fast in its embrace, when so attracted. Indeed, the attraction of cohesion, as a law of love, takes place throughout all inanimate nature.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 1 week ago
Literature is the effort of man...

Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.

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"Walter Savage Landor", from The Dial, xii, 1841
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 1 week ago
With success and a literary career...

With success and a literary career one becomes an unquestioning part of the mechanism, whereas the only truly important years are those in which one is unknown.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 1 week ago
Were we to undertake an exhaustive...

Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 1 week ago
Go where he will, the wise...

Go where he will, the wise man is at home, His hearth the earth, his hall the azure dome.

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Wood-notes, st. 3
Philosophical Maxims
Judith Butler
Judith Butler
2 weeks ago
We are not yet speaking about...

We are not yet speaking about equality if we have not yet spoken about equal grievability, or the equal attribution of grievability. Grievability is a defining feature of equality. Those whose grievability is not assumed are those who suffer inequality-unequal value.

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p. 108
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
1 month 1 week ago
Just as Marx used to say...

Just as Marx used to say about the French Marxists of the late 'seventies: All I know is that I am not a Marxist.

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Letter to Conrad Schmidt
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
2 months 1 week ago
Experience teaches only the teachable... Tragedy...

Experience teaches only the teachable...

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Tragedy and the Whole Truth
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
1 month 5 days ago
The will is a unity of...

The will is a unity of two different aspects or moments: first, the individual's ability to abstract from every specific condition and, by negating it, to return to the absolute liberty of the pure ego; secondly, the individual's act of freely adopting a concrete condition, freely affirming his existence as a particular, limited ego.

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P. 185
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
3 months 1 week ago
It pays to be obvious, especially...

It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
3 weeks 4 days ago
I feel sure that the police...

I feel sure that the police are helping us more than I could do in ten years. They are making more anarchists than the most prominent people connected with the anarchist cause could make in ten years. If they will only continue I shall be very grateful; they will save me lots of work.

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As quoted in "Arrest in Chicago of Emma Goldman, Preacher of Anarchy", The San Francisco Call
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
1 week 5 days ago
Men think it right to eat...

Men think it right to eat animals, because they are led to believe that God sanctions it. This is untrue. No matter in what books it may be written that it is not sinful to slay animals and to eat them, it is more clearly written in the heart of man than in any books that animals are to be pitied and should not be slain any more than human beings. We all know this if we do not choke the voice of our conscience.

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The Pathway of Life: Teaching Love and Wisdom (posthumous), Part I, International Book Publishing Company, New York, 1919, p. 68
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
1 week 1 day ago
Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses...

Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won't know it, and may even vigorously deny it. Accepting that a virus might be difficult to detect in your own mind, what tell-tale signs might you look out for? I shall answer by imaging how a medical textbook might describe the typical symptoms of a sufferer (arbitrarily assumed to be male).

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
1 month 5 days ago
"And seeing every man is presumed...

And seeing every man is presumed to do all things in order to his own benefit, no man is a fit Arbitrator in his own cause.

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The First Part, Chapter 15, p. 78
Philosophical Maxims
William Godwin
William Godwin
1 month 1 week ago
Duty is that mode of action...

Duty is that mode of action which constitutes the best application of the capacity of the individual to the general advantage. Right is the claim of the individual to his share of the benefit arising from his neighbors' discharge of their several duties.

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"Summary of Principles". 1.5
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
3 months 2 weeks ago
May I really say it!
May I really say it! All truths are bloody truths to me, take a look at my previous writings.
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Philosophical Maxims
Peter Singer
Peter Singer
2 months 3 days ago
Animal Liberation is Human Liberation too....

Animal Liberation is Human Liberation too.

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Preface
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
3 months 1 week ago
That which distinguishes the Christian narrow...

That which distinguishes the Christian narrow way from the common human narrow way is the voluntary. Christ was not someone who coveted earthly things but had to be satisfied with poverty, no, he chose poverty.

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Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
1 week 1 day ago
To know what you prefer, instead...

To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.

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An Inland Voyage (1878), Ch. III, "The Royal Sport Nautique".
Philosophical Maxims
Gaston Bachelard
Gaston Bachelard
1 month 5 days ago
A word is a bud attempting...

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

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Introduction, sect. 6
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
2 months 2 weeks ago
Lastly, we must also know what...

Lastly, we must also know what Baptism signifies, and why God has ordained just such external sign and ceremony for the Sacrament by which we are first received into the Christian Church. But the act or ceremony is this, that we are sunk under the water, which passes over us, and afterwards are drawn out again. These two parts, to be sunk under the water and drawn out again, signify the power and operation of Baptism, which is nothing else than putting to death the old Adam, and after that the resurrection of the new man, both of which must take place in us all our lives, so that a truly Christian life is nothing else than a daily baptism, once begun and ever to be continued.

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On Infant Baptism, Large Catechism
Philosophical Maxims
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
1 month 3 days ago
Plato and his objectivistic successors ......

Plato and his objectivistic successors ... preserved the awareness of differences that pragmatism has been invented to deny-the difference between thinking in the laboratory and in philosophy, and consequently the difference between the destination of mankind and its present course.

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p. 53.
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
1 month 1 week ago
All those instances to be found...

All those instances to be found in history, whether real or fabulous, of a doubtful public spirit, at which morality is perplexed, reason is staggered, and from which affrighted Nature recoils, are their chosen and almost sole examples for the instruction of their youth.

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No. 1, volume v, p. 286
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton
2 weeks 2 days ago
The best and safest method of...

The best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be, first to enquire diligently into the properties of things, and to establish these properties by experiment, and then to proceed more slowly to hypothesis for the explanation of them. For hypotheses should be employed only in explaining the properties of things, but not assumed in determining them, unless so far as they may furnish experiments.

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Letter to Ignatius Pardies (1672) Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (Feb. 1671/2) as quoted by William L. Harper
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
2 months 1 week ago
The circulation of capital realizes value,...

The circulation of capital realizes value, while living labour creates value.

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Notebook V, The Chapter on Capital, p. 463.
Philosophical Maxims
John Searle
John Searle
2 weeks 1 day ago
In the performance of an illocutionary...

In the performance of an illocutionary act in the literal utterance of a sentence, the speaker intends to produce a certain effect by means of getting the hearer to recognize his intention to produce that effect; and furthermore, if he is using the words literally, he intends this recognition to be achieved in virtue of the fact that the rules for using the expressions he utters associate the expression with the production of that effect.

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P. 45.
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
2 months 1 week ago
The trail of the human serpent...

The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything.

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Lecture II, What Pragmatism Means
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
2 months 1 week ago
In this third period

In this third period (as it may be termed) of my mental progress, which now went hand in hand with hers, my opinions gained equally in breadth and depth, I understood more things, and those which I had understood before, I now understood more thoroughly. I had now completely turned back from what there had been of excess in my reaction against Benthamism. I had, at the height of that reaction, certainly become much more indulgent to the common opinions of society and the world, and more willing to be content with seconding the superficial improvement which had begun to take place in those common opinions, than became one whose convictions on so many points, differed fundamentally from them. I was much more inclined, than I can now approve, to put in abeyance the more decidedly heretical part of my opinions, which I now look upon as almost the only ones, the assertion of which tends in any way to regenerate society.

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(p. 229)
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
2 months 3 weeks ago
But the best demonstration by far...

But the best demonstration by far is experience, if it go not beyond the actual experiment.

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Aphorism 70
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
3 months 1 week ago
It seems to be almost an...

It seems to be almost an invariable rule that as real power declines, the symbols of power multiply and intensify in compensation.

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Philosophical Maxims
Epicurus
Epicurus
3 months 2 days ago
Fortitude, the virtue which enables us...

Fortitude, the virtue which enables us to endure pain, and to banish fear, is of great use in producing tranquility. Philosophy instructs us to pay homage to the gods, not through hope or fear, but from veneration of their superior nature. It moreover enables us to conquer the fear of death, by teaching us that it is no proper object of terror; since, whilst we are, death is not, and when death arrives, we are not: so that it neither concerns the living nor the dead.

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Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
2 months 1 week ago
The miracles in fact are a...

The miracles in fact are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see. Of that larger script part is already visible, part is still unsolved. In other words, some of the miracles do locally what God has already done universally: others do locally what He has not yet done, but will do. In that sense, and from our human point of view, some are reminders and others prophecies.

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"Miracles" (1942), p. 29
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Rorty
Richard Rorty
2 months 3 days ago
On James's view, "true" resembles "good"...

On James's view, "true" resembles "good" or "rational" in being a normative notion, a compliment paid to sentences that seem to be paying their way and that fit with other sentences which are doing so.

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Introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 1 week ago
True confessions are written with tears...

True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes.

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Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
1 month 1 week ago
Second, in the presence of this...

Second, in the presence of this continuity of feeling, nominalistic maxims appear futile. There is no doubt about one idea affecting another, when we can directly perceive the one generally modified and shaping itself into the other. Nor can there any longer be any difficulty about one idea resembling another, when we can pass along the continuous field of quality from one to the other and back again to the point which we had marked.

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Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
2 months 2 weeks ago
I. The subjects of every state...

I. The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities, that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state.

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Chapter II, Part II, p. 892.
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
2 weeks ago
The slave begins...
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Main Content / General
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
1 week 1 day ago
They are in you and me;...

They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

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Ch. 2. The replicators
Philosophical Maxims
John Rawls
John Rawls
2 months 1 week ago
I have tried to set forth...

I have tried to set forth a theory that enables us to understand and to assess these feelings about the primacy of justice. Justice as fairness is the outcome: it articulates these opinions and supports their general tendency.

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Chapter IX, Section 87, p. 586
Philosophical Maxims
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
1 month 1 week ago
I veil my face before thee,...

I veil my face before thee, and lay my finger on my lips. What thou art in thyself, or how thou appearest to thyself, I can never know. After living through a thousand lives, I shall comprehend Thee as little as I do now in this mansion of clay. What I can comprehend, becomes finite by my mere comprehension, and this can never, by perpetual ascent, be transformed into the infinite, for it does not differ from it in degree merely, but in kind. By that ascent we may find a greater and greater man, but never a God, who is capable of no measurement.

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Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p.115
Philosophical Maxims
Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton
5 days ago
It goes without saying that apartheid...

It goes without saying that apartheid is offensive. It was adopted, however, as the lesser of two evils. The Afrikaners believe that black majority rule has, in almost every case, led to the collapse of the constitutional government which they brought to South Africa, and upon which their freedoms and privileges - and perhaps even their lives - depend. And it did not seem so very bad to deny to blacks a vote which they would, when in power, promptly deny to themselves.

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'A lift at last for the other Afrikaners', The Times (17 May 1983), p. 12
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 1 week ago
To-day unbind the captive, So only...

To-day unbind the captive, So only are ye unbound; Lift up a people from the dust, Trump of their rescue, sound!

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Boston Hymn, st. 17
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
2 months 1 week ago
Although I consider our political world...

Although I consider our political world to be the best of which we have any historical knowledge, we should beware of attributing this fact to democracy or to freedom. Freedom is not a supplier who delivers goods to our door. Democracy does not ensure that anything is accomplished - certainly not an economic miracle. It is wrong and dangerous to extol freedom by telling people that they will certainly be all right once they are free. How someone fares in life is largely a matter of luck or grace, and to a comparatively small degree perhaps also of competence, diligence, and other virtues. The most we can say of democracy or freedom is that they give our personal abilities a little more influence on our well-being.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
2 months 1 week ago
I think so badly of philosophy...

I think so badly of philosophy that I don't like to talk about it. ... I do not want to say anything bad about my dear colleagues, but the profession of teacher of philosophy is a ridiculous one. We don't need a thousand of trained, and badly trained, philosophers - it is very silly. Actually most of them have nothing to say.

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As quoted in "At 90, and Still Dynamic : Revisiting Sir Karl Popper and Attending His Birthday Party" by Eugene Yue-Ching Ho, in Intellectus 23
Philosophical Maxims
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