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Voltaire
Voltaire
2 months 1 week ago
This body which…

This body which called itself and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

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Essai sur l'histoire générale et sur les mœurs et l'esprit des nations, Chapter 70, 1756
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
1 month 6 days ago
To theology, ... only what it...

To theology, ... only what it holds sacred is true, whereas to philosophy, only what holds true is sacred.

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Lecture II, R. Manheim, trans. (1967), p. 11
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
2 months 3 weeks ago
The superior man loves his soul;...

The superior man loves his soul; the inferior man loves his property.

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Philosophical Maxims
Judith Butler
Judith Butler
1 week 1 day ago
To subdue destruction is one of...

To subdue destruction is one of the most important affirmations of which we are capable in this world. It is the affirmation of this life, bound up with yours, and with the realm of the living: an affirmation caught up with a potential for destruction and its countervailing force.

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p. 65
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
2 months 3 weeks ago
The more man meditates upon good...

The more man meditates upon good thoughts, the better will be his world and the world at large.

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Philosophical Maxims
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
2 weeks 5 days ago
The task of power is to...

The task of power is to transform the always possible 'no' into a 'yes.'

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Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
3 weeks 1 day ago
The thought of being under absolute...

The thought of being under absolute compulsion, the plaything of another, is unendurable for a human being. Hence, if every way of escape from the constraint is taken from him, there is nothing left for him to do but to persuade himself that he does the things he is forced to do willingly, that is to say, to substitute devotion for obedience. ... It is by this twist that slavery debases the soul: this devotion is in fact based on a lie, since the reasons for it cannot bear investigation. ... Moreover, the master is deceived too by the fallacy of devotion.

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p. 142
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
2 months 1 week ago
Persons of genius, it is true,...

Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow. Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom.

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Ch. III: Of Individuality, As One of the Elements of Well-Being
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
2 weeks 2 days ago
There were honest people long before...

There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are, God be praised, still honest people where there are no Christians. It could therefore easily be possible that people are Christians because true Christianity corresponds to what they would have been even if Christianity did not exist.

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L 16
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Büchner
Georg Büchner
1 month 6 days ago
Revolution is like the daughters of...

Revolution is like the daughters of Pelias: it cuts humanity to pieces in order to rejuvenate it.

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Act II.
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
2 weeks 2 days ago
One might call habit a moral...

One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.

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A 10
Philosophical Maxims
Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch
4 weeks ago
The novel, the novel proper that...

The novel, the novel proper that is, is about people's treatment of each other, and so it is about human values.

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Ch. 10, p. 138
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
1 month 6 days ago
It is provable both that the...

It is provable both that the historical sequence was, in its main outlines, a necessary one; and that the causes which determined it apply to the child as to the race. ...as the mind of humanity placed in the midst of phenomena and striving to comprehend them has, after endless comparisons, speculations, experiments, and theories, reached its present knowledge of each subject by a specific route; it may rationally be inferred that the relationship between mind and phenomena is such as to prevent this knowledge from being reached by any other route; and that as each child's mind stands in this same relationship to phenomena, they can be accessible to it only through the same route. Hence in deciding upon the right method of education, an inquiry into the method of civilization will help to guide us.

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Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
2 months 1 week ago
Psychologists have hitherto failed to realize...

Psychologists have hitherto failed to realize that imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself.

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A 120
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
4 weeks 1 day ago
Moses because of the hardness of...

Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so. And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery: and whoso marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery.

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19:8-9 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
3 weeks 6 days ago
Similarly a work of art vanishes...

Similarly a work of art vanishes from sight for a beholder who seeks in it nothing but the moving fate of John and Mary or Tristan and Isolde and adjusts his vision to this. Tristan's sorrows are sorrows and can evoke compassion only in so far as they are taken as real. But an object of art is artistic only in so far as it is not real. In order to enjoy Titian's portrait of Charles the Fifth on horseback we must forget that this is Charles the Fifth in person and see instead a portrait - that is, an image, a fiction. The portrayed person and his portrait are two entirely different things; we are interested in either one or the other. In the first case we "live" with Charles the Fifth, in the second we look at an object of art.

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"The Dehumanization of Art"
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
3 months 1 week ago
The world is rejuvenated, but as...

The world is rejuvenated, but as Heine so wittily remarked, it was rejuvenated by romanticism to such a degree that it became a baby again.

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Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
1 month 2 days ago
Democracy would be wholly valueless to...

Democracy would be wholly valueless to the proletariat if it were not immediately used as a means for putting through measures directed against private property and ensuring the livelihood of the proletariat.

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Philosophical Maxims
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
2 weeks 5 days ago
The pornographic face says nothing. It...

The pornographic face says nothing. It has no expressivity or mystery.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Rawls
John Rawls
2 months 5 days ago
The extreme nature of dominant-end views...

The extreme nature of dominant-end views is often concealed by the vagueness and ambiguity of the end proposed.

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Chapter IX, Section 83, p. 554
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
4 days ago
Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance....

Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance.

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Yeats studies, Issue 2, Irish University Press, 1972, p. 135
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
2 months 1 week ago
Suicide evokes revulsion with horror, because...

Suicide evokes revulsion with horror, because everything in nature seeks to preserve itself: a damaged tree, a living body, an animal; and in man, then, is freedom, which is the highest degree of life, and constitutes the worth of it, to become now a principium for self-destruction? This is the most horrifying thing imaginable. For anyone who has already got so far as to be master, at any time, over his own life, is also master over the life of anyone else; for him, the door stands open to every crime, and before he can be seized he is ready to spirit himself away out of the world. So suicide evokes horror, in that a man thereby puts himself below the beasts. We regard a suicide as a carcase, whereas we feel pity for one who meets his end through fate.

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Part II, p. 146
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 2 weeks ago
It's not the experience....
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Main Content / General
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
2 months 1 week ago
Whenever I have read any part...

Whenever I have read any part of the Vedas, I have felt that some unearthly and unknown light illuminated me. In the great teaching of the Vedas, there is no touch of sectarianism. It is of all ages, climes and nationalities and is the royal road for the attainment of the Great Knowledge. When I am at it, I feel that I am under the spangled heavens of a summer night.

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Quoted in Bansi Pandit, The Hindu Mind (B & V Enterprises, 1996) p. 307
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
2 months 1 day ago
In the tragedies of the early...

In the tragedies of the early seventeenth century, madness too provided the dénouement, but it did so in liberating the truth. It still opened onto language, to a renewed form of speech, that of explanation and of the real regained. The most it could ever be was the penultimate moment of tragedy. Not the closing moment, as in Andromaque, where no truth appears, other than, in Delirium, the truth of a passion that finds its fullest, most perfect expression in madness.

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Part Two: 2. The Transcendence of Delirium
Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
1 month 1 week ago
There is no sin, and there...

There is no sin, and there can be no sin on all the earth, which the Lord will not forgive to the truly repentant! Man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God. Can there be a sin which could exceed the love of God?

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Book II, ch. 3 (trans. Constance Garnett) The Elder Zossima, speaking to a devout widow afraid of death
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
4 weeks 1 day ago
Saint-Simon, like Hegel, begins with the...

Saint-Simon, like Hegel, begins with the assertion that the social order engendered by the French Revolution proved that mankind has reached the adult state. In contrast to Hegel, however, he described this stage primarily in terms of its economy; the industrial process was the sole integrating factor in the new social order.

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P. 330
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert A. Simon
Herbert A. Simon
2 weeks 1 day ago
Organizations and institutions provide the general...

Organizations and institutions provide the general stimuli and attention-directors that channelize the behaviors of the members of the group, and that provide those members with the intermediate objectives that stimulate action.

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p. 100.
Philosophical Maxims
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
2 weeks 5 days ago
Depression is a narcissistic malady.

Depression is a narcissistic malady.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 1 week ago
Righteousness cannot be born until self-righteousness...

Righteousness cannot be born until self-righteousness is dead.

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Justice in War-Time (1916), p. 192
Philosophical Maxims
Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm
2 weeks 4 days ago
In erotic love, two people who...

In erotic love, two people who were separate become one. In motherly love, two people who were one become separate. The mother must not only tolerate, she must wish and support the child's separation.

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Ch. 2
Philosophical Maxims
bell hooks
bell hooks
2 weeks 6 days ago
The moment we choose to love...

The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.

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Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
2 days ago
For my part, I travel not...

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.

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Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1878).
Philosophical Maxims
Gaston Bachelard
Gaston Bachelard
4 weeks 1 day ago
Ideas are invented only as correctives...

Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectifications of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid.

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A Retrospective Glance at the Lifework of a Master of Books
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
2 months 2 weeks ago
All passions that suffer themselves to...

All passions that suffer themselves to be relished and digested are but moderate.

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Ch. 2. Of Sorrow, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Hazlitt, 1842
Philosophical Maxims
John Dewey
John Dewey
4 weeks ago
The three qualities of space and...

The three qualities of space and time reciprocally affect and qualify one another in experience. Space is inane save as occupied with active volumes. Pauses are holes when they do not accentuate masses and define figures as individuals. Extension sprawls and finally benumbs if it does not interact with place so as to assume intelligible distribution. Mass is nothing fixed. It contracts and expands, asserts and yields, according to its relations to other spatial and enduring things.... these are then the common properties of the matter of arts because there are general conditions without which an experience is not possible. As we saw earlier, the basic condition is felt relationship between doing and undergoing as the organism and environment interact.

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pp. 220-21
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
3 months 1 week ago
Whereas the man of action binds...
Whereas the man of action binds his life to reason and its concepts so that he will not be swept away and lost, the scientific investigator builds his hut right next to the tower of science so that he will be able to work on it and to find shelter for himself beneath those bulwarks which presently exist. And he requires shelter, for there are frightful powers which continuously break in upon him, powers which oppose scientific "truth" with completely different kinds of "truths" which bear on their shields the most varied sorts of emblems.
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Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
1 month 2 days ago
The first character of a general...

The first character of a general idea so resulting is that it is living feeling. A continuum of this feeling, infinitesimal in duration, but still embracing innumerable parts, and also, though infinitesimal, entirely unlimited, is immediately present. And in its absence of boundedness a vague possibility of more than is present is directly felt.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
2 months 2 weeks ago
There is nothing more notable in...

There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.

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Book III, Ch. 13
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
3 months 4 days ago
I don't say it was deliberate...

I don't say it was deliberate fraud. He was probably madly sincere, and sincerely mad.

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Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
2 months 3 weeks ago
The way of the superior man...

The way of the superior man may be compared to what takes place in traveling, when to go to a distance we must first traverse the space that is near, and in ascending a height, when we must begin from the lower ground.

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Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
2 months 1 week ago
The world neither ever saw, nor...

The world neither ever saw, nor ever will see, a perfectly fair lottery.

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Chapter X, Part I.
Philosophical Maxims
Horace
Horace
1 month 3 weeks ago
Ah, Postumus! They fleet away….

Ah, Postumus! they fleet away, our years, nor piety one hour can win from wrinkles and decay, and Death's indomitable power.

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Book II, ode xiv, line 1 (trans. John Conington)
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
2 months 1 week ago
As the analysis of a substantial...

As the analysis of a substantial composite terminates only in a part which is not a whole, that is, in a simple part, so synthesis terminates only in a whole which is not a part, that is, the world.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
2 months 1 week ago
We are apt to imagine that...

We are apt to imagine that this hubbub of Philosophy, Literature, and Religion, which is heard in pulpits, lyceums, and parlors, vibrates through the universe, and is as catholic a sound as the creaking of the earth's axle. But if a man sleeps soundly, he will forget it all between sunset and dawn.

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January 6, 1842
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert A. Simon
Herbert A. Simon
2 weeks 1 day ago
Decision making processes are aimed at...

Decision making processes are aimed at finding courses of action that are feasible or satisfactory in the light of multiple goals and constraints.

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p. 274.
Philosophical Maxims
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
3 weeks 6 days ago
Nationalism is always an effort in...

Nationalism is always an effort in a direction opposite to that of the principle which creates nations. The former is exclusive in tendency, the latter inclusive. In periods of consolidation, nationalism has a positive value, and is a lofty standard. But in Europe everything is more than consolidated, and nationalism is nothing but a mania, a pretext to escape from the necessity of inventing something new, some great enterprise.

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Chapter XIV: Who Rules The World?
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
2 months 2 days ago
Don't get involved in partial problems,...

Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem.

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Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
3 months 1 week ago
It is the duty of the...

It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. Human understanding has vulgarly occupied itself with nothing but understanding, but if it would only take the trouble to understand itself at the same time it would simply have to posit the paradox.

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Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
3 weeks 2 days ago
I would say that teleology is...

I would say that teleology is theology, and that God is not a "because," but rather an "in order to."

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Philosophical Maxims
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