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Cisero
Cisero
2 months 1 week ago
They are such fools that they...

They are such fools that they seem to expect that, though the Republic is lost, their fish-ponds will be safe.

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Letters to Atticus, Book I, 18.
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
3 weeks 3 days ago
There can be little question that...

There can be little question that good composition is far less dependent upon acquaintance with its laws, than upon practice and natural aptitude. A clear head, a quick imagination, and a sensitive ear, will go far towards making all rhetorical precepts needless.

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Pt. I, sec. 1, "The Principle of Economy"
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
1 month 3 weeks ago
An individual may perceive a way...

An individual may perceive a way of life, or a method of social organisation, by which more of the desires of mankind could be satisfied than under the existing method. If he perceives truly, and can persuade men to adopt his reform, he is justified. Without rebellion, mankind would stagnate, and injustice would be irremediable.

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Ch. 15: Power and moral codes
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
1 month 2 weeks ago
If you tried to doubt...

If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.

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Philosophical Maxims
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
3 weeks 3 days ago
Since it cannot be overlooked by...

Since it cannot be overlooked by the Doctrine of Knowledge that Actual Knowledge does by no means present itself as a Unity, such as is assumed above but as a multiplicity, there is consequently a second task imposed upon it, - that of setting forth the ground of this apparent Multiplicity. It is of course understood that this ground is not to be derived from any outward source, but must be shown to be contained in the essential Nature of Knowledge itself as such; - and that therefore this problem, although apparently two-fold, is yet but one and the same, - namely, to set forth the essential Nature of Knowledge.

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Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
1 week 3 days ago
Rome is the Great Beast of...

Rome is the Great Beast of atheism and materialism, adoring nothing but itself. Israel is the Great Beast of religion. Neither one nor the other is likable. The Great Beast is always repulsive.

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p. 123
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 week 4 days ago
"And the upshot of all this,"...

"And the upshot of all this," so I have been told more than once and by more than one person, "will be simply that all you will succeed in doing will be to drive people to the wildest Catholicism." And I have been accused of being a reactionary and even a Jesuit. Be it so! ...I know very well it is madness to seek to turn the waters of the river back to their source, and that it is only the ignorant who seek to find in the past a remedy for their present ills; but I know too that anyone who fights for any ideal whatever, although his ideal may seem to lie in the past, is driving the world on to the future, and that the only reactionaries are those who find themselves at home in the present. Every supposed restoration of the past is a creation of the future, and if the past which it is sought to restore is a dream, something imperfectly known, so much the better.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
1 month 3 weeks ago
France has done more for even...

France has done more for even English history than England has.

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John Stuart Mill. Michelet.On the writing of English history. Complete Works Vol 20. Page 221.
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
1 month 3 weeks ago
Don't you feel the same way?...

Don't you feel the same way? When I cannot see myself, even though I touch myself, I wonder if I really exist.

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Estelle, discovering that there are no mirrors in Hell, Act 1, sc. 5
Philosophical Maxims
George Santayana
George Santayana
2 weeks 2 days ago
The young man who has not...

The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.

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Ch. 3, P. 57
Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
2 months 1 week ago
Love all men, even your enemies;...

Love all men, even your enemies; love them, not because they are your brothers, but that they may become your brothers. Thus you will ever burn with fraternal love, both for him who is already your brother and for your enemy, that he may by loving become your brother. Even he that does not as yet believe in Christ, love him, and love him with fraternal love. He is not yet thy brother, but love him precisely that he may be thy brother.

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p.436
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
2 months 2 days ago
Once conform, once do what others...

Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul.

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Philosophical Maxims
Richard Rorty
Richard Rorty
1 month 2 weeks ago
Complaints about the social irresponsibility of...

Complaints about the social irresponsibility of the intellectual typically concern the intellectual's tendency to marginalize herself, to move out from one community by interior identification of herself with some other community-for example, another country or historical period. ... It is not clear that those who thus marginalize themselves can be criticized for social irresponsibility. One cannot be irresponsible toward a community of which one does not think of oneself as a member. Otherwise runaway slaves and tunnelers under the Berlin Wall would be irresponsible.

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"Postmodernist bourgeois liberalism," Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (Cambridge: 1991), p. 197
Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
2 weeks 6 days ago
Even if the whole world were...

Even if the whole world were to fall to pieces, the unity of the psyche would never be shattered. And the wider and more numerous the fissures on the surface, the more the unity is strengthened in the depths.

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Civilization in Transition
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
2 months 3 weeks ago
The Autarch maintained his indifferent calm,...

The Autarch maintained his indifferent calm, but a certain lack of certainty was gathering, and he did not like to experience a lack of certainty. He liked nothing which made him aware of limitations. An Autarch should have no limitations, and on Lingane he had none that natural law did not impose.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
1 month 3 weeks ago
We may well be ashamed to...

We may well be ashamed to tell what things we have read or heard in our day. I do not know why my news should be so trivial, - considering what one's dreams and expectations are, why the developments should be so paltry. The news we hear, for the most part, is not news to our genius. It is the stalest repetition.

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p. 491
Philosophical Maxims
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
2 weeks 1 day ago
To imagine that Caesar aspired to...

To imagine that Caesar aspired to do something in the way Alexander did it - and this is what almost all historians have believed - is definitely to give up trying to understand him. Caesar is very nearly the opposite of Alexander. ...[I]t is not merely a universal kingdom that Caesar has in view. His purpose is a deeper one. He wants a Roman empire which does not live on Rome, but on the periphery, on the provinces, and this implies the complete supersession of the City-State. It implies a State in which the most diverse peoples collaborate, in regard to which all feel solidarity.

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Chapter XIV: Who Rules The World?
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
3 weeks 4 days ago
In this choice of inheritance we...

In this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood, binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties, adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections, keeping inseparable and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars.

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Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
1 month 3 weeks ago
I have in this treatise followed...

I have in this treatise followed the mathematical method, if not with all strictness, at least imitatively, not in order, by a display of profundity, to procure a better reception for it, but because I believe such a system to be quite capable of it, and that perfection may in time be obtained by a cleverer hand, if stimulated by this sketch, mathematical investigators of nature should find it not unimportant to treat the metaphysical portion, which anyway cannot be got rid of, as a special fundamental department of general physics, and to bring it into unison with the mathematical doctrine of motion.

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Preface, Tr. Bax, 1883
Philosophical Maxims
Diogenes of Sinope
Diogenes of Sinope
1 month 2 weeks ago
It is not that I am...

It is not that I am mad, it is only that my head is different from yours.

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Stobaeus, iii. 3. 51
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 weeks 6 days ago
All my life, I have lived...

All my life, I have lived with the feeling that I have been kept from my true place. If the expression "metaphysical exile" had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one.

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Philosophical Maxims
Epicurus
Epicurus
2 months 1 week ago
Since it is every man's interest...

Since it is every man's interest to be happy through the whole of life, it is the wisdom of every one to employ philosophy in the search of felicity without delay; and there cannot be a greater folly, than to be always beginning to live.

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Philosophical Maxims
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
1 month 3 weeks ago
[N]o matter how abstract our theories...

[N]o matter how abstract our theories may sound or how consistent our arguments may appear, there are incidents and stories behind them which, at least for ourselves, contain as in a nutshell the full meaning of whatever we have to say.

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Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953-1975
Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
4 weeks ago
When superstition is allowed to perform...

When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.

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Ch. 3, as quoted in Selected Writings (1966) edited by Lester G. Crocker
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
1 month 3 weeks ago
What the English call "comfortable" is...

What the English call "comfortable" is something endless and inexhaustible. Every condition of comfort reveals in turn its discomfort, and these discoveries go on for ever. Hence the new want is not so much a want of those who have it directly, but is created by those who hope to make profit from it.

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S. Dyde, trans. (1896), § 191
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
3 days ago
As the few adepts in such...

As the few adepts in such things well know, universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones. There is so much goodness and ingenuity in a raindrop that an apothecary wouldn't let it go for less than half-a-crown.

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B 33
Philosophical Maxims
Edward Said
Edward Said
1 week ago
The history of other cultures is...

The history of other cultures is non-existent until it erupts in confrontation with the United States.

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Chap 4, Sect 2
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
2 months 2 days ago
How many we know who have...

How many we know who have fled the sweetness of a tranquil life in their homes, among their friends, to seek the horror of uninhabitable deserts; who have flung themselves into humiliation, degradation, and the contempt of the world, and have enjoyed these and even sought them out.

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Ch. 14 (tr. Donald M. Frame)
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
1 month 3 weeks ago
We are spinning our own fates,...

We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. ...Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.

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Ch. 4
Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
2 months 1 week ago
If what the philosophers say be...

If what the philosophers say be true,—that all men's actions proceed from one source; that as they assent from a persuasion that a thing is so, and dissent from a persuasion that it is not, and suspend their judgment from a persuasion that it is uncertain, so likewise they seek a thing from a persuasion that it is for their advantage.

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Book I, ch. 18, 1.
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Buber
Martin Buber
2 weeks 1 day ago
To win a truly great life...

To win a truly great life for the people of Israel, a great peace is necessary, not a fictitious peace, the dwarfish peace that is no more than a feeble intermission, but a true peace with the neighboring peoples, which alone can render possible a common development of this portion of the earth as the vanguard of the awakening Near East.

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"Our Reply" (September 1945), as published in A Land of Two Peoples : Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs (1983) edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr, p. 178
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
1 week ago
You cannot conduct war with equals;...

You cannot conduct war with equals; you cannot have militarism with free born men; you must have slaves, automatons, machines, obedient disciplined creatures, who will move, act, shoot and kill at the command of their superiors. That is preparedness, and nothing else.

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Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
1 month 3 weeks ago
"They would say," he answered, "that...

"They would say," he answered, "that you do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience."

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Ch. 7 : The Pendragon, section 2
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
3 weeks 3 days ago
Equity knows no difference of sex....

Equity knows no difference of sex. In its vocabulary the word man must be understood in a generic, and not in a specific sense.

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Pt. II, Ch. 16 : The Rights of Women
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
1 month 3 weeks ago
It is only by risking our...

It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.

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"Is Life Worth Living?"
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
2 days ago
All they that take....
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Karl Marx
Karl Marx
1 month 3 weeks ago
Consumption is also immediately production, just...

Consumption is also immediately production, just as in nature the consumption of the elements and chemical substances is the production of the plant.

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Introduction, p. 10.
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
1 week 1 day ago
Nature is a structure of evolving...

Nature is a structure of evolving processes. The reality is the process.

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Ch. 4: "The Eighteenth Century", p. 102
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Büchner
Georg Büchner
3 weeks 3 days ago
The state is therefore everyone; the...

The state is therefore everyone; the rules within the state are laws which safeguard the welfare of all and which must originate from the welfare of all.

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Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
1 month 3 weeks ago
Europeans are awakening more and more...

Europeans are awakening more and more to a sense that beasts have rights, in proportion as the strange notion is being gradually overcome and outgrown, that the animal kingdom came into existence solely for the benefit and pleasure of man. This view, with the corollary that non-human living creatures are to be regarded merely as things, is at the root of the rough and altogether reckless treatment of them, which obtains in the West.

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Part III, Ch. VIII, 7, p. 225
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
1 month 3 weeks ago
In any case, if you ever...

In any case, if you ever leave me with a handsome man, do not tell me that you trust me because, let me warn you: that is not what will prevent me from deceiving you, if I want to. On the contrary.

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Jessica to her husband Hugo, Act 3, sc. 5
Philosophical Maxims
Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno
1 month 1 day ago
It is then unnecessary to investigate...

It is then unnecessary to investigate whether there be beyond the heaven Space, Void or Time. For there is a single general space, a single vast immensity which we may freely call Void; in it are innumerable globes like this one on which we live and grow. This space we declare to be infinite, since neither reason, convenience, possibility, sense-perception nor nature assign to it a limit. In it are an infinity of worlds of the same kind as our own.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
1 month 3 weeks ago
In the same year in which...

In the same year in which I began Latin, I made my first commencement in the Greek poet with the Iliad. After I had made some progress in this, my father put Pope's translation into my hands. It was the first English verse I had cared to read, and it became one of the books in which for many years I most delighted: I think I must have read it from twenty to thirty times through. I should not have thought it worth while to mention a taste apparently so natural to boyhood, if I had not, as I think, observed that the keen enjoyment of this brilliant specimen of narrative and versification is not so universal with boys, as I should have expected both à priori and from my individual experience.

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(p. 10)
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
1 week ago
The point I wish to make...

The point I wish to make is that I became aware that we discipline our minds to see only certain aspects of the world; life is complicated, and we need all our wits about us to deal with its complexities. There would be no great point in having second sight or thaumaturgic powers for most of us. But it is worth observing that they can generally be developed where needed.

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p. 240
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
1 month 2 weeks ago
Do not ask who I am...

Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.

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The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), tr. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon)
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
2 months 3 weeks ago
How then to enforce peace? Not...

How then to enforce peace? Not by reason, certainly, nor by education. If a man could not look at the fact of peace and the fact of war and choose the former in preference to the latter, what additional argument could persuade him? What could be more eloquent as a condemnation of war than war itself? What tremendous feat of dialectic could carry with it a tenth the power of a single gutted ship with its ghastly cargo?

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Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
2 months 3 weeks ago
Scientific theories can always be improved...

Scientific theories can always be improved and are improved. That is one of the glories of science. It is the authoritarian view of the Universe that is frozen in stone and cannot be changed, so that once it is wrong, it is wrong forever.

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Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
2 months 1 week ago
Be not swept off your feet...

Be not swept off your feet by the vividness of the impression, but say, "Impression, wait for me a little. Let me see what you are and what you represent. Let me try you."

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Book II, ch. 18, § 24, Reported in Bartlett's Quotations (1919) as "Be not hurried away by excitement, but say, "Semblance, wait for me a little".
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
1 month 3 weeks ago
I assert(1) There is no method...

I assert(1) There is no method of discovering a scientific theory.(2) There is no method of ascertaining the truth [i.e., verification] of a scientific hypothesis...(3) There is no method of ascertaining whether a hypothesis is 'probable', in the sense of the probability calculus.

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Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
2 months 1 week ago
Yes, you see the Trinity if...

Yes, you see the Trinity if you see charity.

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De Trinitate VIII 8,12.
Philosophical Maxims
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