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Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel
1 month 3 weeks ago
All of us, I believe, are...

All of us, I believe, are fortunate to have been born.

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"Death" (1970), p. 7.
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
3 days ago
Wealth is a great sin in...

Wealth is a great sin in the eyes of God. Poverty is a great sin in the eyes of man.

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p. 86
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
1 month 4 days ago
It is not, what a lawyer...

It is not, what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice, tell me I ought to do.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 3 days ago
I am not much an advocate...

I am not much an advocate for travelling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home? I have been quoted as saying captious things about travel; but I mean to do justice. .... He that does not fill a place at home, cannot abroad. He only goes there to hide his insignificance in a larger crowd. You do not think you will find anything there which you have not seen at home? The stuff of all countries is just the same. Do you suppose there is any country where they do not scald milk-pans, and swaddle the infants, and burn the brushwood, and broil the fish? What is true anywhere is true everywhere. And let him go where he will, he can only find so much beauty or worth as he carries.

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Culture
Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
2 weeks 5 days ago
An imaginary perfection is automatically at...

An imaginary perfection is automatically at the same level as I who imagine it - neither higher nor lower.

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p. 240
Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
1 day ago
The loss which is unknown is...

The loss which is unknown is no loss at all.

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Maxim 38
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
1 month 4 days ago
It is reconciled in policy; and...

It is reconciled in policy; and politics ought to be adjusted, not to human reasonings, but to human nature; of which the reason is but a part; and by no means the greatest part.

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Observations on a Late Publication on the Present State of the Nation (1769), page 78
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
2 months 1 week ago
Great abuses in the world are...

Great abuses in the world are begotten, or, to speak more boldly, all the abuses of the world are begotten, by our being taught to be afraid of professing our ignorance, and that we are bound to accept all things we are not able to refute: we speak of all things by precepts and decisions. The style at Rome was that even that which a witness deposed to having seen with his own eyes, and what a judge determined with his most certain knowledge, was couched in this form of speaking: "it seems to me." They make me hate things that are likely, when they would impose them upon me as infallible.

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Ch. 12, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Carew Hazlitt, 1877
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
2 months 4 days ago
I am here to plead his...

I am here to plead his cause with you. I plead not for his life, but for his character - his immortal life; and so it becomes your cause wholly, and is not his in the least. Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified; this morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung. These are the two ends of a chain which is not without its links. He is not Old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light.

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Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
2 months 1 week ago
This great increase of the quantity...

This great increase of the quantity of work which, in consequence of the division of labour, the same number of people are capable of performing, is owing to three different circumstances; first, to the increase of dexterity in every particular workman; secondly, to the saving of the time which is commonly lost in passing from one species of work to another; and lastly, to the invention of a great number of machines which facilitate and abridge labour, and enable one man to do the work of many.

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Chapter I
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 4 days ago
Just as we teach children to...

Just as we teach children to avoid being destroyed by motor cars if they can, so we should teach them to avoid being destroyed by cruel fanatics, and to this end we should seek to produce independence of mind, somewhat sceptical and wholly scientific, and to preserve, as far as possible, the instinctive joy of life that is natural to healthy children. This is the task of a liberal education: to give a sense of the value of things other than domination, to help create wise citizens of a free community, and through the combination of citizenship with liberty in individual creativeness to enable men to give to human life that splendour which some few have shown that it can achieve.

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Ch. 18: The Taming of Power
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
1 month 3 days ago
A subject interests me and holds...

A subject interests me and holds my attention only so long as it presents me with difficulties, only so long as I am at odds with it and have, as it were, to struggle with it; but once I have mastered it I hurry on to something else, to a new subject; for my interest is not confined to any particular field or subject; it extends to everything human. This does not mean that I am an intellectual miser or egoist, who amasses knowledge for himself alone; by no means! What I do and think for myself, I must also think and do for others. But I feel the need of instructing others in a subject only so long as, while instructing others, I am also instructing myself.

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Lecture I, , R. Manheim, trans. (1967), p. 2
Philosophical Maxims
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
3 weeks 3 days ago
The characteristic activity of science is...

The characteristic activity of science is not construction, but induction. The more often something has occurred in the past, the more certain that it will in all the future. Knowledge relates solely to what is and to its recurrence. New forms of being, especially those arising from the historical activity of man, lie beyond empiricist theory. Thoughts which are not simply carried over from the prevailing pattern of consciousness, but arise from the aims and resolves of the individual, in short, all historical tendencies that reach beyond what is present and recurrent, do not belong to the domain of science.

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p. 144.
Philosophical Maxims
Zoroaster
Zoroaster
1 month 3 weeks ago
For a thinking man is where...

For a thinking man is where Wisdom is at home.

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Ahunuvaiti Gatha; Yasna 30, 9.
Philosophical Maxims
Niccolò Machiavelli
Niccolò Machiavelli
2 months 1 week ago
I believe that it is possible...

I believe that it is possible for one to praise, without concern, any man after he is dead since every reason and supervision for adulation is lacking.

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Book 1
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
2 months 3 weeks ago
The institutions of the Ruler are...

The institutions of the Ruler are rooted in his own character and conduct, and sufficient attestation of them is given by the masses of the people. He examines them by comparison with those of the three kings, and finds them without mistake. He sets them up before Heaven and Earth, and finds nothing in them contrary to their mode of operation. He presents himself with them before spiritual beings, and no doubts about them arise. He is prepared to wait for the rise of a sage a hundred ages after, and has no misgivings. His presenting himself with his institutions before spiritual beings, without any doubts arising about them, shows that he knows Heaven. His being prepared, without any misgivings, to wait for the rise of a sage a hundred ages after, shows that he knows men.

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Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
2 months 2 weeks ago
The members of Christ, many though...

The members of Christ, many though they be, are bound to one another by the ties of charity and peace under the one Head, who is our Saviour Himself, and form one man. Often their voice is heard in the Psalms as the voice of one man; the cry of one is as the cry of all, for all are one in One.

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p.430
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
2 weeks 6 days ago
But as far as our own...

But as far as our own world is concerned, its gradual leveling-down - or, we might say, its death - appears to be proved. And how will this process affect the fate of our spirit? Will it wane with the degradation of the energy of our world and return to unconsciousness, or will it grow according as the utilizable energy diminishes and by virtue of the very efforts that it makes to retard this degradation and to dominate Nature? - for this it is that constitutes the life of the spirit. May it be that consciousness and its extended support are two powers in contraposition, the one growing at the expense of the other?

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 weeks 1 day ago
What I know wreaks havoc upon...

What I know wreaks havoc upon what I want.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham
2 months 6 days ago
Lawyers are the only persons in...

Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.

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Attributed to Bentham in The Dictionary of Humorous Quotations‎ (1949) by Evan Esar, p. 29; no earlier sources for this have been located.
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
2 months 3 days ago
Tell him to live by yes...

Tell him to live by yes and no - yes to everything good, no to everything bad.

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As quoted in The Thought and Character of William James (1935) by Ralph Barton Perry, Vol. II, ch. 91
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
2 months 4 days ago
The goal to be reached is...

The goal to be reached is the mind's insight into what knowing is. Impatience asks for the impossible, wants to reach the goal without the means of getting there. The length of the journey has to be borne with, for every moment is necessary, ... because by nothing less could that all-pervading mind ever manage to become conscious of what itself is - for that reason, the individual mind, in the nature of the case, cannot expect by less toil to grasp what its own substance contains.

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Preface (J. B. Baillie translation), § 29
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas
2 months 3 weeks ago
The perfection of the effect demonstrates...

The perfection of the effect demonstrates the perfection of the cause, for a greater power brings about a more perfect effect. But God is the most perfect agent. Therefore, things created by Him obtain perfection from Him. So, to detract from the perfection of creatures is to detract from the perfection of divine power.

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III, 69, 15
Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
1 month 1 week ago
Good music is very close to...

Good music is very close to primitive language.

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"Correspondence of Ideas with the Motion of Organs"
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
2 months 5 days ago
What is tolerance…

What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly - that is the first law of nature.

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"Tolerance", 1764
Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
2 months 5 days ago
Suicide may also be regarded as...

Suicide may also be regarded as an experiment - a question which man puts to Nature, trying to force her to answer. The question is this: What change will death produce in a man's existence and in his insight into the nature of things? It is a clumsy experiment to make; for it involves the destruction of the very consciousness which puts the question and awaits the answer.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 13, § 160
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
3 months 6 days ago
If each us had a different...
If each us had a different kind of sense perception — if we could only perceive things now as a bird, now as a worm, now as a plant, or if one of us saw a stimulus as red, another as blue, while a third even heard the same stimulus as a sound, then no one would speak of such a regularity of nature, rather, nature would be grasped only as a creation which is subjective in the highest degree. After all, what is a law of nature as such for us? We are not acquainted with it in itself, but only with its effects, which means in its relation to other laws of nature which, in turn, are known to us only as sums of relations. Therefore all these relations always refer again to others and are thoroughly incomprehensible to us in their essence.
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Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
2 months 4 days ago
The application of algebra to geometry......

The application of algebra to geometry... far more than any of his metaphysical speculations, has immortalized the name of Descartes, and constitutes the greatest single step ever made in the progress of the exact sciences.

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An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (1865) as quoted in 5th ed. (1878) p. 617.
Philosophical Maxims
Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale
2 weeks 1 day ago
Jesus Christ raised women above the...

Jesus Christ raised women above the condition of mere slaves, mere ministers to the passions of the man, raised them by His sympathy, to be Ministers of God. He gave them moral activity. But the Age, the World, Humanity, must give them the means to exercise this moral activity, must give them intellectual cultivation, spheres of action.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine
2 months 5 days ago
And the final event to himself...

And the final event to himself has been, that, as he rose like a rocket, he fell like the stick.

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On Edmund Burke's reactions to the American and French revolutions.
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton
1 week ago
I wish we could derive the...

I wish we could derive the rest of the phenomena of nature by the same kind of reasoning from mechanical principles; for I am induced by many reasons to suspect that they may all depend upon certain forces by which the particles of bodies, by some causes hitherto unknown, are either mutually impelled towards each other, and cohere in regular figures, or are repelled and recede from each other; which forces being unknown, philosophers have hitherto attempted the search of nature in vain; but I hope the principles here laid down will afford some light either to that or some truer method of philosophy.

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Preface
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
2 weeks 2 days ago
This is a strange -- and...

This is a strange -- and rather alarming -- realisation. For it clearly implies that masturbation is one of our highest faculties that human beings have developed. Many animals masturbate -- but never without the presence of another animal, or some similar stimulus. A human being can masturbate in an empty room: a triumph of pure imagination.

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p. 90
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
1 month 3 days ago
That the uneducated and the ill-educated...

That the uneducated and the ill-educated should think the hypothesis that all races of beings, man inclusive, may in process of time have been evolved from the simplest monad, a ludicrous one, is not to be wondered at. But for the physiologist, who knows that every individual being is so evolved-who knows, further, that in their earliest condition the germs of all plants and animals whatever are so similar, "that there is no appreciable distinction amongst them, which would enable it to be determined whether a particular molecule is the germ of a Conferva or of an Oak, of a Zoophyte or of a Man";-for him to make a difficulty of the matter is inexcusable.

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Spencer here references William Benjamin Carpenter, Principles of Comparative Physiology see p. 473
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 day ago
Blast Sputnik for closing terrestrial nature...

Blast Sputnik for closing terrestrial nature in a man-made environment that transfers the evolutionary process from biology to technology.

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(p. 85)
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
2 months 2 days ago
Put in a nut-shell, my thesis...

Put in a nut-shell, my thesis amounts to this. The repeated attempts made by Rudolf Carnap to show that the demarcation between science and metaphysics coincides with that between sense and nonsense have failed. The reason is that the positivistic concept of 'meaning' or 'sense' (or of verifiability, or of inductive confirmability, etc.) is inappropriate for achieving this demarcation - simply because metaphysics need not be meaningless even though it is not science. In all its variations demarcation by meaninglessness has tended to be at the same time too narrow and too wide: as against all intentions and all claims, it has tended to exclude scientific theories as meaningless, while failing to exclude even that part of metaphysics which is known as 'rational theology'.

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Ch 11. "The Demarcation between Science and Metaphysics." (Summary, p. 253)
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 4 days ago
You don't choose universality....
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Main Content / General
John Dewey
John Dewey
3 weeks 4 days ago
In the late eighteenth and the...

In the late eighteenth and the greater part of the nineteenth centuries appeared the first marked cultural shift in the attitude taken toward change. Under the names of indefinite perfectibility, progress, and evolution, the movement of things in the universe itself and of the universe as a whole began to take on a beneficent instead of hateful aspect.

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Philosophical Maxims
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
2 weeks 2 days ago
The smartphone seems to be a...

The smartphone seems to be a playground, but it is a digital panopticon.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
2 months 5 days ago
He that denies any of the...

He that denies any of the doctrines that Christ has delivered, to be true, denies him to be sent from God, and consequently to be the Messiah; and so ceases to be a Christian.

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§ 232
Philosophical Maxims
Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas
1 month 4 weeks ago
As medium for reaching understanding, speech...

As medium for reaching understanding, speech acts serve: a) to establish and renew interpersonal relations, whereby the speaker takes up a relation to something in the world of legitimate social orders; b) to represent states and events, whereby the speaker takes up a relation to something in the world of existing states of affairs; c) to manifest experiences that is, to represent oneself- whereby the speaker takes up a relation to something in the subjective world to which he has privileged access.

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p. 308
Philosophical Maxims
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
3 weeks 3 days ago
Answers determined by the social division...

Answers determined by the social division of labor become truth as such.

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p. 50: Describing the pragmatist view
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
2 weeks 2 days ago
A child might be overawed by...

A child might be overawed by a great city, but a civil engineer knows that he might demolish it and rebuild it himself. Husserl's philosophy has the same aim: to show us that, although we may have been thrust into this world without a 'by your leave,' we are mistaken to assume that it exists independently of us. It is true that reality exists apart from us; but what we mistake for the world is actually a world constituted by us, selected from an infinitely complex reality.

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p. 63
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
3 months 4 days ago
If one prefers to have little...

If one prefers to have little with blessing, to have truth with concern, to suffer instead of exulting over imagined victories, then one presumably will not be disposed to praise the knowledge, as if what it bestows were at all proportionate to the trouble it causes, although one would not therefore deny that through its pain it educates a person, if he is honest enough to want to be educated rather than to be deceived, out of the multiplicity to seek the one, out of abundance to seek the one thing needful, as this is plainly and simply offered precisely according to the need for it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Theodor Adorno
Theodor Adorno
2 weeks 5 days ago
In America I was liberated from...

In America I was liberated from a certain naïve belief in culture and attained the capacity to see culture from the outside. To clarify the point: in spite of all social criticism and all consciousness of the primacy of economic factors, the fundamental importance of the mind-"Geist"-was quasi a dogma self-evident to me from the very beginning. The fact that this was not a foregone conclusion, I learned in America, where no reverential silence in the presence of everything intellectual prevailed.

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as quoted in The Origin of Negative Dialectics (Free Press: 1977), p. 187
Philosophical Maxims
Democritus
Democritus
1 month 3 weeks ago
The enmity of one's kindred is...

The enmity of one's kindred is far more bitter than the enmity of strangers.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 3 days ago
I trust a good deal to...

I trust a good deal to common fame, as we all must. If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.

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February 1855
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
2 months 3 weeks ago
It is more shameful to distrust...

It is more shameful to distrust our friends than to be deceived by them.

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Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
2 weeks 2 days ago
These are the visionary, mystical moments,...

These are the visionary, mystical moments, when a man 'completes his partial mind'. His everyday conscious self is only a small part of the mind, like the final crescent of the moon. In moments of crisis, the full moon suddenly appears.

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p. 156
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 day ago
The sculptural qualities of the image...

The sculptural qualities of the image dim down the purely personal identity.

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(p. 369)
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 day ago
One touch of nature makes the...

One touch of nature makes the whole world tin.

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Philosophical Maxims
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