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Novalis
Novalis
2 months 5 days ago
I shall in no time forget...

I shall in no time forget that moment. We felt as if we had had in our souls a clear passing glimpse into this wondrous World.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henri Bergson
Henri Bergson
2 months ago
People talk, indeed, of a "primitive...

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

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Chapter II : Static Religion
Philosophical Maxims
bell hooks
bell hooks
1 month 3 weeks ago
Lying takes the form of mass...

Lying takes the form of mass media creating the myth that feminist movement has completely transformed society, so much so that the politics of patriarchal power have been inverted and that men, particularly white men, just like emasculated black men, have become the victims of dominating women. So, it goes, all men (especially black men) must pull together (as in the Clarence Thomas hearings) to support and reaffirm patriarchal domination. Add to this the widely held assumptions that blacks, other minorities, and white women are taking jobs from white men, and that people are poor and unemployed because they want to be, and it becomes most evident that part of our contemporary crisis is created by a lack of meaningful access to truth.

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Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard
1 month 1 week ago
One may dream of a culture...

One may dream of a culture where everyone bursts into laughter when someone says: this is true, this is real.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Jaspers
Karl Jaspers
1 month 4 weeks ago
We cannot avoid conflict, conflict with...

We cannot avoid conflict, conflict with society, other individuals and with oneself. Conflicts may be the sources of defeat, lost life and a limitation of our potentiality but they may also lead to greater depth of living and the birth of more far-reaching unities, which flourish in the tensions that engender them.

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As quoted in Turning Conflict Into Profit : A Roadmap for Resolving Personal and Organizational Disputes (2005) by Larry Axelrod and Rowland Johnson
Philosophical Maxims
Plato
Plato
4 months 5 days ago
I shall have to test the...

I shall have to test the theory of my father Parmenides, and contend forcibly that after a fashion not-being is and on the other hand in a sense being is not. For unless these statements are either disproved or accepted, no one who speaks about false words, or false opinion whether images or likenesses or imitations or appearances about the arts which have to do with them, can ever help being forced to contradict himself and make himself ridiculous.

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Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
2 months 1 week ago
As for me, I am deeply...

As for me, I am deeply a democrat; this is why I am in no way a socialist. Democracy and socialism cannot go together. You can't have it both ways.

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Notes for a Speech on Socialism (1848).
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
3 months 1 week ago
Young man! Deny yourself satisfaction (of...

Young man! Deny yourself satisfaction (of amusement, of debauchery, of love, etc.), not with the Stoical intention of complete abstinence, but with the refined Epicurean intention of having in view an ever-growing pleasure. This stinginess with the cash of your vital urge makes you definitely richer through the postponement of pleasure, even if you should, for the most part, renounce the indulgence of it until the end of your life. The awareness of having pleasure under your control is, like everything idealistic, more fruitful and more abundant than everything that satisfies the sense through indulgence because it is thereby simultaneously consumed and consequently lost from the aggregate of totality.

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Kant, Immanuel (1996), page 54.
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Browne
Thomas Browne
2 months 1 week ago
Half our days we pass in...

Half our days we pass in the shadow of the earth; and the brother of death exacteth a third part of our lives.

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Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
2 months 4 days ago
The more remote and unreal the...

The more remote and unreal the personal mother is, the more deeply will the son's yearning for her clutch at his soul, awakening that primordial and eternal image of the mother for whose sake everything that embraces, protects, nourishes, and helps assumes maternal form, from the Alma Mater of the university to the personification of cities, countries, sciences and ideals.

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"Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon" (1942) In CW 13: Alchemical Studies P.47
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
3 months 1 week ago
The possession and the exercise of...

The possession and the exercise of political, and among others of electoral, rights, is one of the chief instruments both of moral and of intellectual training for the popular mind; and all governments must be regarded as extremely imperfect, until every one who is required to obey the laws, has a voice, or the prospect of a voice, in their enactment and administration.

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Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform (1859), p. 22
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 months 1 week ago
What potent blood hath modest May!...

What potent blood hath modest May!

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May-Day
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
1 month 2 weeks ago
For me [fiction] is a manner...

For me [fiction] is a manner of philosophizing ... Philosophy may be only a shadow of the reality it tries to grasp, but the novel is altogether more satisfactory. I am almost tempted to say that no philosopher is qualified to do his job unless he is also a novelist ... I would certainly exchange any of the works of Whitehead or Wittgenstein for the novels they ought to have written.

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p. 160-1
Philosophical Maxims
Henri Poincaré
Henri Poincaré
1 day ago
All laws are... deduced from experiment;...

All laws are... deduced from experiment; but to enunciate them, a special language is needful... ordinary language is too poor...This... is one reason why the physicist can not do without mathematics; it furnishes him the only language he can speak. And a well-made language is no indifferent thing;...the analyst, who pursues a purely esthetic aim, helps create, just by that, a language more fit to satisfy the physicist....law springs from experiment, but not immediately. Experiment is individual, the law deduced from it is general; experiment is only approximate, the law is precise...In a word, to get the law from experiment, it is necessary to generalize... But how generalize? ...in this choice what shall guide us?It can only be analogy. ...What has taught us to know the true profound analogies, those the eyes do not see but reason divines?It is the mathematical spirit, which disdains matter to cling only to pure form.

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Philosophical Maxims
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
2 weeks 6 days ago
Only in growth, reform, and change,...

Only in growth, reform, and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found.

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The Wave of the Future
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 month 5 days ago
Headlines are icons, not literature.

Headlines are icons, not literature.

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(p. 5)
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
3 months 2 weeks ago
Rejoice in the things that are...

Rejoice in the things that are present; all else is beyond thee.

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Philosophical Maxims
Isaiah Berlin
Isaiah Berlin
1 month 4 weeks ago
The notion that one can discover...

The notion that one can discover large patterns or regularities in the procession of historical events is naturally attractive to those who are impressed by the success of the natural sciences in classifying, correlating, and above all predicting.

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Philosophical Maxims
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
1 month 2 weeks ago
Rituals are symbolic acts. They represent,...

Rituals are symbolic acts. They represent, and pass on, the values and orders on which a community is based. They bring forth a community without communication; today, however, communication without community prevails.

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Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
3 months 3 weeks 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
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 3 days ago
We should, out of decency, choose...

We should, out of decency, choose for ourselves the moment to disappear.

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Philosophical Maxims
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
2 months 1 week ago
Education to true religion is the...

Education to true religion is the final task of the new education.

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General Nature of New Eduction p. 38
Philosophical Maxims
Theodor Adorno
Theodor Adorno
1 month 3 weeks ago
We cannot think any true thought...

We cannot think any true thought unless we want the true. Thinking is itself an aspect of practice.

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p. 45
Philosophical Maxims
George Santayana
George Santayana
2 months ago
Art like life should be free,...

Art like life should be free, since both are experimental.

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Ch. IX.: Justification of Art
Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
1 month 5 days ago
Never promise more than you can...

Never promise more than you can perform.

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Maxim 528
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
3 months 6 days ago
Every age has its own poetry;...

Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

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"Orphée Noir (Black Orpheus)"
Philosophical Maxims
Theodor Adorno
Theodor Adorno
1 month 3 weeks ago
If philosophy is still necessary, it...

If philosophy is still necessary, it is so only in the way it has been from time immemorial: as critique, as resistance to the expanding heteronomy, even if only as thought's powerless attempt to remain its own master and to convict of untruth, by their own criteria, both a fabricated mythology and a conniving, resigned acquiescence. ... It is incumbent upon philosophy ... to provide a refuge for freedom. Not that there is any hope that it could break the political tendencies that are throttling freedom throughout the world both from within and without and whose violence permeates the very fabric of philosophical argumentation.

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p. 10
Philosophical Maxims
Plato
Plato
4 months 5 days ago
Then the case is the same...

Then the case is the same in all the other arts for the orator and his rhetoric; there is no need to know the truth of the actual matters, but one merely needs to have discovered some device of persuasion which will make one appear to those who do not know to know better than those who know.

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Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
3 months 3 weeks 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
David Hume
David Hume
3 months 1 week ago
In a word, human life is...

In a word, human life is more governed by fortune than by reason; is to be regarded more as a dull pastime than as a serious occupation; and is more influenced by particular humour, than by general principles. Shall we engage ourselves in it with passion and anxiety? It is not worthy of so much concern. Shall we be indifferent about what happens? We lose all the pleasure of the game by our phlegm and carelessness. While we are reasoning concerning life, life is gone; and death, though perhaps they receive him differently, yet treats alike the fool and the philosopher.

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Part I, Essay 18: The Sceptic
Philosophical Maxims
Antonio Negri
Antonio Negri
3 days ago
A specter haunts the world and...

A specter haunts the world and it is the specter of migration.

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213
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
2 months ago
Put up again thy sword into...

Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword. Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and he shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then shall the scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?

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Philosophical Maxims
Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes
1 month 3 weeks ago
The Text is plural. Which is...

The Text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural. The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination.

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Proposition 4
Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
4 months 1 week ago
For legislators make the citizens good...

For legislators make the citizens good by forming habits in them, and this is the wish of every legislator, and those who do not effect it miss their mark, and it is in this that a good constitution differs from a bad one.

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Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
3 months 1 week ago
The necessaries of life occasion the...

The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.

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Chapter II, Part II, Article I, p. 911.
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
1 month 3 days ago
The imagination loves to trifle with...

The imagination loves to trifle with what is not.

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The Sea Fogs
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
3 months 1 week ago
Newton... (after having remarked that geometry...

Newton... (after having remarked that geometry only requires two of the mechanical actions which it postulates, namely, to describe a straight line and a circle) says: geometry is proud of being able to achieve so much while taking so little from extraneous sources. One might say of metaphysics, on the other hand: it stands astonished, that with so much offered it by pure mathematics it can effect so little. In the meantime, this little is something which mathematics indispensably requires in its application to natural science, which, inasmuch as it must here necessarily borrow from metaphysics, need not be ashamed to allow itself to be seen in company with the latter.

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Preface, Tr. Bax (1883) citing Isaac Newton's Principia
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 1 week ago
We used to think that Hitler...

We used to think that Hitler was wicked when he wanted to kill all the Jews, but what Kennedy and Macmillan and others both in the East and in the West pursue policies which will probably lead to killing not only all the Jews but all the rest of us too. They are much more wicked than Hitler and this idea of weapons of mass extermination is utterly and absolutely horrible and it is a thing which no man with one spark of humanity can tolerate and I will not pretend to obey a government which is organising the massacre of the whole of mankind. I will do anything I can to oppose such Governments in any non-violent way that seems likely to be fruitful, and I should exhort all of you to feel the same way. We cannot obey these murderers. They are wicked and abominable. They are the wickedest people that ever lived in the history of man and it is our duty to do what we can.

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On Civil Disobedience, April 15th, 1961
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
1 month 2 weeks ago
We have all experienced the moments...

We have all experienced the moments that William James calls melting moods, when it suddenly becomes perfectly obvious that life is infinitely fascinating. And the insight seems to apply retrospectively. Periods of my life that seemed confusing and dull at the time now seem complex and rather charming. It is almost as if some other person a more powerful and mature individual has taken over my brain. This higher self views my problems and anxieties with kindly detachment, but entirely without pity. Looking at problems through his eyes, I can see I was a fool to worry about them.

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pp. 2-3
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
4 months 4 days ago
The absurd does not liberate...

The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. "Everything is permitted" does not mean that nothing is forbidden.

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Philosophical Maxims
Richard Rorty
Richard Rorty
2 months 4 weeks ago
I think of the course of...

I think of the course of human history as a long, swelling, increasingly polyphonic poem - a poem that leads up to nothing save itself. When the species is extinct, "human nature's total message" will not be a set of propositions, but a set of vocabularies - the more, and the more various, the better.

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Response to Hartshorne in 'Rorty and Pragmatism, The Philosopher Responds to his Critics', p. 33
Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
2 months 4 days ago
Our psychology is ... a science...

Our psychology is ... a science of mere phenomena without any metaphysical implications. [It] Treats all metaphysical claims and assertions as mental phenomena, and regards them as statements about the mind and its structure.

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Psychology and Religion: West and East (1958), p. 476, as cited in Psychotherapy East and West (1961), p. 14
Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
2 months 4 days ago
In allem Chaos ist Kosmos und...

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.

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p. 32 (1981 edition) Originally presented at an Eranos conference.
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 3 days ago
Except for music, everything is a...

Except for music, everything is a lie, even solitude, even ecstasy. Music, in fact, is the one and the other, only better.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
3 months 6 days ago
I construct my memories with my...

I construct my memories with my present. I am lost, abandoned in the present. I try in vain to rejoin the past: I cannot escape.

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Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
1 month 5 days ago
Anyone can hold…

Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm.

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Maxim 358
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
3 months 2 weeks ago
Since the law is good, the...

Since the law is good, the will, which is hostile to it, cannot be good.

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Thesis 87
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay
3 weeks 5 days ago
The highest proof of virtue is...

The highest proof of virtue is to possess boundless power without abusing it.

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The Life and Writings of Addison', The Edinburgh Review (July 1843), quoted in T. B. Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to The Edinburgh Review: A New Edition (1852), p. 706
Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
3 months 3 weeks ago
Beauty is indeed a good gift...

Beauty is indeed a good gift of God; but that the good may not think it a great good, God dispenses it even to the wicked.

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XV, 22
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
2 months 2 weeks ago
He who thinks....
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