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Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
1 month 1 week ago
The purpose of an encyclopedia is...

The purpose of an encyclopedia is to collect knowledge disseminated around the globe; to set forth its general system to the men with whom we live, and transmit it to those who will come after us, so that the work of preceding centuries will not become useless to the centuries to come; and so that our offspring, becoming better instructed, will at the same time become more virtuous and happy, and that we should not die without having rendered a service to the human race in the future years to come.

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Encyclopédie
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
3 months 4 days ago
When you read God's Word, in...

When you read God's Word, in everything you read, continually to say to yourself: It is I to whom it is speaking - this is earnestness, precisely this is earnestness. Not a single one of those to whom the cause of Christianity in the higher sense has been entrusted forgot to urge this again and again as most crucial, as unconditionally the condition if you are to come to see yourself in the mirror.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
2 weeks 2 days ago
The very proclaimers of "America first"...

The very proclaimers of "America first" have long before this betrayed the fundamental principles of real Americanism...the other truly great Americans who aimed to make of this country a haven of refuge, who hoped that all the disinherited and oppressed people in coming to these shores would give character, quality and meaning to the country.

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Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
3 weeks 5 days ago
The radical empiricist onslaught ... provides...

The radical empiricist onslaught ... provides the methodological justification for the debunking of the mind by the intellectuals-a positivism which, in its denial of the transcending elements of Reason, forms the academic counterpart of the socially required behavior.

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p. 13
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Buber
Martin Buber
3 weeks 3 days ago
When we desire to lead men...

When we desire to lead men to God, we must not simply overthrow their idols. In each of these images we must seek to discover what divine quality he who carved it sought.

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p. 117
Philosophical Maxims
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida
1 month 4 weeks ago
Oh. Marx's love for Shakespeare! It...

Oh. Marx's love for Shakespeare! It is well known. Chris Hani shared the same passion. I have just learned this and I like the idea. Even though Marx more often quotes Timon of Athens, the Manifesto seems to evoke or convoke, right from the start, the first coming of the silent ghost, the apparition of the spirit that does not answer, on those ramparts of Elsinore which is then the old Europe.

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Injunctions of Marx
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
2 months 5 days ago
Faith consists…

Faith consists in believing what reason cannot.

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"The Flood", 1764
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 4 days ago
Thank you for your letter and...

Thank you for your letter and for the enclosure which I return herewith. I have been wondering whether there is any means of preventing the confusion between you and me, and I half-thought that we might write a joint letter to The Times in the following terms: Sir, To prevent the continuation of confusions which frequently occur, we beg to state that neither of us is the other. Do you think this would be a good plan?

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Letter to Lord Russell of Liverpool, February 18, 1959
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
2 months 3 days ago
Why did it occur to anyone...

Why did it occur to anyone to believe in only one God? And conversely why did it ever occur to anyone to believe in many gods? To both these questions we must return the same answer: Because that is how the human mind happens to work. For the human mind is both diverse and simple, simultaneously many and one. We have an immediate perception of our own diversity and of that of the outside world. And at the same time we have immediate perceptions of our own oneness.

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"One and Many," p. 12
Philosophical Maxims
Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek
6 months 1 week ago
The symptom is automatically dissolved

Precisely as an enigma, the symptom, so to speak, announces its dissolution through interpretation: the aim of psychoanalysis is to re-establish the broken network of communication by allowing the patient to verbalize the meaning of his symptom: through this verbalization the symptom is automatically dissolved. This, then is the basic point: in its very construction, the symptom implies the field of the big Other as consistent, complete, because its very function is an appeal to the Other which contains its meaning.

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Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
3 months 6 days ago
When someone hides something behind a...
When someone hides something behind a bush and looks for it again in the same place and finds it there as well, there is not much to praise in such seeking and finding. Yet this is how matters stand regarding seeking and finding "truth" within the realm of reason. If I make up the definition of a mammal, and then, after inspecting a camel, declare "look, a mammal' I have indeed brought a truth to light in this way, but it is a truth of limited value. That is to say, it is a thoroughly anthropomorphic truth which contains not a single point which would be "true in itself" or really and universally valid apart from man. At bottom, what the investigator of such truths is seeking is only the metamorphosis of the world into man.
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Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
3 days ago
For us, with the rule of...

For us, with the rule of right and wrong given us by Christ, there is nothing for which we have no standard. And there is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.

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Bk. XIV, ch. 18
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
2 months 3 days ago
Surplus value is exactly equal to...

Surplus value is exactly equal to surplus labour; the increase of the one [is] exactly measured by the diminution of necessary labour.

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Notebook III, The Chapter on Capital, p. 259.
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Jaspers
Karl Jaspers
3 weeks 3 days ago
No one is guiltless...But no one...

No one is guiltless...But no one is beyond the pale of human existence, provided he pays for his guilt.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 day ago
Environments are invisible. Their groundrules, pervasive...

Environments are invisible. Their groundrules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception.

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Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
2 weeks 3 days ago
Religion is the vision of something...

Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind and within the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realized; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.

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Ch. 12: "Religion and Science", pp. 267-268
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard
6 days ago
For it is with the same...

For it is with the same imperialism that present-day simulators try to make the real, all of the real, coincide with their simulation models.

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"The Precession of Simulacra," pp. 1-2
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 3 days ago
Revolutions never go backwards.

Revolutions never go backwards.

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p. 214
Philosophical Maxims
Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus
2 months 1 week ago
You venerate the saints, and you...

You venerate the saints, and you take pleasure in touching their relics. But you disregard their greatest legacy, the example of a blameless life. No devotion is more pleasing to Mary than the imitation of Mary's humility. No devotion is more acceptable and proper to the saints than striving to imitate their virtues.

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The Erasmus Reader (1990), p. 144.
Philosophical Maxims
Plato
Plato
3 months 1 day ago
The shoemaker, for example, uses...

Socrates: The shoemaker, for example, uses a square tool, and a circular tool, and other tools for cutting?

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Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
2 months 2 days ago
Dostoevsky once wrote: "If God did...

Dostoevsky once wrote: "If God did not exist, everything would be permitted"; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself. He discovers forthwith, that he is without excuse.

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pp. 33-34
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 3 days ago
The word liberty in the mouth...

The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.

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February 12, 1851; cf. the remark of John Wilkes about Samuel Johnson, "Liberty is as ridiculous in his mouth as Religion in mine" (20 March 1778), quoted in Boswell's Life of Johnson, 1791
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 3 days ago
The soul active sees absolute truth;...

The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates.

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par. 17
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 day ago
The most human thing about us...

The most human thing about us is our technology.

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Man and the future of organizations, Volume 5, School of Business Administration, Georgia State University, 1974, p. 19
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 3 days ago
Always put the best interpretation on...

Always put the best interpretation on a tenet. Why not on Christianity, wholesome, sweet, and poetic? It is the record of a pure and holy soul, humble, absolutely disinterested, a trutn-speaker, and bent on serving, teaching, and uplifting men. Christianity taught the capacity, the element, to Jove the All-perfect without a stingy bargain for personal happiness. It taught that to love him was happiness,-to love him in other's virtues.

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Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
Just now
Even a single hair casts its...

Even a single hair casts its shadow.

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Maxim 228
Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
2 months 5 days ago
New opinions are always suspected, and...

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.

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Dedicatory epistle, as quoted in Fred R Shapiro (2006). The Yale Book of Quotations. Yale University Press. p. 468. ISBN 0-300-10798-6.
Philosophical Maxims
Gottfried Leibniz
Gottfried Leibniz
2 months 1 week ago
Thus there is nothing waste, nothing...

Thus there is nothing waste, nothing dead in the universe; no chaos, no confusions, save in appearence. We might compare this to the appearence of a pond in the distance, where we can see the confused movement and swarming of the fish, without distinguishing the fish themselves.Thus we are that each living body has a dominante entelechy, which in case of an animal is the soul, but the members of this living body are full of other living things, plants and animals, of which each has in turn ita dominant entelechy or soul.

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Monadology (69-70).
Philosophical Maxims
Max Scheler
Max Scheler
3 weeks 2 days ago
In the ancient notion of love,...

In the ancient notion of love, on the other hand, there is an element of anxiety. The noble fears the descent to the less noble, is afraid of being infected and pulled down. The "sage" of antiquity does not have the same firmness, the same inner certainty of himself and his own value, as the genius and hero of Christian love.

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L. Coser, trans. (1961), p. 92
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
1 month 3 days ago
Evil perpetually tends to disappear. Part...

Evil perpetually tends to disappear.

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Part I, Ch. 2 : The Evanescence of Evil, § 2
Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
2 months 4 days ago
If two men who were friends...

If two men who were friends in their youth meet again when they are old, after being separated for a life-time, the chief feeling they will have at the sight of each other will be one of complete disappointment at life as a whole; because their thoughts will be carried back to that earlier time when life seemed so fair as it lay spread out before them in the rosy light of dawn, promised so much - and then performed so little.

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"On the Sufferings of the World"
Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
1 month 2 weeks ago
Cut not fire with a sword....

Cut not fire with a sword. Symbol 9 Variant translation: Poke not the fire with a sword.

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As quoted in Short Sayings of Great Men: With Historical and Explanatory Notes‎ (1882) by Samuel Arthur Bent, p. 455
Philosophical Maxims
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
1 month 3 days ago
Among other men Reason awakes in...

Among other men Reason awakes in another form-as the impulse towards Personal Freedom, which, although it never opposes the mild rule of the inward Instinct which it loves, yet rises in rebellion against the pressure of a stranger Instinct which has usurped its rights; and in this awakening it breaks the chains,-not of Reason as Instinct itself, but of the Instinct of foreign natures clothed in the garb of external power.

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p. 8
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 4 days ago
I must before I die, find...

I must before I die, find some way to say the essential thing that is in me, that I have never said yet - a thing that is not love or hate or pity or scorn, but the very breath of life, fierce and coming from far away, bringing into human life the vastness and fearful passionless force of non-human things...

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p. 261
Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
1 month 1 week ago
If there is one realm in...

If there is one realm in which it is essential to be sublime, it is in wickedness. You spit on a petty thief, but you can't deny a kind of respect for the great criminal.

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Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
2 weeks 6 days ago
Faith feels itself secure neither with...

Faith feels itself secure neither with universal consent, nor with tradition, nor with authority. It seeks support of its enemy, reason.

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Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
2 weeks 3 days ago
Error is the price we pay...

Error is the price we pay for progress.

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Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
2 months 2 weeks ago
Remember that you ought to behave...

Remember that you ought to behave in life as you would at a banquet. As something is being passed around it comes to you; stretch out your hand, take a portion of it politely. It passes on; do not detain it. Or it has not come to you yet; do not project your desire to meet it, but wait until it comes in front of you. So act toward children, so toward a wife, so toward office, so toward wealth.

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(15).
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
6 days ago
Truth is the cry....
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Main Content / General
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
2 weeks 6 days ago
The wretched consciousness shrinks from it...

The wretched consciousness shrinks from it own annihilation, and just as an animal spirit newly severed from the womb of the world, finds itself confronted with the world and knows itself distinct from it, so consciousness must needs desire to possess another life than that of the world itself.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 week 1 day ago
There's no objective morality....

There's no objective morality, but that's not the real point. It's not the point that morality has to somehow be a stone, or something that can be touched. 

The options that are available to choose are determined to a point, and this is the objective aspect of morality, ethics, goodness, fairness, justice. 

The subjective aspect can still remain subjective, but that doesn't mean goodness is relative.....at all. The measure of a man is a man.

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Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
1 week 6 days ago
Once the good man was dead,...

Once the good man was dead, one wore his hat and another his sword as he had worn them, a third had himself barbered as he had, a fourth walked as he did, but the honest man that he was - nobody any longer wanted to be that.

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C 36
Philosophical Maxims
Parmenides
Parmenides
1 month 2 weeks ago
For it is the same thing...

For it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be.

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Frag. B 3, quoted by Plotinus, Enneads V, i.8
Philosophical Maxims
Max Scheler
Max Scheler
3 weeks 2 days ago
When we cannot obtain a thing,...

When we cannot obtain a thing, we comfort ourselves with the reassuring thought that it is not worth nearly as much as we believed.

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L. Coser, trans. (1973), p. 73
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Schlegel
Friedrich Schlegel
1 month 4 days ago
Wit is the appearance, the external...

Wit is the appearance, the external flash of imagination. Thus its divinity, and the witty character of mysticism.

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Aphorism 26, as translated in Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms (1968)
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 3 days ago
Poetry must be new as foam,...

Poetry must be new as foam, and as old as the rock.

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March 1845
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
2 months 4 days ago
A pupil from whom nothing is...

A pupil from whom nothing is ever demanded which he cannot do never does all he can.

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(p. 32)
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
2 months 5 days ago
The man, who in a fit….

The man, who in a fit of melancholy, kills himself today, would have wished to live had he waited a week.

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"Cato", 1764
Philosophical Maxims
Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Bakunin
1 month 1 day ago
Equality, proclaimed in 1793, has been...

Equality, proclaimed in 1793, has been one of the greatest conquests of the French Revolution. Despite all the reactions which have arrived since, that great principle has triumphed in the political economy of Europe. In the most advanced countries, it is called the equality of politic rights; in the other countries, civil equality - equality before the law. No country in Europe would dare to openly proclaim today the principle of political inequality. But the history of the revolution itself and that of the seventy-five years that have passed since, we prove that political equality without economic equality is a lie. You would proclaim in vain the equality of political rights, as long as society remains split by its economic organization into socially different layers - that equality will be nothing but a fiction.

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Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
2 months 2 weeks ago
Be bold to look towards God...

Be bold to look towards God and say, "Use me henceforward for whatever you want; I am of one mind with you; I am yours; I refuse nothing that seems good to you; lead me where you will; wrap me in what clothes you will."

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Book II, ch. 16, 42
Philosophical Maxims
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