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Jesus
Jesus
2 weeks 3 days ago
Suffer it to be so now:...

Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness.

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3:15 (KJV) Said to John the Baptist.
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
1 month 2 weeks ago
This is not for me, I...

This is not for me, I want an entirely rural spot.

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C 1920, expressing displeasure at a village that had a park with a fountain.
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
1 month 3 weeks ago
In the course of instruction which...

In the course of instruction which I have partially retraced, the point most superficially apparent is the great effort to give, during the years of childhood an amount of knowledge in what are considered the higher branches of education, which is seldom acquired (if acquired at all) until the age of manhood.

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(p. 30)
Philosophical Maxims
Hilary Putnam
Hilary Putnam
2 days ago
To sum up: we have seen...

To sum up: we have seen that of the three notions of 'partial interpretation' discussed, each is either unsuitable for Carnap's purposes (starting with observation terms), or incompatible with a rather minimal scientific realism; and, in addition, the second notion depends upon gross and misleading changes in our use of language. Thus in none of these senses is 'a partially interpreted calculus in which only the observation terms are directly interpreted' an acceptable model for a scientific theory.

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"What theories are not"
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
1 month 3 weeks ago
How shall we define a god?...

How shall we define a god? Expressed in psychological terms (which are primary-there is no getting behind them) a god is something that gives us the peculiar kind of feeling which Professor Otto has called "numinous". Numinous feelings are the original god-stuff from which the theory-making mind extracts the individualised gods of the pantheon.

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"Meditation on the Moon"
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
3 weeks 3 days ago
The universal basis of co-operation is...

The universal basis of co-operation is the proportioning of benefits received to services rendered.

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Ch. 8, The Sociological View
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
2 weeks 3 days ago
My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even...

My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death: tarry ye here, and watch with me.

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26:38 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
2 weeks 3 days ago
A new commandment I give unto...

A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.

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13:34-35 KJV
Philosophical Maxims
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal
2 months 1 week ago
The mind must not be forced;...

The mind must not be forced; artificial and constrained manners fill it with foolish presumption, through unnatural elevation and vain and ridiculous inflation, instead of solid and vigorous nutriment.

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Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
2 months 3 weeks ago
The truth is a trap...

The truth is a trap: you can not get it without it getting you; you cannot get the truth by capturing it, only by its capturing you.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 weeks 6 days ago
The worst is not ennui nor...

The worst is not ennui nor despair but their encounter, their collision. To be crushed between the two!

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Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
2 weeks 3 days ago
What is exalted among men is...

What is exalted among men is an abomination in the sight of God.

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16:15 ESV
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
1 month 3 weeks ago
The believers in the non-natural character...

The believers in the non-natural character of sudden conversion have had practically to admit that there is no unmistakable class-mark distinctive of all true converts. The super-normal incidents, such as voices and visions and overpowering impressions of the meaning of suddenly presented scripture texts, the melting emotions and tumultuous affections connected with the crisis of change, may all come by way of nature, or worse still, be counterfeited by Satan. The real witness of the spirit to the second birth is to be found only in the disposition of the genuine child of God, the permanently patient heart, the love of self eradicated. And this, it has to be admitted, is also found in those who pass no crisis, and may even be found outside of Christianity altogether.

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Lecture X, "Conversion, concluded"
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 week 4 days ago
A terrible thing is intelligence. It...

A terrible thing is intelligence. It tends to death as memory tends to stability. The living, the absolutely unstable, the absolutely individual, is strictly unintelligible. Logic tends to reduce everything to identities and genera, to each representation having no more than one self-same content in whatever place, time or relation it may occur to us. And there is nothing that remains for two successive moments of its existence. My idea of God is different each time that I conceive it. Identity, which is death, is the goal of the intellect. The mind seeks what is dead, for what is living escapes it; it seeks to congeal the flowing stream in blocks of ice; it seeks to arrest it. In order to analyze a body it is necessary to extenuate or destroy it. In order to understand anything it is necessary to kill it, to lay it out rigid in the mind.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 weeks 6 days ago
The only profound thinkers are the...

The only profound thinkers are the ones who do not suffer from a sense of the ridiculous.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
3 weeks 3 days ago
Demonstrating is therefore only the means...

Demonstrating is therefore only the means through which I strip my thought of the form of "mine-ness" so that the other person may recognize it as his own.

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Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), p. 66
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
1 month 3 weeks ago
The process of philosophizing, to my...

The process of philosophizing, to my mind, consists mainly in passing from those obvious, vague, ambiguous things, that we feel quite sure of, to something precise, clear, definite, which by reflection and analysis we find is involved in the vague thing that we start from, and is, so to speak, the real truth of which that vague thing is a sort of shadow.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Browne
Thomas Browne
1 month ago
A little water makes a sea,...

A little water makes a sea, a small puff of wind a Tempest.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 weeks 6 days ago
For a long while I have...

For a long while I have lived with the notion that I was the most normal being that ever existed. This notion gave me the taste, even the passion for being unproductive: what was the use of being prized in a world inhabited by madmen, a world mired in mania and stupidity? For whom was one to bother, and to what end? It remains to be seen if I have quite freed myself from this certitude, salvation in the absolute, ruin in the immediate.

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Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
1 week ago
I could see clearly that this...

I could see clearly that this problem could only be solved on the individual and personal level; political revolt is irrelevant. Both Camus and Sartre had been neatly hog-tied by their earlier radicalism. Camus came to see that rebellion is a political roundabout that revolves back to the same old tyranny; too ashamed to admit that he had outgrown his leftism, he found himself in an intellectual cul-de-sac. Sartre accused Camus of being a reactionary; but he paid for his own refusal to reexamine his political convictions by congealing into a grotesque attitude of permanent indignation, shaking his fist at some abstract Authority. Where politics is concerned, he seemed determined to be guided by his emotions.

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p. 101
Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
4 weeks 1 day ago
Poetry must have something in it...

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.

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Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
1 week ago
Art is thought, and thought only...

Art is thought, and thought only gives the world an appearance of order to anyone weak enough to be convinced by its show.

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Chapter one, The Country of the Blind
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1 month 3 weeks ago
Society undergoes continual changes; it is...

Society undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is Christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For everything that is given something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet; he has a fine Geneva watch, but cannot tell the hour by the sun.

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p. 243
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
3 weeks 3 days ago
Every cause produces more than one...

Every cause produces more than one effect.

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On Progress: Its Law and Cause
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
2 months 2 weeks ago
Better a diamond with a flaw...

Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1 month 3 weeks ago
'Tis the good reader that makes...

Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear.

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Success
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
1 month 3 weeks ago
I think people who are unhappy...

I think people who are unhappy are always proud of being so, and therefore do not like to be told that there is nothing grand about their unhappiness. A man who is melancholy because lack of exercise has upset his liver always believes that it is the loss of God, or the menace of Bolshevism, or some such dignified cause that makes him sad. When you tell people that happiness is a simple matter, they get annoyed with you.

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Letter to W. W. Norton, 17 February, 1931
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
3 weeks 4 days ago
Magnanimity in politics is not seldom...

Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.

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Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
2 months 1 week ago
Let us rejoice and give thanks....

Let us rejoice and give thanks. Not only are we become Christians, but we are become Christ. My brothers, do you understand the grace of God that is given us? Wonder, rejoice, for we are made Christ! If He is the Head, and we the members, then together He and we are the whole man.... This would be foolish pride on our part, were it not a gift of his bounty. But this is what He promised by the mouth of the Apostle: You are the body of Christ, and severally His members.

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(1 Cor. 12:27). p. 415
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
2 months 2 days ago
It is not death, it is...

It is not death, it is dying that alarms me.

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Book II, Ch. 13
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Büchner
Georg Büchner
3 weeks 3 days ago
There is something beautiful about virtue,...

There is something beautiful about virtue, Captain. But I am just a poor guy.

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Scene VI.
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
1 month 3 weeks ago
I am almost inclined to set...

I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children's story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children's story. The good ones last. A waltz which you can like only when you are waltzing is a bad waltz.

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"On Three Ways of Writing for Children" (1952) - in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (1967), p. 24
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
2 months 3 days ago
Hurl your calumnies…

Hurl your calumnies boldly; something is sure to stick.

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De Augmentis Scientiarum
Philosophical Maxims
Baruch Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza
1 month 4 weeks ago
I pass, at length, to the...

I pass, at length, to the third and perfectly absolute dominion, which we call democracy.

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Ch. 11, Of Democracy
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
1 month 3 weeks ago
A public can only arrive at...

A public can only arrive at enlightenment slowly. Through revolution, the abandonment of personal despotism may be engendered and the end of profit-seeking and domineering oppression may occur, but never a true reform of the state of mind. Instead, new prejudices, just like the old ones, will serve as the guiding reins of the great, unthinking mass. All that is required for this enlightenment is freedom; and particularly the least harmful of all that may be called freedom, namely, the freedom for man to make public use of his reason in all matters. But I hear people clamor on all sides: Don't argue! The officer says: Don't argue, drill! The tax collector: Don't argue, pay! The pastor: Don't argue, believe!

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 weeks 6 days ago
A distant enemy is always preferable...

A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.

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Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
1 week ago
Taken as a whole, the Cross...

Taken as a whole, the Cross Correspondences and the Willet scripts are among the most convincing evidence that at present exists for life after death. For anyone who is prepared to devote weeks to studying them, they prove beyond all reasonable doubt that Myers, Gurney, and Sidgwick went on communicating after death.

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p. 136
Philosophical Maxims
John Rawls
John Rawls
1 month 3 weeks ago
Inequalities are permissible when they maximize,...

Inequalities are permissible when they maximize, or at least all contribute to, the long term expectations of the least fortunate group in society.

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Chapter III, Section 26, pg. 151
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
1 month 3 weeks ago
A gun gives you the body,...

A gun gives you the body, not the bird.

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Quoted by Ralph Waldo Emerson, in C. J. Woodbury (ed.) Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1890
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
1 month 3 weeks ago
My thinking is first and last...

My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing.

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Sometimes paraphrased as "Thinking is for doing", perhaps originally by S.T. Fiske (1992) Ch. 22
Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
2 months 1 week ago
In matters that are so obscure...

In matters that are so obscure and far beyond our vision, we find in Holy Scripture passages which can be interpreted in very different ways without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such cases, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search for truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it.

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I, xviii, 37. Modern translation by J.H. Taylor
Philosophical Maxims
William Godwin
William Godwin
3 weeks 1 day ago
The case of mere titles is...

The case of mere titles is so absurd that it would deserve to be treated only with ridicule were t not for the serious mischief they impose on mankind. The feudal system was a ferocious monster, devouring, where it came, all that the friend of humanity regards with attachment and love. The system of titles appears under a different form. The monster is at length destroyed, and they who followed in his train, and fattened upon the carcasses of those he slew, have stuffed his skin, and, b exhibiting it, hope still to terrify mankind into patient and pusillanimity.

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Book V, Chapter 13
Philosophical Maxims
Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas
1 month 2 weeks ago
This investigation aims to analyze the...

This investigation aims to analyze the type "bourgeois public sphere". Its particular approach is required, to begin with, by the difficulties specific to an object whose complexity precludes exclusive reliance on the specialized methods of a single discipline. Rather, the category. "public sphere" must be investigated within the broad field formerly reflected in the perspective of the traditional science of "politics."' When particular social-scientific discipline, this object disintegrates. The problems that result from fusing aspects of sociology and economics, of constitutional law and political science, and of social and intellectual history are obvious: given the present state of differentiation and specialization in the social sciences, scarcely anyone will be able to master several, let alone all, of these disciplines.

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p.xvii
Philosophical Maxims
Peter Singer
Peter Singer
1 month 2 weeks ago
The goal of maximizing the welfare...

The goal of maximizing the welfare of all may be better achieved by an ethic that accepts our inclinations and harnesses them so that, taken as a whole, the system works to everyone's advantage.

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Chapter 6, A New Understanding Of Ethics, p. 157
Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
4 weeks 1 day ago
Americans of all ages, all stations...

Americans of all ages, all stations of life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations... In democratic countries knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other forms of knowledge; on its progress depends that of all the others.

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Book Two, Chapter V.
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 weeks 6 days ago
To think is to submit to...

To think is to submit to the whims and commands of an uncertain health.

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Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
2 months 3 weeks ago
Capital punishment is the most premeditated...

Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated, can be compared. For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date on which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not to be encountered in private life.

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Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
2 months 3 weeks ago
In Germany there is much complaining...
In Germany there is much complaining about my "eccentricities." But since it is not known where my center is, it won't be easy to find out where or when I have thus far been "eccentric." That I was a philologist, for example, meant that I was outside my center (which fortunately does not mean that I was a poor philologist). Likewise, I now regard my having been a Wagnerian as eccentric. It was a highly dangerous experiment; now that I know it did not ruin me, I also know what significance it had for me — it was the most severe test of my character.
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Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Schlegel
Friedrich Schlegel
3 weeks 4 days ago
Honour is the mysticism of legality....

Honour is the mysticism of legality.

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Aphorism 77, of Ideas as translated in The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics (1996) edited by Frederick C. Beiser, p. 131
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
3 weeks 6 days ago
This reasonable moderator...
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