Skip to main content

Main navigation

☰ ˟
  • Home
  • Articulation
  • Contact
  • Shop
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 1 day ago
Brief and powerless is Man's life;...

Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
1 month 3 weeks ago
Don't turn back when you are...

Don't turn back when you are just at the goal.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Maxim 580
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard
2 months 2 days ago
Such would be the successive phases...

Such would be the successive phases of the image:it is the reflection of a profound reality;it masks and denatures a profound reality;it masks the absence of a profound reality;it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.In the first case, the image is a good appearance-representation is of the sacramental order. In the second, it is an evil appearance-it is of the order of maleficence. In the third, it plays at being an appearance-it is of the order of sorcery. In the fourth, it is no longer of the order of appearances, but of simulation.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 1 day ago
Life seems to me essentially passion,...

Life seems to me essentially passion, conflict, rage... It is only intellect that keeps me sane; perhaps this makes me overvalue intellect against feeling.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell in 1912, as quoted in Clark The life of Bertrand Russell (1976), p. 174
Philosophical Maxims
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida
3 months 3 weeks ago
Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot...

Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'here are our monsters', without immediately turning the monsters into pets.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and other small Seismisms, The States of Theory, ed. David Carroll, New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
Philosophical Maxims
John Dewey
John Dewey
2 months 3 weeks ago
Freedom of thought and of expression...

Freedom of thought and of expression are not mere rights to be claimed. They have their roots deep in the existence of individuals as developing careers in time. Their denial and abrogation is an abdication of individuality and a virtual rejection of time as opportunity.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
4 months ago
The measure of a master is...

The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion twenty years later.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Culture
Philosophical Maxims
Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton
1 month 3 weeks ago
Hayek fails to account either for...

Hayek fails to account either for the passion among intellectuals for equality, or for the resulting success of socialists and their egalitarian successors in driving the liberal idea from the stage of politics. This passion for equality is not a new thing, and indeed pre-dates socialism by many centuries, finding its most influential expression in the writings of Rousseau. There is no consensus as to how equality might be achieved, what it would consist in if achieved, or why it is so desirable in the first place. But no argument against the cogency or viability of the idea has the faintest chance of being listened to or discussed by those who have fallen under its spell.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Hayek and conservatism, in Edward Feser (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hayek
Philosophical Maxims
Leszek Kołakowski
Leszek Kołakowski
3 weeks 1 day ago
In 1903 there appeared Problems of...

In 1903 there appeared Problems of Idealism, a collection of essays many of whose authors had recently been Marxists, but which condemned Marxism and materialism for their moral nihilism, contempt of personality, determinism, and fanatical pursuit of social values regardless of the individuals who made up society; they also attacked Marxism for its uncritical worship of progress and sacrifice of the present to the future.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
(pp. 420-1)
Philosophical Maxims
Hilary Putnam
Hilary Putnam
2 months 1 week ago
I think part of the appeal…

I think part of the appeal of mathematical logic is that the formulas look mysterious - you write backward Es!

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Putnam as quoted in: Julian Baggini, Jeremy Stangroom (2005) What Philosophers Think. p. 233
Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
2 months 3 weeks ago
I define a Sign as anything...

I define a Sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its Interpretant, that the latter is thereby mediately determined by the former.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Letter to Victoria, Lady Welby (1908) SS 80-81
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
3 weeks ago
I say, it is the everlasting...

I say, it is the everlasting privilege of the foolish to be governed by the wise; to be guided in the right path by those who know it better than they. This is the first "right of man;" compared with which all other rights are as nothing.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Jaspers
Karl Jaspers
2 months 2 weeks ago
The teacher of love…

The teacher of love teaches struggle. The teacher of lifeless isolation from the world teaches peace.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Will Durant
Will Durant
2 weeks 5 days ago
Rooted in freedom, bonded in the...

Rooted in freedom, bonded in the fellowship of danger, sharing everywhere a common human blood, we declare again that all men are brothers, and that mutual tolerance is the price of liberty.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
2 weeks 3 days ago
Our moral virtues....
0
⚖0
Main Content / General
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay
1 month 2 weeks ago
A man possessed of splendid talents,...

A man possessed of splendid talents, which he often abused, and of a sound judgment, the admonitions of which he often neglected; a man who succeeded only in an inferior department of his art, but who in that department succeeded pre-eminently.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 231
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
2 months 3 weeks ago
The slave is sold once and...

The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly. The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master's interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence. This existence is assured only to the class as a whole.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 3 weeks ago
What is marvelous is that each...

What is marvelous is that each day brings us a new reason to disappear.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
4 months 1 week ago
I'd rather be ruled by a...

I'd rather be ruled by a competent Turk than an incompetent Christian.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
The earliest published source for such a statement yet located is in Pat Robertson - Where He Stands (1988) by Hubert Morken, p. 42, where such a comment is attributed to Luther without citation.
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
5 months 1 day ago
Consciousness presupposes itself, and asking about...

Consciousness presupposes itself, and asking about its origin is an idle and just as sophistical a question as that old one, "What came first, the fruit-tree or the stone? Wasn't there a stone out of which came the first fruit-tree? Wasn't there a fruit-tree from which came the first stone?

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
3 months 4 weeks ago
I am not virtuous. Our sons...

I am not virtuous. Our sons will be if we shed enough blood to give them the right to be.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Act 3, sc. 5
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
4 months 4 days ago
The administration of the great system...

The administration of the great system of the universe, however, the care of the universal happiness of all rational and sensible beings, is the business of God and not of man. To man is allotted a much humbler department, but one much more suitable to the weakness of his powers, and to the narrowness of his comprehension; the care of his own happiness, of that of his family, his friends, his country: that he is occupied in contemplating the more sublime, can never be an excuse for his neglecting the more humble department.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Section II, Chap. III.
Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
3 months ago
Is it really not possible to...

Is it really not possible to touch the gaming table without being instantly infected by superstition?

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton
1 month 3 weeks ago
Europe owes its greatness to the...

Europe owes its greatness to the fact that the primary loyalties of the European people have been detached from religion and re-attached to the land. Those who believe that the division of Europe into nations has been the primary cause of European wars should remember the devastating wars of religion that national loyalties finally brought to an end. And they should study our art and literature for its inner meaning. In almost every case, they will discover, it is an art and literature not of war but of peace, an invocation of home and the routines of home, of gentleness, everydayness and enduring settlement.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
2 months 2 weeks ago
Reason as an organ for perceiving...

Reason as an organ for perceiving the true nature of reality and determining the guiding principles of our lives has come to be regarded as obsolete.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 18.
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 1 day ago
First of all: what is work?...

First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Ch. 1: In Praise of Idleness
Philosophical Maxims
Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas
3 months 3 weeks ago
I would in fact tend to...

I would in fact tend to have more confidence in the outcome of a democratic decision if there was a minority that voted against it, than if it was unanimous... Social psychology has amply shown the strength of this bandwagon effect.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Habermas (1993) "Further reflections on the public sphere", in: Craig Calhoun Eds. Habermas and the Public Sphere. MIT Press. p. 441
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
4 months ago
All honour to those who can...

All honour to those who can abnegate for themselves the personal enjoyment of life, when by such renunciation they contribute worthily to increase the amount of happiness in the world; but he who does it, or professes to do it, for any other purpose, is no more deserving of admiration than the ascetic mounted on his pillar. He may be an inspiriting proof of what men can do, but assuredly not an example of what they should.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Ch. 2
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 3 weeks ago
What pride to discover that nothing...

What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
4 months 1 day ago
The presence of thought…

The presence of a thought is like the presence of a lover.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Allan Bloom
Allan Bloom
1 week 3 days ago
A good education would be devoted...

A good education would be devoted to encouraging and refining the love of the beautiful, but a pathologically misguided moralism instead turns such longing into a sin against the high goal of making everyone feel good, of overcoming nature in the name of equality. ... Love of the beautiful may be the last and finest sacrifice to radical egalitarianism.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 15.
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
4 months 2 weeks ago
The superior man, while there is...

The superior man, while there is anything he has not studied, or while in what he has studied there is anything he cannot understand, Will not intermit his labor. While there is anything he has not inquired about, or anything in what he has inquired about which he does not know, he will not intermit his labor. While there is anything which he has not reflected on, or anything in what he has reflected on which he does not apprehend, he will not intermit his labor. While there is anything which he has not discriminated or his discrimination is not clear, he will not intermit his labor. If there be anything which he has not practiced, or his practice fails in earnestness, he will not intermit his labor. If another man succeed by one effort, he will use a hundred efforts. If another man succeed by ten efforts, he will use a thousand. Let a man proceed in this way, and, though dull, he will surely become intelligent; though weak, he will surely become strong.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay
1 month 2 weeks ago
That is the best government which...

That is the best government which desires to make the people happy, and knows how to make them happy.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 160
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 3 weeks ago
Love, a tacit agreement between two...

Love, a tacit agreement between two unhappy parties to overestimate each other. p. 111, first American edition

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
1970
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
3 months ago
Kings will be tyrants from policy,...

Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Volume iii, p. 334
Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
4 months 1 day ago
Childish and altogether ludicrous is what...

Childish and altogether ludicrous is what you yourself are and all philosophers; and if a grown-up man like me spends fifteen minutes with fools of this kind, it is merely a way of passing the time. I've now got more important things to do. Goodbye!

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Thrasymachus, in On the Indestructibility of our Essential Being by Death, in Essays and Aphorisms (1970) as translated by R. J. Hollingdale, p. 76
Philosophical Maxims
George Berkeley
George Berkeley
3 months 6 days ago
Seeing therefore they are both [heat...

Seeing therefore they are both [heat and pain] immediately perceived at the same time, and the fire affects you only with one simple, or uncompounded idea, it follows that this same simple idea is both the intense heat immediately perceived, and the pain; and consequently, that the intense heat immediately perceived, is nothing distinct from a particular sort of pain.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Philonous to Hylas
Philosophical Maxims
Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas
3 months 3 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.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 308
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton
2 months 3 days ago
Our design, not respecting arts, but...

Our design, not respecting arts, but philosophy, and our subject, not manual, but natural powers, we consider chiefly those things which relate to gravity, levity, elastic force, the resistance of fluids, and the like forces, whether attractive or impulsive; and therefore we offer this work as mathematical principles of philosophy; for all the difficulty of philosophy seems to consist in this - from the phenomena of motions to investigate the forces of nature, and then from these forces to demonstrate the other phenomena...

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Preface
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
4 months 2 weeks ago
Better a diamond with a flaw...

Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
3 months 4 weeks ago
If anyone would like to acquire...

If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realise that one is proud. And a biggish step, too. At least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Book III, Chapter 8, "The Great Sin"
Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
4 months 1 day ago
To be a philosopher, that is...

To be a philosopher, that is to say, a lover of wisdom (for wisdom is nothing but truth), it is not enough for a man to love truth, in so far as it is compatible with his own interest, with the will of his superiors, with the dogmas of the church, or with the prejudices and tastes of his contemporaries; so long as he rests content with this position, he is only a philautos, not a philosophos [a lover of self, not a lover of wisdom]. For this title of honor is well and wisely conceived precisely by its stating that one should love the truth earnestly and with one's whole heart, and thus unconditionally and unreservedly, above all else, and, if need be, in defiance of all else. Now the reason for this is the one previously stated that the intellect has become free, and in this state it does not even know or understand any other interest than that of truth.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, pp. 21-22
Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
3 months 4 days ago
The main business of religions is...

The main business of religions is to purify, control, and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire in times of equality.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Book One, Chapter V.
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
2 months 1 week ago
It repudiates, as something vile and...

It repudiates, as something vile and sinful, our deepest feelings; but being absolutely ignorant as to the real functions of human emotions, Puritanism is itself the creator of the most unspeakable vices.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
4 months ago
For as soon as the distribution...

For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic and must remain so if he does not wish to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Vol. 1, Part 1.
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
4 months 2 days ago
Go into the London Stock Exchange...

Go into the London Stock Exchange - a more respectable place than many a court - and you will see representatives from all nations gathered together for the utility of men. Here Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt. Here the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist and the Anglican accepts a promise from the Quaker.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Letters on England, letter 6, "On the Presbyterians" as quoted in Trust and Tolerance, Richard H. Dees, Routledge, London and New York, (2004) p. 92, published first in English in 1733.
Philosophical Maxims
Judith Butler
Judith Butler
2 months 2 days ago
We do not have to love...

We do not have to love one another to be obligated to build a world in which all lives are sustainable. The right to persist can only be understood as a social right, as the subjective instance of a social and global obligation we bear toward one another.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 64
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
4 months ago
This life is worth living, we...

This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it, from the moral point of view.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
"Is Life Worth Living?"
Philosophical Maxims
Willard van Orman Quine
Willard van Orman Quine
2 months 2 weeks ago
Logic chases truth up the tree...

Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Philosophy of Logic
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Fukuyama
Francis Fukuyama
3 weeks 4 days ago
The limits of this strategy were...

The limits of this strategy were evident as the century drew to a close.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
The Marxist left had to confront the fact that actual Communist societies in the Soviet Union and China had turned into grotesque and oppressive dictatorships. p. 112
Philosophical Maxims
  • Load More

User login

  • Create new account
  • Reset your password

Social

☰ ˟
  • Main Feed
  • Philosophical Maxims

Civic

☰ ˟
  • Propositions
  • Issue / Solution

Who's new

  • Søren Kierkegaard
  • Jesus
  • Friedrich Nietzsche
  • VeXed
  • Slavoj Žižek

Who's online

There are currently 1 users online.
  • comfortdragon

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia