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Karl Marx
Karl Marx
1 month 4 weeks ago
When we have chosen the vocation...

When we have chosen the vocation in which we can contribute most to humanity, burdens cannot bend us because they are only sacrifices for all. Then we experience no meager, limited, egotistic joy, but our happiness belongs to millions, our deeds live on quietly but eternally effective, and glowing tears of noble men will fall on our ashes.

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Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, L. Easton, trans. (1967), p. 39
Philosophical Maxims
Democritus
Democritus
1 month 2 weeks ago
Good means not [merely] not to...

Good means not [merely] not to do wrong, but rather not to desire to do wrong.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
1 month 4 weeks ago
If the Russians still adhered to...

If the Russians still adhered to the Greek Orthodox religion, if they had instituted parliamentary government, and if they had a completely free press which daily vituperated us, then - provided they still had armed forces as powerful as they have now - we should still hate them if they gave us ground for thinking them hostile.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
1 month 4 weeks ago
Owing to the identification of religion...

Owing to the identification of religion with virtue, together with the fact that the most religious men are not the most intelligent, a religious education gives courage to the stupid to resist the authority of educated men, as has happened, for example, where the teaching of evolution has been made illegal. So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence; and in this respect ministers of religion follow gospel authority more closely than in some others.

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p. 110
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
4 weeks 1 day ago
All persons possessing any portion of...

All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great Master, Author, and Founder of society.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
1 month 4 weeks ago
This idea of weapons of mass...

This idea of weapons of mass extermination is utterly horrible and is something which no one with one spark of humanity can tolerate. I will not pretend to obey a government which is organising a mass massacre of mankind.

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Speech in Birmingham, England encouraging civil disobedience in support of nuclear disarmament, 4/15/1961
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 weeks 4 days ago
The first thinker was, without a...

The first thinker was, without a doubt, the first man obsessed by why. An unaccustomed mania, not at all contagious: rare indeed are those who suffer from it, who are a prey to questioning, and who can accept no given because they were born in consternation.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
3 weeks 6 days ago
The more man....
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Main Content / General
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
1 month 4 weeks ago
I wish to suggest that a...

I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living. All great enterprises are self-supporting. The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his poetry, as a steam planing-mill feeds its boilers with the shavings it makes. You must get your living by loving.

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pp. 486-7
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
1 month 4 weeks ago
Men and boys are learning all...

Men and boys are learning all kinds of trades but how to make men of themselves. They learn to make houses; but they are not so well housed, they are not so contented in their houses, as the woodchucks in their holes. What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on? - If you cannot tolerate the planet that it is on? Grade the ground first. If a man believes and expects great things of himself, it makes no odds where you put him, or what you show him ... he will be surrounded by grandeur. He is in the condition of a healthy and hungry man, who says to himself, - How sweet this crust is!

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Letter to Harrison Blake (20 May 1860); published in Familiar Letters, 1865
Philosophical Maxims
John Dewey
John Dewey
2 weeks 6 days ago
As long as politics is the...

As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.

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Quoted in John Dewey and American Democracy by Robert Westbrook (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 440
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
2 months 3 weeks ago
No matter how various the subject...

No matter how various the subject matter I write on, I was a science-fiction writer first and it is as a science-fiction writer that I want to be identified.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 weeks 4 days ago
History proves nothing because it contains...

History proves nothing because it contains everything.

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Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
2 months 2 weeks ago
To wisdom belongs the intellectual apprehension...

To wisdom belongs the intellectual apprehension of things eternal; to knowledge, the rational apprehension of things temporal.

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As quoted in The Anchor Book of Latin Quotations: with English translations‎ (1990) by Norbert Guterman, p. 375
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel
1 month 2 weeks ago
Absurdity is one of the most...

Absurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics. ... It is possible only because we possess a certain kind of insight - the capacity to transcend ourselves in thought.If a sense of the absurd is a way of perceiving our true situation (even though the situation is not absurd until the perception arises), then what reason can we have to resent or escape it? ... It results from the ability to understand our human limitations. It need not be a matter of agony unless we make it so. Nor need it evoke a defiant contempt of fate that allows us to feel brave or proud. Such dramatics even if carried on in private, betray a failure to appreciate the cosmic unimportance of the situation. If sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.

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"The Absurd" (1971), p. 23.
Philosophical Maxims
Ernst Mach
Ernst Mach
3 weeks 3 days ago
There is no problem in all...

There is no problem in all mathematics that cannot be solved by direct counting. But with the present implements of mathematics many operations can be performed in a few minutes which without mathematical methods would take a lifetime.

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p. 197; On mathematics and counting.
Philosophical Maxims
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
2 weeks 5 days ago
If this truth has once and...

If this truth has once and for all been discarded and men have decided for integral adjustment, if reason has been purged of all morality regardless of cost, and has triumphed over all else, no one may remain outside and look on. The existence of one solitary "unreasonable" man elucidates the shame of the entire nation. His existence testifies to the relativity of the system of radical self-preservation that has been posited as absolute.

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p. 45.
Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
3 weeks 4 days ago
Where love rules...

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

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P. 97
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
2 months 2 weeks ago
By extensively studying all learning, and...

By extensively studying all learning, and keeping himself under the restraint of the rules of propriety, one may thus likewise not err from what is right.

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Philosophical Maxims
Novalis
Novalis
3 weeks 5 days ago
The seat of the soul is...

The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet. Where they overlap, it is in every point of the overlap.

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Philosophical Maxims
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
1 week 5 days ago
...I pray to God to make...

...I pray to God to make me free of God.

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Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
2 months 3 weeks ago
Milton Ashe is not the type...

Milton Ashe is not the type to marry a head of hair and a pair of eyes.

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Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
1 week 4 days ago
Imagine a book of unexplained mysteries...

Imagine a book of unexplained mysteries written by a contemporary of Shakespeare. It might include the mystery of the falling stars that sweep through the sky foretelling disaster; the mystery of the Kraken, the giant sea devil with 50-foot tentacles; the mystery of monster bones, sometimes found in caves or on beaches. Such a book would be a curious mixture of truth and absurdity, fact and legend. We would all feel superior as we turned its pages and murmured: "Of course, they didn't know about comets and giant squids and dinosaurs." If this book should happen to find its way into the hands of our remote descendants, they may smile pityingly and say: "It's incredible to think that they knew nothing about epsilon fields or multiple psychic feedback or cross gravitational energies. They didn't even know about the ineluctability of time." But let us hope that such a descendant is in a charitable mood, and might add: "And yet they managed to ask a few of the right questions."

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p. 142
Philosophical Maxims
Isaiah Berlin
Isaiah Berlin
2 weeks 6 days ago
But to manipulate men, to propel...

But to manipulate men, to propel them towards goals which you - the social reformer - see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them.

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Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
4 weeks ago
Each new ontological theory, propounded in...

Each new ontological theory, propounded in lieu of previous ones shown to be untenable, has been followed by a new criticism leading to a new scepticism. All possible conceptions have been one by one tried and found wanting; and so the entire field of speculation has been gradually exhausted without positive result: the only result reached being the negative one above stated, that the reality existing behind all appearances is, and must ever be, unknown.

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Pt. I, The Unknowable; Ch. IV, The Relativity of All Knowledge
Philosophical Maxims
William Godwin
William Godwin
3 weeks 5 days ago
Perfectibility is one of the most...

Perfectibility is one of the most unequivocal characteristics of the human species.

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Vol. 1, bk. 1 : Of the Powers of Man Considered in his Social Capacity, ch. 2
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1 month 4 weeks ago
Can anybody remember when the times...

Can anybody remember when the times were not hard and money not scarce?

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Works and Days
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
1 month 4 weeks ago
So much of modern mathematical work...

So much of modern mathematical work is obviously on the border-line of logic, so much of modern logic is symbolic and formal, that the very close relationship of logic and mathematics has become obvious to every instructed student. The proof of their identity is, of course, a matter of detail: starting with premisses which would be universally admitted to belong to logic, and arriving by deduction at results which as obviously belong to mathematics, we find that there is no point at which a sharp line can be drawn, with logic to the left and mathematics to the right. If there are still those who do not admit the identity of logic and mathematics, we may challenge them to indicate at what point, in the successive definitions and deductions of Principia Mathematica, they consider that logic ends and mathematics begins. It will then be obvious that any answer must be quite arbitrary.

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Ch. 18: Mathematics and Logic
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
1 week 4 days ago
No matter how honest scientists think...

No matter how honest scientists think they are, they are still influenced by various unconscious assumptions that prevent them from attaining true objectivity. Expressed in a sentence, Fort's principle goes something like this: People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels.

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p. 125
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
1 month 4 weeks ago
In the same year in which...

In the same year in which I began Latin, I made my first commencement in the Greek poet with the Iliad. After I had made some progress in this, my father put Pope's translation into my hands. It was the first English verse I had cared to read, and it became one of the books in which for many years I most delighted: I think I must have read it from twenty to thirty times through. I should not have thought it worth while to mention a taste apparently so natural to boyhood, if I had not, as I think, observed that the keen enjoyment of this brilliant specimen of narrative and versification is not so universal with boys, as I should have expected both à priori and from my individual experience.

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(p. 10)
Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
2 months 2 weeks 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
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
1 week 6 days ago
The aim of science is to...

The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, "Seek simplicity and distrust it."

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The Concept of Nature (1919), Chapter VII, p.143.
Philosophical Maxims
Ian Hacking
Ian Hacking
6 days ago
Much early alchemy seems to have...

Much early alchemy seems to have been adventure. You heated and mixed and burnt and pounded and to see what would happen. An adventure might suggest an hypothesis that can subsequently be tested, but adventure is prior to theory.

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Chapter 4, Evidence, p. 36.
Philosophical Maxims
Democritus
Democritus
1 month 2 weeks ago
Now his principal…..

Now his principal doctrines were these. That atoms and the vacuum were the beginning of the universe; and that everything else existed only in opinion. (trans. Yonge 1853) The first principles of the universe are atoms and empty space; everything else is merely thought to exist.

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(trans. by Robert Drew Hicks 1925) Often paraphrased as "Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion."
Philosophical Maxims
Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale
1 week 3 days ago
In one sense, I do believe...

In one sense, I do believe I am "like a man," as Parthe [the writer's sister] says. But how? In having sympathy. ... Women crave for being loved, not for loving. They scream out at you for sympathy all day long, they are incapable of giving any in return, for they cannot remember your affairs long enough to do so. ... They cannot state a fact accurately to another, nor can that other attend to it accurately enough for it to become information. Now is not all this the result of want of sympathy?

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Letter to Madame Mohl
Philosophical Maxims
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal
2 months 1 week ago
Of the truths within our reach......

Of the truths within our reach... the mind and the heart are as doors by which they are received into the soul, but... few enter by the mind, whilst they are brought in crowds by the rash caprices of the will, without the council of reason.

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Philosophical Maxims
Georg Büchner
Georg Büchner
4 weeks 1 day ago
The revolution must end and the...

The revolution must end and the republic must begin. In our constitution, right must take the place of duty, welfare that of virtue, and self-defense that of punishment. Everyone must be able to prevail and to live according to one's own nature.

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Act I.
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
1 month 3 weeks ago
""You do not love the mind...

""You do not love the mind of your race, nor the body. Any kind of creature will please you if only it is begotten by your kind as they now are. It seems to me, Thick One, what you really love is no completed creature but the very seed itself: for that is all that is left".

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Oyarsa
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
1 week 1 day ago
Food probably has a very great...

Food probably has a very great influence on the condition of men. Wine exercises a more visible influence, food does it more slowly but perhaps just as surely. Who knows if a well-prepared soup was not responsible for the pneumatic pump or a poor one for a war?

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A 14
Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
1 month 1 week ago
Educate the children and it won't...

Educate the children and it won't be necessary to punish the men.

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As quoted in Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists‎ (2007) by James Geary
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
2 months 2 days ago
But bounty and hospitality very seldom...

But bounty and hospitality very seldom lead to extravagance; though vanity almost always does.

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Chapter III, Part V, p. 987.
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
1 month 4 weeks ago
What extracts from the Vedas I...

What extracts from the Vedas I have read fall on me like the light of a higher and purer luminary, which describes a loftier course through purer stratum. It rises on me like the full moon after the stars have come out, wading through some far stratum in the sky.

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1850
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Jean Jacques Rousseau
2 months 1 day ago
I shall need only myself to...

I shall need only myself to be happy.

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As quoted in The prophetic voice, 1758-1778 by Lester G. Crocke, p. 148.
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
1 month 3 weeks ago
The problems are dissolved in the...

The problems are dissolved in the actual sense of the word - like a lump of sugar in water.

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Ch. 9 : Philosophy, p. 183
Philosophical Maxims
Plato
Plato
2 months 3 weeks ago
If anyone, with his mind...

Parmenides: If anyone, with his mind fixed on all these objections and others like them, denies the existence of ideas of things, and does not assume an idea under which each individual thing is classed, he will be quite at a loss, since he denies that the idea of each thing is always the same, and in this way he will utterly destroy the power of carrying on discussion... Then what will become of philosophy? To what can you turn, if these things are unknown?

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Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
4 weeks 1 day ago
Taxing is an easy business. Any...

Taxing is an easy business. Any projector can contrive new impositions, any bungler can add to the old.

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Philosophical Maxims
Auguste Comte
Auguste Comte
1 month 3 days ago
The first condition of unity is...

The first condition of unity is a subjective principle; and this principle in the Positive system is the subordination of the intellect to the heart: Without this the unity that we seek can never be placed on a permanent basis, whether individually or collectively. It is essential to have some influence sufficiently powerful to produce convergence amid the heterogeneous and often antagonistic tendencies of so complex an organism as ours.

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p. 24
Philosophical Maxims
Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas
1 month 3 weeks ago
Philosophy's position with regard to science,...

Philosophy's position with regard to science, which at one time could be designated with the name "theory of knowledge," has been undermined by the movement of philosophical thought itself. Philosophy was dislodged from this position by philosophy.

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p. 4
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
1 month 3 weeks ago
You are never too old to...

You are never too old to set another goal, or to dream a new dream. Unknown, but also attributed to Les Brown, a motivational speaker. Commonly attributed to C.S. Lewis, but never with a primary source listed.

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Philosophical Maxims
Antisthenes
Antisthenes
1 month 2 weeks ago
Once, when he was applauded by...

Once, when he was applauded by rascals, he remarked, "I am horribly afraid I have done something wrong."

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Philosophical Maxims
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