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Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
4 months 1 week ago
Proverbs are always platitudes until you...

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.

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Part IV: America,Jesting Pilate: The Diary of a Journey, 1926
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
1 week 3 days ago
I wish it were possible to...

I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government to the genuine principles of its Constitution; I mean an additional article, taking from the federal government the power of borrowing.

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Letter to John Taylor (26 November 1798), shortened in The Money Masters to "I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution ... taking from the federal government their power of borrowing".
Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
4 months 2 weeks ago
Actions may be laudable or blameable;...

Actions may be laudable or blameable; but they cannot be reasonable: Laudable or blameable, therefore, are not the same with reasonable or unreasonable. The merit and demerit of actions frequently contradict, and sometimes controul our natural propensities. But reason has no such influence. Moral distinctions, therefore, are not the offspring of reason. Reason is wholly inactive, and can never be the source of so active a principle as conscience, or a sense of morals.

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Part 1, Section 1
Philosophical Maxims
Vandana Shiva
Vandana Shiva
1 month 3 weeks ago
It is the indignity of being...

It is the indignity of being treated as disposable that pushes people towards religious fundamentalism in order to retrieve a sense of self, of meaning, of significance. This is why globalization breeds religious fundamentalism and free markets create terrorism and extremism, not democracy.

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(p80)
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
5 months ago
The administration of government lies in...

The administration of government lies in getting proper men. Such men are to be got by means of the ruler's own character. That character is to be cultivated by his treading in the ways of duty. And the treading those ways of duty is to be cultivated by the cherishing of benevolence.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
3 months 3 days ago
The foxes have holes, and the...

The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.

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8:20 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
2 months 1 week ago
Better to be ignorant of a...

Better to be ignorant of a matter than half know it.

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Maxim 865
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
2 months 1 week ago
We begin again to structure the...

We begin again to structure the primordial feelings...from which 3000 years of literacy divorced us. We begin again to live a myth.

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(p. 17)
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine
4 months 1 week ago
It is from the Bible that...

It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder; for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man.

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A Letter: Being an Answer to a Friend, on the publication of The Age of Reason" (12 May 1797), published in an 1852 edition of The Age of Reason, p. 205
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
2 months 1 week ago
What I can't understand is why...

What I can't understand is why you can't see the extraordinary beauty of the idea that life started from nothing - that is such a staggering, elegant, beautiful thing, why would you want to clutter it up with something so messy as a God?

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" During his conversation with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, as quoted in The Telegraph, in 2012-02-24. In "Richard Dawkins: I can't be sure God does not exist"
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
1 week 3 days ago
The State legislatures should be immediately...

The State legislatures should be immediately urged to relinquish the right of establishing banks of discount. Most of them will comply, on patriotic principles, under the convictions of the moment; and the non-complying may be crowded into concurrence by legitimate devices.

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Letter to Thomas Cooper, 1814. ME 14:190
Philosophical Maxims
Averroes
Averroes
4 months 4 weeks ago
There is no city that is...

There is no city that is truly one other than this city that we are involved in bringing forth.

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Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
3 months 2 weeks ago
The genius of democracies is seen...

The genius of democracies is seen not only in the great number of new words introduced but even more in the new ideas they express.

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Book One, Chapter XVI.
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 1 week ago
The good life is one inspired...

The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
4 months 1 week ago
It is the same: a chosen...

It is the same: a chosen one is a man whom God's finger crushes against the wall.

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Act 2, sc. 4
Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
4 months 3 weeks ago
For it is not death or...

For it is not death or pain that is to be feared, but the fear of pain or death.

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(Book II, ch. 1) Book II, ch. 1, 13.
Philosophical Maxims
A. J. Ayer
A. J. Ayer
3 months 1 week ago
While moral rules may be propounded...

While moral rules may be propounded by authority the fact that these were so propounded would not validate them.

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"The Meaning of Life".
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
3 months 1 week ago
All the time that this horrid...

All the time that this horrid scene was acting or avenging, as well as for some time before, and ever since, the wicked instigators of this unhappy multitude, guilty, with every aggravation, of all their crimes, and screened in a cowardly darkness from their punishment, continued without interruption, pity, or remorse, to blow up the blind rage of the populace, with a continued blast of pestilential libels, which infected and poisoned the very air we breathed in.

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Speech at Bristol Previous to the Election, referring to the Gordon Riots (6 September 1780), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II (1855), pp. 158-159
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton
2 months 2 weeks 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...

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Preface
Philosophical Maxims
Joseph de Maistre
Joseph de Maistre
1 week 1 day ago
False opinions are like false money,...

False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing. Original text:Les fausses opinions ressemblent à la fausse monnaie qui est frappée d'abord par de grands coupables et dépensée ensuite par d'honnêtes gens qui perpétuent le crime sans savoir ce qu'ils font.

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"First Dialogue," p. 13
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
4 months 1 week ago
Freedom is the alone unoriginated birthright...

Freedom is the alone unoriginated birthright of man, and belongs to him by force of his humanity; and is independence on the will and co-action of every other in so far as this consists with every other person's freedom.

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Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Ethics by Immanuel Kant, trans. J.W. Semple, ed. with Iintroduction by Rev. Henry Calderwood (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1886) (3rd edition). Chapter: GENERAL DIVISION OF JURISPRUDENCE.
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
3 months 3 days ago
By MANNERS, I mean not here...

By MANNERS, I mean not here Decency of behaviour; as how one man should salute another, or how a man should wash his mouth, or pick his teeth before company, and such other points of the Small Morals; But those qualities of mankind that concern their living together in Peace and Unity. To which end we are to consider that the Felicity of this life consisteth not in the repose of a mind satisfied. For there is no such Finis ultimus (utmost aim) nor Summum Bonum (greatest good) as is spoken of in the books of the old Moral Philosophers. Nor can a man any more live whose desires are at an end than he whose Senses and Imaginations are at a stand.

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The First Part, Chapter 11, p. 47
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley
1 month 3 weeks ago
The only medicine for suffering, crime,...

The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all the other woes of mankind, is wisdom.

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Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
3 months 2 weeks ago
Americans cleave to the things of...

Americans cleave to the things of this world as if assured that they will never die,... They clutch everything but hold nothing fast, and so lose grip as they hurry after some new delight. ... Death steps in in the end and stops him before he has grown tired of this futile pursuit of that complete felicity which always escapes him. At first sight there is something astonishing in this spectacle of so many lucky men restless in the midst of abundance. But it is a spectacle as old as the world; all that is new is to see a whole people performing in it.

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Book Two, Chapter XIII.
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
2 months 6 days ago
Give us grace and strength to...

Give us grace and strength to forbear and to persevere. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind, spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies.

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Prayer, inscribed on the bronze memorial to Stevenson in St. Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh, Scotland
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
3 weeks 4 days ago
We give voice….

We give voice to our trivial cares, but suffer enormities in silence.

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line 607; (Phaedra)
Philosophical Maxims
William Godwin
William Godwin
3 months 1 week ago
Men may one day feel that...

Men may one day feel that they are partakers of a common nature, and that true freedom and perfect equity, like food and air, are pregnant with benefit to every constitution.

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Vol. 1, bk. 1, ch. 3
Philosophical Maxims
Theodor Adorno
Theodor Adorno
2 months 3 weeks ago
Underlying the concept of positivity is...

Underlying the concept of positivity is the conviction that the positive is intrinsically positive in itself, without anyone pausing to ask what is to be regarded as positive. ... It is significant and really quite interesting that the term 'positive' actually contains this ambivalence. On the one hand, 'positive' means what is given, is postulated, is there-as when we speak of positivism as the philosophy that sticks to the facts. But, equally, 'positive' also refers to the good, the approvable, in a certain sense, the ideal. And I imagine that this semantic constellation expresses with precision what countless people actually feel to be the case.

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p. 18
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
4 months 1 week ago
The law will never make men...

The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free.

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"Slavery in Massachusetts", 1854
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 months 1 week ago
Without God, everything is nothingness; and...

Without God, everything is nothingness; and with God? Supreme nothingness.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 months 1 week ago
In theory, it matters little to...

In theory, it matters little to me whether I live as whether I die; in practice, I am lacerated by every anxiety which opens an abyss between life and death.

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Philosophical Maxims
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
2 months 3 days ago
Reading Decline of the West I...

Reading Decline of the West I learned that in Spengler's view ours was a Faustian civilization and that we, the Jews, were Magians, the survivors and representatives of an earlier type, totally incapable of comprehending the Faustian spirit that had created the great civilization of the West. ... What Magians were to Faustians, Faustians might very well be to Americans.

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Part I, p. 26
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
4 months 1 week ago
We have been given free will,...

We have been given free will, in order that we may will our self-will out of existence and so come to live continuously in a 'state of grace.' All our actions must be directed, in the last analysis, to making ourselves passive in relation to the activity and the being of divine reality. We are, as it were, aeolian harps, endowed with the power either to expose themselves to the wind of the Spirit or to shut themselves away from it.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Dewey
John Dewey
3 months 2 days ago
The color is of the object...

The color is of the object and the object in all its qualities is expressed through color. For it is objects that glows- gems and sunlight; and it is objects that are splendid- crowns, robes, sunlight. Except as they express objects, through being the significant color-quality of materials of ordinary experience, colors effect only transient excitations.

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p. 212
Philosophical Maxims
John Gray
John Gray
1 month 2 weeks ago
As the Genesis story teaches, knowledge...

As the Genesis story teaches, knowledge cannot save us from ourselves. If we know more than before, it means only that we have greater scope to enact our fantasies. But - as the Genesis myth also teaches - there is no way we can rid ourselves of what we know. If we try to regain a state of innocence, the result can only be a worse madness. The message of Genesis is that in the most vital areas of human life there can be no progress, only an unending struggle with our own nature.

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An Old Chaos: Humanism and Flying Saucers (pp. 79-80)
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Owen
Robert Owen
2 months 4 days ago
They would receive the same care...

They would receive the same care and attention as those who belong to the establishment. Nor will there be any distinction made between the children of those parents who are deemed the worst, and of those who may be esteemed the best members of society: indeed I would prefer to receive the offspring of the worst, if they shall be sent at an early age; because they really require more of our care and pity and by well-training these, society will be more essentially benefited than if the like attention were paid to those whose parents are educating them in comparatively good habits. On educating children of the poor, and of neighboring communities.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
4 months 1 week ago
If the Jew did not exist,...

If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.

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p. 8
Philosophical Maxims
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida
4 months 5 days ago
The dissimulation of the woven texture...

The dissimulation of the woven texture can in any case take centuries to undo its web: a web that envelops a web, undoing the web for centuries; reconstituting it too as an organism, indefinitely regenerating its own tissue behind the cutting trace, the decision of each reading. There is always a surprise in store for the anatomy or physiology of any criticism that might think it had mastered the game, surveyed all the threads at once, deluding itself, too, in wanting to look at the text without touching it, without laying a hand on the "object," without risking- which is the only chance of entering into the game, by getting a few fingers caught- the addition of some new thread.

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Plato's Pharmacy
Philosophical Maxims
Nikolai Berdyaev
Nikolai Berdyaev
2 months 3 weeks ago
Spirit is never an object; nor...

Spirit is never an object; nor a spiritual reality an objective one. In the so-called objective world there's no such nature, thing, or objective reality as spirit. Hence it is easy to deny the reality of spirit. God is spirit because he is not object, because he is subject.

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p. 10
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay
1 month 4 weeks ago
Wherever literature consoles sorrow, or assuages...

Wherever literature consoles sorrow, or assuages pain,-wherever it brings gladness to eyes which fail with wakefulness and tears, and ache for the dark house and the long sleep,-there is exhibited, in its noblest form, the immortal influence of Athens.

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p. 179
Philosophical Maxims
John Gray
John Gray
1 month 2 weeks ago
Science is not distinguished from myth...

Science is not distinguished from myth by science being literally true and myth only a type of poetic analogy. While their aims are different, both are composed of symbols we use to deal with a slippery world.

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Beyond the Last Thought: Freud's cigars and the long way round to Nirvana (p. 96)
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 months 1 week ago
By all evidence we are in...

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.

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Philosophical Maxims
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
1 month 3 days ago
When young, one is confident to...

When young, one is confident to be able to build palaces for mankind, but when the time comes one has one's hands full just to be able to remove their trash.

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Letter to Johann Kaspar Lavatar
Philosophical Maxims
chanakya
chanakya
1 month 2 weeks ago
The king who is situated anywhere...

The king who is situated anywhere immediately on the circumference of the conqueror's territory is termed the enemy.The king who is likewise situated close to the enemy, but separated from the conqueror only by the enemy, is termed the friend (of the conqueror).

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Book VI, "The Source of Sovereign States"
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton
2 months 2 weeks ago
It is the perfection of God's...

It is the perfection of God's works that they are all done with the greatest simplicity. He is the God of order and not of confusion. And therefore as they would understand the frame of the world must endeavor to reduce their knowledge to all possible simplicity, so must it be in seeking to understand these visions.

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Cited in Rules for methodizing the Apocalypse, Rule 9, from a manuscript published in The Religion of Isaac Newton (1974) by Frank E. Manuel
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
5 months 1 week ago
To become god is merely to...

To become god is merely to be free on this earth, not to serve an immortal being.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
4 months 1 week ago
What point of morals, of manners,...

What point of morals, of manners, of economy, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of the conduct of life, has he not settled? What mystery has he not signified his knowledge of? What office, or function, or district of man's work, has he not remembered? What king has he not taught state, as Talma taught Napoleon? What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What lover has he not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What gentleman has he not instructed in the rudeness of his behavior?

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Shakespeare; or, The Poet
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
4 months 2 weeks ago
We rarely hear, it has been...

We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of the workman. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject.

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Chapter VIII, p. 80.
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
1 week ago
Live with the gods…

Live with the gods.

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V, 27
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 2 weeks ago
Turning your back...
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