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Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
3 months 4 weeks ago
There is no man so good,...

There is no man so good, who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the laws, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.

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Book III, Ch. 9. Of Vanity
Philosophical Maxims
John Searle
John Searle
1 month 3 weeks ago
There are clear cases in which...

There are clear cases in which "understanding" literally applies and clear cases in which it does not apply; and these two sorts of cases are all I need for this argument.

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Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
6 days ago
It would be some consolation for...

It would be some consolation for the feebleness of ourselves and our works, if all things should perish as slowly as they come into being; but as it is, increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid.

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Letters to Lucilius, letter 91, page 294.
Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
1 month 2 weeks ago
Money alone sets all the world...

Money alone sets all the world in motion.

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Maxim 656
Philosophical Maxims
Empedocles
Empedocles
3 months 1 week ago
Hear first the four roots…

Hear first the four roots of all things: shining Zeus, life-bringing Hera, Aidoneus, and Nestis, who wets with tears the mortal wellspring.

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fr. 6
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 week 5 days ago
Suppose Odin to have been the...

Suppose Odin to have been the inventor of Letters, as well as "magic," among that people! It is the greatest invention man has ever made! this of marking down the unseen thought that is in him by written characters. It is a kind of second speech, almost as miraculous as the first.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
3 months 3 weeks ago
Politics is, as it were, the...

Politics is, as it were, the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its two opposite halves, - sometimes split into quarters, it may be, which grind on each other. Not only individuals, but States, have thus a confirmed dyspepsia, which expresses itself, you can imagine by what sort of eloquence. Thus our life is not altogether a forgetting, but also, alas! to a great extent, a remembering of that which we should never have been conscious of, certainly not in our waking hours. Why should we not meet, not always as dyspeptics, to tell our bad dreams, but sometimes as eupeptics, to congratulate each other on the ever glorious morning? I do not make an exorbitant demand, surely.

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p. 495
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 week 5 days ago
The Noble in the high place,...

The Noble in the high place, the Ignoble in the low; that is, in all times and in all countries, the Almighty Maker's Law.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
3 months 3 weeks ago
How can great minds be produced...

How can great minds be produced in a country where the test of a great mind is agreeing in the opinions of small minds?

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As quoted in Egoists: A Book of Supermen (1909) by James Huneker, p. 367
Philosophical Maxims
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
1 month 2 weeks ago
There's something that remains barbarous in...

There's something that remains barbarous in educated people, and lately I've more and more had the feeling that we are nonwondering primitives. And why is it that we no longer marvel at these technological miracles? They've become the external facts of every life. We've all been to the university, we've had introductory courses in everything, and therefore we have persuaded ourselves that if we had the time to apply ourselves to these scientific marvels, we would understand them. But of course that's an illusion. It couldn't happen. Even among people who have had careers in science. They know no more about how it all works than we do. So we are in the position of savage men who, however, have been educated into believing that they are capable of understanding everything. Not that we actually do understand, but that we have the capacity.

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"A Half Life" (1990), pp. 302-303
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
2 months 3 weeks ago
My Lords, to obtain empire is...

My Lords, to obtain empire is common; to govern it well has been rare indeed. To chastise the guilt of those who have been instruments of imperial sway over other nations by the high superintending justice of the sovereign state has not many striking examples among any people.

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Speech in opening the impeachment of Warren Hastings (16 February 1788), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Volume the Ninth (1899), p. 398
Philosophical Maxims
Max Stirner
Max Stirner
6 days ago
The divine is God's concern; the...

The divine is God's concern; the human, man's. My concern is neither the divine nor the human, not the true, good, just, free, etc., but solely what is mine, and it is not a general one, but is - unique, as I am unique. Nothing is more to me than myself!

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Cambridge 1995, p. 7
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
6 days ago
Is it for this purpose that...

Is it for this purpose that we are strong-that we may have light burdens to bear?

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
3 months 3 weeks ago
But if the labourers could live...

But if the labourers could live on air they could not be bought at any price.

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Vol. I, Ch. 24, Section 4, pg. 657.
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 week 5 days ago
I will remark again, however, as...

I will remark again, however, as a fact not unimportant to be understood, that the different sphere constitutes the grand origin of such distinction; that the Hero can be Poet, Prophet, King, Priest or what you will, according to the kind of world he finds himself born into. I confess, I have no notion of a truly great man that could not be all sorts of men.

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Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
3 months 3 weeks ago
There must be something solemn, serious,...

There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse. It is precisely as being solemn experiences that I wish to interest you in religious experiences. ... The divine shall mean for us only such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor a jest.

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Lecture II, "Circumscription of the Topic"
Philosophical Maxims
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
2 months 4 days ago
The freedom of the 'everyday mind'...

The freedom of the 'everyday mind' consists rather in not kneeling down in awe. Its mental attitude is better expressed as sitting unmoveable like an object.

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Philosophical Maxims
Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Bakunin
2 months 2 weeks ago
I hate Communism because it is...

I hate Communism because it is the negation of liberty and because humanity is for me unthinkable without liberty. I am not a Communist, because Communism concentrates and swallows up in itself for the benefit of the State all the forces of society, because it inevitably leads to the concentration of property in the hands of the State, whereas I want the abolition of the State, the final eradication of the principle of authority and the patronage proper to the State, which under the pretext of moralizing and civilizing men has hitherto only enslaved, persecuted, exploited and corrupted them. I want to see society and collective or social property organized from below upwards, by way of free association, not from above downwards, by means of any kind of authority whatsoever.

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As quoted in Michael Bakunin (1937) by E.H. Carr, p. 356
Philosophical Maxims
Plotinus
Plotinus
4 months 1 week ago
Withdraw into yourself and look. And...

Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer. ... Cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labor to make all one glow or beauty and never cease chiseling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendor of virtue.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 2 weeks ago
Not content with real sufferings, the...

Not content with real sufferings, the anxious man imposes imaginary ones on himself; he is a being for whom unreality exists, must exist; otherwise where would he obtain the ration of torment his nature demands?

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Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
3 months 2 days ago
It is not proper either to...

It is not proper either to have a blunt sword or to use freedom of speech ineffectually. Neither is the sun to be taken from the world, nor freedom of speech from erudition.

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As quoted in the translation of Thomas Taylor
Philosophical Maxims
Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek
7 months 3 weeks ago
Throwing away the veils

In the more sophisticated versions of the critics of ideology - that developed by the Frankfurt School, for example - it is not just a question of seeing things (that is, social reality) as they 'really are," of throwing away the distorting spectacles of ideology; the main point is to see how the reality itself cannot reproduce itself without this so-called ideological mystification. The mask is not simply hiding the real state of things; the ideological distortion is written into its very essence... the moment we see it 'as it really is,' this being dissolves itself into nothingness or, more precisely, it changes into another kind of reality. That is why we must avoid simple metaphors of demasking, of throwing away the veils which are supposed to hide the naked reality.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 3 weeks ago
Marriage is for women the commonest...

Marriage is for women the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
3 months 2 weeks ago
There are, indeed, things that cannot...

There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.

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(6.522) Original German: Es gibt allerdings Unaussprechliches. Dies zeigt sich, es ist das Mystische.
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
4 months 2 weeks ago
It is my own experience ......

It is my own experience ... that commentators are far more ingenious at finding meaning than authors are at inserting it.

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Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
3 months 2 weeks ago
I have known only one person...

I have known only one person in my life who claimed to have seen a ghost. It was a woman; and the interesting thing is that she disbelieved in the immortality of the soul before seeing the ghost and still disbelieves after having seen it. She thinks it was a hallucination. In other words, seeing is not believing. This is the first thing to get clear in talking about miracles.

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"Miracles" (1942), p. 25
Philosophical Maxims
Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham
3 months 3 weeks ago
All poetry is misrepresentation…

All poetry is misrepresentation.

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An Aphorism attributed to him according to John Stuart Mill (see Mill's essay On Bentham and Coleridge in Utilitarianism edt. by Mary Warnock p. 123).
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 3 weeks ago
Where there is politics...
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Main Content / General
Judith Butler
Judith Butler
1 month 3 weeks ago
Indeed it may be only by...

Indeed it may be only by risking the incoherence of identity that connection is possible.

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Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
4 months 2 weeks ago
There is no way of being...

There is no way of being almost funny or mildly funny or fairly funny or tolerably funny. You are either funny or not funny and there is nothing in between. And usually it is the writer who thinks he is funny and the reader who thinks he isn't.

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Philosophical Maxims
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
1 month 2 weeks ago
In an age of enormities, the...

In an age of enormities, the emotions are naturally weakened. We are continually called upon to have feelings - about genocide, for instance, or about famine or the blowing up of passenger planes - and we are all aware that we are incapable of reacting appropriately. A guilty consciousness of emotional inadequacy or impotence makes people doubt their own human weight.

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"The Distracted Public" (1990), p. 156
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Simmel
Georg Simmel
1 day ago
Cities are, first of all, seats...

Cities are, first of all, seats of the highest economic division of labor. They produce thereby such extreme phenomena as in Paris the remunerative occupation of the quatorzième. They are persons who identify themselves by signs on their residences and who are ready at the dinner hour in correct attire, so that they can be quickly called upon if a dinner party should consist of thirteen persons. In the measure of its expansion, the city offers more and more the decisive conditions of the division of labor. It offers a circle which through its size can absorb a highly diverse variety of services.

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p. 420
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 months 3 weeks ago
Consider what you have in the...

Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.

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Philosophical Maxims
Edward Said
Edward Said
2 months 4 days ago
I retain my faith in the...

I retain my faith in the humanist tradition, that it's possible to deal with discrepant experiences truthfully without resolving into simple things like only women should write about women, only Chicanos should write about Chicanos, only Latinos should write about Latinos... I think that's the most damaging crime, and misapprehension of what I'm saying. That's why they debate all these things and they trace them back to me and people say 'you did that!' Absolutely not. I'm talking from a universalistic, if you like cosmopolitan point of view to which I adhere and which is the only way the world makes sense to me. I don't believe in the politics of identity, although in many ways paradoxically I seem to be the father of identity politics, but it's a thing I totally disbelieve in because I realise the damage that identities have done.

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Interview with Michaël Zeeman for Leven en Werken
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
4 months 2 weeks ago
A punishment that penalizes without forestalling...

A punishment that penalizes without forestalling is indeed called revenge.

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Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
1 month 3 weeks ago
The only significance of life consists...

The only significance of life consists in helping to establish the kingdom of God; and this can be done only by means of the acknowledgment and profession of the truth by each one of us. Chapter XII, Conclusion-Repent Ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at Hand Variant translation: The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity by contributing to the establishment of the kingdom of God, which can only be done by the recognition and profession of the truth by every man.

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Philosophical Maxims
William Godwin
William Godwin
2 months 2 weeks ago
It is comparatively easy for the...

It is comparatively easy for the philosopher in his closet to invent imaginary schemes of policy, and to shew how mankind, if they were without passions and without prejudices, might best be united in the form of a political community. But, unfortunately, men in all ages are the creatures of passions, perpetually prompting them to defy the rein, and break loose from the dictates of sobriety and speculation.

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History of the Commonwealth of England. From its Commencement, to the Restoration of Charles the Second. Volume the Fourth. Oliver, Lord Protector (1828), p. 579
Philosophical Maxims
Niccolò Machiavelli
Niccolò Machiavelli
3 months 4 weeks ago
The people resemble a wild beast,...

The people resemble a wild beast, which, naturally fierce and accustomed to live in the woods, has been brought up, as it were, in a prison and in servitude, and having by accident got its liberty, not being accustomed to search for its food, and not knowing where to conceal itself, easily becomes the prey of the first who seeks to incarcerate it again.

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Book 1, Ch. 16
Philosophical Maxims
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
2 months 2 weeks ago
Every political good carried to the...

Every political good carried to the extreme must be productive of evil.

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The French Revolution, Bk. V, ch. 4
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 week 5 days ago
It depends on what we read,...

It depends on what we read, after all manner of Professors have done their best for us.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 months 3 weeks ago
Keep cool: it will be all...

Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.

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Montaigne; or, The Skeptic
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
3 months 4 weeks ago
No man is exempt from saying...

No man is exempt from saying silly things; the mischief is to say them deliberately.

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Book III, Ch. 1
Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
4 months 3 weeks ago
If a man knows what it...

If a man knows what it is right to do, he does not require a formal reason. And a person that has been thus trained, either possesses these first principles already, or can easily acquire them.

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Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
2 months 1 week ago
The spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs...

The spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the control.

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p. 8
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
2 months 5 days ago
In the first place for over...

In the first place for over two centuries religion has been on the defensive, and on a weak defensive. The result of the repetition of this undignified retreat, during many generations, has at last almost entirely destroyed the intellectual authority of religious thinkers. Consider this contrast: when Darwin or Einstein proclaim theories which modify our ideas, it is a triumph for science. We do not go about saying that there is another defeat for science, because its old ideas have been abandoned. We know that another step of scientific insight has been gained.Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development.

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Ch. 12: "Religion and Science", p. 263
Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
4 months 3 weeks ago
Everything that depends on the action...

Everything that depends on the action of nature is by nature as good as it can be, and similarly everything that depends on art or any rational cause, and especially if it depends on the best of all causes. To entrust to chance what is greatest and most noble would be a very defective arrangement.

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Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
2 months 1 week ago
We never know, believe me, when...

We never know, believe me, when we have succeeded best.

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Essays and Soliloquies
Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
3 months 3 weeks ago
"...faith and repentance, i. e. believing...

"...faith and repentance, i. e. believing Jesus to be the Messiah, and a good life, are the indispensable conditions of the new covenant, to be performed by all those who would obtain eternal life. (The reasonableness, or rather necessity of which, that we may the better comprehend, we must a little look back to what was said in the beginning"

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§ 106
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
3 months 2 weeks ago
The homosexual never thinks of himself...

The homosexual never thinks of himself when someone is branded in his presence with the name homosexual. ...His sexual tastes will doubtless lead him to enter into relationships with this suspect category, but he would like to make use of them without being likened to them. Here, too, the ban that is cast on certain men by society has destroyed all possibility of reciprocity among them. Shame isolates.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
3 months 3 weeks ago
Nothing is so much to be...

Nothing is so much to be feared as fear. Atheism may comparatively be popular with God himself.

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September 7, 1851
Philosophical Maxims
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