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Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus
2 months 3 weeks ago
The things that we can see...

The things that we can see with our physical eyes are mere shadows of reality. If they appear ugly and ill formed, then what must be the ugliness of the soul in sin, deprived of all light? The soul, like the body, can undergo transformation in appearance. In sin it appears as completely ugly to the beholder. In virtue it shines resplendently before God.

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Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
3 months 2 weeks ago
Where there is happiness, there is...
Where there is happiness, there is found pleasure in nonsense. The transformation of experience into its opposite, of the suitable into the unsuitable, the obligatory into the optional (but in such a manner that this process produces no injury and is only imagined in jest), is a pleasure; ...
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Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
1 week 4 days ago
Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' is...

Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' is really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable. The universe is populated by stable things. The universe is populated by stable things. A stable thing is a collection of atoms that is permanent enough or common enough to deserve a name. It may be a unique collection of atoms, such as the Matterhorn, that lasts long enough to be worth naming. Or it may be a class of entities, such as rain drops, that come into existence at a sufficiently high rate to deserve a collective name, even if any one of them is short-lived.

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Ch. 2. The replicators
Philosophical Maxims
John Dewey
John Dewey
1 month 6 days ago
Because energy is not restrained by...

Because energy is not restrained by other elements that are at once antagonistic and cooperative, action proceeds by jerks and spasms. There is discontinuity.

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p. 189
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
1 week 4 days ago
Ignorance, to a scientist, is an...

Ignorance, to a scientist, is an itch that begs to be pleasurably scratched. Ignorance, if you are a theologian, is something to be washed away by shamelessly making something up.

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The Intellectual and Moral Courage of Atheism
Philosophical Maxims
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
1 month 1 week ago
A standing army, for instance, is...

A standing army, for instance, is incompatible with freedom; because subordination and rigour are the very sinews of military discipline; and despotism is necessary to give vigour to enterprise that one will directs. A spirit inspired by romantic notions of honour, a kind of morality founded on the fashion of the age, can only be felt by a few officers, whilst the main body must be moved by command, like the waves of the sea; for the strong wind of authority pushes the crowd of subalterns forward, they scarcely know or care why, with headlong fury.

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Ch. 1
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 month 1 day ago
True science teaches…

True science teaches, above all, to doubt and be ignorant.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
2 months 1 week ago
Good tests kill flawed theories; we...

Good tests kill flawed theories; we remain alive to guess again.

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As quoted in My Universe : A Transcendent Reality (2011) by Alex Vary, Part II
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 1 week ago
We should, out of decency, choose...

We should, out of decency, choose for ourselves the moment to disappear.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 1 week ago
Always to have lived with the...

Always to have lived with the nostalgia to coincide with something, but not really knowing with what - it is easy to shift from unbelief to belief, or conversely. But what is there to convert to, and what is there to abjure, in a state of chronic lucidity?

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Philosophical Maxims
Susan Neiman
Susan Neiman
5 days ago
French schoolchildren can be proud to...

French schoolchildren can be proud to become citizens of the country that gave the world the Declaration of the Rights of Man; need they be told that it was disregarded a few years after it inspired the revolution in Haiti, whose leader, Toussaint Louverture, was consigned to death in a French prison?

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Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
3 months 1 week ago
Of all the cultural aspects of...

Of all the cultural aspects of humanity, the only one which is not broken up into national or regional splinters is science. Different nations have different languages, they may have different religions, may have different dietaries, may have different holidays, different ways of thinking, but here's only one science. 

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Interview by Richard Heffner on The Open Mind (19 June 1988); video (25:31)
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
1 month 1 week ago
The guiding question of Marx's analysis...

The guiding question of Marx's analysis was, How does capitalist society supply its members with the necessary use-values? And the answer disclosed a process of blind necessity, chance, anarchy and frustration. The introduction of the category of use-value was the introduction of a forgotten factor, forgotten, that is, by the classical political economy which was occupied only with the phenomenon of exchange value. In the Marxian theory, this factor becomes an instrument that cuts through the mystifying reification of the commodity world.

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P. 304
Philosophical Maxims
Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek
6 months 2 weeks ago
Perception is part of the problem

I think that the task of philosophy is not to provide answers, but to show how the way we perceive a problem can be itself part of a problem.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
3 weeks 4 days ago
We live to improve....
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 2 weeks ago
There are many things of which...

There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant.

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Demonology
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
3 months 2 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
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
1 month 5 days ago
The characteristic activity of science is...

The characteristic activity of science is not construction, but induction. The more often something has occurred in the past, the more certain that it will in all the future. Knowledge relates solely to what is and to its recurrence. New forms of being, especially those arising from the historical activity of man, lie beyond empiricist theory. Thoughts which are not simply carried over from the prevailing pattern of consciousness, but arise from the aims and resolves of the individual, in short, all historical tendencies that reach beyond what is present and recurrent, do not belong to the domain of science.

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p. 144.
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
2 months 2 weeks ago
Indeed, history is nothing more…

Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.

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L'Ingénu, ch.10 (1767) Quoted in The End, part 13 of A Series of Unfortunate Events
Philosophical Maxims
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
1 month 5 days ago
No criticism can be brought against...

No criticism can be brought against a branch of technical science from outside; no thought fitted out with the knowledge of a period and setting its course by definite historical aims could have anything to say to the specialist. Such thought and the critical, dialectical element it communicates to the process of cognition, thereby maintaining conscious connection between that process and historical life, do not exist for empiricism; nor do the associated categories, such as the distinction between essence and appearance, identity in change, and rationality of ends, indeed, the concept of man, of personality, even of society and class taken in the sense that presupposes specific viewpoints and directions of interest.

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p. 145.
Philosophical Maxims
Nikolai Berdyaev
Nikolai Berdyaev
1 month 1 day 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
William James
William James
2 months 2 weeks ago
The last peculiarity of consciousness to...

The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that it is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.

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Ch. 9
Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
1 month 3 weeks ago
Do not even think of doing...

Do not even think of doing what ought not to be done.

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Pythagorean Ethical Sentences From Stobæus
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 2 weeks ago
Never self-possessed, or prudent, love is...

Never self-possessed, or prudent, love is all abandonment.

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p. 158
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 week 5 days ago
Try not to have Emily exposed...

Try not to have Emily exposed to hours and hours of TV. It is a vile drug which permeates the nervous system, especially in the young.

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Letter to son Eric McLuhan, regarding one of Eric's daughters, 1976
Philosophical Maxims
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
4 weeks ago
Pornography completes the deritualization of love.

Pornography completes the deritualization of love.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
2 months 2 weeks ago
The poet is, etymologically, the maker....

The poet is, etymologically, the maker. Like all makers, he requires a stock of raw materials - in his case, experience. Now experience is not a matter of having actually swum the Hellespont, or danced with the dervishes, or slept in a doss-house. It is a matter of sensibility and intuition, of seeing and hearing the significant things, of paying attention at the right moments, of understanding and co-ordinating. Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. It is a gift for dealing with the accidents of existence, not the accidents themselves. By a happy dispensation of nature, the poet generally possesses the gift of experience in conjunction with that of expression. What he says so well is therefore intrinsically of value.

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p. 5
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 1 week ago
I dream of a language whose...

I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.

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Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
2 months 2 weeks ago
Talent works for money and fame;...

Talent works for money and fame; the motive which moves genius to productivity is, on the other hand, less easy to determine. It isn't money, for genius seldom gets any. It isn't fame: fame is too uncertain and, more closely considered, of too little worth. Nor is it strictly for its own pleasure, for the great exertion involved almost outweighs the pleasure. It is rather an instinct of a unique sort by virtue of which the individual possessed of genius is impelled to express what he has seen and felt in enduring works without being conscious of any further motivation. It takes place, by and large, with the same sort of necessity as a tree brings forth fruit, and demands of the world no more than a soil on which the individual can flourish.

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Vol. 2 "On Philosophy and the Intellect" as translated in Essays and Aphorisms (1970), as translated by R. J. Hollingdale
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
1 month 1 week ago
An autonomous electorate, free because it...

An autonomous electorate, free because it is free from indoctrination and manipulation, would indeed be on a "level of articulate opinion and ideology" which is not likely to be found. Therefore, the concept has to be rejected as "unrealistic"-has to be if one accepts the factually prevailing level of opinion and ideology as prescribing the valid criteria for sociological analysis. And-if indoctrination and manipulation have reached the stage where the prevailing level of opinion has become a level of falsehood, where the actual state of affairs is no longer recognized as that which it is, then an analysis which is methodologically committed to reject transitive concepts commits itself to a false consciousness. Its very empiricism is ideological.

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p. 117
Philosophical Maxims
Empedocles
Empedocles
2 months 4 days ago
And I will tell you something….

And I will tell you something else: there is no birth of all mortal things, nor any end in wretched death, but only a mixing and dissolution of mixtures; 'birth' is so called on the part of mankind.

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fr. 8
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
2 months 2 weeks ago
"They would say," he answered, "that...

"They would say," he answered, "that you do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience."

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Ch. 7 : The Pendragon, section 2
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
2 months 3 weeks ago
Make your educational laws strict and...

Make your educational laws strict and your criminal ones can be gentle; but if you leave youth its liberty you will have to dig dungeons for ages.

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Philosophical Maxims
Novalis
Novalis
1 month 1 week ago
The first Man is the first...

The first Man is the first Spirit-seer; all appears to him as Spirit. What are children, but first men? The fresh gaze of the Child is richer in significance than the forecasting of the most indubitable Seer.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 2 weeks ago
A sect or party is an...

A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.

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June 20, 1831
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
3 months 2 weeks ago
When someone hides something behind a...
When someone hides something behind a bush and looks for it again in the same place and finds it there as well, there is not much to praise in such seeking and finding. Yet this is how matters stand regarding seeking and finding "truth" within the realm of reason. If I make up the definition of a mammal, and then, after inspecting a camel, declare "look, a mammal' I have indeed brought a truth to light in this way, but it is a truth of limited value. That is to say, it is a thoroughly anthropomorphic truth which contains not a single point which would be "true in itself" or really and universally valid apart from man. At bottom, what the investigator of such truths is seeking is only the metamorphosis of the world into man.
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Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
2 months 2 weeks ago
It is asserted that beasts have...

It is asserted that beasts have no rights; the illusion is harboured that our conduct, so far as they are concerned, has no moral significance, or, as it is put in the language of these codes, that "there are no duties to be fulfilled towards animals." Such a view is one of revolting coarseness, a barbarism of the West, whose source is Judaism. In philosophy, however, it rests on the assumption, despite all evidence to the contrary, of the radical difference between man and beast,-a doctrine which, as is well known, was proclaimed with more trenchant emphasis by Descartes than by any one else: it was indeed the necessary consequence of his mistakes.

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Part III, Ch. VIII, 7, p. 218
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
2 months 2 weeks ago
Morality is everywhere…

Morality is everywhere the same for all men, therefore it comes from God; sects differ, therefore they are the work of men.

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"Atheist", 1764
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay
3 days ago
I hold agitation to be essential,...

I hold agitation to be essential, not only to the obtaining of good and just measures, but to the existence of a free Government itself. If you choose to adopt the principle of Bishop Horsley, that the people have nothing to do with the laws but to obey them, then, indeed, you may deprecate agitation; but, while we live in a free country, and under a free Government, your deprecation is vain and untenable... I say that the slave-trade would never have been abolished without agitation. I say that slavery would never have been abolished without agitation... What is agitation when it is examined, but the mode in which the people in the great outer assembly debate?

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Speech in the House of Commons, 29 January 1840
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
2 months 3 weeks ago
And to bring in a new...

And to bring in a new word by the head and shoulders, they leave out the old one.

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Book III, Ch. 5. Upon some Verses of Virgil
Philosophical Maxims
René Descartes
René Descartes
2 months 3 weeks ago
M. Desargues puts me under obligations...

M. Desargues puts me under obligations on account of the pains that it has pleased him to have in me, in that he shows that he is sorry that I do not wish to study more in geometry, but I have resolved to quit only abstract geometry, that is to say, the consideration of questions which serve only to exercise the mind, and this, in order to study another kind of geometry, which has for its object the explanation of the phenomena of nature... You know that all my physics is nothing else than geometry.

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Letter to Marin Mersenne (July 27, 1638) as quoted by Florian Cajori, A History of Mathematics (1893) letter dated in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Vol. 3, The Correspondence (1991) ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch
Philosophical Maxims
Hilary Putnam
Hilary Putnam
3 weeks 1 day ago
Now, moral philosophers generally prefer to...

Now, moral philosophers generally prefer to talk about virtues, or about (specific) duties, rights, and so on, rather than about moral images of the world. There are obvious reasons for this; nevertheless, I think that it is a mistake, and that Kant is profoundly right. What we require in moral philosophy is, first and foremost, a moral image of the world, or rather--since, here again, I am more of a pluralist than Kant--a number of complementary moral images of the world.

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Lecture III: Equality and Our Moral Image of the World
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
1 week 4 days ago
If you want to do evil,...

If you want to do evil, science provides the most powerful weapons to do evil; but equally, if you want to do good, science puts into your hands the most powerful tools to do so. The trick is to want the right things, then science will provide you with the most effective methods of achieving them.

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Philosophical Maxims
Antisthenes
Antisthenes
2 months 5 days ago
The ability to hold….

When he was asked what advantage had accrued to him from philosophy, his answer was, "The ability to hold converse with myself."

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§ 4
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
1 month 1 week ago
Jesus said to His disciples, "Compare...

Jesus said to His disciples, "Compare me to someone and tell Me whom I am like." Simon Peter said to Him, "You are like a righteous angel." Matthew said to Him, "You are like a wise philosopher." Thomas said to Him, "Master, my mouth is wholly incapable of saying whom You are like." Jesus said, "I am not your master. Because you have drunk, you have become intoxicated by the bubbling spring which I have measured out." And He took him and withdrew and told him three things. When Thomas returned to his companions, they asked him, "What did Jesus say to you?" Thomas said to them, "If I tell you one of the things which he told me, you will pick up stones and throw them at me; a fire will come out of the stones and burn you up."

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Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
1 week 4 days ago
But perhaps the rest of us...

But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
2 months 2 weeks ago
I did not know the way...

I did not know the way in which, among the ordinary English, the absence of interest in things of an unselfish kind, except occasionally in a special thing here and there, and the habit of not speaking to others, nor much even to themselves, about the things in which they do feel interest, causes both their feelings and their intellectual faculties to remain undeveloped, or to develope themselves only in some single and very limited direction; reducing them, considered as spiritual beings, to a kind of negative existence.

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(p. 59)
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 1 week ago
No one has the audacity to...

No one has the audacity to exclaim: "I don't want to do anything!" - we are more indulgent with a murderer than with a mind emancipated from actions.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
2 months 2 weeks ago
It is remarkable that, notwithstanding the...

It is remarkable that, notwithstanding the universal favor with which the New Testament is outwardly received, and even the bigotry with which it is defended, there is no hospitality shown to, there is no appreciation of, the order of truth with which it deals.

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Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
1 month 1 week ago
Consciousness must essentially cover an interval...

Consciousness must essentially cover an interval of time; for if it did not, we could gain no knowledge of time, and not merely no veracious cognition of it, but no conception whatever. We are therefore, forced to say that we are immediately conscious through an infinitesimal interval of time.

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Philosophical Maxims
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