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Democritus
Democritus
2 months 2 weeks ago
No power and no treasure can...

No power and no treasure can outweigh the extension of our knowledge.

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Durant (1939), Ch. XVI, §II, p. 354; citing J. Owen, Evenings with the Skeptics, London, 1881, vol. 1, p. 149.
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 month 2 weeks ago
To all this, someone is sure...

To all this, someone is sure to object that life ought to subject itself to reason, to which we will reply that nobody ought to do what he is unable to do, and life cannot subject itself to reason. "Ought, therefore can," some Kantian will retort. To which we shall demur: "Cannot, therefore ought not." And life cannot submit itself to reason, because the end of life is living and not understanding.

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Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
3 months 2 days ago
But such is the nature of...

But such is the nature of the human mind, that it always lays hold on every mind that approaches it; and as it is wonderfully fortified by an unanimity of sentiments, so is it shocked and disturbed by any contrariety. Hence the eagerness, which most people discover in a dispute; and hence their impatience of opposition, even in the most speculative and indifferent opinions.

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Part I, Essay 8: Of Parties in General
Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
1 month 3 weeks ago
All ages before ours believed in...

All ages before ours believed in gods in some form or other. Only an unparalleled impoverishment in symbolism could enable us to rediscover the gods as psychic factors, which is to say, as archetypes of the unconscious. No doubt this discovery is hardly credible as yet.

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p. 72
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
1 month 1 week ago
What is morality in any given...

What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike.

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Ch. 22, August 30, 1941.
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
1 month 3 weeks ago
The kingdom of heaven can be...

The kingdom of heaven can be compared to a king who wanted to settle accounts with his slaves.

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18:23
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
3 months 4 weeks ago
Forgetting when God does it in...

Forgetting when God does it in relation to sin, is the opposite of creating, since to create is to bring forth from nothing and to forget is to take back into nothing. What is hidden from my eyes, that I have never seen; but what is hidden behind my back, that I have seen. The one who loves forgives in this way; he forgives, he forgets, he blots out the sin, in love he turns toward the one he forgives; but when he turns toward him, he of course, cannot see what is lying behind his back.

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Philosophical Maxims
Novalis
Novalis
1 month 3 weeks ago
Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by...

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.

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As quoted in Quote, Unquote‎ (1989) by Jonathan Williams, p. 136
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
2 months 3 weeks ago
Confession frees, but power reduces one...

Confession frees, but power reduces one to silence; truth does not belong to the order of power, but shares an original affinity with freedom: traditional themes in philosophy, which a political history of truth would have to overturn by showing that truth is not by nature free--nor error servile--but that its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power. The confession is an example of this.

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Vol. I, p. 60
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 4 weeks ago
It is only when we think...

It is only when we think abstractly that we have such a high opinion of man. Of men in the concrete, most of us think the vast majority very bad. Civilized states spend more than half their revenue on killing each other's citizens. Consider the long history of the activities inspired by moral fervour: human sacrifices, persecutions of heretics, witch-hunts, pogroms leading up to wholesale extermination by poison gases ... Are these abominations, and the ethical doctrines by which they are prompted, really evidence of an intelligent Creator? And can we really wish that the men who practised them should live for ever? The world in which we live can be understood as a result of muddle and accident; but if it is the outcome of a deliberate purpose, the purpose must have been that of a fiend. For my part, I find accident a less painful and more plausible hypothesis.

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Essay Do We Survive Death?, 1936
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 4 weeks ago
I shall keep it [the manuscript]...

I shall keep it [the manuscript] by me until the end of May for purposes of revision, and of adding malicious foot-notes.

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Letter to W. W. Norton, 17 February, 1931
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 4 weeks ago
At the present stage in the...

At the present stage in the development of the art of war, there is only way of coping with them, and that is to keep out of war. In all the densely populated countries of Western Europe, it seems almost certain that, within a few days of the outbreak of war, panic will seize the surviving inhabitants of the capitals and the industrial areas, leading to anarchy, starvation, and paralysis of all warlike effort. The only sensible course, therefore, is to prevent war if possible, and to remain neutral if war occurs.

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Letter to The New Statesman and Nation (10 August 1935)
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 4 weeks ago
That I, a funny little gesticulating...

That I, a funny little gesticulating animal on two legs, should stand beneath the stars and declaim in a passion about my rights - it seems so laughable, so out of all proportion. Much better, like Archimedes, to be killed because of absorption in eternal things... There is a possibility in human minds of something mysterious as the night-wind, deep as the sea, calm as the stars, and strong as Death, a mystic contemplation, the "intellectual love of God." Those who have known it cannot believe in wars any longer, or in any kind of hot struggle. If I could give to others what has come to me in this way, I could make them too feel the futility of fighting. But I do not know how to communicate it: when I speak, they stare, applaud, or smile, but do not understand.

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Letter to Miss Rinder, July 30, 1918
Philosophical Maxims
Hilary Putnam
Hilary Putnam
1 month 6 days ago
To me, believing that some correspondence...

To me, believing that some correspondence intrinsically just is reference (not as a result of our operational and theoretical constraints, or our intentions, but as an ultimate metaphysical fact) amounts to a magical theory of reference. Reference itself becomes what Locke called a 'substantial form' (an entity which intrinsically belongs with a certain name) on such a view. Even if one is willing to contemplate such unexplainable metaphysical facts, the epistemological problems that accompany such a metaphysical view seem insuperable. For, assuming a world of mind- independent, discourse-independent entities (this is the presupposition of the view we are discussing), there are, as we have seen, many different 'correspondences' which represent possible or candidate reference relations (infinitely many, in fact, if there are infinitely many things in the universe).

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Chap. 2 : A problem about reference
Philosophical Maxims
Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus
3 months 1 week ago
Among the celestial bodies that are...

Among the celestial bodies that are revolving over our heads, though the motions are not the same, and though the force is not equal, yet they move, and ever have moved, without clashing, and in perfect harmony.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Browne
Thomas Browne
2 months 4 days ago
A man may be in as...

A man may be in as just possession of Truth as of a City, and yet be forced to surrender.

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Section 6
Philosophical Maxims
David Pearce
David Pearce
1 week ago
It is hard to imagine an...

It is hard to imagine an experience more horrific than being eaten alive. Most of us would prefer not to imagine what it must feel like. Note that the photographer here had to persuade the park ranger to violate the park rules and put the baby elephant out of his misery.By analogy, suppose it were lawful to visit Third World countries for photoshoots but illegal to "interfere" and help a stricken human baby. Is there a fundamental difference between "ethical" intervention to help humans and "sentimental" pleas to "interfere" and help non-humans? Should we encourage the preservation of life-forms such as the hyena in their current guise? Or do the value judgements underlying the "science" of conservation biology need to be re-examined?

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"Hyenas Eat Baby Elephant Alive: The Case for Intervention"
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
2 months 4 weeks ago
I believe that the early success...

I believe that the early success and reputation of Carlyle's French Revolution, were considerably accelerated by what I wrote about it in the Review. Immediately on its publication, and before the commonplace critics, all whose rules and modes of judgment it set at defiance, had time to preoccupy the public with their disapproval of it, I wrote and published a review of the book, hailing it as one of those productions of genius which are above all rules, and are a law to themselves.

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(p. 217)
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
1 month 3 weeks ago
Time, and Industry, produce everyday new...

Time, and Industry, produce everyday new knowledge.

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The Second Part, Chapter 30, p. 176
Philosophical Maxims
Baruch Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza
3 months 2 days ago
After experience had taught me that...

After experience had taught me that all the usual surroundings of social life are vain and futile; seeing that none of the objects of my fears contained in themselves anything either good or bad, except in so far as the mind is affected by them, I finally resolved to inquire whether there might be some real good having power to communicate itself, which would affect the mind singly, to the exclusion of all else: whether, in fact, there might be anything of which the discovery and attainment would enable me to enjoy continuous, supreme, and unending happiness.

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I, 1
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 4 weeks ago
... it may be hoped that...

... it may be hoped that the white population of the world will soon cease to increase. The Asiatic races will be longer, and the negroes still longer, before their birth rate falls sufficiently to make their numbers stable without help of war and pestilence. But it is to be hoped that the religious prejudices which have hitherto hampered the spread of birth control will die out, and that ... the whole world will learn not to be unduly prolific. Until that happens, the benefits aimed at by socialism can only be partially realized, and the less prolific races will have to defend themselves against the more prolific by methods which are disgusting even if they are necessary.

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Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
4 weeks ago
Aesthetic theories arose one hundred fifty...

Aesthetic theories arose one hundred fifty years ago among the wealthy classes of the Christian European world. ...And notwithstanding its obvious insolidity, nobody else's theory so pleased the cultured crowd or was accepted so readily and with such absence of criticism. It so suited the people of the upper classes that to this day, notwithstanding its entirely fantastic character and the arbitrary nature of its assertions, it is repeated by the educated and uneducated as though it were something indubitable and self-evident.

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Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
2 months 4 weeks ago
I look forward to a future...

I look forward to a future when acts of war shall be formally outlawed as between civilized peoples. All these beliefs of mine put me firmly into the anti-military party. But I do not believe that peace either ought to be or will be permanent on this globe, unless the states, pacifically organized, preserve some of the old elements of army-discipline. A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy. In the more or less socialistic future toward which mankind seems drifting we must still subject ourselves collectively to those severities which answer to our real position upon this only partly hospitable globe. We must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings.

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Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
2 months 3 days ago
The world is the house of...

The world is the house of the strong. I shall not know until the end what I have lost or won in this place, in this vast gambling den where I have spent more than sixty years, dicebox in hand, shaking the dice.

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Conclusion
Philosophical Maxims
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
1 month 3 weeks ago
If women be educated for dependence;...

If women be educated for dependence; that is, to act according to the will of another fallible being, and submit, right or wrong, to power, where are we to stop?

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Ch. 3
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
3 months 1 day ago
The child must be brought up...

The child must be brought up free (that he allow others to be free). He must learn to endure the restraint to which freedom subjects itself for its own preservation (experience no subordination to his command). Thus he must be disciplined. This precedes instruction. Training must continue without interruption. He must learn to do without things and to be cheerful about it. He must not be obliged to dissimulate, he must acquire immediate horror of lies, must learn so to respect the rights of men that they become an insurmountable wall for him. His instruction must be more negative. He must not learn religion before he knows morality. He must be refined, but not spoiled (pampered). He must learn to speak frankly, and must assume no false shame. Before adolescence he must not learn fine manners ; thoroughness is the chief thing. Thus he is crude longer, but earlier useful and capable.

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Part III : Selection on Education from Kant's other Writings, Ch. I Pedagogical Fragments, # 3
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley
2 weeks ago
If the hypothesis of evolution is...

If the hypothesis of evolution is true, living matter must have arisen from non-living matter; for by the hypothesis the condition of the globe was at one time such, that living matter could not have existed in it, life being entirely incompatible with the gaseous state.

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In the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Ninth edition, (1876) Vol. III, "Biology", p. 689. Also quoted in Joseph Cook (1878), Biology, with Preludes on Current Events, Houghton, Osgood, p. 39
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
1 month 1 week ago
Every man has his moral backside...

Every man has his moral backside which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum.

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B 12 Variant translation: Everyone has a moral backside, which he does not show except in case of need and which he covers as long as possible with the breeches of respectability.
Philosophical Maxims
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
2 months 3 weeks ago
The simple-minded positivism that believes it...

The simple-minded positivism that believes it has found a firm ground of certainty if it only excludes all mental phenomena from consideration and holds fast to observable facts.

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p. 39
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
2 months 3 weeks ago
I squander untold effort making an...

I squander untold effort making an arrangement of my thoughts that may have no value whatever.

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p. 33e
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
2 months 4 weeks ago
As for large landed property, its...

As for large landed property, its defenders have always, sophistically, identified the economic advantages offered by large-scale agriculture with large-scale landed property, as if it were not precisely as a result of the abolition of property that this advantage, for one thing, would receive its greatest possible extension, and, for another, only then would be of social benefit.

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Rent of Land, p. 66.
Philosophical Maxims
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
1 month 4 weeks ago
Who am I? Subject and object...

Who am I? Subject and object in one - contemplating and contemplated, thinking and thought of. As both must I have become what I am.

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Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p. 71
Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
3 months 2 days ago
Does a man of sense run...

Does a man of sense run after every silly tale of hobgoblins or fairies, and canvass particularly the evidence? I never knew anyone, that examined and deliberated about nonsense who did not believe it before the end of his enquiries.

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Letters
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 month 2 weeks ago
What objection is there in reason...

What objection is there in reason to there being no other purpose in the sum of things save only to exist and happen as it does exist and happen? For him who places himself outside of himself, none; but for him who lives and suffers and desires within himself - for him it is a question of life or death.

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Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
1 month 1 week ago
The art of progress is to...

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.

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Philosophical Maxims
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal
3 months 1 week ago
Whilst in speaking of human things,...

Whilst in speaking of human things, we say that it is necessary to know them before we can love them...the saints on the contrary say in speaking of divine things that it is necessary to love them in order to know them, and that we only enter truth through charity.

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Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
4 weeks ago
Go - take the mother's soul,...

Go - take the mother's soul, and learn three truths: Learn What dwells in man, What is not given to man, and What men live by. When thou hast learnt these things, thou shalt return to heaven.

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Ch. IV
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 3 weeks ago
What pride to discover that nothing...

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

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Philosophical Maxims
Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno
2 months 5 days ago
Perchance you who pronounce…

Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it.

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His famous response to his judges upon his conviction as a heretic, prior to his transfer to the civil authorities for execution. (16 February 1600); as quoted by Gaspar Schopp of Breslau in a letter to Conrad Rittershausen
Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
1 month 2 weeks ago
It is not only in literature...

It is not only in literature that fiction generates immorality. It does it also in life itself. For the substance of our life is almost exclusively composed of fiction. We fictionalize our future, and, unless we are heroically devoted to truth, we fictionalize our past, refashioning it to our taste. We do not study other people; we invent what they are thinking, saying, and doing. Reality provides us with some raw material, just as novelists often take a theme from a news item, but we envelop it in a fog in which, as in all fiction, values are reversed, so that evil is attractive and good is tedious.

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"Morality and literature," pp. 161-162
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard
1 month 1 day ago
Today's terrorism is not the product...

Today's terrorism is not the product of a traditional history of anarchism, nihilism, or fanaticism. It is instead the contemporary partner of globalization.

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The Spirit of Terrorism (2003) "The Violence of the Global"
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 4 weeks ago
Whoso walketh in solitude, And inhabiteth...

Whoso walketh in solitude, And inhabiteth the wood, Choosing light, wave, rock, and bird, Before the money-loving herd, Into that forester shall pass From these companions power and grace.

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Wood-notes, no. II, st. 4
Philosophical Maxims
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal
3 months 1 week ago
Do not imagine that it is...

Do not imagine that it is less an accident by which you find yourself master of the wealth which you possess, than that by which this man found himself king.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 4 weeks ago
Wit makes its own welcome, and...

Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, and no force of character can make any stand against good wit.

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The Comic
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 3 weeks ago
By capitulating to life, this world...

By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness. . . . I resign from movement, and from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole glory. . . . Let "desire" be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping.

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Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
2 months 3 weeks ago
I am sorry that my convictions...

I am sorry that my convictions do not allow me to repeat my friend's offer, said one of the others. But I have had to abandon the humanitarian and egalitarian fancies. His name was Mr. Neo-Classical.

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Pilgrim's Regress 89
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 week ago
Turning your back...
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Main Content / General
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
1 month 4 weeks ago
The writers against religion, whilst they...

The writers against religion, whilst they oppose every system, are wisely careful never to set up any of their own.

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Preface
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
1 month 1 week ago
When, in the course of human...

When, in the course of human development, existing institutions prove inadequate to the needs of man, when they serve merely to enslave, rob, and oppress mankind, the people have the eternal right to rebel against, and overthrow, these institutions.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
2 months 4 weeks ago
The Ideal Man of the eighteenth...

The Ideal Man of the eighteenth century was the Rationalist; of the seventeenth, the Christian Stoic; of the Renaissance, the Free Individual; of the Middle Ages, the Contemplative Saint. And what is our Ideal Man? On what grand and luminous mythological figure does contemporary humanity attempt to model itself? The question is embarrassing. Nobody knows. And, in spite of all the laudable efforts of the Institute for Intellectual Co-operation to fabricate an acceptable Ideal Man for the use of Ministers of Education, nobody, I suspect, will know until such time as a major poet appears upon the scene with the unmistakable revelation. Meanwhile, one must be content to go on piping up for reason and realism and a certain decency.

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p. 5
Philosophical Maxims
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