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Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 months 3 days ago
The only interesting philosophers are the...

The only interesting philosophers are the ones who have stopped thinking and have begun to search for happiness.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Gray
John Gray
1 month 2 weeks ago
For Leopardi evil is integral to...

For Leopardi evil is integral to the way the world works; but when he talks of evil he does not mean any kind of malign agency of the sort that Gnostics imagined. Evil is the suffering that is built into the scheme of things. 'What hope is there when evil is ordinary?' he asks. 'I mean, in an order where evil is necessary?' These rhetorical questions show why Leopardi had no interest in projects of revolution and reform. No type of human action - least of all the harlequinade of politics - could fundamentally alter a world in which evil was ordinary.

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The Faith of Puppets: Leopardi and the Souls of Machines (p.35-6)
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
2 months 3 weeks ago
If consciousness is, as some inhuman...

If consciousness is, as some inhuman thinker has said, nothing more than a flash of light between two eternities of darkness, then there is nothing more execrable than existence.

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Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
2 months 3 weeks ago
Alexander is to a peasant proprietor...

Alexander is to a peasant proprietor what Don Juan is to a happily married husband.

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p. 78,
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
4 months 3 weeks ago
The way which the superior man...

The way which the superior man pursues, reaches wide and far, and yet is secret. Common men and women, however ignorant, may intermeddle with the knowledge of it; yet in its utmost reaches, there is that which even the sage does not know. Common men and women, however much below the ordinary standard of character, can carry it into practice; yet in its utmost reaches, there is that which even the sage is not able to carry into practice. Great as heaven and earth are, men still find some things in them with which to be dissatisfied. Thus it is that, were the superior man to speak of his way in all its greatness, nothing in the world would be found able to embrace it, and were he to speak of it in its minuteness, nothing in the world would be found able to split it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Charles Fourier
Charles Fourier
1 month 3 days ago
The seeds of heavenly bodies are...

The seeds of heavenly bodies are deposited and cared for in the Milky Way, from which they emanate in swarms of comets that travel a ;long time and ordinarily gravitate towards various suns before becoming fixed in orbit.

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L'attraction passioneé
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
4 days ago
...be tolerant with others and strict...

...be tolerant with others and strict with yourself. Remember, nothing belongs to you but your flesh and blood-and nothing else is under your control.

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(Hays translation) V, 33
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
3 months 1 week ago
Monsters cannot be...
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Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
4 months 2 weeks ago
For a desperate disease a desperate...

For a desperate disease a desperate cure.

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Book II, Ch. 3. The Custom of the Isle of Cea
Philosophical Maxims
Zoroaster
Zoroaster
3 months 4 weeks ago
In forming a store of good...

In forming a store of good works thou shouldst be diligent, so that it may come to thy assistance among the spirits.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
1 week ago
Of all the systems of morality,...

Of all the systems of morality, ancient or modern, which have come under my observation, none appear to me so pure as that of Jesus. He who follows this steadily need not, I think, be uneasy, although he cannot comprehend the subtleties and mysteries erected on his doctrines by those who, calling themselves his special followers and favorites, would make him come into the world to lay snares for all understandings but theirs. These metaphysical heads, usurping the judgment seat of God, denounce as his enemies all who cannot perceive the Geometrical logic of Euclid in the demonstrations of St. Athanasius, that three are one, and one is three; and yet that the one is not three nor the three one.

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Letter to William Canby
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
4 months 1 week ago
Consciousness, then, does not appear to...

Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits ... A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.

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Ch. 9
Philosophical Maxims
Nikolai Berdyaev
Nikolai Berdyaev
2 months 3 weeks ago
God is denied either because the...

God is denied either because the world is so bad or because the world is so good.

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Original: Бога отрицают или потому, что мир так плох, или потому, что мир так хорош.
Philosophical Maxims
Nikos Kazantzakis
Nikos Kazantzakis
1 week 1 day ago
I am NOT nothing! A vaporous...

I am NOT nothing! A vaporous phosphorescence on a damp meadow, a miserable worm that crawls and loves, that shouts and talks about wings for an hour or two until his mouth is blocked with earth. The dark powers give no other answer. But within me a deathless Cry, superior to me, continues to shout. For whether I want to or not, I am also, without doubt, a part of the visible and the invisible Universe. We are one.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
2 months 5 days ago
The potential of any new technology...

The potential of any new technology is always dissipated by its users involvement in its predecessors.

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(p. 210)
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
4 months 1 week ago
Seeing only what is fair, Sipping...

Seeing only what is fair, Sipping only what is sweet, Thou dost mock at fate and care.

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To the Humble Bee, st. 6
Philosophical Maxims
John Rawls
John Rawls
4 months 6 days ago
The intolerant can be viewed as...

The intolerant can be viewed as free-riders, as persons who seek the advantages of just institutions while not doing their share to uphold them.

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Chapter VI, Section 59, pg. 388
Philosophical Maxims
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
2 months 4 weeks ago
Similarly a work of art vanishes...

Similarly a work of art vanishes from sight for a beholder who seeks in it nothing but the moving fate of John and Mary or Tristan and Isolde and adjusts his vision to this. Tristan's sorrows are sorrows and can evoke compassion only in so far as they are taken as real. But an object of art is artistic only in so far as it is not real. In order to enjoy Titian's portrait of Charles the Fifth on horseback we must forget that this is Charles the Fifth in person and see instead a portrait - that is, an image, a fiction. The portrayed person and his portrait are two entirely different things; we are interested in either one or the other. In the first case we "live" with Charles the Fifth, in the second we look at an object of art.

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"The Dehumanization of Art"
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
4 months 2 weeks ago
Another argument of hope may be...

Another argument of hope may be drawn from this - that some of the inventions already known are such as before they were discovered it could hardly have entered any man's head to think of; they would have been simply set aside as impossible. For in conjecturing what may be men set before them the example of what has been, and divine of the new with an imagination preoccupied and colored by the old; which way of forming opinions is very fallacious, for streams that are drawn from the springheads of nature do not always run in the old channels.

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Aphorism 109
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
2 months 2 weeks ago
Maslow explained that, some time in...

Maslow explained that, some time in the late thirties, he had been struck by the thought that modern psychology is based on the study of sick people. But since there are more healthy people around than sick people, how can this psychology give a fair idea of the workings of the human mind? It struck him that it might be worthwhile to devote some time to the study of healthy people.

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p. 15
Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
2 months 5 days ago
When Fortune is on our side,...

When Fortune is on our side, popular favor bears her company.

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Maxim 275
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
4 weeks ago
Alas! such is the miseducation of...

Alas! such is the miseducation of these days, it is only among those that are called the uneducated classes - those educated by experience - that you can look for a Man. Even among these, such a sight is growing daily rarer. My father, in several respects, has not, that I can think of, left his fellow. Perhaps among Scottish peasants what Samuel Johnson was among English authors. I have a sacred pride in my peasant father, and would not exchange him, even now, for any king known to me. Gold and the guinea stamp - the Man and the clothes of the man. Let me thank God for that greatest of blessings, and strive to live worthily of it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Plato
Plato
5 months 5 days ago
The many do not know...

Zeno: The many do not know that except by this devious passage through all things the mind cannot attain to the truth. Zeno: Most people are not aware that this roundabout progress through all things is the only way in which the mind can attain truth and wisdom.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Mannheim
Karl Mannheim
4 days ago
Relativism is a product of the...

Relativism is a product of the modern historical-sociological procedure which is based on the recognition that all historical thinking is bound up with the concrete position in life of the thinker [Standortsgebundenheit des Denkers]. But relativism combines this historical-sociological insight with an older theory of knowledge which was as yet unaware of the interplay between conditions of existence and modes of thought, and which modelled its knowledge after static prototypes such as might be exemplified by the proposition 2 x 2 = 4. This older type of thought, which regarded such examples as the model of all thought, was necessarily led to the rejection of all those forms of knowledge which were dependent upon the subjective standpoint and the social situation of the knower, and which were, hence, merely "relative".

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Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
2 months 1 week ago
No longer able to believe in...

No longer able to believe in the Church religion, whose falsehood they had detected, and incapable of accepting true Christian teaching, which denounced their whole manner of life, these rich and powerful people, stranded without any religious conception of life, involuntarily returned to that pagan view of things which places life's meaning in personal enjoyment. And then among the upper classes what is called the "Renaissance of science and art" took place, which was really not only a denial of every religion, but also an assertion that religion was unnecessary.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 1 week ago
In democratic countries, the most important...

In democratic countries, the most important private organizations are economic. Unlike secret societies, they are able to exercize their terrorism without illegality, since they do not threaten to kill their enemies, but only to starve them.

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Ch. 12: Powers and forms of governments
Philosophical Maxims
Iamblichus
Iamblichus
5 days ago
If the potential of every number...

If the potential of every number is in the monad, then the monad would be intelligible number in the strict sense, since it is not yet manifesting anything actual, but everything conceptually together in it.

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On the Monad
Philosophical Maxims
Plato
Plato
5 months 5 days ago
Then the case is the same...

Then the case is the same in all the other arts for the orator and his rhetoric; there is no need to know the truth of the actual matters, but one merely needs to have discovered some device of persuasion which will make one appear to those who do not know to know better than those who know.

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Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
2 months 2 weeks ago
He was a man born into...

He was a man born into a world dominated by scientific materialism. His objection to this materialism was not merely intellectual, or even egotistical (the feeling 'If the world is wholly material, then I can't be very important'). It was the feeling that man is cut off from his inner powers by this superficial attitude.

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p. 166
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
4 months 2 weeks ago
There must then be something that...

There must then be something that is better, and that must be God. When you see a stately and stupendous edifice, though you do not know who is the owner of it, you would yet conclude it was not built for rats. And this divine structure, that we behold of the celestial palace, have we not reason to believe that it is the residence of some possessor, who is much greater than we?

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Ch. 12, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Carew Hazlitt, 1877
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
4 months 1 week ago
Philosophical knowledge is the knowledge gained...

Philosophical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from concepts; mathematical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from the construction of concepts.

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A 713, B 741
Philosophical Maxims
Willard van Orman Quine
Willard van Orman Quine
2 months 3 weeks ago
The word 'definition' has come to...

The word 'definition' has come to have a dangerously reassuring sound, owing no doubt to its frequent occurrence in logical and mathematical writings.

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"Two dogmas of Empiricism", p. 26
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
2 months 2 weeks ago
It is the fallacy of all...

It is the fallacy of all intellectuals to believe that intellect can grasp life. It cannot, because it works in terms of symbols and language. There is another factor involved: consciousness. If the flame of consciousness is low, a symbol has no power to evoke reality, and intellect is helpless.

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p. 112
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
4 months 6 days ago
The best way to drive out...

The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn. 

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Martin Luther, quoted at the beginning of The Screwtape Letters
Philosophical Maxims
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
2 months 4 weeks ago
Leibniz's theory on the subject as...

Leibniz's theory on the subject as substantia ideans in the sense of a causative agent of decision and acts stands much closer to a materialist interpretation of history than does a philosophy which reduces the thinking subject to the role of subsuming protocol sentences under general propositions and deducing other sentences from them.

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p. 149.
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine
4 months 1 week ago
War involves in its progress such...

War involves in its progress such a train of unforeseen and unsupposed circumstances ... that no human wisdom can calculate the end. Prospects on the Rubicon

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London: J. Debrett, 1787
Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
4 months 1 week ago
But though all the general rules...

But though all the general rules of art are founded only on experience and on the observation of the common sentiments of human nature, we must not imagine, that, on every occasion, the feelings of men will be conformable to these rules.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
4 months 2 weeks ago
How many things served us…

How many things served us yesterday for articles of faith, which today are fables for us?

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Ch. 27. Of Friendship
Philosophical Maxims
Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm
2 months 2 weeks ago
Both dreams and myths are important...

Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world.

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As quoted in The New York Times
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
4 months 1 week ago
Never read any book that is...

Never read any book that is not a year old.

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Books
Philosophical Maxims
Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale
2 months 2 weeks ago
You ask me why I do...

You ask me why I do not write something... I think one's feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions and into actions which bring results.

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Letter to a friend, quoted in The Life of Florence Nightingale (1913) by Edward Tyas Cook, p. 94
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
3 weeks 1 day ago
No easy way…

No easy way leads from the earth to heaven..

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line 437; (Megara).
Philosophical Maxims
Sydney Smith
Sydney Smith
3 weeks 1 day ago
What would life be without arithmetic,...

What would life be without arithmetic, but a scene of horrors?

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Vol. II, letter to Miss Lucie Austin (22 July 1835), p. 364
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Nozick
Robert Nozick
1 month 1 week ago
You can't satisfy everybody; especially if...

You can't satisfy everybody; especially if there are those who will be dissatisfied unless not everybody is satisfied.

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Ch. 10 : A Framework for Utopia; The Framework as Utopian Common Ground, p. 320
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
4 months 3 days ago
My difficulty is only an -...

My difficulty is only an - enormous - difficulty of expression.

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Journal entry (8 March 1915) p. 40
Philosophical Maxims
Cornel West
Cornel West
4 months 2 days ago
The paradox of race in America...

The paradox of race in America is that our common destiny is more pronounced and imperiled precisely when our divisions are deeper.

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(p4)
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
4 months 1 week ago
When we hear news

When we hear news, we should always wait for the sacrament of confirmation.

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Letter to Charles-Augustin Ferriol, comte d'Argental, 28 August 1760]]
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
2 months 2 weeks ago
If you are going to build...

If you are going to build something in the air it is always better to build castles than houses of cards.

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F 39
Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
3 months 4 days ago
Every interpretation is hypothetical, for it...

Every interpretation is hypothetical, for it is a mere attempt to read an unfamiliar text. An obscure dream, taken by itself, can rarely be interpreted with any certainty, so that I attach little importance to the interpretation of single dreams. With a series of dreams we can have more confidence in our interpretations, for the later dreams correct the mistakes we have made m handling those that went before. We are also better able, in a dream series, to recognize the important contents and basic themes.

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p. 14
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
3 months ago
Bourgeois political economy ... never gets...

Bourgeois political economy ... never gets to see man who is its real subject. It disregards the essence of man and his history and is thus in the profoundest sense not a 'science of people' but of non-people and of an inhuman world of objects and commodities.

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"The Foundations of Historical Materialism," Studies in Critical Philosophy (1972), p. 9
Philosophical Maxims
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