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Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 2 weeks ago
I used to ask myself, over...

I used to ask myself, over a coffin: "What good did it do the occupant to be born?," I now put the same question about anyone alive.

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Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
2 months 2 weeks ago
Men use thought…

Men use thought only to justify their wrongdoings, and speech only to conceal their thoughts.

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Dialogue 14, Le Chapon et la Poularde (1766); reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed., 1919
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
2 months 2 weeks ago
Everybody knows that the same sum...

Everybody knows that the same sum of money is of much greater value to a poor man that to a rich one. Give £10 a year to the man who has but £10 a year, you double his income, and you nearly double his enjoyments. Add £10 more, you do not add to his enjoyments so much as you did by the first £10. The third £10 is less valuable than the second, and the fourth less valuable than the third. To the possessor of £1,000 a year the addition of £10 would be scarcely perceptible; to the possessor of £10,000 it would not be worth slooping for.The richer a man is the less he is benefited by any further addition to his income. The man of £4,000 a year has four times the income of the man who has but £1,000; but does anybody suppose that he has four times the happiness?

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John Stuart Mill, Primogeniture, in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Toronto, 1988, vol. 26, p. 336
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
3 months 2 weeks ago
How close men, despite all their...

How close men, despite all their knowledge, usually live to madness? What is truth but to live for an idea? When all is said and done, everything is based on a postulate; but not until it no longer stands on the outside, not until one lives in it, does it cease to be a postulate.

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Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
3 months 4 days ago
People travel to wonder at the...

People travel to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars; and they pass by themselves without wondering.

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Variant: Men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty billows of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, and pass themselves by. X
Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
1 month 4 days ago
The human soul has need of...

The human soul has need of disciplined participation in a common task of public value, and it has need of personal initiative within this participation. The human soul has need of security and also of risk. The fear of violence or of hunger or of any other extreme evil is a sickness of the soul. The boredom produced by a complete absence of risk is also a sickness of the soul.

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Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
1 month 2 weeks ago
I am aware that the age...

I am aware that the age is not what we all wish. But I am sure, that the only means of checking its precipitate degeneracy, is heartily to concur with whatever is the best in our time; and to have some more correct standard of judging what that best is, than the transient and uncertain favour of a court. If once we are able to find, and can prevail on ourselves to strengthen an union of such men, whatever accidentally becomes indisposed to ill-exercised power, even by the ordinary operation of human passions, must join with that society, and cannot long be joined, without in some degree assimilating to it. Virtue will catch as well as vice by contact; and the public stock of honest manly principle will daily accumulate. We are not too nicely to scrutinize motives as long as action is irreproachable. It is enough, (and for a worthy man perhaps too much,) to deal out its infamy to convicted guilt and declared apostacy.

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Philosophical Maxims
bell hooks
bell hooks
1 month 2 days ago
People with healthy self-esteem do not...

People with healthy self-esteem do not need to create pretend identities.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 3 weeks ago
His capital is...
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Main Content / General
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
3 months 2 weeks ago
What will be left of the...

What will be left of the power of example if it is proved that capital punishment has another power, and a very real one, which degrades men to the point of shame, madness, and murder?

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Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
2 months 2 weeks ago
I have received, sir, your new...

I have received, sir, your new book against the human species, and I thank you for it. You will please people by your manner of telling them the truth about themselves, but you will not alter them. The horrors of that human society-from which in our feebleness and ignorance we expect so many consolations-have never been painted in more striking colours: no one has ever been so witty as you are in trying to turn us into brutes: to read your book makes one long to go on all fours. Since, however, it is now some sixty years since I gave up the practice, I feel that it is unfortunately impossible for me to resume it: I leave this natural habit to those more fit for it than are you and I.

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Letter to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, August 30, 1755 referring to Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality.
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
2 months 2 weeks ago
There is no spiritual sustenance in...

There is no spiritual sustenance in flat equality. It is a dim recognition of this fact which makes much of our political propaganda sound so thin. We are trying to be enraptured by something which is merely the negative condition of the good life. That is why the imagination of people is so easily captured by appeals to the craving for inequality, whether in a romantic form of films about loyal courtiers or in the brutal form of Nazi ideology. The tempter always works on some real weakness in our own system of values - offers food to some need which we have starved.

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Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
2 months 3 weeks ago
The heights of popularity and patriotism...

The heights of popularity and patriotism are still the beaten road to power and tyranny ; flattery to treachery ; standing armies to arbitrary government ; and the glory of God to the temporal interest of the clergy.

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Part I, Essay 8: Of Public Credit (This appears as a footnote in editions H to P. Other editions include it in the body of the text, and some number it Essay 9.)
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
2 months 2 weeks ago
Why you fool, it's the educated...

Why you fool, it's the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything.

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Ch. 5: Elasticity, section 1 Miss Hardcastle speaking to Mark Studdock
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 month 5 days ago
Fe que no duda es fe...

Faith which does not doubt is dead faith.

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La Agonía del Cristianismo (The Agony of Christianity)
Philosophical Maxims
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
1 week 4 days ago
It seems hard for the American...

It seems hard for the American people to believe that anything could be more exciting than the times themselves. What we read daily and view on the TV has thrust imagined forms into the shadow. We are staggeringly rich in facts, in things, and perhaps, like the nouveau riche of other ages, we want our wealth faithfully reproduced by the artist.

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Facts That Put Fancy to Flight (1962), p. 67
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
1 month 1 day ago
The very proclaimers of "America first"...

The very proclaimers of "America first" have long before this betrayed the fundamental principles of real Americanism...the other truly great Americans who aimed to make of this country a haven of refuge, who hoped that all the disinherited and oppressed people in coming to these shores would give character, quality and meaning to the country.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
2 months 1 week ago
But what then is this confrontation...

But what then is this confrontation below the language of reason? Where might this interrogation lead, following not reason in its horizontal becoming, but seeking to retrace in time this constant verticality, which, the length of Western culture, confronts it with what it is not, measuring it with its own extravagance?

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Preface to 1961 edition
Philosophical Maxims
Diogenes of Sinope
Diogenes of Sinope
2 months 1 week ago
One day, observing a child drinking...

One day, observing a child drinking out of his hands, he cast away the cup from his wallet with the words, "A child has beaten me in plainness of living."

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Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 37
Philosophical Maxims
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
1 month 1 week 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
Friedrich Schlegel
Friedrich Schlegel
1 month 2 weeks ago
Irony is the form of paradox....

Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time.

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Aphorism 48, as translated in Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms (1968), p. 151
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 month 5 days ago
...as the great Unitarian preacher Channing...

...as the great Unitarian preacher Channing pointed out, that in France and Spain there are multitudes who have proceeded from rejecting Popery to absolute atheism, because "the fact is, that false and absurd doctrines, when exposed, have a natural tendency to beget skepticism in those who receive them without reflection. None are so likely to believe too little as those who have begun by believing too much." Here is, indeed, the terrible danger of believing too much. But no! the terrible danger comes from another quarter - from seeking to believe with the reason and not with the life.

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Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
1 month 1 day ago
The real importance of Swedenborg lies...

The real importance of Swedenborg lies in the doctrines he taught, which are the reverse of the gloom and hell-fire of other breakaway sects. He rejects the notion that Jesus died on the cross to atone for the sin of Adam, declaring that God is neither vindictive nor petty-minded, and that since he is God, he doesn't need atonement. It is remarkable that this common-sense view had never struck earlier theologians. God is Divine Goodness, and Jesus is Divine Wisdom, and Goodness has to be approached through Wisdom. Whatever one thinks about the extraordinary claims of its founder, it must be acknowledged that there is something very beautiful and healthy about the Swedenborgian religion. Its founder may have not been a great occultist, but he was a great man.

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p. 280
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 2 weeks ago
Tears do not burn except in...

Tears do not burn except in solitude.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel
2 months 1 week ago
Bats ... present a range of...

Bats ... present a range of activity and a sensory apparatus so different from ours that the problem I want to pose is exceptionally vivid (though it certainly could be raised with other species). Even without the benefit of philosophical reflection, anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.

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p. 168.
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
2 months 3 weeks ago
Rejoice in the things that are...

Rejoice in the things that are present; all else is beyond thee.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas
3 months 6 days ago
Now what has been said about...

Now what has been said about the Jews is also to be understood about Cahorsins, and anyone else depending upon the depravity of usury.

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art. 4
Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
2 months 2 weeks ago
Reason, if consulted with, would advise,...

Reason, if consulted with, would advise, that their children's time should be spent in acquiring what might be useful to them when they come to be men, rather than to have their heads stuff'd with a deal of trash, a great part whereof they usually never do ('tis certain they never need to) think on again as long as they live: and so much of it as does stick by them they are only the worse for.

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Sec. 94
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard
3 weeks ago
Simulation is no longer that of...

Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is a generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.

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"The Precession of Simulacra," p. 1
Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
3 months 4 days ago
Charity is no substitute for justice...

Charity is no substitute for justice withheld.

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As quoted in Majority of One (1957) by Sydney J. Harris, p. 283
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
2 weeks 4 days ago
It occurred to him that what...

It occurred to him that what had appeared perfectly impossible before, namely that he had not spent his life as he should have done, might after all be true. It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false. He tried to defend all those things to himself and suddenly felt the weakness of what he was defending.

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Ch. XI
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
2 months 3 weeks ago
To found a great empire for...

To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers, may at first appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers; but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers.

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Chapter VII, Part Third, p. 667.
Philosophical Maxims
Diogenes of Sinope
Diogenes of Sinope
2 months 1 week ago
When Alexander the Great addressed him...

When Alexander the Great addressed him with greetings, and asked if he wanted anything, Diogenes replied "Yes, stand a little out of my sunshine."

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From Plutarch, Alexander, 14. Cf. Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 38, Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, v. 32
Philosophical Maxims
Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Bakunin
1 month 2 weeks ago
We exhort the compromisers to open...

We exhort the compromisers to open their hearts to truth, to free themselves of their wretched and blind circumspection, of their intellectual arrogance, and of the servile fear which dries up their souls and paralyzes their movements. Let us therefore trust the eternal Spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternal source of all life. The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!

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"The Reaction in Germany" (1842) Often paraphrased as, "The urge to destroy is also a creative urge"
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 2 weeks ago
In the fact of being born...

In the fact of being born there is such an absence of necessity that when you think about it a little more than usual, you are left...with a foolish grin.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
2 months 2 weeks ago
As a rule, begin my lectures...

As a rule, begin my lectures on Scientific Method by telling my students that scientific method does not exist. ...having been ...the one and only professor of this non-existent subject within the British Commonwealth.

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Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
1 month 1 week ago
The music of the soul is...

The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value counts. On it centers the rationality of the status quo, and all alien rationality is bent to It.

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p. 57
Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
2 months ago
Let thy mind rule thy tongue!

Let thy mind rule thy tongue!

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Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
2 months 3 weeks ago
The guardians who have kindly undertaken...

The guardians who have kindly undertaken the supervision will see to it that by far the largest part of mankind, including the entire "beautiful sex," should consider the step into maturity, not only as difficult but as very dangerous. After having made their domestic animals dumb and having carefully prevented these quiet creatures from daring to take any step beyond the lead-strings to which they have fastened them, these guardians then show them the danger which threatens them, should they attempt to walk alone.

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Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 month 5 days ago
Yes, I know well that others...

Yes, I know well that others before me have felt what I feel and express; that many others feel it today, although they keep silence about it. ...And I do not keep silence about it because it is for many the thing which must not be spoken, the abomination of abominations - infandum - and I believe that it is necessary now and again to speak the thing which must not be spoken. ...Even if it should lead only to irritating the devotees of progress, those who believe that truth is consolation, it would lead to not a little. To irritating them and making them say: "Poor fellow! if he would only use his intelligence to better purpose!... Someone perhaps will add that I do not know what I say, to which I shall reply that perhaps he may be right - and being right is such a little thing! - but that I feel what I say and I know what I feel and that suffices me. And that it is better to be lacking in reason than to have too much of it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
2 months 3 weeks ago
A man must be perfectly crazy...

A man must be perfectly crazy who, where there is tolerable security, does not employ all the stock which he commands…

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Chapter I, p. 313 (see opportunity cost).
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
2 months 1 week ago
The political, ethical, social, philosophical problem...

The political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our day is not to try to liberate the individual from the state and from the state's institutions but to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization which is linked to the state. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries.

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p. 785
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
2 months 3 weeks ago
We are brought to a belief...

We are brought to a belief of God either by reason or by force. Atheism being a proposition as unnatural as monstrous, difficult also and hard to establish in the human understanding, how arrogant soever, there are men enough seen, out of vanity and pride, to be the authors of extraordinary and reforming opinions, and outwardly to affect the profession of them; who, if they are such fools, have, nevertheless, not the power to plant them in their own conscience. Yet will they not fail to lift up their hands towards heaven if you give them a good thrust with a sword in the breast, and when fear or sickness has abated and dulled the licentious fury of this giddy humour they will easily re-unite, and very discreetly suffer themselves to be reconciled to the public faith and examples.

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Ch. 12
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
2 weeks ago
Wherever a man is, there will...

Wherever a man is, there will be a lie.

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Episodes in the Story of a Mine.
Philosophical Maxims
Gaston Bachelard
Gaston Bachelard
1 month 1 week ago
Childhood lasts all through life. It...

Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life.... Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable immobile world.

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Introduction, sect. 6
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
2 months 2 weeks ago
Whenever a theory appears to you...

Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.

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Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach
Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
2 months 2 weeks ago
A mother gave her children Aesop's...

A mother gave her children Aesop's fables to read, in the hope of educating and improving their minds; but they very soon brought the book back, and the eldest, wise beyond his years, delivered himself as follows: This is no book for us; it's much too childish and stupid. You can't make us believe that foxes and wolves and ravens are able to talk; we've got beyond stories of that kind! In these young hopefuls you have the enlightened Rationalists of the future.

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"Similes, Parables and Fables" Parerga and Paralipomena
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
3 months 1 week ago
The man of virtue makes the...

The man of virtue makes the difficulty to be overcome his first business, and success only a subsequent consideration.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
1 month 1 week ago
Whoever blasphemes against the Father will...

Whoever blasphemes against the Father will be forgiven, and whoever blasphemes against the Son will be forgiven, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven either on earth or in heaven.

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Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
3 months 2 weeks ago
It is important to remember that...

It is important to remember that the viciousness and wrongs of life stick out very plainly but that even at the worst times there is a great deal of goodness, kindness, and day-to-day decency that goes unnoticed and makes no headlines.

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Philosophical Maxims
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