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Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas
5 months 2 weeks ago
I shall develop the thesis that...

I shall develop the thesis that anyone acting communicatively must, in performing any speech act, raise universal validity claims and suppose that they can be vindicated.

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p. 22
Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
3 months 2 weeks ago
He is a despicable sage whose...

He is a despicable sage whose wisdom does not profit himself.

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Maxim 629
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
2 months 4 days ago
He knows his own strength; he...

He knows his own strength; he knows that he was born to carry burdens.

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Philosophical Maxims
Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno
4 months 3 weeks ago
I cleave the heavens and soar...

I cleave the heavens and soar to the infinite. And while I rise from my own globe to others And penetrate ever further through the eternal field, That which others saw from afar, I leave far behind me. Variant translation: While I venture out beyond this tiny globe Into reaches past the bounds of starry night I leave behind what others strain to see afar.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ian Hacking
Ian Hacking
3 months 3 weeks ago
We favor hypotheses for their simplicity...

We favor hypotheses for their simplicity and explanatory power, much as the architect of the world might have done in choosing which possibility to create.

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Chapter 15, Inductive Logic, p. 142.
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
3 months 2 weeks ago
An appeal to his alarm is...

An appeal to his alarm is never a good plan to rid oneself of a spirited young man.

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The Pavilion on the Links, ch. III.
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
5 months 2 weeks ago
In art the Chinese aim at...

In art the Chinese aim at being exquisite, and in life at being reasonable.

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The Problem of China (1922), Ch. XI: Chinese and Western Civilization Contrasted
Philosophical Maxims
Gottlob frege
Gottlob frege
4 months 1 week ago
The ideal of strictly scientific method...

The ideal of strictly scientific method in mathematics which I have tried to realise here, and which perhaps might be named after Euclid I should like to describe in the following way... The novelty of this book does not lie in the content of the theorems but in the development of the proofs and the foundations on which they are based... With this book I accomplish an object which I had in view in my Begriffsschrift of 1879 and which I announced in my Grundlagen der Arithmetik. I am here trying to prove the opinion on the concept of number that I expressed in the book last mentioned.

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Vol. 1. pp. 137-140, as cited in: Ralph H. Johnson (2012), Manifest Rationality: A Pragmatic Theory of Argument, p. 87
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
4 months 3 days ago
'Tis a grievous...
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Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
4 months 3 days ago
Jung believed that he was proceeding...

Jung believed that he was proceeding scientifically, but most Freudians remain convinced that he was inventing his own underground realm, rather as Tolkien invented Middle Earth. There is at least an element of truth in this view.

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p. 126
Philosophical Maxims
Chrysippus
Chrysippus
5 months 1 week ago
Wise people are in want of...

Wise people are in want of nothing, and yet need many things. On the other hand, nothing is needed by fools, for they do not understand how to use anything, but are in want of everything.

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As quoted in Moral Epistles by Seneca, iii. 10.
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Simmel
Georg Simmel
2 months ago
If wandering is the liberation from...

If wandering is the liberation from every given point in space, and thus the conceptional opposite to fixation at such a point, the sociological form of the "stranger" presents the unity, as it were, of these two characteristics.

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p. 402; Opening line.
Philosophical Maxims
Julien Offray de La Mettrie
Julien Offray de La Mettrie
1 month 2 weeks ago
If one's organism is... the preeminent...

If one's organism is... the preeminent advantage, and the source of all others, education is the second. The best made brain would be a total loss without it...

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Philosophical Maxims
George Santayana
George Santayana
4 months 1 week ago
Progress, far from consisting in change,...

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. This famous statement has produced many paraphrases and variants: Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not remember their past are condemned to repeat their mistakes. Those who do not read history are doomed to repeat it. Those who fail to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors are destined to repeat them. Those who do not know history's mistakes are doomed to repeat them.

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There is a similar quote by Edmund Burke (in Revolution in France) that often leads to misattribution: "People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors."
Philosophical Maxims
Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham
5 months 3 weeks ago
Liberty therefore not being more fit...

Liberty therefore not being more fit than other words in some of the instances in which it has been used, and not so fit in others, the less the use that is made of it the better. I would no more use the word liberty in my conversation when I could get another that would answer the purpose, than I would brandy in my diet, if my physician did not order me: both cloud the understanding and inflame the passions.

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Jeremy Bentham, quoted in P. J. Kelly, Utilitarianism and Distributive Justice: Jeremy Bentham and the Civil Law, Oxford, 1990, p. 96
Philosophical Maxims
Max Scheler
Max Scheler
4 months 1 week ago
Beyond all conscious lying and falsifying,...

Beyond all conscious lying and falsifying, there is a deeper "organic mendacity." Here the falsification is not formed in consciousness, but at the same stage of the mental process as the impressions and value feelings themselves: on the road of experience into consciousness. There is "organic mendacity" whenever a man's mind admits only those impressions which serve his "interest" or his instinctive attitude. Already in the process of mental reproduction and recollection, the contents of his experience are modified in this direction. He who is "mendacious" has no need to lie! In his case, the automatic process of forming recollections, impressions, and feelings is involuntarily slanted, so that conscious falsification becomes unnecessary.

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L. Coser, trans. (1973), pp. 77-78
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
5 months 2 weeks ago
I sit astride life like a...

I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.

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p. 36e
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Boyle
Robert Boyle
1 month 2 weeks ago
There are some mixt bodies, from...

There are some mixt bodies, from which it has not been yet made appear, that any degree of fire can separate either salt, or sulphur, or mercury, much less all the three. The most obvious instance of this truth is gold, which is a body so fixed, and wherein the elementary ingredients (if it have any) are so firmly united to each other, that we find not in the operations, wherein gold is exposed to the fire, how violent soever, that it does discernably so much as lose of its fixedness or weight, so far is it from being dissipated into those principles, whereof one at least is acknowledged to be fugitive enough.

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Philosophical Maxims
Nikos Kazantzakis
Nikos Kazantzakis
1 month 2 weeks ago
In order to succeed, we must...

In order to succeed, we must first believe that we can.

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Michael Korda, in Success! (1977), p. 284
Philosophical Maxims
Niels Bohr
Niels Bohr
1 month 4 weeks ago
What is it that we humans...

What is it that we humans depend on? We depend on our words... Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others. We must strive continually to extend the scope of our description, but in such a way that our messages do not thereby lose their objective or unambiguous character ... We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down. The word "reality" is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly.

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Quoted in Philosophy of Science Vol. 37 (1934), p. 157, and in The Truth of Science : Physical Theories and Reality (1997) by Roger Gerhard Newton, p. 176
Philosophical Maxims
William Kingdon Clifford
William Kingdon Clifford
1 month 2 weeks ago
If God holds all mankind guilty...

If God holds all mankind guilty for the sin of Adam, if he has visited upon the innocent the punishment of the guilty, if he is to torture any single soul for ever, then it is wrong to worship him.

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[Lectures and essays (1879), vol. 2, p. 224]
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
3 months 2 weeks ago
It is the mark of a...

It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in the retrospect. We should have been cut-throats to do otherwise. And there's an end. We ought to know distinctly that we are damned for what we do wrong; but when we have done right, we have only been gentlemen, after all. There is nothing to make a work about.

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"Reflections and Remarks on Human Life", VI: Right and Wrong, published in Works: Letters and Miscellanies of Robert Louis Stevenson -- Sketches, Criticisms, Etc. (1895), p. 628.
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
5 months 2 weeks ago
Being is only Being for Dasein...

Being is only Being for Dasein.

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Macquarrie & Robinson translation
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
3 months 2 weeks ago
Such is the content of the...

Such is the content of the mental life of the Hemingway hero and the good guy in general. Every day he gets beaten into a servile pulp by his own mechanical reflexes, which are constantly busy registering and reacting to the violent stimuli which his big, noisy, kinesthetic environment has provided for his unreflective reception.

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Eye Appeal, p. 79-80
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
5 months 3 weeks ago
There is much pleasure to be...

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.

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Ch. 2: 'Useless' Knowledge
Philosophical Maxims
Willard van Orman Quine
Willard van Orman Quine
4 months 5 days ago
The issue over there being classes...

The issue over there being classes seems more a question of convenient conceptual scheme; the issue over there being centaurs, or brick houses on Elm Street, seems more a question of fact. But I have been urging that this difference is only one of degree, and that it turns upon our vaguely pragmatic inclination to adjust one strand of the fabric of science rather than another in accommodating some particular recalcitrant experience. Conservatism figures in such choices, and so does the quest for simplicity.

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"Two Dogmas of Empiricism"
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
2 months 5 days ago
If you would not have a...

If you would not have a man flinch when the crisis comes, train him before it comes.

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Philosophical Maxims
Nikos Kazantzakis
Nikos Kazantzakis
1 month 2 weeks ago
Behind all appearances, I divine a...

Behind all appearances, I divine a struggling essence. I want to merge with it. I feel that behind appearances this struggling essence is also striving to merge with my heart. But the body stands between us and separates us. The mind stands between us and separates us.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
2 months 1 week ago
In all cases, therefore, we will...

In all cases, therefore, we will agree with the judicious Mrs. Glass: 'First catch your hare!' First get your man; all is got: he can learn to do all things, from making boots, to decreeing judgments, governing communities; and will do them like a man.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henri Poincaré
Henri Poincaré
2 months 2 weeks ago
He has begun by supposing that...

He has begun by supposing that light has a constant velocity... the same in all directions. This... could never be verified directly by experiment... The postulate... resembling the principle of sufficient reason... furnishes us with a new rule for the investigation of simultaneity.

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Philosophical Maxims
Lin Yutang
Lin Yutang
1 month 4 weeks ago
It is important that man dreams,...

It is important that man dreams, but it is perhaps equally important that he can laugh at his own dreams.

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Ch. I : The Awakening, pp. 4-5
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
5 months 2 weeks ago
As for me, I am mean:...

As for me, I am mean: that means that I need the suffering of others to exist. A flame. A flame in their hearts. When I am all alone, I am extinguished.

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Inès, describing her path to Hell, Act 1, sc. 5
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
2 months 1 week ago
O poor mortals, how ye make...

O poor mortals, how ye make this earth bitter for each other.

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Pt. I, Bk. V, ch. 5.
Philosophical Maxims
Hilary Putnam
Hilary Putnam
3 months 3 weeks ago
Philosophers today are as fond as...

Philosophers today are as fond as ever of apriori arguments with ethical conclusions. One reason such arguments are always unsatisfying is that they always prove too much; when a philosopher 'solves' an ethical problem for one, one feels as if one had asked for a subway token and been given a passenger ticket valid for the first interplanetary passenger-carrying space ship instead.

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How Not to Solve Ethical Problems
Philosophical Maxims
Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini
2 months 4 weeks ago
I think television has betrayed the...

I think television has betrayed the meaning of democratic speech, adding visual chaos to the confusion of voices. What role does silence have in all this noise?

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"Television"
Philosophical Maxims
Max Stirner
Max Stirner
2 months 5 days ago
I have no need to take...

I have no need to take up each thing that wants to throw its cause on us and show that it is occupied only with itself, not with us, only with its good, not with ours. Look at the rest for yourselves. Do truth, freedom, humanity, justice, desire anything else than that you grow enthusiastic and serve them?

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Cambridge 1995, p. 6
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 2 weeks ago
We define only out of despair,...

We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade to the void.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
1 month 2 weeks ago
Timid men prefer the calm of...

Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.

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Letter to his Italian friend, Philip Mazzei
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
5 months 2 weeks ago
For I now saw, or thought...

For I now saw, or thought I saw, what I had always before received with incredulity-that the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings: as indeed it has, when no other mental habit is cultivated, and the analysing spirit remains without its natural complements and correctives.

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(p. 137)
Philosophical Maxims
Joseph de Maistre
Joseph de Maistre
1 month 2 weeks ago
Nothing great has great beginnings...

Nothing great has great beginnings.

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XXIII, p. 73
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
5 months 3 weeks ago
All true metaphysics is taken from...

All true metaphysics is taken from the essential nature of the thinking faculty itself, and therefore in nowise invented, since it is not borrowed from experience, but contains the pure operations of thought, that is, conceptions and principles à priori, which the manifold of empirical presentations first of all brings into legitimate connection, by which it can become empirical knowledge, i.e. experience. ...mathematical physicists were thus quite unable to dispense with such metaphysical principles...

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Preface, Tr. Bax, 1883
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
5 months 2 weeks ago
I was your luxury. For nineteen...

I was your luxury. For nineteen years I have been put in your man's world and was forbidden to touch anything and you made me think that all was going very well and that I did not have to worry about anything but putting flowers in vases. Why did you lie to me? Why did you keep me ignorant, if it was to admit to me one day that this world is cracking and that you are all powerless and to make me choose between a suicide and a murder?

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Jessica to Hugo, Act 5, sc. 2
Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
5 months 3 weeks ago
Every man takes the limits of...

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

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"Psychological Observations"
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
4 months 4 days ago
What the learned world tends to...

What the learned world tends to offer is one second-hand scrap of information illustrating ideas derived from another second-hand scrap of information. The second-handedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
5 months 3 weeks ago
Some part of life - perhaps...

Some part of life - perhaps the most important part - must be left to the spontaneous action of individual impulse, for where all is system there will be mental and spiritual death.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
5 months 2 weeks ago
The really important facts were that...

The really important facts were that spatial relationships had ceased to matter very much and that my mind was perceiving the world in terms of other than spatial categories. At ordinary times the eye concerns itself with such problems as where? - how far? - how situated in relation to what? In the mescaline experience the implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern."

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Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
3 months 2 weeks ago
Such delusions of grandeur to think...

Such delusions of grandeur to think that a God with a hundred billion galaxies on his mind would give a tuppenny damn who you sleep with, or indeed whether you believe in him.

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Richard Dawkins debates Rowan Williams
Philosophical Maxims
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
4 months 1 week ago
As one advances in life, one...

As one advances in life, one realises more and more that the majority of men - and of women - are incapable of any other effort than that strictly imposed on them as a reaction to external compulsion. And for that reason, the few individuals we have come across who are capable of a spontaneous and joyous effort stand out isolated, monumentalised, so to speak, in our experience. These are the select men, the nobles, the only ones who are active and not merely reactive, for whom life is a perpetual striving, an incessant course of training. Training = askesis. These are the ascetics.

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Chap. VII: Noble Life And Common Life, Or Effort And Inertia
Philosophical Maxims
Epicurus
Epicurus
6 months 1 week ago
Of our desires some are natural...

Of our desires some are natural and necessary, others are natural but not necessary; and others are neither natural nor necessary, but are due to groundless opinion.

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Philosophical Maxims
David Pearce
David Pearce
2 months 4 weeks 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
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