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Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
3 months 1 day ago
It is clear that the causal...

It is clear that the causal nexus is not a nexus at all.

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Journal entry (12 October 1916), p. 84e
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
3 months ago
The chief function of the disciplinary...

The chief function of the disciplinary power is to 'train', rather than to select and to levy; or, no doubt, to train in order to levy and select all the more. It does not link forces together in order to reduce them; it seeks to bind them together in such a way as to multiply and use them.

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Part Three, The Means of Correct Training
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
1 month 4 weeks ago
Wherefore I say unto you, All...

Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.

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(Matthew 12:31-32) (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 1 day ago
No longer ask me for my...

No longer ask me for my program: isn't breathing one?

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Philosophical Maxims
Theodor Adorno
Theodor Adorno
1 month 3 weeks ago
Regressive listeners behave like children. Again...

Regressive listeners behave like children. Again and again and with stubborn malice, they demand the one dish they have once been served.

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p. 290
Philosophical Maxims
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
2 weeks 4 days ago
I must write it all out,...

I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.

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Locked Rooms and Open Doors
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
2 months 6 days ago
A man full of warm, speculative...

A man full of warm, speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than he finds it, but a good patriot and a true politician always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country. A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman. Everything else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Rawls
John Rawls
3 months 4 days ago
The suppression of liberty is always...

The suppression of liberty is always likely to be irrational.

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Chapter IV, Section 33, p. 210
Philosophical Maxims
bell hooks
bell hooks
1 month 2 weeks ago
A dangerous form of psychological splitting...

A dangerous form of psychological splitting had to have taken place, and it continues to take place, in the psyches of many African Americans who can on one hand oppose racism, and then on the other hand passively absorb ways of thinking about beauty that are rooted in white supremacist thought.

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Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
3 months 6 days ago
The cheapest sort of pride is...

The cheapest sort of pride is national pride; for if a man is proud of his own nation, it argues that he has no qualities of his own of which he can be proud; otherwise he would not have recourse to those which he shares with so many millions of his fellowmen. The man who is endowed with important personal qualities will be only too ready to see clearly in what respects his own nation falls short, since their failings will be constantly before his eyes. But every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud adopts, as a last resource, pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and glad to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.

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Vol. 1, Ch. 3, Section 2: Pride
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
3 months 6 days ago
The commonest and cheapest sounds, as...

The commonest and cheapest sounds, as the barking of a dog, produce the same effect on fresh and healthy ears that the rarest music does. It depends on your appetite for sound. Just as a crust is sweeter to a healthy appetite than confectionery to a pampered or diseased one.

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December 27, 1857
Philosophical Maxims
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
2 weeks 4 days ago
I believe most people are aware...

I believe most people are aware of periods in their lives when they seem to be "in grace" and other periods when they feel "out of grace," even though they may use different words to describe these states. In the first happy condition, one seems to carry all one's tasks before one lightly, as if borne along on a great tide; and in the opposite state one can hardly tie a shoe-string. It is true that a large part of life consists in learning a technique of tying the shoe-string, whether one is in grace or not. But there are techniques of living too; there are even techniques in the search for grace.

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Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
3 months 1 week ago
I thought that I was the...

I thought that I was the only historian, that had at once neglected present power, interest, and authority, and the cry of popular prejudices; and as the subject was suited to every capacity, I expected proportional applause. But miserable was my disappointment: I was assailed by one cry of reproach, disapprobation, and even detestation; English, Scotch, and Irish, Whig and Tory, churchman and sectary, freethinker and religionist, patriot and courtier, united in their rage against the man, who had presumed to shed a generous tear for the fate of Charles I and the Earl of Strafford.

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My Own Life' (1776), quoted in David Hume, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary (1741-1777), ed. Eugene Miller (1985), p. xxxvii
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
4 months 6 days ago
I have never worked as hard...

I have never worked as hard as now. I go for a brief walk in the morning. Then I come home and sit in my room without interruption until about three o'clock. My eyes can barely see. Then with my walking stick in hand I sneak off to the restaurant, but am so weak that I believe that if somebody were to call out my name, I would keel over and die. Then I go home and begin again. In my indolence during the past months I had pumped up a veritable shower bath, and now I have pulled the string and the ideas are cascading down upon me: healthy, happy, merry, gay, blessed children born with ease and yet all of them with the birthmark of my personality.

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Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
4 months 2 days ago
To work and create "for nothing,"...

To work and create "for nothing," to sculpture in clay, to know one's creation has no future, to see one's work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this has no more importance than building for centuries, this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions. Performing these two tasks simultaneously, negating on the one hand and magnifying on the other, it the way open to the absurd creator. He must give the void its colors.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Jean Jacques Rousseau
3 months 1 week ago
Let us not forget what befits...

Let us not forget what befits our present state in the pursuit of vain fancies. Mankind has its place in the sequence of things; childhood has its place in the sequence of human life; the man must be treated as a man and the child as a child. Give each his place, and keep him there. Control human passions according to man's nature; that is all we can do for his welfare. The rest depends on external forces, which are beyond our control.

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Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
3 months 1 week ago
Monopoly of one kind or another,...

Monopoly of one kind or another, indeed, seems to be the sole engine of the mercantile system.

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Chapter VII, Part Third, p. 684.
Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
2 months 2 weeks ago
Let thy mind rule thy tongue!

Let thy mind rule thy tongue!

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Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
1 month 1 day ago
We no longer have to resort...

We no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems: Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man?

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Ch. 1. Why Are People?
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel
2 months 3 weeks ago
The idealist tradition, including contemporary phenomenology,...

The idealist tradition, including contemporary phenomenology, has of course admitted subjective points of view as basic and has gone to the opposite length of denying an irreducible objective reality. ... I find the idealist solution unacceptable ...: objective reality cannot be analyzed or shut out of existence any more than subjective reality can. Even if not everything is something from no point of view, some things are.The deep source of both idealism and its objectifying opposite is the same: a conviction that a single world cannot contain both irreducible points of view and irreducible objective reality - that one of them must be what there really is and the other somehow reducible or dependent on it. This is a very powerful idea. To deny it is in a sense to deny that there is a single world.

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"Subjective and Objective" (1979), p. 212.
Philosophical Maxims
chanakya
chanakya
2 weeks 1 day ago
Our bodies are perishable, wealth is...

Our bodies are perishable, wealth is not at all permanent and death is always nearby. Therefore we must immediately engage in acts of merit.

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Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
3 months 4 days ago
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like...

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
3 months 5 days ago
The survival of democracy depends on...

The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information.

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Chapter 6 (p. 47)
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
3 months 1 week ago
The universal and lasting establishment of...

The universal and lasting establishment of peace constitutes not merely a part, but the whole final purpose and end of the science of right as viewed within the limits of reason.

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Philosophical Maxims
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
1 month 3 weeks ago
The disparagement of empirical evidence in...

The disparagement of empirical evidence in favor of a metaphysical world of illusion has its origin in the conflict between the emancipated individual of bourgeois society and his fate within that society.

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p. 138.
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
3 months 3 weeks ago
If a man has no...

If a man has no humaneness what can his propriety be like? If a man has no humaneness what can his happiness be like?

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Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
4 months 6 days ago
My lectures are published and not...

My lectures are published and not published; they will be intelligible to those who heard them, and to none beside.

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Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
1 month 2 weeks ago
Nothing can contribute more to peace...

Nothing can contribute more to peace of soul than the lack of any opinion whatever.

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E 11
Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
3 months 1 week ago
Look round the world: contemplate the...

Look round the world: contemplate the whole and every part of it: You will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines, which again admit of subdivisions, to a degree beyond what human senses and faculties can trace and explain. All these various machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy, which ravishes into admiration all men, who have ever contemplated them. The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles exactly, though it much exceeds, the productions of human contrivance; of human design, thought, wisdom, and intelligence.

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Philo to Cleanthes, Part II
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 months 5 days ago
Everything intercepts us from ourselves...

Everything intercepts us from ourselves.

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1833
Philosophical Maxims
Peter Singer
Peter Singer
2 months 3 weeks ago
People do not feel in any...

People do not feel in any way ashamed or guilty about spending money on new clothes or a new car instead of giving it to famine relief. (Indeed, the alternative does not occur to them.) This way of looking at the matter cannot be justified. When we buy new clothes not to keep ourselves warm but to look "well-dressed" we are not providing for any important need. We would not be sacrificing anything significant if we were to continue to wear our old clothes, and give the money to famine relief. By doing so, we would be preventing another person from starving. It follows from what I have said earlier that we ought to give money away, rather than spend it on clothes which we do not need to keep us warm. To do so is not charitable, or generous. Nor is it the kind of act which philosophers and theologians have called "supererogatory" - an act which it would be good to do, but not wrong not to do. On the contrary, we ought to give the money away, and it is wrong not to do so.

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Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
2 months 5 days ago
Every man is free to do...

Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.

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Ch. 6, The Formula of Justice
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
3 months 1 week ago
The man who barely abstains from...

The man who barely abstains from violating either the person, or the estate, or the reputation of his neighbours, has surely very little positive merit. He fulfils, however, all the rules of what is peculiarly called justice, and does every thing which his equals can with propriety force him to do, or which they can punish him for not doing. We may often fulfil all the rules of justice by sitting still and doing nothing.

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Section II, Chap. I.
Philosophical Maxims
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
4 weeks ago
People reserve their best thinking for...

People reserve their best thinking for their professional specialties and, next in line, for serious matters confronting the alert citizen -economics, politics, the disposal of nuclear waste, etc. The day's work done, they want to be entertained.

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p. 16
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
1 month 2 weeks ago
The vitality of the ordinary members...

The vitality of the ordinary members of society is dependent on its Outsiders.

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Chapter Three, The Romantic Outsider
Philosophical Maxims
Empedocles
Empedocles
2 months 3 weeks ago
Fortunate is he who…

Fortunate is he who has acquired a wealth of divine understanding, but wretched the one whose interest lies in shadowy conjectures about divinities.

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fr. 132
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 months 5 days ago
I regard it as the irresistible...

I regard it as the irresistible effect of the Copernican astronomy to have made the theological scheme of redemption absolutely incredible.

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Quoted in Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson, the Mind On Fire (Univ. of Calif Press 1995), p. 124
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
3 months 4 days ago
Science does not rest upon solid...

Science does not rest upon solid bedrock. The bold structure of its theories arises, as it were, above a swamp. It is like a building erected on piles. The piles are driven down from above into the swamp, but not down to any natural or 'given' base; and if we stop driving the piles deeper, it is not because we have reached firm ground. We simply stop when we are satisfied that the piles are firm enough to carry the structure, at least for the time being.

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Ch. 5 "The Problem of the Empirical Basis", Section 30: Theory and Experiment, p. 94.
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
3 months 6 days ago
There are a thousand hacking at...

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.

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p. 87
Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
1 month 3 weeks ago
Gregorian chant, Romanesque architecture, the Iliad,...

Gregorian chant, Romanesque architecture, the Iliad, the invention of geometry were not, for the people through whom they were brought into being and made available to us, occasions for the manifestation of personality.

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p. 55
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
2 months 6 days ago
Flattery corrupts both the receiver and...

Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver.

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Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
1 month 5 days ago
Humanity unceasingly strives forward from a...

Humanity unceasingly strives forward from a lower, more partial and obscure understanding of life to one more general and more lucid. And in this, as in every movement, there are leaders - those who have understood the meaning of life more clearly than others - and of those advanced men there is always one who has in his words and life, manifested this meaning more clearly, accessibly, and strongly than others. This man's expression ... with those superstitions, traditions, and ceremonies which usually form around the memory of such a man, is what is called a religion. Religions are the exponents of the highest comprehension of life ... within a given age in a given society ... a basis for evaluating human sentiments. If feelings bring people nearer to the religion's ideal ... they are good, if these estrange them from it, and oppose it, they are bad.

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Philosophical Maxims
Georg Büchner
Georg Büchner
2 months 5 days ago
We are only puppets, our strings...

We are only puppets, our strings are being pulled by unknown forces.

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Act II.
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
3 months 1 day ago
Like everything metaphysical the harmony between...

Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.

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§ 112
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 1 week ago
Virtue cannot dwell...
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Main Content / General
Confucius
Confucius
3 months 3 weeks ago
Better a diamond with a flaw...

Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.

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Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
2 months 5 days ago
Those who cavalierly reject the Theory...

Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all. Like the majority of men who are born to a given belief, they demand the most rigorous proof of any adverse belief, but assume that their own needs none.

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Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
4 months 3 days ago
The fact is that I've never...

The fact is that I've never called myself a genius, and I think the term has been cheapened by overuse into meaninglessness. If other people want to call me that, that's their problem.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 1 day ago
Late at night. I feel like...

Late at night. I feel like falling into a frenzy, doing some unprecedented thing to release myself, but I don't see against whom, against what...

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Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
1 month 2 weeks ago
The average mind is slow in...

The average mind is slow in grasping a truth, but when the most thoroughly organized, centralized institution, maintained at an excessive national expense, has proven a complete social failure, the dullest must begin to question its right to exist. The time is past when we can be content with our social fabric merely because it is "ordained by divine right," or by the majesty of the law.

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Philosophical Maxims
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