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Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
4 months 2 weeks ago
You have stolen my face from...

You have stolen my face from me: you know it and I no longer do.

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Act 1, sc. 5
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
1 month 3 days ago
The mind must be indulged, and...

The mind must be indulged, and leisure must be given from time to time, which is the place of food and strength.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
4 months 2 weeks ago
Nothing makes the earth seem so...

Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 95
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
2 weeks 4 days ago
It is rare that the public...

It is rare that the public sentiment decides immorally or unwisely, and the individual who differs from it ought to distrust and examine well his own opinion.

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Letter to William Findley, Washington (21 March 1801); published in Thomas Jefferson - A chronology of his thoughts (2002) by Jerry Holmes, p. 175
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
5 months 2 weeks ago
If it were so, as conceited...

If it were so, as conceited sagacity, proud of not being deceived, thinks, that we should believe nothing that we cannot see with our physical eyes, then we first and foremost ought to give up believing in love. ... We can be deceived by believing what is untrue, but we certainly are also deceived by not believing what is true. ... Which deception is more dangerous?

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
4 months 2 weeks ago
We do not count a man's...

We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count.

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Old Age
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
5 months 1 week ago
It is said in the Book...

It is said in the Book of Poetry, "In silence is the offering presented, and the spirit approached to; there is not the slightest contention." Therefore the superior man does not use rewards, and the people are stimulated to virtue. He does not show anger, and the people are awed more than by hatchets and battle-axes.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
4 months 2 weeks ago
The Beatific Vision, Sat Chit Ananda,...

The Beatific Vision, Sat Chit Ananda, Being-Awareness-Bliss-for the first time I understood, not on the verbal level, not by inchoate hints or at a distance, but precisely and completely what those prodigious syllables referred to. And then I remembered a passage I had read in one of Suzuki's essays. "What is the Dharma-Body of the Buddha?" ('"the Dharma-Body of the Buddha" is another way of saying Mind, Suchness, the Void, the Godhead.) The question is asked in a Zen monastery by an earnest and bewildered novice. And with the prompt irrelevance of one of the Marx Brothers, the Master answers, "The hedge at the bottom of the garden." "And the man who realizes this truth," the novice dubiously inquires, "what, may I ask, is he?" Groucho gives him a whack over the shoulders with his staff and answers, "A golden-haired lion."

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
2 weeks 4 days ago
As to the species of exercise,...

As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun. While this gives a moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise, and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body, and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be the constant companion of your walks. Never think of taking a book with you.

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Philosophical Maxims
Walter Lippmann
Walter Lippmann
1 month 2 weeks ago
Many a time I have wanted...

Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.

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Introduction, p. x
Philosophical Maxims
Polybius
Polybius
1 month 1 week ago
The only method of learning to...

The only method of learning to bear with dignity the vicissitudes of fortune is to recall the catastrophes of others.

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Polybius. The Histories of Polybius, trans. Evelyn S. Shuckburgh. London, New York: Macmillan and Co., 1889. Book I, Chapter 1
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
4 months 2 weeks ago
People who live in society have...

People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked?

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Diary entry of Friday (2 February)
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig von Mises
Ludwig von Mises
1 month 4 days ago
The criterion of truth is that...

The criterion of truth is that it works even if nobody is prepared to acknowledge it.

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Chapter 5: On Some Popular Errors Concerning the Scope and Method of Economics, § 9 : The Belief in the Omnipotence of Thought
Philosophical Maxims
George Santayana
George Santayana
3 months 1 week ago
On fact, the whole machinery of...

On fact, the whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices.

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Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact. Pt. III, Form; § 30: "The average modified in the direction of pleasure.", p. 125
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
2 months 2 weeks ago
What began as a "Romantic reaction"...

What began as a "Romantic reaction" towards organic wholeness may or may not have hastened the discovery of electro-magnetic waves. But certainly the electro-magnetic discoveries have recreated the simultaneous "field" in all human affairs so that the human family now exists under conditions of a "global village." We live in a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums. So that concern with the "primitive" today is as banal as nineteenth-century concern with "progress," and as irrelevant to our problems. The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

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(p. 36)
Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
4 months 3 weeks ago
'Tis only from the selfishness and...

Tis only from the selfishness and confin'd generosity of men, along with the scanty provision nature has made for his wants, that justice derives its origin.

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Part 2, Section 2
Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
3 months 2 weeks ago
Aion is a child at play,...

Aion is a child at play, gambling; a child's is the kingship. Telesphorus traverses the dark places of the world, like a star flashing from the deep, leading the way to the gates of the sun and the land of dreams.

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Combining fragments of Heraclitus and Homer
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 months 2 weeks ago
Reality is a creation of our...

Reality is a creation of our excesses.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 2 weeks ago
Yes, if you happen to be...

Yes, if you happen to be interested in philosophy and good at it, but not otherwise - but so does bricklaying. Anything you're good at contributes to happiness. When asked "Does philosophy contribute to happiness?"

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(SHM 76), as quoted in The quotable Bertrand Russell (1993), p. 149
Philosophical Maxims
Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry
2 weeks 4 days ago
If I solve my dispute with...

If I solve my dispute with my neighbor by killing him, I have certainly solved the immediate dispute. If my neighbor was a scoundrel, then the world is no doubt better for his absence. But in killing my neighbor, though he may have been a terrible man who did not deserve to live, I have made myself a killer - and the life of my next neighbor is in greater peril than the life of the last. In making myself a killer I have destroyed the possibility of neighborhood.

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A Statement against the War in Vietnam
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
4 months 2 weeks ago
So that is what hell is….

So that is what hell is. I would never have believed it. You remember: the fire and brimstone, the torture. Ah! the farce. There is no need for torture: Hell is other people.

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Garcin, Act 1, sc. 5
Philosophical Maxims
Joseph de Maistre
Joseph de Maistre
2 weeks 2 days ago
Wherever an altar is found, there...

Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.

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Original text:Partout où vous verrez un autel, là se trouve la civilisation. "Second Dialogue," p. 44
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
4 months 2 weeks ago
Poetry is the mysticism of mankind.

Poetry is the mysticism of mankind.

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Philosophical Maxims
Auguste Comte
Auguste Comte
3 months 3 weeks ago
Every attempt to refer chemical questions...

Every attempt to refer chemical questions to mathematical doctrines must be considered, now and always, profoundly irrational, as being contrary to the nature of the phenomena. . . . but if the employment of mathematical analysis should ever become so preponderant in chemistry (an aberration which is happily almost impossible) it would occasion vast and rapid retrogradation....

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Philosophical Maxims
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
4 months 2 weeks ago
The sad truth of the matter...

The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.

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The Life of the Mind (1978), "Thinking"
Philosophical Maxims
Sydney Smith
Sydney Smith
1 month 3 days ago
It is always right that a...

It is always right that a man should be able to render a reason for the faith that is within him.

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Vol. I, ch. 3, p. 91
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
4 months 2 weeks ago
The stronghold of the determinist argument...

The stronghold of the determinist argument is the antipathy to the idea of chance...This notion of alternative possibility, this admission that any one of several things may come to pass is, after all, only a roundabout name for chance.

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The Dilemma of Determinism (1884) p.153
Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
4 months 3 weeks ago
The law of faith, being a...

The law of faith, being a covenant of free grace, God alone can appoint what shall be necessarily believed by everyone whom He will justify. What is the faith which He will accept and account for righteousness, depends wholly on his good pleasure. For it is of grace, and not of right, that this faith is accepted. And therefore He alone can set the measures of it: and what he has so appointed and declared is alone necessary. No-body can add to these fundamental articles of faith; nor make any other necessary, but what God himself hath made, and declared to be so. And what these are which God requires of those who will enter into, and receive the benefits of the new covenant, has already been shown. An explicit belief of these is absolutely required of all those to whom the gospel of Jesus Christ is preached, and salvation through his name proposed.

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§ 156
Philosophical Maxims
Polybius
Polybius
1 month 1 week ago
How highly should we honor the...

How highly should we honor the Macedonians, who for the greater part of their lives never cease from fighting with the barbarians for the sake of the security of Greece? For who is not aware that Greece would have constantly stood in the greater danger, had we not been fenced by the Macedonians and the honorable ambition of their kings?

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Histories, IX, 35:2 (Loeb)
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 2 weeks ago
A man might say, with enough...

A man might say, with enough truth to justify a joke: "Science is what we know, and philosophy is what we don't know." But it should be added that philosophical speculation as to what we do not yet know has shown itself a valuable preliminary to exact scientific knowledge.

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Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Schlegel
Friedrich Schlegel
3 months 2 weeks ago
Whoever hasn't yet arrived at the...

Whoever hasn't yet arrived at the clear realization that there might be a greatness existing entirely outside his own sphere and for which he might have absolutely no feeling; whoever hasn't at least felt obscure intimations concerning the approximate location of this greatness in the geography of the human spirit: that person either has no genius in his own sphere, or else he hasn't been educated to the level of the classic.

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Lucinde and the Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991), "Critical Fragments," § 36
Philosophical Maxims
John Herschel
John Herschel
4 weeks ago
The question "cui bono" to what...

The question "cui bono" to what practical end and advantage do your researches tend? is one which the speculative philosopher who loves knowledge for its own sake, and enjoys, as a rational being should enjoy, the mere contemplation of harmonious and mutually dependent truths, can seldom hear without a sense of humiliation. He feels that there is a lofty and disinterested pleasure in his speculations which ought to exempt them from such questioning; communicating as they do to his own mind the purest happiness (after the exercise of the benevolent and moral feelings) of which human nature is susceptible, and tending to the injury of no one, he might surely allege this as a sufficient and direct reply to those who, having themselves little capacity, and less relish for intellectual pursuits, are constantly repeating upon him this enquiry.

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Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
4 months 2 weeks ago
Every Christian is to become a...

Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.

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Book IV, Chapter 4, "Good Infection"
Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
4 months ago
Choose rather to be strong in...

Choose rather to be strong in soul than in body.

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"Pythagorean Ethical Sentences From Stobæus" (1904) Choose rather to be strong of soul than strong of body. As quoted in Florilegium, I.22, as translated in Dictionary of Quotations (1906) by Thomas Benfield Harbottle, p. 396
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 months 2 weeks ago
Without will, no conflict: no tragedy...

Without will, no conflict: no tragedy among the abulic. Yet the failure of will can be experienced more painfully than a tragic destiny.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
4 months 2 weeks ago
It might otherwise appear paradoxical that...

It might otherwise appear paradoxical that money can be replaced by worthless paper; but that the slightest alloying of its metallic content depreciates it.

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Notebook VII, The Chapter on Capital, p. 734.
Philosophical Maxims
John Dewey
John Dewey
3 months 1 week ago
All the cases in which means...

All the cases in which means and ends are external to one another are non-esthetic.

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p. 205
Philosophical Maxims
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
3 months 1 week ago
Montaigne puts not self-satisfied understanding but...

Montaigne puts not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.

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Signs, trans. R. McCleary (Evanston: 1964), p. 203
Philosophical Maxims
Hermann Weyl
Hermann Weyl
4 weeks 1 day ago
Space and time are commonly regarded...

Space and time are commonly regarded as the forms of existence of the real world, matter as its substance. A definite portion of matter occupies a definite part of space at a definite moment of time. It is in the composite idea of motion that these three fundamental conceptions enter into intimate relationship.

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Introduction
Philosophical Maxims
Hilary Putnam
Hilary Putnam
2 months 3 weeks ago
To me, believing that some correspondence...

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

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Chap. 2 : A problem about reference
Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
4 months 3 weeks ago
But such is the nature of...

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

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Part I, Essay 8: Of Parties in General
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
4 months 2 weeks ago
Cure the drunkard, heal the insane,...

Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debaucher of sentiment?

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p. 236
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
4 months 3 weeks ago
'T is so much to be...

T is so much to be a king, that he only is so by being so. The strange lustre that surrounds him conceals and shrouds him from us; our sight is there broken and dissipated, being stopped and filled by the prevailing light.

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Book III, Ch. 7. Of the Inconveniences of Greatness
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 week 3 days ago
Money, as a matter...
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Main Content / General
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
3 months 5 days ago
Religion is better described than defined...

Religion is better described than defined and better felt than described. But if there is any one definition that latterly has obtained acceptance, it is that of Schleiermacher, to the effect that religion consists in the simple feeling of a relationship of dependence upon something above us and a desire to establish relations with this mysterious power.

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Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
4 months 2 weeks ago
Define your terms…

Define your terms, you will permit me again to say, or we shall never understand one another.

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"Miracles", 1764
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 2 weeks ago
The past alone is truly real:...

The past alone is truly real: the present is but a painful, struggling birth into the immutable being of what is no longer. Only the dead exist fully. The lives of the living are fragmentary, doubtful, and subject to change; but the lives of the dead are complete, free from the sway of Time, the all but omnipotent lord of the world. Their failures and successes, their hopes and fears, their joys and pains, have become eternal-our efforts cannot now abate one jot of them. Sorrows long buried in the grave, tragedies of which only a fading memory remains, loves immortalized by Death's hallowing touch these have a power, a magic, an untroubled calm, to which no present can attain. ...On the banks of the river of Time, the sad procession of human generations is marching slowly to the grave; in the quiet country of the Past, the march is ended, the tired wanderers rest, and the weeping is hushed.

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On History, 1904
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
2 months 2 weeks ago
There is no general reason to...

There is no general reason to expect evolution to be progressive - even in the weak, value-neutral sense. There will be times when increased size of some organ is favoured and other times when decreased size is favoured. Most of the time, average-sized individuals will be favoured in the population and both extremes will be penalised. During these times the population exhibits evolutionary stasis (i.e., no change) with respect to the factor being measured. If we had a complete fossil record and looked for trends in some particular dimension, such as leg length, we would expect to see periods of no change alternating with fitful continuations or reversals in direction - like a weathervane in changeable, gusty weather.

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Philosophical Maxims
Montesquieu
Montesquieu
3 months 5 days ago
In a free nation, it matters...

In a free nation, it matters not whether individuals reason well or ill; it is sufficient that they do reason. Truth arises from the collision and from hence springs liberty, which is a security from the effects of reasoning.

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Quoted by Thomas Erskine in the trial of Thomas Paine, 1792
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
3 months 2 weeks ago
Through a wise and salutary neglect...

Through a wise and salutary neglect [of the colonies], a generous nature has been suffered to take her own way to perfection; when I reflect upon these effects, when I see how profitable they have been to us, I feel all the pride of power sink and all presumption in the wisdom of human contrivances melt and die away within me. My vigour relents. I pardon something to the spirit of liberty.

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Philosophical Maxims
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