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Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
4 months 3 weeks ago
Now a life of honour includes...

Now a life of honour includes various kinds of conduct; it may include the chest in which Regulus was confined, or the wound of Cato which was torn open by Cato's own hand, or the exile of Rutilius, or the cup of poison which removed Socrates from gaol to heaven.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 4 weeks ago
The multitude.....
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Main Content / General
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
7 months 4 days ago
I love talking to simple people,...

I love talking to simple people, with common folk, if you like, and I still do it and still chat now as before with anyone, regardless of intellectual level. On the contrary, I like uneducated people much better and that is obviously my Rumanian heritage.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
8 months 1 week ago
Written words differ from spoken words...

Written words differ from spoken words in being material structures. A spoken word is a process in the physical world, having an essential time-order; a written word is a series of pieces of matter, having an essential space-order.

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An Outline of Philosophy Ch.4 Language, 1927
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
9 months 5 days ago
Economics is on the side of...

Economics is on the side of humanity now.

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Philosophical Maxims
Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze
6 months 2 weeks ago
Second, we make no distinction between...

Second, we make no distinction between man and nature: the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man become one within nature in the form of production or industry, just as they do within the life of man as a species. Industry is then no longer considered from the extrinsic point of view of utility, but rather from the point of view of its fundamental identity with nature as production of man and by man.

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The Desiring Machine
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
8 months 6 days ago
I will take it all: tongs,...

I will take it all: tongs, molten lead, prongs, garrotes, all that burns, all that tears, I want to truly suffer. Better one hundred bites, better the whip, vitriol, than this suffering in the head, this ghost of suffering which grazes and caresses and never hurts enough.

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Act 1, sc. 5
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley
5 months 3 weeks ago
Whatever part of the animal fabric-whatever...

Whatever part of the animal fabric-whatever series of muscles, whatever viscera might be selected for comparison-the result would be the same-the lower Apes and the Gorilla would differ more than the Gorilla and the Man.

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Ch.2, p. 101
Philosophical Maxims
Hilary Putnam
Hilary Putnam
6 months 2 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
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
7 months 1 week ago
Who consciously throws himself into the...

Who consciously throws himself into the water or onto the knife?

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Part 2, Chapter ?
Philosophical Maxims
Gottlob Frege
Gottlob Frege
7 months ago
Gottlob Frege created modern logic including...

Gottlob Frege created modern logic including "for all," "there exists," and rules of proof. Leibniz and Boole had dealt only with what we now call "propositional logic" (that is, no "for all" or "there exists"). They also did not concern themselves with rules of proof, since their aim was to reach truth by pure calculation with symbols for the propositions. Frege took the opposite track: instead of trying to reduce logic to calculation, he tried to reduce mathematics to logic, including the concept of number.

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Michael J. Beeson, "The Mechanization of Mathematics," in Alan Turing: Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker2004
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
6 months 1 week ago
Genuine religion is not about speculating...

Genuine religion is not about speculating about God or the soul or about what happened in the past or will happen in the future; it cares only about one thing-finding out exactly what should or should not be done in this lifetime.

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p. 3
Philosophical Maxims
Leszek Kołakowski
Leszek Kołakowski
5 months ago
But the philosophy that killed off...

But the philosophy that killed off truth proclaims unlimited tolerance for the "language games" (i.e., opinions, beliefs and doctrines) that people find useful. The outcome is expressed in the words of Karl Kraus: "Alles ist wahr und auch das Gegenteil." "Everything is true, and also its opposite."

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"Our Merry Apocalypse" (1997), as quoted in Is God Happy? Selected Essays (Basic Books, 2013), p. 318
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
7 months ago
He that is not on my...

He that is not on my side is against me, and he that does not gather with me scatters.

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12:30, New World Translation
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
7 months 1 week ago
Nothing made a happy slave, but...

Nothing made a happy slave, but a degraded man. In proportion as the mind grew callous to its degradation, and all sense of manly pride was lost, the slave felt comfort. In fact, he was no longer a man. If he were to define a man, he would say with Shakspeare,"Man is a being, holding large discourse,Looking before and after."A slave was incapable of either looking before or after.

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Speech in the House of Commons (12 May 1789), quoted in The Parliamentary History of England, From the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, Vol. XXVIII (1816), column 71
Philosophical Maxims
William Godwin
William Godwin
7 months 5 days ago
The pleasures of self-approbation, together with...

The pleasures of self-approbation, together with the right cultivation of all our pleasures, require individual independence. Without independence men cannot become either wise, or useful, or happy.

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"Summary of Principles" 1.3
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
8 months 6 days ago
By 'arguing...' I mean... criticizing... inviting......

By 'arguing...' I mean... criticizing... inviting... criticism; and trying to learn from it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
8 months 1 week ago
Life seems to me essentially passion,...

Life seems to me essentially passion, conflict, rage... It is only intellect that keeps me sane; perhaps this makes me overvalue intellect against feeling.

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Letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell in 1912, as quoted in Clark The life of Bertrand Russell (1976), p. 174
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
8 months 1 week ago
Sunshine cannot bleach the snow...

Sunshine cannot bleach the snow, Nor time unmake what poets know.

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"The Test", as quoted in Emerson As A Poet (1883) by Joel Benton, p. 40
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
8 months 1 week ago
Morality is thus the relation of...

Morality is thus the relation of actions to the autonomy of the will, that is, to a possible giving of universal law through its maxims. An action that can coexist with the autonomy of the will is permitted; one that does not accord with it is forbidden. A will whose maxims necessarily harmonize with the laws of autonomy is a holy, absolutely good will. The dependence upon the principle of autonomy of a will that is not absolutely good (moral necessitation) is obligation. This, accordingly, cannot be attributed to a holy being. The objective of an action from obligation is called duty.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
8 months 1 week ago
Men rush to California and Australia...

Men rush to California and Australia as if the true gold were to be found in that direction; but that is to go to the very opposite extreme to where it lies. They go prospecting farther and farther away from the true lead, and are most unfortunate when they think themselves most successful.

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p. 489
Philosophical Maxims
Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton
6 months 1 day ago
The culture of a civilization is...

The culture of a civilization is the art and literature through which it rises to consciousness of itself and defines its vision of the world.

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"What is Culture?" (p. 2)
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
7 months 1 week ago
The pursuit of individual happiness within...

The pursuit of individual happiness within those limits prescribed by social conditions, is the first requisite to the attainment of the greatest general happiness.

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Ethics (New York:1915), § 70, pp. 190-191
Philosophical Maxims
Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno
7 months 2 weeks ago
Of the eternal incorporeal substance nothing...

Of the eternal incorporeal substance nothing is changed, is formed or deformed, but there always remains only that thing which cannot be a subject of dissolution, since it is not possible that it be a subject of composition, and therefore, either of itself or by accident, it cannot be said to die.

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As translated by Arthur Imerti
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
7 months ago
The Kantian philosophy left a gulf...

The Kantian philosophy left a gulf between thought and being, or between subject and object, which the Hegelian philosophy sought to bridge. The bridge was to be made by positing one universal structure of all being. Being was to be a process wherein a thing 'comprehends' or 'grasps' the various states of existence and draws them into the more or less enduring unity of its 'self,' thus actively constituting itself as 'the same' throughout all change. Everything, in other words, exists more or less as a 'subject.'

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P. 64
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
4 months 4 days ago
Shame on the soul, to falter...

Shame on the soul, to falter on the road of life while the body still perseveres.

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VI. 29, trans. Maxwell Staniforth
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
8 months 1 week ago
The child must be brought up...

The child must be brought up free (that he allow others to be free). He must learn to endure the restraint to which freedom subjects itself for its own preservation (experience no subordination to his command). Thus he must be disciplined. This precedes instruction. Training must continue without interruption. He must learn to do without things and to be cheerful about it. He must not be obliged to dissimulate, he must acquire immediate horror of lies, must learn so to respect the rights of men that they become an insurmountable wall for him. His instruction must be more negative. He must not learn religion before he knows morality. He must be refined, but not spoiled (pampered). He must learn to speak frankly, and must assume no false shame. Before adolescence he must not learn fine manners ; thoroughness is the chief thing. Thus he is crude longer, but earlier useful and capable.

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Part III : Selection on Education from Kant's other Writings, Ch. I Pedagogical Fragments, # 3
Philosophical Maxims
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
8 months 6 days ago
The most radical revolutionary will become...

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.

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The New Yorker
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
6 months 3 days ago
The devil, depend upon it, can...

The devil, depend upon it, can sometimes do a very gentlemanly thing.

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The Suicide Club, Story of the Young Man with the Cream Tarts.
Philosophical Maxims
Hilary Putnam
Hilary Putnam
6 months 2 weeks ago
If reason is both transcendent and...

If reason is both transcendent and immanent, then philosophy, as culture-bound reflection and argument about eternal questions, is both in time and eternity. We don't have an Archimedean point; we always speak the language of a time and place; but the rightness and wrongness of what we say is not just for a time and a place.

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Why reason can't be naturalized
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
8 months 1 week ago
As for my own business, even...

As for my own business, even that kind of surveying which I could do with most satisfaction my employers do not want. They would prefer that I should do my work coarsely and not too well, ay, not well enough. When I observe that there are different ways of surveying, my employer commonly asks which will give him the most land, not which is most correct.

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p. 486
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
7 months 1 week ago
I decline the election. - It...

I decline the election. - It has ever been my rule through life, to observe a proportion between my efforts and my objects. I have never been remarkable for a bold, active, and sanguine pursuit of advantages that are personal to myself.

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Speech at Bristol on declining the poll (9 September 1780), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II (1855), p. 170
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
4 months 3 weeks ago
By Hercules, the state would have...

By Hercules, the state would have sustained a great loss if you had not brought him forth from the oblivion to which his two splendid qualities, eloquence and independence, had consigned him: he is now read, is popular, is received into men's hands and bosoms, and fears no old age: but as for those who butchered him, before long men will cease to speak even of their crimes, the only things by which they are remembered.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
7 months 4 days ago
One hardly saves a world without...

One hardly saves a world without ruling it.

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Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
8 months 1 week ago
We speak not strictly and philosophically...

We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

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Part 3, Section 3
Philosophical Maxims
Gottlob Frege
Gottlob Frege
7 months ago
A judgment, for me is not...

A judgment, for me is not the mere grasping of a thought, but the admission of its truth.

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Gottlob Frege (1892). On Sense and Reference, note 7.
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Kuhn
4 months 4 weeks ago
Few people who are not actually...

Few people who are not actually practitioners of a mature science realize how much mop-up work of this sort a paradigm leaves to be done or quite how fascinating such work can prove in the execution.

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p. 24
Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
6 months 3 weeks ago
No human being escapes the necessity...

No human being escapes the necessity of conceiving some good outside himself towards which his thought turns in a movement of desire, supplication, and hope. consequently, the only choice is between worshipping the true God or an idol. Every atheist is an idolater - unless he is worshipping the true God in his impersonal aspect. The majority of the pious are idolaters.

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Last Notebook (1942) p. 308
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
6 months 5 days ago
Cartoons drove the photo back to...

Cartoons drove the photo back to myth and dream screen.

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Philosophical Maxims
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
3 months 3 weeks ago
Sometimes one pays most for...

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
8 months 1 week ago
I was looking at my furniture,...

I was looking at my furniture, not as the utilitarian who has to sit on chairs, to write at desks and tables, and not as the cameraman or scientific recorder, but as the pure aesthete whose concern is only with forms and their relationships within the field of vision or the picture space. But as I looked, this purely aesthetic, Cubist's-eye view gave place to what I can only describe as the sacramental vision of reality. I was back where I had been when I was looking at the flowers-back in a world where everything shone with the Inner Light, and was infinite in its significance.

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describing his experiment with mescaline, p. 22
Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
7 months 1 week ago
Inventors and geniuses have almost always...

Inventors and geniuses have almost always been looked on as no better than fools at the beginning of their career, and very frequently at the end of it also.

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Part 3, Chapter 1
Philosophical Maxims
Alan Watts
Alan Watts
4 months 2 weeks ago
There is no formula for generating...

There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied. You cannot talk yourself into it or rouse it by straining at the emotions or by dedicating yourself solemnly to the service of mankind. Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself. This conviction will not come through condemnations, through hating oneself, through calling self love bad names in the universe. It comes only in the awareness that one has no self to love.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
8 months 1 week ago
Great men, great nations, have not...

Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.

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Fate
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
6 months 5 days ago
TV is not good at covering...

TV is not good at covering single events. It needs a ritual, a rhythm, and a pattern...TV tends to fosters patterns rather than events.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
6 months 2 weeks ago
I have been taught that the...

I have been taught that the land should belong to those who till the soil. With all of his deep-seated sympathies with the Arabs, our comrade cannot possibly deny that the Jews in Palestine have tilled the soil. Tens of thousands of them, young and deeply devout idealists, have flocked to Palestine, there to till the soil under the most trying pioneer conditions. They have reclaimed wastelands and have turned them into fertile fields and blooming gardens. Now I do not say that therefore Jews are entitled to more rights than the Arabs, but for an ardent socialist to say that the Jews have no business in Palestine seems to me rather a strange kind of socialism.

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Philosophical Maxims
Mozi
Mozi
4 months 2 weeks ago
If one does not preserve the...

If one does not preserve the learned in a state he will be injuring the state; if one is not zealous (to recommend) the virtuous upon seeing one, he will be neglecting the ruler. Enthusiasm is to be shown only to the virtuous, and plans for the country are only to be shared with the learned. Few are those, who, neglecting the virtuous and slighting the learned, could still maintain the existence of their countries. Book 1; Befriending the Learned Variant translation: To enter upon rulership of a country but not preserve its scholars will result in the downfall of the country. To see the worthy but not hasten to them will make the country's ruler less able to perform his duties. To the unworthy is due no attention. The ignorant should remain without inclusion in the state's affairs. To impede the virtuous and neglect the scholarly and still maintain the survival of the state has yet to be, indeed.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
7 months ago
A Covenant not to defend my...

A Covenant not to defend my selfe from force, by force, is always voyd.

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The First Part, Chapter 14, p. 69
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Schlegel
Friedrich Schlegel
7 months 1 week ago
All those countless battles-those endless, and......

All those countless battles-those endless, and... for the greater part, useless wars, of which... fills up for so many thousand years... are but little atoms compared with the great whole of human destiny.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
8 months 1 week ago
It seems to me that science...

It seems to me that science has a much greater likelihood of being true in the main than any philosophy hitherto advanced (I do not, of course, except my own). In science there are many matters about which people are agreed; in philosophy there are none. Therefore, although each proposition in a science may be false, and it is practically certain that there are some that are false, yet we shall be wise to build our philosophy upon science, because the risk of error in philosophy is pretty sure to be greater than in science. If we could hope for certainty in philosophy, the matter would be otherwise, but so far as I can see such a hope would be chimerical.

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Logical Atomism, 1924
Philosophical Maxims
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