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Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
4 months 2 weeks ago
No man is exempt from saying...

No man is exempt from saying silly things; the mischief is to say them deliberately.

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Book III, Ch. 1
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
4 months 2 days ago
Philosophy hasn't made any progress?-If someone...

Philosophy hasn't made any progress?-If someone scratches where it itches, do we have to see progress? Is it not genuine scratching otherwise, or genuine itching?

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p. 98e
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
4 days ago
In the case of all things...

In the case of all things which have a certain constitution, whatever harm may happen to any of them, that which is affected becomes consequently worse; but in like case, a man becomes both better... and more worthy of praise, by making the right use of these accidents.

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X, 33
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
4 months 1 week ago
History is not like some individual...

History is not like some individual person, which uses men to achieve its ends. History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends.

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The Holy Family, Ch. VI (1845).
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
1 week ago
I advance with obedience to the...

I advance with obedience to the work, ready to retire from it whenever you become sensible how much better choice it is in your power to make.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henri Bergson
Henri Bergson
3 months ago
Je dirais qu'il faut agir en...

I would say act like a man of thought and think like a man of action.

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Speech at the Descartes Conference in Paris (1937) Quoted in The Forbes Scrapbook of Thoughts on the Business of Life (1950), p. 442, as "Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought."
Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
4 months 3 weeks ago
For human beings, the measure of...

For human beings, the measure of every action is the impression of the senses.

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Book I, ch. 28, 10
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 months 3 days ago
One grasps incomparably more things in...

One grasps incomparably more things in boredom than by labor, effort being the mortal enemy of meditation.

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Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
3 weeks 1 day ago
When the changes of our times...

When the changes of our times gave you an opportunity, you restored to the use of man that genius of your father for which he had suffered, and made him in real truth immortal by publishing as an eternal memorial of him those books which that bravest of men had written with his own blood. You have done a great service to Roman literature: a large part of Cordus's books had been burned; a great service to posterity, who will receive a true account of events, which cost its author so dear; and a great service to himself, whose memory flourishes and ever will flourish, as long as men set any value upon the facts of Roman history, as long as anyone lives who wishes to review the deeds of our fathers, to know what a true Roman was like - one who still remained unconquered when all other necks were broken in to receive the yoke of Sejanus, one who was free in every thought, feeling, and act.

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Philosophical Maxims
Iamblichus
Iamblichus
5 days ago
What appears to us to be...

What appears to us to be an accurate definition of justice does not also appear to be so to the Gods. For we, looking to that which is most brief, direct our attention to things present, and to this momentary life, and the manner in which it subsists. But the Powers that are superior to us know the whole life of the Soul, and all its former lives.

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The Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians, translated from the Greek by Thomas Taylor, (1821) quoted by Annie Besant in Karma,
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
5 months 5 days ago
The newsmen were writing down sentences...

The newsmen were writing down sentences busily as Hoskins spoke to them. They did not understand and they were sure their readers would not, but it sounded scientific and that was what counted.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay
1 month 3 weeks ago
We have classical associations and great...

We have classical associations and great names of our own which we can confidently oppose to the most splendid of ancient times. Senate has not to our ears a sound so venerable as Parliament. We respect the Great Charter more than the laws of Solon. The Capitol and the Forum impress us with less awe than our own Westminster Hall and Westminster Abbey... The list of warriors and statesmen by whom our constitution was founded or preserved, from De Montfort down to Fox, may well stand a comparison with the Fasti of Rome. The dying thanksgiving of Sydney is as noble as the libation which Thrasea poured to Liberating Jove: and we think with far less pleasure of Cato tearing out his entrails than of Russell saying, as he turned away from his wife, that the bitterness of death was past.

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'History', The Edinburgh Review (May 1828), quoted in The Miscellaneous Writings of Lord Macaulay, Vol. I (1860), p. 252
Philosophical Maxims
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
2 months ago
Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent...

Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent public is wonderfully patient with them, continues to read them, and endures disappointment after disappointment, waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy, social theory, and what it cannot hear from pure science. Out of the struggle at the center has come an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.

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Nobel Prize lecture
Philosophical Maxims
John Herschel
John Herschel
2 weeks 2 days ago
Of the splendid constellation of great...

Of the splendid constellation of great names... we admire the living and revere dead far too warmly and too deeply to suffer us sit in judgment on their respective claims to in this or that particular discovery; to balance mathematical skill of one against the experimental dexterity of another, or the philosophical acumen a third. So long as "one star differs from another in glory," - so long as there shall exist varieties, or even incompatibilities of excellence, - so long will the admiration of mankind be found sufficient for all who merit it.

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On the Theory of Light (1828) p.494
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
4 months 2 days ago
If the true is what...

If the true is what is grounded, then the ground is not true, nor yet false.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 3 weeks ago
There are only two cases...
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Carl Jung
Carl Jung
3 months 3 days ago
When animus and anima meet, the...

When animus and anima meet, the animus draws his sword of power and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction. The outcome need not always be negative, since the two are equally likely to fall in love (a special instance of love at first sight).

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Aion (1951). CW 9, Part II: P.338.30
Philosophical Maxims
Montesquieu
Montesquieu
2 months 3 weeks ago
And yet there is nothing so...

And yet there is nothing so badly imagined: nature seems to have provided, that the follies of men should be transient, but they by writing books render them permanent. A fool ought to content himself with having wearied those who lived with him: but he is for tormenting future generations; he is desirous that his folly should triumph over oblivion, which he ought to have enjoyed as well as his grave; he is desirous that posterity should be informed that he lived, and that it should be known for ever that he was a fool. Commonly paraphrased as "An author is a fool who, not content with having bored those who have lived with him, insists on boring future generations".

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No. 66. (Rica writing to * * *)
Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
3 months 1 week ago
It has been said that love...

It has been said that love robs those who have it of their wit, and gives it to those who have none.

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Paradoxe sur le Comédien
Philosophical Maxims
Arnold J. Toynbee
Arnold J. Toynbee
1 month 2 weeks ago
Every oasis is an island that...

Every oasis is an island that has water inside it but not round it.

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Between Niger and Nile (London: Oxford UP, 1965) 20. Cyrenaïca's Green Mountain
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
4 months 1 week ago
To-day unbind the captive, So only...

To-day unbind the captive, So only are ye unbound; Lift up a people from the dust, Trump of their rescue, sound!

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Boston Hymn, st. 17
Philosophical Maxims
Mozi
Mozi
2 weeks 1 day ago
When we try to develop and...

When we try to develop and procure benefits for the world with universal love as our standard, then attentive ears and keen eyes will respond in service to one another, then limbs will be strengthened to work for one another, and those who know the Tao will untiringly instruct others. Thus the old and those who have neither wife nor children will have the support and supply to spend their old age with, and the young and weak and orphans will have the care and admonition to grow up in. When universal love is adopted as the standard, then such are the consequent benefits. It is incomprehensible, then, why people should object to universal love when they hear it.

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Book 4; Universal Love III
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
4 months 6 days ago
A young man who wishes to...

A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere... God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.

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p. 191
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
3 months 2 days ago
Communism is the doctrine of the...

Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat.

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Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
3 months 2 days ago
Having destroyed the social power of...

Having destroyed the social power of the nobility and the guildmasters, the bourgeois also destroyed their political power. Having raised itself to the actual position of first class in society, it proclaims itself to be also the dominant political class. This it does through the introduction of the representative system which rests on bourgeois equality before the law and the recognition of free competition, and in European countries takes the form of constitutional monarchy. In these constitutional monarchies, only those who possess a certain capital are voters - that is to say, only members of the bourgeoisie. These bourgeois voters choose the deputies, and these bourgeois deputies, by using their right to refuse to vote taxes, choose a bourgeois government.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 months 3 days ago
Erect I make a resolution; prone...

Erect I make a resolution; prone I revoke it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus
4 months 2 weeks ago
This world, the whole of the...

This world, the whole of the planet called earth, is the common country of all who live and breathe upon it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
4 months 3 weeks ago
The superior man thinks of...

The superior man thinks of virtue; the small man thinks of comfort. The superior man thinks of the sanctions of law; the small man thinks of favors which he may receive.

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Philosophical Maxims
bell hooks
bell hooks
2 months 3 weeks ago
When television screens had only rare...

When television screens had only rare images of black folks, black people were more critically vigilant about these representations. Even when blackness was represented 'positiviely,' as it was in early black television shows like Julia, which focused on the life of a black nurse, the beauty standard was a reflection of white supremacist aesthetics.

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Philosophical Maxims
Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale
2 months 2 weeks ago
At present we live to impede...

At present we live to impede each other's satisfactions; competition, domestic life, society, what is it all but this? We go somewhere where we are not wanted and where we don't want to go. What else is conventional life? Passivity when we want to be active. So many hours spent every day in passively doing what conventional life tells us, when we would so gladly be at work. And is it a wonder that all individual life is extinguished?

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Jaspers
Karl Jaspers
2 months 4 weeks ago
Even the most…..

Even the most elevated psychological understanding is not a loving understanding.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 months 3 days ago
We make choices, decisions, as long...

We make choices, decisions, as long as we keep to the surface of things; once we reach the depths, we can neither choose nor decide, we can do nothing but regret the surface...

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Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
4 months 1 week ago
The world would be astonished if...

The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments-of those most distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue-are complete sceptics in religion...

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(p. 45)
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Browne
Thomas Browne
3 months 1 week ago
But the Quincunx of Heaven runs...

But the Quincunx of Heaven runs low, and 'tis time to close the five ports of knowledge. We are unwilling to spin out our awaking thoughts into the phantasmes of sleep, which often continueth præcogitations; making Cables of Cobwebbes and Wildernesses of handsome Groves. Beside Hippocrates hath spoke so little and the Oneirocriticall Masters, have left such frigid Interpretations from plants, that there is little encouragement to dream of Paradise it self. Nor will the sweetest delight of Gardens afford much comfort in sleep; wherein the dulnesse of that sense shakes hands with delectable odours; and though in the Bed of Cleopatra, can hardly with any delight raise up the ghost of a Rose.

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Ch. 5
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Schweitzer
Albert Schweitzer
2 weeks 4 days ago
The way to true mysticism leads...

The way to true mysticism leads up through rational thought to deep experience of the world and of our will-to-live. We must all venture once more to be "thinkers," so as to reach mysticism, which is the only direct and the only profound world-view. We must all wander in the field of knowledge to the point where knowledge passes over into experience of the world. We must all, through thought, become religious.This rational thought must become the prevailing force among us, for all the valuable ideas that we need develop out of it. In no other fire than that of the mysticism of reverence for life can the broken sword of idealism be forged anew.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Gray
John Gray
1 month 2 weeks ago
Liberals tend to regard being subjects...

Liberals tend to regard being subjects of the Queen as an insult to their dignity. But at least the archaic structures by which we are ruled do not force us to define ourselves by blood, soil or faith, and we are protected from the poisonous politics of identity.

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"Monarchy is the key to our liberty,", The Observer
Philosophical Maxims
Heraclitus
Heraclitus
4 months 3 weeks ago
War is the father and king...

War is the father and king of all, and has produced some as gods and some as men, and has made some slaves and some free.

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Philosophical Maxims
Herbert A. Simon
Herbert A. Simon
2 months 2 weeks ago
Decision making processes are aimed at...

Decision making processes are aimed at finding courses of action that are feasible or satisfactory in the light of multiple goals and constraints.

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p. 274.
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
4 months 1 week ago
Write it on your heart that...

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

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Works and Days
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
5 months 4 days ago
So many men are deprived of...

So many men are deprived of grace. How can one live without grace? One has to try it and do what Christianity never did: be concerned with the damned.

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Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
5 months 1 week ago
One will rarely err if extreme...
One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear.
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Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
3 months 1 week ago
If your little savage were left...

If your little savage were left to himself and be allowed to retain all his ignorance, he would in time join the infant's reasoning to the grown man's passion, he would strangle his father and sleep with his mother.

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Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
3 months 1 week ago
No man has received…

No man has received from nature the right to give orders to others. Freedom is a gift from heaven, and every individual of the same species has the right to enjoy it as soon as he is in enjoyment of his reason.

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Article on Political Authority, Vol. 1, (1751) as quoted in Selected Writings (1966) edited by Lester G. Crocker
Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
4 months 1 week ago
What peculiar privilege has this little...

What peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call thought, that we must thus make it the model of the whole universe? Our partiality in our own favour does indeed present it on all occasions; but sound philosophy ought carefully to guard against so natural an illusion.

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Philo to Cleanthes, Part II
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas
4 months 3 weeks ago
The order of authority derives from...

The order of authority derives from God, as the Apostle says [in Romans 13:1-7]. For this reason, the duty of obedience is, for the Christian, a consequence of this derivation of authority from God, and ceases when that ceases. But, as we have already said, authority may fail to derive from God for two reasons: either because of the way in which authority has been obtained, or in consequence of the use which is made of it. There are two ways in which the first may occur. Either because of a defect in the person, if he is unworthy; or because of some defect in the way itself by which power was acquired, if, for example, through violence, or simony or some other illegal method.

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in Aquinas: Selected Political Writings (Basil Blackwell: 1974), p. 183
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
3 months ago
Ye fools, did not he that...

Ye fools, did not he that made that which is without make that which is within also?

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11:40 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas
4 months 3 weeks ago
A hymn is the praise of...

A hymn is the praise of God with song; a song is the exultation of the mind dwelling on eternal things, bursting forth in the voice.

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Commentary on the Psalms (c. 1273), Introduction
Philosophical Maxims
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
2 months 3 weeks ago
The metaphysical apologia at least betrayed...

The metaphysical apologia at least betrayed the injustice of the established order through the incongruence of concept and reality. The impartiality of scientific language deprived what was powerless of the strength to make itself heard and merely provided the existing order with a neutral sign for itself. Such neutrality is more metaphysical than metaphysics.

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E. Jephcott, trans., p. 17.
Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
3 months 1 week ago
Do you know that ages will...

Do you know that ages will pass and mankind will proclaim in its wisdom and science that there is no crime and, therefore no sin, but that there are only hungry people. "Feed them first and then demand virtue of them!" - that is what they will inscribe on their banner which they will raise against you and which will destroy your temple.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
4 months 1 week ago
In the Catholic Church, especially, they...

In the Catholic Church, especially, they go into chancery, make a clean confession, give up all, and think to start again. Thus men will lie on their backs, talking about the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up.

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p. 487
Philosophical Maxims
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