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Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 1 week ago
I seem to myself, among civilised...

I seem to myself, among civilised men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers.

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Philosophical Maxims
Sydney Smith
Sydney Smith
1 month 4 weeks ago
Life is to be fortified by...

Life is to be fortified by many friendships. To love, and to be loved, is the greatest happiness of existence. If I lived under the burning sun of the equator, it would be a pleasure to me to think that there were many human beings on the other side of the world who regarded and respected me; I could and would not live if I were alone upon the earth, and cut off from the remembrance of my fellow-creatures. It is not that a man has occasion often to fall back upon the kindness of his friends; perhaps he may never experience the necessity of doing so; but we are governed by our imaginations, and they stand there as a solid and impregnable bulwark against all the evils of life.

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Vol. I, ch. 6, "Of Friendship", p. 178
Philosophical Maxims
George Berkeley
George Berkeley
4 months 3 weeks ago
For no one's authority ought to...

For no one's authority ought to rank so high as to set a value on his words and terms even though nothing clear and determinate lies behind them.

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Paragraph 1
Philosophical Maxims
Niels Bohr
Niels Bohr
1 month 3 weeks ago
It is not enough to be...

It is not enough to be wrong, one must also be polite.

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As quoted in The Genius of Science: A Portrait Gallery (2000) by Abraham Pais, p. 24
Philosophical Maxims
Gottlob frege
Gottlob frege
4 months 1 week ago
The historical approach, with its aim...

The historical approach, with its aim of detecting how things began and arriving from these origins at a knowledge of their nature, is certainly perfectly legitimate; but it also has its limitations. If everything were in continual flux, and nothing maintained itself fixed for all time, there would no longer be any possibility of getting to know about the world, and everything would be plunged into confusion.

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Translation J. L. Austin (Oxford, 1950) as quoted by Stephen Toulmin, Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts (1972) Vol. 1, p. 55.
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
3 months 1 week ago
A good conscience is eight parts...

A good conscience is eight parts of courage.

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Catriona, ch. XI (1893).
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
1 month 4 days ago
I believe that whatever we...

I believe that whatever we do or live for has its causality; it is good, however, that we cannot see through to it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Horace
Horace
5 months 4 days ago
Then take, good sir…

Then take, good sir, your pleasure while you may; With life so short 'twere wrong to lose a day.

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Book II, satire viii, line 96 (trans. Conington)
Philosophical Maxims
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
1 month 3 weeks ago
Human nature is full of riddles,...

Human nature is full of riddles, and one of these riddles is this: How is it that people who have been crushed by the sheer weight of slavery and cast to the bottom of the pit can nevertheless find strength to rise up and free themselves, first in spirit then in body, while those who soar unhampered over the peaks of freedom suddenly appear to lose the taste for freedom, lose the will to defend it, and hopelessly confused and lost almost begin to crave slavery?

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"Argentina's President Javier Milei Loves Being the Skunk at the Garden Party" (at 47m35s), Honestly with Bari Weiss, 6 June 2024.
Philosophical Maxims
Cisero
Cisero
6 months 2 days ago
We should never take pleasure in...

We should never take pleasure in causing pain to others, even to those who have wronged us, but rather strive to do good to all.

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Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
5 months 4 weeks ago
In theory there is nothing to...

In theory there is nothing to hinder our following what we are taught; but in life there are many things to draw us aside.

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Book I, ch. 26, 3.
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
1 month 2 weeks ago
A free people claim their rights,...

A free people claim their rights, as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Jaspers
Karl Jaspers
4 months 5 days ago
The possibility of peace, on whose...

The possibility of peace, on whose behalf many are working, might perhaps become actual because the technical advances in offensive weapons make the prospect of a European war so disastrous, and because, if the nations were at grips again, even the victorious aggressor would be ruined. But there still remains open the possibility of a new war which, more dreadful than any that have preceded it would make an end of contemporary Europeans.

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Philosophical Maxims
Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch
4 months 6 days ago
Love is the extremely difficult realisation...

Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.

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"The Sublime and the Good", in the Chicago Review, Vol. 13 Issue 3 (Autumn 1959) p. 51.
Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
4 months ago
We must wish either for that...

We must wish either for that which actually exists or for that which cannot in any way exist - or, still better, for both. That which is and that which cannot be are both outside the realm of becoming.

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p. 154
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
3 months 1 week ago
So our self-feeling....
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Jesus
Jesus
4 months 1 week ago
O faithless and perverse generation, how...

O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? how long shall I suffer you? bring him hither to me.

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17:17 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 1 week ago
We are afraid of the enormity...

We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.

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Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
4 months 2 weeks ago
Justice was in all countries originally...

Justice was in all countries originally administered by the priesthood; nor indeed could laws in their first feeble state have either authority or sanction, so as to compel men to relinquish their natural independence, had they not appeared to come down to them enforced by beings of more than human power. The first openings of civility have been everywhere made by religion. Amongst the Romans, the custody and interpretation of the laws continued solely in the college of the pontiffs for above a century.

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An Essay towards an Abridgment of English History (1757-c. 1763), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI (1856), p. 196
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
5 months 2 weeks ago
In its widest possible sense, however,...

In its widest possible sense, however, a man's Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account. All these things give him the same emotions. If they wax and prosper, he feels triumphant; if they dwindle and die away, he feels cast down.

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Ch. 10
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
5 months 1 week ago
Generosity is nothing else than a...

Generosity is nothing else than a craze to possess. All which I abandon, all which I give, I enjoy in a higher manner through the fact that I give it away.... To give is to enjoy possessively the object which one gives.

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Part 2
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
5 months 3 weeks ago
Saying is one thing, doing another....

Saying is one thing, doing another.

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Book II, Ch. 31. Of Anger
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
5 months 2 weeks ago
Capacity for the nobler feelings is...

Capacity for the nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but by the mere want of sustenance; and in the majority of young persons it speedily dies away if the occupations to which their position in life has devoted them, and the society into which it has thrown them, are not favourable to keeping that higher capacity in existence.

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Ch. 2
Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
6 months ago
Shut out the evil love of...

Shut out the evil love of the world, that you may be filled with the love of God. You are a vessel that was already full: you must pour away what you have, that you may take in what you have not.

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Second Homily, as translated by John Burnaby (1955), p. 274
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 1 week ago
Maybe suffering has no more justification...

Maybe suffering has no more justification than life.

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Philosophical Maxims
Will Durant
Will Durant
2 months 4 days ago
It is life that educates, and...

It is life that educates, and perhaps love more than anything else in life.

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Ch. 2 : On Youth
Philosophical Maxims
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
3 months 1 week ago
Human beings can lose their lives...

Human beings can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.

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Him with His Foot in His Mouth, from Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories (1984) [Penguin Classics, 1998, ISBN 0-141-18023-4], p. 11
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
5 months 3 weeks ago
Throughout your treatment you forget that...

Throughout your treatment you forget that you said that 'free-will' can do nothing without grace, and you prove that 'free-will' can do all things without grace! Your inferences and analogies "For if man has lost his freedom, and is forced to serve sin, and cannot will good, what conclusion can more justly be drawn concerning him, than that he sins and wills evil necessarily?

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p. 149
Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
5 months 2 weeks ago
Great minds are related to the...

Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 20, § 242
Philosophical Maxims
Alan Watts
Alan Watts
1 month 3 weeks ago
I have always done things in...

I have always done things in my own way, which is at once the way that comes naturally to me, that is honest, sincere, genuine, and unforced; but also perverse, although you must remember that this word means per (through) verse (poetry), out-of-the-way and wayward, which is surely towards the way, and that to be queer-to "follow your own weird"-is wholeheartedly to accept your karma, or fate, or destiny, and thus to be odd in the service of God, "whose service," as the Anglican Book of Common Prayer declares, "is perfect freedom."

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p. xiii
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas
6 months 2 days 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
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
5 months 3 weeks ago
We were halves throughout, and to...

We were halves throughout, and to that degree that, methinks, by outliving him I defraud him of his part.

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Ch. 27. Of Friendship, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Hazlitt, 1842
Philosophical Maxims
Rosa Luxemburg
Rosa Luxemburg
1 month 1 week ago
The self-discipline of the Social Democracy...

The self-discipline of the Social Democracy is not merely the replacement of the authority of bourgeois rulers with the authority of a socialist central committee. The working class will acquire the sense of the new discipline, the freely assumed self-discipline of the Social Democracy, not as a result of the discipline imposed on it by the capitalist state, but by extirpating, to the last root, its old habits of obedience and servility.

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Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
1 month 1 week ago
No longer let thy breathing only...

No longer let thy breathing only act in concert with the air which surrounds thee, but let thy intelligence also now be in harmony with the intelligence which embraces all things. For the intelligent power is no less diffused in all parts and pervades all things for him who is willing to draw it to him than the aërial power for him who is able to respire it.

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VIII, 54
Philosophical Maxims
Max Stirner
Max Stirner
2 months ago
An appeal to men's self-sacrificing disposition...

An appeal to men's self-sacrificing disposition and self-renouncing love ought at least to have lost its seductive plausibility when, after an activity of thousands of years, it has left nothing behind but the - misery of today. Why then still fruitlessly expect self-sacrifice to bring us better times? Why not rather hope for them from usurpation? Salvation comes no longer from the giver, the bestower, the loving one, but from the taker, the appropriator (usurper), the owner. Communism, and, consciously, egoism-reviling humanism, still count on love.

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Cambridge 1995, p. 274
Philosophical Maxims
Plotinus
Plotinus
6 months 3 days ago
We may treat of the Soul...

We may treat of the Soul as in the body whether it be set above it or actually within it since the association of the two constitutes the one thing called the living organism, the Animate. Now from this relation, from the Soul using the body as an instrument, it does not follow that the Soul must share the body's experiences: a man does not himself feel all the experiences of the tools with which he is working.

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Philosophical Maxims
Nikos Kazantzakis
Nikos Kazantzakis
1 month 2 weeks ago
I felt that human partitions -...

I felt that human partitions - bodies, brains, and souls - were capable of being demolished, and that humanity might return again, after frightfully bloody wandering, to its primeval, divine oneness. In this condition, there is no such thing as "me", "you", and "he"; everything is a unity and this unity is a profound mystic intoxication in which death loses its scythe and ceases to exist. Separately, we die one by one, but all together we are immortal. Like prodigal sons, after so much hunger, thirst, and rebellion, we spread our arms and embrace our two parents: heaven and earth.

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Liberty, Ch. 12, p. 105
Philosophical Maxims
Niels Bohr
Niels Bohr
1 month 3 weeks ago
However far the phenomena transcend the...

However far the phenomena transcend the scope of classical physical explanation, the account of all evidence must be expressed in classical terms. The argument is that simply by the word "experiment" we refer to a situation where we can tell others what we have done and what we have learned and that, therefore, the account of the experimental arrangement and of the results of the observations must be expressed in unambiguous language with suitable application of the terminology of classical physics.

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Niels Bohr, "Discussions with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics," in Paul Arthur Schilpp, Albert Einstein: Philosopher Scientist (1949) pp. 199-241.
Philosophical Maxims
Al-Ghazali
Al-Ghazali
4 months 3 weeks ago
The lowest degree of education is...

The lowest degree of education is to distinguish oneself from the ignorant ordinary man. The educated man does not loathe honey even if he finds it in the surgeon's cupping-glass; he realizes that the cupping glass does not essentially alter the honey. The natural aversion from it in such a case rests on popular ignorance, arising from the fact that the cupping-glass is made only for impure blood. Men imagine that the blood is impure because it is in the cupping-glass, and are not aware that the impurity is due to a property.

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III. The Classes of Seekers, p. 31.
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
3 months 1 week ago
The "interface" of the Renaissance was...

The "interface" of the Renaissance was the meeting of medieval pluralism and modern homogeneity and mechanism - a formula for blitz and metamorphosis.

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(p. 161)
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
1 month 2 weeks ago
I am quite at a loss...

I am quite at a loss about the nailboys remaining with mr Stewart. they have long been a dead expence instead of profit to me. in truth they require a vigour of discipline to make them do reasonable work, to which he cannot bring himself. on the whole I think it will be best for them also to be removed to mr Lilly's control.

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In a letter to James Dinsmore as quoted in The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson, by Henry Wiencek, Smithsonian Magazine,
Philosophical Maxims
John Gray
John Gray
2 months 3 weeks ago
If we are to put interrogators...

If we are to put interrogators to work in defence of liberal values, their role in the community must receive proper recognition. They will require intensive counselling to overcome the inevitable traumas that this difficult work involves. They must be enabled to see themselves as dedicated workers in the cause of progress. Psychotherapy must be available to help them avoid the negative self-image from which some torturers have suffered in the past.

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Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
4 months 1 week ago
The ordinary logic has a great...

The ordinary logic has a great deal to say about genera and species, or in our nineteeth century dialect, about classes. Now a class is a set of objects comprising all that stand to one another in a special relation of similarity. But where ordinary logic talks of classes the logic of relatives talks of systems. A system is a set of objects comprising all that stands to one another in a group of connected relations. Induction according to ordinary logic rises from the contemplation of a sample of a class to that of a whole class; but according to the logic of relatives it rises from the comtemplation of a fragment of a system to the envisagement of the complete system.

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Vol. IV, par. 5
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
5 months 2 weeks ago
I owed a magnificent day to...

I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad Gita. It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us.

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October 1, 1848
Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
3 months 1 week ago
Even a single hair casts its...

Even a single hair casts its shadow.

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Maxim 228
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
6 months 1 week ago
What, then, is that incalculable feeling...

What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 1 week ago
The source of our actions resides...

The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, the cause, and the conclusion of time. Our reflexes and our pride transform into a planet the parcel of flesh and consciousness we are. If we had the right sense of our position in the world, if to compare were inseparable from to live, the revelation of our infinitesimal presence would crush us. But to live is to blind ourselves to our own dimensions. . . .

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel
5 months 5 days ago
In speaking of the fear of...

In speaking of the fear of religion, I don't mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something much deeper-namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.

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The Last Word, Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 130-131.
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
5 months 2 weeks ago
Most of us are not neutral...

Most of us are not neutral in feeling, but, as human beings, we have to remember that, if the issues between East and West are to be decided in any manner that can give any possible satisfaction to anybody, whether Communist or anti-Communist, whether Asian or European or American, whether White or Black, then these issues must not be decided by war. We should wish this to be understood, both in the East and in the West.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 1 week ago
He who has never envied the...

He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama. 

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p. 178, first American edition
Philosophical Maxims
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