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Isaiah Berlin
Isaiah Berlin
2 months 1 week ago
Philosophers are adults who persist in...

Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions. 

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As quoted in The Listener
Philosophical Maxims
Gaston Bachelard
Gaston Bachelard
2 months 1 week ago
There is no original truth, only...

There is no original truth, only original error.

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A Retrospective Glance at the Lifework of a Master of Books
Philosophical Maxims
Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas
3 months 1 week ago
Subjects who reciprocally recognize each other...

Subjects who reciprocally recognize each other as such, must consider each other as identical, insofar as they both take up the position of subject; they must at all times subsume themselves and the other under the same category. At the same time, the relation of reciprocity of recognition demands the non-identity of one and the other, both must also maintain their absolute difference, for to be a subject implies the claim of individuation.

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Habermas (1972) "Sprachspiel, intention und Bedeutung. Zu Motiven bei Sellars und Wittgenstein". In R.W. Wiggerhaus (Ed.) Sprachanalyse and Soziologie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp). p. 334 This is called the paradoxical achievement of intersubjectivity
Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
2 months 3 weeks ago
I have no hesitation in saying...

I have no hesitation in saying that although the American woman never leaves her domestic sphere and is in some respects very dependent within it, nowhere does she enjoy a higher station. And if anyone asks me what I think the chief cause of the extraordinary prosperity and growing power of this nation, I should answer that it is due to the superiority of their women.

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Book Three, Chapter XII.
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
2 months 1 week ago
Go and shew John again those...

Go and shew John again those things which ye do hear and see: The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them. And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me.

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11:4-6 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 week ago
Luther's merit in literary history is...

Luther's merit in literary history is of the greatest: his dialect became the language of all writing. They are not well written, these Four-and-twenty Quartos of his; written hastily, with quite other than literary objects. But in no Books have I found a more robust, genuine, I will say noble faculty of a man than in these. A rugged honesty, homeliness, simplicity; a rugged sterling sense and strength. He dashes out illumination from him; his smiting idiomatic phrases seem to cleave into the very secret of the matter. Good humor too, nay tender affection, nobleness and depth: this man could have been a Poet too! He had to work an Epic Poem, not write one.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
3 months 2 weeks ago
False and doubtful positions, relied upon...

False and doubtful positions, relied upon as unquestionable maxims, keep those who build on them in the dark from truth. Such are usually the prejudices imbibed from education, party, reverence, fashion, interest, et cetera.

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Book IV, Ch. 7
Philosophical Maxims
Sydney Smith
Sydney Smith
1 day ago
He not only overflowed with learning...

He not only overflowed with learning but stood in the slops.

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On Macaulay; reported in Hesketh Pearson, The Smith of Smiths (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1934), p. 180
Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
2 months 3 weeks ago
This is a work that cannot...

This is a work that cannot be completed except by a society of men of letters and skilled workmen, each working separately on his own part, but all bound together solely by their zeal for the best interests of the human race and a feeling of mutual good will.

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Article on Encyclopedia, as translated in The Many Faces of Philosophy : Reflections from Plato to Arendt (2001), "Diderot", p. 237
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
4 months 2 weeks ago
The man who does not wish...
The man who does not wish to belong to the mass needs only to cease taking himself easily; let him follow his conscience, which calls to him: Be your self! All you are now doing, thinking, desiring, is not you yourself.
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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 3 weeks ago
Basic justice

Basic justice is based on everything we as humans share that is the same. It extends to nature also, but, if we can't keep it straight amongst ourselves, of course we'll never have the traction to extend it to the larger context we are a part of.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 2 weeks ago
In obedience to the feeling of...

In obedience to the feeling of reality, we shall insist that, in the analysis of propositions, nothing "unreal" is to be admitted. But, after all, if there is nothing unreal, how, it may be asked, could we admit anything unreal? The reply is that, in dealing with propositions, we are dealing in the first instance with symbols, and if we attribute significance to groups of symbols which have no significance, we shall fall into the error of admitting unrealities, in the only sense in which this is possible, namely, as objects described.

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Ch. 16: Descriptions
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
2 months 1 week ago
We have reached the point where...

We have reached the point where the Objective Logic turns into the Subjective Logic, or, where subjectivity emerges as the true form of objectivity. We may sum up Hegel's analysis in the following schema: The true form of reality requires freedom. Freedom requires self-consciousness and knowledge of the truth. Self-consciousness and knowledge of the truth are the essentials of the subject. The form of reality must be conceived as subject.

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P. 154-155
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 month 2 weeks ago
Headlines are icons, not literature.

Headlines are icons, not literature.

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(p. 5)
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
3 months 2 weeks ago
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely...

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

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"The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment" (1949), p. 292 Similar statements were included in "A Reply to Professor Haldane" (1946) (see above), published posthumously.
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley
1 month 2 days ago
It cannot be doubted, I think,...

It cannot be doubted, I think, that Mr. Darwin has satisfactorily proved that what he terms selection, or selective modification, must occur, and does occur, in nature; and he has also proved to superfluity that such selection is competent to produce forms as distinct, structurally, as some genera even are. If the animated world presented us with none but structural differences, I should have no hesitation in saying that Mr. Darwin has demonstrated the existence of a true physical cause, amply competent to account for the origin of living species, and of man among the rest.

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Ch.2, p. 126
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
2 months 2 weeks ago
Slavery they can have anywhere. It...

Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil.

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Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
3 months 2 weeks ago
The inscrutable wisdom through which we...

The inscrutable wisdom through which we exist is not less worthy of veneration in respect to what it denies us than in respect to what it has granted.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henri Poincaré
Henri Poincaré
1 week 3 days ago
We should like to represent... the......

We should like to represent... the... universe, and... feel... we understood it. We... never can attain this representation: our weakness is too great. But... we desire... to conceive an infinite intelligence... which should see all, and... classify all in its time, as we classify, in our time, the little we see. ...This supreme intelligence would be only a demigod; infinite in one sense... limited in another, since it would have... imperfect recollection of the past... otherwise all recollections would be equally present... and for it there would be no time.

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Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
2 months 2 weeks ago
The effect of liberty to individuals...

The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations.

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Philosophical Maxims
Baruch Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza
3 months 2 weeks ago
Extreme pride or dejection….

Extreme pride or dejection indicates extreme ignorance of self.

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Part IV, Prop. LV
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Rorty
Richard Rorty
3 months 1 week ago
As long as we try to...

As long as we try to project from the relative and conditioned to the absolute and unconditioned, we shall keep the pendulum swinging between dogmatism and skepticism. The only way to stop this increasingly tiresome pendulum swing is to change our conception of what philosophy is good for. But that is not something which will be accomplished by a few neat arguments. It will be accomplished, if it ever is, by a long, slow process of cultural change - that is to say, of change in common sense, changes in the intuitions available for being pumped up by philosophical arguments.

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Introduction to Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (1998).
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
4 months 1 week ago
One does not discover the absurd...

One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. "What! — by such narrow ways — ?" There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd discovery. It happens as well that the feeling of the absurd springs from happiness.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
3 months 2 weeks ago
Something that is merely negative creates...

Something that is merely negative creates nothing.

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Notebook VI, The Chapter on Capital, p. 532.
Philosophical Maxims
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
2 months 2 weeks ago
Executions, far from being useful examples...

Executions, far from being useful examples to the survivors, have, I am persuaded, a quite contrary effect, by hardening the heart they ought to terrify. Besides, the fear of an ignominious death, I believe, never deterred anyone from the commission of a crime, because in committing it the mind is roused to activity about present circumstances.

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Letter 19
Philosophical Maxims
Ernst Mach
Ernst Mach
2 months 1 week ago
There is no problem in all...

There is no problem in all mathematics that cannot be solved by direct counting. But with the present implements of mathematics many operations can be performed in a few minutes which without mathematical methods would take a lifetime.

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p. 197; On mathematics and counting.
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
1 month 1 week ago
Times are changed with him who...

Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more by-path meadows, where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the grave. Idleness, which is often becoming and even wise in the bachelor, begins to wear a different aspect when you have a wife to support.

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Virginibus Puerisque, Ch. 2.
Philosophical Maxims
Henri Bergson
Henri Bergson
2 months 1 week ago
All the living hold together, and...

All the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and in time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death.

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Creative Evolution (1907), Chapter III. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911, p. 271
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
2 months 2 weeks 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
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 month 2 weeks ago
Until writing was invented, we lived...

Until writing was invented, we lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, the dark of the mind, the world of emotion, primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.

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(p. 13)
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
3 months 2 weeks ago
Words are good servants but bad...

Words are good servants but bad masters.

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As quoted by Laura Huxley, in conversation with Alan Watts about her memoir This Timeless Moment (1968), in Pacifica Archives #BB2037
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 1 week ago
For two thousand years, Jesus has...

For two thousand years, Jesus has revenged himself on us for not having died on a sofa.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 week ago
I care little about the sword:...

I care little about the sword: I will allow a thing to struggle for itself in this world, with any sword or tongue or implement it has, or can lay hold of. We will let it preach, and pamphleteer, and fight, and to the uttermost bestir itself, and do, beak and claws, whatsoever is in it; very sure that it will, in the long-run, conquer nothing which does not deserve to be conquered. What is better than itself, it cannot put away, but only what is worse. In this great Duel, Nature herself is umpire, and can do no wrong: the thing which is deepest-rooted in Nature, what we call truest, that thing and not the other will be found growing at last.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 2 weeks ago
In spite of Death, the mark...

In spite of Death, the mark and seal of the parental control, Man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticise, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
3 months 1 week ago
At the end of the Middle...

At the end of the Middle Ages, leprosy disappeared from the Western world. In the margins of the community, at the gates of cities, there stretched wastelands which sickness had ceased to haunt but had left sterile and long uninhabitable. For centuries, these reaches would belong to the non-human. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, they would wait, soliciting with strange incantations a new incarnation of disease, another grimace of terror, renewed rites of purification and exclusion.

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Part One: 1. Stultifera Navis
Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
2 months 1 week ago
Thus far, gentlemen, I have been...

Thus far, gentlemen, I have been insisting very strenuously upon what the most vulgar common sense has every disposition to assent to and only ingenious philosophers have been able to deceive themselves about. But now I come to a category which only a more refined form of common sense is prepared willingly to allow, the category which of the three is the chief burden of Hegel's song, a category toward which the studies of the new logico-mathematicians, Georg Cantor and the like, are steadily pointing, but to which no modern writer of any stripe, unless it be some obscure student like myself, has ever done anything approaching to justice.

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Lecture II : The Universal Categories, §3. Laws: Nominalism, CP 5.59
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 months 2 weeks ago
It is easy to see that...

It is easy to see that the existing generation are conspiring with a beneficence, which, in its working for coming generations, sacrifices the passing one, which infatuates the most selfish men to act against their private interest for the public welfare. We build railroads, we know not for what or for whom; but one thing is certain, that we who build will receive the very smallest share of benefit. Benefit will accrue; they are essential to the country, but that will be felt not until we are no longer countrymen. We do the like in all matters: - 'Man's heart the Almighty to the Future setBy secret and inviolable springs.'

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Philosophical Maxims
John Dewey
John Dewey
2 months 1 week ago
To regiment artists, to make them...

To regiment artists, to make them servants of some particular cause does violence to the very springs of artistic creation. But it does more than that. It betrays the very cause of a better future it would serve, for in its subjugation of the individuality of the artist it annihilates the source of that which is genuinely new. Where the regimentation is successful, it would cause the future to be but a rearrangement of the past.

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Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
3 months 2 weeks ago
The public is a ferocious beast…

The public is a ferocious beast: one must chain it up or flee from it.

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Letter to Mademoiselle Quinault, quoted in Charles Sainte-Beuve, "Lettres inédites de Voltaire," Causeries de Lundi (20 October 1856) ; an English translation can be found on this page:
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
4 months 2 weeks ago
Earth governments in moments of stress...

Earth governments in moments of stress are not famous for being reasonable.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 months 2 weeks ago
It costs a beautiful person no...

It costs a beautiful person no exertion to paint her image on our eyes; yet how splendid is that benefit! It costs no more for a wise soul to convey his quality to other men.

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Uses of Great Men
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
2 months 2 weeks ago
We have an enemy, to whose...

We have an enemy, to whose virtues we can owe nothing; but on this occasion we are infinitely obliged to one of his vices. We owe more to his insolence than to our own precaution.

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p.3
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Jaspers
Karl Jaspers
2 months 1 week ago
I approach the presentation of Kierkegaard...

I approach the presentation of Kierkegaard with some trepidation. Next to Nietzsche, or rather, prior to Nietzsche, I consider him to be the most important thinker of our post-Kantian age. With Goethe and Hegel, an epoch had reached its conclusion, and our prevalent way of thinking - that is, the positivistic, natural-scientific one - cannot really be considered as philosophy.

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The Great Philosophers
Philosophical Maxims
Charles Fourier
Charles Fourier
1 week 5 days ago
The possibility of associating two or...

The possibility of associating two or three hundred families in agricultural and manufacturing industry depends upon a system so entirely different from what now exists, that it will open to the reader a new social world. He must consequently, in the study which opens before him, follow the guide with confidence, bearing constantly in min the gigantic results which will flow from association. Such results are well worth the sacrifice of a few prejudices. Every sensible reader will be of this opinion, and will concur to follow the advice which I shall constantly give, namely, to neglect the form and style of presentation, and occupy himself solely with the substance of the theory, seeking to determine whether the process of association is really discovered or not.

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The Theory of Social Organization. Harmonian Man: Selected Writings of Charles Fourier, p. 5.
Philosophical Maxims
Henri Poincaré
Henri Poincaré
1 week 3 days ago
But these labels can only be...

But these labels can only be finite in number. On that score, psychologic time should be discontinuous.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
3 months 2 weeks ago
It would be worthy of the...

It would be worthy of the age to print together the collected Scriptures or Sacred Writings of the several nations, the Chinese, the Hindus, the Persians, the Hebrews, and others, as the Scripture of mankind. The New Testament is still, perhaps, too much on the lips and in the hearts of men to be called a Scripture in this sense. Such a juxtaposition and comparison might help to liberalize the faith of men. This is a work which Time will surely edit, reserved to crown the labors of the printing-press. This would be the Bible, or Book of Books, which let the missionaries carry to the uttermost parts of the earth.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
3 months 2 weeks ago
Popery so threatens and so nearly...

Popery so threatens and so nearly surrounds us...every sober man would think it seasonable at this time that all dissenting Protestants should be brought to a good understanding and compliance one with another...I think all Protestants ought now by all ways to be stirred up against them [Catholics] as People that have declared themselves ready by blood, violence, and destruction to ruine our Religion and Government...[they] are nothing but either Enemys in our bowells or spies among us, whilst their General commanders whom they blindly obey declare warr, and an unalterable designe to destroy us.

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Critical Notes Upon Edward Stillingfleet's Mischief and Unreasonableness of Separation' (c. May 1681), quoted in John Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 110
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 2 weeks ago
God gave us....
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Main Content / General
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
4 weeks 1 day ago
One can never pay in gratitude;...

One can never pay in gratitude; one can only pay "in kind" somewhere else in life.

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North to the Orient (1935) Ch. 19
Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
3 months 2 weeks ago
Reading is merely a surrogate for...

Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 22, § 261
Philosophical Maxims
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