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Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
5 months 3 weeks ago
Suppose that I wish to deserve...

Suppose that I wish to deserve the title of "robber of remorse" and that I place in myself all the townspeople's repentence?

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Orestes to Electra, Act 2
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
6 months 3 weeks ago
He believes in that mummery a...

He believes in that mummery a good deal less than I do, and I don't believe in it at all.

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Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
3 months 3 weeks ago
What I can't understand is why...

What I can't understand is why you can't see the extraordinary beauty of the idea that life started from nothing - that is such a staggering, elegant, beautiful thing, why would you want to clutter it up with something so messy as a God?

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" During his conversation with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, as quoted in The Telegraph, in 2012-02-24. In "Richard Dawkins: I can't be sure God does not exist"
Philosophical Maxims
Democritus
Democritus
5 months 2 weeks ago
In a shared fish, there are...

In a shared fish, there are no bones.

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Freeman (1948), p. 157
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
6 months 5 days ago
There is no man....

There is no man so good that if he placed all his actions and thoughts under the scrutiny of the laws, he would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.

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Ch. 9
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
5 months 4 weeks ago
Every philosophical problem, when it is...

Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.

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p. 33
Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
4 months 1 week ago
Above all our thought should be...

Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it. All wrong translations, all absurdities in geometry problems, all clumsiness of style, and all faulty connection of ideas in compositions and essays, all such things are due to the fact that thought has seized upon some idea too hastily, and being thus prematurely blocked, is not open to the truth.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 3 weeks ago
To have committed every crime but...

To have committed every crime but that of being a father.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Kuhn
2 months 2 weeks ago
I suggest that scientific knowledge, though...

I suggest that scientific knowledge, though logically more articulate and far more complex, is of this sort. The books and teachers from whom it is acquired present concrete examples together with a multitude of theoretical generalizations. Both are essential carriers of knowledge, and it is therefore Pickwickian to seek a methodological criterion that supposes the scientist can specify in advance whether each imaginable instance fits or would falsify his theory.

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"Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research?", Criticism and the growth of knowledge edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
2 months 2 weeks ago
A punishment that....
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Main Content / General
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
5 months 3 weeks ago
To travel is to discover that...

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong.

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Part II: Malaya,
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
5 months 3 weeks ago
Good bye, proud world! I'm going...

Good bye, proud world! I'm going home; Thou art not my friend; I am not thine.

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Good-bye, st. 1
Philosophical Maxims
John Gray
John Gray
3 months 4 days ago
For a consistent naturalist science can...

For a consistent naturalist science can only be a refinement of animal exploration, a practice humans have devised for finding their way in the bit of the universe in which they have so far survived. Instead of thinking of science as a law-seeking activity, we can think of it as a tool humans use to cope with a world they will never understand.

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Sweet Morality (p. 224)
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
4 months 1 week ago
Normally man's mind is composed only...

Normally man's mind is composed only of a consciousness of his immediate needs, which is to say that this consciousness at any moment can be defined as ''his awareness of his own power to satisfy those needs.'' He thinks in terms of what he intends to do in half an hour's time, a day's time, a month's time an no more. He never asks himself: what are the ''limits'' of my powers? In a sense, he is like a man who has a fortune is the bank, who never asks himself, How much money have I got, but only, Have I enough for a pound of cheese, a new tie, etc.

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Chapter Six, The Question of Identity
Philosophical Maxims
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut
3 months 4 weeks ago
Literature is idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal...

Literature is idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines in only twenty-six symbols, ten arabic numbers, and about eight punctuation marks.

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Public conversation with Lee Stringer, in Like Shaking Hands With God
Philosophical Maxims
kalokagathia
kalokagathia
10 months 1 week ago
Exclude those that exclude

We cannot stand by while the social contract is broken by those who chose conflict over equality. Those that want equal treatment for themselves have to treat others equally. They cannot lead with exclusion, then turn around and demand equal treatment. It is a double standard. If they are going to exclude first, then justice demands that we, the group that stands with universality, follow our duty to react and exclude those that exclude.

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Propositions / General
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
2 months 2 weeks ago
A poet without love were a...

A poet without love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility.

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Burns (1828).
Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
5 months 4 weeks ago
To be a philosopher, that is...

To be a philosopher, that is to say, a lover of wisdom (for wisdom is nothing but truth), it is not enough for a man to love truth, in so far as it is compatible with his own interest, with the will of his superiors, with the dogmas of the church, or with the prejudices and tastes of his contemporaries; so long as he rests content with this position, he is only a philautos, not a philosophos [a lover of self, not a lover of wisdom]. For this title of honor is well and wisely conceived precisely by its stating that one should love the truth earnestly and with one's whole heart, and thus unconditionally and unreservedly, above all else, and, if need be, in defiance of all else. Now the reason for this is the one previously stated that the intellect has become free, and in this state it does not even know or understand any other interest than that of truth.

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E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, pp. 21-22
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 3 weeks ago
The deepest and most organic death...

The deepest and most organic death is death in solitude, when even light becomes a principle of death. In such moments you will be severed from life, from love, smiles, friends and even from death. And you will ask yourself if there is anything besides the nothingness of the world and your own nothingness.

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Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
6 months 6 days ago
Truth will sooner come out from...

Truth will sooner come out from error than from confusion.

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Aphorism 20
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
5 months 3 weeks ago
God offers to every mind its...

God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose.

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Intellect
Philosophical Maxims
Cornel West
Cornel West
5 months 3 weeks ago
We're at such a low point...

We're at such a low point in the American empire. Its spiritual decay and its immoral decadence are so profound that we have to begin on the foundational level of a spiritual awakening and a moral reckoning. Organized greed. Institutionalized hatred. Routinized indifference to the lives of poor and working people of all colors. We've got to get beyond an analysis of the predatory capitalist processes that have saturated every nook and cranny of the culture. We've got to get beyond the ways in which the political system has been colonized by corporate wealth and by monied elite. We've got to get beyond that sense of impotence of the citizenry. These are all the signs of an empire in decline. The only thing that we have to add is military overreach, and we see that as well. Speaking to Chris Hedges about his decision to run for president in 2024.

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Chris Hedges: Dr. Cornel West Announces He Is Running for President. Scheerpost. June 5, 2023
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
5 months 3 weeks ago
Never have so many been manipulated...

Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.

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Chapter 3 (pp. 19-20)
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Rorty
Richard Rorty
5 months 2 weeks ago
Complaints about the social irresponsibility of...

Complaints about the social irresponsibility of the intellectual typically concern the intellectual's tendency to marginalize herself, to move out from one community by interior identification of herself with some other community-for example, another country or historical period. ... It is not clear that those who thus marginalize themselves can be criticized for social irresponsibility. One cannot be irresponsible toward a community of which one does not think of oneself as a member. Otherwise runaway slaves and tunnelers under the Berlin Wall would be irresponsible.

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"Postmodernist bourgeois liberalism," Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (Cambridge: 1991), p. 197
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
6 months 1 day ago
The sneaking arts of underling tradesmen...

The sneaking arts of underling tradesmen are thus erected into political maxims for the conduct of a great empire; for it is the most underling tradesmen only who make it a rule to employ chiefly their own customers. A great trader purchases his good always where they are cheapest and best, without regard to any little interest of this kind.

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Chapter III, Part II, p. 530.
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
4 months 4 weeks ago
I am convinced that we have...

I am convinced that we have a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pains of others.

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Part I Section XIV
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
5 months 4 weeks ago
A company of….

A company of solemn tyrants is impervious to all seductions.

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"Tyranny", 1764
Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
6 months 4 weeks ago
If there is some end of...

If there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake, clearly this must be the good. Will not knowledge of it, then, have a great influence on life? Shall we not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what we should? If so, we must try, in outline at least, to determine what it is.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
1 month 3 weeks ago
England was, until we copied her,...

England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.

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Philosophical Maxims
Antisthenes
Antisthenes
5 months 2 weeks ago
Ill repute is a good thing….

Ill repute is a good thing and much the same as pain.

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§ 5
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 3 weeks ago
Your suffering like your fate is...

Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle...

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Philosophical Maxims
Francis Fukuyama
Francis Fukuyama
2 months 3 weeks ago
It's also been attacked from the...

It's also been attacked from the left by people... I teach students at Stanford, and many of them think that liberalism is... the doctrine of their parents' or their grandparents' generation, but it's really not relevant to Gen Z younger people who are impatient for social justice and social change that liberalism is not providing.

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6:48
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
5 months 3 weeks ago
What seem our worst prayers may...

What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God's eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard.

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Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
4 months 1 week ago
The pursuit of mathematics is a...

The pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit.

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Ch. 2: "Mathematics as an Element in the History of Thought", p. 30
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
6 months 3 weeks ago
I see your vile implication. My...

I see your vile implication. My only explanation for it is that you are criminally insane.

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Philosophical Maxims
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
4 months 1 week ago
The huge laugh is a most...

The huge laugh is a most extreme expression of freedom.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
1 month 3 weeks ago
Remember, that to change thy mind...

Remember, that to change thy mind upon occasion, and to follow him that is able to rectify thee, is equally ingenuous, as to find out at the first, what is right and just, without help. For of thee nothing is required, that is beyond the extent of thine own deliberation and judgment, and of thine own understanding.

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VII, 14
Philosophical Maxims
William Godwin
William Godwin
4 months 3 weeks ago
The first authentic record on this...

The first authentic record on this subject (alchemy) is an edict of Diocletian, about 300 years after Christ, ordering a diligent search to be made in Egypt for all the ancient books which treated of the art of making gold and silver, that they might be consigned to the flames. This edict necessarily presumes a certain antiquity to the pursuit; and fabulous history has recorded Solomon, Pythagoras, and Hermes among its distinguished votaries.

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Quoted by H.P. Blavatsky, in Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology, Vol. I, (1877) (p. 504)
Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
6 months 4 weeks ago
Of things said without any combination,...

Of things said without any combination, each signifies either substance or quantity or qualification or a relative or where or when or being-in-a-position or having or doing or being affected. To give a rough idea, examples of substance are man, horse; of quantity: four-foot, five-foot; of qualification: white, grammatical; of a relative: double, half, larger; of where: in the Lyceum, in the market-place; of when: yesterday, last-year; of being-in-a-position: is-lying, is sitting; of having: has-shoes-on, has-armour-on; of doing: cutting, burning; of being-affected: being-cut, being-burned.

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Philosophical Maxims
Max Stirner
Max Stirner
2 months 1 week ago
Look upon yourself as more powerful...

Look upon yourself as more powerful than they give you out for, and you have more power; look upon yourself as more, and you have more.

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Cambridge 1995, p. 318
Philosophical Maxims
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
4 months 3 weeks ago
The Doctrine of a Perfect God...

The Doctrine of a Perfect God; in whose nature nothing arbitrary or changeable can have a place; in whose Highest Being we all live, and in this Life may, and ought at all times to be, blessed;-this Doctrine, which ignorant men think they have sufficiently demolished when they have proclaimed it to be Mysticism, is by no means Mysticism, for it has an immediate reference to human action, and in deed to the inmost spirit which ought to inspire and guide all our actions. It can only become Mysticism when it is associated with the pretext that the insight into this truth proceeds from a certain inward and mysterious light, which is not accessible to all men, but is only bestowed upon a few favourites chosen from among the rest:-in which pretext the Mysticism consists, for it betrays a presumptuous contemplation of personal merit, and a pride in mere sensuous Individuality.

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p, 122-123
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
3 months 3 weeks ago
Man is a creature who lives...

Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.

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Virginibus Puerisque, Ch. 2.
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
3 months 3 weeks ago
Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is...

Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful.

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The less identity, the more violence. "Violence in the media." Canadian Forum. Volume 56, 1976, p. 9
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
5 months 3 weeks ago
He needs no library, for he...

He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is himself a prophet; no statute book, for he hath the Lawgiver; no money, for he is value itself; no road, for he is at home where he is.

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December 26, 1839
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine
5 months 4 weeks ago
The Managers of that Trade themselves,...

The Managers of that Trade themselves, and others, testify, that many of these African nations inhabit fertile countries, are industrious farmers, enjoy plenty, and lived quietly, averse to war, before the Europeans debauched them with liquors, and bribing them against one another; and that these inoffensive people are brought into slavery, by stealing them, tempting Kings to sell subjects, which they can have no right to do, and hiring one tribe to war against another, in order to catch prisoners. By such wicked and inhuman ways the English are said to enslave towards one hundred thousand yearly; of which thirty thousand are supposed to die by barbarous treatment in the first year; besides all that are slain in the unnatural wars excited to take them. So much innocent blood have the Managers and Supporters of this inhuman Trade to answer for to the common Lord of all!

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Philosophical Maxims
Henri Poincaré
Henri Poincaré
2 months 3 weeks ago
It is because….

It is because simplicity and vastness are both beautiful that we seek by preference simple facts and vast facts; that we take delight, now in following the giant courses of the stars, now in scrutinizing the microscope that prodigious smallness which is also a vastness, and now in seeking in geological ages the traces of a past that attracts us because of its remoteness.

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Part I. Ch. 1 : The Selection of Facts, p. 23
Philosophical Maxims
Julien Offray de La Mettrie
Julien Offray de La Mettrie
1 month 3 weeks ago
Man... whatever the origin of his...

Man... whatever the origin of his soul, if it is pure, noble, and lofty, it is a beautiful soul which dignifies the man endowed with it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Willard van Orman Quine
Willard van Orman Quine
4 months 1 week ago
The issue over there being classes...

The issue over there being classes seems more a question of convenient conceptual scheme; the issue over there being centaurs, or brick houses on Elm Street, seems more a question of fact. But I have been urging that this difference is only one of degree, and that it turns upon our vaguely pragmatic inclination to adjust one strand of the fabric of science rather than another in accommodating some particular recalcitrant experience. Conservatism figures in such choices, and so does the quest for simplicity.

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"Two Dogmas of Empiricism"
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
2 months 2 weeks ago
To the wild deep-hearted man all...

To the wild deep-hearted man all was yet new, not veiled under names or formulas; it stood naked, flashing in on him there, beautiful, awful, unspeakable. Nature was to this man, what to the Thinker and Prophet it forever is, preternatural. This green flowery rock-built earth, the trees, the mountains, rivers, many-sounding seas;-that great deep sea of azure that swims overhead; the winds sweeping through it; the black cloud fashioning itself together, now pouring out fire, now hail and rain.

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Philosophical Maxims
Plato
Plato
6 months 3 weeks ago
The beginning in every task is...

The beginning in every task is the chief thing.

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Philosophical Maxims
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