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Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
1 month 1 week ago
No man can have….

No man can have a peaceful life who thinks too much about lengthening it.

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Line 4.
Philosophical Maxims
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
3 months 2 weeks ago
As one advances in life, one...

As one advances in life, one realises more and more that the majority of men - and of women - are incapable of any other effort than that strictly imposed on them as a reaction to external compulsion. And for that reason, the few individuals we have come across who are capable of a spontaneous and joyous effort stand out isolated, monumentalised, so to speak, in our experience. These are the select men, the nobles, the only ones who are active and not merely reactive, for whom life is a perpetual striving, an incessant course of training. Training = askesis. These are the ascetics.

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Chap. VII: Noble Life And Common Life, Or Effort And Inertia
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
3 months 1 week ago
But now we come to the...

But now we come to the real paradox: that something as explosive as sexual excitement can nevertheless become a matter of habit, But then that applies to all our pleasures. We discover some new product in the supermarket, and become addicted to it. Then our tastebuds become accustomed to its flavour, and or interest fades. In the same way a honeymoon couple may find an excuse to hurry off to the bedroom half a dozen times a day; but after a month or so sex has taken its place among the many routines of their lives. They still enjoy it, but it no longer has quite the same power to excite the imagination. Sex, like every other pleasure, can become mechanical.

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p. 14
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
4 months 2 weeks ago
"It is necessary to be given...

"It is necessary to be given the prop that all elementary props are given." This is not necessary because it is even impossible. There is no such prop! That all elementary props are given is SHOWN by there being none having an elementary sense which is not given.

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Notes of 1919, as quoted in Ludwig Wittgenstein : The Duty of Genius (1990) by Ray Monk
Philosophical Maxims
Zoroaster
Zoroaster
4 months 2 weeks ago
With an ill-famed man form no...

With an ill-famed man form no connection.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
4 months 2 weeks ago
The question here is the same...

The question here is the same as the question I addressed with regard to madness, disease, delinquency and sexuality. In all of these cases, it was not a question of showing how these objects were for a long time hidden before being finally discovered, nor of showing how all these objects are only wicked illusions or ideological products to be dispelled in the light of reason finally having reached its zenith. It was a matter of showing by what conjunctions a whole set of practices-from the moment they become coordinated with a regime of truth-was able to make what does not exist (madness, disease, delinquency, sexuality, etcetera), nonetheless become something.

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Lecture 1, January 10, 1979, p. 19
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
4 months 3 weeks ago
Many Catholic mystics have affirmed that,...

Many Catholic mystics have affirmed that, at a certain stage of that contemplative prayer in which, according to the most authoritative theologians, the life of Christian perfection ultimately consists, it is necessary to put aside all thought of the Incarnation as distracting from the higher knowledge of that which has been incarnated. From this fact have arisen misunderstandings in plenty and a number of intellectual difficulties.

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Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
4 months 4 weeks ago
Among civilized and thriving nations, on...

Among civilized and thriving nations, on the contrary, though a great number of people do no labor at all, many of whom consume the produce of ten times, frequently of a hundred times more labour than the greater part of those who work; yet the produce of the whole labour of the society is so great, that all are often abundantly supplied, and a workman, even of the lowest and poorest order, if he is frugal and industrious, may enjoy a greater share of the necessaries and conveniencies of life than it is possible for any savage to acquire.

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Introduction and Plan of the Work, p. 2.
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
4 months 3 weeks ago
No rational argument will have a...

No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 24 "Oracular Philosophy and the Revolt against Reason"
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
5 months 3 weeks ago
If someone were to expound that...

If someone were to expound that godliness is to belong to childhood in the temporal sense and thus dwindle and die with the years as childhood does, is to be a happy frame of mind that cannot be preserved but only recollected; if someone were to expound that repentance as a weakness of old age accompanies the decline of one's powers, when the senses are dulled, when sleep no longer strengthens but increases lethargy-this would be ungodliness and foolishness.

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Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
3 months 3 weeks ago
They showed me their trees, and...

They showed me their trees, and I could not understand the intense love with which they looked at them; it was as though they were talking with creatures like themselves. And perhaps I shall not be mistaken if I say that they conversed with them. Yes, they had found their language, and I am convinced that the trees understood them. They looked at all Nature like that - at the animals who lived in peace with them and did not attack them, but loved them, conquered by their love. They pointed to the stars and told me something about them which I could not understand, but I am convinced that they were somehow in touch with the stars, not only in thought, but by some living channel.

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Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
5 months 3 weeks ago
The reasons and purposes for habits...
The reasons and purposes for habits are always lies that are added only after some people begin to attack these habits and to ask for reasons and purposes. At this point the conservatives of all ages are thoroughly dishonest: they add lies.
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Philosophical Maxims
George Santayana
George Santayana
3 months 2 weeks ago
Beauty as we feel it is...

Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable: what it is or what it means can never be said.

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Pt. IV, Expression; § 67: "Conclusion.", p. 267
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
3 months 1 week ago
In its mad passion for power,...

In its mad passion for power, the Communist State even sought to strengthen and deepen the very ideas and conceptions which the Revolution had come to destroy. It supported and encouraged all the worst antisocial qualities and systematically destroyed the already awakened conception of the new revolutionary values.The sense of justice and equality, the love of liberty and of human brotherhood - these fundamentals of the real regeneration of society - the Communist State suppressed to the point of extermination. Man's instinctive sense of equity was branded as weak sentimentality; human dignity and liberty became a bourgeois superstition; the sanctity of life, which is the very essence of social reconstruction, was condemned as unrevolutionary, almost counter-revolutionary. This fearful perversion of fundamental values bore within itself the seed of destruction.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 3 weeks ago
The philosophy of Plotinus has the...

The philosophy of Plotinus has the defect of encouraging men to look within rather than to look without: when we look within we see nous, which is divine, while when we look without we see the imperfections of the sensible world. This kind of subjectivity was a gradual growth; it is to be found in the doctrines of Protagoras, Socrates, and Plato, as well as in the Stoics and Epicureans. But at first it was only doctrinal, not temperamental; for a long time it failed to kill scientific curiosity. [...] Plotinus is both an end and a beginning-an end as regards the Greeks, a beginning as regards Christendom.

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Russell, Bertrand (2008). History of Western Philosophy. Simon and Schuster. pp. 296-297. ISBN 978-1-4165-9915-9.
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 months 3 weeks ago
What place do we occupy in...

What place do we occupy in the "universe"? A point, if that! Why reproach ourselves when we are evidently so insignificant? Once we make this observation, we grow calm at once: henceforth, no more bother, no more frenzy, metaphysical or otherwise. And then that point dilates, swells, substitutes itself for space. And everything begins all over again.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
3 weeks 3 days ago
My new trade of nail-making is...

My new trade of nail-making is to me in this country what an additional title of nobility or the ensigns of a new order are in Europe.

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As quoted in The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson, by Henry Wiencek, Smithsonian Magazine,
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
3 months 2 weeks ago
You read the face of the...

You read the face of the sky and of the earth, but you have not recognized the one who is before you, and you do not know how to read this moment.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
3 weeks ago
He would be the finer gentleman...

He would be the finer gentleman that should leave the world without having tasted of lying or pretence of any sort, or of wantonness or conceit.

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IX, 2
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
3 months 2 weeks ago
To those who hold abstractly to...

To those who hold abstractly to Hegel's political philosophy, Hobhouse replies that the very fact of class society, the patent influence of class interests on the state, renders it impossible to designate the state as expressive of the real will of individuals as a whole. 'Wherever a community is governed by one class or one race, the remaining class or race is permanently in the position of having to take what it can get.'

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P. 396
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
3 weeks 3 days ago
I may say Christianity itself divided...

I may say Christianity itself divided into its thousands also, who are disputing, anathematizing and where the laws permit burning and torturing one another for abstractions which no one of them understand, and which are indeed beyond the comprehension of the human mind.

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Letter to George Logan (12 November 1816). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 12, pp. 43
Philosophical Maxims
Joseph de Maistre
Joseph de Maistre
3 weeks 1 day ago
The wiser nations are, the more...

The wiser nations are, the more public spirit they possess, the more perfect their political constitution, the fewer constitutional laws they have, for these laws are only props, and a building only needs props when it has become out of plumb or when it has been violently shaken by an external force. The most perfect constitution of antiquity was without contradiction that of Sparta, and Sparta has not left us a single line of its public law. It justly boasted of having written its laws only in the hearts of its children.

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p. 84
Philosophical Maxims
Max Stirner
Max Stirner
1 month 1 week ago
One is not worthy to have...

One is not worthy to have what one, through weakness, lets be taken from him; one is not worthy of it because one is not capable of it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
4 months 3 weeks ago
And every man, in love or...

And every man, in love or pride, Of his fate is ever wide.

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Nemesis
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
5 months 3 weeks ago
To have time was at once...

To have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.

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Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
5 months 1 week ago
The weakness of little children's limbs...

The weakness of little children's limbs is innocent, not their souls.

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I, 7
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
3 months 2 weeks 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
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
4 months 3 weeks ago
I think that if God forgives...

I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him.

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Letter (19 April 1951); published in Letters of C. S. Lewis (1966), p. 230
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
4 months 3 weeks ago
Now the maximum of perfection is...

Now the maximum of perfection is called ideal, by Plato, Idea - for instance, his Idea of a Republic - and is the principle of all that is contained under the general notion of any perfection, inasmuch as the lesser grades are not thought determinable but by limiting the maximum. But God, the Ideal of perfection, and hence the principle of cognition, is also, as existing really, the principle of the creation of all perfection.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 3 weeks ago
We have to learn to think...

We have to learn to think in a new way. We have to learn to ask ourselves, not what steps can be taken to give military victory to whatever group we prefer, for there no longer are such steps; the question we have to ask ourselves is: what steps can be taken to prevent a military contest of which the issue must be disastrous to all parties?

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Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
3 months 1 week ago
The consequences of a plethora of...

The consequences of a plethora of half-digested theoretical knowledge are deplorable.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
4 months 3 weeks ago
Children (nay, and men too) do...

Children (nay, and men too) do most by example.

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Sec. 67
Philosophical Maxims
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
3 months 2 weeks ago
To-day the Enlightenment ideal has been...

To-day the Enlightenment ideal has been changed into a reality; not only in legislation, which is the mere framework of public life, but in the heart of every individual, whatever his ideas may be, and even if he be a reactionary in his ideas, that is to say, even when he attacks and castigates institutions by which those rights are sanctioned.... The sovereignty of the unqualified individual, of the human being as such, generically, has now passed from being a juridical idea or ideal to be a psychological state inherent in the average man. And note this, that when what was before an ideal becomes a component part of reality, it inevitably ceases to be an ideal. The prestige and the magic that are attributes of the ideal are volatilised.

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Chap.II: The Rise Of The Historic Level
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
1 month 1 week ago
He maintained this attitude up to...

He maintained this attitude up to the very end, and no man ever saw Socrates too much elated or too much depressed. Amid all the disturbance of Fortune, he was undisturbed.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
4 months 3 weeks ago
If you can speak what you...

If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.

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Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
5 months 2 weeks ago
I am not bothered by...

I am not bothered by the fact that I am not understood. I am bothered when I do not know others.

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Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
4 months 4 weeks ago
The commodities of Europe were almost...

The commodities of Europe were almost all new to America, and many of those of America were new to Europe. A new set of exchanges, therefore, began..and which should naturally have proved as advantageous to the new, as it certainly did to the old continent. The savage injustice of the Europeans rendered an event, which ought to have been beneficial to all, ruinous and destructive to several of those unfortunate countries.

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Chapter I, p. 481.
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
5 months 2 days ago
It's a thorny undertaking...

It is a thorny undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds, to pick out and immobilize the innumerable flutterings that agitate it.

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Ch. 6. Of Preparation, tr. E. J. Trechmann, 1927
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
5 months 3 weeks ago
Homer tells us also that Sisyphus...

Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto could not endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire. He dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
5 months 2 days ago
Let us give Nature a chance;...

Let us give Nature a chance; she knows her business better than we do.

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Ch. 13
Philosophical Maxims
Will Durant
Will Durant
1 month 2 weeks ago
Philosophy is a hypothetical interpretation of...

Philosophy is a hypothetical interpretation of the unknown (as in metaphysics), or of the inexactly known (as in ethics or political philosophy); it is the front trench in the siege of truth.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
4 months 3 weeks ago
The perception of beauty is a...

The perception of beauty is a moral test.

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June 21, 1852
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
2 months 2 weeks ago
The job of science...
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Main Content / General
Baruch Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza
4 months 4 weeks ago
This I know, that between finite...

This I know, that between finite and infinite there is no comparison; so that the difference between God and the greatest and most excellent created thing is no less than the difference between God and the least created thing.

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Letter to Hugo Boxel (October 1674) The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza (1891) Tr. R. H. M. Elwes, Vol. 2, Letter 58 (54).
Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
3 months 4 weeks ago
The God of the Christians is...

The God of the Christians is a father who makes much of his apples, and very little of his children.

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No. 16
Philosophical Maxims
Emperor Julian
Emperor Julian
1 month 4 days ago
One indeed is the Creator of...

One indeed is the Creator of all things, but many are the creative powers revolving in the heavens; we must, therefore, place the influence of the Sun as intermediate with respect to each single operation affecting the earth. Moreover, the principle productive of Life is vastly superabundant in the Intelligible World; our world, also, is evidently full of generative life. It is therefore clear that the life-producing power of the sovereign Sun is intermediate between these two, since the phenomena of Nature bear testimony to the fact; for some kinds of things the Sun brings to perfection, others of them he brings to pass, others he regulates, others he excites, and there exists nothing that, without the creative influence of the Sun, comes to light and is born.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
2 months 3 weeks ago
The global village is a place...

The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.

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Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
3 months 1 week ago
Conformity is an imitation of grace....

Conformity is an imitation of grace.

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p. 146
Philosophical Maxims
Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek
9 months ago
Notional determinism

When we observe a thing, we see too much in it, we fall under the spell of the wealth of empirical detail which prevents us from clearly perceiving the notional determination which forms the core of the thing. The problem is thus not that of how to grasp the multiplicity of determinations, but rather to abstract from them, how to constrain our gaze and teach it to grasp only the notional determinism.

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Philosophical Maxims
Xunzi
Xunzi
1 month 3 weeks ago
The learning of the gentleman enters...

The learning of the gentleman enters through his ears, fastens to his heart, spreads through his four limbs, and manifests itself in his actions. ... The learning of the petty person enters through his ears and passes out his mouth. From mouth to ears is only four inches-how could it be enough to improve a whole body much larger than that?

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Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy (2001), p. 259
Philosophical Maxims
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