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Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
4 months 1 day ago
The public weal requires that men...

The public weal requires that men should betray and lie and massacre.

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Book III, Ch. 1. Of Profit and Honesty
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
2 months 2 weeks ago
What will be the influence of...

What will be the influence of communist society on the family? It will transform the relations between the sexes into a purely private matter which concerns only the persons involved and into which society has no occasion to intervene. It can do this since it does away with private property and educates children on a communal basis, and in this way removes the two bases of traditional marriage - the dependence rooted in private property, of the women on the man, and of the children on the parents.

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Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
4 months 1 week ago
There is nothing more visible than...

There is nothing more visible than what is secret, and nothing more manifest than what is minute. Therefore the superior man is watchful over himself, when he is alone.

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Philosophical Maxims
Democritus
Democritus
3 months 1 week ago
Coition is a slight attack of...

Coition is a slight attack of apoplexy. For man gushes forth from man, and is separated by being torn apart with a kind of blow.

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Freeman (1948), p. 150
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
3 months 2 weeks ago
The desire to philosophize from the...

The desire to philosophize from the standpoint of standpointlessness, as a purportedly genuine and superior objectivity, is either childish, or, as is usually the case, disingenuous.

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The Essence of Truth, 1931-32
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
1 month 3 weeks ago
People understand the meaning of eating...

People understand the meaning of eating lies in the nourishment of the body only when they cease to consider that the object of that activity is pleasure. ...People understand the meaning of art only when they cease to consider that the aim of that activity is beauty, i.e., pleasure.

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Philosophical Maxims
bell hooks
bell hooks
2 months 1 week ago
We need to recognize the destructive...

We need to recognize the destructive role played by the media in fanning the flames of the "Black-Jewish Conflict." Cornel West, bell hooks, Richard Green, Barbara Christian, Henry Louis Gates, Marian Wright Edelman, Nell Painter, Albert Raby....Why are these names not as well known outside the African American community as the names of Louis Farrakhan or Leonard Jeffries? Are they, in their diversity and dynamism, less representative of the African American community?

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Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz "Jews, Class, Color, and the Cost of Whiteness" in The Issue is Power
Philosophical Maxims
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal
4 months 6 days ago
The source of the errors of...

The source of the errors of these two sects, is in not having known that the state of man at the present time differs from that of his creation; so that the one, remarking some traces of his first greatness and being ignorant of his corruption, has treated nature as sound and without need of redemption, which leads him to the height of pride; whilst the other, feeling the present wretchedness and being ignorant of the original dignity, treats nature as necessarily infirm and irreparable, which precipitates it into despair of arriving at real good, and thence into extreme laxity.

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Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
4 months 1 week ago
It is the act of an...

It is the act of an ill-instructed man to blame others for his own bad condition; it is the act of one who has begun to be instructed, to lay the blame on himself; and of one whose instruction is completed, neither to blame another, nor himself.

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(5) [tr. George Long (1888)].
Philosophical Maxims
Lin Yutang
Lin Yutang
1 day ago
He who perceives death perceives a...

He who perceives death perceives a sense of the human comedy, and quickly becomes a poet.

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pp. 39-40
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
3 months 3 weeks ago
Human reason has this peculiar fate...

Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.

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Preface, A vii
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
2 weeks ago
No man lives without jostling and...

No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offense.

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Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
3 months 3 weeks ago
In my individual heart I fully...

In my individual heart I fully believe my faith is as robust as yours. The trouble with your robust and full bodied faiths, however, is, that they begin to cut each others throats too soon, and for getting on in the world and establishing a modus vivendi these pestilential refinements and reasonablenesses and moderations have to creep in.

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Letter to John Jay Chapman, 5 April 1897
Philosophical Maxims
Gaston Bachelard
Gaston Bachelard
2 months 2 weeks ago
The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and...

The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.

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Ch. 2, sect. 2
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
2 months 6 days ago
Sex also concentrates the mind wonderfully,...

Sex also concentrates the mind wonderfully, and that is why civilised man is so obsessed by it. It enables him to "savour every fraction of an inch," not merely of the act of sexual intercourse, but of living itself. But that, of course, only underlines the basic problem: after coitus, "man becomes sad," because he quickly returns to his unconcentrated and defocused state. In sexual excitement, it is the spirit itself that becomes erect, and becomes capable of penetrating the meaning of life. Normal consciousness is limp and flaccid; its attitude towards reality is defensive. This is what Sartre called contingency, that feeling of being at the mercy of chance.

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pp. 45-46
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
1 month 3 weeks ago
The most difficult subjects can be...

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.

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Chapter III, Christianity Misunderstood by Believers
Philosophical Maxims
Epicurus
Epicurus
4 months 1 week ago
Is God willing to prevent evil,...

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

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Philosophical Maxims
Alan Watts
Alan Watts
4 days ago
Running away from fear is fear;...

Running away from fear is fear; fighting pain is pain; trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought.

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Philosophical Maxims
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
1 month 2 weeks ago
As for types like my own,...

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting - the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

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Ch. 6
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
4 months 2 days ago
Further, it will not be amiss...

Further, it will not be amiss to distinguish the three kinds and, as it were, grades of ambition in mankind. The first is of those who desire to extend their own power in their native country, a vulgar and degenerate kind. The second is of those who labor to extend the power and dominion of their country among men. This certainly has more dignity, though not less covetousness. But if a man endeavor to establish and extend the power and dominion of the human race itself over the universe, his ambition (if ambition it can be called) is without doubt both a more wholesome and a more noble thing than the other two. Now the empire of man over things depends wholly on the arts and sciences. For we cannot command nature except by obeying her.

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Aphorism 129
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
2 weeks ago
Clever men are good, but they...

Clever men are good, but they are not the best.

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Goethe.
Philosophical Maxims
Diogenes of Sinope
Diogenes of Sinope
3 months 1 week ago
Perdiccas threatened to put him to...

Perdiccas threatened to put him to death unless he came to him, "That's nothing wonderful," Diogenes said, "for a beetle or a tarantula would do the same."

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Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 44
Philosophical Maxims
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
2 months 6 days ago
However, the disappearance of domination does...

However, the disappearance of domination does not entail freedom. Instead, it makes freedom and constraint coincide. Thus, the achievement-subject gives itself over to compulsive freedom--that is, to the free constraint of maximizing achievement. Excess work and performance escalate into auto-exploitation.

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Source: Page 11
Philosophical Maxims
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
2 months 2 weeks ago
Liberalism - it is well to...

Liberalism - it is well to recall this today-is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence it is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet. It announces the determination to share existence with the enemy; more than that, with an enemy which is weak. It was incredible that the human species should have arrived at so noble an attitude, so paradoxical, so refined, so acrobatic, so anti-natural. Hence, it is not to be wondered at that this same humanity should soon appear anxious to get rid of it. It is a discipline too difficult and complex to take firm root on earth.

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Chap. VIII: The Masses Intervene In Everything, And Why Their Intervention Is Solely By Violence
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 months 3 weeks ago
The state of society is one...

The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,-a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.

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par. 5
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
3 months 3 weeks ago
Every poet has trembled on the...

Every poet has trembled on the verge of science.

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July 18, 1852
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
3 months 3 weeks ago
Every crusader is apt to go...

Every crusader is apt to go mad. He is haunted by the wickedness which he attributes to his enemies; it becomes in some sort a part of him.

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Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudon Chatto & Windus, London, (1951), ch. 9, p. 274
Philosophical Maxims
Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas
3 months 2 weeks ago
If we compare the third-person attitude...

If we compare the third-person attitude of someone who simply says how things stand (this is the attitude of the scientist, for example) with the performative attitude of someone who tries to understand what is said to him (this is the attitude of the interpreter, for example), the implications ... become clear. ... First, interpreters relinquish superiority that observers have by virtue of their privileged position, in that they themselves are drawn, at least potentially, into negotiations about the meaning and validity of utterances. By taking part in communicative action, they accept in principle the same status as those whose utterances they are trying to understand. ... It is impossible to decide a priori who is to learn from whom.

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p. 26
Philosophical Maxims
Julius Evola
Julius Evola
1 day ago
The fundamental principle underlying all justifications...

The fundamental principle underlying all justifications of war, from the point of view of human personality, is 'heroism'. War, it is said, offers man the opportunity to awaken the hero who sleeps within him. War breaks the routine of comfortable life; by means of its severe ordeals, it offers a transfiguring knowledge of life, life according to death. The moment the individual succeeds in living as a hero, even if it is the final moment of his earthly life, weighs infinitely more on the scale of values than a protracted existence spent consuming monotonously among the trivialities of cities. From a spiritual point of view, these possibilities make up for the negative and destructive tendencies of war, which are one-sidedly and tendentiously highlighted by pacifist materialism. War makes one realise the relativity of human life and therefore also the law of a 'more-than-life', and thus war has always an anti-materialist value, a spiritual value.

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p. 21
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
2 months 3 days ago
Nothing makes one old so quickly...

Nothing makes one old so quickly as the ever-present thought that one is growing older.

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K 13
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
3 months 3 weeks ago
Truth never turns to rebuke falsehood;...

Truth never turns to rebuke falsehood; her own straightforwardness is the severest correction.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 264
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
2 weeks ago
The battling Reformer too is, from...

The battling Reformer too is, from time to time, a needful and inevitable phenomenon. Obstructions are never wanting: the very things that were once indispensable furtherances become obstructions; and need to be shaken off, and left behind us,-a business often of enormous difficulty.

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Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
1 month 2 weeks ago
Sanity itself is a kind of...

Sanity itself is a kind of convention.

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The Hunter's Family
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
3 months 3 weeks ago
Civil government, so far as it...

Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

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Chapter I, Part II, 775.
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 3 weeks ago
The fundamental concept in social science...

The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.

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Ch. 1: The Impulse to Power
Philosophical Maxims
Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton
1 month 2 weeks ago
In all the areas of life...

In all the areas of life where people have sought and found consolation through forbidding their desires-sex in particular, and taste in general-the habit of judgment is now to be stamped out.

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"Rays of Hope" (p. 106)
Philosophical Maxims
Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes
2 months 1 week ago
The Text is plural. Which is...

The Text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural. The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination.

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Proposition 4
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 2 days ago
Universal Humanism...

Universal Humanism:

1) Preserve Life (end)

Precludes those who think they get to decide who lives and who dies.

2) Avoid and limit suffering (means)

Precludes those who use absurd exceptions to turn their backs on functional rules.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emperor Julian
Emperor Julian
2 days ago
As for the beauty of the...

As for the beauty of the gods, not even Hermes tried to describe it in his tale; he said that it transcended description, and must be comprehended by the eye of the mind; for in words it was hard to portray and impossible to convey to mortal ears. Never indeed will there be or appear an orator so gifted that he could describe such surpassing beauty as shines forth on the countenance of the gods.

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Philosophical Maxims
Judith Butler
Judith Butler
1 month 3 weeks ago
Guilt has to be understood not...

Guilt has to be understood not only as a way of checking one's own destructiveness, but as a mechanism for safeguarding the life of the other, one that emerges from our own need and dependency, from a sense that this life is not a life without another life. Indeed, when it turns into a safeguarding action, I am not sure it should still be called "guilt." If we do still use that term, we could conclude that "guilt" is strangely generative or that its productive form is reparation.

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p. 93
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 2 weeks ago
Without will, no conflict: no tragedy...

Without will, no conflict: no tragedy among the abulic. Yet the failure of will can be experienced more painfully than a tragic destiny.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
3 months 2 days ago
I know nothing.....
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Main Content / General
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
1 week 1 day ago
You are doing an excellent thing….

You are doing an excellent thing, one which will be wholesome for you, if, as you write me, you are persisting in your effort to attain sound understanding; it is foolish to pray for this when you can acquire it from yourself. We do not need to uplift our hands towards heaven, or to beg the keeper of a temple to let us approach his idol's ear, as if in this way our prayers were more likely to be heard. A god is near you, with you, and in you. This is what I mean, Lucilius: there sits a holy spirit within us, one who marks our good and bad deeds, and is our a guardian.

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Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
2 months 3 weeks ago
...what was done in France was...

...what was done in France was a wild attempt to methodize anarchy; to perpetuate and fix disorder. That it was a foul, impious, monstrous thing, wholly out of the course of moral nature. He undertook to prove, that it was generated in treachery, fraud, falsehood, hypocrisy, and unprovoked murder. ... That by the terror of assassination they had driven away a very great number of the members, so as to produce a false appearance of a majority.-That this fictitious majority had fabricated a constitution, which as now it stands, is a tyranny far beyond any example that can be found in the civilized European world of our age.

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p. 376
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
3 months 3 weeks ago
The greatest improvement in the productive...

The greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour, and the greatest part of skill, dexterity, and judgment with which it is any where directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labour.

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Chapter I, p. 7
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
3 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
Thales of Miletus
Thales of Miletus
3 months 5 days ago
Nothing is more ancient than God,...

Nothing is more ancient than God, for He was never created; nothing more beautiful than the world, it is the work of that same God; nothing is more active than thought, for it flies over the whole universe; nothing is stronger than necessity, for all must submit to it.

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As quoted in Love and Live Or Kill and Die: Realities of the Destruction of Human Life (2009) by James H. Wilson, p. 72
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
2 weeks ago
Consider how, even in the meanest...

Consider how, even in the meanest sorts of Labour, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony, the instant he sets himself to work! Doubt, Desire, Sorrow, Remorse, Indignation, Despair itself, all these like helldogs lie beleaguering the soul of the poor dayworker, as of every man: but he bends himself with free valour against his task, and all these are stilled, all these shrink murmuring far off into their caves. The man is now a man. The blessed glow of Labour in him, is it not as purifying fire, wherein all poison is burnt up, and of sour smoke itself there is made bright blessed flame!

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Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
3 months 3 weeks ago
Who is going to educate the...

Who is going to educate the human race in the principles and practice of conservation?

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Chapter 12 (p. 112)
Philosophical Maxims
Diogenes of Sinope
Diogenes of Sinope
3 months 1 week ago
Virtue cannot dwell with wealth either...

Virtue cannot dwell with wealth either in a city or in a house.

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Stobaeus, iv. 31c. 88
Philosophical Maxims
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