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Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
4 months 6 days ago
The whole life of an American...

The whole life of an American is passed like a game of chance, a revolutionary crisis, or a battle.

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Chapter XVIII.
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
4 months 3 weeks ago
My aim is: to teach you...

My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.

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§ 464
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 month 3 weeks ago
Men's hearts ought not to be...

Men's hearts ought not to be set against one another; but set with one another, and all against the Evil Thing only.

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Philosophical Maxims
Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno
4 months 1 week ago
It is then unnecessary to investigate...

It is then unnecessary to investigate whether there be beyond the heaven Space, Void or Time. For there is a single general space, a single vast immensity which we may freely call Void; in it are innumerable globes like this one on which we live and grow. This space we declare to be infinite, since neither reason, convenience, possibility, sense-perception nor nature assign to it a limit. In it are an infinity of worlds of the same kind as our own.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
5 months 2 days ago
For my own part, not believing...

For my own part, not believing in universal selfishness, I have no difficulty in admitting that Communism would even now be practicable among the elite of mankind, and may become so among the rest.

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Philosophical Maxims
Will Durant
Will Durant
1 month 3 weeks ago
Philosophy accepts the hard and hazardous...

Philosophy accepts the hard and hazardous task of dealing with problems not yet open to the methods of science - problems like good and evil, beauty and ugliness, order and freedom, life and death; so soon as a field of inquiry yields knowledge susceptible of exact formulation it is called science. Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement.

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Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
5 months 2 weeks ago
Little is needed to ruin and...

Little is needed to ruin and upset everything, only a slight aberration from reason.

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Book IV, ch. 3, 4.
Philosophical Maxims
bell hooks
bell hooks
3 months 2 weeks ago
The fear of being alone, or...

The fear of being alone, or of being unloved, had caused women of all races to passively accept sexism and sexist oppression.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
5 months 2 days ago
The object of art - like...

The object of art - like every other product - creates a public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty.

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Introduction, p. 12.
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
1 month 2 weeks ago
Besides, he who is feared, fears...

Besides, he who is feared, fears also; no one has been able to arouse terror and live in peace of mind.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
4 months 3 weeks ago
What all these people are doing...

What all these people are doing is not aggressive; they are inventing new possibilities of pleasure with strange parts of their body - through the eroticization of the body. I think it's ... a creative enterprise, which has as one of its main features what I call the desexualization of pleasure.

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In reference to Sadism and Masochism, as quoted in Who's Who in Contemporary Gay & Lesbian History: From World War II to the Present Day (2001) by Robert Aldrich and Gary Wotherspoon
Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
3 months 2 weeks ago
There is a certain kind of...

There is a certain kind of morality which is even more alien to good and evil than amorality is.

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"The responsibility of writers," p. 169
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
3 months 1 day ago
As soon as men live entirely...

As soon as men live entirely in accord with the law of love natural to their hearts and now revealed to them, which excludes all resistance by violence, and therefore hold aloof from all participation in violence - as soon as this happens, not only will hundreds be unable to enslave millions, but not even millions will be able to enslave a single individual.

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V
Philosophical Maxims
Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Bakunin
3 months 4 weeks ago
The peoples' revolution .... will arrange...

The peoples' revolution .... will arrange its revolutionary organisation from the bottom up and from the periphery to the centre, in keeping with the principle of liberty.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
6 months 2 days ago
The single harmony produced by all...

The single harmony produced by all the heavenly bodies singing and dancing together springs from one source and ends by achieving one purpose, and has rightly bestowed the name not of "disordered" but of "ordered universe" upon the whole.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 months 4 weeks ago
We regret not having the courage...

We regret not having the courage to make such and such decision; we regret much more having made one - any one. Better no action than the consequences of an action.

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Philosophical Maxims
Vandana Shiva
Vandana Shiva
2 months 2 weeks ago
It is the indignity of being...

It is the indignity of being treated as disposable that pushes people towards religious fundamentalism in order to retrieve a sense of self, of meaning, of significance. This is why globalization breeds religious fundamentalism and free markets create terrorism and extremism, not democracy.

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(p80)
Philosophical Maxims
Walter Lippmann
Walter Lippmann
1 month 4 weeks ago
Ours is a problem in which...

Ours is a problem in which deception has become organized and strong; where truth is poisoned at its source; one in which the skill of the shrewdest brains is devoted to misleading a bewildered people.

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Ch. IV: "The Golden Rule and After", p. 105.
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
4 months 2 days ago
There never was a bad man...

There never was a bad man that had ability for good service.

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Speech in opening the impeachment of Warren Hastings (18 February 1788), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Volume the Tenth (1899), p. 59
Philosophical Maxims
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida
4 months 3 weeks ago
At the point at which the...

At the point at which the concept of différance, and the chain attached to it, intervenes, all the conceptual oppositions of metaphysics (signifier/signified; sensible/intelligible; writing/speech; passivity/activity; etc.)- to the extent that they ultimately refer to the presence of something present (for example, in the form of the identity of the subject who is present for all his operations, present beneath every accident or event, self-present in its "living speech," in its enunciations, in the present objects and acts of its language, etc.)- become non pertinent. They all amount, at one moment or another, to a subordination of the movement of différance in favor of the presence of a value or a meaning supposedly antecedent to différance, more original than it, exceeding and governing it in the last analysis. This is still the presence of what we called above the "transcendental signified.

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p. 29
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 months 4 weeks ago
The multiplication of our kind borders...

The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.

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Philosophical Maxims
Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale
3 months 2 weeks ago
Why have women passion, intellect, moral...

Why have women passion, intellect, moral activity - these three - and a place in society where no one of the three can be exercised? Men say that God punishes for complaining. No, but men are angry with misery. They are irritated with women for not being happy. They take it as a personal offence. To God alone may women complain without insulting Him!

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Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
5 months 1 day ago
Ha! to forget. How childish! I...

Ha! to forget. How childish! I feel you in my bones. Your silence screams in my ears. You may nail your mouth shut, you may cut out your tongue, can you keep yourself from existing? Will you stop your thoughts.

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Inès reiterating to Garcin that they cannot ignore one another, Act 1, sc. 5
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
3 months 3 weeks ago
The slave is outside competition; the...

The slave is outside competition; the proletarian is in it and experiences all its vagaries.

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Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
5 months 4 weeks ago
Martyrs must choose between being forgotten,...

Martyrs must choose between being forgotten, mocked, or made use of. As for being understood, never!

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Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Hölderlin
Friedrich Hölderlin
4 months 2 days ago
You seek life, and a godly...

You seek life, and a godly fire Gushes and gleams for you out of the earth, As, with shuddering long, you Hurl yourself down to the flames of the Etna. So by a queen's wanton whim Pearls were dissolved in wine- heed her not! What folly, poet, to cast your riches Into that bright and bubbling cup! Yet still are you holy to me, as the might of the earth That bore you away, audaciously perishing! And I would follow the hero into the depths Did love not hold me.

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"Empedokles"
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
3 months 2 weeks ago
I do not regard the late...

I do not regard the late Carl Sagan as any kind of authority. On the contrary, as this book will show, I regard him in many ways as a dubious publicity seeker and careerist, more concerned to maintain his reputation as the brilliant and sceptical representative of hard-headed science than to look squarely and honestly at the facts.

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In short, a bit of a crook. pp. xix-xx
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
3 months 2 weeks ago
It has been said of old,...

It has been said of old, all roads lead to Rome. In paraphrased application to the tendencies of our day, it may truly be said that all roads lead to the great social reconstruction. The economic awakening of the workingman, and his realization of the necessity for concerted industrial action; the tendencies of modern education, especially in their application to the free development of the child; the spirit of growing unrest expressed through, and cultivated by, art and literature, all pave the way to the Open Road.

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Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
3 months 1 day ago
The hero of my tale, whom...

The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all his beauty, who has been, is, and will be beautiful, is Truth.

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Sevastopol in May (1855), Ch. 16
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
4 months 3 weeks ago
There is little in common between...

There is little in common between the organised parading of madness in the eighteenth century and the freedom with which madness came to the fore during the Renaissance. The earlier age had found it everywhere, an integral element of each experience, both in images and in real life dangers. During the classical period, it was also on public view, but behind bars. When it manifested itself it was at a carefully controlled distance, under the watchful eye of a reason that denied all kinship with it, and felt quite unthreatened by any hint of resemblance. Madness had become a thing to be observed, no longer the monster within, but an animal moved by strange mechanisms, more beast than man, where all humanity had long since disappeared.

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Part One: 5. The Insane
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
5 months 4 weeks ago
There is not love of life...

There is not love of life without despair about life.

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Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
5 months 1 week ago
It is an article of faith...

It is an article of faith that Mary is Mother of the Lord and still a Virgin.

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Weimar edition of Martin Luther's Works, English translation edited by J. Pelikan [Concordia: St. Louis], Vol. 11, 319-320
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
6 months 4 days ago
One will rarely err if extreme...
One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear.
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Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
4 months 2 days ago
If the people are happy, united,...

If the people are happy, united, wealthy, and powerful, we presume the rest. We conclude that to be good from whence good is derived.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
5 months 2 days ago
The happiness which forms the utilitarian...

The happiness which forms the utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct, is not the agent's own happiness, but that of all concerned. As between his own happiness and that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator. In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. To do as one would be done by, and to love one's neighbour as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality.

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Ch. 2
Philosophical Maxims
Nikos Kazantzakis
Nikos Kazantzakis
1 month 2 days ago
In order to succeed, we must...

In order to succeed, we must first believe that we can.

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Michael Korda, in Success! (1977), p. 284
Philosophical Maxims
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut
3 months 4 days ago
Be kind. Don't kill for any...

Be kind. Don't kill for any reason. Don't even kill out of self-defense. Really - I mean that. Don't take any more than you need of anything. Help others.

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From a speech given on 20 January 1969 at the University of Michigan, about two months before Slaughterhouse Five was published
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
5 months 1 day ago
Can a mortal ask questions which...

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask - half our great theological and metaphysical problems - are like that.

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Philosophical Maxims
David Pearce
David Pearce
2 months 1 week ago
... our descendants may recognize that...

... our descendants may recognize that we are the sociopathic emotional primitives in the grip of an affective psychosis. Jealousy, envy, resentment, ridicule, hate, anger, disgust, spite, contempt, schadenfreude and a whole gamut of nameless but mean-spirited states we undergo each day are a toxic legacy of our Darwinian past. More commonly, perhaps, our genetic make-up ensures we simply feel indifference to the plight of all but a handful of significant others in our lives. Right now, for instance, one knows dimly at some level that there is frightful and preventable suffering in the world. Yet most of us feel no overpowering moral urgency to do anything about it.

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"Utopian Pharmacology: Mental Health in the Third Millennium MDMA and Beyond", BLTC Research, last updated 2020
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
3 months 2 weeks ago
Sensitiveness without impulse spells decadence, and...

Sensitiveness without impulse spells decadence, and impulse without sensitiveness spells brutality.

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Ch. 13: "Requisites for Social Progress", p. 280
Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
2 months 4 weeks ago
Poverty is the lack…

Poverty is the lack of many things, but avarice is the lack of all things.

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Maxim 236
Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
3 months 4 weeks ago
The difference between a pessimistic and...

The difference between a pessimistic and an optimistic mind is of such controlling importance in regard to every intellectual function, and especially for the conduct of life, that it is out of the question to admit that both are normal, and the great majority of mankind are naturally optimistic.

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V
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
2 months 1 week ago
The effect of liberty....
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Main Content / General
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
3 months 2 weeks ago
What excited me was the recognition...

What excited me was the recognition that this was simply another version of the problem that had obsessed me all of my life -- the problem of those moments when life seems entirely delightful, when we experience a sensation of what G.K. Chesterton called "absurd good news." Life normally strikes most of us as hard, dull and unsatisfying; but in these moments, consciousness seems to glow and expand, and all the contradictions seem to be resolved. Which of the two visions is true? My own reflections had led me to conclude that the vision of "absurd good news" is somehow broader and more comprehensive than the feeling that life is dull, boring and meaningless. Boredom is basically a feeling of narrowness, and surely a narrow vision is bound to be less true than a broad one?

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p. 16
Philosophical Maxims
Joseph de Maistre
Joseph de Maistre
4 weeks 1 day ago
There is the same difference between...

There is the same difference between political theory and constitutional laws as there is between poetics and poetry. The illustrious Montesquieu is to Lycurgus, in the intellectual hierarchy, what Batteux is to Homer or Racine. Moreover, these two talents positively exclude each other, as can be seen by the example of Locke, who fumbled badly when he presumed to give laws to the Americans.

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Chapter VI, p. 52
Philosophical Maxims
Cisero
Cisero
5 months 2 weeks ago
Times are bad. Children no longer...

Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.

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As quoted in InfoWorld, Vol. 23, No. 16, 16 April 2001, p. 49. This had been attributed previously to many other sources from 1908 on, according to this analysis by Quote Investigator.
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
5 months 1 day ago
I am condemned...

I am condemned to be free.

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Part 4, chapter 1
Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
5 months 3 days ago
No difference of rank, position, or...

No difference of rank, position, or birth, is so great as the gulf that separates the countless millions who use their head only in the service of their belly, in other words, look upon it as an instrument of the will, and those very few and rare persons who have the courage to say: No! my head is too good for that; it shall be active only in its own service; it shall try to comprehend the wondrous and varied spectacle of this world and then reproduce it in some form, whether as art or as literature, that may answer to my character as an individual.

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On Genius, Parerga and Paralipomena, Chapter III
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
3 months 1 week ago
Cautiousness in judgment is nowadays to...

Cautiousness in judgment is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient. ... To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.

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A 38
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
1 month 2 weeks ago
Besides, he who follows….

Besides, he who follows another not only discovers nothing but is not even investigating.

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Philosophical Maxims
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