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bell hooks
bell hooks
1 month 1 week ago
Revolutionary feminism embraces men who are...

Revolutionary feminism embraces men who are able to change, who are capable of responding mutually in a subject-to-subject encounter where desire and fulfillment are in no way linked to coercive subjugation. This feminist vision of the sexual imaginary is the space few men seem able to enter.

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Philosophical Maxims
bell hooks
bell hooks
1 month 1 week ago
When television screens had only rare...

When television screens had only rare images of black folks, black people were more critically vigilant about these representations. Even when blackness was represented 'positiviely,' as it was in early black television shows like Julia, which focused on the life of a black nurse, the beauty standard was a reflection of white supremacist aesthetics.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 3 weeks ago
Self-trust is the first secret of...

Self-trust is the first secret of success.

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Success
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
3 weeks 5 days ago
Understand that all the evils from...

Understand that all the evils from which you suffer, you yourselves cause by yielding to the suggestions by which emperors, kings, members of parliament, governors, officers, capitalists, priests, authors, artists, and all who need this fraud of patriotism in order to live upon your labour, deceive you!

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Patriotism and Government
Philosophical Maxims
Antisthenes
Antisthenes
2 months 2 weeks ago
It's a royal privilege…

It is a royal privilege to do good and be ill spoken of.

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§ 3; quoted also by Marcus Aurelius, vii. 36
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
2 months 3 weeks ago
Eh bien, continuons... Well, let's get...

Eh bien, continuons... Well, let's get on with it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
3 weeks 5 days ago
To say that the activity of...

To say that the activity of science and art helps humanity's progress, if by that activity we mean the activity which now calls itself by those names, is as though one said that the clumsy, obstructive splashing of oars in a boat moving down stream assists the boat's progress. It only hinders it... The proof of this is seen in the confession made by men of science that the achievements of the arts and sciences are inaccessible to the labouring masses on account of the unequal distribution of wealth.

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Philosophical Maxims
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
2 months 3 weeks ago
In contrast to "Blessed are they...

In contrast to "Blessed are they who do not see and still believe," he speaks of "seeing and still not believing."

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p. 30
Philosophical Maxims
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
1 month 3 weeks ago
I am a strange compound of...

I am a strange compound of weakness and resolution! However, if I must suffer, I will endeavour to suffer in silence. There is certainly a great defect in my mind - my wayward heart creates its own misery - Why I am made thus I cannot tell; and, till I can form some idea of the whole of my existence, I must be content to weep and dance like a child - long for a toy, and be tired of it as soon as I get it.

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Undated letter to Joseph Johnson (October? 1792), published in The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft (2004), edited by Janet Todd, p. 206.
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 3 weeks ago
The skepticism which fails to contribute...

The skepticism which fails to contribute to the ruin of our health is merely an intellectual exercise.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
2 months 3 weeks ago
To his dog, every man is...

To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.

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Reader's Digest, 1934
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
1 month 2 weeks ago
Another parable put he forth unto...

Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man which sowed good seed in his field: But while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way. But when the blade was sprung up, and brought forth fruit, then appeared the tares also. So the servants of the householder came and said unto him, Sir, didst not thou sow good seed in thy field? from whence then hath it tares? He said unto them, An enemy hath done this. The servants said unto him, Wilt thou then that we go and gather them up? But he said, Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn.

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13:24-30 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale
1 month 1 week ago
The family uses people, not for...

The family uses people, not for what they are, nor for what they are intended to be, but for what it wants them for - its own uses. It thinks of them not as what God has made them, but as the something which it has arranged that they shall be.

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Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
3 months 1 week ago
You can live, provided you live;...

You can live, provided you live; that is, you can live for ever, provided you live a good life.

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229H:3:2
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
3 weeks 3 days ago
Although meaningless in a tribal context,...

Although meaningless in a tribal context, numbers and statistics assume mythic and magical qualities of infallibility in literate societies.

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(p. 114)
Philosophical Maxims
Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus
3 months 6 days ago
Whatever you see in the more...

Whatever you see in the more material part of yourself, learn to refer to God and to the invisible part of yourself. In that way, whatever offers itself to the senses will become for you an occasion for the practice of piety.

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The Erasmus Reader (1990), p. 141.
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
1 month 3 weeks ago
But like the desire for eternal...

But like the desire for eternal life, the desire for omniscience and absolute perfection is merely an imaginary desire; and, as history and daily experience prove, the supposed human striving for unlimited knowledge and perfection is a myth. Man has no desire to know everything; he only wants to know the things to which he is particularly drawn.

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Lecture XXX, Atheism alone a Positive View
Philosophical Maxims
René Descartes
René Descartes
3 months 4 days ago
What I have given in the...

What I have given in the second book on the nature and properties of curved lines, and the method of examining them, is, it seems to me, as far beyond the treatment in the ordinary geometry, as the rhetoric of Cicero is beyond the a, b, c of children.

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Letter to Marin Mersenne (1637) as quoted by D. E. Smith & M. L. Latham Tr. The Geometry of René Descartes
Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
2 months 1 week ago
The most momentous thing in human...

The most momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or to evil.

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As quoted in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, as translated by Robert Drew Hicks (1925)
Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
3 months 3 weeks ago
The ancient philosophers... all of them...

The ancient philosophers... all of them assert that the elements, and those things which are called by them principles, are contraries, though they establish them without reason, as if they were compelled to assert this by truth itself. They differ, however... that some of them assume prior, and others posterior principles; and some of them things more known according to reason, but others such as are more known according to sense: for some establish the hot and the cold, others the moist and the dry, others the odd and the even, and others strife and friendship, as the causes of generation. ...in a certain respect they assert the same things, and speak differently from each other. They assert different things... but the same things, so far as they speak analogously. For they assume principles from the same co-ordination; since, of contraries, some contain, and others are contained.

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Philosophical Maxims
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
2 months 3 weeks ago
The human body is essentially something...

The human body is essentially something other than an animal organism.

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Letter on Humanism
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
1 month 1 week ago
The heart, oddly enough, seems to...

The heart, oddly enough, seems to be the essential organ concerned. When we are in a hurry or doing something we dislike, we clench the heart, exactly like clenching a fist, and nothing can get in. When we are filled with a sense of multiplicity and excitement we somehow 'open' the heart and allow reality to flow in. But in that state we only need to entertain the shadow of some unpleasant thought for it to close again. And human beings are so naturally prone to mistrust that it is hard to maintain the openness for very long. Children on the other hand find it easy to slip into states of wonder and delight when the heart finally opens so wide that the whole world seems magical. the 'trick' of the peak experience lies in this ability to relax out of our usual defensive posture and to 'open the heart'.

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p. 360
Philosophical Maxims
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal
3 months 1 week ago
In order to enter into a...

In order to enter into a real knowledge of your condition, consider it in this image: A man was cast by a tempest upon an unknown island, the inhabitants of which were in trouble to find their king, who was lost; and having a strong resemblance both in form and face to this king, he was taken for him, and acknowledged in this capacity by all the people.

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Philosophical Maxims
Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek
7 months 2 days ago
The appropriate moment

If we merely wait for the appropriate moment we will never live to see it, because this [appropriate moment] cannot arrive without the subjective conditions of the maturity of the revolutionary force being fulfilled - it can only arrive after a series of failed attempts.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
1 month 1 week ago
There is no greater fallacy than...

There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another, This conception is a potent menace to social regeneration. All human experience teaches that methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim. The means employed become, through individual habit and social practice, part and parcel of the final purpose; they influence it, modify it, and presently the aims and means become identical.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 3 weeks ago
All the thoughts of a turtle...

All the thoughts of a turtle are turtle.

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1855
Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
1 month 3 weeks ago
In an article published in The...

In an article published in The Monist for January, 1891, I endeavored to show what ideas ought to form the warp of a system of philosophy, and particularly emphasized that of absolute chance. In the number of April, 1892, I argued further in favor of that way of thinking, which it will be convenient to christen tychism (from τύχη, chance). A serious student of philosophy will be in no haste to accept or reject this doctrine; but he will see in it one of the chief attitudes which speculative thought may take, feeling that it is not for an individual, nor for an age, to pronounce upon a fundamental question of philosophy. That is a task for a whole era to work out. I have begun by showing that tychism must give birth to an evolutionary cosmology, in which all the regularities of nature and of mind are regarded as products of growth, and to a Schelling-fashioned idealism which holds matter to be mere specialized and partially deadened mind.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
3 months 3 weeks ago
Liars ... when they speak the...

Liars ... when they speak the truth they are not believed.

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Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
2 months 3 weeks ago
Who does not see that we...

Who does not see that we are likely to ascertain the distinctive significance of religious melancholy and happiness, or of religious trances, far better by comparing them as conscientiously as we can with other varieties of melancholy, happiness, and trance, than by refusing to consider their place in any more general series, and treating them as if they were outside of nature's order altogether?

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Lecture I, "Religion and Neurology"
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
1 month 2 weeks ago
The concept of labor is not...

The concept of labor is not peripheral in Hegel's system, but is the central notion through which he conceives the development of society. Driven by the insight that opened this dimension to him, Hegel describes the mode of integration prevailing in a commodity-producing society in terms that clearly fore-shadow Marx's critical approach.

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P. 78
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
1 month 1 week ago
They certainly demonstrate that Seth, whether...

They certainly demonstrate that Seth, whether an aspect of Jane Robert's unconscious mind or a genuine "spirit," was of a high level of intelligence. Yet when Jane Roberts produced a book that purported to be the after-death journal of the philosopher William James, it was difficult to take it seriously. James's works are noted for their vigour and clarity of style; Jane Robert's "communicator" writes like an undergraduate . . . there is a clumsiness here that is quite unlike James's swift-moving, colloquial prose.

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p. 390
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
2 months 3 weeks ago
The doctrine of the Second Coming...

The doctrine of the Second Coming teaches us that we do not and cannot know when the world drama will end. The curtain may be rung down at any moment: say, before you have finished reading this paragraph.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
2 weeks 3 days ago
It is love....
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Main Content / General
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 3 weeks ago
Sunshine cannot bleach the snow...

Sunshine cannot bleach the snow, Nor time unmake what poets know.

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"The Test", as quoted in Emerson As A Poet (1883) by Joel Benton, p. 40
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 3 weeks ago
The best university that can be...

The best university that can be recommended to a man of ideas is the gauntlet of the mobs.

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Eloquence
Philosophical Maxims
Nikolai Berdyaev
Nikolai Berdyaev
1 month 1 week ago
The life of Berdyaev spans the...

The life of Berdyaev spans the momentous events of the first half of the twentieth century in Europe. He was no ivory tower philosopher but was intimately affected by these events throughout his life and drew his inspirations from them regarding the nature of the human condition. His writings bear the imprint of the catastrophic situations within which he was destined to live.

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Richard Schain, in In Love with Eternity : Philosophical Essays and Fragments (2005), Ch. 7 : Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev - A Champion of the Spirit, p. 43
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
1 month 1 week ago
In training a child to activity...

In training a child to activity of thought, above all things we must beware of what I will call "inert ideas"-that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilised, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.In the history of education, the most striking phenomenon is that schools of learning, which at one epoch are alive with a ferment of genius, in a succeeding generation exhibit merely pedantry and routine. The reason is, that they are overladen with inert ideas. Education with inert ideas is not only useless: it is, above all things, harmful.

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Philosophical Maxims
David Wood
David Wood
6 days ago
Philosophy is an everlasting fire, sometimes...

Philosophy is an everlasting fire, sometimes damped down by setting itself limits, then flaring into new life as it consumes them. Every field of inquiry is limited, but philosophy has an essential relation to the question of limits, to its own limits.

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Introduction, p. xiii
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
3 weeks 5 days ago
The whole plan of our order...

The whole plan of our order should be based on the idea of preparing men of firmness and virtue bound together by unity of conviction-aiming at the punishment of vice and folly, and patronizing talent and virtue: raising worthy men from the dust and attaching them to our Brotherhood. Only then will our order have the power unobtrusively to bind the hands of the protectors of disorder and to control them without their being aware of it. In a word, we must found a form of government holding universal sway, which should be diffused over the whole world without destroying the bonds of citizenship, and beside which all other governments can continue in their customary course and do everything except what impedes the great aim of our order, which is to obtain for virtue the victory over vice.

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Book VI, Chapter VII
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
1 month 3 weeks ago
Lassalle. It would be a pity...

Lassalle. It would be a pity about the fellow because of his great ability, but these goings-on are really too bad. He was always a man one had to keep a devilish sharp eye on and as a real Jew from the Slav border was always to exploit anyone for his own private ends on party pretexts. And then his urge to push his way into polite society, de parvenir, if only for appearance's sake, to disguise the greasy Breslau Jew with all kinds of pomade and paint was always repulsive.

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Letter to Karl Marx (7 March 1856), quoted in The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Volume 40. Letters 1856-59 (2010), p. 27
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
1 month 1 week ago
Nietzsche's great concept of Yea-saying gave...

Nietzsche's great concept of Yea-saying gave him a notion of purpose that is seen as positive.

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Nietzsche, in short, was a religious mystic. p. 275
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
2 months 3 weeks ago
Every way of classifying a thing...

Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
2 months 4 weeks ago
How much education may reconcile young...

How much education may reconcile young people to pain and sufference, the examples of Sparta do sufficiently shew; and they who have once brought themselves not to think bodily pain the greatest of evils, or that which they ought to stand most in fear of, have made no small advance toward virtue.

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Sec. 115
Philosophical Maxims
Horace
Horace
2 months 2 weeks ago
If the world should break….

If the world should break and fall on him, it would strike him fearless.

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Book III, ode iii, line 7
Philosophical Maxims
Arnold J. Toynbee
Arnold J. Toynbee
1 week 2 days ago
It is a paradoxical but profoundly...

It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it.

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Vol. 7 (1954). Also in Civilization on Trial (1957 ) p. 247
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
2 months 3 weeks ago
It is remarkable that, notwithstanding the...

It is remarkable that, notwithstanding the universal favor with which the New Testament is outwardly received, and even the bigotry with which it is defended, there is no hospitality shown to, there is no appreciation of, the order of truth with which it deals.

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Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
1 month 3 weeks ago
We have an enemy, to whose...

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

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p.3
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
3 months ago
Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate...

Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favor of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favor of the masters.

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Chapter x, Part II, p. 168.
Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
3 months 1 week ago
Yes, you see the Trinity if...

Yes, you see the Trinity if you see charity.

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De Trinitate VIII 8,12.
Philosophical Maxims
Cornel West
Cornel West
2 months 3 weeks ago
Justice is what love looks like...

Justice is what love looks like in public.

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Brother West (2009), p. 232
Philosophical Maxims
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