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Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
2 months 6 days ago
I suddenly dreamt that I picked...

I suddenly dreamt that I picked up the revolver and aimed it straight at my heart - my heart, and not my head; and I had determined beforehand to fire at my head, at my right temple. After aiming at my chest I waited a second or two, and suddenly my candle, my table, and the wall in front of me began moving and heaving. I made haste to pull the trigger.

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Philosophical Maxims
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut
1 month 1 week ago
Say what you will about the...

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
3 months 4 days ago
"Everything is both a trap and...

"Everything is both a trap and a display; the secret reality of the object is what the Other makes of it."

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Philosophical Maxims
Theodor Adorno
Theodor Adorno
1 month 3 weeks ago
Jazz is the false liquidation of...

Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.

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Perennial fashion - Jazz, as quoted in The Sociology of Rock (1978) by Simon Frith
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
3 months 4 days ago
God cannot give us a happiness...

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

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Book II, Chapter 3, "The Shocking Alternative"
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
3 months 4 days ago
When the rich make war…

When the rich make war, it's the poor that die.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 3 weeks ago
We reason deeply...
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Main Content / General
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
2 months 6 days ago
Custom reconciles us to every thing....

Custom reconciles us to every thing.

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Part IV Section XVIII
Philosophical Maxims
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
1 month 3 weeks ago
The metaphor is perhaps one of...

The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. All our other faculties keep us within the realm of the real, of what is already there. The most we can do is to combine things or to break them up. The metaphor alone furnishes an escape; between the real things, it lets emerge imaginary reefs, a crop of floating islands. A strange thing, indeed, the existence in man of this mental activity which substitutes one thing for another - from an urge not so much to get at the first as to get rid of the second.

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"Taboo and Metaphor"
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 months 5 days ago
There are men who astonish and...

There are men who astonish and delight, men who instruct and guide. Some men's words I remember so well that I must often use them to express my thought. Yes, because I perceive that we have heard the same truth, but they have heard it better.

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Character
Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
3 months 3 weeks ago
It is not by change of...

It is not by change of place that we can come nearer to Him who is in every place, but by the cultivation of pure desires and virtuous habits.

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p. 433
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 6 days ago
To save the world requires faith...

To save the world requires faith and courage: faith in reason, and courage to proclaim what reason shows to be true.

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Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
1 month 2 weeks ago
I began with a strong bias...

I began with a strong bias toward skepticism. Besides, to tell the truth, I still find occult phenomena a little preposterous and irrelevant. What do they really matter if you place them against the truly great human achievements - against the creative genius of a Michaelangelo, a Beethoven, an Einstein? In that context they seem almost trivial.

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p. 120
Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
2 months 1 week ago
The greatness of America lies not...

The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.

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Chapter XIII.
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 6 days ago
The supreme maxim in scientific philosophising...

The supreme maxim in scientific philosophising is this: wherever possible, logical constructions are to be substituted for inferred entities.

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Quoted in Hawes The Logic of Contemporary English Realism (1923), p. 110
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
3 months 3 weeks ago
They hate not to make use...

They hate not to make use of their abilities... they do not necessarily work for their own self-interest.

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Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
2 months 6 days ago
France had for some time been...

France had for some time been guilty of a continued series of hostile acts against this country, both external and internal: first, she directed her pursuits to universal empire, under the name of fraternity, in order to overturn the fabric of our laws and government.

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Speech in the House of Commons (12 February 1793)
Philosophical Maxims
Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale
1 month 2 weeks ago
At present we live to impede...

At present we live to impede each other's satisfactions; competition, domestic life, society, what is it all but this? We go somewhere where we are not wanted and where we don't want to go. What else is conventional life? Passivity when we want to be active. So many hours spent every day in passively doing what conventional life tells us, when we would so gladly be at work. And is it a wonder that all individual life is extinguished?

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Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
4 months 2 days ago
When the throne of God is...

When the throne of God is overturned, the rebel realizes that it is now his own responsibility to create the justice, order, and unity that he sought in vain within his own condition, and in this way to justify the fall of God. Then begins the desperate effort to create, at the price of crime and murder if necessary, the dominion of man.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Jaspers
Karl Jaspers
1 month 3 weeks ago
I approach the presentation of Kierkegaard...

I approach the presentation of Kierkegaard with some trepidation. Next to Nietzsche, or rather, prior to Nietzsche, I consider him to be the most important thinker of our post-Kantian age. With Goethe and Hegel, an epoch had reached its conclusion, and our prevalent way of thinking - that is, the positivistic, natural-scientific one - cannot really be considered as philosophy.

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The Great Philosophers
Philosophical Maxims
Al-Ghazali
Al-Ghazali
2 months 1 week ago
The lowest degree of education is...

The lowest degree of education is to distinguish oneself from the ignorant ordinary man. The educated man does not loathe honey even if he finds it in the surgeon's cupping-glass; he realizes that the cupping glass does not essentially alter the honey. The natural aversion from it in such a case rests on popular ignorance, arising from the fact that the cupping-glass is made only for impure blood. Men imagine that the blood is impure because it is in the cupping-glass, and are not aware that the impurity is due to a property.

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III. The Classes of Seekers, p. 31.
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
1 month 5 days ago
I cannot recall those years without...

I cannot recall those years without horror, loathing, and heart-rending pain. I killed people in war, challenged men to duels with the purpose of killing them, and lost at cards; I squandered the fruits of the peasants' toil and then had them executed; I was a fornicator and a cheat. Lying, stealing, promiscuity of every kind, drunkenness, violence, murder - there was not a crime I did not commit... Thus I lived for ten years.

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Pt. I, ch. 2
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
2 months 5 days ago
How often misused words generate misleading...

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts!

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Ch. 8, Humanity
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
3 months 5 days ago
Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel...

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor.

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Ch. 4
Philosophical Maxims
Cato the Younger
Cato the Younger
2 months 3 weeks ago
Nay, men, if any of you...

Nay, men, if any of you had heeded what I was ever foretelling and advising, ye would now neither be fearing a single man nor putting your hopes in a single man.

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Quoted by Plutarch, Life of Cato the Younger, 52 Bernadotte Perrin, ed. Plutarch's Lives, Vol. 8, LCL 100 (1919), pp. 247, 361
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
3 months 6 days ago
The inclination to act as the...

The inclination to act as the laws command, a virtue, is a synthesis in which the law ... loses its universality and the subject its particularity; both lose their opposition, while in the Kantian conception of virtue this opposition remains, and the universal becomes the master and the particular the mastered.

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Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
1 month 5 days ago
The more is given the less...

The more is given the less the people will work for themselves, and the less they work the more their poverty will increase.

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Help for the Starving, Pt. III
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
3 months 1 day ago
The world is all that is...

The world is all that is the case.

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(1) Original German: Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 1 day ago
To fear is to die every...

To fear is to die every minute.

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Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
1 month 4 weeks ago
The avant-garde and the beatniks share...

The avant-garde and the beatniks share in the function of entertaining without endangering the good conscience of the men of good will.

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p. 70
Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
2 months 1 day ago
Fifth, in what measure this unification...

Fifth, in what measure this unification acts, seems to be regulated only by special rules; or, at least, we cannot in our present knowledge say how far it goes. But it may be said that, judging by appearances, the amount of arbitrariness in the phenomenon of human minds is neither altogether trifling nor very prominent.

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Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
3 months 1 week ago
Avarice, the spur of industry, is...

Avarice, the spur of industry, is so obstinate a passion, and works its way through so many real dangers and difficulties, that it is not likely to be scared by an imaginary danger, which is so small, that it scarcely admits of calculation. Commerce, therefore, in my opinion, is apt to decay in absolute governments, not because it is there less secure, but because it is less honourable.

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Part I, Essay 12: Of Civil Liberty
Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
2 months 2 weeks ago
Rejoice not in another man's misfortune!

Rejoice not in another man's misfortune!

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Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
3 months 3 weeks ago
They who know the truth...

They who know the truth are not equal to those who love it, and they who love it are not equal to those who delight in it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
3 months 4 days ago
The homosexual never thinks of himself...

The homosexual never thinks of himself when someone is branded in his presence with the name homosexual. ...His sexual tastes will doubtless lead him to enter into relationships with this suspect category, but he would like to make use of them without being likened to them. Here, too, the ban that is cast on certain men by society has destroyed all possibility of reciprocity among them. Shame isolates.

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Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
2 months 1 day ago
The general co-operation of all members...

The general co-operation of all members of society for the purpose of planned exploitation of the forces of production, the expansion of production to the point where it will satisfy the needs of all, the abolition of a situation in which the needs of some are satisfied at the expense of the needs of others, the complete liquidation of classes and their conflicts, the rounded development of the capacities of all members of society through the elimination of the present division of labor, through industrial education, through engaging in varying activities, through the participation by all in the enjoyments produced by all, through the combination of city and country - these are the main consequences of the abolition of private property.

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Philosophical Maxims
Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Bakunin
2 months 3 days ago
A person is strong only when...

A person is strong only when he stands upon his own truth, when he speaks and acts from his deepest convictions. Then, whatever the situation he may be in, he always knows what he must say and do. He may fall, but he cannot bring shame upon himself or his cause. If we seek the liberation of the people by means of a lie, we will surely grow confused, go astray, and lose sight of our objective, and if we have any influence at all on the people we will lead them astray as well - in other words, we will be acting in the spirit of reaction and to its benefit.

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"Appendix A"
Philosophical Maxims
David Pearce
David Pearce
2 weeks ago
Humans are prone to status quo...

Humans are prone to status quo bias. So let's do a thought-experiment. Imagine we stumble across an advanced civilisation that has abolished predation, disease, famine, and all the horrors of primitive Darwinian life. The descendants of archaic lifeforms flourish unmolested in their wildlife parks - free living, but not "wild". Should we urge scrapping their regime of compassionate stewardship of the living world - and a return to asphyxiation, disembowelling and being eaten alive? Or is a happy biosphere best conserved intact? Reply to "Should humans wipe out all carnivorous animals so the succeeding generations of herbivores can live in peace?"

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, Quora, 16 Jun. 2018
Philosophical Maxims
Lucretius
Lucretius
3 months 2 weeks ago
Life is one…

Life is one long struggle in the dark.

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Book II, line 54 (tr. Rouse)
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 months 5 days ago
A ruddy drop of manly blood...

A ruddy drop of manly blood The surging sea outweighs, The world uncertain comes and goes; The lover rooted stays.

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Friendship
Philosophical Maxims
Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm
1 month 2 weeks ago
I believe that the fundamental alternative...

I believe that the fundamental alternative for man is the choice between "life" and "death"; between creativity and destructive violence; between reality and illusions; between objectivity and intolerance; between brotherhood-independence and dominance-submission.

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Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
4 months 6 days ago
Happy is the one in whom...

Happy is the one in whom there is true sorrow over his sin, so that the extreme unimportance to him of everything else is only the negative expression of the confirmation that one thing is unconditionally important to him, so that the unconditional unimportance to him of everything else is a deadly sickness that still is very far from being a sickness unto death but is precisely unto life, because the life is in this, that one thing is unconditionally important to him: to find forgiveness.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
3 months ago
It was an important moment. The...

It was an important moment. The old partners of the spectacle of punishment, the body and the blood, gave way. A new character came of the scene, masked. It was the end of a certain kind of tragedy; comedy began, with shadow play, faceless voices, impalpable entities. The apparatus of punitive justice must now bite into this bodiless reality.

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pp. 17
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
3 months 3 weeks ago
It is only the individual possessed...

It is only the individual possessed of the most entire sincerity that can exist under Heaven, who can adjust the great invariable relations of mankind, establish the great fundamental virtues of humanity, and know the transforming and nurturing operations of Heaven and Earth; shall this individual have any being or anything beyond himself on which he depends? Call him man in his ideal, how earnest is he! Call him an abyss, how deep is he! Call him Heaven, how vast is he! Who can know him, but he who is indeed quick in apprehension, clear in discernment, of far-reaching intelligence, and all-embracing knowledge, possessing all Heavenly virtue?

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Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
2 months 6 days ago
Even there, in the mines, underground,...

Even there, in the mines, underground, I may find a human heart in another convict and murderer by my side, and I may make friends with him, for even there one may live and love and suffer. One may thaw and revive a frozen heart in that convict, one may wait upon him for years, and at last bring up from the dark depths a lofty soul, a feeling, suffering creature; one may bring forth an angel, create a hero! There are so many of them, hundreds of them, and we are to blame for them.

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Philosophical Maxims
Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Bakunin
2 months 3 days ago
Every state, like every theology, assumes...

Every state, like every theology, assumes man to be fundamentally bad and wicked.

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As quoted in Michael Bakunin (1937), E.H. Carr, p. 453
Philosophical Maxims
Zoroaster
Zoroaster
2 months 3 weeks ago
Commit no slander; so that infamy...

Commit no slander; so that infamy and wickedness may not happen unto thee.

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(p. 59)
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
1 month 4 weeks ago
That a man be willing, when...

That a man be willing, when others are so too, as farre-forth, as for Peace, and defence of himself he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things; and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself.

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The First Part, Chapter 14, p. 64-65
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Rorty
Richard Rorty
2 months 3 weeks ago
... our maturation has consisted in...

... our maturation has consisted in the gradual realization that, if we can rely on one another, we need not rely on anything else. In religious terms, this is the Feuerbachian thesis that God is just a projection of the best, and sometimes the worst, of humanity. In philosophical terms, it is the thesis that anything that talk of objectivity can do to make our practices intelligible can be done equally well by talk of intersubjectivity.

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"John Searle on Realism and Relativism." Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (1998).
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
1 month 4 weeks ago
Therefore every scribe which is instructed...

Therefore every scribe which is instructed unto the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an householder, which bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old.

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13:52 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
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