Daily Quotes

[Tamrin]

[Tamrin]

Saturday’s Quotes:

A multitude of words is no proof of a prudent mind


Hope is the only good that is common to all men;
those who have nothing else possess hope still


Nothing is more active than thought, for it travels over the universe,
and nothing is stronger than necessity for all must submit to it


The principle of all things is water; all comes from water, and to water all returns


The most difficult thing in life is to know yourself


It is difficult to know thyself, it is easy to advise others


The past is certain, the future obscure


Thales of Miletus
Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher
(Died this day 546 BCE)



Space is the greatest thing, as it contains all things

[Tamrin]

There is truly only one misfortune: that of not being born


The best definition of love in the world is not worth one kiss from the girl you love


He felt that there is a loose balance of good and evil, and that the art
of living consists in getting the greatest good out of the greatest evil


How many wicked intentions climb aboard a pure and innocent
phrase, after it is already on its way! It is enough to make one
suspect that lying is, many a time, as involuntary as breathing


Life … is an enormous lottery: the prizes are few, the failures innumerable.
Out of the sighs of one generation are kneaded the hopes of the next. That's life


Everything comes to an end, reader. It is an old truism to which may be added that
not everything that lasts, lasts for long. This latter part is not readily admitted;
on the contrary the idea that an air castle lasts longer than the very air of which
it is made is hard to get out of a person's head, and this is fortunate, other-
wise the custom of making those almost eternal constructions might be lost


Man is...a thinking erratum, that's what he is. Every season of life is an
edition that corrects the one before and which will also be corrected itself
until the definitive edition, which the publisher gives to the worms gratis


Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
African-Brazilian novelist (Helena)
(Born this day 1839)



The greatest sin, after the initial sin, is its publication

[Tamrin]

The family is both a biological and a cultural group


It is biological in the sense that it is the best arrangement for begetting children
and protecting them while they are dependent. It is a cultural group because
it brings into intimate association persons of different age and sex who
renew and reshape the folkways of the society into which they are born


The household serves as a "cultural workshop" for the trans-
mission of old traditions and for the creation of new social values


The child's personality is a product of slow gradual growth


His nervous system matures by stages and natural sequences


He sits before he stands; he babbles before he talks; he fabricates before he
tells the truth; he draws a circle before he draws a square; he is selfish before
he is altruistic; he is dependent on others before he achieves dependence on self


All of his abilities, including his morals, are subject to laws of growth.
The task of child care is not to force him into a predetermined pattern but to guide his growth


Arnold Gesell
American developmental psychologist and pediatrician
(Born this day 1880)



Every generation rediscovers and re-evaluates the meaning of infancy and childhood

[Tamrin]

Family life is too intimate to be preserved by the spirit of justice.
It can be sustained by a spirit of love which goes beyond justice


The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan value
and ends is the source of all religious fanaticism


I think there ought to be a club in which preachers and journalists could come together
and have the sentimentalism of the one matched with the cynicism of the other.
That ought to bring them pretty close to the truth


Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible,
but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary


The final wisdom of life requires not the annulment of incongruity
but the achievement of serenity within and above it


The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world


God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference


Reinhold Niebuhr
US theologian (Nature & Destiny of Man)
(Born this day 1892)



If we can find God only as he is revealed in nature we have no moral God

[Tamrin]

When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die


Existence precedes and rules essence


It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than
to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous


No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point


Every existing thing is born without reason,
prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance


Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is


I confused things with their names: that is belief


Jean-Paul Sartre
French philosopher (Nobel 1964; declined)
(Born this day 1905)



If I became a philosopher, if I have so keenly sought this fame
for which I'm still waiting, it's all been to seduce women basically

[Tamrin]

We cannot be satisfied with the principle of utility as
our sole basic standard of right and wrong in morality


We also sometimes say that things are good, desirable, or worth-
while in themselves, as ends, in themselves, as ends, intrinsically


Autonomy seems to me to come in here, as well as the other things just listed, but
I should want to add rationality and related dispositions like objectivity and intell-
ectual responsibility too. And perhaps this is where one should mention love again


I have contended that we should recognize a principle of justice to
guide our distribution of good and evil that is independent of any
principle about maximizing the balance of good over evil in the world.


We should recognize two basic principles of obligation, the principle
of utility and some principle of justice. The resulting theory would be a
deontological one, but it would be much closer to utilitarianism than most
deontological theories; we might call it a mixed deontological theory


We have a prima facie obligation to maximize the balance of good
over evil only if we have a prior prima facie obligation to do good and
prevent harm. I shall call this prior principle the principle of beneficence


In fact, all evaluations properly so-called are at least implicitly made by reference to some
standard or to some set of general judgments about what is good-making or prima facie good


William K. Frankena
American moral philosopher
(Born this day 1908)



If one is asked why that was a good concert, one must say something like,
"Because it was profoundly moving," which implies that being profoundly
moving is a good-making characteristic, at least from an aesthetic point of view

[Tamrin]

Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted


I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but
what you feel when you're older, I think, is that you really must make the self


Is it really so difficult to tell a good action from a bad one? I think one
usually knows right away or a moment afterward, in a horrid flash of regret


If someone tells you he is going to make a "realistic decision," you
immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad


In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military
considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons


Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism


People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children


Mary McCarthy
American novelist (Group)
(Born this day 1912)



We all live in suspense from day to day;
in other words, you are the hero of your own story

[Tamrin]

The modern state is the distinctive product of a unique civilization.
But it is a product which is still in the making, and a part of the
process is a struggle between old and new principles of social order


At all times men have lived in societies, and ties of kinship and of
simple neighbourhood underlie every form of social organization


Both logically and historically the first point of attack is arbitrary government,
and the first liberty to be secured is the right to be dealt with in accordance
with law. A man who has no legal rights against another, but stands entirely
at his disposal, to be treated according to his caprice, is a slave to that other


The first condition of universal freedom, that is to say, is a measure of universal
restraint. Without such restraint some men may be free but others will be unfree


The more a class is brought low, the greater its difficulty in rising again without assist-
ance. For purposes of legislation the State has been exceedingly slow to accept this view


The Liberal does not meet opinions which he conceives to be false with
toleration, as though they did not matter. He meets them with justice, and
exacts for them a fair hearing as though they mattered just as much as his own


Government must keep the ring, and leave it for individuals to play the game


Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse
British politician and sociologist
(Died this day 1929)



Great changes are not caused by ideas alone; but they are not effected without ideas

[Tamrin]

Art must take reality by surprise


Whisky, gambling and Ferraris are better than housework


Money may not buy happiness, but I'd rather cry in a Jaguar than on a bus


I have loved to the point of madness; that which is called madness,
that which to me, is the only sensible way to love


The one thing I regret is that I will never
have time to read all the books I want to read


There are a few who think too much, and many who think too little


What you call types of mind are only mental ages


Françoise Sagan
French novelist (Bon Jour Trieste)
(Born this day 1935)



Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known