Maxims and Reflections - LightNovelsOnl.com
You're reading novel online at LightNovelsOnl.com. Please use the follow button to get notifications about your favorite novels and its latest chapters so you can come back anytime and won't miss anything.
From this time forward, if a man does not apply himself to some art or handiwork, he will be in a bad way. In the rapid changes of the world, knowledge is no longer a furtherance; by the time a man has taken note of everything, he has lost himself.
329
Besides, in these days the world forces universal culture upon us, and so we need not trouble ourselves further about it; we must appropriate some particular culture.
330
The greatest difficulties lie where we do not look for them.
331
Our interest in public events is mostly the merest philistinism.
332
Nothing is more highly to be prized than the value of each day.
333
_Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt!_ This is so strange an utterance, that it could only have come from one who fancied himself autochthonous.
The man who looks upon it as an honour to be descended from wise ancestors, will allow them at least as much common-sense as he allows himself.
334
Strictly speaking, everything depends upon a man's intentions; where these exist, thoughts appear; and as the intentions are, so are the thoughts.
335
If a man lives long in a high position, he does not, it is true, experience all that a man can experience; but he experiences things like them, and perhaps some things that have no parallel elsewhere.
VII
336
The first and last thing that is required of genius is love of truth.
337
To be and remain true to oneself and others, is to possess the n.o.blest attribute of the greatest talents.
338
Great talents are the best means of conciliation.
339
The action of genius is in a way ubiquitous: towards general truths before experience, and towards particular truths after it.
340
An active scepticism is one which constantly aims at overcoming itself, and arriving by means of regulated experience at a kind of conditioned certainty.
341
The general nature of the sceptical mind is its tendency to inquire whether any particular predicate really attaches to any particular object; and the purpose of the inquiry is safely to apply in practice what has thus been discovered and proved.
342
The mind endowed with active powers and keeping with a practical object to the task that lies nearest, is the worthiest there is on earth.
343
Perfection is the measure of heaven, and the wish to be perfect the measure of man.
344
Not only what is born with him, but also what he acquires, makes the man.
345
A man is well equipped for all the real necessities of life if he trusts his senses, and so cultivates them that they remain worthy of being trusted.
346
The senses do not deceive; it is the judgment that deceives.
347
The lower animal is taught by its organs; man teaches his organs, and dominates them.
348
All direct invitation to live up to ideals is of doubtful value, particularly if addressed to women. Whatever the reason of it may be, a man of any importance collects round him a seraglio of a more or less religious, moral, and aesthetic character.
349
When a great idea enters the world as a Gospel, it becomes an offence to the mult.i.tude, which stagnates in pedantry; and to those who have much learning but little depth, it is folly.
350
Every idea appears at first as a strange visitor, and when it begins to be realised, it is hardly distinguishable from phantasy and phantastery.
351
This it is that has been called, in a good and in a bad sense, ideology; and this is why the ideologist is so repugnant to the hard-working, practical man of every day.
