Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Ideas have consequences.
Neuter discourse is a false idol.
The hero can never be a relativist.
The typical modern has the look of the hunted.
The South is the region that history has happened to.
...knowledge of material reality is the knowledge of death.
Poetry offers the fairest hope of restoring our lost unity of mind.
Man ... feels lost without the direction-finder provide by progress.
Where character forbids self-indulgence, transcendence still hovers around.
Absorption in ease is one of the most reliable signs of present or impending decay.
The complete man, then, is the "lover" added to the scientist; the rhetorician to the dialectician.
The remark has been made that in the Civil War the North reaped the victory and the South the glory.
Life without prejudice, were it ever to be tried, would soon reveal itself to be a life without principle.
We cannot be too energetic in reminding our nihilists and positivists that this is a world of action and history.
When we affirm that philosophy begins with wonder , we are affirming in effect that sentiment is prior to reason .
Most [people] see education only as the means by which a person is transported from one economic plane to a higher one.
No society is healthy which tells its members to take no thought of the morrow because the state underwrites their future.
Now, with the general decay of religious faith , it is the scientists who must speak ex cathedra, whether they wish to or not.
The modern state does not comprehend how anyone can be guided by something other than itself. In its eyes pluralism is treason.
We are more successfully healed by the vis medicatrix naturae (healing power of nature) than by the most ingenious medical application.
The aristocratic mind ... is anti-analytical. It is concerned more with the status of being than with the demonstrable relationship of parts.
We approach a condition in which we shall be amoral without the capacity to perceive it and degraded without the means to measure our descent.
contempt for the degradation of specialization and pedantry. Specialization develops only part of a man; a man partially developed is deformed.
Piety is a discipline of the will through respect. It admits the right to exist of things larger than the ego, of things different from the ego.
The conclusion, so vexatious to democracy, that wisdom and not popularity qualifies for rule may be forced upon us by the peril in atomic energy.
In proportion as man approaches the outer rim, he becomes lost in details, and the more he is preoccupied with details, the less he can understand them.
Man is an organism, not a mechanism; and the mechanical pacing of his life does harm to his human responses, which naturally follow a kind of free rhythm.
The man of culture finds the whole past relevant; the bourgeois and the barbarian find relevant only what has some pressing connection with their appetite.
Our planet is falling victim to a rigorism, so that what is done in any remote corner affects - nay, menaces - the whole. Resiliency and tolerance are lost.
When you're on the wrong road, sometimes the most progressive man is the one who goes backwards first. As long as there are such people, hope lies in our future.
No one can take culture seriously if he believes that it is only the uppermost of several layers of epiphenomena resting on a primary reality of economic activity.
The realization that just as no action is really indifferent, so no utterance is without its responsibility introduces, it is true, a certain strenuosity into life.
The scientists have given [modern man] the impression that there is nothing he cannot know, and false propagandists have told him that there is nothing he cannot have.
Until the world perceives that "good" cannot be applied to a thing because it is our own, and "bad" because it is another's, there is no prospect of realizing community.
Chivalry - ...a romantic idealism closely related to Christianity, which makes honor the guiding principle of conduct. Connected with this is the ancient concept of the gentleman.
It is likely ... that human society cannot exist without some source of sacredness. Those states which have sought openly to remove it have tended in the end to assume divinity themselves.
The issue ultimately involved is whether there is a source of truth higher than, and independent of, man; and the answer to the question is decisive for one’s view of the nature and destiny of man.
Since we want not emancipation from impulse but clarification of impulse, the duty of rhetoric is to bring together action and understanding into a whole that is greater than scientific perception.
Before the age of adulteration it was held that behind each work there stood some conception of its perfect execution. It was this that gave zest to labor and served to measure the degree of success.
It is not that things give meaning to words; it is that meaning makes things "things." It does not make things in their subsistence; but it does make things in their discreteness for the understanding.
Any utterance is a major assumption of responsibility, and the assumption that one can avoid that responsibility by doing something to language itself is one of the chief considerations of the Phaedrus.
The modern position seems only another manifestation of egotism, which develops when man has reached a point at which he will no longer admit the rights to existence of things not of his own contriving.
In the countries of Europe, one after another, the gentleman has been ousted by politicians and entrepreneurs, as materialism has given rewards to the sort of cunning incompatible with any kind of idealism.
[The South] is ****ed for its virtues and praised for its faults, and there are those who wish its annihilation. But most revealing of all is the fear that it gestates the revolutionary impulse of our future.
The case of the Baconians is not won until it has been proved that the substitution of covetousness for wantlessness, or an ascending spiral of desires for a stable requirement of necessities, leads to a happier condition.
The word is a sort of deliverance from the shifting world of appearances. The central teaching of the New Testament is that those who accept the word acquire wisdom and at the same time some identification with the eternal.
Respecters of private property are really obligated to oppose much that is done today in the name of private enterprise, for corporate organization and monopoly are the very means whereby property is casting aside its privacy.
Beneath the surface of repartee and mock seriousness, [Plato's Phaedrus] is asking whether we ought to prefer a neuter form of speech to the kind which is ever getting us aroused over things and provoking an expense of spirit.
It may be true that only those minds which are habituated to think logically can safely trust their intuitive conclusions, on the theory that the subconscious level will do its kind of work as faithfully as the conscious does its kind.
Hysterical optimism will prevail until the world again admits the existence of tragedy, and it cannot admit the existence of tragedy until it again distinguishes between good and evil. . . Hysterical optimism as a sin against knowledge.