No wonder that, when a political career is so precarious, men of worth and capacity hesitate to embrace it. They cannot afford to ...be thrown out of their life's course by a mere accident.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Art has no cosmology, it gives us no view of the universe; every distinct work of art gives us a little cosmology of its own, and ...no ingenuity will combine all these into a single whole. But religion is essentially cosmological, though its cosmology is always an imaginative cosmology. Any given religious experience can be fitted by this cosmology into the scheme of the whole, and labeled as an ascent into the third heaven, a temptation of the devil, and so forth. Hence religion is social, as art can never be. The sociability of artists is a paradoxical and precarious thing, and ceases the instant they begin their actual artistic work. But the sociability of religion is part of its fundamental nature. The life of religion is always the life of a church.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The aggregate of all knowledge has not yet become culture in us. Rather it would seem as if, with the progressive scientific penet...ration and dissection of reality, the foundations of our thinking grow ever more precarious and unstable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Courage, of all national qualities, is the most precarious; because it is exerted only at intervals, and by a few in every nation;... whereas industry, knowledge, civility, may be of constant and universal use, and for several ages, may become habitual to the whole people.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A politician never forgets the precarious nature of elective life. We have never established a practice of tenure in public office....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One good Man may take another's Word, if they so agree, but a whole Nation ought never to trust to any Honesty, but what is built ...upon Necessity; for unhappy is the People, and their Constitution will ever be precarious, whose Welfare must depend upon the Virtues and Consciences of Ministers and Politicians.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Compassion and shame come over one who considers how precarious is the origin of the proudest of living beings: often the smell of... a lately extinguished lamp is enough to cause a miscarriage. And to think that from such a frail beginning a tyrant or butcher may be born! You who trust in your physical strength, who embrace the gifts of fortune and consider yourself not their ward but their son, you who have a domineering spirit, you who consider yourself a god as soon as success swells your breast, think how little could have destroyed you!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »