It is only when men lose their contact with this eternal life-flame, and become merely personal, things in themselves, instead of ...things kindled in the flame, that the fight between man and woman begins.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You may decry some of these scruples and protest that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosoph...y. I am concerned, rather, that there should not be more things dreamt of in my philosophy than there are in heaven or earth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Poetry, at all times, exercises two distinct functions: it may reveal, it may unveil to every eye, the ideal aspects of common thi...ngs ... or it may actually add to the number of motives poetic and uncommon in themselves, by the imaginative creation of things that are ideal from their very birth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If we call the world of "things"Mof physical objects--the first world, and the world of subjective experiences (such as thought pr...ocesses) the second world, we may call the world of statements in themselves the third world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are in fact convinced that if we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate thing...s by themselves with the soul by itself. It seems, to judge from the argument, that the wisdom which we desire and upon which we profess to have set our hearts will be attainable only when we are dead and not in our lifetime.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The poker player learns that sometimes both science and common sense are wrong; that the bumblebee can fly; that, perhaps, one sho...uld never trust an expert; that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of by those with an academic bent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every judgement of conscience, be it right or wrong, be it about things evil in themselves or morally indifferent, is obligatory, ...in such wise that he who acts against his conscience always sins.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Can the knowledge deriving from reason even begin to compare with knowledge perceptible by sense? No doubt the number of people cr...ass enough to reply exclusively on the former and scorn the latter are sufficient in themselves to explain the disfavor into which everything deriving from the senses has gradually fallen. But when the most scholarly of men have taught me that light is a vibration, or offered me any other fruits of their labors of reasoning, they will not have rendered me an account of what is important to me about light, of what my eyes have begun to teach me about it, of what makes me different from a blind man--things which are the stuff of miracles, not subject matter for reasoning.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows o...ne big thing." Scholars have differed about the correct interpretation of these dark words, which may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog's one defence. But, taken figuratively, the words can be made to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general. For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance--and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory.... Their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes; and without insisting on a rigid classifica tion, we may, without too much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs to the first category, Shakespeare to the second.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All ceremonies are in themselves very silly things; but yet, a man of the world should know them. They are the outworks of Manners... and Decency, which would be too often broken in upon, if it were not for that defence, which keeps the enemy at a proper distance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »