I'm feeling crushed by the woes of the world, as if it's incumbent on me to fix its problems and set everyone straight. I should blush at my arrogance. Blushing would at least lend me a rosy semblance of health. Instead, my face is pale and drawn from a day of fretting. And besides, I'm…
Just a thought. 15.
"It is very sweet to do a just action which is disagreeable to those we do not like." Victor Hugo. By Order of the King. (Or, The Man Who Laughs.) The Valjean Edition of the Novels of Victor Hugo. New York: P.F. Collier & Son. (1912?) The Waif Knows Its Course, p 391.
Just a thought. 11.
"Which is the more pitiful I cannot decide -- being accused because of a friendship, or accusing a friend." Tacitus. The Annals: The Reigns of Tiberius, Claudius, and Nero. Oxford World's Classics. Translated by J.C. Yardley. Introduction and notes by Anthony A. Barrett. Oxford University Press Inc.: New York. 2008. (Book Six, Chapter 6, p 182)…
Just a thought. 10.
"Perhaps there is a sort of cycle in all things, with changes of morality coming around again like seasonal changes." Tacitus. The Annals: The Reigns of Tiberius, Claudius, and Nero. Oxford World's Classics. Translated by J.C. Yardley. Introduction and notes by Anthony A. Barrett. Oxford University Press Inc.: New York. 2008. (Book 3, chapter 55, p.…
A David Hume Quote worth contemplating. A balanced life.
"Man is a reasonable being; and as such, receives from science his proper food and nourishment: But so narrow are the bounds of human understanding, that little satisfaction can be hoped for in this particular, either from the extent or security of his acquisitions. Man is a sociable, no less than a reasonable being: But…
Just a thought. 3.
"Seldom are men blessed with times in which they may think what they like, and say what they think." (Hume, 32-33) Today's thought is a quote that originates with Tacitus, the great Roman historian who lived in the first century CE. This quote, translated as follows, appears in Latin on the title page of the first…
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty. A quote worth contemplating. Series 3.2.
"[Cf Cicero] He who knows only his own side knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may be able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side: if he does not so much know what they are, he has no ground…
A Walter Lippmann (1922) quote worth contemplating. Timely. Series 3.1.
“And since my moral system rests on my accepted version of the facts, he who denies either my moral judgments or my version of the facts, is to me perverse, alien, dangerous. How shall I account for him? The opponent always has to be explained, and the last explanation that we ever look for is…
Thomas Hobbes. We are sensing, social things. Series 1. 2.
"Justice and injustice are none of the faculties neither of the body nor mind. If they were, they might be in a man that were alone in the world, as well as his senses and passions. They are qualities that relate to men in society, not in solitude." Hobbes, Thomas. "Leviathan, revised edition, edited by…
