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PRACTICAL APHORISMS FOR LIFE

[NB: If you feel that some of these aphorisms try your patience, mulling
over the function of aphorism may help to make them more palatable.]

To be angry is to be wrong.

Hugh Kingsmill

Getting angry about human affairs is as ridiculous as losing one’s temper in a traffic jam.

Malcolm Muggeridge

It’s not anger that’s wrong, it’s being angry at the wrong thing that’s wrong. It’s not hatred that’s wrong, it’s hating the wrong thing that’s wrong.

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A large part of mankind is angry not with the sins, but with the sinners.

Seneca

There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as moral indignation which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue.

Erich Fromm

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It is absurd to blame any class or any sex, as a whole. Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do. They are driven by instincts which are not within their control.

Virginia Woolf

As I know more of mankind I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man upon easier terms than I was formerly.

Samuel Johnson

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The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

William James

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

Aldous Huxley

Generally speaking, human beings are extremely tolerant of nonsense.

So little trouble do men take in the search after truth; so readily do they accept whatever comes first to hand.

Thucydides

It is folly to expect people to do all that you would reasonably expect them to do.

Archbishop Richard Whately

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A good test of character is how one reacts to the weaknesses of other people.

The perfection of man consists not in being perfect but in trying to be; and that trying implies, of course, continual failures.

Michael Mason

It’s a sign of maturity not to be scandalized.

Flannery O’Connor

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Be sparing in praise, and more so in blame.

William Langland

The human mind is generally far more eager to praise or blame than to describe and define. It wants to make every distinction a distinction of value.

C. S. Lewis

We all have sharp likes and dislikes, and hand out praise and condemnation with equal ease.

Jean Vanier

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Nobody can doubt that nine-tenths of the harm in the world is done simply by talking.

G. K. Chesterton

Blaming or scapegoating someone always implies the claim that we would have done better in their shoes. It’s a way of protesting our innocence and brightening our self-esteem.

David Cayley

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No habit is so important to acquire as [the ability] to delight in fine characters and noble actions.

Aristotle

There now appeared on the ravaged scene an Angel of Deliverance, the noblest patriot of France, the most splendid of her heroes, the most beloved of her saints, the most inspiring of all her memories, the peasant Maid, the ever-shining, every glorious Joan of Arc.

Winston Churchill

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Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.

Carl Jung

What on earth would a man do with himself, if something did not stand in his way.

H. G. Wells

If every desire were satisfied as soon as it arose how would men occupy their lives, how would they pass the time? Imagine this race transported to a Utopia where everything grows of its own accord and turkeys fly around ready-roasted, where lovers find one another without any delay and keep one another without any difficulty; in such a place some men would die of boredom or hang themselves, some would fight and kill one another, and thus they would create for themselves more suffering than nature inflicts on them as it is.

Arthur Schopenhauer

It would not be better if things happened to men just as they wish.

Heraclitus

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The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.

All’s Well That Ends Well (1st Lord)

Life is ten percent what you make it and ninety percent how you take it.

Irving Berlin

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It doesn’t pay to tell someone they are wrong.

Dale Carnegie

Adopting a moral tone is very hard on relationships. More specifically, when you object to someone’s attitude or opinion on moral grounds, it invariably causes bad feeling.

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Equality is essential to conversation.

G. K. Chesterton

Every man has a right to be wrong in his opinions. But no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.

Bernard Baruch

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He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.

John Stuart Mill

If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from his angle as well as your own.

Dale Carnegie

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The simple realization that there are other points of view is the beginning of wisdom. Knowing what they are is a big step. The final achievement is understanding why they are held.

Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition. It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.

G. K. Chesterton

One can’t be right until one has first conceived the possibility of being wrong.

Diana Kuhn

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Intolerance respecting other people’s religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people’s art [or taste].

Wallace Stevens

My view of literature is that a man appreciates what he can, and should keep his appreciation supple by not conceiving fanatical hates and loves, and also by not straining it where it doesn’t arise naturally. Writers who don’t appeal to me I don’t bother about but I don’t mind my friends liking them.

Hugh Kingsmill

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There are no entirely false opinions. The listener, then, must proceed from what is valid in the opinions of the speaker to the fuller and purer truth as he, the listener, understands it.

Josef Pieper

Aristotle remarks that if one wishes to find the truth one must first consider the opinions of those who judge differently.

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“Every intelligent man is four-fifths right,” he once said to me in reference to, of all people, Sartre.

Wilfrid Sheed (speaking of his father, Catholic publisher Frank Sheed)

Men despise religion; they hate it, and fear it is true.

Pascal

Nothing is serious except passion. The intellect is an instrument on which one plays, that is all.

Oscar Wilde

Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.

George Bernard Shaw

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.

Bertrand Russell

Democracy is the worship of jackals by jackasses.

H. L. Mencken

LABOUR: one of the processes by which A acquires property for B.

Ambrose Bierce

The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.

Pascal

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Education does not mean teaching people to know what they do not know; it means teaching them to behave as they do not behave.

John Ruskin

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.

Robert Frost

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The test of good manners is to be patient with bad ones.

Solomon ibn Gabirol

Certain good qualities are like the senses: people entirely lacking in them can neither perceive nor comprehend them.

La Rochefoucauld

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There is no greater folly than to seek to correct the natural infirmities of those we love.

Henry Fielding

Men have to be reminded that things must be loved first and improved afterwards.

G. K. Chesterton

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We often irritate others when we think we could not possibly do so.

La Rochefoucauld

The strongest human instinct is to impart information, the second strongest is to resist it.

Kenneth Grahame

Most people do not care to be taught what they do not already know; it makes them feel ignorant.

Mary McCarthy

The degree to which a person is liked or accepted is in exact proportion to his or her ability to give enjoyment to others—family sometimes excepted.

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A bore is a man who has nothing to say and says it anyway.

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.

H. L. Mencken

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When a thing bores you do not do it. Do not pursue a fruitless perfection.

Eugène Delacroix

A former female associate of a prestigious Manhattan law-firm had this to say about her work: “At best it’s tedious, and at worst the tedium will kill you. It deadened my senses. I’d go out at lunch and find myself envying people who scooped ice cream for a living. At least they could daydream all day.”

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One must choose in life between boredom and suffering.

Mme de Staël

A certain amount of excitement is wholesome, but, like almost everything else, the matter is quantitative. Too little may produce morbid cravings; too much will produce exhaustion. A certain power of enduring boredom is therefore essential to a happy life, and is one of the things that ought to be taught to the young.

Bertrand Russell

The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.

Thomas Carlyle

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Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

Oscar Wilde

It is quite clear that the body must be recognized and the soul kept in its place, since a little refreshing food and drink can do so much to make a man.

Hilaire Belloc

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Those who are now pursuing pleasure are not only fleeing from boredom, but are acutely suffering from it.

G. K. Chesterton

Instant gratification is bad psychology. Pleasure must be earned because part of its very intensity comes from resistance or self-control. To gratify every impulse at once destroys this intensity, as the breaking of a dam reduces all water to the same level.

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We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.

Charles Kingsley

I have known some quite good people who were unhappy, but never an interested person who was unhappy.

A. C. Benson

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The world is so full of a number of things,
I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.

Robert Louis Stevenson

To be happy you must organize your time around the things that are true priorities in your life, and not allow the things that matter most to be at the mercy of those that matter least.

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To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.

Albert Camus

The cure for the greatest part of human miseries is not radical, but palliative.

Samuel Johnson

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To talk quite reasonably about your own quite real wrongs is the quickest way to go off your head.

G. K. Chesterton

We are condemned to rub shoulders with injustice all our lives, and we are often judged by our acceptance of this fact. The spirit in which we manage it can even be said to be a measure of our maturity.

Peter Ustinov

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Happiness is a monstrosity. Those who pursue it are punished.

Gustave Flaubert

The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.

Eric Hoffer

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Of all follies there is none greater than wanting to put the world to rights.

Molière

The troubles of our proud and angry dust
Are from eternity, and shall not fail.

A. E. Housman

Men will always be mad and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all.

Voltaire

The youth of twenty who does not think the world can be improved is a cad; the man of forty who still thinks it can is a fool.

Hesketh Pearson

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Stop being upset for no good reason. It’s easy to feel unhappy, but much of the time it’s unnecessary.

Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

Abraham Lincoln

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The heart has its reasons which reason does not understand.

Pascal

Thinking should come before feeling. It may be that the heart has reasons of which the head knows nothing, but why should the reasons of the heart, which lead so many people into the wrong bed, necessarily lead anybody to the right conclusions.

Arnold Lunn

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The mind is always the dupe of the heart.

La Rochefoucauld

This is the greatest paradox: the emotions cannot be trusted, yet it is they that tell us the greatest truths.

Don Herold

The first condition of right thought is right sensation.

T. S. Eliot

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Most emotion originates on the level of sense experience.

I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquillity which religion is powerless to bestow.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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It is in our private life that we find people intolerably individual.

G. K. Chesterton

The very same conditions of intimacy which make affection possible also make possible a peculiarly incurable distaste; a hatred as immemorial, constant, unemphatic, almost at times unconscious, as the corresponding form of love.

C. S. Lewis

Feelings of antipathy are instinctive and have to be recognized as such. Since we can’t pretend we feel differently than we really do we simply have to accept our instinctive dislikes as an unavoidable trial.

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To wrestle with a bad feeling only pins our attention on it, and keeps it still fastened in the mind; whereas if we act as if from some better feeling, the old bad feeling soon folds its tent and silently steals away.

William James

Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.

Dale Carnegie

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Desire is the very essence of man.

Spinoza

The search for an outside meaning that can compel an inner response must always be disappointed: all ‘meaning’ must be at bottom related to our primary desires, and when they are extinct no miracle can restore to the world the value which they reflected upon it.

Bertrand Russell

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Sometimes it proves the highest understanding not to understand.

Gracian

We are not meant to put everything through the intellect.

The ordinary man has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual [or intellectual] sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that.

G. K. Chesterton

You cease being a mere logician and become a philosopher when you stop trying to eliminate paradox from reality and begin contemplating it.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.

Albert Einstein

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Very few people listen to argument.

G. K. Chesterton

Time makes more converts than reason.

Tom Paine

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Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence.

G. K. Chesterton

It is as absurd to argue men, as to torture them, into believing.

John Henry Newman

Man is not a rational animal, but an animal capable of reason.

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People only see what they are prepared to see.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A man has his beliefs: his arguments are only his excuses for them . . . we only see what we look at: our attention to our temperamental convictions produces complete oversight as to all the facts that tell against us.

George Bernard Shaw

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A man convinced against his will,
Is of the same opinion still.

It is impossible to make any intellectual headway against the steady resistance of a strong negative conviction.

There is nothing purely rational which is strong enough to bind the heart of man.

Karl Stern

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Never try to reason the prejudice out of a man. It was not reasoned into him, and cannot be reasoned out.

Sydney Smith

Many people like their beliefs, opinions and prejudices more than they like reason.

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Nobody will admit without a struggle that he is prejudiced against anything. Such an admission is distressing to one’s vanity. One likes to believe that one’s views on all subjects are the product of calm, dispassionate reasoning on the available evidence.

Arnold Lunn

What [often] distorts [our perception of things] is that one is convinced that one is speaking the truth because one says what one thinks.

Sacha Guitry

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Objectivity means that we can separate facts from our thoughts and feelings about those facts.

It is important to concede everything which should be conceded because it is not only bad policy but intellectually dishonest to defend the indefensible.

Arnold Lunn

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We are not won by arguments that we can analyse but by tone and temper, by the manner which is the man himself.

Samuel Butler

Men become susceptible to ideas, not by discussion and argument, but by seeing them personified and by loving the person who so embodies them.

Lewis Mumford

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You cannot win a man from his belief, political or religious, unless you can see why it attracts him and can almost imagine holding it yourself.

Frank Sheed

The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent. Each of them tacitly claims that “the truth” has already been revealed, and that the heretic, if he is not simply a fool, is secretly aware of “the truth” and merely resists it out of selfish motives.

George Orwell (from The Prevention of Literature, 1946)

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If a creed makes a man feel happy, he almost inevitably adopts it. Such a belief ought to be true, he reasons, therefore it is true.

William James

Arguments that don’t satisfy us emotionally usually don’t satisfy us intellectually. Everyone weighs certain kinds of evidence differently depending on what they want or don’t want to believe.

The closest we can get to impartiality is admitting we are partial.

G. K. Chesterton

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We are full of odd hates and dislikes.

C. S. Lewis

All men naturally hate each other. We have used desire as best we can to make it serve the common good, but this is mere sham and a false image of charity, for essentially it is just hate.

Pascal

At the heart of our friendly or purely social relations, there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but recurring in fits and starts.

Marcel Proust

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Direct and simple language always has some force behind it.

Northrop Frye

Broadly speaking, the short words are best, and the old words best of all.

Winston Churchill

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Words, like eyeglasses, blur everything that they do not make clearer.

Joseph Joubert

Ideas do not exist until they have been incorporated into words. The operation of thinking is the practice of articulating ideas until they are in the right words.

Northrop Frye

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A dislike of defined dogmas really means a preference for unexamined dogmas.

G. K. Chesterton

There are only two kinds of people; those who accept dogmas and know it and those who accept dogmas and don’t know it.

G. K. Chesterton

Somebody complained to Matthew Arnold that he was getting as dogmatic as Carlyle. He replied, “That may be true; but you overlook an obvious difference. I am dogmatic and right, and Carlyle is dogmatic and wrong.” The humour of the reply should not blind us to its everlasting common sense.

G. K. Chesterton

The cardinal doctrine or dogma of Western intellectual culture is that God has not revealed himself and that therefore no revealed religion is true.

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What is true conscience, that which comes from reason or that which one feels intuitively?

Pierre Elliott Trudeau (in a letter to a girl friend)

All knowledge must be built up upon our instinctive [or intuitive] beliefs, and if these are rejected, nothing is left.

Bertrand Russell

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You can never prove your first statement or it would not be your first.

G. K. Chesterton

Logic can only work on premises supplied independently of logic; any proof must start with some premise which is unproved.

Alan Wood

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Without faith—or something very like it—reason can’t get any traction.

Not everything can be justified on the basis of reasoned argument. Some things have to be justified on the basis of instinct or intuition, which, in turn, depend on faith or that closely related thing, common sense.

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Common sense is a form of insight, but it’s not infallible.

We seldom attribute common sense except to those who agree with us.

La Rochefoucauld

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Faith is intense, usually confident, belief that is not based on evidence sufficient to command assent from every reasonable person.

Walter Kaufmann

A man who has faith must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool.

G. K. Chesterton

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Uncertainty and mystery are energies of life. [Cherish them], for they keep boredom at bay and spark creativity.

R. I. Fitzhenry

It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.

Wallace Stevens

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We must abandon the search for an argument so powerful and so incontrovertible that it will destroy the philosophical opposition once and for all.

Every philosophical position has its own difficulties. The question one must decide is not whether the answers to the difficulties of some particular philosophy are completely satisfying, but whether they are more satisfying than the answers to the difficulties inherent in alternative philosophies.

Arnold Lunn

The attempt to establish the truth of any particular philosophy through purely intellectual processes is absolutely hopeless—and for purely intellectual reasons.

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Philosophy should hinder and resist the natural craving of the human spirit for a clear, transparent and definite system.

Josef Pieper

A complete and closed ‘system’ of philosophy is not possible. The claim to expound the world in a formula, or to have a system with which to explain the world, is quite simply unphilosophic or pseudo-philosophy.

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If God wants us to do a thing, He should make his wishes sufficiently clear. Sensible people will wait till He has done this before paying much attention to Him.

Samuel Butler

The Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of God’s scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to over-ride human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless.

C. S. Lewis

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Had God designed the world, it would not be
A world so frail and faulty as we see.

Lucretius

I defy anyone to imagine an environment more exquisitely designed to provide us with opportunities for spiritual growth than this life of ours.

M. Scott Peck

It is very dangerous to go into eternity with possibilities which one has oneself prevented from becoming realities. A possibility is a hint from God.

Soren Kierkegaard

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