In all pointed sentences some degree of accuracy must be sacrificed to conciseness.
Samuel Johnson
There is an accuracy that defeats itself by the overemphasis of details. I often say that one must permit oneself, and quite advisedly and deliberately, a certain margin of misstatement.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
A good test of character is how one reacts to the weaknesses of other people.
It’s a sign of maturity not to be scandalized.
Flannery O’Connor
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
Courtesy is to virtue as words are to thought.
Joseph Joubert
No man can put more virtue into his words than he practises in his life.
Hugh Kingsmill
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
Nobody can doubt that nine-tenths of the harm in the world is done simply by talking.
G. K. Chesterton
A large part of mankind is angry not with the sins, but with the sinners.
Seneca
Erich Fromm
There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labour of thinking.
Sir Joshua Reynolds
Our minds are lazier than our bodies.
La Rochefoucauld
Everyone is guilty of enjoying the comfort of opinion without submitting himself to the discomfort of thought.
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
Sacha Guitry
Objectivity means that we can separate facts from our thoughts and feelings about those facts.
Arnold Lunn
Ambrose Bierce
Government comprises a large part of the organized injustice in any society, ancient or modern.
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
H. L. Mencken
By and large the United States is run by the corporations and they hire lawyers from Whittier and actors from Warner Brothers to impersonate presidents, but the actual governing of the United States is done in the board rooms of America.
Gore Vidal
Perhaps the simultaneously most profound and silliest words ever written were: “We hold these truths to be self-evident...”
M. Scott Peck
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
Samuel Johnson
Perfection in making is an art, perfection in acting is a virtue.
Aristotle
Michael Mason
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
Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
George Orwell
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
Christopher Derrick
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
Robert Frost
Allow children to be happy in their own way, for what better way will they ever find?
Samuel Johnson
Sydney Smith
Very few people listen to argument.
G. K. Chesterton
Many people like their beliefs, opinions and prejudices more than they like argument.
Very few people listen to argument.
G. K. Chesterton
Time makes more converts than reason.
Tom Paine
Samuel Butler
Lewis Mumford
George Orwell (from The Prevention of Literature, 1946)
When a subject is highly controversial one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one’s audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker.
Virginia Woolf
It doesn’t pay to tell someone they are wrong.
Dale Carnegie
When you object to someone’s attitude or opinion on moral grounds, it invariably causes bad feeling.
Equality is essential to conversation.
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
The need to be right—the sign of a vulgar mind.
Albert Camus
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The first condition of right thought is right sensation.
T. S. Eliot
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
All the settlement and sane government of life consists in coming to the conclusion that some instincts, impulses or inspirations have authority, and others do not.
G. K. Chesterton
Immanuel Kant
Genuine love is volitional rather than emotional.
M. Scott Peck
I was taught when I was young that if people would only love one another, all would be well with the world. This seemed simple and very nice; but I found when I tried to put it in practice not only that other people were seldom lovable, but that I was not very lovable myself . . . you will find yourself making friends with people whose opinions are the very opposite to your own, whilst you cannot bear the sight of others who share all your beliefs. You may love your dog and find your nearest relatives detestable. So don’t waste your time arguing whether you ought to love all your neighbours. You can’t help yourself; and neither can they.
George Bernard Shaw (from a broadcast to sixth forms in 1937)
J. H. Newman
We often irritate others when we think we could not possibly do so.
La Rochefoucauld
The degree to which a person is loved and accepted is in exact proportion to his or her ability to give enjoyment to others—family sometimes excepted.
Fr. Michel Quoist
All God wants is gratitude and self-surrender. He needs nothing from us except our love.
St. Thérèse of Lisieux
It is a great mistake to suppose that love unites and unifies men. Love diversifies them, because love is directed towards individuality. The thing that really unites men and makes them like to each other is hatred.
Movements born in hatred very quickly take on the characteristics of the thing they oppose.
J. S. Habgood
All science requires faith in the inner harmony of the world.
He who wishes to learn must believe.
Aristotle
Walter Kaufmann
A man who has faith must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool.
Religion by its very nature is unpopular, unpopular with the ego.
Fulton Sheen
Speak, Lord, for Thy servant is listening.
RELIGION: Insurance in this world against fire in the next.
Men despise religion; they hate it, and fear it is true.
Pascal
Had God designed the world, it would not be
A world so frail and faulty as we see.
Lucretius
M. Scott Peck
The word “prove” has two distinct meanings, one strict and one colloquial, that have very little to do with one another. The strict meaning of “prove,” as understood by logicians and mathematicians, is to reason syllogistically such that the conclusion states explicitly what is already contained—but implicit—in the premises. The ordinary wide meaning of “prove”—as in the courtroom phrase “to prove beyond a reasonable doubt”—is to ascertain knowledge with a high degree of probability through evidence and reason.
Reason, in the fullest sense of the word, is about making rational inferences from “reasonable” premises. But most of the rational inferences we make in philosophy and science, as well as in practical life, are non-demonstrative. In other words, most of the inferences employed by reason are not, strictly speaking, logical (or deductive or demonstrative or necessary) inferences.
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
Full List of Sample Aphorisms All 90 Topics in One Webpage