While I wanted to think everything false, it must necessarily be that I who thought was something; and remarking that this truth, I think, therefore I am, was so solid and so certain that all the most extravagant suppositions of the sceptics were incapable of upsetting it, I judged that I could receive it without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy that I sought.
Uncomplicated joy and sorrow is not matter for philosophy, but rather for the simpler kinds of poetry and music.
Is “consciousness” ultimate and simple, something to be merely accepted and contemplated? Or is it something complex, perhaps consisting in our way of behaving in the presence of objects, or, alternatively, in the existence in us of things called “ideas,” having a certain relation to objects, though different from them, and only symbolically representative of them?
When a difficult or worrying decision has to be reached, as soon as all the data are available give the matter your best thought and make your decision; having made the decision, do not revise it unless some new fact comes to your knowledge. Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile. A.
To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization .
My first book of stories was ‘Satan in the Suburbs’. The title story was in part suggested to me by a stranger whom I met in Mortlake and who, when he saw me, crossed the road and made the sign of the Cross as he went.
There Self must die; there the eagerness, the greed of untamed desire must be slain, for only so can the soul be freed from the empire of Fate.
The man who can centre his thoughts and hopes upon something transcending self can find a certain peace in the ordinary troubles of life which is impossible to the pure egoist.
Political and social institutions are to be judged by the good or harm that they do to individuals. Do they encourage creativeness rather than possessiveness? Do they embody or promote a spirit of reverence between human beings? Do they preserve self-respect? In.
We think too much of production, and too little of consumption. One result is that we attach too little importance to enjoyment and simple happiness, and that we do not judge production by the pleasure that it gives to the consumer.
Santayana... reasoned that the young men who were being killed in the war would die anyhow sooner or later, and would be good for nothing while they lived.
The discovery of geometry had intoxicated them, and its a priori deductive method appeared capable of universal application. They would prove, for instance, that all reality is one, that there is no such thing as change, that the world of sense is a world of mere illusion; and the strangeness of their results gave them no qualms because they believed in the correctness of their reasoning.
The word conscience covers as a matter of fact several different feelings; the simplest of these is the fear of being found out. You, reader, have, I am sure, lived a completely blameless life, but if you will ask some one who has at some time acted in a manner for which he would be punished if it became known, you will find that when discovery seemed imminent, the person in question repented of his crime.
Next to worry probably one of the most potent causes of unhappiness is envy.
The faculty of being acquainted with things other than itself is the main characteristic of a mind.
Many of the actions by which men have become rich are far more harmful to the community than the obscure crimes of poor men, yet they go unpunished because they do not interfere with the existing order.
Any of us confronted by a forgotten letter written some years ago will be astonished to find how much more foolish our opinions were than we had remembered them as being.
Why do people read? The answer, as regards the great majority, is: ‘They don’t.
Where there is evidence, no one speaks of ” faith ”. We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence .
It must be admitted, however, that life in More’s Utopia, as in most others, would be intolerably dull.