One can regard the moral law as an illusion, and so cut himself off from the common ground of humanity.
The standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people’s ideas get nearer to that real Right than others.
The value given to the testimony of any feeling must depend on our whole philosophy, not our whole philosophy on a feeling.
We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, Blessed are they that morn.
It is only when you are asked to believe in Reason coming from non-reason that you must cry Halt. Human minds. They do not come from nowhere.
Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger.
Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors.
Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining ‘It’s not fair’ before you can say Jack Robinson.
For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life – namely myself.
How difficult it is to avoid having a special standard for oneself.
The great thing is to be found at one’s post as a child of God, living each day as though it were our last, but planning as though the world might last a hundred years.
True humility is more like self-forgetfulness than false modesty.
Humility, after the first shock, is cheerful virtue.
A myth is a lie that conveys a truth.
Anger is the fluid love bleeds when cut.
A noble hunger, long unsatisfied, met at last its proper food.
You know what this is, I suppose. Religious melancholia. Stop while there is time. If you dive, you dive into insanity.
As long as this deliberate refusal to understand things from above, even where such understanding is possible, continues, it is idle to talk of any final victory over materialism.
No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as ‘what a man does with his solitude.’
Reasoning is never, like poetry, judged from the outside at all.