Fear of death, wonder at the causes of chance events or unintelligible happenings, hope for divine aid and gratitude for good fortune, cooperated to generate religious belief.
A sense of humor, being born of perspective, bears a near kinship to philosophy; each is the soul of the other.
The family is the nucleus of civilization.
I thank God,” he used to say, “that I was born Greek and not barbarian, freeman and not slave, man and not woman; but above all, that I was born in the age of.
The historian always oversimplifies, and hastily selects a manageable minority of facts and faces out of a crowd of souls and events whose multitudinous complexity he can never quite embrace or comprehend.
In books “we converse with the wise, as in action with fools.” That is, if we know how to select our books. “Some books are to be tasted,” reads a famous passage, “others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested”; all these groups forming, no doubt, an infinitesimal portion of the oceans and cataracts of ink in which the world is daily bathed and poisoned and drowned.
Plato complains that whereas in simpler matters – like shoe-making – we think only a specially-trained person will serve our purpose, in politics we presume that every one who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state.
Utopias of equality are biologically doomed, and the best that the amiable philosopher can hope for is an approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity. A.
The fear of death is strangely mingled with the longing for repose.
It was his motto that one lived best by the hidden life – bene vixit qui bene latuit.
Until our states become members of a large and effectively protective group they will continue to act like individuals and families in the hunting stage.
Radicalism is a luxury of stability; we may dare to change things only when things lie steady under our hands.
A disintegrating individualism had weakened the Athenian character, and left the city a prey at last to the sternly-nurtured Spartans.
Ideally parentage should be a privilege of health, not a by-product of sexual agitation. Is.
Our democratic dogma has leveled not only all voters but all leaders; we delight to show that living geniuses are only mediocrities, and that dead ones are myths. If.
War does one good – it teaches people geography.
The fount and breeding-place of the Semites was Arabia.
By 1911 I found it impossible to continue my pretenses to orthodoxy;.
We must steel ourselves against utopias and be content with a slightly better state.
The harmony of the part with the whole may be the best definition of health, beauty, truth, wisdom, morality, and happiness. This.