If ideas do not determine history, inventions do; and inventions are determined by ideas.
For what is philosophy but an art – one more attempt to give “significant form” to the chaos of experience?
Homer is right: “Bad is the lordship of many; let one be your ruler and master.” For such a man law would be rather an instrument than a limit: “for men of eminent ability there is no law – they are themselves a law.
Men look to love and life for everything; they receive a little less than that; they imagine that they have received nothing: these are the three stages of the pessimist.
Pagan professors of philosophy, after the death of Hypatia, sought security in Athens, where non-Christian teaching was still relatively and innocuously free. Student life was still lively there, and enjoyed most of the consolations of higher education – fraternities, distinctive garbs, hazing, and a general hilarity.
There his chief enterprises are reading and doing nothing.
Three meals a day are a highly advanced institution. Savages gorge themselves or fast.”2 The wilder tribes among the American Indians considered it weak-kneed and unseemly to preserve food for the next day.3 The natives of Australia are incapable of any labor whose reward is not immediate; every Hottentot is a gentleman of leisure; and with the Bushmen of Africa it is always “either a feast or a famine.
Custom gives the same stability to the group that heredity and instinct give to the species, and habit to the individual. It is the routine that keeps men sane; for if there were no grooves along which thought and action might move with unconscious ease, the mind would be perpetually hesitant, and would soon take refuge in lunacy.
Inequality is not only natural and inborn, it grows with the complexity of civilization.
Make wisdom human to the adolescent mind.
The principle of democracy is freedom, the principle of war is discipline; each requires the absence of the other.
There is no humorist like history.
A knowledge of history may teach us that civilization is a co-operative product, that nearly all peoples have contributed to it; it is our common heritage and debt; and the civilized soul will reveal itself in treating every man or woman, however lowly, as a representative of one of these creative and contributory groups.
History in the large is the conflict of minorities; the majority applauds the victor and supplies the human material of social experiment.
When I introspect I perceive not merely sensations and ideas but desire, will, ambition, and pride as vital phases of me. Spinoza was right: “desiderium ipsa essentia hominis” – desire is the very essence of man. We are living flames of desire until we admit final defeat. Will is desire expressed in ideas that become actions unless impeded by contrary or substitute desires and ideas. Character is the sum of our desires, fears, propensities, habits, abilities, and ideas.
We are choked with News and starved of History.
Racial” antipathies have some roots in ethnic origin, but they are also generated, perhaps predominantly, by differences of acquired culture – of language, dress, habits, morals, or religion. There is no cure for such antipathies except a broadened education.
When a simpleton abused him, Buddha listened in silence; but when the man had finished, Buddha asked him: “Son, if a man declined to accept a present made to him, to whom would it belong?” The man answered: “To him who offered it.” “My son,” said Buddha, “I decline to accept your abuse, and request you to keep it for yourself.
Centuries of barbarism, insecurity and war had to intervene before man could defile his God with attributes of undying vengeance and inexhaustible cruelty.
If you look at a map of Europe you will observe that Greece is a skeleton-like hand stretching its crooked fingers out into the Mediterranean Sea.