The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one’s mind a pleasant place in which to spend one’s leisure.
We believe what we want to believe, what we like to believe, what suits our prejudices and fuels our passions.
The paradox of friendship is that it is both the strongest thing in the world and the most fragile. Wild horses cannot separate friends, but whining words can. A man will lay down his life for his friend but will not sacrifice his eardrums.
Skepticism is not an end in itself; it is a tool for the discovery of truths.
Many a secret that cannot be pried out by curiosity can be drawn out by indifference.
Never take the advice of someone who has not had your kind of trouble.
A famously wise old man in a village was once asked how he came by his wisdom. “I got it from my good judgment,” he answered. And where did his good judgment come from? “I got it from my bad judgment.”
When we have “second thoughts” about something, our first thoughts don’t seem like thoughts at all – just feelings.
All significant achievement comes from daring from experiment from the willingness to risk failure.
When a baseball player makes an error, it goes into the record and is published. How many of us could stand this sort of daily scrutiny?
Somebody who never got over the embarrassing fact that he was born in bed with a lady.
The truest test of independent judgment is being able to dislike someone who admires us, and to admire someone who dislikes us.
All our efforts to attain immortality-by statesmanship, by conquest, by science or the arts-are equally vain in the long run, because the long run is longer than any of us can imagine.
Patriotism is proud of a country’s virtues and eager to correct its deficiencies; it also acknowledges the legitimate patriotism of other countries, with their own specific virtues. The pride of nationalism, however, trumpets its country’s virtues and denies its deficiencies, while it is contemptuous toward the virtues of other countries. It wants to be, and proclaims itself to be, “the greatest”, but greatness is not required of a country; only goodness is.
In most cases, it gives a false impression of my views – but when i am confronting an extremist, I become a passionate defender of the opposite view... This, of course, is a senseless way to behave; it is over-reacting to a situation. But, in all fairness, there is something about extremism that breeds its own opposite.
A good talker is sensitive to expression, to tone and color and inflection in human speech. Because he himself is articulate, he can help others to articulate their half-formulated feelings. His mind fills in the gaps, and he becomes, in Socrates’ words, a kind of midwife for ideas that are struggling to be born.
The Unconvincibles are the people who are not amenable to reason of any sort. Their minds are not only closed, but bolted and hermetically sealed. In most cases, their beliefs congealed at an early age; by the time they left their teens, they were encased in a rigid framework of thought and feeling, which no evidence or argument can penetrate.
Parents should learn to stop nagging their children about how well they could do “if you only tried more, or cared more.” Trying and caring, in specific areas, is built into people; or else it comes to them later, if they mature properly; or it never comes at all. But it is dead certain that no young person was ever motivated by a querulous, disappointed parent more concerned with his own pride than with the child’s ultimate self-actualization.
The principal difference between love and hate is that love is an irradiation, and hate is a concentration. Love makes everything lovely; hate concentrates itself on the object of its hatred. All the fearful counterfeits of love – possessiveness, lust, vanity, jealousy – are closer to hate: they concentrate on the object, guard it, suck it dry.
Success is just a little more effort.
We are all too fond of naive answers to complex questions, because it relieves us of the necessity of thinking hard and it permits us to find a scapegoat for our own mistakes. The simple answer almost always places the blame on someone else. We need to pluralize our thinking, to recognize that if you ask the wrong question, you cannot get the right answers.