Notable Quotable 336

Oct 25, 2024

A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live.

- Thomas Merton

These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

- C.S. Lewis

The first thing to realize, if you wish to become a philosopher, is that most people go through life with a whole world of beliefs that have no sort of rational justification, and that one man’s world of beliefs is apt to be incompatible with another man’s, so that they cannot both be right. People’s opinions are mainly designed to make them feel comfortable; truth, for most people is a secondary consideration.

- Bertrand Russell

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

- G.K. Chesterton

False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

- Plato

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We have been given so many excellences, so many skills, and a mind, moreover, which can penetrate anything with the force of its application, swifter than the stars whose courses, many centuries hence, it anticipates. And what a wealth of harvests we have, of riches, of treasures one piled up on top of the other. You may go round all creation and, finding nothing which in its entirety you would rather be, pick out from everything individual gifts which you would like to have – if you make a true judgment of Nature’s kindness, you must confess that you are her favourite. The fact is that we have been, and are, dearest to the immortal gods. They have bestowed the greatest honour possible on us by placing us next to them. Much we had given to us. We had no room for more.

- Seneca

Tradition is the everlasting memory of mankind; remembering the great lessons of its past, storing them up in the mind of man, until they become instinctive, even as the half-conscious knowledge of the beast is stored as a protection from danger.

- George Robert Stirling Taylor

Be true to your old dreams so that our world will not lose hope.

- Ezra Pound

The contemplation of celestial things will make a man both speak and think more sublimely and magnificently when he descends to human affairs.

- Cicero

Dost thou not understand that there are two distinct forces in us, that of the soul and that of the body, that is, a movement and a regulator?

- Jules Verne