F. H. Bradley
The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil.Collection: Best
The man who has ceased to fear has ceased to care.Collection: Fear
The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring. And that is not happiness.Collection: Happiness
It is by a wise economy of nature that those who suffer without change, and whom no one can help, become uninteresting. Yet so it may happen that those who need sympathy the most often attract it the least.Collection: Sympathy
There are those who so dislike the nude that they find something indecent in the naked truth.
We say that a girl with her doll anticipates the mother. It is more true, perhaps, that most mothers are still but children with playthings.
The one self-knowledge worth having is to know one's own mind.
One said of suicide, As long as one has brains one should not blow them out. And another answered, But when one has ceased to have them, too often one cannot.
True penitence condemns to silence. What a man is ready to recall he would be willing to repeat.
Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct; but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.
The deadliest foe to virtue would be complete self-knowledge.
It is good to know what a man is, and also what the world takes him for. But you do not understand him until you have learnt how he understands himself.
Another occupation might have been better.
The mood in which my book was conceived and executed, was in fact to some extent a passing one.
There are persons who, when they cease to shock us, cease to interest us.
Eclecticism - every truth is so true that any truth must be false.
Our live experiences, fixed in aphorisms, stiffen into cold epigrams. Our heart's blood, as we write it, turns to mere dull ink.
Adam knew Eve his wife and she conceived. It is a pity that this is still the only knowledge of their wives at which some men seem to arrive.
The force of the blow depends on the resistance. It is sometimes better not to struggle against temptation. Either fly or yield at once.
The one self- knowledge worth having is to know one's own mind.Collection: Knowledge
I can myself conceive of nothing else than the experienced.Collection: I Can
The hunter for aphorisms on human nature has to fish in muddy water, and he is even condemned to find much of his own mind.Collection: Water
His mind is so open - so open that ideas simply pass through it.Collection: Sarcastic
The cost of a thing is what I call life which has to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.Collection: Running
Religion is rather the attempt to express the complete reality of goodness through every aspect of our being.Collection: Reality
The man whose nature is such that by one path alone his chief desire will reach consummation will try to find it on that path, whatever it may be, and whatever the world thinks of it; and if he does not, he is contemptible.Collection: Men
Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct.Collection: Believe
An aphorism is true where it has fixed the impression of a genuine experience.Collection: Aphorism
The propriety of some persons seems to consist in having improper thoughts about their neighbors.Collection: Neighbor
My external sensations are no less private to my self than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside... the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.Collection: Fall
Reason teaches us that what is good is good for something, and that what is good for nothing is not good at all.Collection: Reason
Up to a certain point every man is what he thinks he is.Collection: Crazy
Eclecticism. Every truth is so true that any truth must be false.Collection: Fake People
But when one has ceased to have them, too often one cannot.Collection: Suicide
Where everything is bad it must be good to know the worst.Collection: Anxiety
Few people would not be the worse for complete sincerity.Collection: People
The Self has turned out to mean so many things, to mean them so ambiguously, and to be so wavering in its application, that we do not feel encouraged.Collection: Mean
I will begin with the self-styled "Christian" party, who profess to base their morality on the New Testament. But whether it is really more Christian to follow or to ignore the teachings of the Gospels I shall not discuss.Collection: Christian