Quotes4study

There is a wisdom in this beyond the rules of physic. A man's own observation, what he finds good of and what he finds hurt of, is the best physic to preserve health.

FRANCIS BACON. 1561-1626.     _Of Regimen of Health._

The things that annoy us in life are after all very trifling things, if we always bear in mind for what purpose we are here. And even in the heavier trials, one knows, or one should know, that all is sent by a higher power, and in the end must be for our best interests. It is true we cannot understand it, but we can understand that God rules in the world in the smallest and in the largest events, and he who keeps that ever in mind has the peace of God, and enjoys his life as long as it lasts.

Friedrich Max Müller     Thoughts on Life and Religion

I love child things because there's so much mystery when you're a child. When you're a child, something as simple as a tree doesn't make sense. You see it in the distance and it looks small, but as you go closer, it seems to grow you haven't got a handle on the rules when you're a child. We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experienced is a narrowing of the imagination.

David Lynch

If it be asked, What is the improper expectation which it is dangerous to indulge, experience will quickly answer that it is such expectation as is dictated not by reason but by desire--an expectation that requires the common course of things to be changed, and the general rules of action to be broken.

_Johnson._

Love rules without a sword and binds without a cord.

Proverb.

Vitam regit fortuna, non sapientia=--Fortune rules this life, and not wisdom.

Cicero.

The end of society is peace and mutual protection, so that the individual may reach the fullest and highest life attainable by man. The rules of conduct by which this end is to be attained are discoverable--like the other so-called laws of Nature--by observation and experiment, and only in that way.

T. H. Huxley     Aphorisms and Reflections from the Works of T. H. Huxley

No working world, any more than a fighting world, can be led on without a noble chivalry of work, and laws and fixed rules which follow out of that--far nobler than any chivalry of fighting war.

_Carlyle._

The life, the fortune, and the happiness of every one of us, and, more or less, of those who are connected with us, do depend upon our knowing something of the rules of a game infinitely more difficult and complicated than chess. It is a game which has been played for untold ages, every man and woman of us being one of the two players in a game of his or her own. The chessboard is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance. To the man who plays well, the highest stakes are paid, with that sort of overflowing generosity with which the strong shows delight in strength. And one who plays ill is checkmated--without haste, but without remorse.

T. H. Huxley     Aphorisms and Reflections from the Works of T. H. Huxley

In peace, Love tunes the shepherd's reed; In war, he mounts the warrior's steed; In halls, in gay attire is seen; In hamlets, dances on the green. Love rules the court, the camp, the grove, And men below and saints above; For love is heaven, and heaven is love.

SIR WALTER SCOTT. 1771-1832.     _Lay of the Last Minstrel. Canto iii. Stanza 1._

Ware der Geist nicht frei, dann war' es ein grosser Gedanke, / Dass ein Gedankenmonarch uber die Seele regiert=--Only if the spirit of man were not free, would the thought be a great one that there is a monarch of thought who rules over our souls.

_Platen._

Maybe I don’t blame myself for what happened, but when they tell you that something was completely and utterly random, they’re also telling you something else. That nothing you do matters. It doesn’t matter if you do everything right, if you dress the right way and act the right way and follow all the rules, because evil will find you anyway. Evil’s resourceful that way.

Katja Millay

Let my rules guide thy conduct; see how I have led the Virgin and the saints who have let me act in them.

Blaise Pascal     The Thoughts of Blaise Pascal

_Spongia solis._--When we see the same effect invariably recur we conclude there is in it a natural necessity, as that there will be a to-morrow, etc. But nature often gives us the lie, and will not subject herself to her own rules.

Blaise Pascal     The Thoughts of Blaise Pascal

All religions and sects in the world have had natural reason for a guide. Christians alone have been obliged to take their rules from without themselves, and to acquaint themselves with those which Jesus Christ left to men of old time to be transmitted to the faithful. This constraint is wearisome to these good fathers. They desire like the rest of the world to have liberty to follow their imaginations. In vain we cry to them, as the prophets to the Jews of old: "Enter into the Church, enquire of the ways which men of old have left to her, and follow those paths." They have answered, as did the Jews, "We will not walk in them, but we will follow the thoughts of our hearts;" and they have said, "We will be as the nations round about us."

Blaise Pascal     The Thoughts of Blaise Pascal

>Rules of society are nothing; one's conscience is the umpire.

_Mme. Dudevant._

Fancy rules over two-thirds of the universe, the past and the future, while reality is confined to the present.

_Jean Paul._

Force rules the world, and not opinion, but opinion is that which makes use of force.

_Pascal._

Geld beheert de wereld.=--Money rules the world.

_Dut. Pr._

Pedantry and mastery are opposite attitudes toward rules. To apply a rule to the letter, rigidly, unquestioningly, in cases where it fits and in cases where it does not fit, is pedantry... To apply a rule with natural ease, with judgment, noticing the cases where it fits, and without ever letting the words of the rule obscure the purpose of the action or the opportunities of the situation, is mastery.

George Pólya (date of birth

You are glad to know general rules, thinking by that to introduce difficulties, and render all useless. We shall stop you, my good father; truth is one, and strong.

Blaise Pascal     The Thoughts of Blaise Pascal

There is a spiritual obligation, there is a task to be done. It is not, however, something as simple as following a set of somebody else's rules. The noetic enterprise is a primary obligation toward being. Our salvation is linked to it. Not everyone has to read alchemical texts or study superconducting biomolecules to make the transition. Most people make it naively by thinking clearly about the present at hand, but we intellectuals are trapped in a world of too much information. Innocence is gone for us. We cannot expect to cross the rainbow bridge through a good act of contrition; that will not be sufficient. We have to understand.

Terence McKenna

Disguise our bondage as we will, / 'Tis woman, woman rules us still.

_Moore._

Piety, like wisdom, consists in the discovery of the rules under which we are actually placed, and in faithfully obeying them.

_Froude._

If you ever get trial by television or guilt by accusation, that day freedom dies because you have not had it done with all of the careful rules that have developed in a court of law. Press and television rely on freedom. Those who rely on freedom must uphold the rule of law and have a duty and a responsibility to do so and not try to substitute their own system for it.

Margaret Thatcher (born 13 October 1925

Kraft erwart' ich vom Mann, des Gesetzes Wurde behaupt' er; / Aber durch Anmuth allein herrschet und herrsche das Weib=--I look for power in the man; he affirms the dignity of the law; but the woman rules, and will continue to rule, through grace alone.

_Schiller._

There is but one unconditional commandment, which is that we should seek incessantly, with fear and trembling, so to vote and to act as to bring about the very largest total universe of good which we can see. Abstract rules indeed can help; but they help the less in proportion as our intuitions are more piercing, and our vocation is the stronger for the moral life. For every real dilemma is in literal strictness a unique situation; and the exact combination of ideals realized and ideals disappointed which each decision creates is always a universe without a precedent, and for which no adequate previous rule exists.

William James

Mechanic slaves With greasy aprons, rules, and hammers.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 1564-1616.     _Antony and Cleopatra. Act v. Sc. 2._

Lenin’s and Stalin’s form of communism is gone, yet its trappings have been expropriated by mega-corporations. We have companies featuring central planning by troikas, mission statements crafted by apparatchiks, five-year plans, no right to choose leaders in companies, no democracy in the workplace, a clear distinction between intelligentsia and peasants (top CEOs make 152 times the median salary and enjoy company dachas, jets, and limos), and state monitoring (time clocks, dress codes, drug screening, “employee assistance” plans, e-mail monitoring, no smoking, and other personal conduct rules, as well as family-life audits).

Ricardo Semler

He who learns the rules of wisdom without conforming to them in his life, is like a man who labours in his fields but does not sow.

_Saadi._

In the family where the house-father rules secure, there dwells the peace= (_Friede_) =which thou wilt in vain seek for elsewhere in the wide world outside.

_Goethe._

All their life was spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure. They rose out of their beds when they thought good: they did eat, drink, labour, sleep, when they had a mind to it, and were disposed for it. None did awake them, none did offer to constrain them to eat, drink, nor to do any other thing; for so had Gargantua established it. In all their rule, and strictest tie of their order, there was but this one clause to be observed, DO WHAT THOU WILT. Because men that are free, well-born, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth them unto virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice, which is called honour.

François Rabelais

But the spirit of the science of painting deals with all works, human as well as divine, which are terminated by their surfaces, that is, the lines of the limits of bodies by means of which the sculptor is required to achieve perfection in his art. She with her fundamental rules, i.e. drawing, teaches the architect how to work so that his building may be pleasant to the eye; she teaches the makers of diverse vases, the goldsmiths, weavers, embroiderers; she has found the characters with which diverse languages find expression; she has given symbols to the mathematicians; she has taught geometry its figures, and instructed the astrologers, the makers of machines and engineers.

Leonardo da Vinci     Thoughts on Art and Life

For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again.

Eric Roth

Works of art make rules but rules do not make works of art.

Claude Debussy

She who ne'er answers till a husband cools, Or if she rules him, never shows she rules.

ALEXANDER POPE. 1688-1744.     _Moral Essays. Epistle ii. Line 261._

Love rules without law.

_It. Pr._

For all a rhetorician's rules Teach nothing but to name his tools.

SAMUEL BUTLER. 1600-1680.     _Hudibras. Part i. Canto i. Line 89._

To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.

Voltaire

The proverbial wisdom of the populace in the street, on the roads, and in the markets, instructs the ear of him who studies man more fully than a thousand rules ostentatiously displayed.--_Lavater._

Maturin M. Ballou     Pearls of Thought

He rules the world with truth and grace, And makes the nations prove The glories of His righteousness, And wonders of His love, And wonders of His love, And wonders, wonders, of His love.

Isaac Watts

One definition of justice is “giving to each what he or she is due.” The problem is knowing what is “due”. Functionally, “justice” is a set of universal principles which guide people in judging what is right and what is wrong, no matter what culture and society they live in. Justice is one of the four “cardinal virtues” of classical moral philosophy, along with courage, temperance (self-control) and prudence (efficiency). (Faith, hope and charity are considered to be the three “religious” virtues.) Virtues or “good habits” help individuals to develop fully their human potentials, thus enabling them to serve their own self-interests as well as work in harmony with others for their common good. The ultimate purpose of all the virtues is to elevate the dignity and sovereignty of the human person. While often confused, justice is distinct from the virtue of charity. Charity, derived from the Latin word caritas, or “divine love,” is the soul of justice. Justice supplies the material foundation for charity. While justice deals with the substance and rules for guiding ordinary, everyday human interactions, charity deals with the spirit of human interactions and with those exceptional cases where strict application of the rules is not appropriate or sufficient. Charity offers expedients during times of hardship. Charity compels us to give to relieve the suffering of a person in need. The highest aim of charity is the same as the highest aim of justice: to elevate each person to where he does not need charity but can become charitable himself. True charity involves giving without any expectation of return. But it is not a substitute for justice. [“Toward Economic and Social Justice: Founding Principles of CESJ,” 1987.]

Center for Economic and Social Justice.

_Submission._--We must know when to doubt, when to feel certain, when to submit. Who fails in this understands not the force of reason. There are those who offend against these three rules, either by accepting everything as evidence, for want of knowing what evidence is; or by doubting everything, for want of knowing when to submit; or by yielding in everything, for want of knowing when to use their judgment.

Blaise Pascal     The Thoughts of Blaise Pascal

The greatest of all economists are the fortifying virtues, which the wisest men of all time have arranged under the general heads of Prudence, or Discretion, the spirit which discerns and adopts rightly; Justice, the spirit which rules and divides rightly; Fortitude, the spirit which persists and endures rightly; and Temperance, the spirit which stops and refuses rightly.

_Ruskin._

If I'd observed all the rules I'd never have got anywhere.

Marilyn Monroe

~Art.~--Rules may teach us not to raise the arms above the head; but if passion carries them, it will be well done: passion knows more than art.--_Baron._

Maturin M. Ballou     Pearls of Thought

~Hyperbole.~--Sprightly natures, full of fire, and whom a boundless imagination carries beyond all rules, and even what is reasonable, cannot rest satisfied with hyperbole.--_Bruyère._

Maturin M. Ballou     Pearls of Thought

Love rules the camp, the court, the grove, / And men below and saints above; / For love is heaven, and heaven is love.

_Scott._

Obviously if the mind turns away from one part of the environment it will only do so under some temptation to correspond with another. This temptation, at bottom, can only come from one source--the love of self. The irreligious man's correspondences are concentrated upon himself. He worships himself. Self-gratification rather than self-denial; independence rather than submission--these are the rules of life. And this is at once the poorest and the commonest form of idolatry. Natural Law, p. 170.

Henry Drummond     Beautiful Thoughts

Slowly but certainly the proletarian, by every political reform which secures his well-being under new rules of insurance, of State control in education, of State medicine and the rest, is developing into the slave, leaving the rich man apart and free. All industrial civilization is clearly moving towards the re-establishment of the Servile State,… [“The Faith and Capitalism,” Essays of a Catholic . Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1992, p. 226.]

Belloc, Hilaire.

The position which Christianity from the very beginning took up with regard to Judaism served as the first lesson in comparative theology, and directed the attention even of the unlearned to a comparison of two religions, differing in their conception of the Deity, in their estimate of humanity, in their motives of morality, and in their hope of immortality, yet sharing so much in common that there are but few of the psalms and prayers in the Old Testament in which a Christian cannot heartily join even now, and but few rules of morality which he ought not even now to obey.

Friedrich Max Müller     Thoughts on Life and Religion

When Britain first, at Heaven's command, Arose from out the azure main, This was the charter of her land, And guardian angels sung the strain: Rule, Britannia! Britannia rules the waves! Britons never shall be slaves.

JAMES THOMSON. 1700-1748.     _Alfred. Act ii. Sc. 5._

The best rules to form a young man are, to talk little, to hear much, to reflect alone upon what has passed in company, to distrust one's own opinions, and value others' that deserve it.

_Sir W. Temple._

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

W. Somerset Maugham

"A few strong instincts and a few plain rules" suffice us.

_Emerson, from Wordsworth._

As duchies, kingships, and magistracies are real and necessary, because power rules all, these exist every where and always. But since it is only caprice which makes one or another duke or king, the rule is not constant, and may vary, etc.

Blaise Pascal     The Thoughts of Blaise Pascal

How far should one accept the rules of the society in which one lives? To put it another way: at what point does conformity become corruption? Only by answering such questions does the conscience truly define itself.

Kenneth Tynan

There is a higher kind of music which we all have to learn, if our life is to be harmonious, beautiful, and useful. There are certain intervals between the young and the old which must be there, which are meant to be there, without which life would be monotonous; but out of these intervals and varieties the true art of life knows how to build up perfect harmonies.... Even great sorrow may be a blessing, by drawing some of our affections away from this life to a better life ... of which, it is true, we know nothing, but from which, when we see the wisdom and love that underlie this life, we may hope everything. We are meant to hope and to trust, and that is often much harder than to see and to know.... The greatest of all arts is the art of life, and the best of all music the harmony of spirits. There are many little rules to be learnt for giving harmony and melody to our life, but the thorough bass must be--love.

Friedrich Max Müller     Thoughts on Life and Religion

There are different societies, in which are the strong, the fair, the judicious, the devout, in which each man rules at home, not elsewhere. Sometimes they meet, and the strong and the fair contend for the mastery, foolishly, for their mastery is each in a different kind. They do not agree, and their fault is that each aims at universal dominion. None can obtain this, not even power, which is of no avail in the realm of the wise; she is only mistress of our external actions.

Blaise Pascal     The Thoughts of Blaise Pascal

The two best rules for a system of rhetoric are: first, have something to say; and next, say it.

_George Emmons._

The mind of the painter should continually transmute the figure of the notable objects which come before him into so many discourses; and imprint them in his memory and classify them {116} and deduce rules from them, taking the place, the circumstances, the light and the shade into consideration.

Leonardo da Vinci     Thoughts on Art and Life

Gold beheert de wereld=--Gold rules the world.

_Dut. Pr._

Of all the passions that possess mankind, / The love of novelty rules most the mind; / In search of this, from realm to realm we roam, / Our fleets come fraught with every folly home.

_Foote._

Laws are not masters, but servants, and he rules them who obeys them.

_Ward Beecher._

~Salary.~--Other rules vary; this is the only one you will find without exception: That in this world the salary or reward is always in the inverse ratio of the duties performed.--_Sydney Smith._

Maturin M. Ballou     Pearls of Thought

War suspends the rules of moral obligation, and what is long suspended is in danger of being totally abrogated.

_Burke._

From sensuality men have found and drawn excellent rules of policy, of morals, and of justice.

Blaise Pascal     The Thoughts of Blaise Pascal

As a natural process, of the same character as the development of a tree from its seed; or of a fowl from its egg, evolution excludes creation and all other kinds of supernatural intervention. As the expression of a fixed order, every stage of which is the effect of causes operating according to definite rules, the conception of evolution no less excludes that of chance. It is very desirable to remember that evolution is not an explanation of the cosmic process, but merely a generalized statement of the method and results of that process. And, further, that, if there is proof that the cosmic process was set going by any agent, then that agent will be the creator of it and of all its products, although, supernatural intervention may remain strictly excluded from its further course.

T. H. Huxley     Aphorisms and Reflections from the Works of T. H. Huxley

Bullies — political bullies, economic bullies, and religious bullies — cannot be appeased; they have to be opposed with courage, clarity, and conviction. This is never easy. These true believers don't fight fair. Robert's Rules of Order is not one of their holy texts.

Bill Moyers

The twelve good rules, the royal game of goose.

OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 1728-1774.     _The Deserted Village. Line 232._

Yet it is an astonishing thing that the mystery most removed from our knowledge, that of the transmission of sin, should be a thing without which we can have no knowledge of ourselves. For it is certain that nothing more shocks our reason than to say that the sin of the first man rendered those culpable, who, being so distant from the source, seem incapable of participation in it. This transfusion does not only seem to us impossible, but even most unjust, for there is nothing so repugnant to the rules of our miserable justice as to damn eternally an infant incapable of will, for a sin in which he seems to have so scanty a share, that it was committed six thousand years before he was in being. Certainly nothing shocks us more rudely than this doctrine, and yet without this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we are incomprehensible to ourselves. The tangle of our condition takes its plies and folds in this abyss, so that man is more inconceivable without the mystery than the mystery is inconceivable to man.

Blaise Pascal     The Thoughts of Blaise Pascal

Somewhere along the way, the gospel had gotten buried under a massive pile of extras: political positions, lifestyle requirements, and unspoken rules that for whatever reason came with the Christian territory. Sometimes Jesus himself seemed buried beneath the rubble.

Rachel Held Evans

Man has a soul as certainly as he has a body; nay, much more certainly; properly it is the course of his unseen spiritual life, which informs and rules his external visible life, rather than receives rule from it, in which spiritual life the true secret of his history lies.

_Carlyle._

We cannot think of Plato and Aristotle, save in professorial robes. They were honest men like others, laughing with their friends, and when they amused themselves with writing the _Laws_ or the _Politics_, they did it as a pastime. That part of their life was the least philosophic and the least serious; the most philosophic was to live simply and quietly. If they wrote on politics it was as though they were laying down rules for a madhouse, and if they made as though they were speaking of a great matter, it was because they knew that the madmen to whom they spoke fancied themselves kings and emperors. They entered into their views in order to make their folly as little harmful as possible.

Blaise Pascal     The Thoughts of Blaise Pascal

Much that was called religion has carried an unconscious attitude of hostility toward life. True religion must teach that life is filled with joys pleasing to the eye of God, that knowledge without action is empty. All men must see that the teaching of religion by rules and rote is largely a hoax. The proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you've always known.

Frank Herbert in Dune (born 8 October 1920

Simply having rules does not change the things that people want to do. You have to change incentives.

Jimmy Wales

One of the oldest and most important elements in such systems is the conception of justice. Society is impossible unless those who are associated agree to observe certain rules of conduct towards one another; its stability depends on the steadiness with which they abide by that agreement; and, so far as they waver, that mutual trust which is the bond of society is weakened or destroyed. Wolves could not hunt in packs except for the real, though unexpressed, understanding that they should not attack one another during the chase. The most rudimentary polity is a pack of men living under the like tacit, or expressed, understanding; and having made the very important advance upon wolf society, that they agree to use the force of the whole body against individuals who violate it and in favour of those who observe it. This observance of a common understanding, with the consequent distribution of punishments and rewards according to accepted rules, received the name of justice, while the contrary was called injustice. Early ethics did not take much note of the animus of the violator of the rules. But civilization could not advance far without the establishment of a capital distinction between the case of involuntary and that of wilful misdeed; between a merely wrong action and a guilty one.

T. H. Huxley     Aphorisms and Reflections from the Works of T. H. Huxley

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