“The real trouble is that 'kindness' is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds. Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment. Thus a man easily comes to console himself for all his other vices by a conviction that 'his heart's in the right place' and 'he wouldn't hurt a fly,' though in fact he has never made the slightest sacrifice for a fellow creature. We think we are kind when we are only happy: it is not so easy, on the same grounds, to imagine oneself temperate, chaste, or humble.”
Wise feeling
Wise Quotes — page 191 of 916
“Anyone who is honestly trying to be a Christian will soon find his intelligence being sharpened: one of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself. That is why an uneducated believer like Bunyan was able to write a book that has astonished the whole world.”
“Is there a difference between a man who thinks that honesty is the best policy, and an honest man?”
“The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of them which will not make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it is not. If you leave out justice you will find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials "for the sake of humanity", and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man.”
“Better mad with the rest of the world than wise alone.”
“Wise guidance never violates people's Free Will. A superior who demands obedience of his subordinates should show respect for their capacity to understand, and also for their Innate Right to their own Free Will.”
“Only through communication can human life hold meaning.”
“Formulae are the anaesthetics of thought, not its stimulants and to make any one think is far better worth while than cramming him with ill-considered, and therefore indigestible, learning.”
“History has been written not by the most talented but by the most motivated.”
“Innovation requires us to systematically identify changes that have already occurred in a business - in demographics, in values, in technology or science - and then to look at them as opportunities. It also requires something that is most difficult for existing companies to do: to abandon rather than defend yesterday.”
“Not every truth is the better for showing its face undisguised; and often silence is the wisest thing for a man to heed.”
“A man is not learned until he can read, write and swim.”
“Knowledge of the soul is the only universal truth and the only wisdom - all other knowledge is transient.”
“Glory ought to be the consequence, not the motive of our actions.”
“The Church is a virgin, the bride of one Spouse, Who is Christ, and this Church does not allow herself to be violated by any error; so that, throughout the whole world there may be for us one uncorruptedness of a single chaste communion.”
“The words of the President have an enormous weight and ought not to be used indiscriminately.”
“In a republic the first rule for the guidance of the citizen is obedience of the law.”
“The way I see it, a person isn't nothing more than a scarecrow... The only difference between one that stands up good and one that blows over is what kind of a stick they're stuck up there on.”
“Character is the result of two things: mental attitude and the way we spend our time.”
“Zen masters say you cannot see your reflection in running water, only in still water.”