Plain and Simple Minds
About Life, Happiness
Without music, life would be a mistake.
And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.
Life is that which must overcome itself again and again.
To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.
The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
It is essential to happiness that our way of living should spring from our own deep impulses and not from the accidental tastes and desires of those who happen to be our neighbors, or even our relations.
A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live.
Rules for happiness: something to do, someone to love, something to hope for.
Articles: The World as I See It | The Strenuous Life | Solitude | What I Have Lived For | The Tapestry of Human Life
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Plain and Simple Minds
About Knowledge, Education
There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.
Ignorance, the root and stem of every evil.
All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.
How then is perfection to be sought? Wherein lies our hope? In education, and in nothing else.
Education is teaching our children to desire the right things.
Education is not to be viewed as something like filling a vessel with water but, rather, assisting a flower to grow in its own way.
What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.
When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
The world that I should wish to see would be one freed from the virulence of group hostilities and capable of realizing that happiness for all is to be derived rather from co-operation than from strife. I should wish to see a world in which education aimed at mental freedom rather than imprisoning the minds of the young in rigid armor of dogma calculated to protect them through life against the shafts of impartial evidence.
Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.
When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That’s if you want to teach them to think.
Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.
It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them.
Articles: Of Studies | General's Prayer for His Son | Francis Scott Fitzgerald to His Daughter
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Plain and Simple Minds
About Life, Happiness
Without music, life would be a mistake.
And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.
Life is that which must overcome itself again and again.
To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.
The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
It is essential to happiness that our way of living should spring from our own deep impulses and not from the accidental tastes and desires of those who happen to be our neighbors, or even our relations.
A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live.
Rules for happiness: something to do, someone to love, something to hope for.
Articles: The World as I See It | The Strenuous Life | Solitude | What I Have Lived For | The Tapestry of Human Life
------------------------------------------------
About Knowledge, Education
There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.
Ignorance, the root and stem of every evil.
All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.
How then is perfection to be sought? Wherein lies our hope? In education, and in nothing else.
Education is teaching our children to desire the right things.
Education is not to be viewed as something like filling a vessel with water but, rather, assisting a flower to grow in its own way.
What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.
When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
The world that I should wish to see would be one freed from the virulence of group hostilities and capable of realizing that happiness for all is to be derived rather from co-operation than from strife. I should wish to see a world in which education aimed at mental freedom rather than imprisoning the minds of the young in rigid armor of dogma calculated to protect them through life against the shafts of impartial evidence.
Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.
When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That’s if you want to teach them to think.
Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.
It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them.
Articles: Of Studies | General's Prayer for His Son | Francis Scott Fitzgerald to His Daughter
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About Friendship, Love, Marrage
Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow ripening fruit.
What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.
Surround yourself with people who make you happy. People who make you laugh, who help you when you’re in need. People who genuinely care. They are the ones worth keeping in your life. Everyone else is just passing through.
Love can flourish only as long as it is free and spontaneous; it tends to be killed by the thought of duty. To say that it is your duty to love so-and-so is the surest way to cause you to hate him of her.
Man is like a hedgehog in the cold winter. It hurts to stand too close, and it gets cold to stand too far away.
The difference between love and mere sex attraction. Love is an experience in which our whole being is renewed and refreshed as is that of plants by rain after drought. In sex intercourse without love there is nothing of this. When the momentary pleasure is ended, there is fatigue, disgust, and a sense that life is hollow. Love is part of the life of Earth; sex without love is not.
Love is not two people gazing at each other, but two people looking ahead together in the same direction.
When considering marriage one should ask oneself this question; 'will I be able to talk with this person into old age?' Everything else is transitory, the most time is spent in conversation.
Morality in sexual relations, when it is free from superstition, consists essentially in respect for the other person, and unwillingness to use that person solely as a means of personal gratification, without regard to his or her desires.
Marrying means to halve one's rights and double one's duties
Articles: Of Friendship | Henry David Thoreau to Ralph Waldo Emerson | | Of Love | The Date Father Didn't Keep | New Life | Percy Bysshe Shelley to Elizabeth Hitchener | Karl Marx to Jenny Marx
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Plain and Simple Minds
About Thought, Prejudice
Stupidity and unconscious bias often work more damage than venality.
A good social system is not to be secured by making people unselfish, but, by making their own vital impulses fit in with other peoples. This is feasible. Those who have produced stoic philosophies have all had enough to eat and drink.
A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.
We need a morality based upon love of life, upon pleasure in growth and positive achievement, not upon repression and prohibition.
Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.
Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.
It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Very many people spend money in ways quite different from those that their natural tastes would enjoin, merely because the respect of their neighbors depends upon their possession of a good car and their ability to give good dinners. As a matter of fact, any man who can obviously afford a car but genuinely prefers travel or a good library will in the end be much more respected than if he behaved exactly like everyone else.
No man is liberated from fear who dare not see his place in the world as it is; no man can achieve the greatness of which he is capable until he has allowed himself to see his own littleness.
Any passionate and courageous life seems good in itself, yet one feels that some element of delusion is involved in giving so much passion to any humanly attainable object. And so irony creeps into the very springs of one's being.
The high-minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think.
People are always angry at anyone who chooses very individual standards for his life; because of the extraordinary treatment which that man grants to himself, they feel degraded, like ordinary beings.
Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.
And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
Dogmatism is the greatest of mental obstacles to human happiness.
You should not honor men more than truth.
Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?
Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.
Science does not aim at establishing immutable truths and eternal dogmas; its aim is to approach the truth by successive approximations, without claiming that at any stage final and complete accuracy has been achieved.
Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid ... Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
Article: Upon Affectation
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Plain and Simple Minds
About Wisdom, Work
Doubt is the origin of wisdom.
In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.
Conquer yourself rather than the world.
The most common lie is that which one lies to himself; lying to others is relatively an exception.
An action, to have moral worth, must be done from duty.
Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.
The measure of a man is what he does with power.
Understanding human nature must be the basis of any real improvement in human life.
To know what people really think, pay attention to what they do, rather than what they say.
Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives - choice, not chance, determines your destiny.
Every action has its pleasures and its price.
Whenever you find yourself getting angry about a difference of opinion, be on your guard; you will probably find, on examination, that your belief is going beyond what the evidence warrants.
The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.
A habit of finding pleasure in thought rather than action is a safeguard against unwisdom and excessive love of power, a means of preserving serenity in misfortune and peace of mind among worries. A life confined to what is personal is likely, sooner or later, to become unbearably painful; it is only by windows into a larger and less fretful cosmos that the more tragic parts of life become endurable.
Never let yourself be diverted, either by what you wish to believe, or what you think could have beneficent social effects if it were believed; but look only and solely at what are the facts.
what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first one is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.
Articles: Of Friendship | Henry David Thoreau to Ralph Waldo Emerson | | Of Love | The Date Father Didn't Keep | New Life | Percy Bysshe Shelley to Elizabeth Hitchener | Karl Marx to Jenny Marx
Plain and Simple Minds
About Thought, Prejudice
Stupidity and unconscious bias often work more damage than venality.
A good social system is not to be secured by making people unselfish, but, by making their own vital impulses fit in with other peoples. This is feasible. Those who have produced stoic philosophies have all had enough to eat and drink.
A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.
We need a morality based upon love of life, upon pleasure in growth and positive achievement, not upon repression and prohibition.
Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.
Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.
It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Very many people spend money in ways quite different from those that their natural tastes would enjoin, merely because the respect of their neighbors depends upon their possession of a good car and their ability to give good dinners. As a matter of fact, any man who can obviously afford a car but genuinely prefers travel or a good library will in the end be much more respected than if he behaved exactly like everyone else.
No man is liberated from fear who dare not see his place in the world as it is; no man can achieve the greatness of which he is capable until he has allowed himself to see his own littleness.
Any passionate and courageous life seems good in itself, yet one feels that some element of delusion is involved in giving so much passion to any humanly attainable object. And so irony creeps into the very springs of one's being.
The high-minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think.
People are always angry at anyone who chooses very individual standards for his life; because of the extraordinary treatment which that man grants to himself, they feel degraded, like ordinary beings.
Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.
And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
Dogmatism is the greatest of mental obstacles to human happiness.
You should not honor men more than truth.
Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?
Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.
Science does not aim at establishing immutable truths and eternal dogmas; its aim is to approach the truth by successive approximations, without claiming that at any stage final and complete accuracy has been achieved.
Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid ... Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
Article: Upon Affectation
------------------------------------------------
Plain and Simple Minds
About Wisdom, Work
Doubt is the origin of wisdom.
In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.
Conquer yourself rather than the world.
The most common lie is that which one lies to himself; lying to others is relatively an exception.
An action, to have moral worth, must be done from duty.
Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.
The measure of a man is what he does with power.
Understanding human nature must be the basis of any real improvement in human life.
To know what people really think, pay attention to what they do, rather than what they say.
Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives - choice, not chance, determines your destiny.
Every action has its pleasures and its price.
Whenever you find yourself getting angry about a difference of opinion, be on your guard; you will probably find, on examination, that your belief is going beyond what the evidence warrants.
The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.
A habit of finding pleasure in thought rather than action is a safeguard against unwisdom and excessive love of power, a means of preserving serenity in misfortune and peace of mind among worries. A life confined to what is personal is likely, sooner or later, to become unbearably painful; it is only by windows into a larger and less fretful cosmos that the more tragic parts of life become endurable.
Never let yourself be diverted, either by what you wish to believe, or what you think could have beneficent social effects if it were believed; but look only and solely at what are the facts.
what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first one is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.
We are not rich by what we possess but by what we can do without.
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