Book detail: The Life of Reason: Human Understanding is presented as a focused source page for quotations connected with this book, collection, transcript, or source record.
This book delves into the intricacies of human thought and reasoning, offering a detailed analysis of the cognitive processes that underpin human understanding.
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“History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory.”
“To turn events into ideas is the function of literature.”
“Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.”
“When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.”
“The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.”
“Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.”
“The highest form of vanity is love of fame.”
“Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.”
“To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.”
“The combative instinct is a savage prompting by which one man's good is found in another's evil.”
“Reason and happiness are like other flowers; they wither when plucked.”
“Art like life, should be free, since both are experimental.”
“Philosophy may describe unreasoning, as it may describe force; it cannot hope to refute them.”
“We crave support in vanity, as we do in religion, and never forgive contradictions in that sphere.”
“Memory itself is an internal rumour.”
“History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.”
“It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.”
“A simple life is its own reward.”
“Love is at once more animal than friendship and more divine.”
“A friend's only gift is himself.”
“The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.”
“There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal.”
“Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists.”
“It is one thing to lack a heart and another to possess eyes and a just imagination.”