BASIC PHILOSOPHY
A GUIDE FOR THE PHILOSOPHICALLY PERPLEXED
OR
A COMMON SENSE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY
ALSO
A COLLECTION OF FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS
AND
APHORISMS FOR LIBERAL EDUCATION
A Word of Caution
Few statements are true in all respects or for all plausible interpretations. This is especially true of interesting or significant statements and arises from the vague and ambiguous nature of language. The only way we know of surmounting this problem is to look for proportion in a set of statements or ideas. To this end and to make discussion more interesting the following quotes and aphorisms have been grouped into sets of two, three or more. Successive items within each set have then been connected with an italicized word or phrase which suggests a relationship. If you would like to comment on this website you can email me at: bp@basicincome.com. Due to spam you will have to modify this email address by adding the number “1” after the letters “bp”. To find recently added material or links on this web page, search for “**NEW**” or simply “**”.
Copyright © MCMXCVII
(Site last updated March 27, 2008)
Table of Contents
PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY
Intellectual Tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Happiness & Unhappiness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7
Love & Friendship. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .19
Romance & The Opposite Sex . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Human Nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .42
Human Frailty. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .60
Egotism & Self-Deception . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
Feelings & Emotional Energy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .90
Education & Virtue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .106
Ideas, Thinking & Argument . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .126
Religion & Philosophy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138
Philosophical Questions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
Politics, Government & Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
Science, Technology & Capitalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176
Work & Leisure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .188
Miscellaneous. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .199
LOGIC; Certainty. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .218
FAITH; Freedom. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250
COMMON SENSE; Limitation; Dogma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 316
MYSTERY; Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 379
PARADOX; Subjectivism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 410
LANGUAGE; Analogy; Fundamentalism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .458
ASPECTS OF PHILOSOPHY
What is Philosophy? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .513
Four World Views: Theism, Monism, Materialism, Buddhism . . . . . . . . . . 533
Mysticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 556
Fifteen Unprovable Beliefs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .561
Six Arguments Against Subjectivism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .576
THE SHORT VERSION: Because of the great length of this web page I’ve selected what I think are the most practical and illuminating quotes from the material below and called it, The Short Version. It is approximately one third the length of this page, and any links contained here are preserved there.
WESTERN PHILOSOPHY: Have you ever wanted to read the classics of Western philosophy, but shuddered to think of how much time that would involve? Glyn Hughes has created a website called ‘Squashed Philosophers’ that is the answer to your (perhaps unconscious) prayer. His brilliant idea was to take the works of the great philosophers from Plato to Karl Popper and to condense them to a fraction of their original length—the Confessions of St. Augustine was reduced from 160,000 words to 10,119—while trying to retain their styles and famous maxims. Hughes also provides a short introduction to each philosopher and his work, a glossary, and sometimes a Very Squashed Version of only a few paragraphs. He even gives an estimate of the time required to read the squashed version, as well as its length as a percentage of the original work. I have made extensive use of this time-saving website and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
MODERN PHILOSOPHY: A readable overview of much of modern philosophy can be found in Bryan Magee's 1997 book, Confessions of a Philosopher. What makes the book so thoroughly enjoyable is the fact that it is written from the point of view of a man who is passionately interested in philosophy for personal rather than professional or academic reasons. Magee wants philosophy to shed light on questions that have engrossed and tormented him from childhood, especially the problem of mortality. With such a motivation, it is not surprising that he has many harsh things to say about modern philosophy and philosophers. He reserves his sharpest criticism for the school in which we was immersed when he attented Oxford in the 1950s, the school known as linguistic philosophy, or lingusitic analysis. Logical positivism, by then on the wane, also receives much critical attention. Kant, Schopenhauer, Russell and Popper come in for detailed and mostly favourable consideration. What I think is best about the book is his persuasive case for the bankruptcy of the analytic tradition, a tradition that in one form or another has dominated the English speaking world since Hume. But he has no love for Continental philosophy, most of which falls beneath his contempt. Magee is not a professional philosopher, but his life-long and practical interest in the great questions probably makes him better equiped than most academics to lead the layman through the maze of this endlessly controverted subject. In order to either whet your appetite for Magee's book, or to save you the trouble of reading 500 plus pages, here are my copious excerpts from Confessions of a Philosopher.
ABOUT ME: I am a married middle-aged male, a Canadian citizen, a retired bridge engineer, a democrat, and a theist. I think that unregulated capitalism, despite its waste and obvious injustice, is infinitely preferable to genuine socialism with its crazy faith in “Our Holy Mother the State.” My intellectual heroes are G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, Christopher Dawson, and, with qualifications, Bertrand Russell. My intellectual causes are 1) liberal education and educational reform, and 2) a universal basic income wherever it is affordable.
The first purpose of this website is to offer an organized collection of interesting aphorisms and quotes to people who love words and ideas. The second is to promote a conception of "faith" as a category of belief which is valid or reasonable—despite innumerable instances of arbitrary, irrational, foolish, or superstitious beliefs that are held on faith. It seems to me that we need such a conception in order to create a level playing field for competing philosophies, for every philosopher is at some level a man of faith. Faith is the free element in thought—the complement to logic which is the necessary element—and only with the principle of valid or reasonable faith can both the theist and the atheist maintain their respective positions without losing intellectual respect for one another.
Although the word “faith” is often identified with religious beliefs, for philosophical purposes I propose to define faith as belief which has the following three characteristics:
A belief which is of supreme importance to us
A belief to which we are deeply committed, i.e., which causes us to live our lives differently than we would without such a belief
A belief which is not supported by evidence sufficient to command assent from every reasonable person
Here are some examples of non-scientific, non-religious beliefs that are held on faith in the above sense:
The belief that there is a stable self that persists through time (rejected by much Eastern philosophy, especially Buddhism, and, apparently, Hume)
The belief that human beings are sometimes morally responsible for their actions (rejected by Nietzsche and, in theory, many determinists **NEW**)
The belief that different races and classes have the right to equal treatment under the law (rejected, at least in practice, by most of the human race throughout history)
The belief that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all "design" anywhere in the universe is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection (rejected by Christian and Islamic fundamentalists and, assuming a designer-free interpretation of Darwinian evolution **NEW**, most other theists)
The inability of the human race, along with many of its most brilliant and famous minds, to reach a consensus about these and other crucially important matters, suggests to me that the Enlightenment should be amended and extended along the following lines.
[1]
THE PARADOX OF CAUSATION
An effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely.
George Orwell
for example
A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks.
for example
If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
George Orwell
for example
We act as we do because we are what we are: and what we are is the result very largely of the use we have made of our freedom to act as we will.
INTELLECTUAL TOOLS
[2]
THE PARADOX OF EXTREMES
When a thing is pushed to its extreme, it moves to its opposite.
for example
Beyond a certain level of intensity, medicine engenders helplessness and disease.
Ivan Illich
for example
Beware the fury of a patient man.
John Dryden
for example
In every age of transition men are never so firmly bound to one way of life as when they are about to abandon it.
Bernard Levin
INTELLECTUAL TOOLS
[3]
LANGUAGE DEALS IN HALF-TRUTHS
There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.
A. N. Whitehead
in fact
Every heresy is a truth taught out of proportion.
for example
The ego or the self is a social construct.
for example
There is no such thing as objectivity in anything involving human interpretation.
for example
In personal and public life, in kitchen, bedroom and halls of parliament, men wage unremitting war against women.
Marilyn French
for example
Love is what we call the situation which occurs when two people who are sexually compatible discover that they can also tolerate one another in various other circumstances.
Marc Maihueird
for example
Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent.
Eleanor Roosevelt
...nevertheless
There are no entirely false opinions. The listener, then, must proceed from what is valid in the opinions of the speaker to the fuller and purer truth as he, the listener, understands it.
Josef Pieper
INTELLECTUAL TOOLS
[4]
WORDS MERELY INDICATE
C. S. Lewis
because
There are many possibilities beyond ‘true’ and ‘not true.’ There’s half-true, a little bit true, true in some respects but not in others, etc., etc.
consequently
Any general statement is like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.
Ezra Pound
for example
Every nation has the government it deserves.
Joseph de Maistre
for example
The rich are the scum of the earth in every country.
G. K. Chesterton
for example
When two cultures collide is the only time when true suffering exists.
Hermann Hesse
for example
The fundamental fault of the female character is that it has no sense of justice.
Schopenhauer
INTELLECTUAL TOOLS
[5]
LANGUAGE IS A COMPROMISE
Language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise—that which is common to you, me, and everybody.
consequently
In the naming of things one must go with the crowd.
Aristotle
otherwise
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a
scornful tone, "it means what I choose it to mean. Neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many
different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "who is to be master. That is
all."
Lewis Carroll
INTELLECTUAL TOOLS
[6]
LANGUAGE IS NOT A LOGICAL SYSTEM
In all pointed sentences some degree of accuracy must be sacrificed to conciseness.
Oscar Wilde
moreover
There is an accuracy that defeats itself by the overemphasis of details. I often say that one must permit oneself, and quite advisedly and deliberately, a certain margin of misstatement.
for example
Samuel Johnson defined ‘network’ in the following unhelpful way: anything reticulated or decussated at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections. Someone else offered this alternative: a bunch of holes held together with string.
HAPPINESS & UNHAPPINESS
[7]
HAPPINESS: A TALENT OR A GIFT?
Happiness is a how, not a what; a talent, not an object.
Hermann Hesse
yet
Happiness is not smug, peaceful or contented. It doesn’t bring peace but a sword. It shakes you like rattling dice. It breaks your speech and darkens your sight. Happiness is stronger than oneself and sets its palpable foot upon one’s neck.
(from a young man’s letter to his fiancé)
perhaps
Deep experience is never peaceful.
Henry James
for example
Jim Corbett, the famous Anglo-Indian hunter and conservationist, said that when he shot his first leopard at about the age of fifteen he could have screamed, shouted, danced and sung all at once.
HAPPINESS & UNHAPPINESS
[8]
PERHAPS HAPPINESS IS A DUTY
Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
Abraham Lincoln
consequently
Merely wanting to be happy is like merely wanting to be fit—totally ineffective unless you go into training.
moreover
There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.
Robert Louis Stevenson
and
Even if we can’t be happy, we must always be cheerful.
fortunately
Cheerfulness is the principal ingredient in the composition of health.
HAPPINESS & UNHAPPINESS
[9]
THE SECRET OF HAPPINESS
The belief that youth is the happiest time of life is founded upon a fallacy. The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts, and we grow happier as we grow older.
William Lyon Phelps
consequently
I have known some quite good people who were unhappy, but never an interested person who was unhappy.
A. C. Benson
yet
We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.
Charles Kingsley
on the other hand
If we could have just one thing, it would be energy.
John F. Kennedy
HAPPINESS & UNHAPPINESS
[10]
THE HIDDEN CONNECTION
BETWEEN LIMITATION & FREEDOM
The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.
Robert Louis Stevenson
but
The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.
G. K. Chesterton
perhaps
The crowning blessing of life is to be born with a bias to some pursuit.
however that may be
The last and greatest art is to limit and isolate oneself.
Goethe
because
Renunciation is the way to experience freedom. Self-imposed limits are the way to experience freedom.
Ivan Illich
in fact
The ambition narrows as the mind expands.
G. K. Chesterton
HAPPINESS & UNHAPPINESS
[11]
CHRONIC BOREDOM IS SOMETHING
TO BE AVOIDED AT ALL COSTS
Nothing is as fatiguing as boredom.
for example
Speaking of the public school at which he boarded C. S. Lewis wrote: I think that this feigning, this ceaseless pretence of interest in matters [school games] to me supremely boring, was what wore me out more than anything else... Never, except in the front line trenches (and not always there) do I remember such aching and continuous weariness as at Malvern.
consequently
When a thing bores you do not do it. Do not pursue a fruitless perfection.
Eugène Delacroix
for example
A former female associate of a prestigious Manhattan law-firm said of her work, "At best it’s tedious, and at worst the tedium will kill you. It deadened my senses. I’d go out at lunch and find myself envying people who scooped ice cream for a living. At least they could daydream all day."
in conclusion
The enlightened person is not easily bored. Nonetheless the enlightened person knows when he or she is being bored and knows for sure when she or he is not. No amount of spectacle or surface glamour should ever persuade you that you are not being bored when, in fact, you are.
Lister Sinclair (of CBC’s Ideas)
HAPPINESS & UNHAPPINESS
[12]
HOPE BLOOMS ETERNAL
Tomorrow is an old deceiver, and his cheat never grows stale.
Samuel Johnson
for example
We all think that some day we’ll start living.
HAPPINESS & UNHAPPINESS
[13]
IS ALL HAPPINESS RELATIVE?
Happiness is relative. Just as the boiling point of water changes according to the atmospheric pressure, so the boiling point of happiness changes according to the pressure of external circumstances. In passing through bad circumstances to better ones, one feels the external pressure lightened, while the mind still retains the power of resistance appropriate to the former situation: and there arises the boiling point of happiness. But if the worse circumstances weren’t fresh in memory, the better ones might pass unnoticed.
for example
Just think how happy you would be if you lost everything you own right now, and then got it back five minutes later.
on the other hand
No situation, however wretched it seems, but has some sort of comfort attending it.
Oliver Goldsmith
consequently
Life is seldom as unendurable as, to judge by the facts, it logically ought to be.
HAPPINESS & UNHAPPINESS
[14]
HOW INDIVIDUAL IS HAPPINESS?
What makes people happy is different and sometimes contradictory from one person to the next.
for example
Happiness must be a form of contemplation.
Aristotle
for example
Belief in a cause is a source of happiness to large numbers of people.
Bertrand Russell
for example
I can’t imagine anything better than growing big pumpkins. Once you get hooked, it’s like alcohol, you can’t let it go, you just can’t stop.
Howard Dill (Nova Scotian farmer)
nevertheless
Worldly happiness in the eyes of most people is the enjoyment of wealth, pleasure, power, prestige, and freedom from pain. Since we can appreciate this kind of happiness it awakens spontaneous desire, while supernatural happiness is beyond our experience and consequently leaves our imaginations unstirred.
HAPPINESS & UNHAPPINESS
[15]
HOW LARGE A PART DOES
PLEASURE PLAY IN HAPPINESS?
To a happy soul, pleasures are no longer necessary; to a pleasure-seeking soul, happiness is not yet possible.
perhaps
Unhappiness at the end of life is due to a failure to achieve a transcendental view of reality, a mystical or religious insight without which there can be no true happiness.
Hugh Kingsmill
however that may be
Old age has the last word: the purely naturalistic look at life, however enthusiastically it may begin, is sure to end in sadness.
William James
HAPPINESS & UNHAPPINESS
[16]
HAPPINESS IS A DELICATE BALANCE
To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
Bertrand Russell
in fact
Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords.
Samuel Johnson
consequently
Always leave something to wish for; otherwise you will be miserable from your very happiness.
Gracian
HAPPINESS & UNHAPPINESS
[17]
DOES WEALTH HELP OR HINDER HAPPINESS?
Money can’t buy happiness. But it can bring you the kind of misery you prefer.
moreover
Make money and the whole world will conspire to call you a gentleman.
Mark Twain
whereas
There is no scandal like rags, nor any crime so shameful as poverty.
on the other hand
A poor person who is unhappy is in a better position than a rich person who is unhappy. Because the poor person has hope. He thinks money would help.
HAPPINESS & UNHAPPINESS
[18]
JUST HOW FAR DOES HAPPINESS
DEPEND ON EXTERNALS?
The world has treated me kindly. I have done those things I wanted to do. I have children, a home, interesting work, people who love me and whom I love, marketable abilities; yet I here record at the age of 33 that I have no wish to go on living, that I cannot conceive any circumstances in which living would be to me worth while.
Malcolm Muggeridge (Diaries)
often
Happiness depends, as Nature shows,
Less on exterior things than most suppose.
William Cowper
in fact
The happiest people seem to be those who have no particular reason for being happy except that they are so.
W. R. Inge
perhaps
Happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalized.
G. K. Chesterton
LOVE & FRIENDSHIP
[19]
IS LOVE A FEELING OR AN ACT?
Love is a matter of feeling, not of will or volition. Hence there is no such thing as a duty to love.
Immanuel Kant
rather
It is obviously impossible to love all men in any strict and true sense. What is meant by loving all men, is to feel well disposed towards all men, to be ready to assist them, and to act towards those who come in our way as if we loved them.
John Henry Newman
in other words
Genuine love is volitional rather than emotional.
M. Scott Peck
for example
Love seeks to make happy rather than to be happy.
Ralph Connor
for example
Love is an act of endless forgiveness.
Peter Ustinov
often
To love is to suffer; to be loved is to cause suffering.
Comtesse Diane
LOVE & FRIENDSHIP
[20]
IS FRIENDSHIP THE HIGHEST LOVE?
You can’t love what you don’t know.
but
We only know someone through friendship.
St. Augustine
and
The bond of companionship, both in marriage and friendship, is conversation.
Oscar Wilde
LOVE & FRIENDSHIP
[21]
TO LOVE IS TO LISTEN
Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention.
Simone Weil
in fact
Attention is, in many ways, the heart of charity.
whereas
The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that’s the essence of inhumanity.
George Bernard Shaw
consequently
The first duty of love is to listen.
LOVE & FRIENDSHIP
[22]
IS LOVE’S PATIENCE INEXHAUSTIBLE?
Men have to be reminded that things must be loved first and improved afterwards.
G. K. Chesterton
however that may be
If you treat men the way they are you never improve them. If you treat them the way you want them to be, you do.
Goethe
consequently
Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself.
St. Francis de Sales
LOVE & FRIENDSHIP
[23]
SHOULD FRIENDSHIP BE THE MAIN
COURSE IN LIFE’S BANQUET?
You almost don’t know you exist until someone else receives you. Our friends create us in lots of ways.
however that may be
Life is to be fortified by many friendships. To love, and to be loved, is the greatest happiness of existence.
Sydney Smith
whereas
He that has no one to love or confide in, has little to hope. He wants the radical principle of happiness.
Samuel Johnson
LOVE & FRIENDSHIP
[24]
ARE THEY GENERALIZING TOO
BROADLY FROM PERSONAL EXPERIENCE?
Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.
Aristotle
because
Without friendship life is nothing.
Cicero
consequently
A true friend is the most precious of all possessions and the one we take least thought about acquiring.
La Rochefoucauld
LOVE & FRIENDSHIP
[25]
SOMETIMES TRYING TO BREAK DOWN
BARRIERS IS A MISTAKE
A different taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.
George Eliot
perhaps
There is a certain distance at which each person we know is naturally placed from us. It varies with each, and we must not attempt to alter it. We may clasp him who is close, and we are not to pull closer him who is more remote.
Mark Rutherford
LOVE & FRIENDSHIP
[26]
THE ACID TEST OF CHARITY
The test of good manners is to be patient with bad ones.
because
Certain good qualities are like the senses: people entirely lacking in them can neither perceive nor comprehend them.
de La Rochfoucauld
after all
When a boor first enters the society of courteous people what can he do, for a while, except imitate the motions? How can he learn except by imitation?
C. S. Lewis
LOVE & FRIENDSHIP
[27]
DOES FRIENDSHIP HAVE THE
RIGHT TO EXCLUDE?
I have no duty to be anyone’s friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine.
C. S. Lewis
because
In friendship ‘Do you love me?’ means ‘Do you see the same truth?’—or at least, ‘Do you care about the same truth?’ The person who agrees with us that some thing is of great interest or importance can be our friend.
whereas
People not qualified to enter a circle of friends must be excluded or the circle will be transformed into something else.
C. S. Lewis
consequently
In friendship no standard applies except the standards of friendship. That is why it is the most delightful of all human relationships.
Malcolm Muggeridge
LOVE & FRIENDSHIP
[28]
FRIENDSHIP IS LIKE EROS
IN SOME RESPECTS
Friendship must be willed. But more than this is necessary. A few years ago I worked on the same project with a man close to me in age and cultural interests. I had high respect for both his intelligence and his emotional qualities. We also found ourselves in perfect accord on ideological and spiritual matters. I have rarely so intensely desired to become anyone’s friend; I confided my desire to him and from all evidence he had an identical desire. We made meritorious efforts to meet one another, endeavoured to achieve as intimate a dialogue as possible and acted in all things like friends. It was all in vain; the emotional spark was not forthcoming. We had to resign ourselves to being good companions, friends in the broad sense of the term. We got along marvellously on the intellectual plane, but our emotional accord left something to be desired.
Ignace Lepp
consequently
Friendship, like eros and affection, has its source in emotional energy.
LOVE & FRIENDSHIP
[29]
UNDERSTANDING ANOTHER PERSON
IS NOT AS EASY AS IT LOOKS
Each man and woman dwells in a different environment—so different that I believe that not two people have so much as half in common. Men know each other’s inner world so slightly that they neglect this difference and it is only when two people have a relationship of utter love and trust that their inner lives begin to become perceptible to each other and are revealed as mutually most strange.
Sherwood Taylor
consequently
It is a luxury to be understood.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
LOVE & FRIENDSHIP
[30]
IS FRIENDSHIP A VIRTUE?
Aristotle placed friendship among the virtues.
because
To love involves trusting the beloved beyond the evidence. No person is our friend who believes in our good intentions only when they are proved.
C. S. Lewis
in fact
The perfect friend to my mind is one who believes in you from the start and never requires explanations and assurances.
Dame Laurentia McLachlan
perhaps
Love demands infinitely less than friendship.
LOVE & FRIENDSHIP
[31]
GETTING TO KNOW ANOTHER PERSON
ISN’T JUST A MATTER OF TIME
It takes a long time for two people to get to know each other.
George Bernard Shaw
(speaking of his wife)
moreover
Sometimes you have to get to know someone really well to realize you’re really strangers.
Mary Tyler Moore
but
It’s a seldom realised truth that those we know longest we often know least, and that a person will frequently understand a casual acquaintance better than the wife or friend whom his affection, vanity, or self-interest show not as they are but as he wishes them to be.
Hugh Kingsmill
for example
You never really know a man until you have divorced him.
Zsa Zsa Gabor
ROMANTIC LOVE & THE OPPOSITE SEX
[32]
A GENDER DIFFERENCE THAT
IS WORTH REMEMBERING
Erica Jong
because
Men love with their eyes, but women love with their ears.
consequently
Women woo men with dress and appearance while men woo women with words.
ROMANTIC LOVE & THE OPPOSITE SEX
[33]
IS COMPETITION BETWEEN THE SEXES
A THING TO BE AVOIDED?
The more men and women are rivals the less they are lovers.
however that may be
Winning an argument with the opposite sex is like winning a nuclear war. After it’s over life isn’t worth living.
perhaps
The more the sexes are in violent contrast the less likely they are to be in violent collision. The more incompatible their tempers are the better.
G. K. Chesterton
ROMANTIC LOVE & THE OPPOSITE SEX
[34]
DOES EROS (THE STATE OF BEING IN
LOVE) HAVE ANY MORAL AUTHORITY?
The event of falling in love is of such a nature that we are right to reject as intolerable the idea that it should be transitory. In one high bound it has overleaped the massive wall of our selfhood; it has made appetite itself altruistic, tossed personal happiness aside as a triviality and planted the interests of another in the centre of our being. Spontaneously and without effort we have fulfilled the law (towards one person) by loving our neighbour as ourselves. Simply to relapse from it, merely to "fall out of" love again is—if I may coin the ugly word—a sort of disredemption.
C. S. Lewis
nevertheless
Eros may unite the most unsuitable partners; many unhappy, and predictably unhappy, marriages were love-matches.
C. S. Lewis
consequently
We must not give unconditional obedience to the voice of Eros even when he speaks like a god. But neither must we ignore or attempt to deny the god-like quality.
C. S. Lewis
ROMANTIC LOVE & THE OPPOSITE SEX
[35]
CAN TRUE LOVE BE DISTINGUISHED
FROM SEXUAL INFATUATION?
When you’re in love your instinct is to contemplate the beloved. When you’re in lust your instinct is to contemplate your enjoyment.
because
Without Eros sexual desire, like every other desire, is a fact about ourselves. Within Eros it is rather about the Beloved. It feels objective; something outside us, in the real world.
C. S. Lewis
for example
In time the Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble, They’re only made of clay, But our love is here to stay.
Ira Gershwin
for example
If you wake up in the night, and as your eyes become used to the dark you begin to make out your favourite features creased with the kind of concentration babies devote to sleep, and you catch yourself smiling at the sight with unaccustomed warmth, you can be pretty sure you are looking at the woman you love. It gives me an enormous pleasure to watch her when she does not know she is being watched, when she is publicly engaged, or privately thoughtful, buried in a book, before the make-up mirror, or just asleep.
Peter Ustinov
ROMANTIC LOVE & THE OPPOSITE SEX
[36]
DOES SEXUAL ATTRACTION OPERATE
ASYMMETRICALLY BETWEEN THE SEXES?
The man’s desire is for the woman; but the woman’s desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
consequently
Healthy sexual attraction between a man and a woman usually takes the following form: the man must desire the woman and the woman must know she is desired by the man.
but
Not everyone can find a partner who is personally as well as erotically compatible. Quite often the ‘perfect’ sexual partners remain isolated in their solitude.
ROMANTIC LOVE & THE OPPOSITE SEX
[37]
IN MARRIAGE ALWAYS ASSUME THAT
WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU GET
There is no greater folly than to seek to correct the natural infirmities of those we love.
Henry Fielding
consequently
A man who marries a woman to educate her falls into the same fallacy as the woman who marries a man to reform him.
perhaps
People should marry selfishly so that they can act unselfishly after they marry.
ROMANTIC LOVE & THE OPPOSITE SEX
[38]
HOW TO MARRY HAPPILY
When one feels oneself smitten by love for a woman, one should say to oneself, ‘Who are the people around her, What kind of life has she led?’ All one’s future happiness lies in the answer.
because
It is in childhood that people pick up the attitudes and opinions which determine conduct in later life.
consequently
The young man who wants to marry happily should pick out a good mother and marry one of her daughters—any one will do.
moreover
As a general thing, people marry most happily with their own kind. The trouble lies in the fact that people usually marry at an age when they do not really know what their own kind is.
Robertson Davies
often
I am not at all the sort of person you and I took me for.
Jane Carlyle
ROMANTIC LOVE & THE OPPOSITE SEX
[39]
ARE WOMEN REALLY LESS
SELFISH THAN MEN?
By unselfishness a woman means taking trouble for others. But a man means not giving trouble to others.
C. S. Lewis
consequently
A woman is capable of more sacrifices than a man.
but perhaps
If men were as unselfish and devotive as women, then women would very soon become more selfish than men.
however that may be
The temperaments of men and women are typically different, and for that very reason are complementary, but at the price of what efforts of mutual understanding.
in fact
I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible.
G. K. Chesterton
ROMANTIC LOVE & THE OPPOSITE SEX
[40]
CAN MEN BE EDUCATED TO ACCEPT
LEADERSHIP FROM WOMEN?
When a woman behaves like a man why doesn't she behave like a nice man.
Dame Edith Evans
however that may be
Women will often look to men for leadership and initiative. The reverse is much less true.
in fact
The most intolerable thing is the dominant female. For a man to be under female subjection is a terrible and awful fate.
C. S. Lewis
consequently
How gently glides the marriage life away
When she who rules still seems but to obey.
Publius Syrus
ROMANTIC LOVE & THE OPPOSITE SEX
[41]
WHAT EXACTLY DOES SHE MEAN?
The only thing that sanctifies sex is desire.
Germaine Greer Interview
but
The journey from erotomania to erotophobia is shorter than many people think.
HUMAN NATURE
[42]
THE BRUTALITY OF REASON
People don’t ask for facts in making up their minds. They would rather have one good, soul-satisfying emotion than a dozen facts.
in other words
Man is not a rational animal, but an animal capable of reason.
moreover
Nothing hath an uglier look to us than reason, when it is not on our side.
Marquess of Halifax
consequently
Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however mild and polite, are necessarily men of violence.
G. K. Chesterton
HUMAN NATURE
[43]
A HOMELY BUT IMPORTANT PRINCIPLE
Most emotion is situated on the level of sense experience.
for example
We can face things which we know to be dangerous if they don’t look or sound too dangerous; our real trouble is often with things we know to be safe but which look dreadful.
C. S. Lewis
for example
Appearances beat the facts nine times out of ten.
for example
There are some people who state that the exterior, sex, or physique of another person is a matter of indifference to them, that they care only for the communion of mind with mind; but these people need not detain us. There are some statements that no one ever thinks of believing, however often they are made.
G. K. Chesterton
for example
I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquillity which religion is powerless to bestow.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
for example
It is almost impossible to remember how tragic a place the world is when one is playing golf.
HUMAN NATURE
[44]
MAN’S ANIMAL SIDE
If man attempts to suppress the animal side of his nature by a sheer effort of conscious will, nature finds a hundred unexpected and unpleasant ways to take its revenge.
perhaps
Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.
Oscar Wilde
HUMAN NATURE
[45]
WHAT KIND OF DIFFICULTIES
DO WE NEED FOR HEALTH?
Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.
Carl Jung
because
Man’s happiness springs mainly from moderate troubles, which afford the mind a healthy stimulus, and are followed by a reaction which produces a cheerful flow of spirits.
consequently
It would not be better if things happened to men just as they wish.
Heraclitus
HUMAN NATURE
[46]
HUMAN NATURE
Human beings are creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.
Dale Carnegie
consequently
If you can engage people’s pride, love, pity, ambition (or whatever is their prevailing passion), on your side, you need not fear what their reason can do against you.
Lord Chesterfield
HUMAN NATURE
[47]
HUMAN NATURE
The strongest human instinct is to impart information, the second strongest is to resist it.
because
Most people do not care to be taught what they do not already know; it makes them feel ignorant.
Mary McCarthy
HUMAN NATURE
[48]
SECURITY & HUMILITY
It is always the secure who are humble.
G. K. Chesterton
consequently
An attitude of superiority often conceals a feeling of inferiority.
and
Exaggerated sensitiveness is an expression of the feeling of inferiority.
Alfred Adler
HUMAN NATURE
[49]
PATIENCE ISN’T ALWAYS A VIRTUE
Endurance is frequently a form of indecision.
however that may be
It would seem as if a living creature had to be taught, like an art of culture, the art of protesting when it is hurt. It would seem as if patience were the natural thing; it would seem as if impatience were an accomplishment like bridge.
but
One can reach a point of humiliation where violence is the only outlet.
Arthur Koestler
HUMAN NATURE
[50]
CONFIDENCE OFTEN VARIES
INVERSELY WITH PASSION
The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.
Bertrand Russell
because
Every man who attacks my belief diminishes in some degree my confidence in it, and therefore makes me uneasy, and I am angry with him who makes me uneasy.
Samuel Johnson
consequently
When people are least sure they are often most dogmatic.
John Kenneth Galbraith
perhaps
There is a holy, mistaken zeal in politics, as well as religion. By persuading others we convince ourselves.
HUMAN NATURE
[51]
HUMAN NATURE
Two starving men cannot be twice as hungry as one; but two rascals can be ten times as vicious as one.
George Bernard Shaw
because
The wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.
Carl Jung
consequently
Men in association are capable of wickedness from which each individually would shrink.
Evelyn Waugh
HUMAN NATURE
[52]
HUMAN NATURE
How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty coming from the drivers of slaves?
Samuel Johnson
because
Among those who dislike oppression are many who like to oppress.
Napoleon
HUMAN NATURE
[53]
WHO HAS MORE RIGHT ON HIS SIDE?
The matter with mankind is not incorrigible natural depravity but just ignorance—flat earth ignorance.
George Bernard Shaw
versus
People without human passions, loyalties and appetites could undoubtedly handle the world’s problems with laughable ease: a restatement of the view held by Aristotle (and your grandfather) that human nature is our chief problem.
Wilfrid Sheed
HUMAN NATURE
[54]
HUMAN NATURE
Sometimes we think we dislike flattery, but it is only the way it is done that we dislike.
de La Rochefoucauld
for example
I can live for two months on a good compliment.
Mark Twain
because
The deepest principle of Human Nature is the craving to be appreciated.
William James
consequently
We often forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive those who find us boring.
de La Rochefoucauld
and
Now, Sir, there are people whom one should very well like to drop, but would not wish to be dropped by.
Samuel Johnson
HUMAN NATURE
[55]
HUMAN NATURE
The great consolation in life is to say what one thinks.
Voltaire
however that may be
Self-expression is the dominant necessity of human nature.
Dale Carnegie
consequently
I’m exhausted from not talking.
Sam Goldwyn
HUMAN NATURE
[56]
MAN IS A CREATURE OF HABIT
Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.
C. S. Lewis
however that may be
Habit is stronger than reason.
George Santayana
for example
New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.
John Locke
for example
It is easier to believe a lie one has heard a hundred times before than to believe a truth one is hearing for the first time.
HUMAN NATURE
[57]
HUMAN NATURE
Many a man would rather you heard his story than granted his request.
Lord Chesterfield
because
There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathized with.
George Santayana
HUMAN NATURE
[58]
HUMAN NATURE
Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
H. L. Mencken
consequently
It’s hard to forgive someone you’ve wronged.
in fact
It is a sin peculiar to man to hate his victim.
Tacitus
HUMAN NATURE
[59]
THE PARADOX OF HUMAN NATURE
AND INDIVIDUALITY
How many natures lie in human nature!
Pascal
yet
In each of us there is a little of all of us.
Lichtenberg
HUMAN FRAILTY
[60]
HUMAN FRAILTY: IMAGINATIVE
What a man knows at fifty which he didn’t know at twenty is, for the most part, incommunicable.
Adlai Stevenson
because
Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced—even a proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it.
John Keats
for example
For nothing can seem foul to those that win.
King Henry IV (King Henry)
for example
We are all strong enough to bear the misfortunes of others.
de la Rochfoucauld
for example
One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.
Jane Austen
for example
A man must have grown old and lived long in order to see how short life is.
Arthur Schopenhauer
consequently
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences.
Edward R. Murrow
HUMAN FRAILTY
[61]
DO LIKES AND DISLIKES WEIGH MORE
WITH US THAN REASON OR CONSCIENCE?
We resent offenses against our taste at least as much as offenses against our conscience or reason. If we are not careful, criticism may become a mere excuse for taking revenge on things we dislike by erecting our temperamental antipathies into pseudo-moral judgements.
C. S. Lewis
often
Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.
Oscar Wilde
in other words
Men are disliked not for what they do, but for what they are.
Hugh Kingsmill
for example
I was glad when I found Celia (his wife) was unfaithful. I felt it was all right for me to dislike her.
Charles Ryder to his soon-to-be lover
(from Brideshead Revisited)
HUMAN FRAILTY
[62]
ARE MOST PEOPLE BASICALLY DECENT?
Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?
Bertrand Russell
because
People respond to hate, not love. They don’t teach you that in Sunday School, but it’s true.
Richard Nixon
in fact
There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiless, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal than the public.
William Hazlitt
consequently
Do not overestimate the decency of the human race.
H. L. Mencken
HUMAN FRAILTY
[63]
BIGOTRY IS A FAILURE OF
THE IMAGINATION
Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition. It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.
G. K. Chesterton
whereas
The simple realization that there are other points of view is the beginning of wisdom. Knowing what they are is a big step. The final achievement is understanding why they are held.
but
It takes effort to imagine how other people see the world and many people are not prepared to make that effort.
HUMAN FRAILTY
[64]
IS THERE A CURE FOR SIMPLE
MORAL JUDGEMENT?
In a televised interview Rev. Donald Spitz, an evangelical Christian, commented on the murder of a receptionist and another person at an abortion clinic as follows: "Why is the life of a receptionist worth more than the lives of fifty innocent human babies. They were guilty. They had blood on their hands. I’ll be honest. If they died without accepting Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour in that split second before they died they are in hell now, and they’ll remain there for eternity."
however that may be
Self-righteousness is the inevitable fruit of simple moral judgments.
Reinhold Niebuhr
for example
In August of 1980 a dynamic, young preacher, James Robison, spoke to an assembly of Evangelical Christian leaders in Dallas, Texas. The meeting had been organized for the political benefit of presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, who was in attendance. Robison wrapped up his homily as follows: "If the righteous, the pro-family, the moral, the biblical, the godly, the hard-working and the decent individuals in this country stay out of politics, who on this earth does that leave to make the policies under which you and I live and struggle to survive. I’m sick and tired of hearing about all of the radicals, and the perverts, and the liberals, and the leftists, and the Communists coming out of the closets. It’s time for God’s people to come out of the closet and the churches and change America. We must do it!" (Applause)
HUMAN FRAILTY
[65]
HUMAN FRAILTY: MORAL
Few men are sufficiently discerning to appreciate all the evil they do.
de La Rochefoucauld
and
Generally speaking those who carry most guilt will acknowledge least.
for example
I came to carry out the struggle, not to kill people. Even now, and you can look at me: Am I a savage person? My conscience is clear.
Pol Pot Interview Oct 1997
but
It sometimes happens that he who would not hurt a fly will hurt a nation.
HUMAN FRAILTY
[66]
HUMAN FRAILTY: BELIEVING
WHAT SUITS US
I dislike arguments of any kind. They are always vulgar, and often convincing.
Oscar Wilde
in other words
Many people like their beliefs, opinions and prejudices more than they like reason.
moreover
There is a certain amount of trauma involved in changing any long-held belief.
consequently
Never try to reason the prejudice out of a man. It was not reasoned into him, and cannot be reasoned out.
Sydney Smith
HUMAN FRAILTY
[67]
HUMAN FRAILTY: EGOCENTRICITY
A man has his beliefs: his arguments are only his excuses for them...we only see what we look at: our attention to our temperamental convictions blind us to all the facts that tell against us.
George Bernard Shaw
in other words
People only see what they are prepared to see.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
moreover
What ardently we wish, we soon believe.
Edward Young
for example
People believe lies, not because they are plausibly presented, but because they want to believe them. So, their credulity is unshakeable.
Malcolm Muggeridge
consequently
It’s not a controversial proposition that people tend to believe what they want, and that the strength of their conviction is usually proportional to their self-interest.
HUMAN FRAILTY
[68]
HUMAN FRAILTY: IMAGINATIVE
Vice is a monster of so frightful mien
As, to be hated, needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.
Alexander Pope
however that may be
Men do not differ much about what things they will call evil; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.
G. K. Chesterton
consequently
Of all follies there is none greater than wanting to put the world to rights.
Moliere
for example
This is going full circle and it’s going to be like Shanghai again. There’s brothels now, there’s Madams now, there’s child prostitution, there’s all the evils that we felt in the early days we could wipe out. That I find very disappointing and very sad and I think well, ‘Why did I bloody come here in the first place for if this is what we’ve come to...we feel very bitter.’
old China hand
perhaps
The troubles of our proud and angry dust
Are from eternity, and shall not fail.
A. E. Housman
HUMAN FRAILTY
[69]
HUMAN FRAILTY: IMAGINATIVE
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
Aldous Huxley
moreover
Generally speaking, human beings are extremely tolerant of nonsense.
consequently
There are people into whose heads it never enters to conceive of any better state of society than that which now exists.
Henry George
HUMAN FRAILTY
[70]
HUMAN FRAILTY: EMOTIONAL
Some people have great intellectual gifts, but are emotionally deprived, just as the opposite may be the case.
for example
His [G. Bernard Shaw’s] own mind was astonishingly fast, but emotionally he was lame. The result was that women found themselves continually out of step with him.
Michael Holroyd (biographer)
perhaps
Reason is an emotion for the sexless.
in other words
There are some people who feel with their head, so to speak, instead of with their heart.
HUMAN FRAILTY
[71]
HUMAN FRAILTY: MORAL
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
Seneca
consequently
Crime expands according to our willingness to put up with it.
HUMAN FRAILTY
[72]
HUMAN FRAILTY: MORAL
The brightest and the best are often out-manoeuvred by the trickiest and the most unscrupulous.
because
Want of principle is power. Truth and honesty set a limit to our efforts, which impudence and hypocrisy easily overleap.
William Hazlitt
consequently
It’s going to be fun to watch and see how long the meek can keep the earth after they inherit it.
HUMAN FRAILTY
[73]
HUMAN FRAILTY: EMOTIONAL
We are full of odd hates and dislikes.
C. S. Lewis
moreover
Most people are more conscious of their dislikes than of their sympathies. The latter are weak while hatreds are strong.
moreover
Men hate more steadily than they love.
Samuel Johnson
HUMAN FRAILTY
[74]
DO LONG-HELD PRIVILEGES TAKE ON
THE APPEARANCE OF RIGHTS?
What men value in this world is not rights, but privileges.
H. L. Mencken
moreover
People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.
John Kenneth Galbraith
consequently
What makes equality such a difficult business is that we only want it with our superiors.
HUMAN FRAILTY
[75]
PEOPLE NEED TO BE PRETTY MISERABLE
BEFORE THEY WILL OPPOSE POWER
It is much easier to do and die than it is to reason why.
however that may be
Despite a flattering supposition to the contrary, people come readily to terms with power.
John Kenneth Galbraith
in fact
Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
Fredrick Douglass
consequently
Slavery of the acquiescent majority to the ruthless few is the hereditary state of mankind; freedom, a rarely-acquired characteristic.
HUMAN FRAILTY
[76]
HUMAN FRAILTY: INTELLECTUAL
Very few people listen to argument.
G. K. Chesterton
consequently
Time makes more converts than reason.
Tom Paine
HUMAN FRAILTY
[77]
HUMAN FRAILTY: INTELLECTUAL
Our minds are lazier than our bodies.
La Rochefoucauld
however that may be
The number of those who undergo the fatigue of judging for themselves is very small indeed.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
in fact
There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labour of thinking.
Sir Joshua Reynolds
HUMAN FRAILTY
[78]
HUMAN FRAILTY: NAIVETE
Men will always be mad and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all.
Voltaire
consequently
It is folly to expect people to do all that you would reasonably expect them to do.
nevertheless
Reformers have the idea that change can be achieved by brute sanity.
George Bernard Shaw
HUMAN FRAILTY
[79]
THE PARADOX OF THE SELF-EVIDENT
There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.
Mary McCarthy
in other words
People often perceive things without apprehending them.
moreover
The most obvious facts are the most easily forgotten.
R. H. Tawney
consequently
Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.
Samuel Johnson
and
The vindication of the obvious is sometimes more important than the elucidation of the obscure.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
EGOTISM & SELF-DECEPTION
[80]
HUMAN FRAILTY: SELF-DECEPTION
The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduces them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.
Gustave Le Bon
however that may be
Propaganda cannot succeed without the complicity of those at whom it is aimed.
because
You can deceive yourself without your experience trying to deceive you. The universe rings true whenever you fairly test it.
C. S. Lewis
for example
When my love swears that she is made of truth, I do believe her, though I know she lies.
Shakespeare (Sonnet 138)
but
Maturity is when you’re no longer taken in by yourself.
EGOTISM & SELF-DECEPTION
[81]
HUMAN FRAILTY: SELF-DECEPTION
Everyone is guilty of enjoying the comfort of opinion without submitting himself to the discomfort of thought.
for example
nevertheless
One likes to believe that one’s views on all subjects are the product of calm, dispassionate reasoning on the available evidence.
consequently
What probably distorts everything in life is that one is convinced that one is speaking the truth because one says what one thinks.
EGOTISM & SELF-DECEPTION
[82]
HUMAN FRAILTY: SELF-DECEPTION
It is in the ability to deceive oneself that one shows the greatest talent.
Anatole France
for example
Albert Camus
EGOTISM & SELF-DECEPTION
[83]
HUMAN FRAILTY: EGOISM
Sometimes the surest way to upset people is to tell them the truth.
Margaret Wente
because
What’s important for some people is not the truth of things, but their being right.
in fact
The chief use to which we put our love of truth is in persuading ourselves that what we love is true.
consequently
Perceiving truth doesn’t have that much to do with intelligence.
for example
[George Bernard] Shaw got everything wrong—Shakespeare, Caesar, the Soviet Union, Mussolini, St. Paul. He had a sparkling intelligence but a low understanding; this enabled him to be very funny, but whenever he was serious he was absurd. In any event, he was too encased in his own narcissism, too remote from real life ever to do more than grimace at it through a long-distance telescope.
Malcolm Muggeridge
EGOTISM & SELF-DECEPTION
[84]
Everyone wants to have the truth on their side, but not everyone wants to be on the side of truth.
moreover
A fondness for intellectual inquiry is not at all the same thing as a hunger for the truth.
consequently
As scarce as truth is the supply has always exceeded the demand.
EGOTISM & SELF-DECEPTION
[85]
HUMAN FRAILTY: SELF-DECEPTION
The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of the truth—that error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.
H. L. Mencken
but
History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
Abba Eban
in other words
Necessity does the work of courage.
George Eliot
EGOTISM & SELF-DECEPTION
[86]
USUALLY IT TAKES A CRISIS TO
BRING US TO OUR SENSES
Fortunate people seldom mend their ways, for when good luck crowns their misdeeds with success they think it is because they are right.
La Rochefoucauld
however that may be
Human beings cling to their delicious tyrannies and to their exquisite nonsense, till death stares them in the face.
Sydney Smith
in other words
Most people don’t see the light without feeling a bit of heat first.
yet
We are dismayed when we find that even disaster cannot cure us of our faults.
EGOTISM & SELF-DECEPTION
[87]
ARE SUBJECTIVISM AND EGOISM
ESSENTIALLY THE SAME SIN?
When you’re an egoist all the harm you do is unintentional.
for example
Other nations use ‘force’; we Britons alone use ‘Might’.
Evelyn Waugh
however that may be
We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.
Ana‹s Nin
moreover
All violent feelings produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things.
John Ruskin
consequently
The truth is generally seen, rarely heard.
Gracian
on the other hand
Objectivity means that we can separate facts from our thoughts and feelings about those facts.
but perhaps
When a subject is highly controversial one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one's audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker.
Virginia Woolf
EGOTISM & SELF-DECEPTION
[88]
WHEN IT COMES TO SELF-DECEPTION
INTELLECTUALS ARE THE WORST
Language is the main instrument of man’s refusal to accept the world as it is.
George Steiner
consequently
If there is one class of men whom history has proved especially and supremely capable of going quite wrong in all directions, it is the class of highly intellectual men.
G. K. Chesterton
for example
Putty is exactly like human nature...you can twist it and pat it and model it into any shape you like; and when you have shaped it, it will set so hard that you would suppose that it could never take any other shape on earth...the Soviet Government has shaped the Russian putty very carefully...and it has set hard and produced quite a different sort of animal.
George Bernard Shaw
for example
My work with couples has led me to the stark conclusion that open marriage is the only kind of mature marriage that is healthy and not seriously destructive to the spiritual health and growth of the individual partners.
M. Scott Peck
for example
In secular society politics does what metaphysics once did. It brings unity and meaning to human life and thought.
Harvey Cox
but
One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that—no ordinary man could be such a fool.
George Orwell
in other words
To be very stupid you have to be pretty bright. Normal stupidity only requires normal intelligence.
Fr. Benedict Groeschel
EGOTISM & SELF-DECEPTION
[89]
IS INJUSTICE THE BIGGEST BLIND
SPOT IN HUMAN NATURE?
How fond men are of justice when it comes to judging the crimes of former generations.
yet
A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend upon the support of Paul.
George Bernard Shaw
perhaps
The love of justice is, in most men, nothing more than the fear of suffering injustice.
de La Rochefoucauld
and
The only true way to make the mass of mankind see the beauty of justice is by showing to them in pretty plain terms the consequences of injustice.
Sydney Smith
FEELINGS & EMOTIONAL ENERGY
[90]
FEELINGS ARE THE PRODUCTS AS WELL
AS THE CAUSES OF ACTIONS
‘To wrestle with a bad feeling only pins our attention on it, and keeps it still fastened in the mind; whereas if we act as if from some better feeling, the old bad feeling soon folds its tent and silently steals away.’ Thus William James claimed that negative states of consciousness are more effectively dissipated by strategic behaviour than by introspective scrutiny.
because
Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.
Dale Carnegie
for example
Praising what is lost
Makes the remembrance dear.
All’s Well That Ends Well (King)
FEELINGS & EMOTIONAL ENERGY
[91]
IS IT POSSIBLE TO ROOT OUT
UNCONSCIOUS BELIEFS?
Let your conscious beliefs be so vivid and emphatic that they make an impression upon your unconscious strong enough to cope with the impressions made by the formative experiences of your early childhood.
Bertrand Russell
because
Unconscious beliefs about oneself often grow out of childhood experiences and a negative view of oneself is at the heart of depression.
for example
You’ve no idea what a poor opinion I have of myself—and how little I deserve it.
W. S. Gilbert
moreover
We are all apt to believe what the world believes about us.
George Eliot
consequently
We speak of independence of thought, but the real challenge is independence of feeling.
FEELINGS & EMOTIONAL ENERGY
[92]
DEVOTE YOUR TIME TO THE THINGS
YOU REALLY CARE ABOUT
The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere. That is why so much social life is exhausting.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
in fact
Only when a person is paying attention to something he really cares about can he concentrate and find true satisfaction.
consequently
People who bore one another should meet seldom, people who interest one another, often.
C. S. Lewis
FEELINGS & EMOTIONAL ENERGY
[93]
EMOTIONAL ENERGY IS ONE OF THE
MOST SOLID FACTS OF LIFE
Emotional energy can no more be defined than pain or pleasure, but it is every bit as real.
moreover
Our emotional energy is meant to flow in a certain direction and if we impede that flow or try to redirect it unhappiness and dissatisfaction are sure to follow.
for example
Speaking of the family parties of his boyhood, C. S. Lewis wrote, ‘My party manner, a deliberate concealment of all that I really thought and felt under a sort of feeble jocularity and enthusiasm, was assumed as consciously as an actor assumes his role, sustained with unspeakable weariness, and dropped with a groan of relief the moment my brother and I at last tumbled into our cab for the drive home.
consequently
Allow children to be happy in their own way, for what better way will they ever find?
Samuel Johnson
FEELINGS & EMOTIONAL ENERGY
[94]
GO WHERE YOU FEEL YOU BELONG
Owing to differences of outlook a person of given tastes and convictions may find himself practically an outcast while he lives in one set, although in another set he would be accepted as an entirely ordinary human being. A very great deal of unhappiness, especially among the young, arises in this way.
Bertrand Russell
consequently
The essence of living reasonably is to be where you feel you belong. All forms of social malaise and discontent derive from ignoring this most important of all principles.
Malcolm Muggeridge
for example
There is something very wonderful about this country [The United States], but not for me. In no country that I’ve been in have I felt so completely an outsider as here.
Malcolm Muggeridge
for example
Almost immediately after starting Exeter [an exclusive New England prep school] I became miserably unhappy. The reasons for my unhappiness were totally obscure to me then and are still quite profoundly mysterious to me today. I just did not seem to fit. I didn’t seem to fit with the faculty, the students, the courses, the architecture, the social life, the total environment. Yet there seemed nothing to do other than to try to make the best of it and try to mould my imperfections so that I could fit more comfortably into this pattern that had been laid out for me and that was so obviously the right pattern. And try I did for two and a half years. Yet daily my life appeared more meaningless and I felt more wretched. The last year I did little but sleep, for only in sleep could I find any comfort.
M. Scott Peck
FEELINGS & EMOTIONAL ENERGY
[95]
INSTINCTIVE DISLIKES
We often irritate others when we think we could not possibly do so.
de La Rochefoucauld
in fact
After appetite human beings seem to be driven by aversion as much as by anything.
for example
At the heart of our friendly or purely social relations, there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but recurring in fits and starts.
Marcel Proust
for example
I was taught when I was young that if people would only love one another, all would be well with the world. This seemed simple and very nice; but I found when I tried to put it in practice not only that other people were seldom lovable, but that I was not very lovable myself... The oddest thing is that you will find yourself making friends with people whose opinions are the very opposite to your own, while you can’t bear the sight of others who share all your beliefs. You may love your dog and find your nearest relatives detestable. So don’t waste your time arguing whether you ought to love all your neighbours. You can’t help yourself; and neither can they.
George Bernard Shaw
consequently
Feelings of antipathy are instinctive and have to be recognized as such. Since we can’t pretend we feel differently than we really do we simply have to accept our instinctive dislikes as an unavoidable trial.
FEELINGS & EMOTIONAL ENERGY
[96]
AFFECTION & ANTIPATHY:
TWO SIDES OF THE SAME COIN
It is in our private life that we find people intolerably individual.
in fact
The very same conditions of intimacy which make affection possible also make possible a peculiarly incurable distaste; a hatred as immemorial, constant, unemphatic, almost at times unconscious, as the corresponding form of love.
C. S. Lewis
consequently
Mannerisms and personality quirks can cause great unhappiness to those who have to put up with them, and can even in time lead to hatred.
FEELINGS & EMOTIONAL ENERGY
[97]
NO RELATIONSHIP WEARS VERY
WELL WITHOUT AFFECTION
My domestic life was falling into nerveless and dispassionate ways... there were arguments. These were never rows but rather wearisome exercises in self-justification which never stuck to any point for very long, but dragged across a whole landscape of differences along prescribed furrows. A kind of tedium enveloped us, made worse by the heedless happiness of our daughter.
Peter Ustinov (speaking
of his first marriage)
perhaps
The marriage state, with and without the affection suitable to it, is the completest image of Heaven and Hell we are capable of receiving in this life.
Sir Richard Steele
FEELINGS & EMOTIONAL ENERGY
[98]
RATIONAL ARGUMENT IS NO MATCH
FOR STRONG FEELING
Thank God, that while the nerves decay
And muscles desiccate away,
The brain’s the hardiest part of men
And lasts till three score years and ten.
consequently
Man is obviously made for thinking.
Pascal
but
The first condition of right thought is right sensation.
T. S. Eliot
because
The mind is always the dupe of the heart.
de la Rochefoucauld
for example
There was no way to dissuade [Evelyn] Waugh from an irrational hatred once contracted.
Martin Stannard (biographer)
FEELINGS & EMOTIONAL ENERGY
[99]
SHOULD FEELINGS ALWAYS
BE ACKNOWLEDGED?
Sensation is sensation.
Samuel Johnson
consequently
One of the phrases that men should never use with women, says Susan Shapiro, author of The Male-to-Female Dictionary, is "Don’t be upset."
FEELINGS & EMOTIONAL ENERGY
[100]
SOME FEELINGS DEFY ANALYSIS
It is notorious that facts are compatible with opposite emotional responses, since the same fact will inspire entirely different feelings in different people, and at different times in the same person; and there is no rationally deducible connection between any outer fact and the sentiments it may happen to elicit.
William James
perhaps
The roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here but in other worlds.
Dostoevsky
however that may be
The reason why I love the sea, I cannot explain.
Jacques Cousteau
similarly
Mystified by the appeal mathematics has for him Evan Stratfort, a brilliant 11 year-old Ontario student, said, "No one else seems to find math fun. I can’t really see why I would find it any more fun than anyone else—but I do."
FEELINGS & EMOTIONAL ENERGY
[101]
SOME FEELINGS SHOULD BE
TREATED AS HARD FACTS
The passion of love is the most familiar and extreme example of the importance of the inner element in experience. If it comes, it comes; if it does not come, no process of reasoning can force it.
William James
consequently
I have every reason to love you. What I lack is the unreason.
FEELINGS & EMOTIONAL ENERGY
[102]
HOW FAR CAN WE CREATE INTEREST
WHERE IT DOESN’T ARISE NATURALLY?
No profit grows where is no pleasure ta’en;
In brief, sir, study what you most affect.
Taming of the Shrew (Tranio)
in fact
It can never be repeated often enough that nothing intellectual can be achieved in a field that does not attract us. Working in our vein, without a sense of effort, and, on the contrary, with a sense of ease and freedom, is the fundamental condition of a healthy mental operation.
consequently
A man ought to read just as his inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.
Samuel Johnson
for example
George Bernard Shaw seemed to have no power of learning anything that did not interest him.
Michael Holroyd (biographer)
FEELINGS & EMOTIONAL ENERGY
[103]
CAN ANGER BE GOOD?
Hatred is settled anger.
Cicero
perhaps
To be angry is to be wrong.
Hugh Kingsmill
however that may be
Getting angry about human affairs is as ridiculous as losing one’s temper in a traffic jam.
Malcolm Muggeridge
FEELINGS & EMOTIONAL ENERGY
[104]
CAN THERE BE PATHETIC EMOTIONAL
EXCUSES FOR HATRED?
It doesn’t much matter what a man hates, provided he hates something.
Samuel Butler
because
Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.
Eric Hoffer
for example
In 1923 Hitler told Goebbels, "God’s most beautiful gift bestowed on us is the hate of our enemies, whom we in turn hate from the bottom of our hearts."
FEELINGS & EMOTIONAL ENERGY
[105]
HOW DOES ‘PROCESSING’ FEELINGS
DIFFER FROM ‘ANALYSING’ THEM?
It takes time to process our feelings.
in fact
It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is.
W. B Yeats
perhaps
This is the greatest paradox: the emotions cannot be trusted, yet it is they that tell us the greatest truths.
Don Herold
EDUCATION, ENLIGHTENMENT & VIRTUE
[106]
CONVERSATION IS ONE OF THE HIGH
ARTS OF CIVILIZATION
Some have wondered that disputes about opinions should so often end in personalities; but the fact is, that such disputes begin with personalities. Besides, after the first contradiction it is ourselves, and not the thing, we maintain.
Edward Fitzgerald
consequently
It doesn’t pay to tell someone they are wrong.
Dale Carnegie
in fact
I made it a rule to forbear all direct contradiction to the sentiments of others, and all positive asertion of my own.
Benjamin Franklin
however that may be
That is the happiest conversation where there is no competition, no vanity but a calm quiet interchange of sentiments.
Samuel Johnson
on the other hand
There is nothing so good to the heart as well argued conversation, when you know that your companion will answer to your thought as the anvil meets the hammer.
Richard Jefferies
perhaps
Equality is essential to conversation.
G. K. Chesterton
and
Every man has a right to be wrong in his opinions. But no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.
Bernard Baruch
in other words
In conversation no opinion, however right, has any special status.
EDUCATION, ENLIGHTENMENT & VIRTUE
[107]
COURTESY: THE MARK OF VIRTUE?
There is not a single outward mark of courtesy that does not have a deep moral basis.
Goethe
perhaps
Courtesy is to virtue as words are to thought.
Joseph Joubert
and
Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.
Honoré de Balzac
EDUCATION, ENLIGHTENMENT & VIRTUE
[108]
MODERATION IN JUDGEMENT
A good test of character is how one reacts to the weaknesses of other people.
perhaps
Moderation is an conspicuous proof of our strength of character.
de la Rochfoucauld
and
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
William James
whereas
All empty souls tend to extreme opinion.
W. B. Yeats
EDUCATION, ENLIGHTENMENT & VIRTUE
[109]
IS MANKIND TO BE JUDGED
HARSHLY OR LENIENTLY?
To act from pure benevolence is not possible for finite beings. Human benevolence is always mingled with vanity, interest or some other motive.
Samuel Johnson
moreover
All sins are attempts to fill voids.
Simone Weil
moreover
Insanity in individuals is rare—but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.
Friedrich Nietzsche
moreover
It is absurd to blame any class or any sex, as a whole. Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do. They are driven by instincts which are not within their control.
Virginia Woolf
moreover
If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a man and a dog.
Mark Twain
consequently
As I know more of mankind I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man upon easier terms than I was formerly.
Samuel Johnson
EDUCATION, ENLIGHTENMENT & VIRTUE
[110]
UNDERESTIMATE CIRCUMSTANCE?
If life teaches us one thing, it’s that we make our own luck by believing in ourselves and creating our own lives.
Dr. David Viscott
but
A man is only a man. Without favourable circumstances his power is nothing.
Napoleon
moreover
I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.
Abraham Lincoln
however that may be
Free will, in my experience, is tactical rather than strategic; in all the larger shaping of a life, there is a plan already, into which one has no choice but to fit, or contract out of living altogether.
Malcolm Muggeridge
consequently
Destiny is not something you can choose, but it is something you can follow.
in other words
Life is ten percent what you make it and ninety percent how you take it.
perhaps
There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will.
Hamlet (Hamlet)
EDUCATION, ENLIGHTENMENT & VIRTUE
[111]
WHAT IS THE ULTIMATE GOAL
OF EDUCATION?
Education does not mean teaching people to know what they do not know; it means teaching them to behave as they do not behave.
John Ruskin
for example
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
Robert Frost
for example
Education frees the intellect and imagination from bondage to unexamined ideologies or beliefs.
Northrop Frye
for example
The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one's mind a pleasant place in which to spend one's time.
EDUCATION, ENLIGHTENMENT & VIRTUE
[112]
THE SCANDAL OF NEGATIVITY
The art of pleasing consists in being pleased.
William Hazlitt
in fact
The most important trait in determining a person’s attractiveness is the degree of their negativity: the more negative, the less attractive.
but
Sometimes intelligent, well-intentioned people have a peculiar blindness to certain emotional or aesthetic realities of life.
EDUCATION, ENLIGHTENMENT & VIRTUE
[113]
ARE THERE SOME THINGS THAT
ONLY SUFFERING CAN TEACH US?
It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.
Somerset Maugham
but
Do you not see how a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
John Keats
moreover
Man must learn to think of himself as a limited and dependent being, and only suffering teaches him this.
Simone Weil
EDUCATION, ENLIGHTENMENT & VIRTUE
[114]
EDUCATION IS A MIXED BLESSING
By education most have been misled; So they believe, because they so were bred.
John Dryden
for example
For all the fact my father was a very rich man, he went to work every day. He always taught us the value of work, and that work is fun and good, and everybody should work.
Fred Eaton (of Eaton’s)
for example
The Queen is most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of ‘Woman’s Rights’ with all its attendant horrors on which her poor, feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety.
Queen Victoria
moreover
There is no villainy to which education cannot reconcile us.
Anthony Trollope
EDUCATION, ENLIGHTENMENT & VIRTUE
[115]
THE EDUCATION THAT STICKS
COMES THROUGH IMITATION
Education is implication. It is not the things you say which children respect; when you say things, they very commonly laugh and do the opposite. It is the things you assume that really sink into them. It is the things you forget even to teach that they learn.
G. K. Chesterton
similarly
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
James Baldwin
consequently
Children have more need of models than of critics.
Joseph Joubert
EDUCATION, ENLIGHTENMENT & VIRTUE
[116]
EDUCATION IS A METHOD,
NOT AN OBJECT
Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought.
however that may be
It is a fact of experience and common-sense that education has to be governed by some set of human values, however sharply we may disagree about the content of these.
Christopher De