Category: Thought

Stretching his hand up to reach the stars, too often man forgets the flowers at his feet.

The prophecy of democracy states that if we indeed treat each other as created equal and therefore act on the principles of respect for all persons regardless of race, color, religion, or previous condition of servitude, we shall all of us — both the oppressors and the oppressed — be healed of the profound emotional scars that we inherit from earlier and less just forms of human organization, and attain a full human dignity. Like all self-fulfilling prophecies, this prophecy will not fulfill itself on the dawn of a sudden Day of Jubilee. It fulfills itself only as we accept its premises, accept the responsibilities it places on each of us individually, and prepare ourselves, not to fight over and again the battles of yesterday, but to take our places, with pride and dignity, in the changed world of tomorrow.

S. I. Hayakawa, “How to Be Sane Though Negro” (Contact 1, 1958), conclusion.

Universally therefore, virtue is a certain co-adaptation of the irrational parts of the soul to the rational part. Virtue however, is produced through pleasure and pain receiving the boundary of that which is fit. For true virtue is nothing else than the habit of that which is fit. But the fit, or the decorous, is that which ought to be; and the unfit, or indecorous, is that which ought not to be. Of the indecorous however, there are two species, viz. excess and defect. And excess indeed, is more than is fit; but defect is less than is fit. But since the fit is that which ought to be, it is both a summit and a middle. It is a summit indeed, because it neither requires ablation, nor addition; but it is a middle, because it subsists between excess and defect.

Theages, Treatise on the Virtues, found in Iamblichus, Iamblichus’ ‘Life of Pythagoras,’ or ‘Pythagoric Life’ / Accompanied by Fragments of the Ethical Writings of certain Pythagoreans in the Doric dialect; and a collection of Pythagoric Sentences from Stobaeus and others, which are omitted by Gale in his ‘Opuscula Mythologica,’ and have not been noticed by any editor (Thomas Taylor, translator, 1818).

In terra di ciechi chi vi ha un occhio è signore.

In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Mandrake, Act III, scene ix.