Category: Thought

It is unlikely that the good of a snail should reside in its shell: so is it likely that the good of a man should?

Where there are no rights, there are no duties.

Democracy does not attach men strongly to each other; but it places their habitual intercourse upon an easier footing.

You see now how little nature requires, to be satisfied. Felicity, the companion of content, is rather found in our own breasts than in the enjoyment of external things, and I firmly believe it requires but a little philosophy to make a man happy in whatsoever state he is.

Daniel Boone, Daniel Boone’s Own Story & The Adventures of Daniel Boone

War, hate, jealousy, racism — what are they but manifestations of fear?

No guilt is forgotten so long as the conscience still knows of it.

Stefan Zweig, Beware of Pity (1939)

One of the chief charms of Political Economy is the open secret, that it deals not with rigidities and inflexible qualities and mathematical quantities and the unchanging laws of matter, but with the billowy play of desires and estimates and purposes and satisfactions, all of which are mental states, and all of which are subject in the general to ascertainable laws, though laws of a quite different kind from those of Mechanics. Values come and they go. Within certain limits and under certain conditions they may be anticipated and even predicted, but never with the precision of an eclipse or the result of a known chemical combination.

Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears. At least, such is my experience. I have often sung to drown my sorrow, but seldom to express my happiness. Crying for joy, and singing for joy, were alike uncommon to me while in the jaws of slavery. The singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave; the songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion.

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 1845.

Diaulus, lately a doctor,
Is now an undertaker:
What he does as an undertaker,
He used to do also as a doctor.

A leader is best when people barely know that he exists,
not so good when people obey and acclaim him,
worst when they despise him.
Fail to honor people,
They fail to honor you.
But of a good leader, who talks little,
when his work is done, his aims fulfilled,
they will all say,
‘We did this ourselves.’

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, chapter 17.