What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?
The chaplain in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962), Part Two, Chapter 3.
Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think.
Jean de La Bruyère, as quoted in Selected Thoughts from the French: XV Century-XX Century, with English Translations (1913), pp. 132-133, by James Raymond Solly. Not sourced beyond that, however.
The wise man looks into space and does not regard the small as too little, nor the great as too big, for he knows that, there is no limit to dimensions.
Master Zhuang, from 莊子/秋水.
For the discovery of truth, your one and only sure or well-founded hope is the possession of this power: you must be able to judge and sift truth from falsehood; you must have the assayer’s sense for sound and true or forged coin. . . .
Lucian, in his dialogue Hermotimus.
For the things we have to learn before we can do, we learn by doing.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, 1103a.33.
If you would not have a man flinch when the crisis comes, train him before it comes.
Seneca the Younger, Letter XVII of Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius).
Morally, it is wrong to suppose the source of evil is outside oneself, that one is a vessel of holiness running over with virtue. Such a disposition is the best soil for a hateful and cruel fanaticism. It is as wrong to impute every wickedness to Jews, Freemasons, “intellectuals,” as it is to blame all crimes on the bourgeoisie, the nobility, and the powers that were. No; the root of evil is in me as well, and I must take my share of the responsibility and the blame.
Nikolai Berdyaev, The End of Our Time (1919; Donald Atwater, trans., 1933).
To the mind of the ancients, who knew something of such matters, liberty and prosperity seemed hardly compatible, yet modern liberalism wants them together.
George Santayana, “The Irony of Liberalism,” Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922).
Men are unequal in all their relations with the things of this world, without exception. The only thing that is identical in all men is the presence of a link with the reality outside the world.
Simone Weil, Draft for a Statement of Human Obligation (1943).
Il n’y a point de plus cruelle tyrannie que celle que l’on exerce à l’ombre
des lois et avec les couleurs de la justice, lorsqu’on va, pour ainsi dire,
noyer des malheureux sur la planche même sur laquelle ils s’étaient sauvés.No tyranny is more cruel than the one practiced in the shadow of the laws and under color of justice — when, so to speak, one proceeds to drown the unfortunate on the very plank by which they had saved themselves.
Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline (1734), p. 89.