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16 years in the making, this 36,000 motivational quote search engine can identify quotations by the name of the author, keyword, gender, general ethnicity, and by phrase. It’s yours to use for free. I think it is the most diverse, deep, and far-reaching quotation search engine on values, ethics, and wisdom anywhere in the Milky Way galaxy. Enjoy! – Jason
Consider the statements about God’s existence or the immortality of the soul. These are answers to questions that cannot be answered—one way or the other—by the experimental method. If that is the only method by which probable and verifiable knowledge is attainable, we are debarred from having knowledge about God’s existence or the immortality of the soul. If modern man…still wishes to believe in these things, he must acknowledge that he does so by religious faith or by the exercise of his will to believe; and he must be prepared to be regarded in certain quarters as hopelessly superstitious. Does the scientific method mean the observing and collecting of facts? Though facts are indispensable, they are not sufficient. To solve a problem it is necessary to think. It is necessary to think even to decide what facts to collect. Even the experimental scientist cannot avoid being a liberal artist, and the best of them, as the great books show, are people of imagination and of theory as well as observers of particular facts. A man would not be called a scientist in a particular field—mathematics, let’s say—unless he actually had some mathematical knowledge; but a man who is not actually wise can be called a philosopher by virtue of his effort to become wise. The denial of the existence in man—or anywhere else—of the immaterial leads ineluctably to the denial not only of the Greek or Christian ideas of the soul, but also of the concept of the existence of mind apart from brain cells and central nervous system. We all philosophize, and philosophy, unlike the so-called “exact” sciences, deals with all the commonplace problems of everyone’s life. In this sense every good book we read, every painting, every sunset, every symphony is philosophical: It says something to us about questions we cannot help asking. We we all want is a satisfying life. Assuming a modest economic sufficiency, he who is happy is everywhere esteemed rich and he who is unhappy, poor. Nor have the philosophers dismissed wealth, power, or fame as the condition of human happiness simply because these goods are unworthy, but, rather, because they are achieved and lost by chance, because they depend on others for their achievement and loss, and because, like the pleasures of the moment, they are transient. Philosophy is hard to “sell” to young people; but it is young people above all who have the courage to confront it, and to be undismayed by the questions that are hardest to answer. They key to philosophy is nothing more than this: Since every child philosophizes, youth is not a moment too soon to enter the company of the great philosophers and partake of the banquet they spread before us. The thinking of great writers does more than elevate our own. It throws a light on our own lives that inspires us. What we learn as experience and reflection accumulate, is to examine ourselves; and it is with self-examination that the way to wisdom is hewn. Wisdom does not come packaged, nor does other men’s wisdom attach itself to us uninvited. Neither do we put it on all at once like a suit of clothes. Rather, it grows as we grow, organically. The cross-examination to which the great books submit us has a friendly, not a punitive, purpose: to lead us to cross-examine ourselves and to test our own thinking. This is education. And in this sense it may be said without qualification that only adults can become educated. The young man or woman fresh from school or college does not know what he does not know. To be mature is to have finished growth; a mature apple is a ripe apple. Its maturity lasts, so to say, for a moment. Before that moment it was green; after that moment it begins to die. When does a human being reach that perfect and evanescent state of development? The societies of the West, America above all, are not distinctively contemplative; they are societies of great action whose triumphs of discovery, invention, and production have changed the face of the earth. Now they must turn, not to the moon, but to themselves, to make of life a rich experience and of the world a livable place. If anything is clear to us today, it is that the rising generation will have to think, and to think hard and straight. A university should be a center of rational thought. Certainly it is more than a storehouse of rapidly ageing facts. It should be a stronghold of those who insist on the exercise of reason…. The gaze of a university should be turned toward ideas. By the light of ideas it may promote the understanding of the nature of the world and man. A university is not denial, nor evasion, nor apology. It is the assertion that free inquiry is indispensable to the good life, that universities exist for the sake of such inquiry, that without it they cease to be universities, and that such inquiry and hence universities are more necessary now than ever. The sacred trust of the university is to carry the torch of freedom. It may be that the atomic bomb is the good news of damnation, that it may frighten us into that Christian character and those righteous actions and those positive political steps necessary to the creation of a world society, not a thousand years hence, but now. The moral virtues are habits, and habits are formed by acts. Alphabetical ordering places animal after angel in this list of ideas. There is a third term which belongs with these two and, but for the alphabet, might have come between them. That term is man. To the defenders of democracy, ancient or modern, aristocracy and oligarchy stand together, at least negatively, in their denial of the principle of equality. To the defenders of aristocracy, oligarchy is as far removed as democracy, since both oligarchy and democracy neglect or underestimate the importance of virtue in organizing the state. The defenders of aristocracy have admitted the tendency of aristocratic government to degenerate into oligarchy. Its critics are not satisfied with this admission. They deny that aristocracy has ever existed in purity of principle—they deny that the governing few have ever been chosen solely for their virtue. …perhaps the strongest attack upon aristocracy in all of the great political books is made by [John Stuart] Mill in his Representative Government….When their actions are dictated by “sinister interests,” as frequently happens, the aristocratic class “assumes to themselves an endless variety of unjust privileges, sometimes benefitting their pockets at the expense of the people, sometimes merely tending to exalt them above others, or, what is the same thing in different words, to degrade others below themselves.” For the American constitutionalists, as for Edmund Burke, the representative serves his constituents by making independent decisions for the common good, not by doing their bidding. This theory of representation, to which [John Stuart] Mill and other democratic thinkers agree in part, supposes that the representative knows better than his constituents what is for their good. Even when, as today, a purely aristocratic form of government does not present a genuine political alternative to peoples who have espoused democracy, there remains the sense that pure or unqualified democracy is an equally undesirable extreme. The qualifications proposed usually add an aristocratic leaven. The affirmation that all men are created equal does not exclude a recognition of their individual inequalities—the wide diversity of human talents and the uneven distribution of intelligence and other abilities. Nor does it mean that all men use their native endowments to good purpose or in the same degree to acquire skill or knowledge or virtue. Certainly, those who acknowledge a political wisdom in the preponderant voice of the many, but who also recognize another wisdom in the skilled judgment of the few, cannot wish to exclude either from exerting its due influence upon the course of government. Man has used astronomy to measure, not only the passage of time or the course of a voyage, but also his position in the world, his power of knowing, his relation to God. When man first turns from himself and his immediate earthly surroundings to the larger universe of which he is a part, the object which presses on his vision is the overhanging firmament with its luminous bodies, moving with great basic regularity and, upon closer observation, with certain perplexing irregularities. Always abiding and always changing, the firmament, which provides man with the visible boundary of his universe, also becomes for him a basic, in fact an inescapable, object of contemplation. Truth, goodness, and beauty, singly and together, have been the focus of the age-old controversy concerning the absolute and the relative, the objective and the subjective, the universal and the individual. Like [Michel de] Montaigne, [Charles] Darwin gives an extensive account of the things men have found beautiful, many of them so various and contradictory that it would seem there could be no objective basis for judgments of beauty. To the extent that aesthetic judgments “express inner harmonies and discords between objects of thought,” the beautiful, according to [William] James, has a certain objectivity; and good taste can be conceived as the capacity to be pleased by objects which should elicit that reaction. Desire is sometimes thought of as fundamentally acquisitive, directed toward the appropriation of a good; whereas love, on the contrary, aims at no personal aggrandizement but rather, with complete generosity, wishes only the well-being of the beloved. Curiosity is not evenly distributed. All of us possess it in insatiable quantity at birth. However, most of us lose it, or stifle it, as we grow older. A few men and women retain it, and are activated by it, all their lives. They become the persistently and professionally curious who curiosity changes the world. This is the fraternity to which the great scientists—like the great poets and philosophers—belong. In the whole field of learning, philosophy is distinguished from other disciplines—from history, the sciences, and mathematics—by its concern with the problem of being. It alone asks about the nature of existence, the modes and properties of being, the difference between being and becoming, appearance and reality, the possible and the actual, being and nonbeing. A scientific theory is like a shelter against chaos. It is designed to hold in some sort of order the known facts of the universe. New facts require a little juggling of the old, the addition of a new wing or second story; some sections may have to be torn down and rebuilt. Increasingly inadequate, the structure stands, representing a worldview, a comfort to man who cannot rest until he perceives that nature has a pattern. Then, one day, there is a crisis. The foundation begins to crumble. The fate Aristotle suffered at the hands of his successors, who took his tentative conclusions as a rounded body of complete knowledge rather than as incentives to inquiry and further discovery, indicates that science is in the making of knowledge, and not knowledge as such. And in the making, modern science uses two tools that Aristotle did not use—experiment and mathematics. The heroes of history and poetry may be cruel, violent, self-seeking, ruthless, intemperate, and unjust, but they are never cowards. They do not falter or give way. They do not despair in the face of almost hopeless odds. They have the strength and stamina to achieve whatever they set their minds and wills to do. They would not be heroes if they were not men of courage. Fear seizes them, as does anger, with all its bodily force. They are fearless only in the sense that they do not act afraid or fail to act. Their courage is always equal to the peril sensed or felt, so that they can perform what must be done as if they had no fear of pain or death. The brave man, mastering fear, will appear to be fearless. It is the sort of courage which goes with physical strength, with fears of endurance; and, as signified by the root-meaning of “fortitude,” which is a synonym for courage, it is a reservoir of moral or spiritual strength to sustain action even when flesh and blood can carry on no further. Such courage is a virtue in the primary sense of the Latin word virius—manliness, the spirit, or strength of spirit, required to be a man. Courage does not consist only in conquering fear and in withholding the body from flight no matter what the risk of pain. It consists at least as much in steeling the will, reinforcing its resolutions, and turning the mind relentlessly to seek or face the truth. Learning is never an easy enterprise, nor truth an easy master. The great scientists and philosophers have shown the patience and perseverance of courage in surmounting the social hardships of opposition and distrust, as well as the intellectual difficulties which might discourage men less resolved to seek and find the truth. It sustains the honor of Don Quixote and in some sense even of Sir John Falstaff; it burnishes the fame of Alexander and Caesar; it fortifies Socrates and Galileo to withstand their trials. Whether in the discharge of duty or in the pursuit of happiness, courage confirms a man in the hard choices he has been forced to make. Does it make any difference whether the end for which a man strives valiantly is itself something commendable rather than despicable? If not, then the thief can have courage just as truly as the man who fears dishonor more than death; the tyrant can be courageous no less and no differently than the law-abiding citizen. Both Plato and Aristotle criticize the constitution of Crete and Sparta for making war the end of the state and exalting courage, which is only a part, above “the whole of virtue.” Courage must be joined with the other virtues to make a man good, not only as a citizen but as a man. “Justice, temperance, and wisdom,” says the Athenian Stranger in the Laws, “when united with courage are better than courage only.” The fact that men can depart from, as well as abide by, their conventions—that they can transgress as well as conform to custom—seems to indicate that custom and convention belong to the sphere of human freedom. Yet there is also a sense in which custom is a constraining force, which reduces the tendency of individuals to differ from one another, and which has the effect of molding them alike and regimenting their lives. The repressive effect of custom can be seen, according to Freud, in the neurotic disorders from which men suffer when their instinctive impulses come into conflict with “accepted custom.” Discussing the influence of custom upon the developing individual, he says that “it’s ordinances, frequently too stringent, exact a great deal from him, much self-restraint, much renunciation of instinctual gratification.” Considered in relation to society, custom also seems to exercise a conservative, if not repressive effect. Established customs tend to resist change. They are sometimes thoughts to impede progress. But to the extent that they conserve the achievements of the past, they may be indispensable to progress because they provide the substance of what we call “tradition.” Yet whatever the source of doubt, Pyrrhonism states the traditional denials of the skeptic in their most extreme form. The senses are entirely untrustworthy. Reason is both impotent and self-deceiving. Men possess no knowledge or science. No truth is self-evident; none can be demonstrated. Of all human deceptions or impostures, none is worse than that which flows from a man’s unwillingness to qualify every remark with the admission that this is the way it seems to me. Do good, harm no one, and render to each his own. Because these precepts are the prescriptions of reason rather than enactments of the state, they can be interpreted as declaring that murder and larceny are always and everywhere unjust. But what sort of killing and taking of what is not one’s own shall be defined as murder and theft; and how offenders shall be tried, judged, and punished—these are matters which natural justice or the precepts of natural law leave open for determination by the positive laws of each community, according to its own constitution and its local customs. The defenders of natural law, which is also sometimes called “the law of reason,” proclaim the existence of an absolute standard, above the diversity and conflict of customs, by which their soundness is measured. Conflicting ethical doctrines raise many issues concerning what it is right for men to do or good for them to seek; but the moralists at least agree that morality is based on reason or nature. Man is the question-asking animal. …To ask is to be excited. To be excited is to live. However far apart Plato and Aristotle, Aquinas and Hegel, Kant and Mill may be in their conceptions or analyses of the right and the good, they stand together (at least negatively) on the question of how their disputes can be resolved: not by appealing to the mores of the tribe, not by looking to the conventions of the community as a measure, not by letting the customs of the majority decide. …the West needs to recapture and re-emphasize and bring to bear upon its present problems the wisdom that lies in the works of its greatest thinkers and in the discussion that they have carried on.
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Today's Quote
The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?
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