More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
I answer, the man who regards his own life and that of his fellow-creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life.
A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labours of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.
Schopenhauer’s saying, that “a man can do as he will, but not will as he will,”
The ideals which have lighted me on my way and time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.
My political ideal is that of democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized.
The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.
ACADEMIC CHAIRS ARE MANY, but wise and noble teachers are few; lecture-rooms are numerous and large, but the number of young people who genuinely thirst after truth and justice is small.
Let every man judge according to his own standards, by what he has himself read, not by what others tell him.
The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained to liberation from the self.
A man’s value to the community depends primarily on how far his feelings, thoughts, and actions are directed towards promoting the good of his fellows.
Without creative, independently thinking and judging personalities the upward development of society is as unthinkable as the development of the individual personality without the nourishing soil of the community.
I AM ABSOLUTELY CONVINCED that no wealth in the world can help humanity forward, even in the hands of the most devoted worker in this cause.
Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus, or Gandhi armed with the money-bags of Carnegie?
(The principal art of the teacher is to awaken the joy in creation and knowledge.)
EVERYTHING THAT THE human race has done and thought is concerned with the satisfaction of felt needs and the assuagement of pain.
The Jewish scriptures admirably illustrate the development from the religion of fear to moral religion, which is continued in the New Testament.
A God who rewards and punishes is inconceivable to him for the simple reason that a man’s actions are determined by necessity, external and internal, so that in God’s eyes he cannot be responsible, any more than an inanimate object is responsible for the motions it goes through.
It is therefore easy to see why the Churches have always fought science and persecuted its devotees.
YOU WILL HARDLY FIND one among the profounder sort of scientific minds without a peculiar religious feeling of his own.
For the latter God is a being from whose care one hopes to benefit and whose punishment one fears; a sublimation of a feeling similar to that of a child for its father, a being to whom one stands to some extent in a personal relation, however deeply it may be tinged with awe.
NEVER YET HAVE I experienced from the fair sex such energetic rejection of all advances; or, if I have, never from so many at once.
THE IMPORTANCE OF SECURING international peace was recognized by the really great men of former generations.
THE GREATEST OBSTACLE to the success of the disarmament plan was the fact that people in general left out of account the chief difficulties of the problem.
MAY I BEGIN WITH an article of political faith? It runs as follows: The State is made for man, not man for the State.
Finally, I would draw your attention to a book, War again To-morrow, by Ludwig Bauer, which discusses the issues here involved in an acute and unprejudiced manner and with great psychological insight.
Book recommonend by ES
IN MY OPINION, the patriotic women ought to be sent to the front in the next war instead of the men. It would at least be a novelty in this dreary sphere of infinite confusion, and besides-why should not such heroic feelings on the part of the fair sex find a more picturesque outlet than in attacks on a defenceless civilian?
(4) The dropping-out of the two Powers, China and Russia. This blow to world trade also does not touch America very nearly, and therefore cannot be a principal cause of the crisis.
AS LONG AS I have any choice, I will only stay in a country where political liberty, toleration, and equality of all citizens before the law are the rule.
THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE for its own sake, an almost fanatical love of justice, and the desire for personal independence-these are the features of the Jewish tradition which make me thank my stars that I belong to it.
