mjohn > mjohn's Quotes

“It is a painful thing to say to oneself: by choosing one road I am turning my back on a thousand others. Everything is interesting; everything might be useful; everything attracts and charms a noble mind; but death is before us; mind and matter make their demands; willy-nilly we must submit and rest content as to things that time and wisdom deny us, with a glance of sympathy which is another act of our homage to the truth.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods

“Vicious actions are not hurtful because they are forbidden, but forbidden because they are hurtful.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.”
― Warren Buffet

“Tis hard for an empty bag to stand upright.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“Everyone is as God has made him, and oftentimes a great deal worse.”
― Miguel de Cervantes

“For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“The truth is sometimes a poor competitor in the market place of ideas – complicated, unsatisfying, full of dilemmas, always vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse.”
― George F. Kennan

“A real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things that can be named.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room