Studies in the History of Ideas, Volume 2

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Page 265 - How much more than is necessary do we spend in sleep, forgetting that The sleeping fox catches no poultry, and that There will be sleeping enough in the grave, as Poor Richard says.
Page 298 - Of two pleasures, if there be one to which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure.
Page 233 - Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.
Page 265 - ... and from these taxes the commissioners cannot ease or deliver us by allowing an abatement. However let us hearken to good advice, and something may be done for us; God helps them that help themselves, as Poor Richard says, in his almanac of 1733.
Page 265 - TRANQUILLITY Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable. 12. CHASTITY Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dulness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation.
Page 265 - ... forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence ; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.
Page 265 - O powerful Goodness! bountiful Father! merciful Guide! Increase in me that wisdom, which discovers my truest interest. Strengthen my resolution to perform what that wisdom dictates. Accept my kind offices to thy other children, as the only return in my power for thy continual favors to me.
Page 249 - Adam, though his rational faculties be supposed, at the very first, entirely perfect, could not have inferred from the fluidity and transparency of water, that it would suffocate him ; or from the light and warmth of fire that it would consume him. No object ever discovers, by the qualities which appear to the senses, either the causes which produced it, or the effects which will arise from it ; nor can our reason, unassisted by experience, ever draw any inference concerning real existence and matter...
Page 119 - I could suppose that I had no body, and that there was no world nor any place in which I might be...
Page 333 - If there were any part of a thought that made no difference in the thought's practical consequences, then that part would be no proper element of the thought's significance.

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