F. H. Bradley Quotes

F. H. Bradley offers dry, philosophical reflections that will draw in readers who enjoy probing ideas about virtue and reality.

34 quotes

The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil.

#1
Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct; but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.

#2
Eclecticism. Every truth is so true that any truth must be false.

#3
The one self-knowledge worth having is to know one's own mind.

#4
True penitence condemns to silence. What a man is ready to recall he would be willing to repeat.

#5
There are persons who, when they cease to shock us, cease to interest us.

#6
It is by a wise economy of nature that those who suffer without change, and whom no one can help, become uninteresting. Yet so it may happen that those who need sympathy the most often attract it the least.

#7
We say that a girl with her doll anticipates the mother. It is more true, perhaps, that most mothers are still but children with playthings.

#8
Our live experiences, fixed in aphorisms, stiffen into cold epigrams. Our heart's blood, as we write it, turns to mere dull ink.

#9
The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring. And that is not happiness.

#10
One said of suicide, 'As long as one has brains one should not blow them out.' And another answered, 'But when one has ceased to have them, too often one cannot.'

#11
The man who has ceased to fear has ceased to care.

#12
The deadliest foe to virtue would be complete self-knowledge.

#13
The force of the blow depends on the resistance. It is sometimes better not to struggle against temptation. Either fly or yield at once.

#14
There are those who so dislike the nude that they find something indecent in the naked truth.

#15
'Adam knew Eve his wife and she conceived.' It is a pity that this is still the only knowledge of their wives at which some men seem to arrive.

#16
Another occupation might have been better.

#17
It is good to know what a man is, and also what the world takes him for. But you do not understand him until you have learnt how he understands himself.

#18
The mood in which my book was conceived and executed, was in fact to some extent a passing one.

#19
The cost of a thing is what I call life which has to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
Religion is rather the attempt to express the complete reality of goodness through every aspect of our being.
The propriety of some persons seems to consist in having improper thoughts about their neighbors.
I can myself conceive of nothing else than the experienced.
Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct.
The Self has turned out to mean so many things, to mean them so ambiguously, and to be so wavering in its application, that we do not feel encouraged.
Up to a certain point every man is what he thinks he is.
The hunter for aphorisms on human nature has to fish in muddy water, and he is even condemned to find much of his own mind.
The man whose nature is such that by one path alone his chief desire will reach consummation will try to find it on that path, whatever it may be, and whatever the world thinks of it; and if he does not, he is contemptible.
I will begin with the self-styled "Christian" party, who profess to base their morality on the New Testament. But whether it is really more Christian to follow or to ignore the teachings of the Gospels I shall not discuss.
My external sensations are no less private to my self than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside... the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.
Few people would not be the worse for complete sincerity.
His mind is so open - so open that ideas simply pass through it.
But when one has ceased to have them, too often one cannot.
Reason teaches us that what is good is good for something, and that what is good for nothing is not good at all.