Henry David Thoreau Quotes

Confucianism is all about tempering your instincts with intellectual discipline, with book learning.

Philosophy, to be relevant, must offer us a wisdom to live by.

What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes? But the man who orders his life according to their teachings cannot go far wrong.

But goodness alone is never enough. A hard, cold wisdom is required for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil.

Wisdom is an affair of values, and of value judgments. It is intelligent conduct of human affairs.

I have something that I call my Golden Rule. It goes something like this: 'Do unto others twenty-five percent better than you expect them to do unto you.' … The twenty-five percent is for error.

Hold it the greatest sin to prefer existence to honour, and for the sake of life to lose the reasons for living.

We cannot be truly Christian people so long as we flaunt the central teachings of Jesus: brotherly love and the Golden Rule.

Most people affirm pleasure to be the good, but the finer sort of wits say it is knowledge.

I admire the courage and wisdom of Socrates in everything he did, said--and did not say.

There's strong men of wisdom in many different fields. They say 5% of the people are wise and righteous and 10% are wise but use their wiseness for wickedness or to deceive others. It's like a magician: he knows the answer to the trick, but you don't. He has to keep you blind to the truth in order for the illusion to work. When you've got that kind of wisdom and somebody else doesn't, you can always take advantage of them.

Philosophy is fundamentally about how you come to terms with living your life and trying to do it in a wise manner, and, for me, that means decently and compassionately and courageously and so forth.

Golden Rule lies at the heart of every religious and of every ethical system of morality, it what makes us look at one another. The religions have all adopted it independently, Chinese, Indian, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, because they find it works and because it says something very deep about the structure of our humanity.

At the heart of Christian ethic is humility; at the heart of its parodies, pride. Different roads with different destinations, and the destinations color the character of those who travel by them.

No matter what theory of the origin of government you adopt, if you follow it out to its legitimate conclusions it will bring you face to face with the moral law.

It is of no profit to have learned well, if you neglect to do well.

The greatest philosopher of all time was Dirty Harry. And if you remember, Dirty Harry took the words right out of my mouth: "A good man needs to know his limitations."

Tsze-Kung asked, “Is there one word with which to act in accordance throughout a lifetime?” The Master said, “Is not reciprocity such a word? What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.

Those sciences which govern the morals of mankind, such as Theology and Philosophy, make everything their concern: no activity is so private or so secret as to escape their attention or their jurisdiction.

The good, we do it; the evil, that is fortune; man is always right, and destiny always wrong.

He who has knowledge of the just and the good and beautiful ... will not, when in earnest, write them in ink.

Here in St. Cloud’s,” Dr. Larch wrote, “ I have been given the choice of playing God or leaving practically everything up to chance. It is my experience that practically everything is left up to chance much of the time; men who believe in good and evil, and who believe that good should win, should watch for those moments when it is possible to play God – we should seize those moments. There won’t be may

Of all parts of wisdom the practice is the best.