Themes

"Does it really matter what these affectionate people do—so long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses!"

"I see no impropriety in looking at the most beautiful of Nature's works, the naked figure. If there is impropriety, then just where does such impropriety begin?"

"I am oppressed with a sense of the impropriety of uttering words on this occasion. If silence is ever golden, it must be here, beside the graves of fifteen thousand men, whose lives were more significant than speech, and whose death was a poem, the music of which can never be sung."

"We fight not to enslave, but to set a country free, and to make room upon the earth for honest men to live in."

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free."

"Our Government is united in its determination to take all necessary measures in support of freedom and in defense of peace in southeast Asia."

"The great German poet, Goethe, who also lived through a crisis of freedom, said to his generation: "What you have inherited from your fathers, earn over again for yourselves or it will not be yours." We inherited freedom. We seem unaware that freedom has to be remade and re-earned in each generation of man."

"Even though no one else discovers the nonconformity or enforces the rules against it, the individual who has committed the impropriety may himself act as the enforcer. He may brand himself as deviant because of what he has done and punish himself in one way or another for his behavior."

"In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility—I welcome it."

"We in this country, in this generation, are—by destiny rather than choice—the watchmen on the walls of world freedom. We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility, that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint, and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of "peace on earth, good will toward men." That must always be our goal, and the righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength. For as was written long ago: "except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.""

"Difficult, say you? Difficult to be a man of virtue, truly good, shaped and fashioned without flaw in the perfect figure of four-squared excellence, in body and mind, in act and thought?"

"Instead of supposing that a work of art must be something that all can behold—a poem, a painting, a book, a great building—consider making your own life a work of art...It need not be something spectacular or even something that will attract notice from others. What it will be is a kind of excellence that you project for yourself, and then attain—something that you can take a look at, with honest self-appraisal, and be proud of."

"If not excellence, what? If not excellence now, when?"

"Warren has a saying, "Intensity is the price of excellence.""

"All societies need elites. Whether for pilots, brain surgeons, or special forces, at some point an objective standard must be met if we are to maintain excellence."

"How miserable is the condition of men when the better a thing is, the further it recedes from our sight and the less it is recognized."

"Above all, don't be satisfied to do only fairly well what ought to be done very well. Someone is going to do it better than anyone else; why not you?"

"The excellent man is he who condemns what he finds in his mind without previous effort, and only accepts as worthy of him what is still far above him and what requires a further effort in order to be reached."

"We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill."

"Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; 'these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions'; we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit: 'the good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life... for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy'."

"Zahlreich sind die Lehrkanzeln, aber selten die weisen und edlen Lehrer. Zahlreich und groß sind die Hörsäle, doch wenig zahlreich die jungen Menschen, die ehrlich nach Wahrheit und Gerechtigkeit dürsten. Zahlreich spendet die Natur ihre Dutzendware, aber das Feinere erzeugt sie selten."

"The Good of man is the active exercise of his soul's faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue, or if there be several human excellences or virtues, in conformity with the best and most perfect among them."

"No man is entitled to the blessings of freedom unless he be vigilant in its preservation."

"An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher. The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water."

"A nation which makes the final sacrifice for life and freedom does not get beaten."

"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it."

"A message is given to many, but those who are meant to understand, understand."

"I always try to be understanding of people, even if they don't make sense to me."

"The mind understands something only insofar as it absorbs it like a seed into itself, nurtures it, and lets it grow into blossom and fruit. Therefore scatter holy seeds into the soil of the spirit, without any affectation of added superfluities."

"One who intends to understand grasps even the slightest hint, but the one who has no intention to understand never comprehends, no matter how loudly you shout."

"It is the aim of public life to arrange that all forms of power are entrusted, so far as possible, to men who effectively consent to be bound by the obligation towards all human beings which lies upon everyone, and who understand the obligation."

"In the history that Franklin writes, knowledge and understanding are complementary: One without the other is incomplete. His contribution has been to make history a field of wisdom, devoid of the cult of fictitious glorification of a whole society or the cant of quantitative reductionism that analyzes parts out of context."

"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."

"Understanding, however--and sometimes a very considerable depth of it--results from seeing the obstinate difficulties in views which often seem, on other grounds, quite obviously true...Let the reader be warned accordingly, that whenever he hears a philosopher proclaim any metaphysical opinion with great confidence, or hears him asset that something in metaphysics is obvious, or that some metaphysical problem turns only on confusions of concepts or upon the meanings of words, then he can be quite sure that this man is still infinitely far from philosophical understanding. His views appear to him devoid of difficulties only because he stoutly refuses to see difficulties."

"Every assimilation of any poem is a translation."

"Understanding is a two-way street."

"Not sure I understand This role I've been given"

"We cannot exert our understanding without from time to time understanding something of importance; and this act of understanding may be accompanied by the awareness of our understanding, by the understanding of understanding, by noesis noesos, and this is so high, so pure, so noble an experience that Aristotle could ascribe it to his God."

"But understand them, people say. And one does. But sometimes understanding is not comforting or flattering to the understood."

"If I draw a conclusion, I act on an idea, on an image, on a symbol, which is the structure of thought, and so I am constantly preventing myself from having insight, from understanding things as they are."

"When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind."

"Are you not ashamed that you give your attention to acquiring as much money as possible, and similarly with reputation and honor, and give no attention or thought to truth and understanding and the perfection of your soul?"

"Generally, poem is understood and liked on the basis of the 'sphere of intellect' of an individual."

"He who has ears to hear, let him hear. ... He who has a mind to understand, let him understand."

"If we understood something just one way, we would not understand it at all."

"知止乎其所不能知，至矣。若有不即是者，天鈞敗之。"

"Love is creative, understanding goodwill for all men. It is the refusal to defeat any individual. When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power, you seek only to defeat evil systems. Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system, you love, but you seek to defeat the system."

"Agape is something of the understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill for all men. It is a love that seeks nothing in return. It is an overflowing love; it’s what theologians would call the love of God working in the lives of men. And when you rise to love on this level, you begin to love men, not because they are likeable, but because God loves them."

"Give to Your servant an understanding heart to judge Your people, that I may discern between good and evil."

"Love is understanding, redemptive goodwill for all men, so that you love everybody, because God loves them. You refuse to do anything that will defeat an individual, because you have agape in your soul. And here you come to the point that you love the individual who does the evil deed, while hating the deed that the person does. This is what Jesus means when he says, "Love your enemy." This is the way to do it. When the opportunity presents itself when you can defeat your enemy, you must not do it."