Quotes from balfour arthur james v

There are for all men moments when the need for some general point of view becomes insistent; when neither labor, nor care, nor pleasure, nor idleness, nor habit will stop a man from asking how he is to regard the universe of reality, how he is to think of it as a whole, how he is to think of his own relation to it.

The truth is that, to every genius there is a characteristic weakness, a defect to which it naturally leans, and into which, in those inevitable moments when inspiration flags, it is apt to subside.

In the historic movements of scientific thought I see, or think I see, drifts and currents such as astronomers detect among the stars of heaven.

In giving up the attempt to combine dramatic music with dramatic representation, the oratorio freed itself at once from all these absurdities, and all these limitations. It ceased to be acting marred by singing; it became recitation glorified by music.

I disowned, as you remember, any intention of providing you with a philosophical system—not because I despise philosophical systems or those who labor to construct them, but in part because I have none to recommend, and in part because it seems to me doubtful whether at our present stage of development a satisfactory system is possible.

It will not, I suppose, be denied that the beauties of nature are at least as well qualified to minister to our higher needs as are the beauties of literature.

The brightest light has cast the deepest shadows. To torture and enslave, not because it brings profit to the victor, but because it brings pain to the vanquished, has, through long ages, been deemed a fitting sequel to victories born of the most heroic courage and the noblest self-sacrifice; while no small part of moral progress has consisted in expelling this perverted altruism from the accepted ideals of civilized mankind.

Persecution is only an attempt to do that overtly and with violence, which the community is, in self-defense, perpetually doing unconsciously and in silence. In many societies variation of belief is practically impossible. In other societies it is permitted only along certain definite lines. In no society that has ever existed, or could be conceived as existing, are opinions equally free (in the scientific sense of the term, not the legal) to develop themselves indifferently in all directions.

Our whole political machinery presupposes a people so fundamentally at one that they can safely afford to bicker.

It seems at first sight strange that any man of genius should have patiently submitted to rules which, from the point of view of art, were perfectly arbitrary.

For as soon as any body of doctrine becomes the watchword of a party or a sect, it is certain to be used with the most confident assurance by multitudes who have the most imperfect apprehension of the true grounds of the opinions they are expressing. In default of reasons they quote authorities.

Whereas reasons may, and usually do, figure among the proximate causes of belief ... it is always possible to ... penetrate but a short way down, and they are found no more.