Quotes from Arthur Balfour

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

I am more or less happy when being praised, not very comfortable when being abused, but I have moments of uneasiness when being explained.

His Majesty's Government looks with favour upon the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jews.

Science preceded the theory of science, and is independent of it. Science preceded naturalism, and will survive it.

Society dead or alive can have no charm without intimacy and no intimacy without an interest in trifles.

Neither do I greatly hope to influence the trained man of speculation, who has already found a theory of things which satisfies his reason.

The physical course of nature does not merely fail to indicate design, it seems loudly to proclaim its absence.

Logic always seems to be telling us, in language quite unnecessarily technical, what we understood much better before it was explained.

There is always something about our feeling for beautiful things which can neither be described nor communicated, which is unshared and unshareable.

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

If by some unimaginable process works of beauty could be produced by machinery, as a symmetrical color pattern is produced by a kaleidoscope, we might think them beautiful till we knew their origin, after which we should be rather disposed to describe them as ingenious.

On questions of taste there is notoriously the widest divergence of opinion.

Imagine an external intelligence studying the methods by which earth-born creatures of various types adjust themselves to future circumstances. The most primitive method is, I suppose, no more than simple nervous reaction. The most developed method involves reasoned expectation. And between these two extremes our supposed observer would see a long series of intermediate forms melting into one another by insensible gradation.

Whatever philosophers may say after the event the conviction that we live in an external world of things and persons, where events are more or less regularly repeated, has never been treated as a speculative conjecture about which doubt was a duty till truth was proved. Beliefs like these are not scientific hypotheses, but scientific presuppositions, and all criticism of their validity is a speculative after-thought.

science proceeds to build up a theory of nature by which the foundation itself is shattered. It saws off the branch on which it is supported. It kicks down the ladder by which it has climbed. It dissolves the thing perceived into a remote reality which is neither perceived nor perceivable. It turns the world of common sense into an illusion, and on this illusion it calmly rests its case.

We are, perhaps, more sensitive about the pedigree of our intellectual creed than we are about the pedigree of our tastes or our sentiments. We like to think that beliefs which claim to be rational are the product of a purely rational process; and though, where others are concerned, we complacently admit the intrusion of non-rational links in the causal chain, we have higher ambitions for ourselves.

The source of morality must be moral.

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.

It is unfortunate, considering that enthusiasm moves the world, that so few enthusiasts can be trusted to speak the truth.

Enthusiasm moves the world.

Ask with urgency and passion.

Nothing matters very much, and few things matter at all.

The General Strike has taught the working class more in four days than years of talking could have done.

The power of authority is never more subtle and effective than when it produces a psychological atmosphere or climate favorable to the life of certain modes of belief, unfavorable, and even fatal, to the life of others.