Quotes About Maxims

I prefer sayings over jokes.

Poverty is very good in poems but very bad in the house; very good in maxims and sermons but very bad in practical life.

Proverbs may not improperly be called the philosophy of the common people.

Yes, yes, children must early be made to practise piety, godliness, and propriety; a person of good breeding is one into whom 'good maxims' have been instilled and impressed, poured in through a funnel, thrashed in and preached in.

I readily discovered the prodigious influence that this primary fact exercises on the whole course of society; it gives a peculiar direction to public opinion and a peculiar tenor to the laws; it imparts new maxims to the governing authorities and peculiar habits to the governed.

Anecdotes and maxims are rich treasures to the man of the world, for he knows how to introduce the former at fit place in conversation.

A collection of anecdotes and maxims is the greatest of treasures for the man of the world, for he knows how to intersperse conversation with the former in fit places, and to recollect the latter on proper occasions.

The Oracle at Delphi contained three maxims emblematic of Greek life. "Know yourself." "Nothing in excess." and, "Offer a guarantee and disaster threatens.

What I detest about these books of maxims is that they are so platitudinously true. A la Molière, Aesop, La Rochefoucauld—Shakespeare. They apply to all women, and that must include you too. But somehow it doesn't ring true to me. But it's disquieting.

It is only in the lonely emergencies of life that our creed is tested: then routine maxims fail, and we fall back on our gods.

Quotations, like much better things, has its abuses.

Precepts or maxims are of great weight; and a few useful ones at hand do more toward a happy life than whole volumes that we know not where to find.

Of the maxims of orthodox finance, none, surely, is more antisocial than the fetish of liquidity…. It forgets that there is no such thing as liquidity of investment for the community as a whole.

All people of broad, strong sense have an instinctive repugnance to the men of maxims; because such people early discern that the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims, and that to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy.

Hear the words of prudence, give heed unto her counsels, and store them in thine heart; her maxims are universal, and all the virtues lean upon her; she is the guide and the mistress of human life.

A man of maxims only is like a Cyclops with one eye, and that in the back of his head.

I will give him the precedence; and then, from these things which he adduces, I will shoot him dead with new words and thoughts. And at last, if he mutter, he shall be destroyed, being stung in his whole face and his two eyes by my maxims, as if by bees. Aristophanes, Clouds 945

It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims.

The two maxims of any great man at court are, always to keep his countenance and never to keep his work.

Es preciso reír y, al mismo tiempo, filosofar, cuidar de los asuntos domésticos y mantener las demás relaciones habituales, sin dejar de proclamar jamás las máximas de la recta filosofía.

Epicurus as a moral empiricist felt that our immediate feelings are far more cogent and authoritative guides to the good life than abstract maxims, verbal indoctrination, or even the voice of reason itself. Hence he based his ethics on nature, not on convention or on reason.

Precepts or maxims are of great weight; and a few useful ones at hand do more toward a happy life than whole volumes that we know not where to find.

With the growth of knowledge our ideas must from time to time be organized afresh. The change takes place usually in accordance with new maxims as they arise, but it always remains provisional.

I would fain coin wisdom,—mould it, I mean, into maxims, proverbs, sentences, that can easily be retained and transmitted. Would that I could denounce and banish from the language of men—as base money—the words by which they cheat and are cheated!