The hunter for aphorisms on human nature has to fish in muddy water, and he is even condemned to find much of his own mind.
F. H. BradleyRead
Our live experiences, fixed in aphorisms, stiffen into cold epigrams. Our heart's blood, as we write it, turns to mere dull ink.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that the essence of our life experiences, when reduced to simple sayings, loses its emotional depth and significance.
F. H. Bradley reflects on the transformation of profound life experiences into mere words. He argues that when we attempt to encapsulate our heartfelt experiences into aphorisms or epigrams, we strip them of their richness and emotional weight, turning them into something lifeless and dull.
In practice
During a public speaking event on the power of storytelling.
The hunter for aphorisms on human nature has to fish in muddy water, and he is even condemned to find much of his own mind.
Where everything is bad it must be good to know the worst.
The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring. And that is not happiness.
True penitence condemns to silence. What a man is ready to recall he would be willing to repeat.
Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct.
One said of suicide, As long as one has brains one should not blow them out. And another answered, But when one has ceased to have them, too often one cannot.
Life is a pure flame and we live by an invisible sun within us.
And if we can accept that a mother can kill her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?
In Paradise there are things which no eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no human mind has thought of.
I'd like to be born the son of a duke with 90,000 pounds a year, on an enormous estate.... And I'd like to have the most enormous library, and I'd like to think that I could read those books forever and forever, and die unlamented, unknown, unsung, unhonored - and packed with information.
For mortal men there is but one hell, and that is the folly and wickedness and spite of his fellows; but once his life is over, there's an end to it: his annihilation is final and entire, of him nothing survives.
If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be β a Christian.
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