Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame.
Alexander PopeRead
All looks yellow to a jaundiced eye.
Interpretation
Our perceptions are often colored by our experiences and prejudices.
This quote suggests that an individual's viewpoint is heavily influenced by their own biases and experiences. Just as a jaundiced eye perceives everything as yellow due to a physical condition, people's perspectives can be similarly distorted by their personal feelings, beliefs, and past experiences, leading to a subjective understanding of reality.
In practice
In a discussion about how personal biases affect decision-making.
Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame.
What dire offence from am'rous causes springs, What mighty contests rise from trivial things.
Fair tresses man's imperial race ensnare; And beauty draws us with a single hair.
An honest man's the noblest work of God.
One thought of thee puts all the pomp to flight;_x000D_ _x000D_ Priests, tapers, temples, swim before my sight.
Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?
Since survival is the sine qua non, I now define the "moral behavior" as "behavior that tends toward survival".
We have the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast. But in the name of freedom, people have done a lot of damage. I think we have to build a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast in order to counterbalance. Because liberty without responsibility is not true liberty. We are not free to destroy.
Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future.
If all sentient beings in the universe disappeared, there would remain a sense in which mathematical objects and theorems would continue to exist even though there would be no one around to write or talk about them. Huge prime numbers would continue to be prime, even if no one had proved them prime.
Every religious tradition is rooted in mysteries I don't pretend to understand, including claims about what happens after we die. But this I know for sure: as long as we're alive, choosing resurrection is always worth the risk.
In a media culture, we not only judge strangers by how they look but by the images of how they look. So we want attractive pictures of our heroes and repulsive images of our enemies.
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