Philosophy Alignment: Mota Parallels and Tolstoy’s Circle of Reading

Our moral feelings are so interwoven with our intellectual powers that we cannot touch the one without touching the other as well. A great intellect, in the absence of moral feeling, is a source of great calamities.

John Ruskin

Better to possess with humility a small share of sound sense than with self-satisfaction the greatest treasures of the sciences. There is nothing wrong in learning, and all knowledge of anything at all is pleasant in itself; but a good conscience and a virtuous life must always be put before knowledge.

Thomas à Kempis

Just as torches and fireworks grow pale and become invisible in the light of the sun, so intelligence, even genius, and beauty as well, fade and are eclipsed before kindness of heart.

Schopenhauer

Thanks to your excellent education, you can measure circles and squares and all the distances between the stars. Everything has become attainable for your geometry. If you are so fine a mechanic, then measure the human mind. Tell me how great it is or how small. You know what a straight line is. What use is that to you if you do not know the straight path in life. All the liberal arts prove powerless to teach virtue. Even if they are of use for something else, for virtue they are worth nothing. They do not lead the mind to virtue: they only clear the way.

Seneca

Reading and writing are in no sense education, unless they contribute to this end of making us feel kindly towards all creatures.

John Ruskin

We all know that we do not live as we ought, and not as we could live. It is this very thought, that life can and should be better, that we must never abandon. But we must remember it not only in order to condemn our present life, but in order to establish a better life. We must believe that life should be better than it is now, and live so that it can become better.

Remember that there is a God who wants from people, whom he created in his own likeness, not praise or glory, but that they, guided by the understanding given them, should become like him in their actions. Why, the fig tree is true to its work, and so are the dog and the bee. And will man not fulfill his calling? But these great, holy truths fade in your memory; the bustle of daily life, unreasoning fear, weakness of spirit, and the habit of being a slave stifle it.

Marcus Aurelius

Whoever fears what is not to be feared and does not shudder at what is truly fearful enters, following a false opinion, upon the evil road to ruin.

Buddhist wisdom [Dhammapada]

No one knows what death is, whether it is an evil or a good. Yet all people fear it, as though they knew for certain that it is an evil.

Plato

Faith is not faith if life does not agree with it.

Every man possesses a particular gift and is capable of fulfilling a definite task. One must try to discover this particular gift in the child and direct his instruction in keeping with it. After general teaching in those branches of knowledge that are good for everyone, his instruction must be directed toward developing the particular gifts that have been found in him. Education means the nourishing of the child’s faculties, not the creating of new faculties that are not in him. The latter is impossible.

Giuseppe Mazzini

Truth learned by rote only sticks to us like an artificial limb, a false tooth, a wax nose, and at most like a nose made from another’s skin. But truth gained by our own thinking is like a real limb of the body; it alone truly belongs to us.

Schopenhauer

A thought moves life only when it has been won by one’s own mind, or at least answers a question that has already arisen in the soul. But another’s thought, taken in by the mind and the memory, has no effect on life and coexists with actions contrary to it.

It would be good if wisdom were of such a nature that it could flow from the one who is full of it into the one who has none, as water flows through wool from one vessel into another until both are level. But the trouble is that to take in the wisdom of another, work of one’s own is needed first of all.

A fool will spend his whole life beside a wise man and will not in the least come to know the truth, as a spoon will never understand the taste of food.

Buddhist wisdom [Dhammapada]

Though people do not know what the good is, they have it within them.

Confucius

If we do not feel the power of God within us, this does not prove that the power of God does not live in us, but only that we have not yet learned to be conscious of it within us.

In our time people forget that first of all they must hold sacred the man within themselves. And the highest quality of man lies in this: that when the soul is in balance, his consciousness is able, entering into communion with the source of understanding, to merge with boundless spiritual life. And yet people, instead of drawing spiritual food directly from this source, prefer to go begging from one another, like paupers, for a mug of stagnant water apiece.

Emerson

For the vast majority, their inner world is like an ocean so wide that they do not dare to explore it; but sooner or later they will have to enter it and seek in it that heavenly haven which they sought in vain in the outer world.

Lucy Mallory

In yourself, within you, is the spring of good. It will not cease to flow as long as you keep digging it out.

Marcus Aurelius

Adversity is the whetstone of human life.

Fletcher

Outward obstacles do no harm to a man strong in spirit, for harm is all that disfigures and weakens — as happens with animals, which obstacles embitter; but to a man who meets them with the strength of spirit that has been given him, every obstacle adds moral beauty and strength.

Marcus Aurelius

Suffering is the spur to activity, and only in activity do we feel our life.

Kant

Carry your burden, and know that your good lies in it; draw from it what is needed for your rational life, as the stomach draws from food all that the flesh needs, or like a fire, which blazes up brighter when something is thrown into it.

Marcus Aurelius

Only in a storm is a sailor’s skill fully shown; only on the battlefield is a soldier’s bravery tested; and a man’s courage is known only by what he proves to be in the hard and dangerous straits of life.

Daniel

Look upon all your talents and knowledge as means of helping others.

The strong and wise man has been given his gifts not in order to oppress, but to help and support the weak.

John Ruskin

And there was also a dispute among them as to which of them should be thought the greatest. But he said to them: Kings lord it over the nations, and those who have power over them are called benefactors; but not so with you: whoever among you is greater, let him be as the lesser, and whoever leads, as one who serves. For who is greater: the one who reclines at table, or the one who serves? Is it not the one who reclines at table? But I am among you as one who serves.

Luke 22:24–27

Without inner freedom, outward freedom is worth nothing. What good is it to me if I am not crushed by outward violence, but through ignorance, vice, egoism, and fear do not govern my own soul? I will call only that man free who is not shut up in himself or his sect, who overcomes pride, anger, and sloth, and is ready to sacrifice himself for the good of humanity.

Channing

Social life rests on consciousness, not on science. Civilization is above all a moral matter. If there is no honesty, no respect for right, no respect for duties, no love of neighbor — in a word, if there is no virtue — everything is in danger, everything collapses: neither the sciences, nor the arts, nor luxury, nor industry, nor rhetoric, nor the police, nor the customs can hold up a building that hangs in the air and has no foundation. A state founded only on calculation and held together by fear is a structure both ugly and unsound. Only the morality of the masses is the firm foundation of any civilization, and its cornerstone is duty. Those who fulfill it in quiet, setting a good example by doing so, are in this way the salvation and support of that glittering world which does not even know of them. Nine righteous men could have saved Sodom, but thousands upon thousands of good people are needed to save a nation from corruption and ruin.

Amiel

There are no accidents in fate; man creates his fate, he does not encounter it.

Villemain

Only when you fulfill the truth you know will a new truth be revealed to you.

Lucy Mallory

Every society that starts from the premise that “there is no God” arrives at certain unexpected results. Since the order of the world appears to such a society as a series of accidents and endless deceptions, no single accident or deception can, of course, surprise anyone any longer. And so all the horrors that take place in our life no longer shock or surprise anyone. All this is quite in the order of things.

Carlyle

Then Jesus said to them: For a little while yet the light is in you; walk while there is light, so that darkness may not envelop you; and he who walks in darkness does not know where he is going.

John 12:35

Moral effort and the joy of the consciousness of life alternate just as bodily labor and the joy of rest do. Without bodily labor there is no joy of rest; without moral effort there is no joy of the consciousness of life.

A man is happy only when he can say that he has done his own work, that he has put his soul into his labor and carried it through to the end as well as he could. But if he acts otherwise, then even when he has finished his labor he will feel neither gladness nor relief.

Emerson

Everything good is gained only by effort.

One of the sure and pure joys is rest after labor.

Kant

The search for truth is carried on not with gladness, but with agitation and unrest; but you must seek it all the same, because if you do not find the truth and come to love it, you will perish. But, you will say, if the truth wished me to seek it and love it, it would of its own accord reveal itself to me. And it does reveal itself to you, but you pay no attention to it. Seek the truth, then — it wants this.

Pascal

Never think that the small bad deed you have done does not matter. “I did it today; I won’t do it again.” That is not true: it will be hard for you to keep from doing a second time what you have done once.

Never say of a good deed: it isn’t even worth the effort, it is so easy, I can always do it whenever I like. Do not think or speak so. The smallest good deed always gives strength for a good life, just as an unkind deed lessens that strength.

Young man! Deny yourself the satisfaction of your desires (in amusements, in luxury, and the like), if not with the intention of renouncing their satisfaction altogether, then from the wish to keep in view an ever-growing enjoyment. Such thrift with your feeling of life will in fact make you richer, thanks to the postponement of enjoyment. The consciousness that enjoyment is in your power is more fruitful and more far-reaching than the feeling satisfied by that enjoyment, because together with the satisfaction it is destroyed.

Kant

The constant fulfillment of unnoticed duties with a simple and morally exalted feeling strengthens character to such a degree that it will act with courage and strength in the noise of the world and on the scaffold.

Emerson

I know that one must constantly keep watch over oneself; I know that Heaven knows everything and that its laws are unchanging. I know that it sees everything, enters into everything, is present in everything. Heaven penetrates the depths of all hearts just as daylight lights up a dark room. We must strive to reflect its light just as two musical instruments, tuned alike, answer each other.

Chinese Shi King

We may be solitary in our own private and passing surroundings, but each of our thoughts and each of our feelings finds, has found, and will find its echo in humanity. For some people, whom the greater part of humanity acknowledges as its leaders and enlighteners, this echo is enormous and resounds with particular force; but there is no man whose thoughts do not produce on others the same kind of effect, though many times smaller. Every sincere expression of the soul, every declaration of personal conviction, serves someone or something — even if no one knows of it, and even when they stop your mouth or throw a noose around your neck. A word said to someone retains an indestructible effect and, like all motion, is transformed into other forms but is not annihilated.

Amiel

Two things fill the soul with ever new and steadily growing wonder and reverence, the more often and the more steadily reflection is occupied with them: the starry heavens above me and the law of morality within me.

Kant

Life is neither suffering nor pleasure, but a task that we are bound to do and to carry honestly through to the end.

Tocqueville

Our acts are our own; their consequences are the business of heaven.

Francis

You are a day laborer: work your day through and receive your day’s wage.

The Talmud

If you wish to keep a man from some action, get him to talk about it: the more people talk, the less inclined they are to act.

Carlyle

You are not bound to finish the work, but neither may you shirk it.

He who gave you the work is to be trusted.

The Talmud

By the mere fact that a good intention has been spoken, the desire to carry it out is already weakened. But how are you to keep the nobly self-satisfied impulses of youth from being spoken? Only much later, remembering them, do you regret them, as you regret a flower you could not keep from picking — you picked it before it opened, and then saw it on the ground, wilted and trampled.

Life is a school in which failure is a better teacher than success.

Suleiman of Granada

Only after experiencing sufferings did I come to know the close kinship of human souls with one another. You need only suffer thoroughly yourself, and at once all who suffer become understandable to you, and you almost know what needs to be said to them. More than that, the mind itself grows clearer: the situations and walks of life of people, hidden until then, become known to you, and you can see who needs what. Great is God, who makes us wise. And by what does he make us wise? By that very grief from which we flee and want to hide. It is ordained for us to win, through sufferings and grief, grains of a wisdom that is not acquired from books.

Gogol

If God gave us teachers of whom we knew for certain that he had sent them, we would obey them freely and gladly.

And we have such teachers: need, and all the misfortunes of life.

Pascal

As the legend of the Wandering Jew, condemned as a punishment to everlasting life without death, is true in its thought, so a legend of someone condemned, as a punishment, to a life without suffering would be equally true.

As our body would burst if the pressure of the atmosphere on it were removed, so, if the pressure of need, hard toil and every kind of adversity were lifted from human life, men’s arrogance would swell — if not to the point of bursting, then at least to displays of the most unbridled folly, and even madness.

Schopenhauer

As the darkness of night reveals the lights of heaven, so suffering alone reveals the full meaning of life.

Thoreau

One hour of honest, serious thought is worth more than weeks of rapturous adoration when the adoration is not shown in deeds.

Harrison

Darkness is the cradle of the sun, and the dark of night is needed for the stars to shine.

Nezahualcoyotl of Tetzcuco

The more solitary we are, the more clearly we hear the voice of God, which is always calling us.

If you are weighed down, go deep into yourself, and at a certain depth you will find God; and as soon as you come to know him within yourself, all that is heavy will become light, and you will feel love and joy.

He who knows little talks much; he who knows mostly keeps silent.

This comes about because he who knows little thinks everything he knows important and wants to tell it to everyone. But he who knows much knows also that there is still far more to be known than he knows, and so he speaks only when others need it, and if he is not asked, he keeps silent.

After Rousseau

The sage assists at the independent birth in people of their own ideas and feelings, which were placed in them from eternity. His role is entirely like that of a spyglass, which does not give sight to a blind man, but only strengthens the sight of even the poorest eyes. Socrates likened the sage to a midwife, who does not give a woman a child, but only helps her bring her own into the world.

Fyodor Strakhov

This is how I picture it: the teachers set out their hours for themselves, but the pupils are free to come or not. Strange as this seems to us, who have set up instruction so monstrously, complete freedom in teaching — that is, that pupils, boys and girls, should come to learn of their own accord, when they want to — is the necessary condition of all fruitful teaching, just as the necessary condition of nourishment is that the one being nourished should want to eat.

Leo Tolstoy

If you want to convince a man that he is living badly, live well; but do not try to convince him with words. Men believe what they see.

Thoreau

He is not humble who says of himself that he is humble. He who says “I know nothing” is wise; he who says “I am learned” is a babbler. He who keeps silent is wiser and better than all.

Vamana Purana [Vemana]

When people take up study for themselves, that study is useful to them; but when people do it for others, so as to seem learned, that learning is not only useless but harmful.

Chinese wisdom [Confucius]

Those who know how to hide their foolishness are better than those who want to show off their wisdom.

We are not content with our true inner life; we want to live yet another, an imagined life in the thoughts of others, and to that end we force ourselves to seem what we are not in reality. We labor without ceasing to adorn this imagined being, and neglect the real one. If we possess calm, faithfulness, generosity, we hasten to proclaim it as soon as we can, so as to attach these virtues to the imagined being.

To give these qualities to the imagined being, we are capable of depriving ourselves of them. We are ready to be cowards, if only we may pass for brave.

Pascal

A man is as presumptuous as he is limited in understanding.

Pope

The bad wheel always creaks the loudest. The empty ear of grain stands tallest. Such too is the nature of pride.

No one can have any notion of the good until he has begun to practice it. And no one can truly love it until he has done it often and with sacrifice. And no one can find rest in it until he does it always.

Martineau

Faith in immortality is given not by reasoning but by life.

What convinces us that there must be a future life is not arguments, but walking through life hand in hand with someone, and suddenly that person vanishes there, into nowhere, and you yourself stop before that abyss and look down into it.

People say: I do not understand what it means to love God. But who understands what it means to love anything or anyone at all? Only those who love understand it.

If people do not know what it means to love art or science, how is it to be explained to them, if they do not know what art or science is?

How, then, is it to be explained to people what it means to love God, when they not only do not know what God is, but are proud of not knowing it.

Persecution is precious in that it breaks down every artificial prop and brings out into the open the real faith by which a person lives.

The quickest and surest means of being known as a virtuous man is to work on yourself so as to be one. Examine all the virtues, and you will see that they all grow through labor and practice.

The Conversations of Socrates

For man there is no higher good than to work unselfishly for the good of others — to work for the eternal good. When people submit to the common interest as they now submit to their personal strivings, then they will know peace and happiness, and there will open before them those endless manifestations of heavenly wisdom that they do not see now.

Lucy Mallory

Morality is the direction of the will toward common, universal ends. He is immoral who acts for a private end. He is moral — we say this with Marcus Aurelius and Kant — whose end or motive can be set up as the end of all rational beings. We affirm that this majestic conception or commandment lies in the consciousness of every man. This is precisely the presence of the eternal in every mortal.

Emerson

What a man does, that he owns. Let no one count anything a lasting good except what is in himself and what must grow in him for as long as he lives.

Emerson

The best answer to a fool is silence. Every word of answer will bounce back from the fool onto you. To repay offense with offense is the same as throwing wood on a fire; but whoever meets an accuser with calm has by that very thing already defeated him.

Muhammad and Ali once met a man who, considering Ali to have wronged him, began to curse him. Ali bore this patiently and in silence for quite a long time, but then could not restrain himself and began to answer curses with curses. Then Muhammad walked on, leaving the two of them to finish their quarrel. When Ali came up to Muhammad again, he said to him, offended: Why did you leave me alone to bear the curses of this insolent man? Muhammad answered: When this man was abusing you and you kept silent, I saw around you ten angels who were answering him. But when you began to answer him with abuse, the angels all left you, and I too went away.

A Muslim tradition

However harmful anger is to other people, it is most harmful of all to the one who is angry.

It is always more harmful than the offense that provoked it.

Your enemy will repay you with evil, the one who hates you will pay you back sorely, but the anger in your heart will bring you incomparably more evil.

Neither father nor mother, nor kin, nor those close to you will do you as much good as your heart when it forgives and forgets an offense.

Buddhist wisdom [Dhammapada]

The more you hurry, the less you get done.

Bears are killed this way: over a trough of honey a heavy log is hung on a rope. The bear pushes the log away to get at the honey. The log swings back and strikes him; the bear grows angry and pushes the log harder, and it strikes him harder. And this goes on until the log kills the bear. Can people really not be more reasonable than bears?

No misfortune is as great as the fear of it.

Zschokke

You are already unfortunate if you dread misfortune; and whoever deserves it dreads it forever.

Chinese proverb

Therefore I say to you: do not worry for your soul, what you will eat and what you will drink, nor for your body, what you will put on. Is not the soul more than food, and the body more than clothing?

Look at the birds of the air: they do not sow, they do not reap, they do not gather into barns; and your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much better than they?

And which of you, by worrying, can add even one cubit to his height?

So do not worry, and do not say: What shall we eat? or what shall we drink? or what shall we put on?

But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all this will be added to you.

So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own. Each day has enough of its own worry.

Matthew 6:25–27, 31, 33–34

Over two things a man should never grieve: what he can help, and what he cannot help.

“Every Body’s Book of Proverbs and Quotations”

When life is hard for you, when you suffer from memories of the past or are anxious about the future, remember that life is only in the present; turn all your strength upon it, and all your suffering over the past and your anxiety about the future will vanish, and you will feel freedom and joy.

The most insignificant small things help to form character.

Do not say that small things are trifles. Only a truly moral person sees the full significance of small things.

The man endowed with ordinary senses conforms his thoughts to things; the artist conforms things to his thoughts. The ordinary man regards nature as immovably fixed and solid; the artist regards it as fluid and shifting, and sets the stamp of his own being upon it. For him the refractory world is obedient and pliant; he clothes dust and stones with human qualities and turns them into expressions of reason.

Emerson

He who recognizes a ray of divine power in the smallest things of the world is a man of high understanding and high aspirations. Such a man respects himself and others, and does not disdain trifling tasks, but looks on them as manifestations of the power of God.

The Persian Jalal al-Din Rumi [Abu’l-Fazl]

Art is an action upon people in which, in their souls, the mysterious becomes evident, the vague becomes clear, the complex simple, the accidental necessary. The true artist always simplifies.

After Amiel

Christian art must bring it about that the feelings of brotherhood and love for one’s neighbors, now accessible only to the best people of society, become habitual feelings, the instinct of all people. By calling up in the imagination of all people the feelings of brotherhood and love, Christian art will accustom people to experience the same feelings in reality. It lays down in people’s souls the rails along which the actions of people brought up by such art will naturally run.

Music shows us the possibilities of greatness that are in our souls, says Emerson. The same can be said of all true art.

The worth of a man is measured not by the truth he possesses, but by the labor he has spent in acquiring it.

Lessing

Perfection belongs to God. To desire the perfect belongs to man.

Goethe

Nothing will be credited to a man but his effort. Only in his effort does a man appear in his true light.

The Koran

Expect from your efforts toward good not only no quick success, but no success visible to you at all. You will not see the fruits of your efforts, because however far you have moved forward, the perfection you strive toward has moved forward before you just as far. Efforts are not the means of attaining the good, but the efforts themselves give the good.

There is no one without sin and no one wholly truthful. The difference between people is not that one is wholly sinless and truthful and another sinful and false through and through, but that one strives for the greatest sinlessness and truthfulness and another does not strive for it.

Seeking God is like scooping up water with a net. While you are scooping, the water is in the net. Once you pull it out, you have caught nothing.

While you seek God in thought and deed, God is in you. As soon as you decide that you have found God, and rest content, you have lost him.

Fyodor Strakhov

Death is the destruction of the bodily organs through which I perceive the world as it appears to me in this life. Death is the destruction of the glass through which I looked at the world. But the destruction of the glass in no way entails the annihilation of the eye.

Death is a change or disappearance of the object of consciousness. Consciousness itself can no more be destroyed by death than a change of spectacle can destroy the spectator.

Death is a change in the form to which our spirit is joined. We must not confuse the form with what is joined to it.

A man’s deeds are his life. And his deeds become his fate, good or bad. In this lies the law of our life, and therefore the most important thing in the world for a man is what he is doing now.

Indian Agni Purana

Let no man think lightly of evil, saying in his heart: surely it will not touch me. A water jar is filled by small drops; the fool is filled wholly with evil, doing evil little by little.

Let no man think carelessly of good, saying in his heart: there is no strength in me to take in the good. As water fills a jar drop by drop, so little by little, doing good, the man who strives toward the good is filled wholly with good.

Buddhist wisdom [Dhammapada]

Let every dawn be for you as it were the beginning of life, and every sunset as it were its end; and let each of these short lives leave behind it the mark of some loving deed done for others and some good effort made upon yourself.

John Ruskin

The house in which a man lives may be ruined and destroyed; but the dwelling that the spirit builds for itself out of pure thoughts and good deeds fears not even eternity, and nothing can harm the one who lives in it.

Lucy Mallory

Act by day so that your sleep at night may be peaceful, and in youth so that your old age may be peaceful.

Indian proverb

Might is given to man not that he may crush the weak, but that he may support him and help him.

John Ruskin

He who has conquered himself is a far greater victor than he who has conquered a thousand times a thousand men in battle. It is better to conquer oneself than all other people.

He who has conquered other people in battle may be conquered, but he who has conquered himself and is master of himself will remain a victor forever.

Dhammapada

Do not think that a man’s courage lies only in bravery and strength: the highest courage lies in rising above anger and loving the one who has wronged you.

Persian wisdom (from d’Herbelot)

Who is wise? — He who learns something from everyone.

Who is strong? — He who curbs himself.

Who is rich? — He who is content with his lot.

The Talmud

The only way to speak the truth is to speak lovingly. Only the lover’s words are heard.

Thoreau

I have learned much from my teachers, more still from my companions, but most of all from my pupils.

The Talmud

A learned man who produces nothing is like a cloud that gives no rain.

Eastern wisdom

If you know the truth, or only think you know it, pass it on as simply as possible and, above all, as gently and as lovingly as possible toward the one to whom you pass it on.

It would be good to investigate the question — is it not harmful to polish children too much in their education? We do not yet know man well enough not to leave the carrying out of this to chance, if one may put it so. I am sure that if our educators succeeded in reaching their goal — I mean, if they proved able to educate children entirely as they wish to — we would no longer have a single truly great man. As a rule, no one taught us what is most needed in life.

God forbid that man, whose teacher is the whole of nature, should become a lump of wax on which some professor or other would stamp his own exalted image.

Lichtenberg

The church, the state, and society have certain typical molds into which the thought of the young is cast. And when the time comes at which the distinctive traits of the new generation ought to have shown themselves, it turns out that its thought has already ossified in these molds and can take in nothing new.

Lucy Mallory

We are inclined to take on the views and thoughts shared by the people we live among, and do not try to develop them further and more deeply. Hence the paltriness of our characters and our lives.

Conforming to customs that are, in essence, none of your concern — that is what your strength is spent on, what robs you of leisure and wipes out all the originality of your nature. When you are occupied with such things, how hard it is to make out what you really are, to say nothing of spending your best faculties on trifles. Such a life ruins soul and body.

Emerson

Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his own childishness, a childishness he himself maintains. Childishness consists in his inability to use his reason without the guidance of another. And this childishness is maintained by man himself when its cause lies not in a lack of reason but in a lack of resolve and courage to use it without the guidance of another.

Kant

Our chief and hardest duty as members of society is to know how to use society’s benefits without bowing to its yoke; to be ready to receive the thoughts and convictions of others, yet hold fast to the sacred right of our own judgment; to take impulses from others, yet act by the demands of our own soul; to act with others, yet follow our own conscience; to know how to join respect for the opinions of others with self-determination.

Channing

If people argue for a long time, this proves that they themselves are not clear about what they are arguing over.

Voltaire

The most ardent defenders of any science, who cannot bear the slightest look askance at it, are usually those persons who have not gone far in it and are secretly conscious of this shortcoming in themselves.

Lichtenberg

Nothing so furthers the triumph of reason as the calm of those who serve it. Truth often suffers more from the heat of its defenders than from the attacks of its opponents.

Penn

Arguments always do more to darken the truth than to make it clear.

Truth must ripen in solitude. And when it has ripened, it is so clear that it is accepted without argument.

Only error needs artificial support. Truth can stand alone.

The nearer people are to the truth, the more tolerant they are of the errors of others. And vice versa.