The first step in freeing yourself from social restrictions is the realization that there is no such thing as a "safe" code of conduct - one that would earn everyone's approval. Your actions can always be condemned by someone - for being too bold or too apathetic, for being too conformist or too nonconformist, for being too liberal or too conservative. So it's necessary to decide whose approval is important to you.
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An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything in to read more
An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything in to an empty head.
Our quarrel with the world is an echo of the endless quarrel proceeding within us.
Our quarrel with the world is an echo of the endless quarrel proceeding within us.
To be fully alive is to feel that everything is possible.
To be fully alive is to feel that everything is possible.
The short-lived self, teetering on the edge of extinction, is the only thing that can ever really matter.
The short-lived self, teetering on the edge of extinction, is the only thing that can ever really matter.
It should be noted that the seeds of wisdom that are to bear fruit in the intellect are sown less read more
It should be noted that the seeds of wisdom that are to bear fruit in the intellect are sown less by critical studies and learned monographs than by insights, broad impressions, and flashes of intuition.
Everything that we think God has in his mind necessarily proceeds from our own mind; it is what we imagine read more
Everything that we think God has in his mind necessarily proceeds from our own mind; it is what we imagine to be in God's mind, and it is really difficult for human intelligence to guess at a divine intelligence. What we usually end up with by this sort of reasoning is to make God the color-sergeant of our army and to make Him as chauvinistic as ourselves.
The burning of an author's books, imprisonment for opinion's sake, has always been the tribute that an ignorant age pays read more
The burning of an author's books, imprisonment for opinion's sake, has always been the tribute that an ignorant age pays to the genius of its time.
It is only doubt that creates. It is only the minority that counts.
It is only doubt that creates. It is only the minority that counts.
The inertia of the human mind and its resistance to innovation are most clearly demonstrated not, as one might expect, read more
The inertia of the human mind and its resistance to innovation are most clearly demonstrated not, as one might expect, by the ignorant mass- which is easily swayed once its imagination is caught- but by professionals with a vested interest in tradition and in the monopoly of learning. Innovation is a twofold threat to academic mediocrities: it endangers their oracular authority, and it evokes the deeper fear that their whole, laboriously constructed intellectual edifice might collapse. The academic backwoodsmen have been the curse of genius from Aristarchus to Darwin and Freud; they stretch, a solid and hostile phalanx of pedantic mediocrities, across the centuries.
