African Spir Quotes

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The doctrine expounded by me is the true one, but I am not its author. I have only been, so to speak, the soil in which it has germinated and has developed itself with an extreme slowness in the course of long years. Also there has never been such a disproportion between the man and his work than in my case, and what is the saddest, is that one has to suffer because of the incapacity and the weakness of the other. A man more capable than me, possessing this doctrine, would already have stirred the world.

African Spir
Whoever has recognized the vainglory of individuality will not attach any store to fame. The only one thing which is really valuable, it is to do good.

African Spir
In life we only try to produce, to win, and enjoy the more we can; in science, to discover and invent the more we can; in religion, to dominate on the greatest number of people we can; whereas the forming of the character, the further development of the faculties of the intelligence, the refinement of the consciousness and of the heart, are considered incidental things.

African Spir
In ancient times, any man rising up above the common people tried to shape his life according to his principles; it is no longer like than now; it is (because) for the ancients, moral was a principle of inner life, whereas in our days, most of the time one is content to adhere to an official moral, that we recognize in theory, but that one does not care to put into practice.

African Spir
The first principle from which stems the moral of about all people at all time; it is summarized in this precept: Love thy neighbor as thyself, and: do as you would be done by.

African Spir
Arbitrariness and true liberty are as distinct from each other that the empirical nature is distinct from the higher nature of man.

African Spir
Religion is not simply a theory, it is a higher life, of which morality is an integral part - a life devoted to the worship of the good and the true, for God, the absolute, is the supreme source of all perfection.

African Spir
The virtue preached by devout persons is the virtue of the slave who always believe themselves under the eye of the master. However, Jesus said: 'Serve God not as slaves, but as sons in the house'

African Spir
Men who have sacrifice their well-being, and even their lives, for the cause of truth or the public good, are, from an empirical point of view - which scorn virtue and altruism - regarded as insane or fools; but, from a moral standpoint, they are heroes who do honor humanity.

African Spir
The divine element manifests itself in man as well by his aptitude for science, than by his aptitude for virtue. True morality, true philosophy and true art are in their essence religious.

African Spir
The intellectual development of man, far from having get men away from war, has, rather, on the contrary, bring them to a refinement always more perfected in the art of killing. They even came to raise the methods of slaughter to the rank of "science"… We would not imagine a more extraordinary moral blindness!

African Spir
We would not permanently change by violence a state of affairs; we can repress resistances for a certain time, but not attain thus a lasting result.

African Spir
So many forces and resources would become available if States, aware of their true mission, would want to get on to abolish every politics aiming at expansion or hegemony; system that maintain among nations a a perpetual distrust and tension, impose on them formidable armies and crushing war budgets.

African Spir
To sacrifice the moral to the physical, as is done in these days, is to sacrifice reality for a shadow.

African Spir
Experience shows that what great role practice and experience play in education; practice , the prolonged exercise lead to habit: exemple suggests imitation. Habit can become a second nature, but, wrongly directed, it may also heighten unfortunate tendencies and be an obstacle to progress.

African Spir
The basic notion of justice, is that the rights of everybody are equals, in principle. In the rights of others, we have to respect our own rights. It is only in that condition that we can reasonably require that it be respected by others.

African Spir
The more gifted by nature is a man, the more is deplorable the abuse that he does by using them to shameful ends. A swindler of higher condition is more blameworthy than a vulgar scoundrel; an intelligent evil-doer, having benefited from a higher education, represent a more saddening phenomenon than an unfortunate illiterate fellow having committed an offence.

African Spir
The need for sociability induce man to be in touch with his fellow men. However, this need might not find its full satisfaction in the conventional and deceitful world, in which everyone is mostly trying to assert oneself in front of others, to appear, and hoping to find in society relationships some advantages for his interest and vanity.

African Spir
To be effective, morality has to be reasoned. To want to repress evil only by coercion, and to obtain morality by a sort of training with the help of constraint, without motivating it from within, is to make it an unnatural result, devoided of lasting value.

African Spir
The physical man, who does not imagine that everything is relative, yield to outer force, that impress him from outside, and whose effects are tangible to him, whether they manifest themselves by force, wealth or by domination.

African Spir
The feeling of solidarity that is born amidst a community rest on the feeling of antagonism arouse by those who are opposed to it. Most of the time we only adhere to a party or a group, in order to better differentiate ourselves of another.

African Spir
It is erroneous to consider the multiplication of needs as a sign of progress, to think that it is necessary to arouse in the people still unpolished, new needs to bring them to a more civilized life. Similarly it is erroneous to expect to measure the degree of culture of a man to the degree of refinement he make in his methods of pleasure.

African Spir
What is missing to our civilization, is the soul, the spiritual unity, the basis. That is why everything in it is pretense and contrivance; why also, in spite of the progress and marvelous improvement they have accomplished in the external realm men have, in general, become themselves neither better, nor happier. They have neglected too much the essential; their own perfecting.

African Spir
Whether in a banquet somebody was to take it upon himself to snatch pieces from the mouth of the guests, we would be unanimous to find the method iniquitous and brutal, but if from another source the same is practiced in a less apparent way, we hardly show ourselves offended by t.

African Spir
Nothing depict better the poverty of human nature than to see men, placed at the head of a State, and who should, so to speak, embody the law, be concerned only with their own prestige and their own particular interests.

African Spir
Besides the progress of industry and technique, we see a growing discontent among the masses; we see, besides the expansion of instruction, distrust and hatred expanding among nations, that vie with one another, by the increase of their armies and the improvement of their engines of murder.

African Spir
The moral improvement demands an evolution leading to a higher consciousness

African Spir
The more a man is successful in getting out from his own individuality, of his egoist self, and to control the instincts of his physical nature, the more his character, by rising above material contingencies, widen, become free and independent.

African Spir
The well understood equity as well as interest of society demand that we work on much more to prevent crime and offenses than to punish them.

African Spir
The belief that the conditioned derives from the unconditioned, wrong from right, represent the most fatal error and the one most fraught with consequences that is. This believe gave rise to incalculable harms; it has obliterated the religious consciousness and warped the moral judgement; moreover, it has created an abyss between science and religion, and brought generations of men to atheism.

African Spir