F. H. Bradley Quotes

27 Sourced Quotes

There are persons who, when they cease to shock us, cease to interest us.

F. H. Bradley
Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct; but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.

F. H. Bradley
The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring. And that is not happiness.

F. H. Bradley
The force of the blow depends on the resistance. It is sometimes better not to struggle against temptation. Either fly or yield at once.

F. H. Bradley
Adam knew Eve his wife and she conceived. It is a pity that this is still the only knowledge of their wives at which some men seem to arrive.

F. H. Bradley
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.

F. H. Bradley
There are those who so dislike the nude that they find something indecent in the naked truth.

F. H. Bradley
The one self-knowledge worth having is to know one's own mind.

F. H. Bradley
True penitence condemns to silence. What a man is ready to recall he would be willing to repeat.

F. H. Bradley
We say that a girl with her doll anticipates the mother. It is more true, perhaps, that most mothers are still but children with playthings.

F. H. Bradley
An aphorism is true where it has fixed the impression of a genuine experience.

F. H. Bradley
Where everything is bad it must be good to know the worst.

F. H. Bradley
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. Bradley
The propriety of some persons seems to consist in having improper thoughts about their neighbors.

F. H. Bradley
When the sense of mystery and enchantment no longer draws the mind to wander aimlessly and to love it knows not what; when, in short, twilight has no charm - then metaphysics will be worthless.

F. H. Bradley
It is good to know what a man is, and also what the world takes him for. But you do not understand him until you have learnt how he understands himself.

F. H. Bradley
For Nature to the common man is not the Nature of the physicist; and the physicist himself, outside his science, still habitually views the world as what he must believe it cannot be.

F. H. Bradley
We may agree, perhaps, to understand by Metaphysics an attempt to know reality as against mere appearance, or the study of first principles or ultimate truths, or again the effort to comprehend the universe, not simply piecemeal or by fragments, but somehow as a whole.

F. H. Bradley
Metaphysical knowledge... may be possible theoretically, and even actual, if you please, to a certain degree; but, for all that, it is practically no knowledge worth the name.

F. H. Bradley
Eclecticism. Every truth is so true that any truth must be false.

F. H. Bradley
I will begin with the self-styled "Christian" party, who profess to base their morality on the New Testament. But whether it is really more Christian to follow or to ignore the teachings of the Gospels I shall not discuss.

F. H. Bradley
The man whose nature is such that by one path alone his chief desire will reach consummation will try to find it on that path, whatever it may be, and whatever the world thinks of it; and if he does not, he is contemptible.

F. H. Bradley
Of Optimism I have said that "The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil."

F. H. Bradley
It is by a wise economy of nature that those who suffer without change, and whom no one can help, become uninteresting. Yet so it may happen that those who need sympathy the most often attract it the least.

F. H. Bradley
Our live experiences, fixed in aphorisms, stiffen into cold epigrams. Our heart's blood, as we write it, turns to mere dull ink.

F. H. Bradley