Quotes by Statesmen - Page 14

You are aware of only one unrest;Oh, never learn to know the other!Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast,And one is striving to forsake its brother.Unto the world in grossly loving zest,With clinging tendrils, one adheres;The other rises forcibly in questOf rarefied ancestral spheres.If there be spirits in the airThat hold their sway between the earth and sky,Descend out of the golden vapors thereAnd sweep me into iridescent life.Oh, came a magic cloak into my handsTo carry me to distant lands,I should not trade it for the choicest gown,Nor for the cloak and garments of the crown.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best
Otto von Bismarck
Finally, everybody agrees that no one pursuit can be successfully followed by a man who is preoccupied with many things—eloquence cannot, nor the liberal studies—since the mind, when distracted, takes in nothing very deeply, but rejects everything that is, as it were, crammed into it. There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living: there is nothing that is harder to learn.
Seneca
What you feed in yourself that grows.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
To end the greatest work designed,A thousand hands need but one mind.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
As Lucretius says: 'Thus ever from himself doth each man flee.' But what does he gain if he does not escape from himself? He ever follows himself and weighs upon himself as his own most burdensome companion. And so we ought to understand that what we struggle with is the fault, not of the places, but of ourselves
Seneca
It is the power of the mind to be unconquerable.
Seneca
People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.
Edmund Burke
Kindness and good nature unite men more effectually and with greater strength than any agreements whatsoever, since thereby the engagements of men's hearts become stronger than the bond and obligation of words.
Thomas More
All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Fidelity purchased with money, money can destroy.
Seneca
Money is a great servant but a bad master.
Francis Bacon
Music is either sacred or profane. What is sacred accords completely with its nobility, and this is where music most immediately influences life; such influence remains unchanged at all times and in every epoch. Profane music should be altogether cheerful.Music of a kind that mixes the sacred with the profane is godless and shoddy music wich goes in for expressing feeble, wretched, deplorable feelings, and is just insipid. For it is not serious enough to be sacred and it lacks the chief quality of the opposite kind: cheerfulness.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
For in music there is no material to be deducted.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
…because it is natural to touch more often the parts that hurt.
Seneca
Peace at home, peace in the world.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
This beach I voyage on leads me through the earth's immortal consistencies. Each form I encounter obeys the principles of perfection and trial, a timelessness in the making. The proportions of truth are at hand. Existence is celebrated in a splinter of driftwood, worn by wind-driven sand into the shape of an arrow. The onshore waves jostle each other, busy with their eternal changing, mixing crab shells, sand grains, and fish bones together. The trim little shorebirds feeding at the water's edge are acutely aware of one another, under the light and shadow leaning and drifting over all awareness. Wither own mysteries behind their beady eyes, their quick, advantageous movements, they follow the great, unifying sea." ~ John Hay. Bird of Light.
John Hay
You must, in studying Nature, always consider both each single thing and the whole: nothing is inside and nothing is outside, for what is within is without. Make haste, then, to grasp this holy mystery which is public knowledge.Rejoice in the true illusion, in the serious game: no living thing is a unity, it is always manifold.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
In a society so estranged from animals as ours, we often fail to credit them with any form of language. If we do, it comes under the heading of communication rather than speech. And yet, the great silence we have imposed on the rest of life contains innumerable forms of expression. Where does our own language come from but this unfathomed store that characterizes innumerable species? We are now more than halfway removed from what the unwritten word meant to our ancestors, who believed in the original, primal word behind all manifestations of the spirit. You sang because you were answered. The answers come from life around you. Prayers, chants, and songs were also responses to the elements, to the wind, the sun and stars, the Great Mystery behind them. Life on earth springs from a collateral magic that we rarely consult. We avoid the unknown as if we were afraid that contact would lower our sense of self-esteem.
John Hay
The nature of things is, I admit, a sturdy adversary.
Edmund Burke
Nature cannot be commanded except by being obeyed.
Francis Bacon
Nature is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished.
Francis Bacon
It is quality rather than quantity that matters.
Seneca
It is naturally given to all men to esteem their own inventions best.
Thomas More
Mankind is a single body and each nation a part of that body. We must never say "What does it matter to me if some part of the world is ailing?" If there is such an illness, we must concern ourselves with it as though we were having that illness.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
Who doesn’t respect and value his past, is not worth the honour of the present, and has no right to a future.
Józef Piłsudski
Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.
Edmund Burke
Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.
Edmund Burke
The greatest evil that can befall man is that he should come to think ill of himself.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others; but that would be only in the less important arguments, and the meaner sort of books, else distilled books are like common distilled waters, flashy things. Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. And therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit: and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know, that he doth not. Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics subtile; natural philosophy deep; moral grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend.----Alcuni libri devono essere gustati, altri masticati e digeriti, vale a dire che alcuni libri vanno letti solo in parte, altri senza curiosità, e altri per intero, con diligenza ed attenzione. Alcuni libri possono essere letti da altri e se ne possono fare degli estratti, ma ciò riguarderebbe solo argomenti di scarsa importanza o di libri secondari perché altrimenti i libri sintetizzati sono come l’acqua distillata, evanescente. La lettura completa la formazione di un uomo; il parlare lo fa abile, e la scrittura lo trasforma in un uomo preciso. E, pertanto, se un uomo scrive poco, deve avere una grande memoria, se parla poco ha bisogno di uno spirito arguto; se legge poco deve avere bisogno di molta astuzia in modo da far sembrare di sapere quello che non sa. Le storie fanno gli uomini saggi; i poeti arguti; la matematica sottile; la filosofia naturale profondi; la logica e la retorica abili nella discussione.
Bacon Francis 1561-1626 Francis
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
Francis Bacon
Reading maketh a full man; and writing an axact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he need have a present wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem to know which he doth not.
Francis Bacon
Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
Edmund Burke
Colors are light's suffering and joy
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence- a reconcentration… tearing away the veils, the attitudes people acquire of their time and earlier time. Really good artists tear down those veils
Francis Bacon
Your friend Plato holds that commonwealths will only be happy when either philosophers rule or rulers philosophize: how remote happiness must appear when philosophers won't even deign to share their thoughts with kings.
Thomas More
The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden. If you don't want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don't have a soul.
Thomas More
The final hour when we cease to exist does not itself bring death; it merely of itself completes the death-process. We reach death at that moment, but we have been a long time on the way.
Seneca
No one, on his deathbed, ever regretted having been a Catholic.
Thomas More
A woman is not beautiful when her ankle or arm wins compliments, but when her total appearance diverts admiration from the individual parts of her body.
Seneca
A pretty face may be enough to catch a man, but it takes character and good nature to hold him.
Thomas More
The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Nothing can be compared to the new life that the discovery of another country provides for a thoughtful person. Although I am still the same I believe to have changed to the bones.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Human kind is made up of two sexes, women and men. Is it possible that a mass is improved by the improvement of only one part and the other part is ignored? Is it possible that if half of a mass is tied to earth with chains and the other half can soar into skies?
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
It is even so in a commonwealth and in the councils of princes; if ill opinions cannot be quite rooted out, and you cannot cure some received vice according to your wishes, you must not, therefore, abandon the commonwealth, for the same reasons as you should not forsake the ship in a storm because you cannot command the winds. You are not obliged to assault people with discourses that are out of their road, when you see that their received notions must prevent your making an impression upon them: you ought rather to cast about and to manage things with all the dexterity in your power, so that, if you are not able to make them go well, they may be as little ill as possible; for, except all men were good, everything cannot be right, and that is a blessing that I do not at present hope to see.
Thomas More
[Government]is cancerous in head and limbs;only its belly is sound, and the laws it excretes are the most strightforward shit in the world.
Otto von Bismarck
A disordered currency is one of the greatest political evils.
Daniel Webster
The secret of politics? Make a good treaty with Russia.
Otto von Bismarck
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Politics are not a science based on logic; they are the capacity of always choosing at each instant, in constantly changing situations, the least harmful, the most useful.
Otto von Bismarck
Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied.
Otto von Bismarck
Everything we see in the world is the creative work of women.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you.
Pericles
It's easier to get philosophers to agree than clocks.
Seneca
But is life really worth so much? Let us examine this; it's a different inquiry. We will offer no solace for so desolate a prison house; we will encourage no one to endure the overlordship of butchers. We shall rather show that in every kind of slavery, the road of freedom lies open. I will say to the man to whom it befell to have a king shoot arrows at his dear ones [Prexaspes], and to him whose master makes fathers banquet on their sons' guts [Harpagus]: 'What are you groaning for, fool?... Everywhere you look you find an end to your sufferings. You see that steep drop-off? It leads down to freedom. You see that ocean, that river, that well? Freedom lies at its bottom. You see that short, shriveled, bare tree? Freedom hangs from it.... You ask, what is the path to freedom? Any vein in your body.
Seneca
Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.
Edmund Burke
Freedom is the sure possession of those alone who have the courage to defend it.
Pericles
It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
Edmund Burke