"The most important truth which has ever been uttered, and the greatest discovery ever made in the moral world."

A. E. Housman Education See all quotes by A. E. Housman →

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“Most men are rather stupid, and most of those who are not stupid are, consequently, rather vain.”

“A man who possesses common sense and the use of reason must not expect to learn from treatises or lectures on textual criticism anything that he could not, with leisure and industry, find out for himself. What the lectures and treatises can do for him is to save him time and trouble by presenting to him immediately considerations which would in any case occur to him sooner or later.”

“Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act...The seat of this sensation is the pit of the stomach. Houseman's test for great poetry.”

“The difference between an icicle and a red-hot poker is really much slighter than the difference between truth and falsehood or sense and nonsense; yet it is much more immediately noticeable and much more universally noticed, because the body is more sensitive than the mind.”

“Nature, not content with denying to Mr — the faculty of thought, has endowed him with the faculty of writing.”

“Three minutes' thought would suffice to find this out; but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time.”

Resonant Thoughts

"Anybody can reduce taxes, but it is not so easy to stand in the gap and resist the passage of increasing appropriation bills which would make tax reduction impossible. It will be very easy to measure …"

— Calvin Coolidge

Politics1780–1853

#leadership

"The Existence of Perfected Men is one of the most important of the many new facts which Theosophy puts before us. It follows logically from the other great Theosophical teachings of karma and evolutio…"

— Charles Webster Leadbeater

occultism1854–1934

#philosophy

"Thus, as Kautsky wrote in 1919, there was growing up amid despotic conditions a new class of bureaucratic German exploiters, no better than the Tsarist chinovniks; and the workers’ future struggle aga…"

— Leszek Kołakowski

Philosophy1927–2009

#freedom

"I think the popular vote would have been easier in a true sense because you'd go to a few places. I think that's the genius of the Electoral College. I was never a fan of the Electoral College until n…"

— Donald Trump

Politics1945

#truth