Author: Gillian Higginson

The hard school

I cannot see how somebody who did not at the right time go to a good school can ever make up for this. Such a person does not know himself;

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Woman

In the three or four civilized countries of Europe by a few centuries of education one can make women into anything one wants, even into men: not, of course, in

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Happiness of the herd

[Democrats and liberals] are unfree and ludicrously superficial, above all in their fundamental inclination to see in the forms of existing society the cause of practically all human failure and

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Morbid mellowing

Every kind of severity, even severity in justice, begins to trouble the conscience; a stern and lofty nobility and self-responsibility is received almost as an offence and awakens mistrust, the

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Man’s self-contempt

Has there not been since the time of Copernicus an unbroken progress in the self-belittling of man and his will for belittling himself? Alas, his belief in his dignity, his

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Instinct of reverence

He whose task and practice it is to explore the soul will avail himself of precisely this art in many forms in order to determine the ultimate value of a

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The modern scholar

Modern, noisy, time-consuming, proud industriousness has extinguished the religious instincts, so that people no longer have any idea of what religions are about and as it were just register their

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Welcome

This is a new website which will be updated regularly with aphorisms and other writings. If what you find here interests you, please return from time to time.

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Irving Babbitt

People will not consent in the long run to look up to those who are not themselves looking up to something higher than their ordinary selves. A leading class that

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Kolakowski

Powerful cultural forces are indeed pushing us towards unity, a barbarian unity built on the loss, the forgetting of tradition. One such force is the barbarity of totalitarianism of the

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Frederick Faber

There is a grace of kind listening, as well as a grace of kind speaking. Some men listen with an abstracted air, which shows that their thoughts are elsewhere. Or

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Radhakrishnan

The Hindu emphasis on inner life seems to many leaders of our generation, apostles of success and efficiency, a sheer waste of time. We are asked to go out and

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