F. H. Bradley Quotes

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

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

I can myself conceive of nothing else than the experienced.

His mind is so open - so open that ideas simply pass through it.

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.

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.

The man who has ceased to fear has ceased to care.

The cost of a thing is what I call life which has to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

Religion is rather the attempt to express the complete reality of goodness through every aspect of our being.

Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct.

The deadliest foe to virtue would be complete self-knowledge.

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

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.

The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

My external sensations are no less private to my self than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside... the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.

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

Reason teaches us that what is good is good for something, and that what is good for nothing is not good at all.

Up to a certain point every man is what he thinks he is.

But when one has ceased to have them, too often one cannot.