Status Updates From Sobre a Democracia e Outros...

Success and cynicism are not only achieved; they are also inherited.

That one should have to talk about the mind in metaphors is unfortunate, but inevitable.

The forms change, but the substance remains.

The self, however, is a living organism, and refuses to be denied without a struggle.

The form of institutions and philosophies may change; but the substance that underlies them remains indestructible, because the nature of humanity remains unaltered.

Nothing so simple and so rational can possibly be true.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

The truth is paradoxical; but man’s passion for rational coherence is even stronger than his love of truth.

The nature of the rationalisation is strictly determined by the nature of the intuition.

All men have similar sensations, but not all have similar intuitions.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude, the less it will be drawn towards social religion or be moved by its practices.

To know a person’s character you must at least have talked with him, and unless you are gifted with remarkable intuitive insight you are not likely to know much about him unless you have seen him living and acting over a considerable period of time.

Ordinary men, we have seen, are not much interested in any political problems which do not immediately affect themselves.

All human minds are not the same, that intelligence differs not only in degree, but to some extent also in kind.

What is the mind? The question is, of course, ultimately quite unanswerable. We do not and we cannot know what mind really is. We do not and cannot know, of that matter, what anything really is.

We are unable to see the mind, and find it difficult in consequence to understand its nature.

One cannot make very serious mistakes about the nature of a thing one can see and actually handle.

To criticise something imperfect is always amusing, and maybe profitable in those cases where the imperfections can be remedies.

[...]and he will restrained, if not by tolerance, at least by the salutary fear of making a fool of himself, from trespassing on the territory of minds belonging to another type.

When psychological education is less rudimentary that it is at present, people belonging to different types will recognize each other’s right to exist. Every man will stick to the problems, inward or outward, with which nature has fitted him to deal;[...]

To use the intelligence in any other than the habitual way is not to use the intelligence; it is to be irrational, to rave like a madman.

One must have some basis of experience on which to build an imagination.

To understand sympathetically, with one’s whole beings, the state of mind of some one radically unlike oneself is very difficult—is, so far as I am concerned, impossible.

We need not know a thing in order to be able to investigate and control it. Where knowledge is absent—and in an absolute sense we can know nothing—a vague working hypothesis is quite enough for all practical and even philosophical purposes.

Life is so constituted that we can make effective use of things whose nature we do not understand.

New ideas are reasonable if they can be fitted into an already familiar scheme, unreasonable if they cannot be made to fit. Our intellectual prejudices determine the channels along which our reason shall flow.