Pensées

From Summa Bergania

Various thoughts, proverbs, or maxims that came my way.

• The only safe kind of fame is posthumous fame.

• A little wisdom is better than a lot of intelligence.

• Thoroughness requires patience.

• Honesty must be balanced with tact.

• A good maxim for your life is this: Treat yourself like a chunk of iron but treat all other people like glass figurines. Take the blows life gives you with as little disfiguring as possible, but never give a blow to someone else.

• The day I became disenchanted with the world was not the day I found out that it was wrong, but when I found out it was unreasonable.

• The effort required to master humility is greater than the sum of the effort required for every other virtue.

• One night I knelt and began to pray for humility, but as I was saying it, it occurred to me that a genuinely humble person wouldn't be praying for his own virtues but for someone else's needs.

• Even the very wise are fools when in love.

• Nobody loves the Devil, and he doesn’t expect anyone to. His scheme is to get you to love yourself more than you love God and other people.

• All acts of evil are like this: a man, hungry for meat, refuses his daily bread and instead gnaws on his own hand.

• There is an unspeakable feeling of joy after finishing any large project.

• I appreciate the sentiment that some people would rather agree to disagree than hold a grudge. However, if we are ever going to uncover truth, then people in a discussion have to be willing to discuss the matter to the end and be willing to change their minds.

• By definition, being reasonable means changing one's mind to fit reason.

• No one is going to call you a saint for doing good things when you get paid for it.

• Every Rome has its coliseum.

• Civilization is always taming its frontiers.

• I much prefer disagreement to mindless acceptance. But, of course, passionate educated acceptance is best of all.

• Where there is desire, there is always time.

• It's easy to say a prayer, but to say one with no subtle reservations in your soul is nearly the most difficult thing in the world.

• One of the saddest things in life is watching one person show affection to another who doesn’t see it as affection, or doesn’t see it at all. But the greatest sadness is realizing that God is usually the one trying to show the affection.

• Too many people spend their time thinking about who will and will not go to Heaven, and not enough people spend their time thinking about what Heaven will be like. The simplest ideas of Heaven lead directly to ultimate moral truths. If someone thinks that everyone in Heaven is going to be nice, then that naturally leads her to realize that she should become nice to fit in there. And suddenly it is seen that we can bring Heaven to Earth merely by acting like citizens of Heaven.

• In all things romantic and sexual: Anticipation amplifies desire.

• When an artist dies, he gives us his eyes. When a composer dies, he gives us his ears. When a poet dies, he gives us his heart. And when a writer dies, he gives us his mind.

• It's better to be wrong while being humble, than to be arrogant and right.

• It's better to lose by fair means, than to win unjustly.

• It's better to be honest and ignorant, than to fake knowledge.

• Goethe said that all that is required for genius is a passion for truth. I agree, but if a distinction can be made between higher and lower geniuses, I contend that the higher geniuses have an additional passion for simplicity.

• Read the Gospels as though every bit of moral instruction, clarification, or judgment was meant for you.

• What a person receives in life is a divine combination of what he wants and what he deserves.

• Arguing against a vested interest is about as productive as arguing against a wall.