Faculty Quotes - Page 15

• I would call the attention of the reader to the difference between "reason" and "reasoning." Reason is a light, reasoning a process. Reason is a faculty, reasoning an exercise of that faculty. Reasoning proceeds from one truth to another by means of argumentation. This generally involves the whole mind in labor and complexity. But reason does not exist merely in order to engage in reasoning. The process is a means to an end. The true fulfillment of reason as a faculty is found when it can embrace the truth simply and without labor in the light of single intuition.

  Thomas Merton

  Mean, Exercise, Light

  Thomas Merton (2002). “The Ascent to Truth”, p.213, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• The interpretations of science do not give us this intimate sense of objects as the interpretations of poetry give it; they appeal to a limited faculty, and not to the whole man. It is not Linnaeus or Cavendish or Cuvier who gives us the true sense of animals, or water, or plants, who seizes their secret for us, who makes us participate in their life; it is Shakspeare [sic] … Wordsworth … Keats … Chateaubriand … Senancour.

  Matthew Arnold

  Animal, Men, Giving

  Matthew Arnold (1869). “Essays in Criticism”, p.76

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The point I wish plainly to bring before you on this occasion is the individuality of each human soul--our Protestant idea, the right of individual conscience and judgment--our republican idea, individual citizenship. In discussing the rights of woman, we are to consider, first, what belongs to her as an individual, in a world of her own, the arbiter of her own destiny, an imaginary Robinson Crusoe with her woman Friday on a solitary island. Her rights under such circumstances are to use all her faculties for her own safety and happiness.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Friday, Destiny, Rights

  Speech before Senate Judiciary Committee, 18 Jan. 1892

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Fear, coercion, punishment, are the masculine remedies for moral weakness, but statistics show their failure for centuries. Why not change the system and try the education of the moral and intellectual faculties, cheerful surroundings, inspiring influences? Everything in our present system tends to lower the physical vitality, the self-respect, the moral tone, and to harden instead of reforming the criminal.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Punishment, Self, Intellectual

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1898). “Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences, 1815-1897”, p.304, UPNE

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Life is the faculty of spontaneous activity, the awareness that we have powers.

  Immanuel Kant

  Action, Life Is, Awareness

  9 Copy quote

• Every man is born with the faculty of reason and the faculty of speech, but why should he be able to speak before he has anything to say?

  Benjamin Whichcote

  Men, Speech, Able

  4 Copy quote

• The Imagination that is raised in man (or any other creature imbued with the faculty of imagining) by words, or other voluntary signs, is that we generally call Understanding; and is common to Man and Beasts.

  Thomas Hobbes

  God, Men, Imagination

  4 Copy quote

• A man needs no arguments to make him discern and approve what is beautiful: it strikes at first sight, and attracts without a reason. And as this beauty is found in the shape and form of corporeal things, so also is there analogous to it a beauty of another kind, an order, a symmetry, and comeliness in the moral world. And as the eye perceiveth the one, so the mind doth by a certain interior sense perceive the other, which sense, talent, or faculty, is ever quickest and purest in the noblest minds.

  George Berkeley

  Beauty, Beautiful, Eye

  George Berkeley (1752). “Alciphron: Or, The Minute Philosopher. In Seven Dialogues Containing an Apology for the Christian Religion Against Those who are Called Free-thinkers”, p.112

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• All that stock of arguments [the skeptics] produce to depreciate our faculties, and make mankind appear ignorant and low, are drawn principally from this head, to wit, that we are under an invincible blindness as to the true and real nature of things.

  George Berkeley

  Real, Ignorant, Argument

  George Berkeley (1982). “A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge ...”, p.62, Hackett Publishing

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• On the theory of the soul's mortality, the inferiority of women's capacity is easily accounted for: Their domestic life requires no higher faculties either of mind or body. This circumstance vanishes and becomes absolutely insignificant, on the religious theory: The one sex has an equal task to perform as the other: Their powers of reason and resolution ought also to have been equal, and both of them infinitely greater than at present.

  David Hume

  Religious, Sex, Women

  David Hume, Richard H. Popkin (1998). “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Second Edition)”, p.93, Hackett Publishing

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Let us become thoroughly sensible of the weakness, blindness, and narrow limits of human reason: Let us duly consider its uncertainty and endless contrarieties, even in subjects of common life and practice.... When these topics are displayed in their full light, as they are by some philosophers and almost all divines; who can retain such confidence in this frail faculty of reason as to pay any regard to its determinations in points so sublime, so abstruse, so remote from common life and experience?

  David Hume

  Determination, Practice, Light

  David Hume (2016). “Delphi Complete Works of David Hume (Illustrated)”, p.4014, Delphi Classics

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• The dramatic art would appear to be rather a feminine art; it contains in itself all the artifices which belong to the province ofwoman: the desire to please, facility to express emotions and hide defects, and the faculty of assimilation which is the real essence of woman.

  Sarah Bernhardt

  Art, Real, Essence

  Sarah Bernhardt (1924). “The Art of the Theatre”

  22 Copy quote

  Show source

• Property is desirable as the ground work of moral independence, as a means of improving the faculties, and of doing good to others, and as the agent in all that distinguishes the civilized man from the savage.

  James F. Cooper

  Mean, Men, Independence

  6 Copy quote

• Men are so inclined to content themselves with what is commonest; the spirit and the senses so easily grow dead to the impressions of the beautiful and perfect, that every one should study, by all methods, to nourish in his mind the faculty of feeling these things. ...For this reason, one ought every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Beautiful, Song, Men

  Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre bk. 5, ch. 1 (1795 - 1796)

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is not death to have the body called back to the earth, and dissolved into its kindred elements, and mouldered to dust, and, it may be, turn to daisies, in the grave. But it is death to have the soul paralyzed, its inner life quenched, its faculties dissipated; that is death.

  Edwin Hubbel Chapin

  Death, Dust, Soul

  4 Copy quote

• We only attain the true idea of marriage when we consider it as a spiritual union--a union of immortal affections, of undying faculties, of an imperishable destiny.

  Edwin Hubbel Chapin

  Marriage, Spiritual, Destiny

  4 Copy quote

• The soul, like the body, acquires vigor by the exercise of all its faculties. In the midst of the world, in overcoming difficulties, in conquering selfishness, indolence, and fear--in all the occasions of duty, it employs, and reveals by employing, energies that render it efficient and robust--that broaden its scope, adjust its powers, and mature it with a rich experience.

  Edwin Hubbel Chapin

  Exercise, Soul, Selfishness

  4 Copy quote

• Style supposes the reunion and the exercise of all the intellectual faculties. The style is the man.

  Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon

  Exercise, Men, Intellectual

  4 Copy quote

• Justice is a faculty that may be developed. This development is what constitutes the education of the human race.

  Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

  Race, Justice, Development

  26 Copy quote

• Want of will causes paralysis of every faculty. In spiritual things man is utterly unable because resolvedly unwilling.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Spiritual, Men, Want

  Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1990). “The Quotable Spurgeon”, Shaw

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• As what we call genius arises out of the disproportionate power and size of a certain faculty, so the great difficulty lies in harmonizing with it the rest of the character.

  Anna Brownell Jameson

  Lying, Character, Genius

  Anna Brownell Jameson (1877). “A commonplace book of thoughts, memories and fancies, original and selected”, p.59

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Conflict, which rouses up the best and highest powers in some characters, in others not only jars the whole being, but paralyzes the faculties.

  Anna Brownell Jameson

  Character, Jars, Conflict

  4 Copy quote

• Where the vivacity of the intellect and the strength of the passions exceed the development of the moral faculties the character is likely to be embittered or corrupted by extremes, either of adversity or prosperity.

  Anna Brownell Jameson

  Passion, Character, Adversity

  7 Copy quote

• Morally a woman has a right to the free and entire development of every faculty which God has given her to be improved and used to His honor. Socially she has a right to the protection of equal laws; the right to labor with her hands the thing that is good; to select the kind of labor which is in harmony with her condition and her powers; to exist, if need be, by her labor, or to profit others by it if she choose. These are her rights, not more nor less than the rights of the man.

  Anna Brownell Jameson

  Men, Rights, Hands

  4 Copy quote

• There are some whose Karma is such as to enable them to develop the purely spiritual faculties first of all -- to overleap the astral plane for the time, as it were; and when afterwards they make its acquaintance they have, if their spiritual development has been perfect, the immense advantage of dipping into it from above, with the aid of a spiritual insight which cannot be deceived and a spiritual strength which nothing can resist.

  Charles Webster Leadbeater

  Karma, Spiritual, Perfect

  24 Copy quote