Francis Herbert Bradley OM (30 January 1846 – 18 September 1924) was a British idealist philosopher. His most important work was Appearance and Reality (1893). Read full biography of F. H. Bradley →
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 secret of happiness is to admire without desiring. And that is not happiness.
The one self-knowledge worth having is to know one's own mind.
Our live experiences, fixed in aphorisms, stiffen into cold epigrams. Our heart's blood, as we write it, turns to mere dull ink.
There are persons who, when they cease to shock us, cease to interest us.
The force of the blow depends on the resistance. It is sometimes better not to struggle against temptation. Either fly or yield at once.
There are those who so dislike the nude that they find something indecent in the naked truth.
Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct; but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.
The man who has ceased to fear has ceased to care.
True penitence condemns to silence. What a man is ready to recall he would be willing to repeat.
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.
One said of suicide, As long as one has brains one should not blow them out. And another answered, But when one has ceased to have them, too often... →
The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil.
Francis Herbert Bradley OM (30 January 1846 – 18 September 1924) was a British idealist philosopher. His most important work was Appearance and Reality (1893).