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Wisdom Quotes from Wise Men & Women To Impart Knowledge
& Deepen Understanding In All Arenas of Life
Commentary  © 2007-2008  Richard J. Chandler & Bonnett Chandler

John Locke

John Locke, a writer, philosopher, political theorist and activist and medical doctor and researcher, was one of the most influential figures in modern western civilization. His writings provided a good deal of the foundational thought from which later philosophers such as Emanuel Kant and Hume. His political ideas including “government with the consent of the governed” and the rights of life, liberty and property were a major influence on many of the founding fathers of the United States including Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. Locke argued for government based on checks and balances and felt that protest and revolution was necessary to prevent and remedy tyranny. We can see the influence of Locke’s ideas on our own Constitution and Declaration of Independence.

One of John Locke’s concepts, which to us in western civilization societies many centuries later is a given, was not at all the case prior to Locke, and that is the concept of owning property as a result of one’s own labors. He stated that it is a natural right of humans to have the opportunity to own property as the result of working. Prior to, in the time of Locke and for many years thereafter, primarily those born into nobility and the church owned property, relegating working people to tenant status. Karl Marx of course was a harsh critic or Locke and argued against his view. Judging by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the substantial poverty of North Korea compared to South Korea and comparisons between mainland China and Taiwan, the verdict seems to be in as to which philosopher had the greater degree of wisdom.
 
His gravestone contains the following epitaph: “Near this place lies John Locke. If you ask what kind of a man he was, he answers that he lived content with his own small fortune. Bred a scholar, he made his learning subservient only to the cause of truth. This you will learn from his writings, which will show you everything else concerning him, with greater truth, than the suspect praises of an epitaph. His virtues, indeed, if he had any, were too little for him to propose as matter of praise to himself, or as an example to you. Let his vices be buried with him. Of good life, you have an example in the gospel, should you desire it; of vice, would there were none for you; of mortality, surely you have one here and everywhere, and may you learn from it. That he was born on the 29th of August in the year of our Lord 1632, and that he died on the 28th of October in the year of our Lord 1704, this tablet, which itself will soon perish, is a record.”

“A sound mind in a sound body, is a short, but full description of a happy state in this World: he that has these two, has little more to wish for; and he that wants either of them, will be little the better for anything else.”

“All wealth is the product of labor.”

“To love our neighbor as ourselves is such a truth for regulating human society, that by that alone one might determine all the cases in social morality.”

“We are like chameleons; we take our hue and the color of our moral character, from those who are around us.”

“What worries you, masters you.”

“It is easier for a tutor to command than to teach.”

“An excellent man, like precious metal, is in every way invariable; a villain, like the beams of a balance, is always varying, upwards and downwards.”

          

“The dread of evil is a much more forcible principle of human actions than the prospect of good.”

“Our incomes are like our shoes; if too small, they gall and pinch us; but if too large, they cause us to stumble and to trip.”

“The thoughts that come often unsought, and, as it were, drop into the mind, are commonly the most valuable of any we have”

“New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.”

“Nature never makes excellent things for mean or no uses.”

“Our incomes are like our shoes; if too small, they gall and pinch us; but if too large, they cause us to stumble and to trip.”

“Our deeds disguise us. People need endless time to try on their deeds, until each knows the proper deeds for him to do. But every day, every hour, rushes by. There is no time.”

“The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it.”

“There cannot be greater rudeness than to interrupt another in the current of his discourse.”

- John Locke (1632 - 1704)

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Russian author and historian, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has written a number of major novels based on his own experience of Soviet prisons, the most famous being The Gulag Archipelago (1973-1978). Descended from an intellectual Cossack family, he was serving in the East Prussian military when he was arrested for criticizing Joseph Stalin in private correspondence with a friend and sentenced to an eight-year term in a labor camp. He was imprisoned from 1945 to 1953, followed by permanent internal exile. Through his writings, he made the world aware of the Gulag, the Soviet labor camp system, and, for these efforts, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970.  He was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974 but returned in 1994 and now lives with his wife, Natalia in Moscow. He has continued to criticize western materialism and Russian bureaucracy and secularization.  Solzhenitsyn is the oldest living Nobel laureate in literature.  

“Do not pursue what is illusory - property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade and can be confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life – don’t be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is after all, all the same: the bitter doesn’t last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing.”

“Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.”

“When truth is discovered by someone else, it loses something of its attractiveness.”

“You only have power over people so long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything he’s no longer in your power- he’s free again.”

“Blow the dust off the clock. Your watches are behind the times. Throw open the heavy curtains which are so dear to you- you do not even suspect that the day has already dawned outside.”

“Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice.”

“Generosity is a two-edged virtue for an artist - it nourishes his imagination but has a fatal effect on his routine.”

“A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.”

“It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones.”

“Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle.”

“It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones.”

“Our envy of others devours us most of all.”

“If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?”

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn  (1918- )

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Flannery O’Connor

An American writer particularly acclaimed for her stories that combined sardonic humor with tragic brutality, Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, the only child of a Catholic family. Along with authors like Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers, O'Connor belonged to the Southern Gothic tradition that focused on the decaying south. And in the vein of William Faulkner, she often wrote in a ‘Southern Gothic’ style that that relied on grotesque and morally flawed characters, most commonly fundamentalist Protestants, who then undergo transformations of character in the pursuit of the holy. She remarked, however that “anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.” However grotesque the setting, she tried to portray her characters as they might be touched by divine grace. O’Connor wrote: “Grace changes us and change is painful.” Her body of work was small, consisting of only thirty-one stories, two novels, and some speeches and letters. 

In 1951 she was diagnosed with lupus and moved to her ancestral farm. Fascinated by birds of all kinds, she raised peacocks, ducks, hens, geese, and many other kinds of exotic birds until her death in 1964. O’Connor often incorporated images of peacocks into her stories.

“Everywhere I go, I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”

“Conviction without experience makes for harshness.”

                

“To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.”

“When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock, to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind, you draw large and startling figures.”

“The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.”

“I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else’s. But behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there’s no truth.”

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”

“A story isn’t any good unless it successfully resists paraphrase, unless it hangs on and expands in the mind.”

“In my own stories I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace . . . With the serious writer, violence is never an end in itself.”

- Flannery O’Connor  (1925-1964)

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Reinhold Niebuhr

Reinhold Niebuhr was a Protestant theologian best known for his study of the task of relating the Christian faith to the reality of modern politics and diplomacy. He thought of himself as a preacher and social activist, but the influence of his theological thought on the field of social ethics and on society made him a significant intellectual figure. As minister of Bethel Evangelical Church in Detroit in 1915, he personally witnessed the working-class realities of American automobile industry laborers. His criticisms of the inhumane treatment of factory employees in the Ford Motor Company plants made him an outspoken advocate for the rights of workers in social and economic matters. He was also an outspoken critic of the Ku Klux Klan, which he concluded was “one of the worst specific social phenomena which the religious pride of peoples has ever developed.”  From 1920 until his retirement in 1968, he taught applied Christianity (later Ethics and Theology) at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. During his lifetime, Niebuhr was the best-known Christian intellectual in the United States. A prolific writer as well as a popular, engaging speaker, Niebuhr became a national celebrity and influenced Martin Luther King, Jr. and policy makers in the administration of President John Kennedy. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964.

“I think there ought to be a club in which preachers and journalists could come together and have the sentimentalism of the one matched with the cynicism of the other. That ought to bring them pretty close to the truth.”

“Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”

“Toleration of people who differ in convictions and habits requires a residual awareness of the complexity of truth and the possibility of the opposing view having some light on one or the other facet of a many-sided truth.”

“Great talents have some admirers, but few friends.”

“A great idea is usually original to more than one discoverer. Great ideas come when the world needs them. They surround the world's ignorance and press for admission.”

                  

“It is better to create than to be learned; creating is the true essence of life.”

“The final wisdom of life requires not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it.”

“The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan value and ends is the source of all religious fanaticism.”

- Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971)

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An American television personality, psychologist and author, Dr. Phil McGraw is the host of the psychology themed television show, Dr. Phil.

“Allow your vulnerability and weaknesses to show through. We are all weak in some ways. Just remember that you can use these weaknesses without being subservient and dependent.”

“What are the truths you believe about yourself when no one else is looking?”

“Never color inside the lines of someone else’s expectations.”

- Phil McGraw  (1950- )

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Andre Gide - Painting by Théo van Rysselberghe

Andre Gide was a French author, humanist, and moralist who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947. Gide has always appealed to different audiences: a traditional psychological novelist to some and an innovative modern writer to others; he was a major literary critic, social crusader, and spokesperson for homosexual rights, at a time in our social history when doing so was extremely controversial. Although The Roman Catholic Church placed his works on the ‘Index of Forbidden Books’ in 1952, Gide's search for self - the underlying theme of his several works - remained essentially religious. Throughout his career Gide used his writings to examine moral questions and his books influenced a generation of young writers, including the existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.

“Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.”

“Fish die belly upward, and rise to the surface. It’s their way of falling.”

“Nothing is so silly as the expression of a man who is being complimented.”

“The color of truth is gray.”

                         

“Be faithful to that which exists within yourself.”

“Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.”

“It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for something you are not.”

“True kindness presupposes the faculty of imagining as one’s own the sufferings and joy of others.”

“Art is collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.”

“Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself - and thus make yourself indispensable.”

“If a young writer can refrain from writing, he shouldn’t hesitate to do so.”

“Nothing excellent can be done without leisure.”

- Andre Gide  (1869-1951)

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Scott Adams

Scott Adams, the cartoonist whose social commentary largely focuses on the world of corporate management, is best known as the creator of the comic strip “Dilbert.” Adams is no stranger to the business world. He earned a four-year degree in economics from Hartwick College and an MBA business management degree from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to launching his fulltime work as a cartoonist and writer, Adams put in 16 years in corporate America in the banking and telecommunications industries. He is a practicing vegetarian and owner of his own vegetarian food company.

“Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion.”

“There’s nothing more dangerous than a resourceful idiot.”

“You don't have to be a “person of influence” to be influential. In fact, the most influential people in my life are probably not even aware of the things they’ve taught me.”

                              

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”

“Remember there’s no such thing as a small act of kindness. Every act creates a ripple with no logical end.”

- Scott Adams (1957- )

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