“Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.”
On the Cambridge Apostles of Cambridge University, in Essays in Biography (1933) Ch. 39; also later used in My Early Beliefs, a memoir he read to the Bloomsbury Group's Memoir Club in 1943.
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John Maynard Keynes 122
British economist 1883–1946Related quotes
“Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.”
Source: Structured analysis (SA): A language for communicating ideas (1977), p. 19.
“In matters of the heart, nothing is true except the improbable.”
Letter to Juliette Récamier (October 5, 1810), quoted in J. Christopher Herold, Mistress to an Age: A Life of Madame de Staël (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p. 401
IV, 3
Variant translation: The good man, though a slave, is free; the wicked, though he reigns, is a slave, and not the slave of a single man, but — what is worse — the slave of as many masters as he has vices.
The City of God (early 400s)
Context: The dominion of bad men is hurtful chiefly to themselves who rule, for they destroy their own souls by greater license in wickedness; while those who are put under them in service are not hurt except by their own iniquity. For to the just all the evils imposed on them by unjust rulers are not the punishment of crime, but the test of virtue. Therefore the good man, although he is a slave, is free; but the bad man, even if he reigns, is a slave, and that not of one man, but, what is far more grievous, of as many masters as he has vices; of which vices when the divine Scripture treats, it says, “For of whom any man is overcome, to the same he is also the bond-slave.”
“I do not speak the minds of others except to speak my own mind better.”
Je ne dis les autres, sinon pour d'autant plus me dire.
Book I, Ch. 26
Essais (1595), Book I
Variant: I quote others only in order the better to express myself.
Source: Life's Little Instruction Book: 511 Suggestions, Observations, and Reminders on How to Live a Happy and Rewarding Life
“I had nothing to offer anybody, except my own confusion”
Variant: I have nothing to offer anybody, except my own confusion.
Source: On the Road