In Search of the Miraculous (1949), Ch. 10. p. 203
Context: It is impossible to recognize a wrong way without knowing the right way. This means that it is no use troubling oneself how to recognize a wrong way. One must think of how to find the right way.
In Search of the Miraculous (1949), Ch. 10. p. 203
NOW interview (2004)
Context: We're animals. We're violent. We're criminal. We're not so far away from the gorillas and the apes, those beautiful creatures. … And then, we're supposed to be civilized. We're supposed to go to work every day. We're supposed to be nice to our friends and send Christmas cards to our parents.
We're supposed to do all these things which trouble us deeply because it's so against what we naturally would want to do. And if I've done anything, I've had kids express themselves as they are, impolitely, lovingly — they don't mean any harm. They just don't know what the right way is.
And as it turns out sometimes the so-called "right way" is utterly the wrong way. What a monstrous confusion.
“There are many ways of being wrong, but only one way of being right.”
As quoted in Thinking to Some Purpose (1939), p. 153
“This to the right, that to the left hand strays,
And all are wrong, but wrong in different ways.”
Ille sinistrorsum, hie dextrorsum abit : unus utrique
Error, sed variis illudit partibus.
Book II, satire iii, line 50 (trans. Conington)
Satires (c. 35 BC and 30 BC)
The Dilemma of Determinism (1884)
1880s
“There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.”
Source: Rabbit, Run
“The way is the beginning of all beings and the measure of right and wrong.”
from "The Way of the Ruler", Han Fei Tzu: Basic Writings, Columbia University Press, New York, 1996. Translated by Burton Watson.
Source: Philosophy in a New Key (1942), Ch. 1, p. 1
