Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)
Context: Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But, in fact, they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.
History jeers at the attempts of physiologists to bind great original laws by the forms which flow from them. They make a rule; they say from observation what can and cannot be. In vain! Nature provides exceptions to every rule. She sends women to battle, and sets Hercules spinning; she enables women to bear immense burdens, cold, and frost; she enables the man, who feels maternal love, to nourish his infant like a mother.
“There is no exception to the rule that every rule has an exception.”
“To every rule there is an exception—and an idiot ready to demonstrate it. Don't be the one!”
Source: The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
“Accident ruled every corner of the universe except the chambers of the human heart.”
Source: Snow Falling on Cedars (1994), Ch. 32, last page.
“Every man, in his own opinion, forms an exception to the ordinary rules of morality.”
No. 305
Characteristics, in the manner of Rochefoucauld's Maxims (1823)
“The rule of law is not an exception to rule by fear; it is the fulfillment of rule by fear.”
Fear: The History of a Political Idea
The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)
“Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.”
Source: The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God
Source: Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty
“You can't make rules for the exceptional.”
Other
