“We insist on self-roasting, by slow degrees, and at regular intervals, to show our contempt for experience, and to develop our chief virtue, which is obstinacy.”
"That a Burnt Child often Dreads the Fire".
Sketches from Life (1846)
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Samuel Laman Blanchard 40
British author and journalist 1804–1845Related quotes
Letter to Charles Bray (15 November 1857)
Speech at 12th Plenum of the Party Central Committee (1 December 1965)
Lettre sur les aveugles [Letter on the Blind] (1749)
Context: As to all the outward signs that awaken within us feelings of sympathy and compassion, the blind are only affected by crying; I suspect them in general of lacking humanity. What difference is there for a blind man, between a man who is urinating, and man who, without crying out, is bleeding? And we ourselves, do we not cease to commiserate, when the distance or the smallness of the objects in question produce the same effect on us as the lack of sight produces in the blind man? All our virtues depend on the faculty of the senses, and on the degree to which external things affect us. Thus I do not doubt that, except for the fear of punishment, many people would not feel any remorse for killing a man from a distance at which he appeared no larger than a swallow. No more, at any rate, than they would for slaughtering a cow up close. If we feel compassion for a horse that suffers, but if we squash an ant without any scruple, isn’t the same principle at work?
Book 1, p. 10
Cosmotheoros (1695; publ. 1698)
Life Without and Life Within (1859), Sub Rosa, Crux
Context: The pass-word now is lost
To that initiation full and free;
Daily we pay the cost
Of our slow schooling for divine degree.
We know no means to feed an undying lamp;
Our lights go out in every wind or damp.
Reverence for Life (1969)
Virginia Charters (1773)
Wir müssen darauf bestehen, dass unserer Integrationsbereitschaft der Integrationswille bei denen entspricht, die zu uns kommen
on the integration of immigrants, laudatory speech on the occasion of the presentation of the ’Preis für Toleranz und Verständigung’ (Prize for Tolerance and Understanding), 20 November 2004, quoted on dradio.de http://www.dradio.de/dlr/sendungen/fazit/323593/