Leon MacLaren, Principles of Music, 1978
“Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.”
“Deceiving himself well is the first quality of the statesman.”
Ibid., p. 241
The Book of Disquiet
Original: Saber iludir-se bem é a primeira qualidade do estadista.
“There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.”
Source: Rabbit, Run
In Great Contemporaries, "Alfonso XIII" (1937).
The 1930s
Lecture II : The Universal Categories, § 1 : Presentness, CP 5.44
Pragmatism and Pragmaticism (1903)
Context: The quality of feeling is the true psychical representative of the first category of the immediate as it is in its immediacy, of the present in its direct positive presentness. Qualities of feeling show myriad-fold variety, far beyond what the psychologists admit. This variety however is in them only insofar as they are compared and gathered into collections. But as they are in their presentness, each is sole and unique; and all the others are absolute nothingness to it — or rather much less than nothingness, for not even a recognition as absent things or as fictions is accorded to them. The first category, then, is Quality of Feeling, or whatever is such as it is positively and regardless of aught else.
Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part 1: The Myth of Male Power, p. 65.
Religion in the Making (February 1926), Lecture II: "Religion and Dogma".
1920s
Small Houses: Their Economic Design and Construction (1922)
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29
Context: Lightning hits!
Quality! Virtue! Dharma! That is what the Sophists were teaching! Not ethical relativism. Not pristine "virtue." But aretê. Excellence. Dharma! Before the Church of Reason. Before substance. Before form. Before mind and matter. Before dialectic itself. Quality had been absolute. Those first teachers of the Western world were teaching Quality, and the medium they had chosen was that of rhetoric.
