F. H. Bradley

The hunter for aphorisms on human nature has to fish in muddy water, and he is even condemned to find much of his own mind.

Where everything is bad it must be good to know the worst.

The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring. And that is not happiness.

True penitence condemns to silence. What a man is ready to recall he would be willing to repeat.

Our live experiences, fixed in aphorisms, stiffen into cold epigrams. Our heart's blood, as we write it, turns to mere dull ink.

Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct.

One said of suicide, As long as one has brains one should not blow them out. And another answered, But when one has ceased to have them, too often one cannot.

It is good to know what a man is, and also what the world takes him for. But you do not understand him until you have learnt how he understands himself.

The cost of a thing is what I call life which has to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

We say that a girl with her doll anticipates the mother. It is more true, perhaps, that most mothers are still but children with playthings.