A great fortune is a great slavery.
Seneca The YoungerRead
As so often happens in philosophy, clever people accept a false general principle on a priori grounds and then devote endless labour and ingenuity to explaining away plain facts which obviously conflict with it.
Interpretation
Clever individuals sometimes accept flawed theories and work tirelessly to justify them, despite contrary evidence.
C. D. Broad highlights a common issue in philosophical thinking, where intelligent individuals may latch onto certain flawed generalizations or principles without sufficient evidence and then go to great lengths to rationalize them. This behavior often leads to the dismissal of clear, observable facts that contradict their preconceived notions, showcasing a disconnect between theory and reality.
In practice
In a debate on the philosophy of science, this quote can emphasize the importance of grounding theories in observable facts.
A great fortune is a great slavery.
My golf is so delicate, so tenuously wired together with silent inward prayers, exhortations and unstable visualizations, that the sheer pressure of an additional pair of eyes crumbles the whole rickety structure into rubble.
Who are the lunatics? The ones who see horror in the heart of their fellow humans and search for peace at any price? Or the ones who pretend they don't see what's going on around them? The world belongs either to lunatics or hypocrites. There are no other races on this earth. You must choose which one to belong to.
The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: 'What good is it?
Begin with dhyana, with meditation, and end in samadhi, in ecstasy, and you will know what God is. It is not a hypothesis, it is an experience. You have to LIVE it - that is the only way to know it.
I feel closer ties and more intimate bonds with certain characters in books, with certain images I’ve seen in engravings, than with many supposedly real people with the metaphysical absurdity known as ‘flesh and blood’. In fact, ‘flesh and blood’ describes them very well: they resemble cuts of meat laid out on the butcher’s marble slab, dead creatures bleeding as though still alive.
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