It is a grand old name, that of gentleman, and has been recognized as a rank and power in all stages of society. To possess this character is a dignity of itself, commanding the instinctive homage of every generous mind, and those who will not bow to titular rank will yet do homage to the gentleman. His qualities depend not upon fashion or manners, but upon moral worth; not on personal possessions, but on personal qualities. The Psalmist briefly describes him as one "that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, and speaketh the truth in his heart."--_Samuel Smiles._
I say that man believes in a God, who feels himself in the presence of a Power which is not himself, and is immeasurably above himself, a Power in the contemplation of which he is absorbed, in the knowledge of which he finds safety and happiness. Natural Law, Death, p. 162.
For those, who by these signs and that wisdom have deserved your belief, and who have proved to you their character, declare to you that nothing of all this can change you, and render you capable of knowing and loving God, but the power of the foolishness of the cross without wisdom and signs, and not the signs without this power. Thus our Religion is foolish when we consider the effective cause, wise when we consider the wisdom which has prepared it.
What is force? I say that force is a spiritual, incorporate and invisible power, which for a brief duration is produced in bodies that by accidental violence are displaced from their natural state of inertia.
If thinking men are few, they are for that reason all the more powerful. Let no man imagine that he has no influence. Whoever he may be, and wherever he may be placed, the man who thinks becomes a light and a power.
Confide not in a friend until you have tried him, and fight no enemy until you have sufficient power.
The law always limits every power which it bestows.
And not only does he live inside of you, he rules all the situations, locations, and relationships that are out of your control. He is not only your indwelling Savior, he is your reigning King. He does in you what you could not do for yourself and he does outside of you what you have no power or authority to do. And he does all of this with your redemptive good in mind. Since this is true, why would you give way to fear?
Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace, and power in it.
The owners of labor, on the other hand, are being taught, by the most powerful and well-publicized examples, that the highest rewards are not for production, but for the employment of organized power to take over a share of what others produce. [ Two-Factor Theory: The Economics of Reality , Random House, 1967, p. 46.]
Proportion is not only to be found in figures and measurements, but also in sound, weight, time and position, and in whatever power which exists.
Gross and vulgar minds will always pay a higher respect to wealth than to talent; for wealth, although it be a far less efficient source of power than talent, happens to be far more intelligible.--_Colton._
Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves only in the legal sense. Technology was the slave’s real emancipator. Technology freed the slave by transferring his toil onto the tireless backs of non-human slaves driven by water, steam, petroleum and electricity. But the Black man…has never owned, and never had a chance to own, the machine that replaced and indeed, surpassed his power to toil a thousandfold. When he lost his servitude he lost his livelihood. As Frederick Douglas said, “Emancipation made the slaves free to hunger; free to the winter and rains of heaven…free without roofs to cover them or bread to eat or land to cultivate.” For all his good intentions, Lincoln didn’t free the slaves. He fired them.… People who teach economics are mostly white, but the people who understand economics are mostly Black.… Slavery taught us WHO had the leisure, WHO had freedom, WHO had wealth. Not the slave, but the slave owner. Not the sharecropper, but the land-owner. Not the employee, but the capital owner. [Statement on 1969 founding of Soul City, North Carolina on the 160th Anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth; former President of the Congress or Racial Equality (CORE).]
Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and, far from commanding it, we are forced to obey it.
Quotes by people born this day, already used as QOTD: Where the market works, I'm for that. Where the government is necessary, I'm for that. I'm deeply suspicious of somebody who says, "I'm in favor of privatization," or, "I'm deeply in favor of public ownership." I'm in favor of whatever works in the particular case.
He who gives up the smallest part of a secret has the rest no longer in his power.
Great genial power consists in being altogether receptive.
Now, the typical way to measure your potential is to compare the size of the problem to your natural gifts and your track record so far. No, it’s not irrational to measure your potential this way, but for the believer in Christ Jesus, it simply isn’t enough. By grace, God doesn’t leave you on your own. He doesn’t leave you with the tool box of your own strength, righteousness, and wisdom. No, he invades you with his presence, power, wisdom, and grace. Paul captures this reality with these life-altering words: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20).
Next to invention is the power of interpreting invention; next to beauty the power of appreciating beauty.--_Margaret Fuller._
One must always be careful of books," said Tessa, "and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.
The death of those we love is the last lesson we receive in life--the rest we must learn for ourselves. To me, the older I grow, and the nearer I feel that to me the end must be, the more perfect and beautiful all seems to be; one feels surrounded and supported everywhere by power, wisdom, and love, content to trust and wait, incapable of murmuring, very helpless, very weak, yet strong in that very helplessness, because it teaches us to trust in something not ourselves. Yet parting with those we love is hard--only I fear there is nothing else that would have kept our eyes open to what is beyond this life.
Oh for a forty-parson power!
For there is no virtue, the honour and credit for which procures a man more odium [from the elite] than that of justice; and this, because more than any other, it acquires a man power and authority among the common people. For they only honour the valiant and admire the wise, while in addition they also love just men, and put entire trust and confidence in them. They fear the bold man, and mistrust the clever man, and moreover think them rather beholding to their natural complexion, than to any goodness of their will, for these excellences; they look upon valour as a certain natural strength of the mind, and wisdom as a constitutional acuteness; whereas a man has it in his power to be just, if he have but the will to be so, and there injustice is thought the most dishonourable, because it is least excusable. [“Cato the Younger,” The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans , Translated by John Dryden and revised by Arthur Hugh Clough. (New York: Random House, Modern Library edition, p. 943).]
Self-will never will be satisfied, though it should have power for all it would; but we are satisfied from the moment we renounce it. Without it we cannot be discontented, with it we cannot be content.
Genius is that power of man which by its deeds and actions gives laws and rules; and it does not, as used to be thought, manifest itself only by over-stepping existing laws, breaking established rules, and declaring itself above all restraint.
Nothing destroyeth authority so much as the unequal and untimely interchange of power pressed too far and relaxed too much.
That which makes men happy is activity= (_die Thatigkeit_), =which, first producing what is good, soon changes evil itself into good by power working in a god-like manner.
The nature of man may be considered in two ways, one according to its end, and then it is great and incomparable; the other according to popular opinion, as we judge of the nature of a horse or a dog, by popular opinion which discerns in it the power of speed, _et animum arcendi_; and then man is abject and vile. These are the two ways which make us judge of it so differently and which cause such disputes among philosophers.
What is force? Force, I say, is a spiritual virtue, an invisible power, which by accidental external violence is caused by motion, and communicated and infused into bodies which are inert by nature, giving them an active life of marvellous power.
We praise the dramatic poet who possesses the art of drawing tears, a power which he has in common with the meanest onion.--_Heinrich Heine._
Angels had been present on many august occasions, and they had joined in many a solemn chorus to the praise of their Almighty Creator. They were present at the creation: "The morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy." They had seen many a planet fashioned between the palms of Jehovah, and wheeled by His eternal hands through the infinitude of space. They had sung solemn songs over many a world which the Great One had created. We doubt not, they had often chanted, "Blessing and honor, and glory, and majesty, and power, and dominion, and might, be unto Him that sitteth on the throne," manifesting Himself in the work of creation. I doubt not, too, that their songs had gathered force through ages. As when first created, their first breath was song, so when they saw God create new worlds, then their song received another note; they rose a little higher in the gamut of adoration. But this time, when they saw God stoop from His throne and become a babe hanging upon a woman's breast, they lifted their notes higher still; and reaching to the uttermost stretch of angelic music, they gained the highest notes of the divine scale of praise and they sang, "Glory to God _in the highest_," for higher in goodness they felt God could not go. Thus their highest praise they gave to Him in the highest act of His Godhead.--_Spurgeon._
Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it
But to enlarge or illustrate this power and effects of love is to set a candle in the sun.--_Burton._
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power just 'cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!
Rather privation of limbs than weariness of doing good. The power of using my limbs shall fail me before the power of being useful. Rather death than weariness. I cannot be satiated with serving. I do not weary of giving help. No amount of work is sufficient to weary me. This is a carnival motto: "Sine lassitudine." Hands in which ducats and precious stones abound like snow never grow weary of serving, but such a service is for its utility only and not for our profit. Nature has formed me thus.
Der hat die Macht, an den die Menge glaubt=--He has the power whom the majority believe in.
_The reason of effects._--It is strange that men would not have me honour a man clothed in brocade, and followed by seven or eight footmen! Yet he will have them give me the strap if I do not salute him. This custom is a power. It is the same with a horse in fine trappings compared with another. It is odd that Montaigne does not see what difference there is, wonders that we find any, and asks the reason. "Indeed," he says, "how comes it," etc....
To enlarge or illustrate this power and effect of love is to set a candle in the sun.
gift of wisdom consisting in the power to do this, the gift actually presupposes our conscious inability to do it,
Strictly speaking, the imagination is never governed; it is always the ruling and divine power, and the rest of the man is to it only as an instrument which it sounds, or a tablet on which it writes; clearly and sublimely if the wax be smooth and the strings true, grotesquely and wildly if they are stained and broken.
Why are taste= (_Geschmack_) =and genius so seldom willing to unite? The former is shy of power, the latter scorns restraint.
Eyes / Of microscopic power, that could discern / The population of a dewdrop.
The great failure of the critic of culture, even when his intentions are benign, lies in his inability to recognize that the perfect world of peace, justice, equality, and environmental harmony of which he dreams — a utopia run by enlightened, sensitive, progressive (and preferably multi-degree) philosopher-kings — is a tyranny pure and simple. Philosopher-kings soon must discover a need for bureaucrats and policemen to administer and enforce their notion of the public good. They must also discover, to their chagrin, that the bureaucrats and policemen quickly will become the real power in such a society. This is precisely what happened to communism in its evolution from an intellectual, Marxist, social philosophy to a brutally anti-intellectual, Leninist, political system. [“Critics of Culture” (commentary), Fidelity Magazine, March 1995, p. 14.]
"Thou who art the greatest of kings, and to whom God has given a power so extended that thou art renowned among all people, art the golden head of the image which thou hast seen.
By thunders of white silence.
The smallest natural point is larger than all mathematical points, and the proof of this is that the natural point has continuity, and everything which has continuity is infinitely divisible; but the mathematical point is indivisible because it is not a quantity. Every continuous quantity is mentally infinitely divisible. Among the magnitude of things which are among us, the chief of all is nothingness; and its function extends to matter that does not exist, and its essence is in time in the past or in the future, and it has nothing of the present. This nothingness has its part equal to the whole and the whole to the part, and the divisible to the indivisible, and produces the same result by addition or subtraction, or if it be divided or multiplied,--as is proved by arithmeticians by their tenth character, which represents nothing. And its power does not extend to the things of nature.
Valour consists in the power of self-recovery.
Daughter of Jove, relentless power, Thou tamer of the human breast, Whose iron scourge and tort'ring hour The bad affright, afflict the best!
Genius is not a single power, but a combination of great powers. It reasons, but it is not reasoning; it judges, but it is not judgment; imagines, but it is not imagination; it feels deeply and fiercely, but it is not passion. It is neither, because it is all.
Every power of both heaven and earth is friendly to a noble and courageous activity.
But mercy is above this sceptred sway; / It is enthroned in the hearts of kings, / It is an attribute to God Himself, / And earthly power doth then show likest God's / When mercy seasons justice.
You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.
Fortune, which has a great deal of power in other matters but especially in war, can bring about great changes in a situation through very slight forces."
As wealth is power, so all power must infallibly draw wealth to itself by some means or other. [ Commons , February 11, 1780.]
The worship of the nation has been able to make men tolerate under its authority what they could never have tolerated from princes: a submission to rule, which, through sumptuary laws on food and drink, through conscription, through a cast-iron system of compulsory instruction for all on State ordered lines, and through a State examination at the gate of every profession, has almost killed the citizen’s power to react upon that which controls him, and has almost destroyed that variety which is the mark of life. [ Survivals and New Arrivals: The Old and New Enemies of the Catholic Church . Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1992, p. 84.]
Pharmaca das ?groto, aurum tibi porrigit ?ger, / Tu morbum curas illius, ille tuum=--You give medicine to a sick man, he hands you your fee; you cure his complaint, he cures yours. _To a doctor._ [Greek: pheideo ton kteanon]--Husband your resources. _Gr._ [Greek: pheme ge mentoi demothrous mega sthenei]--The voice of the people truly is great in power.
Einbildungskraft wird nur durch Kunst, besonders durch Poesie geregelt. Es ist nichts furchterlicher als Einbildungskraft ohne Geschmack=--Power of imagination is regulated only by art, especially by poetry. There is nothing more frightful than imaginative faculty without taste.
It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in the masses which, if it is called into play, the minority can seldom resist.
We look forward to the time when the Power of Love will replace the Love of Power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace.
[T]here is another method of obtaining money.… [It] does not presuppose the existence of accumulated results of previous development, and hence may be considered as the only one which is available in strict logic. This method of obtaining money is the creation of purchasing power by banks. The form it takes is immaterial. The issue of banknotes not fully covered by specie withdrawn from circulation is an obvious instance, but methods of deposit banking render the same service, where they increase the sum total of possible expenditure. Or we may think of bank acceptances in so far as they serve as money to make payments in wholesale trade. It is always a question, not of transforming purchasing power which already exists in someone’s possession, but of the creation of new purchasing power out of nothing — out of nothing even if the credit contract by which the new purchasing power is created is supported by securities which are not themselves circulating media — which is added to the existing circulation. And this is the source from which new combinations are often financed, and from which they would have to be financed always, if results of previous development did not actually exist at any moment. These credit means of payment, that is means of payment which are created for the purpose and by the act of giving credit, serve just as ready money in trade, partly directly, partly because they can be converted immediately into ready money for small payments or payments to the non-banking classes — in particular to wage-earners. With their help, those who carry out new combinations can gain access to the existing stocks of productive means, or, as the case may be, enable those from whom they buy productive services to gain immediate access to the market for consumption goods. There is never, in this nexus, granting of credit in the sense that someone must wait for the equivalent of his service in goods, and content himself with a claim, thereby fulfilling a special function; not even in the sense that someone has to accumulate means of maintenance for laborers or landowners, or produced means of production, all of which would only be paid for out of the final results of production. Economically, it is true, there is an essential difference between these means of payment, if they are created for new ends, and money or other means of payment of the circular flow. The latter may be conceived on the one hand as a kind of certificate for completed production and the increase in the social product effected through it, and on the other hand as a kind of order upon, or claim to, part of this social product. The former have not the first of these two characteristics. They too are orders, for which one can immediately procure consumption goods, but not certificates for previous production. Access to the national dividend is usually to be had only on condition of some productive service previously rendered or of some product previously sold. This condition is, in this case, not yet fulfilled. It will be fulfilled only after the successful completion of the new combinations. Hence this credit will in the meantime affect the price level. The banker, therefore, is not so much primarily a middleman in the commodity “purchasing power” as a producer of this commodity. However, since all reserve funds and savings today usually flow to him, and the total demand for free purchasing power, whether existing or to be created, concentrates on him, he has either replaced private capitalists or become their agent; he has himself become the capitalist par excellence. He stands between those who wish to form new combinations and the possessors of productive means. He is essentially a phenomenon of development, though only when no central authority directs the social process. He makes possible the carrying out of new combinations, authorizes people, in the name of society as it were, to form them. He is the ephor of the exchange economy…. [Chapter II: “The Fundamental Phenomenon of Economic Development,” The Theory of Economic Development , New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1993, pp. 72-74.]
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any
To know the mighty works of God, to comprehend His wisdom and majesty and power; to appreciate, in degree, the wonderful workings of His laws, surely all this must be a pleasing and acceptable mode of worship to the Most High, to whom ignorance cannot be more grateful than knowledge.
It is no more in our power to love always than it was not to love.
Quotes by people born this day, already used as QOTD: Happy the man, and happy he alone, He who can call today his own; He who, secure within, can say, Tomorrow, do thy worst, for I have lived today. Be fair, or foul, or rain, or shine, The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine. Not heaven itself upon the past has power; But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.
Kindness, in act at least, is in our power, but fondness is not.
"In any contest between power and patience, bet on patience."
The only real power comes out of a long rifle.
His rod revers'd, And backward mutters of dissevering power.
The tendency everywhere in America to concentrate power and responsibility in one man is unmistakable. The American Commonwealth .
'T is said that absence conquers love; But oh believe it not! I 've tried, alas! its power to prove, But thou art not forgot.
Libertas est potestas faciendi id quod jure licet=--Liberty consists in the power of doing what the law permits.
The power of thought,--the magic of the mind!
Private property works like circuitry in electronics, or piping in hydraulics. It conveys wages to the owners of labor power, as well as the various forms of nonwage property income to the owners of capital. In itself, it is no more responsible for maldistribution of purchasing power than the science of bookkeeping is responsible for bankruptcy.
The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.
Words are but poor interpreters in the realms of emotion. When all words end, music begins; when they suggest, it realises; and hence the secret of its strange, ineffable power.
Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a person's sexual choice is the result and sum of their fundamental convictions. Tell me what a person finds sexually attractive and I will tell you their entire philosophy of life. Show me the person they sleep with and I will tell you their valuation of themselves. No matter what corruption they're taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which they cannot perform for any motive but their own enjoyment - just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity! - an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exultation, only on the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces them to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and accept their real ego as their standard of value. They will always be attracted to the person who reflects their deepest vision of themselves, the person whose surrender permits them to experience - or to fake - a sense of self-esteem .. Love is our response to our highest values - and can be nothing else.