A Quote by Thucydides

It is the habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not desire

Thucydides

Quote Topics

Aside Careless Desire Entrust Habit Hope Long Mankind Reason Sovereign Thrust Use

Quote Author

Thucydides
Greek - Historian
460 BC - 395 BC

There are many objects of desire, and therefore many desires. Some are born with us, hunger, yearning, and pride of place, and some are of the foolishness of the world, such as the desire to eat off silver plates. Desire is a wild horse to be tamed. Virtue is habit long continued. The taming of desire is like the training of an athlete. Discipline is not the restraint but the use of energy.

Guy Davenport

And that desire-the strong desire to take pictures-is important. It borders on a need, based on a habit: the habit of seeing. Whether working or not, photographers are looking, seeing, and thinking about what they see, a habit that is both a pleasure and a problem, for we seldom capture in a single photograph the full expression of what we see and feel. It is the hope that we might express ourselves fully-and the evidence that other photographers have done so-that keep us taking pictures.

Sam Abell

The beginning of pride and hatred lies in worldly desire, and the strength of your desire if from habit. When an evil tendency becomes confirmed by habit, rage is triggered when anyone restrains you.

Rumi

Mankind has one great habit, a bad habit: To create rules on behalf of God! Unless A God appears on the sky and says 'Here are the rules,' do not take any rule serious! Remember that in this universe, there is no port that you can take refuge apart from the reason and the science!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

Never give out while there is hope; but hope not beyond reason, for that shows more desire than judgement.

William Penn

Sweep up the debris of decaying faith; Sweep down the cobwebs of worn-out out beliefs, And throw your soul wide open to the light of reason and of knowledge. Be not afraid To thrust aside half-truths and grasp the whole.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Men who are ruled by reason desire nothing for themselves which they would not wish for all mankind.

Baruch Spinoza

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

Aristotle

Either we are a sovereign state, or we are not! As long as we are not, we have no business in a community of sovereign states.

Adolf Hitler

We can use decision-making to choose the habits we want to form, use willpower to get the habit started, then - and this is the best part - we can allow the extraordinary power of habit to take over. At that point, we're free from the need to decide and the need to use willpower.

Gretchen Rubin

With many sovereign states, with no system of law enforceable among them, with each state judging its grievances and ambitions according to the dictates of its own reason or desire - conflict, sometimes leading to war, is bound to occur.

Kenneth Waltz

We can use decision-making to choose the habits we want to form, use willpower to get the habit started, then - and this is the best part - we can allow the extraordinary power of habit to take over. At that point, were free from the need to decide and the need to use willpower.

Gretchen Rubin

The desire for bad art is the desire bred of habit: like the smoker's desire for tobacco, more marked by the extreme malaise of denial than by any very strong delight in fruition.

C. S. Lewis

We don't have faith in reason; we use reason because, unlike revelation, it produces results and understanding. Even discussing why we should use reason employs reason!

Jerry A. Coyne

As long as I hold it as long as I use it, the knife lives, lives in order to take life, but it has to be commanded, it has to have me to tell it to kill, and it wants to, it wants to plunge and thrust and cut and stab and gouge, but I have to want it to as well, my will has to join with its will. I'm the one who allows it and I'm the one responsible.