The first principle of all action is leisure.
principlequotes
And here will apply an observation made before, that whatever is proper to each is naturally best and pleasantest to him: such then is to Man the life in accordance with pure Intellect (since this Principle is most truly Man), and if so, then it is also the happiest.
For if Being is just one, and one in the way mentioned, there is a principle no longer, since a principle must be the principle of some thing or things.
We all feel that the opposite of our own highest principle must be purely destructive, deadly, and evil. We refuse to endow it with any positive life-force; hence we avoid and fear it.
The negative principle is less identity-with-self than non-difference-with-self. This absence becomes a factor only by negation of its own negation. It is less a unity of the multiple in the living than an adhesion between the elements of the multiple. In a sense, there is only the multiple, and this totality that surges from it is not a totality in potential, but the establishment of a certain dimension.
My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.
No excuses ever, for anyone; that is my principle at the outset. I deny the good intention, the respectable mistake, the indiscretion, the extenuating circumstance. With me there is no giving of absolution or blessing.
‘On principle’ one can do anything and what one does is, fundamentally, a matter of indifference, just as a man’s life remains insignificant even though ‘on principle’ he gives his support to all the needs of the times.
If a man had a little button sewn on the inner pocket of his coat ‘on principle’ his otherwise unimportant and quite serviceable action would become charged with importance – it is not improbable that it would result in the formation of a society.
I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.
