The really important thing is not to live, but to live well. And to live well meant, along with more enjoyable things in life, to live according to your principles.
principlesquotes
Let this then be one of our rules and principles concerning the gods, to which our poets and reciters will be expected to conform – that God is not the author of all things, but of good only.
The longing to behold this pre-established harmony [of phenomena and theoretical principles] is the source of the inexhaustible patience and perseverance with which Planck has devoted himself … The state of mind which enables a man to do work of this kind is akin to that of the religious worshiper or the lover; the daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart.
All thinkers then agree in making the contraries principles, both those who describe the All as one and unmoved (for even Parmenides treats hot and cold as principles under the names of fire and earth) and those too who use the rare and the dense.
For we do not think that we know a thing until we are acquainted with its primary conditions or first principles, and have carried our analysis as far as its simplest elements. Plainly therefore in the science of Nature, as in other branches of study, our first task will be to try to determine what relates to its principles.
A man investigating principles cannot argue with one who denies their existence.
It is plain then that they all in one way or another identify the contraries with the principles. And with good reason. For first principles must not be derived from one another nor from anything else, while everything has to be derived from them. But these conditions are fulfilled by the primary contraries, which are not derived from anything else because they are primary, nor from each other because they are contraries.
The foremost of his therapeutic principles is that conscious realization is an important agent for transforming the personality.
I always find the same principles confirmed: the elements formed into the dream are drawn from the entire mass of the dream-thoughts, and in its relation to the dream-thoughts each one of the elements seems to be determined many times over.
A man far oftener appears to have a decided character from persistently following his temperament than from persistently following his principles.
