maxims

Thinking, not growth, makes manhood. Accustom yourself, therefore, to thinking. Set yourself to understand whatever you see or read. To join thinking with reading is one of the first maxims, and one of the easiest operations.

Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a general natural law.

There is . . . but one categorical imperative: 'Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law.'

To be beneficent when we can is a duty; and besides this, there are many minds so sympathetically constituted that, without any other motive of vanity or self-interest, they find a pleasure in spreading joy around them, and can take delight in the satisfaction of others so far as it is their own work. But I maintain that in such a case an action of this kind, however proper, however amiable it may be, has nevertheless no true moral worth, but is on a level with other inclinations. . . . For the maxim lacks the moral import, namely, that such actions be done from duty, not from inclination.

The Names . . . have existed from all eternity: these Names are designated as "Lords" (Arbab), who often have all the appearance of hypostases though they cannot strictly be defined as such. We know them only by our knowledge of ourselves (that is the basic maxim). God describes Himself to us through ourselves. Which means that the divine Names are essentially relative to the beings who name them, since these beings discover and experience them in their own mode of being. . . . Thus the divine Names have meaning and full reality only through and for beings . . . in which they are manifested. Likewise from all eternity, these forms, substrate of the divine Names, have existed in the divine Essence (A 'yan thabita). And it is these latent individualities who from all eternity have aspired to concrete being in actu. Their aspiration is itself nothing other than the nostalgia of the divine Names yearning to be revealed. And this nostalgia of the divine Names is nothing other than the sadness of the unrevealed God, the anguish He experiences in His unknownness and occultation.

It is a maxim that man and wife should never have it in their power to hang one another.

In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.

But 'twas a maxim he had often tried, That right was right, and there he would abide.

It is the penalty of fame that a man must ever keep rising. "Get a reputation, and then go to bed," is the absurdest of all maxims. "Keep up a reputation or go to bed, "would be nearer the truth.