#maxim

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

— St. Jerome

#action #become #general #law #maxim

No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be, if one has not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better. ↗

— William James

#advantage #better #character #concrete #entirely

It has to be able to play at the maximum expression and communication in every style, and the only way you can do that is - like Verdi said - working with a file, every day, little by little, until the orchestra's collective qualities emerge. ↗

— James Levine

#collective #communication #day #emerge #every

My table seats eight, so that's my maximum. Having a small number of guests is the only way to generate good conversation. Besides, your whole house doesn't get wrecked that way. ↗

— Paul Lynde

#conversation #eight #generate #get #good

Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim. ↗

— Thomas B. Macaulay

#down #fit #fool #free #freedom

Nothing is so useless as a general maxim. ↗

— Thomas B. Macaulay

#maxim #nothing #useless

I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity, it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind. ↗

— Norman Mailer

#become #combinations #grasp #had #hold

Which is supposed to mean they're doing something in their broadcasting they would not do is they were simply out to maximize profit; if they were really public service institutions, not purely profit maximizing institutions. ↗

— Robert McChesney

#doing #institutions #maximize #maximizing #mean

These maxims and the art of interpreting them may be said to constitute the premisses of science but I prefer to call them our scientific beliefs. These premisses or beliefs are embodied in a tradition, the tradition of science. ↗

— Michael Polanyi

#beliefs #call #constitute #embodied #i

This persistence as private firms continued because it ensured the maximum of anonymity and secrecy to persons of tremendous public power who dreaded public knowledge of their activities as an evil almost as great as inflation. ↗

— Carroll Quigley

#almost #anonymity #because #continued #dreaded