Life Without Principle Quotes & Sayings

The first principle of solid wisdom is discretion, without it all the erudition of life is merely bagatelle. — Norm MacDonald

This reminds me of the place in Genesis 4 where God looks at Cain, who is full of self-pity, and says to him, "Cain, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must master it." What's important to understand is that the principle of self in your life is crouching at your door! It wants to have you, it wants to pounce on you, it wants to devour you. And it's up to you to do something about it. God asks that you deny yourself, that you lose yourself to find yourself. If you try to do this without the work of the Spirit, and without belief in all Christ has done for you, then simply giving up your rights and desires will be galling and hardening. But in Christ and with the Spirit, it will be liberating. — Timothy Keller

I despised myself for my weakness. I may have dreamed all my youth of life as a horse-trader like my father; I may have railed against my conscription and loathed the legions on principle, but even so, every morning in this place I cursed my lack of valour and every night, when I slept, my traitorous
mind brought me dreams drenched in the blood of our enemies as my comrades in the Vth launched themselves into battle, taking risks, winning glory, rising in the ranks, killing the enemy and so becoming men ... all without my being there.
The fact that it was winter, when the weather forced a kind of peace on both sides, and that my comrades were currently enduring endless forced marches over the mountains in western Armenia because their general had deemed them unfit for battle, did nothing to hamper my fantasies. — M.C. Scott

Life without prejudice, were it ever to be tried, would soon reveal itself to be a life without principle. — Richard M. Weaver

Imagine a being like nature, wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time; imagine indifference itself as a power, how could you live according to this indifference? Living, is that not precisely wanting to be different? And supposing your imperative 'live according to nature' meant at bottom as much as 'live according to life', how could you not do that? Why make a principle of what you yourselves are and must be? — Friedrich Nietzsche

Anybody who thinks there's nothing wrong with this world needs to have his head examined. Just when things are going all right, without fail someone or something will come along and spoil everything. Somebody should write that down as a fundamental law of the Universe. The principle of perpetual disappointment. If there is a God who created this world, he should scrap it and try again. — Athol Fugard

This, indeed, is the problem, the ultimate question, in neuroscience - and it cannot be answered, even in principle, without a global theory of brain function, one capable of showing the interactions of every level, from the micropatterns of individual neuronal responses to the grand macropatterns of an actual lived life. Such a theory, a neural theory of personal identity, has been proposed in the last few years by Gerald M. Edelman, in his theory of neuronal group selection, or neural Darwinism. — Oliver Sacks

It was necessary for the Son to disappear as an outward authority, in order that He might reappear as an inward principle of life. Our salvation is no longer God manifested in a Christ without us, but as a Christ within us, the hope of glory. — Frederick William Robertson

There are two irreconcilable ideas of God. There's the Unknowable Creative Principle---one believes in That. And there's the Sum of altruism in man---naturally one believes in That...The sublime poem of the Christ life was man's attempt to join those two irreconcilable conceptions of God. And since the Sum of human altruism was as much a part of the Unknowable Creative Principle as anything else in Nature and the Universe, a worse link might have been chosen after all! Funny---how one went through life without seeing it in that sort of way! — John Galsworthy

Socrates famously said that the unconsidered life is not worth living. He meant that a life lived without forethought or principle is a life so vulnerable to chance, and so dependent on the choices and actions of others, that it is of little real value to the person living it. He further meant that a life well lived is one which has goals, and integrity, which is chosen and directed by the one who lives it, to the fullest extent possible to a human agent caught in the webs of society and history. — A.C. Grayling

I do not think it possible for anyone to get by in life without prejudice. However, the attempt to do so leads many people to suppose that, in order to decide any moral question, they have to find an indubitable first principle from which they can deduce an answer. — Theodore Dalrymple

But when it has been shown by the researches of Pasteur that the septic property of the atmosphere depended not on the oxygen, or any gaseous constituent, but on minute organisms suspended in it, which owed their energy to their vitality, it occurred to me that decomposition in the injured part might be avoided without excluding the air, by applying as a dressing some material capable of destroying the life of the floating particles. Upon this principle I have based a practice. — Joseph Lister

Love to a woman is what the sun is to the world, it is her life, her animating principle, without which she must droop, and, if the plant be very tender, die. Except under its influence, a woman can never attain her full growth, never touch the height of her possibilities, or bloom into the plenitude of her moral beauty. A loveless marriage dwarfs our natures, a marriage where love is develops them to their utmost. — H. Rider Haggard

Because what my gradmother did with her fine coat (the loveliest thing she would ever own) is what all women of that generation (and before) did for their families and their husbands and their children. They cut up the finest and proudest parts of themselves and gave it all away. They repatterned what was theirs and shaped it for others. They went without. They were the last ones to eat at supper, and they were the first ones to get up every morning, warming the cold kitchen for another day spent caring for everyone else. This was the only thing they knew how to do. This was their guiding verb and their defining principle of life: They gave. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Leaders need to be able to reconcile opposing viewpoints without giving offense or compromising principle. A leader should be able to project into the life and heart and mind of another, then setting aside personal preferences, deal with the other in a fashion that fits the other best. These skills can be learned and developed.
A leader needs the ability to negotiate differences in a way that recognizes mutual rights and intelligence and yet leads to a harmonious solution. Funadmental to this skill is understanding how people feel, how people react. — J. Oswald Sanders

God said, "Thou shalt not kill" - does the theft of a little money make it quite all right for us to do so? If it's said that this commandment applies only to illegal killing, what's to prevent human beings from similarly agreeing among themselves to legalize certain types of rape, adultery, or perjury? Considering that God has forbidden us even to kill ourselves, can we really believe that purely human arrangements for the regulation of mutual slaughter are enough, without any divine authority, to exempt executioners from the sixth commandment? Isn't that like saying that this particular commandment has no more validity than human laws allow it? - in which case the principle can be extended indefinitely, until in all spheres of life human beings decide just how far God's commandments may conveniently be observed. — Thomas More

Take the case of just actions; just punishments and chastisements do indeed spring from a good principle, but they are good only because we cannot do without them - it would be better that neither individuals nor states should need anything of the sort - but actions which aim at honor and advantage are absolutely the best. The conditional action is only the choice of a lesser evil; whereas these are the foundation and creation of good. A good man may make the best even of poverty and disease, and the other ills of life; — Aristotle.

Epicurus said you should live for pleasure - adding that nothing brings more pleasure than a little sun and a glass of water. It is on this principle that our conjugal existence has rested for three years, devoted to making love, reading, eating excellent meals, spending a few days in a nice hotel by the sea, visiting out friends (not very many, all without children), going to concerts and movies, sleeping, cultivating our garden. — Benoit Duteurtre

Someday, maybe, there will exist a well-informed, well considered and yet fervent public conviction that the most deadly of all possible sins is the mutilation of a child's spirit; for such mutilation undercuts the life principle of trust, without which every human act, may it feel ever so good and seem ever so right is prone to perversion by destructive forms of conscientiousness. — Erik Erikson

ANARCHISM (from the Gr. , and , contrary to authority), the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being. — Peter Kropotkin

A new principle cannot be put into effect without bringing with it new mistakes. But we may, however, be convinced that the laws of life - to which belongs the law that suffering follows the misuse of freedom - will finally be able to bring everything within its right limits. — Ellen Key

Custom, then, is the great guide of human life. It is that principle alone which renders our experience useful to us, and makes us expect, for the future, a similar train of events with those which have appeared in the past. Without the influence of custom, we should be entirely ignorant of every matter of fact beyond what is immediately present to the memory and senses. We should never know how to adjust means to ends, or to employ our natural powers in the production of any effect. There would be an end at once of all action, as well as of the chief part of speculation. — David Hume

I know there's a principle of spirit. It works without space-time. I am subject to that principle, in spirit and in belief of body. Learn how spirit works, a few simple rules, living a perfect spiritual life is easy. — Richard Bach

Life is larger than any principle. Morality is an idea, but life is what we live. How can we fit it into this idea without damaging it? More lives have been ruined in attempts to prevent sin than because of sin itself."
"Should we live in sin then?"
"No. But prohibiting it doesn't help at all. It creates hypocrisy and spiritual cripples."
"So what should we do?"
"I don't know. — Mesa Selimovic

The first principle is that the business should be successful: that it should make money. There is a belief prevalent in America and other Western countries that being successful, making money, is somehow wrong for people who are trying to lead a spiritual life. In Buddhism though it is not the money which is in itself wrong; in fact, a person with greater resources can do much more good in the world than the one without. The question rather is how we make the money; whether we understand where it comes from and how to make it continue to come; and whether we keep a healthy attitude about the money. — Michael Roach

I don't think of spiritual principle as a struggle. I think of life lived without spiritual principles as a struggle. — Marianne Williamson

Without core convictions to help us navigate, we stand uneasily on shifting sand, and we lack the solid footing with which to stage a life of principle and character. Today is a call to biblical conviction ... What is needed today is a battalion of believers who follow Christ and stand for Him and His truth. — Dennis Rainey

A person whose skin is metallic can no more have its reproduction restricted than a black-skinned person. Regarding life as a form of machinery and intelligent machines as people without our environmental limitations is essential in understanding FAP, the Final Anthropic Principle, which deals with evolution in the far future. — Frank Tipler

With pure nature, money isn't necessary but meaningful to every one, including me, but i don't make it a principle rule because I can live without it. — Auliq Ice

The universe shows us the life of God, or rather it is in itself the life of God. We behold in it his permanent action, the scene upon which his power is exercised, and in which all his attributes are reflected. God is not out of the universe any more than the universe is out of God. God is the principle, the universe is the consequence, but a necessary consequence, without which the principle would be inert, unfruitful, impossible to conceive. — Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire

The Principle which gives life dwells in us, and without us, is undying and beneficent, is not heard or seen or smelt, but it is perceived by the man who desires perception. — Mabel Collins

Enthusiasm "wants" nothing because it lacks nothing. It is at one with life and no matter how dynamic the enthusiasm-inspired activities are, you don't lose yourself in them. And there remains always a still but intensely alive space at the center of the wheel, a core of peace in the midst of activity that is both the source of all and untouched by it all. Through enthusiasm you enter into full alignment with the outgoing creative principle of the universe, but without identifying with its creations, that is to say, without ego. Where there is no identification, there is no attachment - one of the great sources of suffering. — Eckhart Tolle

A man may cry out against sin in principle; but he cannot abhor it except by virtue of a godly aversion against it. I have heard many cry out against sin in the pulpit, but who still live with it without any problem in their heart, house, and everyday life. — John Bunyan

The idea of duty, that recognition of something to be lived for beyond the mere satisfaction of self, is to the moral life what the addition of a great central ganglion is to animal life. No man can begin to mould himself on a faith or an idea without rising to a higher order of experience: a principle of subordination, of self-mastery, has been introduced into his nature; he is no longer a mere bundle of impressions, desires, and impulses. — George Eliot

LUKE: O, what is life, and what our purpose here?
Are living creatures made for pain and strife,
Do we but walk our days upon the ground
To perish without memory or fame?
If so, what shall we seek whilst we yet like?
Is brave adventure worthy of our time,
Or should we seek the principle of pleasure? — Ian Doescher

We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention. Read not the Times. Read the Eternities.. Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven. — Henry David Thoreau