Francis Herbert Bradley OM (30 January 1846 – 18 September 1924) was a British idealist philosopher. His most important work was Appearance and Reality (1893).
The deadliest foe to virtue would be complete self-knowledge.
True penitence condemns to silence. What a man is ready to recall he would be willing to repeat.
I can myself conceive of nothing else than the experienced.
The cost of a thing is what I call life which has to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
The man who has ceased to fear has ceased to care.
The one self- knowledge worth having is to know one's own mind.
It is good to know what a man is, and also what the world takes him for. But you do not understand him until you have learnt how he understands himself.
There are persons who, when they cease to shock us, cease to interest us.
It is by a wise economy of nature that those who suffer without change, and whom no one can help, become uninteresting. Yet so it may happen that those who need sympathy the most often attract it the least.
Where everything is bad it must be good to know the worst.
The Self has turned out to mean so many things, to mean them so ambiguously, and to be so wavering in its application, that we do not feel encouraged.
Religion is rather the attempt to express the complete reality of goodness through every aspect of our being.
I will begin with the self-styled "Christian" party, who profess to base their morality on the New Testament. But whether it is really more Christian to follow or to ignore the teachings of the Gospels I shall not discuss.
The man whose nature is such that by one path alone his chief desire will reach consummation will try to find it on that path, whatever it may be, and whatever the world thinks of it; and if he does not, he is contemptible.
Adam knew Eve his wife and she conceived. It is a pity that this is still the only knowledge of their wives at which some men seem to arrive.
There are those who so dislike the nude that they find something indecent in the naked truth.
Few people would not be the worse for complete sincerity.
The force of the blow depends on the resistance. It is sometimes better not to struggle against temptation. Either fly or yield at once.
The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring. And that is not happiness.
One said of suicide, As long as one has brains one should not blow them out. And another answered, But when one has ceased to have them, too often one cannot.