Lean on principles, one day they'll end up giving way.
The most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.
We have lost faith in the formal powers of the mind, not, as some suppose, because our universe is too difficult to grasp, but because we lack the inner principle of order.
In England, wit is at least a profession, if not an art. everything becomes professional there, and even the rogues of that islandare pedants. So are the "wits" there too. They introduce into reality absolute freedom whose reflection lends a romantic and piquant air to wit, and thus they live wittily; hence their talent for madness. They die for their principles.
The first principles of the universe are atoms and empty space; everything else is merely thought to exist.
Principle I:;: Legal rights are presumptive rights.
The Synthesis consists in assuming the Causes discovered and established as Principles, and by them explaining the Phænomena proceeding from them, and proving the Explanations.
People must have righteous principals in the first, and then they will not fail to perform virtuous actions.
The principles governing the behavior of systems are not widely understood.
convictions. . . are always getting in the way of opportunities.
The mind has its arrangement; it proceeds from principles to demonstrations. The heart has a different mode of proceeding.
In the theory of psycho-analysis we have no hesitation in assuming that the course taken by mental events is automatically regulated by the pleasure principle. We believe, that is to say, that the course of those events is invariably set in motion by an unpleasurable tension, and that it takes a direction such that its final outcome coincides with a lowering of that tension that is, with an avoidance of unpleasure or a production of pleasure.
My dear fellow, my whole life is moved by the principle that the one thing which is more important than peace is music. It is because I believe that I am poor.
Pareto's Principle: you generally spend 80% of your time on 20% of the project.
You would have thought that our first priority would be to ask what the ecologists are finding out, because we have to live within the conditions and principles they define. Instead, we've elevated the economy above ecology.
In the space between stimulus (what happens) and how we respond, lies our freedom to choose. Ultimately, this power to choose is what defines us as human beings. We may have limited choices but we can always choose. We can choose our thoughts, emotions, moods, our words, our actions; we can choose our values and live by principles. It is the choice of acting or being acted upon.
Selfishness is the grand moving principle of nine-tenths of our actions.
There is no peace and no rest in the development of material interests. They have their law, and their justice. But it is founded on expediency, and is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without the continuity and the force that can be found only in a moral principle.
It is a principle that the right to a thing gives a right to the means without which it could not be used, that is to say, that the means follow their end.
All our moves are based on four general principles: continued use of the rifle, no waiving of historical rights, no peace, and no negotiations. . . Whatever form of government is established in the territory when the shadow of occupation passes away, whenever I address my fighters and revolutionaries, I shall say: 'Let our rifles be aimed at the beloved land, the land of the homeland, the land of Palestine