He was a British idealist philosopher whose absolute idealism once dominated British philosophy. He considered the mind to be more fundamental than matter. In Ethical Studies (1876), he sought to expose confusion in utilitarianism. In The Principles of Logic (1883), he denounced the psychology of the empiricists. His most ambitious work, Appearance and Reality (1893), maintained that, though the reality is spiritual, the thesis cannot be demonstrated because of the fatally abstract nature of human thought.
Instead of ideas, which could not properly contain reality, he recommended feeling, the immediacy of which could embrace the harmonious nature of reality.
(1846-1924)
– Francis Herbert Bradley Quotes –
The man who has ceased to fear has ceased to care.
~ Francis Herbert Bradley
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.
~ Francis Herbert Bradley
There are persons who, when they cease to shock us, cease to interest us.
~ Francis Herbert Bradley
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.
~ Francis Herbert Bradley
The force of the blow depends on the resistance. It is sometimes better not to struggle against temptation. Either fly or yield at once.
~ Francis Herbert Bradley
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.
~ Francis Herbert Bradley
The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring. And that is not happiness.
~ Francis Herbert Bradley
Eclecticism – every truth is so true that any truth must be false.
~ Francis Herbert Bradley
There are those who so dislike the nude that they find something indecent in the naked truth.
~ Francis Herbert Bradley
The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil.
~ Francis Herbert Bradley
An aphorism is true where it has fixed the impression of a genuine experience
~ Francis Herbert Bradley
We say that a girl with her doll anticipates the mother. It is more true, perhaps, that most mothers are still but children with playthings.
~ Francis Herbert Bradley
The one self-knowledge worth having is to know one’s own mind.
~ Francis Herbert Bradley
Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct; but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.
~ Francis Herbert Bradley
The mood in which my book was conceived and executed, was in fact to some extent a passing one.
~ Francis Herbert Bradley
Our live experiences, fixed in aphorisms, stiffen into cold epigrams. Our heart’s blood, as we write it, turns to mere dull ink.
~ Francis Herbert Bradley
The deadliest foe to virtue would be complete self-knowledge.
~ Francis Herbert Bradley
