JOHN STUART BLACKIE QUOTES
Scottish scholar (1809-1895)
Brahma is the great Creator,
Life a mystic drama;
Heaven, and Earth, and living Nature
Are but masks of Brahma.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
Trimurti
A people without religion does not exist, or, if it does exist, it exists only as an abnormal and deficient specimen of the genus to which it belongs, which is of no more account in the just estimate of the type than a fox without a tail, or a lawyer without a tongue.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
What Does History Teach?
True it is, no doubt, in the order of abstract relationship, thought is the father of speech, and speech is the harbinger of deed; but this abstract fatherhood of thought is a thing in itself absolutely without reality; the mere thought of an orange, though entertained and cherished in the most capacious of fertile brains for infinite ages, will never produce an orange.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
The Natural History of Atheism
The highest art is always the most religious; and the greatest artist is always a devout man. A scoffing Raphael or Michelangelo is not conceivable.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
On Beauty: three discourses delivered in the University of Edinburgh
If our moral principles always existed in a vivid and healthy state, there might be little need for the slow retrogressive process of induction in ethics; but as these instincts are peculiarly liable to be enfeebled, curtailed, and perverted by individual neglect, as well as social constraint, the corrective and cathartic process by induction on a more extended basis becomes necessary for the worst men, and not without utility for the best.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
Four Phases of Morals
A fair face without a fair soul is like a glass eye that shines and sees nothing.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
The Wise Men of Greece: In a Series of Dramatic Dialogues
Chaos, Chaos, infinite wonder! Wheeling and reeling on wavering wings...
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
"A Song of Geology", Musa Burschicosa: A Book of Songs for Students and University Men
The second fundamental error of Buddha consists in his placing human excellence in meditation rather than in action. The hero with him is always a saint, never a king.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
The Natural History of Atheism
The world is work; life is work; growth is work; all things are full of labour, and attain their perfection only by labour.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
The Natural History of Atheism
Order is the law of all intelligible existence.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
"The Creation of the World", Lay Sermons
People who are not in love may lightly laugh at lovers; and yet true love is a genuine and a noble thing for all that.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
Altavona: Fact and Fiction From My Life in the Highlands
In moral inquiries we can often start directly with deduction from some inward principle, implanted in the human mind by the Author of our being. The love of truth, for instance, as above set forth, is one of those principles; our general term in this case we bring with us; and any induction which we may require is not to prove the existence of such an instinct, but to verify, to extend, and to correct our notions of its applicability, or perhaps merely to confirm us in our original sacred faith, by showing in detail that society never has existed, and in fact never can exist, without that regard to truth in all dealings of man with man, the necessity of which we had asserted originally from the constraining power of the inborn moral imperative decree.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
Four Phases of Morals
Pride, indeed, is not only the sin by which Lucifer falls in Christian angelography, but it peoples Tartarus also in heathen legends; and the boastful Salmoneus, whose insane ambition aspires to mimic the thunder of Jove, is always the first to be blasted by the bolt.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
Four Phases of Morals
It never can be the virtue of a man to wish to be more than man; and every religion which sets a stamp of special approval on superhuman, and therefore unhuman, virtue, erects a wall of separation between the gospel which it preaches and the world which it should convert.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
What Does History Teach?
All powers, all laws, are but the fair
Embodied thoughts of God.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
All things are full of God
But the most general excess which runs, so to speak, in the blood of Christian ethics, arises from the overflow of zeal without knowledge, at one time boiling over in floods of the most savage intolerance, at another ossified into the rigid features of the most unrelenting bigotry. This is an evil which springs naturally from the connexion of morality with religion; and it is an evil of so enormous a magnitude that it seems in some sort to supply an excuse for those inadequate ethical systems of recent growth which take no cognisance of the reverential and devout instincts of human nature, and, after the model of Aristotle, would build up an architecture of Ethics without piety.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
Four Phases of Morals
Little seed! thy hidden virtue
Stirs Time's womb;
The bright promise thou art heir to
Lights the tomb.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
"Advent Hymn", Songs of Religion and Life
We cannot, therefore, in aspiring to a divine life, overlook the dignity of deed, to make an idol of thought.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
The Natural History of Atheism
If it be contrary to man's nature that he should live like a mere pig, or a tiger, or any form of brute beast, it is equally contrary to his nature not to like a good dinner, and to shrink from a glass of good wine.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
The Natural History of Atheism
Commonplace wisdom is the best kind of wisdom for common needs and every-day occasions.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
Four Phases of Morals