The first principle of solid wisdom is discretion, without it all the erudition of life is merely bagatelle.
When a company or an individual compromises one time, whether it's on price or principle, the next compromise is right around the corner.
Filial Piety is the principle of Heaven, The righteousness of Earth, And the (proper) conduct of the people.
There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats Grape-Nuts on principle.
It's so easy to become a grumbler, someone who condemns and carps at everything on principle and sees an ulterior motive behind it.
My speculation is that the U. S. does not want to establish the principle that it has to defer to some higher authority before carrying out the use of violence.
The principle of asceticism never was, nor ever can be, consistently pursued by any living creature. Let but one tenth part of the inhabitants of the earth pursue it consistently, and in a day's time they will have turned it into a Hell.
Anything that works against you can also work for you once you understand the Principle of Reverse.
To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle [. . . . ] Without cruelty there is no festival.
The ecological principle of unity in diversity grades into a richly mediated social principle; hence my use of the term social ecology.
You can't have the fruits without the roots. It's the principle of sequencing: Private Victories proceed Public Victories. Self-mastery and self-discipline are the foundation of good relationships with others.
Self-determination is not a mere phrase. It is an imperative principle of action, which statesmen will henceforth ignore at their peril.
The only guiding principle you can use is to make something that you want to see.
Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the law of the established reality principle. . . The encounter with the truth of art happens in the estranging language and images which make perceptible, visible, and audible that which is no longer, or not yet, perceived, said, and heard in everyday life.
I have a higher and grander standard of principle than George Washington. He could not lie; I can, but I won't.
The strength that we want is not a brute, unregulated strength; the beauty that we want is no mere surface beauty; but we want a beauty on the surface of life that is from the central force of principle within, as the beauty on the cheek of health is from the central force at the heart.
Donald Trump has made the principle of purposely breaking a taboo into a means of achieving his political objectives, which is something that he has in common with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Trump systematically violates international rules. But we cannot allow ourselves to forget that Trump is not the U. S.
Metaphysical ghosts cannot be killed, because they cannot be touched; but they may be dispelled by dispelling the twilight in which shadows and solidities are easily confounded. The Vital Principle is an entity of this ghostly kind; and although the daylight has dissipated it, and positive Biology is no longer vexed with its visitations, it nevertheless reappears in another shape in the shadowy region of mystery which surrounds biological and all other questions.
The market system is the basis of our civilization. Its only alternative is the Führer principle.
I believe, as a matter of principle, that the debt is a problem that must be addressed sooner rather than later. I also know that fundamental changes are necessary in the way Washington spends and taxes if we truly want a healthy economy.