It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. Human understanding has vulgarly occupied itself with nothing but understanding, but if it would only take the trouble to understand itself at the same time it would simply have to posit the paradox.
One doesn't like to appear vulgarly inquisitive. But if everyone one knows has suddenly started murdering everyone else, it would be terribly nice to know about it.
A man who has cured himself of all ridiculous prepossessions, and is fully, sincerely, and steadily convinced, from experience as well as philosophy, that the difference of fortune makes less difference in happiness than is vulgarly imagined; such a one does not measure out degrees of esteem according to the rent-rolls of his acquaintance. . . . his internal sentiments are more regulated by the personal characters of men, than by the accidental and capricious favors of fortune.
It was only the vulgarly mediocre that repelled her.
To the average mind popular music would mean compositions vulgarly conceived and commonplace in their treatment. That is absolutely false.
Why do I want to believe what I believe?. . . Science, to put it somewhat vulgarly, is a technique to keep yourself from kidding yourself.
The little I know of it has not served to raise my opinion of what is vulgarly called the Monied Interest; I mean, that blood-sucker, that muckworm, that calls itself the friend of government.
