No man, perhaps, is so wicked as to commit evil for its own sake. Evil is generally committed under the hope of some advantage the pursuit of virtue seldom obtains. Yet the most successful result of the most virtuous heroism is never without its alloy.
BENJAMIN HAYDONGenius is nothing more than common faculties refined to a greater intensity. There are no astonishing ways of doing astonishing things. All astonishing things are done by ordinary materials.
More Benjamin Haydon Quotes
-
-
The safest principle through life, instead of reforming others, is to set about perfecting yourself.
BENJAMIN HAYDON -
Some persons are so devotional they have not one bit of true religion in them.
BENJAMIN HAYDON -
All government is an evil, but, of the two form’s of that evil, democracy or monarchy, the sounder is monarchy; the more able to do its will, democracy.
BENJAMIN HAYDON -
How difficult it is to get men to believe that any other man can or does act from disinterestedness!
BENJAMIN HAYDON -
Fortunately for serious minds, a bias recognized is a bias sterilized.
BENJAMIN HAYDON -
Temperance in everything is requisite for happiness.
BENJAMIN HAYDON -
Never suffer youth to be an excuse for inadequacy, nor age and fame to be an excuse for indolence.
BENJAMIN HAYDON -
Invention is totally independent of the will.
BENJAMIN HAYDON -
One of the surest evidences of an elevated taste is the power of enjoying works of impassioned terrorism, in poetry, and painting. The man who can look at impassioned subjects of terror with a feeling of exultation may be certain he has an elevated taste.
BENJAMIN HAYDON -
Satan is to be punished eternally in the end, but for a while he triumphs.
BENJAMIN HAYDON -
We are a compound of both here and hereafter; we shall be made responsible for the actions of both while here. Anything beyond this is beyond our power to prove, and would be of no real value if we could.
BENJAMIN HAYDON -
If men would only take the chances of doing right because it is right, instead of the immediate certainty of the advantage of doing wrong, how much happier would their lives be.
BENJAMIN HAYDON -
Mistrusts sometimes come over one’s mind of the justice of God. But let a real misery come again, and to whom do we fly? To whom do we instinctively and immediately look up?
BENJAMIN HAYDON -
There surely is in human nature an inherent propensity to extract all the good out of all the evil.
BENJAMIN HAYDON -
Nothing is difficult; it is only we who are indolent.
BENJAMIN HAYDON