JohnStuartMill
John Stuart Mill Autobiography (John Stuart Mill)
- Not great. Interesting in parts. Long sentences.
- Moral standards: Justice, temperance, truthfulness, perseverance, readiness to encounter pain and especially labor; regard for the pubic good; estimation of persons according to their merits, and of things according to their intrinsic usefulness; a life of exertion.
- The new methods of teaching are straining up a race of men who will be incapable of doing anything which is disagreeable to them.
- Marginal contents, (practiced by Bentham on all his writings) a short abstract of every paragraph, to enable the writer more easily to judge of, and improve, the order of the ideas, and the general character of the exposition.
- I learned how to obtain the best I could, when I could not obtain everything; instead of being indignant or dispirited because I could not have entirely my own way, to be pleased and encouraged when I could have the smallest part of it; and when even that could not be, to bear with complete equanimity being overruled altogether.
- The mental habit to which I attribute all that I have every done or shall do: never accept half solutions as complete; never abandon a puzzle, but again and again return to it until it was cleared up; never allow corners of subjects to remain unexplored because they do not appear important; never thinking that I perfectly understood any part of a subject without understanding the whole.
- Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose in life.
- When I learned something new I was never content to remain confused and unsettled. I could not rest till I had adjusted its relation to my old opinions, and ascertained exactly how far its effect ought to extend in modifying or super-seeding them.
- Although our character is formed by circumstances, our own desires can do much to shape those circumstances, and that what is really inspiriting and ennobling in the doctrine of freewill, is the conviction that we have real power over the formation of our own character; that our will, by influencing some of our circumstances can modify our future habits or capabilities of willing. All this is entirely consistent with the doctrine of circumstances, or rather was that doctrine itself, properly understood. From that time I drew a clear distinction between the doctrine of circumstances and Fatalism.
I was an interpreter of original thinkers, and a mediator between them and the public. I was much superior to my contemporaries in willingness and ability to learn from everybody, I found hardly any one who make a point of examining what was said in defense of all opinions, however new or old, in the conviction that even if they were errors there might be a substratum of truth underneath them.
- When anything was likely to be as well done, or sufficiently well done, by other people, there was no necessity for me to meddle with it. I reserved myself for work which no others were likely to do.