Urkat's Maxims & Axioms

1. When we hope, we confess our helplessness.

2. Good art talks about itself.

3. If you're handicapped it may take you fifty years to learn the truth;
if not, a hundred.

4. The only way to see the truth is to be the truth.

5. Language forms the precedent whereby thought may be realised.

6. In writing, death is the only deadline.

7. People generally abuse those who disabuse them.

8. The world is a reflection of my self-image.

9. Form in art is the most economical expression of the greatest value.

10. If we could measure the speed of thought, we'd see that
consciousness precedes thought.

11. Sometimes hard words are easiest to speak.

12. Knowledge is a sensational idea.

13. Death is a grave undertaking.

14. For every soul admitted to heaven, millions are evicted.

15. Every artist is a martyr at heart.

16. Let all your thoughts be afterthoughts.

17. Poetry is my life, but my life is prose.

18. Old authors never die, they are merely translated.

19. Without death, life would be meaningless.

20. Doubt can never be taken for the end of an inquiry.

21. No one knows what he believes.

22. Life, like a good epic, begins in medias res.

23. What is impossible for thought is impossible in fact.

24. Virtue consists not so much in performing good works as abstaining
from bad ones.

25. If all would fight the foeman close at hand, there'd be no need to
fight in foreign land.

26. To a fool a wise man seems a fool.

27. We're taught by our own thought.

28. Those who don't seek wisdom when young won't find it when old.

29. That creed alone is true, not which a man lives by, but which he
practises not knowing why.

30. Man is God in posse; God is man in esse.

31. Though you should think me immortal, you are mortal yourself and
so my fame must be short-lived.

32. Words are the weights and measures of the brain.

33. Theology is the philosophy of those who are sceptical of philosophy.

34. Love begins and ends in being friends.

35. Facts are not dangerous unless you ignore them.

36. The world is the worst place to live in the universe, but it's so hard
to commute.

37. Wisdom isn't found in books; we find it in ourselves, often while
reading books.

38. We can will whatever we desire, but we can't desire whatever we will.

39. Who loves the rites of love, writes of love.

40. By knowing ourselves, we know God; and by knowing God, God knows
Himself.

41. Heaven is a euphemism for death, hell a dysphemism for life.

42. Nature is hedonistic.

43. For most people truth is relative; a very distant relative.

44. It's a function of the mind to construe things meaningfully.

45. We are the only thing that stands between us and the truth.

46. The more human, the more divine.

47. Scientists created the universe for their own amusement.

48. Aesop was a fabulous writer who probably never lived in the sixth
century B.C.

49. Honesty is a luxury only the poor can afford.

50. From practise comes experience, from experience, knowledge.

51. Don't seek the truth and the truth will seek you.

52. Money never made a man, but it has unmade many.

53. All thought is relative to the thinker; true thoughts are relative to all
thinkers.

54. Freedom is expensive.

55. Where nothing ends, infinity begins.

56. Most ships wreck on the rock of God, most plows break in religious sod.

57. The most unique individual is the most universal.

58. Music is an idealized form of speech.

59. Everybody loves to laugh, but all have misery enough.

60. Fate is what happens.

61. Nothing is so invincible as ignorance.

62. Determinism accounts for all the phenomena of experience.

63. Reason is what we think about what we feel.

64. Don't let truth go begging for a spokesman.

65. To say something can never be proved is to effectually disprove it.

66. Conscience is not an infallible judge of truth.

67. Opinions are the green fruit on the tree of knowledge.

68. Reasoning means generalizing the particular.

69. Most people put a construction on the world not given in experience.

70. Religion is the metaphysics of the masses.

71. Morals are an impediment to virtue.

72. Intelligence is not the efficient cause of evolution but its most significant
by-product.

73. Our minds are nothing but the means to procure pleasure.

74. The greatest feat of imagination is to imagine life as it really is.

75. An oyster needs a grain of sand, a poet a grain of truth.

76. Meaning is a way of organizing experience.

77. An altar is a place of sacrifice.

78. The world isn't perfectly just; it's we who must adjust to an imperfect
world.

79. Always go in the direction you're headed.

80. Love leavens our lives; like yeast in dough it makes us rise.

81. Confidence comes with competence.

82. Nature uses the personal to accomplish impersonal ends.

83. Courage is the only antidote for fear.

84. I wish people would make truth their God instead of making God their
truth.

85. Intellectual freedom takes precedence over religious dogma.

86. Pain and pleasure can’t be severed.

87. We must constantly outgrow ourselves.

88. Innocence means surrender to yourself, to your own inner sense of who
you are.

89. Few can look truth in the face; thus myth-making proceeds apace.

90. Persevere and you'll overcome.

91. As stewards of life's vital flame, we struggle against the inertia of matter.

92. All I know is what I think.

93. There's no quick spiritual fix for the world's problems.

94. There's no such thing as a permanent state of bliss.

95. Life can’t be reduced to a few well-chosen verbal formulas.

96. You can't take away the world's pain by being enlightened.

97. No one has a surplus of intelligence.

98. Death is how we atone for our every egocentric act.

99. There's an element of volition in evolution.

100. It was his prolificacy of mind that made Napoleon invincible for a time.

101. To those who yearn for moral absolutes, I offer this advice: respect the
truth.

102. The universe possesses dimension but not extension.

103. People are never so happy as when they're in conflict.

104. How we behave has more to do with temperament than whether we
believe the New Testament.

105. It's harder to save one living soul than all mankind.

106. The world is well formulated to frustrate every noble purpose.

107. Philosophers enjoy the unique privilege of explaining how unimportant
death is.

108. It's easy to love in the abstract, hard to love in the flesh.

109. It's easy to be cynical about the intelligence of others, hard to be sceptical
of our own.

110. When ideas are lacking, idealism rushes in to fill the void.

111. Using ultra-sophisticated research methods, physicists can now
stretch the truth to incredible limits.

112. Religion would meet with universal acceptance were it not for
theology.

113. The value of an heroic epic is that it inspires an heroic ethic.

114. Don't expect mental monuments from malicious midgets.

115. Gravity helps us get to the bottom of things, levity lifts us out again.

116. If life is going badly, don't despair. It'll eventually get worse and
these times will seem good by comparison.

117. Thought leads more people awry than it leads aright.

118. Life is inimical to art.

119. Human nature foils every plan for the advancement of man.

120. There's an eternal now at the heart of every passing hour.

121. The best way to avoid a void is to contain content.

122. Truth, not death, is the great leveler because it can be neither engrossed
nor entailed.

123. Inference is as good as evidence when it's based on established facts.

124. Nothing is so false as a too strict fidelity to the truth.

125. The pen is the mind's fang and wisdom its venom.

126. Pay attention to what's worth paying attention to.

127. Sometimes truth slips out despite our best intentions.

128. The way we see things has more to do with the way we see than
with things themselves.

129. To test the truth, taste it; if it contains no salt, toss it.

130. The cranium is the cradle of civilization.

131. Compassion needs no rationale.

132. Art and science are the Olympics of the mind.

133. Love is a hungry guest with impeccable manners.

134. Theory enables practice, thought supports action.
135. Morals are just manners writ large, etiquette for apes.

136. To improve, we'd have to eliminate much that is good in us.

137. The inside of nothing is the outside of everything.

138. Facts require no faith, faith requires no facts.

139. Virtue is vanity's favorite disguise.

140. There are no prizes for courage, that's why it's called courage.

141. To get into Heaven, you must enter through a door.

142. We’ll never exhaust the varieties of thought.

143. Love is a charitable form of aggression.

144. If we understood the assumptions underlying our questions, they
would themselves become the conclusions we set out in search of.

145. By being perpetually dissatisfied, you cheat yourself of much you
might have had.

146. The worst experiences make the best literature. Being a great
writer and living a quiet life are incompatible aims.

147. Reality is structured by the personality of the perceiver.

148. Everything's the same under the surface.

149. Good conduct is the truth for which reason provides the proof.
What contradicts good conduct isn't reason but a ruse.

150. What we all want is freedom from want.

151. It's easy to believe that what we perceive is all there is and dismiss
what we're unaware of.

152. Reality is more severe than imagination, can go places imagination
doesn't dare.

153. The future is just waiting to occur, unfolding in predictable
sequence.

154. Faith is to death as love is to life.

155. Happiness depends more on a steady set of nerves than the correct set of
beliefs.

156. Forget you don't know how to do something and you might
remember you can.

157. It takes a willingness to be wrong to be right.

158. Fear is more powerful than desire. We run away faster than we run
toward something.

159. We give birth to our own antithesis.

160. A being is the desire to become itself and in the process to learn
what it was meant to be.

161. Those who can’t climb the stairway of knowledge must take the elevator.

162. Doing the right thing, though difficult, is the best kind of luck there is.

163. People are usually the least attractive aspect of any landscape.

164. We are sane in proportion to the number of thoughts we can afford
to forgo.

165. The essence of love is sacrifice.

166. Sound principles consistently applied yield the best results.

167. God’s inscrutable purpose is that He has none.

168. The Jews murdered Jesus and the Christians spent two thousand
years performing the autopsy.

169. A show of skill is better than a show of force.

170. A sceptical person needs a sceptical religion, a dogmatic person a
dogmatic one.

171. Life is a journey we're constantly working to turn into a
destination.

172. Philosophy is a way to kill time while waiting for time to kill us.

173. Just as bad things are inevitable, so are good.

174. Figurative language is the only kind that’s literally true.
175. Freedom of thought is always under assault.

176. Make the most of the opportunities you’re given, and even more
of the ones you’re not.

177. Life would be a run on sentence were it not for the punctuation of
death.

178. The course of our thoughts often belies the course our lives are
taking.

179. We should steadfastly reject recourse to God as a way of resolving
philosophical dilemmas.

180. There are limits to what we can be and achieve, but we seldom
know what they are.

181. The trick in language is to get the text to accurately reflect the
texture of experience.

182. All small, particular truths are eventually swallowed up and subsumed
by larger, more general ones, and ultimately by the concept of law
itself.

183. Individuals should never abdicate their responsibility for influencing the
group through dissent.

184. Thought and reality are like egg and sperm: neither survives collision
with the other, but in the process, give birth to a new creation.

185. The next Copernican revolution will be to displace man from the
center of the universe.

186. Man has been trying to co-opt creation for a long time now
with God’s help.

187. Freedom is self-determination.

188. Our minds like to rationalize and impose order on experience. Thus
we’re often led to believe there’s order where none exists.

189. Between something and nothing lies everything.

190. Clarity doesn’t lend itself to charity.

191. Whatever our beliefs, the opposite of those beliefs is generally more true.

192. People waste a lot of words in the service of worthless concepts.

193. We take from the world and give back to the world in altered form, until
we no longer know what belongs to the world and what is our own.

194. Poetry is patterned speech, organic as a bunch of grapes.

195. Everything's provisional, pending better intelligence.

196. The mind's too dull and its meshes too coarse to trap truth. When its
jaws snap shut, the bird of truth slips through, leaving a few stray
feathers in its teeth.

197. The hand that reaches for the apple gets bitten, the hand that doesn't
reach is palsy-stricken.

198. Reality is even more distorted than the pictures we form of it.

199. Better to befriend a leaf than to be lonely in a well-swept world.

200. Don't take life personal.

201. The meaning of life is about what the meaning of life is.

202. Problems solve the problem of having no problems to solve.

203. People are only as beautiful as they act.

204. When man looks out upon the face of nature, he sees a face. When he
looks into the heart of nature, he sees a mind.

205. Strangers always recognize each other.

206. There's a lot to be said for reticence.

207. All we've got is our wits to live by. Wit puts a rogue on a par
with a genius.

208. The best kind of knowledge is to understand how to make the best
use of time.

209. Forget about truth. Write the ideas others will wish they had said
before you.

210. The common man and I have very little in common.