F. H. Bradley (1846–1924,) fully Francis Herbert Bradley, was a Welsh Idealist philosopher. His concepts were extensively debated by British and American philosophers in the first decades of the twentieth century.
Born in Glasbury, Brecknockshire (Powys,) Bradley became a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford in 1870, but lived as a semi-invalid and a recluse most of his life. He was the foremost figure of the British absolute Idealist school. Influenced by Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, this school considered the mind to be a more fundamental feature of the universe than matter.
Bradley’s principal works are Ethical Studies (1876,) Principles of Logic (1883,) and Appearance and Reality (1893.)
Francis was the brother of the English literary scholar Andrew Cecil Bradley, who is best remembered for his authoritative volume, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by F. H. Bradley
There are those who understand everything till one puts it into words.
—F. H. Bradley
Topics: Words
Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct; but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.
—F. H. Bradley
Topics: Philosophy
The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil.
—F. H. Bradley
Topics: Optimism
The one self-knowledge worth having is to know one’s own mind.
—F. H. Bradley
Topics: Self-Knowledge
The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring. And that is not happiness.
—F. H. Bradley
Topics: Money, Success, Desire, Happiness, One liners
There are those who so dislike the nude that they find something indecent in the naked truth.
—F. H. Bradley
There are persons who, when they cease to shock us, cease to interest us.
—F. H. Bradley
Reason teaches us that what is good is good for something, and that what is good for nothing is not good at all.
—F. H. Bradley
Topics: Goodness
True penitence condemns to silence. What a man is ready to recall he would be willing to repeat.
—F. H. Bradley
Topics: Forgiveness
The man who has ceased to fear has ceased to care.
—F. H. Bradley
Topics: Fear
We say that a girl with her doll anticipates the mother. It is more true, perhaps, that most mothers are still but children with playthings.
—F. H. Bradley
Topics: Children
Eclecticism. Every truth is so true that any truth must be false.
—F. H. Bradley
Topics: Truth
Our live experiences, fixed in aphorisms, stiffen into cold epigrams. Our heart’s blood, as we write it, turns to mere dull ink.
—F. H. Bradley
Where everything is bad it must be good to know the worst.
—F. H. Bradley
Topics: Anxiety, Worry
Adam knew Eve his wife and she conceived. It is a pity that this is still the only knowledge of their wives at which some men seem to arrive.
—F. H. Bradley
Topics: Marriage, Wives
The deadliest foe to virtue would be complete self-knowledge.
—F. H. Bradley
Topics: Virtue
The force of the blow depends on the resistance. It is sometimes better not to struggle against temptation. Either fly or yield at once.
—F. H. Bradley
Topics: Temptation
One said of suicide, “As long as one has brains one should not blow them out.” And another answered, “But when one has ceased to have them, too often one cannot.”
—F. H. Bradley
Topics: Suicide
It is by a wise economy of nature that those who suffer without change, and whom no one can help, become uninteresting. Yet so it may happen that those who need sympathy the most often attract it the least.
—F. H. Bradley
Topics: Suffering
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