The outward persona is not treated as the whole self, reminding readers that appearances and social roles can conceal a much larger private inner life.
The Madman, “My Friend”; the speaker contrasts the visible self with the quieter self that remains inaccessible.
“To define is to limit.”
Definitions clarify ideas but can also narrow them, especially when a label is treated as the complete reality of a person or experience.
The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891 edition, Chapter 17; Lord Henry answers the Duchess of Monmouth’s question “What are you?” with “To define is to limit.”
“Diversity repels; likeness attracts.”
The concise axiom is one premise in Boethius’s metaphysical argument: things are described as tending toward what is like them, not as a modern empirical rule about human attraction or relationships.
How Substances Can Be Good in Virtue of Their Existence Without Being Absolute Goods (De Hebdomadibus), preliminary proposition IX, H. F. Stewart / E. K. Rand 1918 edition, Project Gutenberg #13316. Kept as a historical metaphysical premise, not social-science evidence.
“You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.”
Whitman urges the reader not to borrow even his own viewpoint wholesale: other voices can be heard, but judgment still has to be worked through personally rather than accepted second-hand.
Leaves of Grass (1855), untitled first-edition poem later known as “Song of Myself,” printed page 14 (Wikisource scan page 20). The sentence follows Whitman’s warning against taking things at second or third hand and against looking only through another person’s eyes; the reviewed locator is edition-specific.
“One must learn to love, one must learn to be kind, and this from childhood onwards.”
The aphorism treats loving and kind dispositions as capacities that can be practiced and cultivated rather than assumed to arise automatically.
Human, All-Too-Human, Part I, aphorism 601, “Learning to Love”; Helen Zimmern translation; this record uses the opening sentence.
“I may be wrong.”
The admission places a limit on Washington’s own policy claims and models intellectual uncertainty rather than presenting judgment as infallible.
The Future of the American Negro, Chapter VIII; Project Gutenberg #26507. The sentence appears in Washington’s closing policy discussion immediately after his summary of dangers and immediately before his qualification that he may also be in some degree right.
“Public opinion—private laziness.”
The epigram provocatively suggests that adopting public opinion can sometimes substitute borrowed judgment for the harder work of forming one’s own view.
Human, All-Too-Human, Part I, aphorism 482, “Repeated Once More”; Helen Zimmern translation.
