“These studies are useful, pleasant, and entertaining, young friend, because the mind does not encounter in them the abstractions of theology, the uncertainties of medicine, the intricacies of law, nor the ruggedness of mathematics. It is all satisfying, all delightful, all enchanting, and all educational, both physics as well as natural history. It doesn’t exhaust…
We entered the house, I picked out a good seat by the sitting room, for I never liked leaving the company of skirts for long . . . ***** It all seems fine to me in its own fashion; and so, in the countryside I am happy in a country way, and in the city…
It was not yet common, in that illustrious college, that seminary of the learned, that ornament of knowledge for the metropolis—it was not yet common, I was saying, to teach modern philosophy there in all its aspects; its lecture halls still resonated with the ergos of Aristotle. There you could still hear debates over the…
The silliest thing some parents do is to make their son become a lawyer or a priest by brute force, even when he has no vocation for such a career, nor any talent for letters: a baneful process, whose pernicious effects are daily bemoaned when we see all these paper-pushing lawyers, murderous doctors, and ignorant,…
“Do you see, child, the exquisite beauty that Nature holds even in the handful of little flowers and animals we have here? For Nature is the minister of the God we believe in and worship. The greatest wonder of Nature that might astonish you was made by the Creator through a simple act of His…
As Plato said, “children’s passions should not always be restrained with severity, nor should they be habitually petted and caressed.” Wisdom consists in finding the medium between these extremes. ***** How unstable is fortune in this life! ***** Pliny rightly stated that “fear is a very unfaithful teacher.” Fernández de LizardiMexicophilosophical literatureThe Mangy Parrot
It is a scandal against nature for a rational mother to do what no ass, no cat, no dog, nor any female animal devoid of reason would do. “Cruel women, how can you be so insolent and shameless as to call yourselves mothers? Do you have any inkling of a mother’s great dignity? Are you…
manwithoutqualities 