John Of Salisbury Quotes

We are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants. We see more, and things that are more distant, than they did, not because our sight is superior or because we are taller than they, but because they raise us up, and by their great stature add to ours.

Just as the soul animates the body, so, in a way, meaning breathes life into a word.

One who comprehends truth is wise, one who loves it good, one who orders his life in accordance with it happy.

The only sure road to truth is humility.

Seeking is a necessary preliminary to finding, and one who cannot endure the hardship of inquiry cannot expect to harvest the fruit of knowledge.

If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. - From a letter to Robert Hooke dated February 5th, 1676. The metaphor was first recorded in 1159 by John of Salisbury and attributed to Bernard of Chartres: Dicebat Bernardus Carnotensis nos esse quasi nanos, gigantium humeris insidentes, ut possimus plura eis et remotiora videre, non utique proprii visus acumine, aut eminentia corporis, sed quia in altum subvenimur et extollimur magnitudine gigantea.

the system glorified by John of Salisbury and John Fortescue, was unjust in a thousand all too obvious ways, but it offered those on the lowest rungs one notable freedom: the freedom not to have to take the achievements of quite so many people in society as reference points—and so find themselves severely wanting in status and importance as a result.

With his Policraticus (1159), John of Salisbury had become the most famous Christian writer to compare society to a human body and to use that analogy to justify a system of natural inequality. In Salisbury’s formulation, every element in the state had an anatomical counterpart: the ruler was the head, the parliament was the heart, the court was the sides, officials and judges were the eyes, ears and tongue, the treasury was the belly and intestines, the army was the hands and the peasantry and labouring classes were the feet.

Paris became the center for twelfth-century philosophy because of the decision to allow any qualified master to set up a school there, on payment of a fee to the cathedral authorities.4 By the 1130s, as John of Salisbury’s account of his education there shows (Metalogicon II.10), the student could choose among a great variety of masters – rather than being constrained to a single one, however illustrious – and the work of each teacher was stimulated by contact and competition with the others. Outstanding thinkers of the 1130s and 40s, such as Peter Abaelard, Alberic of Paris, and Gilbert of Poitiers explicitly or implicitly adapt and criticize the others’ logical and metaphysical ideas.

There was Arctic John, a businessman from Salisbury who doesn’t hold water, Bruce Knott, a social worker from Cumberland who spends his lunch hour picking his bum, and Judith Glycerine, the reformation pig.

Jackson-Salisbury Diagram for Maladjusted and Unhappy Living Lack of adaptation to social environment caused by Lack of harmony within the personality caused by Inappropriate emotions caused by Wrong ideas or ignorance Working backward, the cure naturally would be: Right ideas resulting in Appropriate emotions resulting in Harmony within the personality resulting in Readjustment to the social environment Health and wholeness begin in the head, with healthy ideas, energizing attitudes, a vision of vitality. When perceptions get twisted, one's emotional life also gets twisted, and these discordant emotions cause disharmony in the total personality.

John of Salisbury, an Englishman who had studied in numerous places, including Paris, placed logic central to understanding: ‘It was the mind which, by means of the ratio [reason], went beyond the experience of the senses and made it intelligible, then, by means of the intellectus, related things to their divine cause and comprehended the order of creation, and ultimately arrived at true knowledge, sapentia.’15 For us today, logic is an arid, desiccated word and has lost much of its interest.

Benny toured with her for two years, traveling through Illinois and Wisconsin under the billing “Salisbury and Kubelsky: From Grand Opera to Ragtime.” When Salisbury retired, Benny continued the act with pianist Lyman Woods. For six years he played his violin and never spoke or told a joke. He enlisted in the Navy for the First World War and found himself in a maritime revue at the Great Lakes Naval Station. Here he told his first jokes, and by the end of the war he had begun to think of himself as a monologuist.