Peter Abelard Quotes

Against the disease of writing one must take special precautions, since it is a dangerous and contagious disease.

The key to wisdom is this -- constant and frequent questioning ... for by doubting we are led to question and by questioning we arrive at the truth.

Assiduous and frequent questioning is indeed the first key to wisdom... for by doubting we come to inquiry; through inquiring we perceive the truth...

Love is incapable of being concealed; a word, a look, nay, silence, speaks it.

By doubting we come to enquiry, and through enquiry we perceive truth.

The first key to wisdom is defined, of course, as frequent and assiduous questioning

We do many things carelessly or unwillingly, but nothing studiously unless we are willing and apply ourselves.

Memory supplies the place of a mistress

Come too, my inseparable companion, and join me in thanksgiving, you who were made my partner both in guilt and in grace.

Nihil credendum nisi prius intellectum. «Non si deve credere in nulla se prima non lo si è capito. »

I had wished to find in philosophy and religion a remedy for my disgrace; I searched out an asylum to secure me from love... duty, reason and decency, which upon other occasions have some power over me, are here useless. The Gospel is a language I do not understand when it opposes my passion... but when love has once been sincere how difficult it is to determine to love no more! ’Tis a thousand times more easy to renounce the world than love. I hate this deceitful, faithless world; I think no more of it...

For my part, the more I went forward in the study of letters, and ever more easily, the greater became the ardour of my devotion to them, until in truth I was so enthralled by my passion for learning that, gladly leaving to my brothers the pomp of glory in arms, the right of heritage and all the honours that should have been mine as the eldest born, I fled utterly from the court of Mars that I might win learning in the bosom of Minerva. And -- since I found the armory of logical reasoning more to my liking than the other forms of philosophy, I exchanged all other weapons for these, and to the prizes of victory in war I preferred the battle of minds in disputation.

The heart of man is a labyrinth whose windings are very difficult to discover.” -Heloise To Abelard

By doubting we are led to enquiry, and by enquiry we discern the truth.

At that memory, it seemed to Gilles that he opened a door into an empty house that had been firelit once, and now was naked rafters under the sky.

The fact is, the great intellectuals of the western religious tradition from Augustine to Aquinas and Peter Abelard became philosophically dominant. The intellectual tradition was preserved. The great intellectuals of the Islamic tradition like Averroes and Avicenna became heretics whose influence disappeared under the weight of rote preaching and practice. Islam as a result has a moral code, a legalistic system of right and wrong, but no evolved ethical tradition.

The master key of knowledge is, indeed, a persistent and frequent questioning. Aristotle, the most clear-sighted of all the philosophers, was desirous above all things else to arouse this questioning spirit, for in his Categories he exhorts a student as follows: "It may well be difficult to reach a positive conclusion in these matters unless they be frequently discussed. It is by no means fruitless to be doubtful on particular points." By doubting we come to examine, and by examining we reach the truth

The malicious erasure of women’s names from the historical record began two or three thousand years ago and continues into our own period. Women take as great a risk of anonymity when they merge their names with men in literary collaboration as when they merge in matrimony. The Lynds, for example, devoted equal time, thought, and effort to the writing of Middletown, but today it is Robert Lynd’s book. Dr. Mary Leakey made the important paleontological discoveries in Africa, but Dr. Louis Leakey gets all the credit. Mary Beard did a large part of the work on America in Midpassage, yet Charles Beard is the great social historian. The insidious process is now at work on Eve Curie. A recent book written for young people states that radium was discovered by Pierre Curie with the help of his assistant, Eve, who later became his wife. Aspasia wrote the famous oration to the Athenians, as Socrates knew, but in all the history books it is Pericles’ oration. Corinna taught Pindar and polished his poems for posterity; but who ever heard of Corinna? Peter Abelard got his best ideas from Heloise, his acknowledged intellectual superior, yet Abelard is the great medieval scholar and philosopher. Mary Sidney probably wrote Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia; Nausicaa wrote the Odyssey, as Samuel Butler proves in his book The Authoress of the Odyssey, at least to the satisfaction of this writer and of Robert Graves, who comment, “no other alternative makes much sense.

Love Christ, and despise yourself for His sake; He will possess your heart and be the sole object of your sighs and tears; seek for no comfort but in Him.

saw logic as the buttress of theology and his faith, not a substitute for them. If this earns him impatience from later skeptics and freethinkers, it does fit him into his own time and place. Peter Abelard’s Aristotle points down the road to Thomas Aquinas, not the Enlightenment.

When bishops, abbots, prelates, and other church officials arrived in the spring of 1140, they had to step over piles of masonry and dodge ropes from cranes as they assembled in the cathedral’s new choir. They were there for a church council, the most important in France ever. In terms of the history of Western civilization, perhaps the most important of all. The Sens council had been summoned to hear Peter Abelard defend his strange new doctrines. His judges included a monk in his early fifties who was a particular friend of Sens’s archbishop and the acknowledged leader of Europe’s most dynamic new monastic order, the Cistercians. He was Bernard of Clairvaux, later to be canonized as Saint Bernard.

It became evident, that in Paris, only one man could fulfil Heloise’s educational needs, Peter (or as the French called him, Pierre) Abelard, a thirty-seven year old philosopher and teacher

You shall not put people to death lazily, because of who they are.’ ‘We

Men wrote the Bible, but God made our consciences.

Men wrote the Bible, but God made our consciences. Does he want them to gather dust?’ There

Was there not a special chair in Rome where newly-elected Popes were checked for testicles?

We can’t just accept it – we must doubt it. For by doubting we come to inquiry, and from inquiry we come to the truth.

It is sometimes dangerous to have too much merit.

How fatal sometimes are the consequences of curiosity!

When we fall from a state of happiness with what impatience do we bear our misfortunes!