Margaret Benson Quotes

Reason cannot remain a bare intellectual faculty; it must become a faculty of judgment dealing with the question of values.

He lives in the halflights in secret places, free and alone, this mysterious little great being whom his mistress calls, My cat.

A plate is distasteful to a cat, a newspaper still worse; they like to eat sticky pieces of meat sitting on a cushioned chair or a nice Persian rug.

Dogs have owners, cats have staff.

But none of us wants to be average. That we are so is a melancholy fact borne in upon us in middle life, and we do not always relish it.

The spiritual is not the emotional; we may receive spiritual things emotionally, but to receive them rationally we must receive them with the mind and the will; we must act on them, we must experiment on them, we must let them permeate our consciousness.

... all progress in knowledge takes place through the correction of that which has been received on authority ... without the huge body of traditional knowledge, accurate and inaccurate together, there would be nothing even to correct. Progress is not made in spite of authority, but by means of it.

The cat is, above all things, a dramatist.

apparent contradiction ... is often the opportunity for new discovery in science; and it even may be said that the absence of apparent contradiction is due to our want of perception, since our knowledge of laws and causes is so small compared to their total sum.