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The ideal man bears the accidents of life
With dignity and grace, the best of circumstances.
--
Act V, scene i.

 

Joseph Addison

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According to Confucianism, the ideal life contains a large dose of respect for traditional ways. All these ideals can be fleshed out and painted in more or less attractive colours. Yet there is something uncomfortable about them, if only because there is little reason to suppose that there is any such thing as the ideal life. Since different people have different tastes and interests, and different cultures encourage different concerns, it seems unlikely that any 'ideal life' will be heavily contextualized: ideal for this person in these circumstances, perhaps, but not much more.

 

Simon Blackburn

 

You don't need something more to get something more. That's what emergence means. Life can emerge from physics and chemistry plus a lot of accidents. The human mind can arise from neurobiology and a lot of accidents, the way the chemical bond arises from physics and certain accidents. Doesn't diminish the importance of these subjects to know they follow from more fundamental things plus accidents.

 

Murray Gell-Mann

 

Each individual bears within himself an ideal man, and to bring him forth in perfect form is his divinely imposed life-work.

 

John Lancaster Spalding

 

The case for individual freedom rests chiefly on the recognition of the inevitable and universal ignorance of all of us concerning a great many of the factors on which the achievement of our ends and welfare depend. It is because every individual knows so little and, in particular, because we rarely know which of us knows best that we trust the independent and competitive efforts of many to induce the emergence of what we shall want when we see it.
Humiliating to human pride as it may be, we must recognize that the advance and even the preservation of civilization are dependent upon a maximum of opportunity for accidents to happen. These accidents occur in the combination of knowledge and attitudes, skills and habits, acquired by individual men and also when qualified men are confronted with the particular circumstances which they are equipped to deal with. Our necessary ignorance of so much means that we have to deal largely with probabilities and chances.
Of course, it is true of social as of individual life that favorable accidents usually do not just happen. We must prepare for them.

 

Friedrich Hayek

 

I have been reading Miss Austen's Emma, which I had entirely forgotten, with the greatest enjoyment. I think it an admirable book, & I dare say you will agree with me. Miss Austen is an inimitable painter of quiet life. It would be difficult to say where the interest of Emma lies, yet it does interest strongly. There is no fine writing; no laboured description; no imaginative or ideal touches; no working on the feelings. Its magic must be its truth. It is exquisitely true. Life is presented to us, not as it may be taken in rare situations, in picturesque emergencies, but as we see it everyday. Common, workday life, with here & there a suit of best for Sundays. Yet there is nothing trivial. It is what Alfred calls in one of his unfinished poems "most ideal unideal, most uncommon commonplace." Dignity in the sentiments, dignity in the style. Quite a woman's book — (don't frown, Miss Fytche — I mean it for compliment) — none but a woman & a lady could possess that tact of minute observation, & that delicacy of sarcasm.

 

Jane Austen