Mercantile jealousy is excited, and both inflames, and is itself inflamed, by the violence of national animosity.

Oh! wherefore come ye forth, in triumph from the North,With your hands, and your feet, and your raiment all red? And wherefore doth your rout send forth a joyous shout? And whence be the grapes of the wine-press which ye tread?

I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observation of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business.

It is almost always impossible to evaluate at the time events which you have already experienced, and to understand their meaning with the guidance of their effects. All the more unpredictable and surprising to us will be the course of future events.

Under the natural course of things each citizen tends towards his fittest function. Those who are competent to the kind of work they undertake, succeed, and, in the average of cases, are advanced in proportion to their efficiency; while the incompetent, society soon finds out, ceases to employ, forces to try something easier, and eventually turns to use.

As regards the objection that possibles are independent of the decrees of God I grant it of actual decrees (although the Cartesians do not at all agree to this), but I maintain that the possible individual concepts involve certain possible free decrees; for example, if this world was only possible, the individual concept of a particular body in this world would involve certain movements as possible, it would also involve the laws of motion, which are the free decrees of God; but these, also, only as possibilities. Because, as there are an infinity of possible worlds, there are also an infinity of laws, certain ones appropriate to one; others, to another, and each possible individual of any world involves in its concept the laws of its world.

There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.

The best life is the one in which the creative impulses play the largest part and the possessive impulses the smallest.

With success and a literary career one becomes an unquestioning part of the mechanism, whereas the only truly important years are those in which one is unknown.

And the Science of them, is the true and onely Moral Philosophy. For Moral Philosophy is nothing else but the Science of what is Good, and Evill, in the conversation, and Society of mankind. Good, and Evill, are names that signify our Appetites, and Aversions; which in different tempers, customes, and doctrines of men, are different.

Our psychology is ... a science of mere phenomena without any metaphysical implications. [It] Treats all metaphysical claims and assertions as mental phenomena, and regards them as statements about the mind and its structure.

A man who belongs to some communist or revolutionary society wills certain concrete ends, which imply the will to freedom, and that freedom is willed in community. We will freedom for freedom's sake, and in and through the particular circumstances. And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely upon the freedom of others and that the freedom of others depends upon our own.

My own sense of how to behave in a simulation has more traditional roots in the theory of perception. I've long believed that each of us lives in an egocentric simulation of the world run by the mind/brain. Since the zombies of each (waking) simulation have sentient real world counterparts, one should treat them as though they were real. Nonetheless as an angst-ridden teenager, my dawning acceptance of an inferential realist theory of perception made me feel as if I'd been condemned to solitary confinement for life. The sense of loneliness was indescribable. Naïve realism is better for one's mental health.

I recognize the necessity of animal experiments with my mind but not with my heart.

The only subversive mind is the one that questions the obligation to exist; all the others, the anarchist at the top of the list, compromise with the established order.

Do you know that ages will pass and mankind will proclaim in its wisdom and science that there is no crime and, therefore no sin, but that there are only hungry people. "Feed them first and then demand virtue of them!" - that is what they will inscribe on their banner which they will raise against you and which will destroy your temple.

There is another ground of hope that must not be omitted. Let men but think over their infinite expenditure of understanding, time, and means on matters and pursuits of far less use and value; whereof, if but a small part were directed to sound and solid studies, there is no difficulty that might not be overcome.

The ancient world takes its stand upon the drama of the Universe, the modern world upon the inward drama of the Soul.

Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

The inversion of external compulsion into the compulsion of conscience ... produces the machine-like assiduity and pliable allegiance required by the new rationality.

Nor knowest thou what argument Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent: All are needed by each one, Nothing is fair or good alone.

It is especially important for Westerners to understand that high lamas, Zen masters, and Hindu gurus in the discipline of yoga are human beings, not supermen. We must not put them, as we have put Jesus Christ, on pedestals of reverence so high that we automatically exclude ourselves from their states of consciousness.

At bottom, as was said above, we are to consider Luther as a Prophet Idol-breaker; a bringer-back of men to reality. It is the function of great men and teachers.

What is left when honor is lost?

I feel awe of the gods, I love, I revere, I venerate them, and in short have precisely the same feelings towards them as one would have towards kind masters or teachers or fathers or guardians or any beings of that sort.

No art can be judged by purely aesthetic standards, although a painting or a piece of music may appear to give a purely aesthetic pleasure. Aesthetic enjoyment is an intensification of the vital response, and this response forms the basis of all value judgements. The existentialist contends that all values are connected with the problems of human existence, the stature of man, the purpose of life. These values are inherent in all works of art, in addition to their aesthetic values, and are closely connected with them.

It is irreverent to the Gods to give you this demonstration, but for your sakes it shall be done.

Use harms and even destroys beauty. The noblest function of an object is to be contemplated.

I get a certain pleasure in knowing that I live not merely in a city but in Manhattan, the center of New York City, a region so unique in many ways that I honestly believe that Earth is divided into halves: Manhattan and non-Manhattan.

Interface, of the resonant interval as 'where the action is', whether chemical, psychic or social, involves touch.

In a superior civilization, as, for example, that of the Indo-Aryans, the being who is without a characteristic form or caste (in the original meaning of the word), not even that of servant or shudra, would emerge as a pariah. In this respect America is a society of pariahs. There is a role for pariahs. It is to be subjected to beings whose form and internal laws are precisely defined. Instead the modern pariahs seek to become dominant themselves and to exercise their dominion over the entire world.

Can the "word" be pinned down to either one period or one church? All churches are, of course, only more or less unsuccessful attempts to represent the unseen to the mind.

As for civilization, from which at last we are about to escape, so far from being the social destiny of man, it is only a transient stage - a state of temporary evil with which globes are afflicted during the first ages of their career; it is for the human race a disease of infancy, like teething; but it is a disease which has been prolonged in our globe at least twenty centuries beyond its natural term, owing to the neglect on the part of the ancient philosophy to study association and passional attraction.

What fools these mortals be!

I wished, by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her to become one.

Hypothetical liberty is allowed to everyone who is not a prisoner and in chains

Thou hast said: nevertheless I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.

We are organization watchers in our role as citizens. Increasing attention has been fixed in recent years upon the functioning of society's organizations: its large corporations and its governments. Hence this could also be described as a book for Everyman-for it proposes a way of thinking about organizational issues that concern us all.

Existing is plagiarism.

In advanced age, and in cases of disability from accident, natural infirmity or any other cause, the individual shall be supported by the colony, and receive every comfort which kindness can administer.

The circle of day and night is the law of the classical world: the most restricted but most demanding of the necessities of the world, the most inevitable but the simplest of the legislations of nature.This was a law that excluded all dialectics and all reconciliation, consequently laying the foundations for the smooth unity of knowledge as well as the uncompromising division of tragic existence. It reigns on a world without darkness, which knows neither effusiveness nor the gentle charms of lyricism. All is waking or dreams, truth or error, the light of being or the nothingness of shadow.

The humans live in time but our Enemy (God) destines them for eternity.

A gifted humanity can only produce skeptics, never saints.