I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it.

Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.

I have always been of the opinion that infamy earned by doing what is right is not infamy at all, but glory.

I do wish I believed in the life eternal, for it makes me quite miserable to think man is merely a kind of machine endowed, unhappily for himself, with consciousness.

The whole business of the kingly weaving is comprised in this and this alone: in never allowing the self-restrained characters to be separated from the courageous, but in weaving them together by common beliefs and honors and dishonors and opinions and interchanges of pledges, thus making of them a smooth and, as we say, well-woven fabric, and then entrusting to them in common forever the offices of the state.

'Who are you? Nobody. Who is Porridge? THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON THERE IS.'

The man who is tenacious of purpose in a rightful cause is not shaken from his firm resolve by the frenzy of his fellow citizens clamoring for what is wrong, or by the tyrant's threatening countenance.

Man is certainly crazy. He could not make a mite, and he makes gods by the dozen.

You will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me. Jesus to Judas, Judas

I also will ask you one thing, which if ye tell me, I in like wise will tell you by what authority I do these things. The baptism of John, whence was it? from heaven, or of men? 21:24-25 (KJV)

I love liberty, and I loathe constraint, dependence, and all their kindred annoyances. As long as my purse contains money it secures my independence, and exempts me from the trouble of seeking other money, a trouble of which I have always had a perfect horror; and the dread of seeing the end of my independence, makes me proportionately unwilling to part with my money. The money that we possess is the instrument of liberty, that which we lack and strive to obtain is the instrument of slavery.

The devil...the prowde spirit...cannot endure to be mocked.

Thee might observe incidentally that if the state paid for child-bearing it might and ought to require a medical certificate that the parents were such as to give a reasonable result of a healthy child - this would afford a very good inducement to some sort of care for the race, and gradually as public opinion became educated by the law, it might react on the law and make that more stringent, until one got to some state of things in which there would be a little genuine care for the race, instead of the present haphazard higgledy-piggledy ways.

The open society is one in which men have learned to be to some extent critical of taboos, and to base decisions on the authority of their own intelligence.

"Understanding being nothing else, but conception caused by Speech."

We thus have a kind of see-saw: first, pure persuasion leading to the conversion of a minority; then force exerted to secure that the rest of the community shall be exposed to the right propaganda; and finally a genuine belief on the part of the great majority, which makes the use of force again unnecessary.

They who know the truth are not equal to those who love it, and they who love it are not equal to those who delight in it.

Since he is unable to be the beloved, he will become the lover.

We're at such a low point in the American empire. Its spiritual decay and its immoral decadence are so profound that we have to begin on the foundational level of a spiritual awakening and a moral reckoning. Organized greed. Institutionalized hatred. Routinized indifference to the lives of poor and working people of all colors. We've got to get beyond an analysis of the predatory capitalist processes that have saturated every nook and cranny of the culture. We've got to get beyond the ways in which the political system has been colonized by corporate wealth and by monied elite. We've got to get beyond that sense of impotence of the citizenry. These are all the signs of an empire in decline. The only thing that we have to add is military overreach, and we see that as well. Speaking to Chris Hedges about his decision to run for president in 2024.

To all my friends without distinction I am ready to display my opulence: come one, come all; and whosoever likes to take a share is welcome to the wealth that lies within my soul.

Whatever we may do, excess will always keep its place in the heart of man, in the place where solitude is found. We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others.

And these were the dishes wherein to me, hunger-starven for thee, they served up the sun and the moon.

If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist

We can be knowledgeable with other men's knowledge, but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom.

Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think.

A thing forgotten on one day will be remembered on the next. Something we have made the most strenuous efforts to recall, but all in vain, will, soon after... saunter into the mind... [T]he sphere of possible recollection may be wider than we think, and... apparent oblivion is no proof against possible recall under other conditions.

The Value of myth is that it takes all the things you know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity.

A man who has no mental needs, because his intellect is of the narrow and normal amount, is, in the strict sense of the word, what is called a philistine.

It had been, when I read it, only a vaguely pregnant piece of nonsense. Now it was all as clear as day, as evident as Euclid. Of course the Dharma-Body of the Buddha was the hedge at the bottom of the garden. At the same time, and no less obviously, it was these flowers, it was anything that I-or rather the blessed Not-I, released for a moment from my throttling embrace-cared to look at.

The charlatan takes very different shapes according to circumstances; but at bottom he is a man who cares nothing about knowledge for its own sake, and only strives to gain the semblance of it that he may use it for his own personal ends, which are always selfish and material.

Verily I say unto thee, That this night, before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice. 26:34 (KJV) Said to Peter.

A spectre is haunting Europe; the spectre of Communism.

There is no more lovely, friendly and charming relationship, communion or company than a good marriage.

Money is human happiness in the abstract: he, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes his heart entirely to money.

To one unnamed, whose name will one day be named, is dedicated, with this little work, the entire authorship, as it was from the beginning.

Nine-tenths of the activities of a modern Government are harmful; therefore the worse they are performed, the better.

Recalling all the erroneous things that doctors have been able to say about sex or madness does us a fat lot of good. I think that what is currently politically important is to determine the regime of verediction established at a given moment ... on the basis of which you can now recognize, for example, that doctors in the nineteenth century said so many stupid things about sex. ... It is not so much the history of the true or the history of the false as the history of verediction which has a political significance.

As to why some are touched by the law and others not, so that some receive and others scorn the offer of grace...[this is the] hidden will of God, Who, according to His own counsel, ordains such persons as He wills to receive and partake of the mercy preached and offered.

Wherever we turn we find that the real obstacles to peace are human will and feeling, human convictions, prejudices, opinions. If we want to get rid of war we must get rid first of all of its psychological causes. Only when this has been done will the rulers of the nations even desire to get rid of the economic and political causes.

The possession and the exercise of political, and among others of electoral, rights, is one of the chief instruments both of moral and of intellectual training for the popular mind; and all governments must be regarded as extremely imperfect, until every one who is required to obey the laws, has a voice, or the prospect of a voice, in their enactment and administration.

Real life is, to most men, a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible; but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity embodying in splendid edifices the passionate aspiration after the perfect from which all great work springs. Remote from human passions, remote even from the pitiful facts of nature, the generations have gradually created an ordered cosmos, where pure thought can dwell as in its natural home, and where one, at least, of our nobler impulses can escape from the dreary exile of the actual world.

Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.

All men cannot receive this saying, save they to whom it is given. For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother's womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it. 19:11-12 (KJV)

Though I certainly deserve no ill treatment from mortals, yet if the insults and repulses I receive were attended with any advantage to them, I would content myself with lamenting in silence my own unmerited indignities and man's injustice.

One day, observing a child drinking out of his hands, he cast away the cup from his wallet with the words, "A child has beaten me in plainness of living."

Whatever you see in the more material part of yourself, learn to refer to God and to the invisible part of yourself. In that way, whatever offers itself to the senses will become for you an occasion for the practice of piety.

The end of the republic is to enervate and to weaken all other bodies so as to increase its own body.

Rules for Demonstrations. I. Not to undertake to demonstrate any thing that is so evident of itself that nothing can be given that is clearer to prove it. II. To prove all propositions at all obscure, and to employ in their proof only very evident maxims or propositions already admitted or demonstrated. III. To always mentally substitute definitions in the place of things defined, in order not to be misled by the ambiguity of terms which have been restricted by definitions.

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.

Without effort and change, human life cannot remain good. It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.