Marcus Aurelius wrote the following about Severus (a person who is not clearly identifiable according to the footnote): Through him I became acquainted with the conception of a community based on equality and freedom of speech for all, and of a monarchy concerned primarily to uphold the liberty of the subject.

Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for the better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities, and a disgust for cheapjacks. We ought to smell, as it were, the difference of quality in men and their proposals when we enter the world of affairs about us.

Having given up autonomy, reason has become an instrument.

And in a flash I understood the meaning of sex. It is a craving for the mingling of consciousness, whose symbol is the mingling of bodies. Every time a man and a woman slake their thirst in the strange waters of the other's identity, they glimpse the immensity of their freedom.

To resist him that is set in authority is evil. .

The main importance of Francis Bacon's influence does not lie in any peculiar theory of inductive reasoning which he happened to express, but in the revolt against second-hand information of which he was a leader.

Kant ... discovered "the scandal of reason," that is the fact that our mind is not capable of certain and verifiable knowledge regarding matters and questions that it nevertheless cannot help thinking about.

Even the mathematical framework helps nothing, I would first like to understand how Nature avoids the contradictions.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.

It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder; for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man.

Haikus allow the whole world to appear within things.

For the purpose of acquiring gain, everything else is pushed aside or thrown overboard, for example, as is philosophy by the professors of philosophy.

This, I feel, is missing a vital point: that the sceptic is often a totally honest person who, for perfectly good, sound reasons, simply cannot see a case for belief. In fact many -- like Courty Bryan -- admit that they would like to be convinced, but find it impossible.

A talent is formed in stillness, a character in the world's torrent.

There are cultures that can only picture their origins and not their ends. Some are obsessed by both. Two other positions are possible: only picturing one's end - our own culture; picturing neither beginning nor end - the coming culture.

What am I, other than a chance in the infinite probabilities of not having been!

An infirmity which affects the whole race, is no proper object for the scorn of an individual who belongs to that race, and who, before he could expose it, must himself have been its slave.

Things have no hold on the soul. They have no access to it, cannot move or direct it. It is moved and directed by itself alone. It takes the things before it and interprets them as it sees fit.

Stories on digital platforms like Facebook or Instagram are not genuine stories. They have no narrative duration. Rather, they are just sequences of momentary impressions that do not tell us anything.

What I know wreaks havoc upon what I want.

Thus, in this universal catastrophe, the sufferings of Christians have tended to their moral improvement, because they viewed them with eyes of faith.

They pronounce absurdly who thus speak, as the Pythagoreans assert: for at the same time they make the infinite to be essence, and distribute it into parts.

The poor are thought to be dangerous, either morally dangerous because they are unproductive social parasites - thieves, prostitutes, drug addicts, and the like - or potentially dangerous because they are disorganized, unpredictable, and tendentially reactionary. In fact the term lumpenproletariat (or rad proletariat) has functioned for times to demonize the poor as a whole. ... The industrial reserve army is a constant threat hanging over the heads of the existing working class because, first of all, its misery serves as a terrifying example to workers of what could happen to them, and, second, the excess supply of labor it represents lowers the costs of labor and undermines workers' power against employers (by serving potentially as strike breakers, for example).

Where the world comes in my way - and it comes in my way everywhere - I consume it to quiet the hunger of my egoism. For me you are nothing but - my food, even as I too am fed upon and turned to use by you. We have only one relation to each other, that of usableness, of utility, of use.

The present state of France was ten times worse than a tyranny. The new constitution was said to be an experiment but the assertion was not true. It had already been tried, and had been found to be only productive of evils. They would go on from tyranny to tyranny, from oppression to oppression, till at last the whole system would terminate in the destruction of that miserable and deluded people... He sincerely hoped that no member of that House would ever barter the constitution of this country, the eternal jewel of their souls, for a wild and visionary system, which could only lead to confusion and disorder.

Blood will stream over Europe until the nations become aware of the frightful madness which drives them in circles. And then, struck by celestial music and made gentle, they approach their former altars all together, hear about the works of peace, and hold a great celebration of peace with fervent tears before the smoking altars.

Men looke not at the greatnesse of the evill past, but the greatnesse of the good to follow.

I must confess (sayes Eleutherius) I have, in the reading of Paracelsus and other Chymical Authors, been troubled to find, that such hard Words and Equivocal Expressions, as You justly complain of, do even when they treat of Principles, seem to be studiously affected by those Writers; whether to make themselves to be admir'd by their Readers, and their Art appear more Venerable and Mysterious, or, (as they would have us think) to conceal from them a Knowledge themselves judge inestimable.

And He is the God of the humble, for in the words of the Apostle, God chose the foolish things of the world to confound the wise and the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty (I Cor. i. 27) And God is in each of us in the measure in which one feels Him and loves Him. "If of two men," says Kierkegaard, "one prays to the true God without sincerity of heart, and the other prays to the an idol with all the passion of an infinite yearning, it is the first who really prays to the idol, while the second really prays to God." It would be better to say that the true God is He to whom man truly prays and whom man truly desires. And there may even be a truer revelation in superstition itself than in theology.

The fundamental tenet of Steiner's teaching is that if we take the trouble to recognize the independent existence of the inner worlds of thought, and keep the mind turned in that direction, we shall soon become increasingly conscious of their reality. We are not, as Sartre believed, stranded in the universe of matter like a whale on a beach. That inner world is our natural home. Moreover, once we grasp this truth, we can also recognize that we ourselves possess an "essential ego," a "true self," a fundamental identity that goes far beyond our usual feeble sense of being "me."

Do not imagine that it is less an accident by which you find yourself master of the wealth which you possess, than that by which this man found himself king.

Thus the universe is to be conceived as attaining the active self-expression of its own variety of opposites of its own freedom and its own necessity, of its own multiplicity and its own unity, of its own imperfection and its own perfection. All the opposites are elements in the nature of things, and are incorrigibly there. The concept of God is the way in which we understand this incredible fact that what cannot be, yet is.

Beyond all conscious lying and falsifying, there is a deeper "organic mendacity." Here the falsification is not formed in consciousness, but at the same stage of the mental process as the impressions and value feelings themselves: on the road of experience into consciousness. There is "organic mendacity" whenever a man's mind admits only those impressions which serve his "interest" or his instinctive attitude. Already in the process of mental reproduction and recollection, the contents of his experience are modified in this direction. He who is "mendacious" has no need to lie! In his case, the automatic process of forming recollections, impressions, and feelings is involuntarily slanted, so that conscious falsification becomes unnecessary.

Don't you know that a good and excellent person does nothing for the sake of appearances, but only for the sake of having acted right?

The liturgy of emptiness dispels the capitalist economy of the commodity.

If you feel irritated by the absurd remarks of two people whose conversation you happen to overhear, you should imagine that you are listening to a dialogue of two fools in a comedy.

It depends only on the weakness of our organs and of our self-excitement (Selbstberuhrung), that we do not see ourselves in a Fairy-world. All Fabulous Tales (Mahrchen) are merely dreams of that home world, which is everywhere and nowhere. The higher powers in us, which one day as Genies, shall fulfil our will, are, for the present, Muses, which refresh us on our toilsome course with sweet remembrances.

There is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees.

It's quite true that there were billions of years that I didn't exist that I was never bothered about.

Life itself is sitting in a room with a murderer, while eating a nice meal. You're just waiting for the meal to be over...

LIFE is the terrible condition.

Christianity does not involve the belief that all things were made for man. It does involve the belief that God loves man and for his sake became man and died.

The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich.

Duty is that mode of action which constitutes the best application of the capacity of the individual to the general advantage. Right is the claim of the individual to his share of the benefit arising from his neighbors' discharge of their several duties.

Living a minimally acceptable ethical life involves using a substantial part of our spare resources to make the world a better place. Living a fully ethical life involves doing the most good we can.

Today's terrorism is not the product of a traditional history of anarchism, nihilism, or fanaticism. It is instead the contemporary partner of globalization.

Then we may begin by assuming that there are three classes of men—lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, lovers of gain?

Lives matter in the sense that they assume physical form within the sphere of appearance; lives matter because they are to be valued equally.