We must consider both the ultimate end and all clear sensory evidence, to which we refer our opinions; for otherwise everything will be full of uncertainty and confusion.

Again, Amyclas the Heracleotean, one of Plato's familiars, and Menæchmus, the disciple, indeed, of Eudoxus, but conversant with Plato, and his brother Dinostratus, rendered the whole of geometry as yet more perfect. But Theudius, the Magnian, appears to have excelled, as well in mathematical disciplines, as in the rest of philosophy. For he constructed elements egregiously, and rendered many particulars more universal. Besides, Cyzicinus the Athenian, flourished at the same period, and became illustrious in other mathematical disciplines, but especially in geometry. These, therefore, resorted by turns to the Academy, and employed themselves in proposing common questions.

"Where do you get those superior airs of yours?" "I've managed to survive, you see, all those nights when I wondered: am I going to kill myself at dawn?"

Even if I could by gradual degrees be transformed into a bat, nothing in my present constitution enables me to imagine what the experiences of such a future stage of myself thus metamorphosed would be like. The best evidence would come from the experience of bats, if we only knew what they were like.

The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don't know where that elsewhere is.

In England ... everything becomes professional ... even the rogues of that island are pedants.

He was often, and much beyond reason, provoked by my failures in cases where success could not have been expected; but in the main his method was right, and it succeeded. I do not believe that any scientific teaching ever was more thorough, or better fitted for training the faculties, than the mode in which logic and political economy were taught to me by my father. Striving, even in an exaggerated degree, to call forth the activity of my faculties, by making me find out everything for myself, he gave his explanations not before, but after, I had felt the full force of the difficulties; and not only gave me an accurate knowledge of these two great subjects, as far as they were then understood, but made me a thinker on both.

Africans are always vicious... mostly inclined to lasciviousness, vengeance, theft and lies.

And what he fears he cannot make attractive with his touch he abandons.

A blow from your friend is better than a kiss from your enemy.

The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know.

Remember that you ought to behave in life as you would at a banquet. As something is being passed around it comes to you; stretch out your hand, take a portion of it politely. It passes on; do not detain it. Or it has not come to you yet; do not project your desire to meet it, but wait until it comes in front of you. So act toward children, so toward a wife, so toward office, so toward wealth.

Q. You do not consider your statement a disloyal one? A. No, sir. Scientific truth is beyond loyalty and disloyalty. Q. You are sure that your statement represents scientific truth? A. I am.

As for my own business, even that kind of surveying which I could do with most satisfaction my employers do not want. They would prefer that I should do my work coarsely and not too well, ay, not well enough. When I observe that there are different ways of surveying, my employer commonly asks which will give him the most land, not which is most correct.

Romeo wants Juliet as the filings want the magnet; and if no obstacles intervene he moves towards her by as straight a line as they. But Romeo and Juliet, if a wall be built between them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against its opposite sides like the magnet and the filings with the card. Romeo soon finds a circuitous way, by scaling the wall or otherwise, of touching Juliet's lips directly. With the filings the path is fixed; whether it reaches the end depends on accidents. With the lover it is the end which is fixed, the path may be modified indefinitely.

The division between human and robot is perhaps not as significant as that between intelligence and nonintelligence.

A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.

What is serious about excitement is that so many of its forms are destructive. It is destructive in those who cannot resist excess in alcohol or gambling. It is destructive when it takes the form of mob violence. And above all it is destructive when it leads to war. It is so deep a need that it will find harmful outlets of this kind unless innocent outlets are at hand. There are such innocent outlets at present in sport, and in politics so long as it is kept within constitutional bounds. But these are not sufficient, especially as the kind of politics that is most exciting is also the kind that does most harm. Civilized life has grown altogether too tame, and, if it is to be stable, it must provide harmless outlets for the impulses which our remote ancestors satisfied in hunting.

It is ugly to be punishable, but there is no glory in punishing. Hence the double system of protection that justice has set up between itself and the punishment it imposes.

Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: Every man I meet is my master at some point, and in that, I learn of him.

Political ideals must be based upon ideals for the individual life. The aim of politics should be to make the lives of individuals as good as possible.

We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.

A hero looks death in the face, real death, not just the image of death. Behaving honourably in a crisis doesn't mean being able to act the part of a hero well, as in the theatre, it means being able to look death itself in the eye. For an actor may play lots of different roles, but at the end of it all he himself, the human being, is the one who has to die.

Even more than in a poem, it is the aphorism that the word is god.

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

All those instances to be found in history, whether real or fabulous, of a doubtful public spirit, at which morality is perplexed, reason is staggered, and from which affrighted Nature recoils, are their chosen and almost sole examples for the instruction of their youth.

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one's death, one dies one's life.

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others.

I forsook the company and the dinner-parties, the port-wine and champagne of the middle-classes, and devoted my leisure-hours almost exclusively to the intercourse with plain working men; I am both glad and proud of having done so. Glad, because thus I was induced to spend many a happy hour in obtaining a knowledge of the realities of life-many an hour, which else would have been wasted in fashionable talk and tiresome etiquette; proud, because thus I got an opportunity of doing justice to an oppressed and calumniated class of men who with all their faults and under all the disadvantages of their situation, yet command the respect of every one but an English money-monger.

Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.

This means that no state, howsoever democratic its forms, not even the reddest political republic - a people's republic only in the sense of the lie known as popular representation - is capable of giving the people what they need: the free organization of their own interests from below upward, without any interference, tutelage, or coercion from above. That is because no state, not even the most republican and democratic, not even the pseudo-popular state contemplated by Marx, in essence represents anything but government of the masses from above downward, by an educated and thereby privileged minority which supposedly understands the real interests of the people better than the people themselves.

The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.

With a higher moral nature will come a restriction on the multiplication of the inferior.

Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continual comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.

If the world were clear, art would not exist.

Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.

All sources of energy upon which industry depends are wasted when they are employed; and industry is expending them at a continually increasing rate. Already coal has been largely replaced by oil, and oil is being used up so fast that East and West alike conceive it necessary to their own prosperity to destroy the industry of the other. And what is true of oil is equally true of other natural resources. Every day, many square miles of forest are turned into newspaper, but there is no known process by which newspaper can be turned into forest. You will say that this need not worry us, since newspapers will be replaced by radio, but radio requires electricity, electricity requires power, and power depends upon raw materials.

An early morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.

Thus intrigues and conspiracies do not arise, and thievery and robbery do not occur; therefore doors need never be locked.

An army of principles will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot; it will succeed where diplomatic management would fall: it is neither the Rhine, the Channel, nor the ocean that can arrest its progress: it will march on the horizon of the world, and it will conquer.

We wish, in a word, equality - equality in fact as a corollary, or rather, as primordial condition of liberty. From each according to his faculties, to each according to his needs; that is what we wish sincerely and energetically.

Even in childhood I watched the hours flow, independent of any reference, any action, any event, the disjunction of time from what was not itself, its autonomous existence, its special status, its empire, its tyranny. I remember quite clearly that afternoon when, for the first time, confronting the empty universe, I was no more than a passage of moments reluctant to go on playing their proper parts. Time was coming unstuck from being - at my expense.

It seems to me that science has a much greater likelihood of being true in the main than any philosophy hitherto advanced (I do not, of course, except my own). In science there are many matters about which people are agreed; in philosophy there are none. Therefore, although each proposition in a science may be false, and it is practically certain that there are some that are false, yet we shall be wise to build our philosophy upon science, because the risk of error in philosophy is pretty sure to be greater than in science. If we could hope for certainty in philosophy, the matter would be otherwise, but so far as I can see such a hope would be chimerical.

How much good it would do if one could exterminate the human race.

Cleanness of body was ever deemed to proceed from a due reverence to God.

It would be better for me that multitudes of men should disagree with me rather than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself.