My life was not useless; I gave important truths to the world, and it was only for want of understanding that they were disregarded. I have been ahead of my time.

This method of mental training is, therefore, the immediate preparation for the moral; it completely destroys the root of immorality by never allowing sensuous enjoyment to become the motive. Formerly, that was the first motive to be stimulated and developed, because it was believed that otherwise the pupil could not be influenced or controlled at all.

As we search as a nation for constructive ways to challenge racism and white supremacy, it is absolutely essential that progressive female voices gain a hearing.

An American cannot converse, but he can discuss, and his talk falls into a dissertation. He speaks to you as if he was addressing a meeting; and if he should chance to become warm in the discussion, he will say "Gentlemen" to the person with whom he is conversing.

Neither art nor wisdom may be attained without learning.

The liar is a person who uses the valid designations, the words, in order to make something which is unreal appear to be real. He says, for example, "I am rich," when the proper designation for his condition would be "poor." He misuses fixed conventions by means of arbitrary substitutions or even reversals of names. If he does this in a selfish and moreover harmful manner, society will cease to trust him and will thereby exclude him. What men avoid by excluding the liar is not so much being defrauded as it is being harmed by means of fraud. Thus, even at this stage, what they hate is basically not deception itself, but rather the unpleasant, hated consequences of certain sorts of deception. It is in a similarly restricted sense that man now wants nothing but truth: he desires the pleasant, life-preserving consequences of truth. He is indifferent toward pure knowledge which has no consequences; toward those truths which are possibly harmful and destructive he is even hostilely inclined.

Money is miraculous. What miraculous facilities has it yielded, will it yield us; but also what never-imagined confusions, obscurations has it brought in; down almost to total extinction of the moral-sense in large masses of mankind!

The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free.

I am convinced that the unwritten knowledge scattered among men of different callings surpasses in quantity and in importance anything we find in books, and that the greater part of our wealth has yet to be recorded.

If you have hitherto believed that life was one of the highest value and now see yourselves disappointed, do you at once have to reduce it to the lowest possible price?

Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities - his preeminence over them simply and solely in the number and in the fantastic and unnecessary character of his wants, physical, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual. Had his whole life not been a quest for the superfluous, he would never have established himself as inexpugnably as he has done in the necessary.

It is not proper either to have a blunt sword or to use freedom of speech ineffectually. Neither is the sun to be taken from the world, nor freedom of speech from erudition.

If we want a love which will protect the soul from wounds we must love something other than God.

The Outsider wants to cease to be an Outsider. He wants to be 'balanced'. He would like to achieve a vividness of sense-perception (Lawrence, Van Gogh, Hemingway) He would also like to understand the human soul and its working and, be 'possessed' by a Will topower, to more life. (Barbusse and Mitya Karamazov) He would like to escape triviality forever. Above all, he would like to know how to express himself because that is the means by which he can get to know himself and hi unknown possibilities.

Art, at least, teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for his existence in the order of nature.

A judgment, for me is not the mere grasping of a thought, but the admission of its truth.

In all ranges of experience, externality of means defines the mechanical.

In memory yet green, in joy still felt, The scenes of life rise sharply into view. We triumph; Life's disasters are undealt, And while all else is old, the world is new.

The Kantian philosophy left a gulf between thought and being, or between subject and object, which the Hegelian philosophy sought to bridge. The bridge was to be made by positing one universal structure of all being. Being was to be a process wherein a thing 'comprehends' or 'grasps' the various states of existence and draws them into the more or less enduring unity of its 'self,' thus actively constituting itself as 'the same' throughout all change. Everything, in other words, exists more or less as a 'subject.'

In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.

Alonso of Aragon was wont to say in commendation of age, that age appears to be best in four things - old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.

Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.

The wise man reads both books and life itself.

If by motivation we mean whatever it is that causes someone to follow a particular course of action, then every action is motivated - by definition. But in most human behavior the relation between motives and action is not simple; it is mediated by a whole chain of events and surrounding conditions. We observe a man scratching his arm. His motive (or goal)? To relieve an itch.

It is more easy to get a favor from Fortune than to keep it.

If by religion, we are understand sectarian dogmas, in which no two of them agree, then your exclamation on that hypothesis is just, "that this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it." But if the moral precepts, innate in man, and made a part of his physical constitution, as necessary for a social being, if the sublime doctrines of philanthropism and deism taught us by Jesus of Nazareth, in which all agree, constitute true religion, then, without it, this would be, as you again say, "something not fit to be named, even indeed, a hell."

I should prefer that Fortune keep me in her camp rather than in the lap of luxury. If I am tortured, but bear it bravely, all is well; if I die, but die bravely, it is also well.

I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds. One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it.

"They would say," he answered, "that you do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience."

Manners are the shadows of virtues; the momentary display of those qualities which our fellow creatures love, and respect.

Jesus Christ raised women above the condition of mere slaves, mere ministers to the passions of the man, raised them by His sympathy, to be Ministers of God. He gave them moral activity. But the Age, the World, Humanity, must give them the means to exercise this moral activity, must give them intellectual cultivation, spheres of action.

There are, it seems, two Muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say, "It is yet more difficult than you thought." This is the muse of form. The first muse is the one mainly listened to in a cheap-energy civilization, in which "economic health" depends on the assumption that everything desirable lies within easy reach of anyone. To hear the second muse one must move outside the cheap-energy enclosure. It is the willingness to hear the second muse that keeps us cheerful in our work. To hear only the first is to live in the bitterness of disappointment.

It must have been in his teens, perhaps rather early, that he and his elder brother John, with William Bell (afterwards of Wylie Hill, and a noted drover) and his brother, all met in the kiln at Eelief to play cards. The corn was dried then at home. There was a fire, therefore, aud perhaps it was both heat and light. The boys had played, perhaps, often enough for trifling stakes, and always parted in good humor. One night they came to some disagreement. My father spoke out what was in him about the folly, the sinfulness, of quarreling over a perhaps sinful amusement. The earnest mind persuaded other minds. They threw the cards into the fire, and (I think the younger Bell told my brother James) no one of the four ever touched a card again through life. My father certainly never hinted at such a game since I knew him. I cannot remember that I, at that age, had any such force of belief. Which of us can?

People in new environments always produce the new preceptual modality without any difficulty or awareness of change. It is later that the psychic and social realignments baffle societies.

The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies. It's matrix-If you will pardon me for demonstrating so little and for being elliptical in order to come more quickly to my principle theme-is the determination of Being as presence in all sense of this word.

The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.

It is always necessary to call men back to history, which is the first master in politics, or more exactly the only master.

the impressionable mind of the child realizes early enough that the lives of their parents are in contradiction to the ideas they represent; that, like the good Christian who fervently prays on Sunday, yet continues to break the Lord's commands the rest of the week, the radical parent arraigns God, priesthood, church, government, domestic authority, yet continues to adjust himself to the condition he abhors.

Instinctively we divide mankind into friends and foes - friends, towards whom we have the morality of co-operation; foes, towards whom we have that of competition. But this division is constantly changing; at one moment a man hates his business competitor, at another, when both are threatened by Socialism or by an external enemy, he suddenly begins to view him as a brother. Always when we pass beyond the limits of the family it is the external enemy which supplies the cohesive force. In times of safety we can afford to hate our neighbour, but in times of danger we must love him.

The most important person is the one you are with in this moment.

The criterion of truth is that it works even if nobody is prepared to acknowledge it.

I take it for granted, when I am invited to lecture anywhere, - for I have had a little experience in that business, - that there is a desire to hear what I think on some subject, though I may be the greatest fool in the country, - and not that I should say pleasant things merely, or such as the audience will assent to; and I resolve, accordingly, that I will give them a strong dose of myself. They have sent for me, and engaged to pay for me, and I am determined that they shall have me, though I bore them beyond all precedent.

I know that my birth is fortuitous, a laughable accident, and yet, as soon as I forget myself, I behave as if it were a capital event, indispensable to the progress and equilibrium of the world.

He who takes not counsel of the Unseen and Silent, from him will never come real visibility and speech.

Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.

How do you think the transition from the present situation to community of Property is to be effected? The first, fundamental condition for the introduction of community of property is the political liberation of the proletariat through a democratic constitution.