I am far from denying that newspapers in democratic countries lead citizens to do very ill-considered things in common; but without newspapers there would be hardly any common action at all. So they mend many more ills than they cause.

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

It is almost never when a state of things is the most detestable that it is smashed, but when, beginning to improve, it permits men to breathe, to reflect, to communicate their thoughts with each other, and to gauge by what they already have the extent of their rights and their grievances. The weight, although less heavy, seems then all the more unbearable.

Not the external and physical alone is now managed by machinery, but the internal and spiritual also. Here too nothing follows its spontaneous course, nothing is left to be accomplished by old natural methods. Everything has its cunningly devised implements, its preestablished apparatus; it is not done by hand, but by machinery.

I believe it to be this; that my will, absolutely of itself, and without the intervention of any instrument that might weaken its effect, shall act in a sphere perfectly congenial - reason upon reason, spirit upon spirit; in a sphere to which it does not give the laws of life, of activity, of progress, but which has them in itself, therefore, upon self-active reason. But spontaneous, self-active reason is will. The law of the transcendental world must, therefore, be a Will.

No Dilettantism in this Mahomet; it is a business of Reprobation and Salvation with him, of Time and Eternity: he is in deadly earnest about it! Dilettantism, hypothesis, speculation, a kind of amateur-search for Truth, toying and coquetting with Truth: this is the sorest sin. The root of all other imaginable sins. It consists in the heart and soul of the man never having been open to Truth; - "living in a vain show." Such a man not only utters and produces falsehoods, but is himself a falsehood. The rational moral principle, spark of the Divinity, is sunk deep in him, in quiet paralysis of life-death.

I write in a hurry, because the little one, who has been sleeping a long time, begins to call for me. Poor thing! when I am sad, I lament that all my affections grow on me, till they become too strong for my peace, though they all afford me snatches of exquisite enjoyment.

First, there must be an end to war and national rivalry and only then could one turn to the internal miseries that, after all, had external conflict as their chief cause.

I am enraptured by Hindu philosophy, whose essential endeavor is to surmount the self; and everything I do, everything I think is only myself and the selfs humiliations.

A whole dimension of human activity and passivity has been de-eroticized. The environment from which the individual could obtain pleasure-which he could cathect as gratifying almost as an extended zone of the body-has been rigidly reduced. Consequently, the "universe" of libidinous cathexis is likewise reduced. The effect is a localization and contraction of libido, the reduction of erotic to sexual experience and satisfaction.

The same polarity of the male and female principle exists in nature; not only, as is obvious in animals and plants, but in the polarity of the two fundamental functions, that of receiving and penetrating. It is the polarity of earth and rain, of the river and the ocean, of night and day, of darkness and light, of matter and spirit.

The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.

Let us endeavour for a moment to disconnect our thinking selves from the mask of humanity; let us imagine ourselves scientific Saturnians, if you will, fairly acquainted with such animals as now inhabit the Earth, and employed in discussing the relations they bear to a new and singular 'erect and featherless biped,' which some enterprising traveller, overcoming the difficulties of space and gravitation, has brought from that distant planet for our inspection, well preserved, may be, in a cask of rum.

The martyr sacrifices herself (himself in a few instances) entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for she (or he) makes the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

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.

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.

Saying is one thing, doing another.

If love does not know how to give and take without restrictions, it is not love, but a transaction that never fails to lay stress on a plus and a minus.

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

I am to talk about Apologetics. Apologetics means of course Defence. The first question is - what do you propose to defend? Christianity, of course...

We know of no great revolution which might not have been prevented by compromise early and graciously made... [I]n all movements of the human mind which tend to great revolutions there is a crisis at which moderate concession may amend, conciliate, and preserve.

To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; & believing he never claimed any other.

Manhattan. Sometimes from beyond the skyscrapers, across of thousands of high walls, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia in the middle of the night, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island.

I don't really know what they mean by "intellectuals," all the people who describe, denounce, or scold them. I do know, on the other hand, what I have committed myself to, as an intellectual, which is to say, after all, a cerebro-spinal individual: to having a brain as supple as possible and a spinal column that's as straight as necessary.

Chi Wan thought thrice, and then acted. When the Master was informed of it, he said, "Twice may do."

A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.

The Outsider has his proper place in the Order of Society, as the impractical dreamer.

Therefore only an utterly senseless person can fail to know that our characters are the result of our conduct.

It seemed to him [Euphemius] it would be a brilliant notion to call in an outside force to fight on his behalf. This same brilliant notion has occurred to participants in civil wars uncounted times in history and it has ended in catastrophe just about every time, since those called in invariably take over for themselves. Of all history's lessons, this seems to be the plainest, and the most frequently ignored.

Great organizers, as much as inevitable slaves, tend to stoic moods: it is difficult to be either master or servant if one is sensitive.

The principles of great men illuminate the universe.

The use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment; but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again: and a nation is not governed, which is perpetually to be conquered.

All things are in the Universe, and the universe is in all things: we in it, and it in us; in this way everything concurs in a perfect unity.

However intimate we may be with the operations of the mind, we cannot think more than two or three minutes a day; - unless, by taste or by profession, we practice, for hours on end, brutalizing words in order to extract ideas from them. The intellectual represents the major disgrace, the culminating failure of Homo sapiens.

The earth's sweat, the sea.

The emotions I feel are no more meant to be shown in their unadulterated state than the inner organs by which we live.

Being Gentlemen and very far from the litigious humour of loving to wrangle about words or terms or notions as empty; they had before his coming in, readily agreed promiscuously to use when they pleased Elements and Principles as terms equivalent: and to understand both by the one and the other, those primitive and simple bodies of which the mixt ones are said to be composed, and into which they are ultimately resolved.

A person may be greedy, envious, cowardly, cold, ungenerous, unkind, vain, or conceited, but behave perfectly by a monumental effort of will.

The painter is turning his eyes towards us only in so far as we happen to occupy the same position as his subject. We, the spectators, are an additional factor. Though greeted by that gaze, we are also dismissed by it, replaced by that which was always there before we were: the model itself. But, inversely, the painter's gaze, addressed to the void confronting him outside the picture, accepts as many models as there are spectators; in this precise but neutral place, the observer and the observed take part in a ceaseless exchange.

Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.

The human body is essentially something other than an animal organism.

By all means begin your folio; even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week.

Not my idea of God, but God.

Some of your hurts you have cured, And the sharpest you still have survived, But what torments of grief you endured From evils which never arrived!

Let us suppose that a man believes in eternal life on Christ's word. In that case he believes without any fuss about being profound and searching and philosophical and racking his brains.

When any work seems to have required immense force and labor to affect it, the idea is grand. Stonehenge, neither for disposition nor ornament, has anything admirable; but those huge rude masses of stone, set on end, and piled each on other, turn the mind on the immense force necessary for such a work. Nay, the rudeness of the work increases this cause of grandeur, as it excludes the idea of art and contrivance; for dexterity produces another sort of effect, which is different enough from this.