The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is a queen, infinitely fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice.

It is precisely in knowing its limits that philosophy consists.

Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.

Every change in the social order, every revolution in property relations, is the necessary consequence of the creation of new forces of production which no longer fit into the old property relations. Private property has not always existed. When, towards the end of the Middle Ages, there arose a new mode of production which could not be carried on under the then existing feudal and guild forms of property, this manufacture, which had outgrown the old property relations, created a new property form, private property. And for manufacture and the earliest stage of development of big industry, private property was the only possible property form; the social order based on it was the only possible social order.

The States should be urged to concede to the General Government, with a saving of chartered rights, the exclusive power of establishing banks of discount for paper.

We have become blind to the alternatives to violence. This involves us in a sort of official madness, in which, while following what seems to be a perfect logic of self-defense and deterrence, we commit one absurdity after another: We seek to preserve peace by fighting a war, or to advance freedom by subsidizing dictatorships, or to "win the hearts and minds of the people" by poisoning their crops and burning their villages and confining them in concentration camps; we seek to uphold the "truth" of our cause with lies, or to answer conscientious dissent with threats and slurs and intimidations. ... I have come to the realization that I can no longer imagine a war that I would believe to be either useful or necessary. I would be against any war.

In Deductive Reasoning, we cannot have any truth in the conclusion which is not virtually contained in the premises.

Nature does not do anything in vain.

'When two equal weights are supported on the middle point between them, the pressure on the fulcrum is equal to the sum of the weights.'

Ideas do not exist separately from language.

What has to be accepted, the given, is - so one could say - forms of life.

When we have no further desire to show ourselves, we take refuge in music, the Providence of the abulic.

For him who loves labor, there is always something to do.

I pre-suppose, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself.

Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better.

The gentleman knows that whatever is imperfect and unrefined does not deserve praise. ... He makes his eyes not want to see what is not right, makes his ears not want to hear what is not right, makes his mouth not want to speak what is not right, and makes his heart not want to deliberate over what is not right. ... For this reason, power and profit cannot sway him, the masses cannot shift him, and nothing in the world can shake him.

In my education, as in that of everyone, the moral influences, which are so much more important than all others, are also the most complicated, and the most difficult to specify with any approach to completeness.

The thing done avails, and not what is said about it. An original sentence, a step forward, is worth more than all the censures.

As Cæsar was at supper the discourse was of death,-which sort was the best. "That," said he, "which is unexpected."

Rules necessary for axioms. Not to demand in axioms any but things perfectly evident.

There is a sort of gratification in doing good which makes us rejoice in ourselves.

Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone-quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

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.

After logic we must proceed to philosophy proper. Here too we have to learn from our predecessors, just as in mathematics and law. Thus it is wrong to forbid the study of ancient philosophy. Harm from it is accidental, like harm from taking medicine, drinking water, or studying law.

Time, which is the author of authors.

The revolution, Stahl declared, is the 'world-historic mark of our age.' It would found 'the entire State on the will of man instead of on the commandment and ordinance of God.'

With what consistency, or decency they complain so loudly of attempts to enslave them, while they hold so many hundred thousands in slavery; and annually enslave many thousands more, without any pretence of authority, or claim upon them?

May some future student go over this ground again, and have the leisure to give his results to the world.

One is ashamed to say how little is needed for all men to be delivered from those calamities which now oppress them; it is only needful not to lie.

To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be.

It's not that there are no differences between human and non-human animals, any more than there are no differences between black people and white people, freeborn citizens and slaves, men and women, Jews and gentiles, gays or heterosexuals. The question is rather: are they morally relevant differences? This matters because morally catastrophic consequences can ensue when we latch on to a real but morally irrelevant difference between sentient beings.

Money, then, appears as this overturning power both against the individual and against the bonds of society, etc., which claim to be essences in themselves. It transforms fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, idiocy into intelligence and intelligence into idiocy.

We are sleeping on a volcano... A wind of revolution blows, the storm is on the horizon.

Of all the ways whereby children are to be instructed, and their manners formed, the plainest, easiest, and most efficacious, is, to set before their eyes the examples of those things you would have them do, or avoid; which, when they are pointed out to them, in the practice of persons within their knowledge, with some reflections on their beauty and unbecomingness, are of more force to draw or deter their imitation, than any discourses which can be made to them.

Riches are a good handmaid, but the worst mistress.

Suppose that thou hast detached thyself from the natural unity... yet here there is this beautiful provision, that it is in thy power again to unite thyself. God has allowed this to no other part, after it has been separated and cut asunder, to come together again. ...he has distinguished man, for he has put it in his power not to be separated at all from the universal ...he has allowed him to be returned and to be united and to resume his place as a part.

I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end. My field is the history of thought. Man is a thinking being.

A true friend will partake of the wants and sorrows of his friend, as if they were his own; if he be in want, he will relieve him; if he be in prison, he will visit him; if he be sick, he will come to him; nay-situations may occur, in which he would not scruple to die for him. It cannot then be doubted, that friendship is one of the most useful means of procuring a secure, tranquil, and happy life.

We sometimes imagine, under the influence of Spenglerian philosophy or some other kind of "historical morphology," that we live in a similar age [to the Romans], the last witnesses of a condemned civilization. But condemned by whom? Not by God, but by some supposed "historical laws." For although we do not know any historical laws, we are in fact able of inventing them quite freely, and such laws, once invented, can then be realized in the form of self-fulfilling prophecies.

I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government to the genuine principles of its Constitution; I mean an additional article, taking from the federal government the power of borrowing.

A man living without conflicts, as if he never lives at all.

How many valiant men we have seen to survive their own reputation!

The obliteration of the evil hath been practised by two means, some kind of redemption or expiation of that which is past, and an inception or account de novo for the time to come. But this part seemeth sacred and religious, and justly; for all good moral philosophy (as was said) is but a handmaid to religion.

It goes without saying that any persons may attempt to unite kindred spirits, but, whatever their hopes and longings, none have the right to impose their vision of unity upon the rest.