Insurrection, never so necessary, is a most sad necessity; and governors who wait for that to instruct them are surely getting into the fatalest courses,-proving themselves sons of Nox and Chaos, of blind Cowardice, not of seeing Valour! How can there be any remedy in insurrection? It is a mere announcement of the disease,-visible now even to sons of Night. Insurrection usually gains little; usually wastes how much. One of its worst kinds of waste, to say nothing of the rest, is that of irritating and exasperating men against each other, by violence done, which is always sure to be injustice done; for violence does even justice unjustly. Book I, Chap. III

To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.

Since, of desires some are natural and necessary; others natural, but not necessary; and others neither natural nor necessary, but the offspring of false judgment; it must be the office of temperance to gratify the first class, as far as nature requires: to restrain the second within the bounds of moderation; and, as to the third, resolutely to oppose, and, if possible, entirely repress them.

Give thyself time to learn something new and good, and cease to be whirled around.

Before his death, Rabbi Zusya said, "In the coming world, they will not ask me: 'Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me: 'Why were you not Zusya?'"

With the abolition of otium and of the ego no aloof thinking is left. ... Without otium philosophical thought is impossible, cannot be conceived or understood.

The workers have the most enormous power in their hands, and if one day they became truly aware of it and used it, then nothing could resist them; they would only have to stop work and look upon the products of work as their own and enjoy them. This is the meaning of the labor unrest that is looming here and there. The state is founded on the-slavery of labor. If labor becomes free, the state is lost.

The doctrine that there is as much science in a subject as... mathematics in it, or as much... measurement or 'precision' in it, rests upon... misunderstanding.

Man has three ways of acting wisely. First, on meditation; that is the noblest. Secondly, on imitation; that is the easiest. Thirdly, on experience; that is the bitterest.

Never buy what you do not want, because it is cheap; it will be dear to you.

So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, Thou must, The youth replies, I can.

Government was intended to suppress injustice, but it offers new occasions and temptations for the commission of it.

In particular, at this point also urge governing authorities and parents to rule well and to send their children to school. Point out how they are obliged to do so and what a damnable sin they commit if they do not, for thereby, as the worst enemies of God and humanity, they overthrow and lay waste both the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the world. Explain very clearly what kind of horrible damage they do when they do not help to train children as pastors, preachers, civil servants, etc., and tell them that God will punish them dreadfully for this. For in our day and age it is necessary to preach about these things. The extent to which parents and governing authorities are now sinning in these matters defies description. The devil, too, intends to do something horrible in all this.

As Being and Life are one and the same, so are Death and Nothingness one and the same. But there is no real Death and no real Nothing ness, as we have already said. There is, however, an Apparent Life, and this is the mixture of life and death, of being and nothingness.

We collect individuals into 'kinds' by applying to them the Idea of Likeness.

People no longer look at each other, but there are institutes for that. They no longer touch each other, but there is contactotherapy. They no longer walk, but they go jogging, etc. Everywhere one recycles lost faculties, or lost bodies, or lost sociality, or the lost taste for food.

Today war seems to have undergone a change of meaning, insofar as it is not a war of religion but a war of interests, not a war of conflicting cultures or civilizations but a war of national areas, not a war of human beings but a technical struggle of machines one against another and all against the non-combatant population.

The even larger difference between rich and poor makes the latter even worse off, and this violates the principle of mutual advantage.

When we have weighed everything, and when our relations in life permit us to choose any given position, we may take that one which guarantees us the greatest dignity, which is based on ideas of whose truth we are completely convinced, which offers the largest field to work for mankind and approach the universal goal for which every position is only a means: perfection.

I take as my example the three notorious words, Humanity, Popularity, and Liberality. When these words are used in speaking to a German who has learnt no language but his own they are to him nothing but a meaningless noise, which has no relationship of sound to remind him of anything he knows already and so takes him completely out of his circle of observation and beyond any observation possible to him. ... Further, if in speaking to the German, instead of the words Popularity [Popularitdt] and Liberality [Liberalitat], I should use the expressions, " striving for favour with the great mob," and " not having the mind of a slave," which is how they must be literally translated, he would, to begin with, not even obtain a clear and vivid sense-image such as was certainly obtained by a Roman of old.

In a word, neither death, nor exile, nor pain, nor anything of this kind is the real cause of our doing or not doing any action, but our inward opinions and principles.

We term sleep a death, and yet it is waking that kills us, and destroys those spirits that are the house of life.

No congress, nor mob, nor guillotine, nor fire, nor all together, can avail, to cut out, burn, or destroy the offense of superiority in persons. The superiority in him is inferiority in me.

We cannot think with precision unless in our own minds we use words with precision.

Ignorance is the mother of Devotion: A maxim that is proverbial, and confirmed by general experience. Look out for a people, entirely destitute of religion: If you find them at all, be assured, that they are but few degrees removed from brutes. What so pure as some of the morals, included in some theological system? What so corrupt as some of the practices, to which these systems give rise?

What I see is teeming cohesion, contained dispersal.... For him, to sculpt is to take the fat off space.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Maman used to say that you can always find something to be happy about.

Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

I find in myself as much evil as in anyone, but detesting action - mother of all vices - I am the cause of no one's suffering.

No man with a genius for legislation has appeared in America. They are rare in the history of the world. There are orators, politicians, and eloquent men, by the thousand; but the speaker has not yet opened his mouth to speak who is capable of settling the much-vexed questions of the day.

Since the communists cannot enter upon the decisive struggle between themselves and the bourgeoisie until the bourgeoisie is in power, it follows that it is in the interest of the communists to help the bourgeoisie to power as soon as possible in order the sooner to be able to overthrow it.

Labor is a commodity, like any other, and its price is therefore determined by exactly the same laws that apply to other commodities. In a regime of big industry or of free competition - as we shall see, the two come to the same thing - the price of a commodity is, on the average, always equal to its cost of production. Hence, the price of labor is also equal to the cost of production of labor. But, the costs of production of labor consist of precisely the quantity of means of subsistence necessary to enable the worker to continue working, and to prevent the working class from dying out. The worker will therefore get no more for his labor than is necessary for this purpose; the price of labor, or the wage, will, in other words, be the lowest, the minimum, required for the maintenance of life.

Intense, long, certain, speedy, fruitful, pure-Such marks in pleasures and in pains endure. Such pleasures seek if private be thy end: If it be public, wide let them extend.Such pains avoid, whichever be thy view: If pains must come, let them extend to few.

Death poses a problem which replaces all the others. What is deadly to philosophy, to the naive belief in the hierarchy of perplexities.

However, what is really required to defend 'the West' against the sudden rise of these barbaric and elemental forces is the strengthening, to an extent perhaps still unknown to Western man, of a heroic vision of life. Apart from the military-technical apparatus the world of the 'Westerners' has at its disposal only a limp and shapeless substance - and the cult of the skin, the myth of 'safety' and of 'war on war', and the ideal of the long, comfortable guaranteed, 'democratic' existence, which is preferred to the ideal of the fulfilment which can be grasped only on the frontiers between life and death in the meeting of the essence of living with the extreme of danger.

It is more shameful to distrust our friends than to be deceived by them.

Let the punishments of criminals be useful. A hanged man is good for nothing; a man condemned to public works still serves the country, and is a living lesson.

The history of the Roman Empire is also the history of the uprising of the Empire of the Masses, who absorb and annul the directing minorities and put themselves in their place. Then, also, is produced the phenomenon of agglomeration, of "the full." For that reason, as Spengler has very well observed, it was necessary, just as in our day, to construct enormous buildings. The epoch of the masses is the epoch of the colossal.

The infinite is in capacity. That, however, which is infinite in capacity is not to be assumed as that which is infinite in energy. ...It has its being in capacity, and in division and diminution. ...It is always possible to assume something beyond it. It does not, however, on this account surpass every definite magnitude; as in division it surpasses every definite magnitude, and will be less.

On the whole, Borne, Heine, Feuerbach, and such authors are the individualities who have great interest for someone who is composing an imaginary construction. They frequently are well informed about the religious-that is, they know definitely that they do not want to have anything to do with it. This is a great advantage over the systematicians, who without knowing where the religious really is located take it upon themselves to explain it-sometimes obsequiously, sometimes superciliously, but always unsuccessfully.

Is it conceivable to adhere to a religion founded by someone else?