The ideal being? An angel ravaged by humor.

It is not, what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice, tell me I ought to do.

Let the public good overcome all private and selfish regards of every kind and degree; though in truth, even private and selfish regards, and every man's own interest, will be best promoted by the preservation of peace.

The great end of all human industry, is the attainment of happiness. For this were arts invented, sciences cultivated, laws ordained, and societies modelled, by the most profound wisdom of patriots and legislators.

The ideal form for a poem, essay, or fiction, is that which the ideal writer would evolve spontaneously. One in whom the powers of expression fully responded to the state of feeling, would unconsciously use that variety in the mode of presenting his thoughts, which Art demands.

Rohde became more and more firmly bound to the bourgeois world, its institutions and accepted opinions. ... The contrast between the two natures makes Rohde and Nietzsche exemplary representatives of two distinctive worlds. In their youth they both live in the realm of boundless possibilities and feel an affinity through the exuberance of their noble aspirations. Subsequently they go in opposite directions. Nietzsche remains young, leaving concrete reality as his task assumes existential import. Rohde grows old, bourgeois, stable, and skeptical. Hence courage is a fundamental trait in Nietzsche, plaintive self-irony in Rohde. ... Rohde retained the interests but not the attitudes of his youth; he looked to the world of the Greeks for the object of his contemplation rather than the norm of obligation.

The one absolutely, the Intelligible, the ever Preexisting, comprehending all the universe together within the One - nay, more, is not the whole world One living thing - all and everywhere full of life and soul, perfect and made up out of parts likewise perfect? Now of this double unity the most perfect part (I mean of the Unity in the Intelligible World that comprehends all things in One, and of the Unity encompassing the Sensible World, that brings together all things into a single and perfect nature) is the perfection of the sovereign Sun, which is central and single, and placed in the middle of the intermediate Powers.

I am looking forward very much to getting back to Cambridge, and being able to say what I think and not to mean what I say: two things which at home are impossible. Cambridge is one of the few places where one can talk unlimited nonsense and generalities without anyone pulling one up or confronting one with them when one says just the opposite the next day.

The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.

That chastity of honour which felt a stain like a wound.

Dumb creatures have not human feelings, but have certain impulses which resemble them: for if it were not so, if they could feel love and hate, they would likewise be capable of friendship and enmity, of disagreement and agreement. Some traces of these qualities exist even in them, though properly all of them, whether good or bad, belong to the human breast alone.

I feel that I have within me a medieval soul, and I believe that the soul of my country is medieval, that it has perforce passed through the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Revolution - learning from them, yes, but without allowing them to touch the soul, preserving the spiritual inheritance which has come down from what are called the Dark Ages. And Quixotism is simply the most desperate phase of the struggle between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which was the offering of the Middle Ages.

But, if it will help ease your irritated souls, please know, dearly departed, that you have ruined our lives.

My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence.

One capitalist always kills many.

Remember that man lives only in the present, in this fleeting instant; all the rest of his life is either past and gone, or not yet revealed. Short, therefore, is man's life, and narrow is the corner of the earth wherein he dwells.

I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: "The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair." In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.

The exploration of oneself is usually also an exploration of the world at large, of other writers, a process of comparison with oneself with others, discoveries of kinships, gradual illumination of one's own potentialities.

If there is to be any philosophy at all, this contradiction must be resolved - and the solution of this problem, or answer to the question: how can we think both of Presentations as conforming to objects, and objects as conforming to presentations? is, not the first, but the highest task of transcendental philosophy.

Self-respect is the cornerstone of all virtue.

Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face.

The real and effectual discipline which is exercised over a workman is that of his customers. It is the fear of losing their employment which restrains his frauds and corrects his negligence.

The debates of that great assembly are frequently vague and perplexed, seeming to be dragged rather than to march, to the intended goal. Something of this sort must, I think, always happen in public democratic assemblies.

All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information.

To avoid falling into the toils of love is not so hard as, after you are caught, to get out of the nets you are in and to break through the strong meshes of Venus.

I came to set fire to the earth, and I wish it were already on fire!

Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that. Revealed faith is not harmless nonsense, it can be lethally dangerous nonsense. Dangerous because it gives people unshakeable confidence in their own righteousness. Dangerous because it gives them false courage to kill themselves, which automatically removes normal barriers to killing others. Dangerous because it teaches enmity to others labelled only by a difference of inherited tradition. And dangerous because we have all bought into a weird respect, which uniquely protects religion from normal criticism. Let's now stop being so damned respectful!

The method of the science not being practiced much nowadays, except what logic prescribes to all sciences generally, that fitted for the peculiar nature of metaphysics being simply ignored, it is no wonder that those who everlastingly turn the Sisyphean stone of this inquiry do not seem so far to have made much progress. Though here I neither can nor will expatiate upon so important and extensive a subject, I shall briefly shadow forth what constitutes no despicable part of this method, namely, the infection between sensuous and intellectual cognition, not only as creeping in on those incautious in the application of principles, but even producing spurious principles under the appearance of axioms.

Our claim is that a common political project is possible. This possibility of course will have to be verified and realized in practice. ... We are capable of democracy. The challange is to organize it politically.

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

I shall need only myself to be happy.

To be in love is not the same as loving. You can be in love with a woman and still hate her.

I've had letters from Chinese scientists at the peak of the SARS epidemic who said the problem is a hybridization between the viruses planted into GMO feed, which is then fed to animals, then the virus jumped from the animals to humans. We're going to see more and more of these kinds of risks. I think the whole issue of the H1N1 virus was the fact that it had genes for three influenza types--human, chicken, pig. All of these crossings are becoming possible because of the crossing of genes across species barriers.

Even then [at the time of Peter's speech in Acts 2] it was the last days; how much more so now, when there must still be as much time till the end of the world as has passed since the ascension of the Lord! We do not know the end of the world, because it is not for us to know the times or the seasons that the Father has set in his power; but we know that, like the apostles, we live in the last times, in the last days, in the last hour. Those who lived after the apostles and before us were more in what we call the last times, and we ourselves are in them even more than they; those who will come after us will be so much more, till one gets to those who will be, if one may say so, the last of the last, and finally till that day, the very last, of which the Lord means to speak when he said, "And I will raise him up on the last day". How far are we from that day? That is an impenetrable secret.

All right, men are as they should be, can be. What should they be? Surely not more than they can be! And what can they be? Not more, again, than they - can, than they have the competence, the force, to be. But this they really are, because what they are not, they are incapable of being; for to be capable means - really to be. One is not capable for anything that one really is not; one is not capable of anything that one does not really do. Could a man blinded by cataract see? Oh, yes, if he had his cataract successfully removed. But now he cannot see because he does not see. Possibility and reality always coincide. One can do nothing that one does not, as one does nothing that one cannot.

The philosopher will ask himself ... if the criticism we are now suggesting is not the philosophy which presses to the limit that criticism of false gods which Christianity has introduced into our history.

The free being with absolute freedom proposes to itself certain ends. It wills because it wills, and the willing of an object is itself the last ground of such willing. Thus we have previously determined a free being, and any other determination would destroy the conception of an Ego, or of a free being. Now, if it could be so arranged that the willing of an unlawful end would necessarily - in virtue of an always effective law - result in the very reverse of that end, then the unlawful will would always ANNIHILATE ITSELF. A person could not will that end for the very reason because he did will it; his unlawful will would become the ground of its own annihilation, as the will is indeed always its own last ground.

Think not disdainfully of death, but look on it with favor; for even death is one of the things that Nature wills.

I do not understand these men who tell me that the prospect of the yonder side of death has never tormented them, that the thought of their own annihilation never disquiets them. For my part I do not wish to make peace between my heart and my head, between my faith and my reason - I wish rather that there should be war between them.

Reviewing what you have learned and learning anew, you are fit to be a teacher.

What maintains the marriage and what is it? Only the knowledge of the hearts, that is its beginning and end.

. ... the prince says that the world will be saved by beauty! And I maintain that the reason he has such playful ideas is that he is in love.

What point of morals, of manners, of economy, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of the conduct of life, has he not settled? What mystery has he not signified his knowledge of? What office, or function, or district of man's work, has he not remembered? What king has he not taught state, as Talma taught Napoleon? What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What lover has he not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What gentleman has he not instructed in the rudeness of his behavior?

I live only because it is in my power to die when I choose to: without the idea of suicide, I'd have killed myself right away.

Religion should be .... successively freed from all statutes based on history, and one purely moral religion rule over all, in order that God might be all in all. The veil must fall. The leading-string of sacred tradition with all its appendices becomes by degrees useless, and at last a fetter ... The humiliating difference between laymen and clergymen must disappear, and equality spring from true liberty. All this, however, must not be expected from an exterior revolution, which acts violently, and depends upon fortune In the principle of pure moral religion, which is a sort of divine revelation constantly taking place in the soul of man, must be sought the ground for a passage to the new order of things, which will be accomplished by slow and successive reforms.

If we sit and talk in a dark room, words suddenly acquire new meanings and different textures...and on the radio. Given only the sound of a play, we have to fill in all of the senses, not just the sight of the action. So much do-it-yourself, or completion and "closure" of action, develops a kind of independent isolation in the young that makes them remote and inaccessible.