I can look a whole day with delight upon a handsome picture, though it be but of a horse. It is my temper, & I like it the better, to affect all harmony, and sure there is music even in the beauty, and the silent note which Cupid strikes, far sweeter than the sound of an instrument. For there is a music wherever there is a harmony, order or proportion; and thus far we may maintain the music of the spheres.

Thus is man that great and true Amphibium, whose nature is disposed to live not only like other creatures in diverse elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds.

If you let people follow their feelings, they will be able to do good. This is what is meant by saying that human nature is good.

This provides us with our first major clue to the solutions of the problem. Even if the left cannot see the world as full of potentiality, it can hold on to the moments of insight and refuse to let go of them. If I know that present difficulties will end in triumph, I am un-discourageable; I merely have to know it intellectually. And if I can 'know' that reality actually has a third dimension, I shall never fall into the mistake of complaining that there is nothing new under the sun and that life is futile.

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.

No mathematician can give any meaning to language about matter, force, inertia, used in text-books of mechanics.

For the world to become philosophic amounts to philosophy's becoming world-order reality; and it means that philosophy, at the same time that it is realized, disappears.

Human beings can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.

He laid it down as a maxim, that monarchy was the basis of all good government and the nearer to monarchy any government approached, the more perfect it was, and vice versa; and he certainly in his wildest moments, never had so far forgotten the nature of government, as to argue that we ought to wish for a constitution that we could alter at pleasure, and change like a dirty shirt. He was by no means anxious for a monarchy with a dash of republicanism to correct it. But the French constitution was the exact opposite of the English in every thing, and nothing could be so dangerous as to set it up to the view of the English, to mislead and debauch their minds.

Reality and history, however, are not dialectical, and no idealist rhetorical gymnastics can make them conform to the dialect.

The romantic poetry is a progressive universal poetry.

Let us consider first the view that it is always wrong to take an innocent human life. We may call this the "sanctity of life" view. People who take this view oppose abortion and euthanasia. They do not usually, however, oppose the killing of nonhuman animals-so perhaps it would be more accurate to describe this view as the "sanctity of human life" view. The belief that human life, and only human life, is sacrosanct is a form of speciesism.

As the animus is partial to argument, he can best be seen at work in disputes where both parties know they are right. Men can argue in a very womanish way, too, when they are anima-possessed and have thus been transformed into the animus of their own anima.

The time is come when women must do something more than the "domestic hearth," which means nursing the infants, keeping a pretty house, having a good dinner and an entertaining party.

In default of any other proof, the thumb would convince me of the existence of a God.

Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, 'Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?' And then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!'

Every habit and faculty is confirmed and strengthened by the corresponding actions, that of walking by walking, that of running by running.

All liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude, and the emergence of this consciousness is always hampered by the predominance of needs and satisfactions which, to a great extent, have become the individual's own.

Evil does not approach us as pride any more, but on the contrary as slumber, lassitude, concealment of the "I." ... It may make us so quickly contented, that any definitive fire will die down. The venomous, breathtaking frigid mist seems able ... to harden hearts and fill them with envy, obduracy and resentment, with bloody scorn for the divine image and light, with all the causes of the only true original sin, which is not wanting to be like God.

If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free; if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.

All people respect and love their own parents and children, as well as the parents and children of others.

Nonviolence is perhaps best described as a practice of resistance that becomes possible, if not mandatory, precisely at the moment when doing violence seems most justified and obvious. In this way, it can be understood as a practice that not only stops a violent act, or a violent process, but requires a form of sustained action, sometimes aggressively pursued. So, one suggestion I will make is that we can think of nonviolence not simply as the absence of violence, or as the act of refraining from committing violence, but as a sustained commitment, even a way of rerouting aggression for the purposes of affirming ideals of equality and freedom.

National loyalty is founded in the love of place, of the customs and traditions that have been inscribed in the landscape and of the desire to protect these good things through a common law and a common loyalty.

Deconstruction never had meaning or interest, at least in my eyes, than as a radicalization, that is to say, also within the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism.

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.

Soon you will have forgotten the world, and soon the world will have forgotten you.

Human virtue, if we went down to the roots of it, is not so rare. The materials of human virtue are everywhere abundant as the light of the sun: raw materials,-O woe, and loss, and scandal thrice and threefold, that they so seldom are elaborated, and built into a result! that they lie yet unelaborated, and stagnant in the souls of wide-spread dreary millions, fermenting, festering; and issue at last as energetic vice instead of strong practical virtue!

Every religious practice is an exercise in attention. A temple is the highest degree of attention.

It is impossible to feel equal respect for things that are in fact unequal unless the respect is given to something that is identical in all of them. Men are unequal in all their relations with the things of this world, without exception. The only thing that is identical in all men is the presence of a link with the reality outside the world. All human beings are absolutely identical in so far as they can be thought of as consisting of a centre, which is an unquenchable desire for good, surrounded by an accretion of psychical and bodily matter.

My thoughts have been shaped by the conviction that feminism must become a mass based political movement if it is to have a revolutionary, transformative impact on society.

None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.

Do you desire another case? Take that of the younger Marcus Cato, with whom Fortune dealt in a more hostile and more persistent fashion. But he withstood her, on all occasions, and in his last moments, at the point of death, showed that a brave man can live in spite of Fortune, can die in spite of her. His whole life was passed either in civil warfare, or under a political regime which was soon to breed civil war.

We men do nothing but lie and make ourselves important. Speech was invented for the purpose of magnifying all of our sensations and impressions - perhaps so that we could believe in them.

For love is ever the beginning of Knowledge, as fire is of light.

For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.

Our labour preserves us from three great evils -- weariness, vice, and want.

Too much straightforwardness is foolish against a shameless person.

Interface, of the resonant interval as 'where the action is', whether chemical, psychic or social, involves touch.

The Calculus required continuity, and continuity was supposed to require the infinitely little; but nobody could discover what the infinitely little might be.

As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value to you than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself; because only through ordering what you know by comparing every truth with every other truth can you take complete possession of your knowledge and get it into your power. You can think about only what you know, so you ought to learn something; on the other hand, you can know only what you have thought about.

Confession of our faults is the next thing to innocence.

Evidence is the only good reason to believe anything.

I do not believe in what is often called... 'exact terminology'... or in definitions... they do not... add to exactness... I especially dislike pretentious terminology and... pseudo-exactness concerned with it.

Don't judge the future of a person based on his present conditions, because time has the power to change black coal to shiny diamond.