To these spurious principles must be added some others of great affinity with them... First, that by which we assume that everything in the universe is done according to the order of nature, which principle by Epicurus was proclaimed without any restriction, and by all other philosophers unanimously with extremely rare exceptions, not to be admitted but from supreme necessity.

The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their life a meaning.

I think they do it to pass the time, nothing more. But time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.

It was not only that I could not become spiteful, I did not know how to become anything; neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything.

Philological analogies are to be preserved if possible, but modified according to scientific convenience.

The thesis of the identity of concept and thing is in general the vital nerve of idealist thought, and indeed traditional thought in general. ... Negative dialectics as critique means above all criticism of precisely this claim to identity.

To be angry with a man is to hate him; to hate him is to wish him harm; but to wish him well, even if he has done you harm, is the mark of a great mind.

A major task in organizing is to determine, first, where the knowledge is located that can provide the various kinds of factual premises that decisions require.

Superstition sets the whole world in flames; philosophy quenches them.

The violence of love is as much to be dreaded as that of hate. When it is durable, it is serene and equable. Even its famous pains begin only with the ebb of love, for few are indeed lovers, though all would fain be.

I shall develop the thesis that anyone acting communicatively must, in performing any speech act, raise universal validity claims and suppose that they can be vindicated.

He was one of those who wished for the abolition of the Slave Trade. He thought it ought to be abolished on principles of humanity and justice.

Alas, the Hero from of old has had to cramp himself into strange shapes: the world knows not well at any time what to do with him, so foreign is his aspect in the world!

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

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him!

We want philosophers, among other reasons, because the world is full of false philosophy. The way of experience is beset on every hand by a multitude of verbal judgments, of empty phrases, of word-copies, which pass themselves off as the real thing, which pretend to do duty for concrete fact and, by force of their number and importunity, capture our attention and cause the true originals to be overlooked. If it is true that philosophy must perforce fight its battles with words, is it not equally true that words are the weapons against which it must everywhere contend? The philosopher bent on the enlargement of experience perceives at once that his work cannot be done, cannot even be commenced, until he has cleared away the heaps of verbal detritus under which the bedrocks of experience lie buried.

The Vedas contain a sensible account of God." "The veneration in which the Vedas are held is itself a remarkable feat. Their code embraced the whole moral life of the Hindus and in such a case there is no other truth than sincerity. Truth is such by reference to the heart of man within, not to any standard without.

As long as this deliberate refusal to understand things from above, even where such understanding is possible, continues, it is idle to talk of any final victory over materialism.

The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.

It is not you talking. Nor is it your race only which shouts within you, for all the innumerable races of mankind shout and rush within you: white, yellow, black. Free yourself from race also; fight to live through the whole struggle of man.

Simplicity and nonviolence are the basis of an economy of wellbeing, and such an economy must be localised.

One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.

Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision-making which replace the principles of instincts. He has to have a frame of orientation which permits him to organize a consistent picture of the world as a condition for consistent actions. He has to fight not only against the dangers of dying, starving, and being hurt, but also against another danger which is specifically human: that of becoming insane. In other words, he has to protect himself not only against the danger of losing his life but also against the danger of losing his mind.

Nationality is not the only kind of social membership, nor is it an exclusive tie. However, it is the only form of membership that has so far shown itself able to sustain a democratic process and a liberal rule of law.

What I have given in the second book on the nature and properties of curved lines, and the method of examining them, is, it seems to me, as far beyond the treatment in the ordinary geometry, as the rhetoric of Cicero is beyond the a, b, c of children.

If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: "This is simply what I do."

At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being.The good is the only source of the sacred. There is nothing sacred except the good and what pertains to it.

As if our birth had at first sundered things, and we had been thrust up through into nature like a wedge, and not till the wound heals and the scar disappears, do we begin to discover where we are, and that nature is one and continuous everywhere.

Then are the children free. Notwithstanding, lest we should offend them, go thou to the sea, and cast an hook, and take up the fish that first cometh up; and when thou hast opened his mouth, thou shalt find a piece of money: that take, and give unto them for me and thee.

It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.

When he entered into the Whig party, he did not conceive that they pretended to any discoveries. They did not affect to be better Whigs, than those were who lived in the days in which principle was put to the test. Some of the Whigs of those days were then living. They were what the Whigs had been at the Revolution; what they had been during the reign of queen Anne; what they had been at the accession of the present royal family.

God judged it better to bring good out of evil than to suffer no evil to exist.

The product of labour is labour which has been congealed in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labour. Labour's realization is its objectification.

If you well apprehend and keep in mind these things, nature free at once and rid of her haughty lords is seen to do all things spontaneously of herself without the meddling of the gods.

I don't understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn't it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?

How important can it be that I suffer and think? My presence in this world will disturb a few tranquil lives and will unsettle the unconscious and pleasant naiveté of others. Although I feel that my tragedy is the greatest in history - greater than the fall of empires - I am nevertheless aware of my total insignificance. I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only real existence.

For truth itself has not the privilege to be spoken at all times and in all sorts.

There are ages in which the rational man and the intuitive man stand side by side, the one in fear of intuition, the other with scorn for abstraction. The latter is just as irrational as the former is inartistic. They both desire to rule over life: the former, by knowing how to meet his principle needs by means of foresight, prudence, and regularity; the latter, by disregarding these needs and, as an "overjoyed hero," counting as real only that life which has been disguised as illusion and beauty.

There have been men before ... who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God himself... as if the good Lord had nothing to do but to exist. There have been some who were so preoccupied with spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ.

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

The erotic is never free of secrecy.

Remember this, then, that this little compound, thyself, must either be dissolved, or thy poor breath must be extinguished, or be removed and placed elsewhere.

Who then is the Mother of the Gods? She is the Source of the Intelligible and Creative Powers, which direct the visible ones; she that gave birth to and copulated with the mighty Jupiter: she that exists as a great goddess next to the Great One, and in union with the Great Creator; she that is dispenser of all life; cause of all birth; most easily accomplishing all that is made; generating without passion; creating all that exists in concert with the Father; herself a virgin, without mother, sharing the throne of Jupiter, the mother in very truth of all the gods; for by receiving within herself the causes of all the intelligible deities that be above the world, she became the source to things the objects of intellect.

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.

I think people who are unhappy are always proud of being so, and therefore do not like to be told that there is nothing grand about their unhappiness. A man who is melancholy because lack of exercise has upset his liver always believes that it is the loss of God, or the menace of Bolshevism, or some such dignified cause that makes him sad. When you tell people that happiness is a simple matter, they get annoyed with you.

Love for distance and order, the ability to subordinate one's individualistic and passionate element to principles, the ability to take action and work above mere personhood, a feeling of dignity devoid of vanity are features of the true warrior spirit as essential as those which refer to actual combat.