For Genet, Beauty will be the offensive weapon that will enable him to beat the just on their own ground: that of value.

Equity knows no difference of sex. In its vocabulary the word man must be understood in a generic, and not in a specific sense.

When we desire to lead men to God, we must not simply overthrow their idols. In each of these images we must seek to discover what divine quality he who carved it sought.

If you are to be kept right, you must possess either good friends or red-hot enemies. The one will warn you, the other will expose you.

Faith is a living, bold trust in God's grace, so certain of God's favor that it would risk death a thousand times trusting in it. Such confidence and knowledge of God's grace makes you happy, joyful and bold in your relationship to God and all creatures. The Holy Spirit makes this happen through faith. Because of it, you freely, willingly and joyfully do good to everyone, serve everyone, suffer all kinds of things, love and praise the God who has shown you such grace.

It is quite possible to be both. I look upon myself as a man. Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.

By scientific thought we mean the application of past experience to new circumstances by means of an observed order of events. By saying that this order of events is exact we mean that it is exact enough to correct experiments by, but we do not mean that it is theoretically or absolutely exact, because we do not know. The process of inference [is] in itself an assumption of uniformity, and... as the known exactness of the uniformity became greater, the stringency of the inference [is] increased. By saying that the order of events is reasonable we do not mean that everything has a purpose, or that everything can be explained, or that everything has a cause; for neither of these is true. But we mean that to every reasonable question there is an intelligible answer, which either we or posterity may know by the exercise of scientific thought.

I am thus one of the very few examples, in this country, of one who has, not thrown off religious belief, but never had it...

Living a minimally acceptable ethical life involves using a substantial part of our spare resources to make the world a better place. Living a fully ethical life involves doing the most good we can.

...an intellectual concept abstracts from everything sensuous, it is not abstracted from sensuous things, and perhaps would be more correctly called abstracting than abstract. Intellectual concepts it is more cautious, therefore, to call pure ideas, and concepts given only empirically, abstract ideas.

The circulation of commodities is the original precondition of the circulation of money.

Have I done something for the general interest? Well then I have had my reward. Let this always be present to thy mind, and never stop doing such good.

Appealing to his [Einstein's] way of expressing himself in theological terms, I said: If God had wanted to put everything into the universe from the beginning, He would have created a universe without change, without organisms and evolution, and without man and man's experience of change. But he seems to have thought that a live universe with events unexpected even by Himself would be more interesting than a dead one.

A teacher's major contribution may pop out anonymously in the life of some ex-student's grandchild. A teacher, finally, has nothing to go on but faith, a student nothing to offer in return but testimony.

Real fulfillment, for the man who allows absolutely free rein to his desires, and who must dominate everything, lies in hatred.

When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, "What's your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act." And they do calm down.

Even if we consider not words by themselves but rules deciding what words may appropriately be produced in certain contexts - even if we consider, in computer jargon, programs for using words - unless those programs themselves refer to something extra-linguistic there is still no determinate reference that those words possess. This will be a crucial step in the process of reaching the conclusion that the Brain-in-a-Vat Worlders cannot refer to anything external at all (and hence cannot say that they are Brain-in-a-Vat Worlders).

One need only open the eyes to see that the conquests of industry which have enriched so many practical men would never have seen the light, if these practical men alone had existed and if they had not been preceded by unselfish devotees who died poor, who never thought of utility, and yet had a guide far other than caprice.As Mach says, these devotees have spared their successors the trouble of thinking.

The fine arts once divorcing themselves from truth are quite certain to fall mad, if they do not die.

If you want to go down deep you do not need to travel far; indeed, you don't have to leave your most immediate and familiar surroundings.

A wise man's kingdom is his own breast: or, if he ever looks farther, it will only be to the judgment of a select few, who are free from prejudices, and capable of examining his work. Nothing indeed can be a stronger presumption of falsehood than the approbation of the multitude; and Phocion, you know, always suspected himself of some blunder when he was attended with the applauses of the populace.

Indeed, it is tempting to suppose that it is self evident that things should be so arranged so as to lead to the most good.

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

I remembered the way out suggested by a great princess when told that the peasants had no bread: "Well, let them eat cake".

In archery we have something like the way of the superior man. When the archer misses the center of the target, he turns round and seeks for the cause of his failure in himself.

Meditation on the chance which led to the meeting of my mother and father is even more salutary than meditation on death.

May we not return to those scoundrels of old, the illustrious founders of superstition and fanaticism, who first took the knife from the altar to make victims of those who refused to be their disciples?

How difficult, how extremely difficult for the soul to sever itself from its body the world: from mountains, seas, cities, people. The soul is an octopus and these are its tentacles. ... No force anywhere on earth is as imperialistic as the human soul. It occupies and is occupied in turn, but it always considers its empire too narrow. Suffocating, it desires to conquer the world in order to breathe freely.

Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one.

The oppression of a majority by a minority, and the demoralization inevitably resulting from it, is a phenomenon that has always occupied me and has done so most particularly of late.

Were I to pray for a taste which should stand me in stead under every variety of circumstances, and be a source of happiness and cheerfulness to me during life, and a shield against its ills, however things might go amiss and the world frown upon me, it would be a taste for reading... Give a man this taste, and the means of gratifying it, and you can hardly fail of making him a happy man; unless, indeed, you put into his hands a most perverse selection of books. You place him in contact with the best society in every period of history,-with the wisest, the wittiest, the tenderest, the bravest, and the purest characters who have adorned humanity. You make him a denizen of all nations, a contemporary of all ages. The world has been created for him.

For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms, and did my duty faithfully, though I never received one cent for it.

When two do the same thing, it is not the same thing after all.

Sex also concentrates the mind wonderfully, and that is why civilised man is so obsessed by it. It enables him to "savour every fraction of an inch," not merely of the act of sexual intercourse, but of living itself. But that, of course, only underlines the basic problem: after coitus, "man becomes sad," because he quickly returns to his unconcentrated and defocused state. In sexual excitement, it is the spirit itself that becomes erect, and becomes capable of penetrating the meaning of life. Normal consciousness is limp and flaccid; its attitude towards reality is defensive. This is what Sartre called contingency, that feeling of being at the mercy of chance.

The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of them which will not make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it is not. If you leave out justice you will find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials "for the sake of humanity", and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man.

What the learned world tends to offer is one second-hand scrap of information illustrating ideas derived from another second-hand scrap of information. The second-handedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity.

It is sometimes difficult to avoid the impression that there is a sort of foreknowledge of the coming series of events.

We have no reason to fear lest a habit of conscientious inquiry should paralyse the actions of our daily life. But because it is not enough to say, "It is wrong to believe on unworthy evidence," without saying also what evidence is worthy, we shall now go on to inquire under what circumstances it is lawful to believe on the testimony of others; and then, further, we shall inquire more generally when and why we may believe that which goes beyond our own experience, or even beyond the experience of mankind.

The bourgeoisie is defined as the social class which does not want to be named.

Avoid shame, but do not seek glory: nothing so expensive as glory.

It is our deliberate opinion that the French Revolution, in spite of all its crimes and follies, was a great blessing to mankind.

Every human being is the natural guardian of his own importance.

In one point I fully agree with the gentlemen to whose general views I am opposed. I feel with them, that it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.

Absolute relativism, which is neither more nor less than skepticism, in the most modern sense of the term, is the supreme triumph of the reasoning reason.

The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.

The refusal of work and authority, or really the refusal of voluntary servitude, is the beginning of liberatory politics.