Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.

Scott does this still better than Wordsworth, and a very second-rate landscape does it more effectually than any poet. What made Wordsworth's poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a Source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings; which had no connexion with struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition of mankind. From them I seemed to learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of life shall have been removed. And I felt myself at once better and happier as I came under their influence.

It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do little.

Never unreal, Pain is a challenge to the universal fiction. What luck to be the only sensation granted a content, if not a meaning!

Operational analysis ... cannot raise the decisive question whether the consent itself was not the work of manipulation-a question for which the actual state of affairs provides ample justification. The analysis cannot raise it because it would transcend its terms toward transitive meaning-toward a concept of democracy which would reveal the democratic election as a rather limited democratic process. Precisely such a non-operational concept is the one rejected by the authors as "unrealistic" because it defines democracy on too articulate a level as the clear-cut control of representation by the electorate-popular control as popular sovereignty.

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have yet to be discovered.

Reason not with him, that will deny the principal truths!

To be sure, Protestant theology presents a different, supposedly unpolitical doctrine, conceiving of God as the "wholly other," just as in political liberalism the state and politics are conceived of as the "wholly other." We have come to recognize that the political is the total, and as a result we know that any decision about whether something is unpolitical is always a political decision, irrespective of who decides and what reasons are advanced. This also holds for the question whether a particular theology is a political or an unpolitical theology.

The problem... Democracy is founded by a politeia, a constitution, where the demos, the people, exercise power, and... everyone is equal in front of the law. Such a constitution... is condemned to give equal place to all forms of parrhesia, even the worst. Because parrhesia is given even to the worst citizens, the overwhelming influence of bad, immoral, or ignorant speakers may lead... into tyranny, or... otherwise endanger the city. Hence parrhesia may be dangerous for democracy itself.

We have become blind to the alternatives to violence. This involves us in a sort of official madness, in which, while following what seems to be a perfect logic of self-defense and deterrence, we commit one absurdity after another: We seek to preserve peace by fighting a war, or to advance freedom by subsidizing dictatorships, or to "win the hearts and minds of the people" by poisoning their crops and burning their villages and confining them in concentration camps; we seek to uphold the "truth" of our cause with lies, or to answer conscientious dissent with threats and slurs and intimidations. ... I have come to the realization that I can no longer imagine a war that I would believe to be either useful or necessary. I would be against any war.

He who does not give himself leisure to be thirsty cannot take pleasure in drinking.

Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience.

As for Hitler, he nourished a fundamental aversion to the monarchy and, as we have noted, his polemic against the Habsburgs, for instance, was of an unparalleled vulgarity. For Hitler, the Volk alone was the principle of legitimacy. He was established as its direct representative and guide, without intermediaries, and it was to follow him unconditionally. No higher princple existed or was tolerated by him. Therefore it is perfectly correct to speak of a consolidated populist dictatorship employing the tools of a single party and the myth of the Volk. Not only the ancient German traditions, but also the very concept of Reich and, as we shall see, the concept of race were brought by Hitler to the level of the masses, which implied their degradation and distorition. Still, in this context they became tools of great power.

Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.

So far as cerebral structure goes... it is clear that Man differs less from the Chimpanzee or the Orang, than these do even from the Monkeys, and that the difference between the brains of the Chimpanzee and of Man is almost insignificant, when compared with that between the Chimpanzee brain and that of a Lemur.

The more exquisite any good is, of which a small specimen is afforded us, the sharper is the evil, allied to it; and few exceptions are found to this uniform law of nature. The most sprightly wit borders on madness; the highest effusions of joy produce the deepest melancholy; the most ravishing pleasures are attended with the most cruel lassitude and disgust; the most flattering hopes make way for the severest disappointments. And, in general, no course of life has such safety (for happiness is not to be dreamed of) as the temperate and moderate, which maintains, as far as possible, a mediocrity, and a kind of insensibility, in every thing. As the good, the great, the sublime, the ravishing are found eminently in the genuine principles of theism; it may be expected, from the analogy of nature, that the base, the absurd, the mean, the terrifying will be equally discovered in religious fictions and chimeras.

A precise language awaits a completed metaphysics.

Incredible that the prospect of having a biographer has made no one renounce having a life.

All the science in the world began in temples, and the first astronomers especially were priests. I do not say that it necessary to begin again with the antique initiation, and to change the presidents of our academies into hierophants, but I say that all things begin again as they began, that they all carry an original principle that modifies itself according to the different character of nations and the progressive advance of the human mind, but which however always shows itself in one way or another. Priests have preserved everything, brooded over everything, and taught us everything.

Since the management of industry by individuals necessarily implies private property, and since competition is in reality merely the manner and form in which the control of industry by private property owners expresses itself, it follows that private property cannot be separated from competition and the individual management of industry. Private property must, therefore, be abolished and in its place must come the common utilization of all instruments of production and the distribution of all products according to common agreement - in a word, what is called the communal ownership of goods.

What cannot be imagined cannot even be talked about.

Once it's been proved to you that you're descended from an ape, it's no use pulling a face; just accept it. Once they've proved to you that a single droplet of your own fat must be dearer to you than a hundred thousand of your fellow human beings and consequently that all so-called virtues and duties are nothing but ravings and prejudices, then accept that too, because there's nothing to be done.

The fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself.

Practice humility at first with man and only then before God. He who despises man, has also no respect for God.

Order thyself so, that thy Soul may always be in good estate; whatsoever become of thy body.

Conquered Greece took captive her savage conqueror and brought her arts into rustic Latium.

Given that annihilation of nature in its entirety is impossible, and that death and dissolution are not appropriate to the whole mass of this entire globe or star, from time to time, according to an established order, it is renewed, altered, changed, and transformed in all its parts.

The de-eroticization of the world, a companion to its disenchantment ... seems to result from a combination of causes-our democratic regime and its tendencies toward leveling and self-protection, a reductionist-materialist science that inevitably interprets eros as sex, and the atmosphere generated by "the death of God" and of the subordinate god, Eros.

I have never had the least sympathy with the a priori reasons against orthodoxy, and I have by nature and disposition the greatest possible antipathy to all the atheistic and infidel school. Nevertheless I know that I am, in spite of myself, exactly what the Christian would call, and, so far as I can see, is justified in calling, atheist and infidel.

There will be a time when those trying to turn the world into a Colosseum for their own amusement will be raw meat thrown to the wolves themselves, and the rest of us will watch, as justice is served, with a clean conscience.

The truth can be spoken only by someone who is already at home in it; not by someone who still lives in untruthfulness, and does no more than reach out towards it from within untruthfulness.

There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that "remembered" a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago.

As a rule, all heroism is due to a lack of reflection, and thus it is necessary to maintain a mass of imbeciles. If they once understand themselves the ruling men will be lost.

A gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion. Money must be so far beneath a gentleman that it is hardly worth troubling about.

What I would like to show is that there is a vital dimension of their writing, which I call performative reflexivity, which if ignored or misunderstood will impede an adequate response to it.

When the representative body have lost the confidence of their constituents, when they have notoriously made sale of their most valuable rights, when they have assumed to themselves powers which the people never put into their hands, then indeed their continuing in office becomes dangerous to the state, and calls for an exercise of the power of dissolution.

A lively and lasting sense of filial duty is more effectually impressed on the mind of a son or daughter by reading King Lear, than by all the dry volumes of ethics, and divinity, that ever were written.

He did not, and could not, understand the meaning of words apart from their context. Every word and action of his was the manifestation of an activity unknown to him, which was his life.

Too much straightforwardness is foolish against a shameless person.

Philosophy is in history, and is never independent of historical discourse. But for the tacit symbolism of life it substitutes, in principle, a conscious symbolism; for a latent meaning, one that is manifest. It is never content to accept its historical situation. It changes this situation by revealing it to itself.

Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone; yet he is no more to be credited with the grand result than the acaleph which adds a cell to the coral reef which is the basis of the continent.

Even to-day, in spite of some signs which are making a tiny breach in that sturdy faith, even to-day, there are few men who doubt that motorcars will in five years' time be more comfortable and cheaper than to-day. They believe in this as they believe that the sun will rise in the morning. The metaphor is an exact one. For, in fact, the common man, finding himself in a world so excellent, technically and socially, believes that it has been produced by nature, and never thinks of the personal efforts of highly-endowed individuals which the creation of this new world presupposed. Still less will he admit the notion that all these facilities still require the support of certain difficult human virtues, the least failure of which would cause the rapid disappearance of the whole magnificent edifice.... These traits together make up the well-known psychology of the spoilt child. Chap.

At the establishment of our constitutions, the judiciary bodies were supposed to be the most helpless and harmless members of the government. Experience, however, soon showed in what way they were to become the most dangerous; that the insufficiency of the means provided for their removal gave them a freehold and irresponsibility in office; that their decisions, seeming to concern individual suitors only, pass silent and unheeded by the public at large; that these decisions, nevertheless, become law by precedent, sapping, by little and little, the foundations of the constitution, and working its change by construction, before any one has perceived that that invisible and helpless worm has been busily employed in consuming its substance. In truth, man is not made to be trusted for life, if secured against all liability to account.

That man and woman have an equality of duties and rights is accepted by woman even less than by man. Behind his destiny woman must annihilate herself, must be only his complement. A woman dedicates herself to the vocation of her husband; she fills up and performs the subordinate parts in it. But if she has any destiny, any vocation of her own, she must renounce it, in nine cases out of ten.

Only the most perfect human being can design the most perfect philosophy.

Tis only from the selfishness and confin'd generosity of men, along with the scanty provision nature has made for his wants, that justice derives its origin.