The source of the errors of these two sects, is in not having known that the state of man at the present time differs from that of his creation; so that the one, remarking some traces of his first greatness and being ignorant of his corruption, has treated nature as sound and without need of redemption, which leads him to the height of pride; whilst the other, feeling the present wretchedness and being ignorant of the original dignity, treats nature as necessarily infirm and irreparable, which precipitates it into despair of arriving at real good, and thence into extreme laxity.

All wars today tend to be netwars.

Our time is Gothic in its spirit. Unlike the Renaissance, it is not dominated by a few outstanding personalities. The twentieth century has established the democracy of the intellect. In the republic of art and science, there are many men who take an equally important part in the intellectual movements of our age. It is the epoch rather than the individual that is important. There is no one dominant personality like Galileo or Newton. Even in the nineteenth century, there were still a few giants who outtopped all others. Today the general level is much higher than ever before in the history of the world, but there are few men whose stature immediately sets them apart from all others.

If beings are grasped as will to power, the "should" which is supposed to hang suspended over them, against which they might be measured, becomes superfluous. If life itself is will to power, it is itself the ground, principium, of valuation. Then a "should" does not determine being. Being determines a "should." "When we talk of values we are speaking under the inspiration or optics of life: life itself compels us to set up values; life itself values through us whenever we posit values."

Through failures one becomes intelligent; but the one who has trained himself in this subject so that he can make others wise through their own failures, has used his intelligence. Ignorance is not stupidity.

We find that everything that makes up difference and number is pure accident, pure show, pure constitution. Every production, of whatever kind, is an alteration, but the substance remains always the same, because it is only one, one divine immortal being.

Another may be more expert in casting [throwing] his opponent; but he is not more social, nor more modest, nor better disciplined to meet all that happens, nor more considerate with respect to the faults of his neighbors.

When the Superior Man (Junzi) eats he does not try to stuff himself; at rest he does not seek perfect comfort; he is diligent in his work and careful in speech. He avails himself to people of the Tao and thereby corrects himself. This is the kind of person of whom you can say, "he loves learning."

I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company.

Silence is the virtue of a fool.

Your favor of July 2. came duly to hand. The concern you therein express as to the effect of your pamphlet in America, induces me to trouble you with some observations on that subject.

The entire method consists in the order and arrangement of the things to which the mind's eye must turn so that we can discover some truth.

What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.

Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, sea-shores, and mountains; and thou too art wont to desire such things very much. But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men, for it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself. For nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble does a man retire than into his own soul. Variant translation: Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul.

And the central assertion of his philosophy is that this inner realm is the 'spiritual world' and that once man has learned to enter this realm, he realizes that it is not a mere imaginative reflection of the external world, but a world that possesses its own independent reality.

Tried myself in the school of affliction, by the loss of every form of connection which can rive the human heart, I know well, and feel what you have lost, what you have suffered, are suffering, and have yet to endure. The same trials have taught me that for ills so immeasurable, time and silence are the only medicines. I will not, therefore, by useless condolences, open afresh the sluices of your grief, nor, although mingling sincerely my tears with yours, will I say a word more where words are vain.

The modern proletarian class doesn't carry out its struggle according to a plan set out in some book or theory; the modern workers' struggle is a part of history, a part of social progress, and in the middle of history, in the middle of progress, in the middle of the fight, we learn how we must fight... That's exactly what is laudable about it, that's exactly why this colossal piece of culture, within the modern workers' movement, is epoch-defining: that the great masses of the working people first forge from their own consciousness, from their own belief, and even from their own understanding the weapons of their own liberation.

There is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not loving. All of us, today, are dying of this misfortune. For violence and hatred dry up the heart itself; the long fight for justice exhausts the love that nevertheless gave birth to it.

I don't think there would be many jokes, if there weren't constant frustration and fear and so forth. It's a response to bad troubles like crime.

Rules for Demonstrations. I. Not to undertake to demonstrate any thing that is so evident of itself that nothing can be given that is clearer to prove it. II. To prove all propositions at all obscure, and to employ in their proof only very evident maxims or propositions already admitted or demonstrated. III. To always mentally substitute definitions in the place of things defined, in order not to be misled by the ambiguity of terms which have been restricted by definitions.

We find here the final application of the doctrine of objective immortality. Throughout the perishing occasions in the life of each temporal Creature, the inward source of distaste or of refreshment, the judge arising out of the very nature of things, redeemer or goddess of mischief, is the transformation of Itself, everlasting in the Being of God. In this way, the insistent craving is justified - the insistent craving that zest for existence be refreshed by the ever-present, unfading importance of our immediate actions, which perish and yet live for evermore.

Mencius went to see King Huei of Liang. The king said, "Venerable sir, since you have not counted it far to come here, a distance of a thousand li, may I presume that you are provided with counsels to profit my kingdom?" Mencius replied, "Why must your Majesty use that word "profit"? What I am provided with, are counsels to benevolence and righteousness, and these are my only topics.

Persons who feel themselves to be exiles in this world-and what noble mind, from Empedocles down, has not had that feeling?-are mightily inclined to believe themselves citizens of another.

The State is a collection of officials, different for difference purposes, drawing comfortable incomes so long as the status quo is preserved. The only alteration they are likely to desire in the status quo is an increase of bureaucracy and the power of bureaucrats.

I am aware that the great Plato himself, and after him, a man posterior to him in date, though not in mind, I mean Iamblichus of Chalcis (who initiated us into other branches of philosophy, and also into this by means of his discourses), did both of them as far as hypothesis goes, take for granted the fact of a Creation and assumed the universe to have been, in a certain sense, the Work of Time, in order that the most important of the effects produced by this Power, may be reduced into a shape for examination.

What is all that men have done and thought over thousands of years, compared with one moment of love. But in all Nature, too, it is what is nearest to perfection, what is most divinely beautiful! There all stairs lead from the threshold of life. From there we come, to there we go.

Friendship ... flourishes not so much by kindnesses as by sincerity.

corporate globalization is really about an aggressive privatization of the water, biodiversity, and food systems of the Earth, when these communities declare sovereignty and act on that sovereignty, they have developed a powerful response to globalization. Living democracy then is the democracy that is custodian of the living wealth on which people depend.

A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with reality, and lives in a world of illusion.

I believe that the early success and reputation of Carlyle's French Revolution, were considerably accelerated by what I wrote about it in the Review. Immediately on its publication, and before the commonplace critics, all whose rules and modes of judgment it set at defiance, had time to preoccupy the public with their disapproval of it, I wrote and published a review of the book, hailing it as one of those productions of genius which are above all rules, and are a law to themselves.

For consequentialists, of course, the imperative to imagine the consequences of living in a world in which everyone would act as you choose to act leads to the conclusion that some practices are utterly untenable, not because they are irrational, but because they inflict consequential damage that is unwanted. In both cases, I would suggest, a potential action is figured as hypothetically reciprocal: one's own act comes back in the imagined form of another's act; another might act on me as I would act on the other, and the consequences are unacceptable because of those damaging consequences.

All true metaphysics is taken from the essential nature of the thinking faculty itself, and therefore in nowise invented, since it is not borrowed from experience, but contains the pure operations of thought, that is, conceptions and principles à priori, which the manifold of empirical presentations first of all brings into legitimate connection, by which it can become empirical knowledge, i.e. experience. ...mathematical physicists were thus quite unable to dispense with such metaphysical principles...

If thou shalt aspire after the glorious acts of men, thy working shall be accompanied with compunction and strife, and thy remembrance followed with distaste and upbraidings; and justly doth it come to pass towards thee, O man, that since thou, which art God's work, doest him no reason in yielding him well-pleasing service, even thine own works also should reward thee with the like fruit of bitterness.

Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination. The range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual.

Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.

The pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes: and in proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false. The rights of men are in a sort of middle, incapable of definition, but not impossible to be discerned. The rights of men in government are their advantages; and these are often in balances between differences of good; in compromises between good and evil, and sometimes between evil and evil. Political reason is a computing principle: adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing, morally and not metaphysically or mathematically, true moral denominations.

Thus, while the refugee serfs only wished to be free to develop and assert those conditions of existence which were already there, and hence, in the end, only arrived at free labour, the proletarians, if they are to assert themselves as individuals, will have to abolish the very condition of their existence hitherto (which has, moreover, been that of all society up to the present), namely, labour. Thus they find themselves directly opposed to the form in which, hitherto, the individuals, of which society consists, have given themselves collective expression, that is, the State. In order, therefore, to assert themselves as individuals, they must overthrow the State.

It has become extremely questionable whether, in the flux of life, it is a genuinely worthwhile intellectual problem to seek to discover fixed and immutable ideas or absolutes. It is a more worthy intellectual task perhaps to learn to think dynamically and relationally rather than statically.

Society: an inferno of saviors!

I saw men go up and down, In the country and the town, With this tablet on their neck,- 'Judgement and a judge we seek.' Not to monarchs they repair, Nor to learned jurist's chair; But they hurry to their peers, To their kinsfolk and their dears; Louder than with speech they pray,- 'What am I? companion, say.'

The greater part of Eastern teachers of the Church, from Clement of Alexandria to Maximus the Confessor, were supporters of Apokatastasis, of universal salvation and resurrection. And this is characteristic of (contemporary) Russian religious thought. Orthodox thought has never been suppressed by the idea of Divine justice and it never forgot the idea of Divine love. Chiefly - it did not define man from the point of view of Divine justice but from the idea of transfiguration and Deification of man and cosmos.

Justice was in all countries originally administered by the priesthood; nor indeed could laws in their first feeble state have either authority or sanction, so as to compel men to relinquish their natural independence, had they not appeared to come down to them enforced by beings of more than human power. The first openings of civility have been everywhere made by religion. Amongst the Romans, the custody and interpretation of the laws continued solely in the college of the pontiffs for above a century.

The Present Age, according to my view of it, stands in that Epoch which in my former lecture I named the THIRD, and which I characterized as the Epoch of Liberation-directly from the external ruling Authority, indirectly from the power of Reason as Instinct, and generally from Reason in any form; the Age of absolute indifference towards all truth, and of entire and unrestrained licentiousness:-the state of completed sinfulness.