Emptiness empties the one seeing into what is seen.

You can live, provided you live; that is, you can live for ever, provided you live a good life.

Discourses are tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force relations; there can exist different and even contradictory discourses within the same strategy; they can, on the contrary, circulate without changing their form from one strategy to another, opposing strategy.

A nation never falls but by suicide.

A man, in so far as he is an individual, may be very sharply detached from others, a sort of spiritual crustacean, and yet be very poor in differentiating content. And further, it is true on the other hand that the more personality a man has and the greater his interior riches and the more he is a society within himself, the less brusquely he is divided from his fellows.

Music directly represents the passion of the soul. If one listens to the wrong kind of music, he will become the wrong kind of person.

A propensity to hope and joy is real riches: One to fear and sorrow, real poverty.

In its relation to the reality of daily life, the high culture of the past was many things-opposition and adornment, outcry and resignation. But it was also the appearance of the realm of freedom: the refusal to behave.

Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.

We do not think good metaphors are anything very important, but I think that a good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on...

A poem is one undivided unimpeded expression fallen ripe into literature, and it is undividedly and unimpededly received by those for whom it was matured.

Virtue (or the man of virtue) is not left to stand alone. He who practices it will have neighbors.

Most men do not feel in themselves the competence required for leading their group to victory, and therefore seek out a captain who appears to possess the courage and sagacity necessary for the achievement of supremacy. Even in religion this impulse appears. Nietzsche accused Christianity of inculcating a slave-morality, but ultimate triumph was always the goal. "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."

I have been baptised and educated in the Church of England; and have seen no cause to abandon that communion. ... I think that Church harmonises with our civil constitution, with the frame and fashion of our Society, and with the general Temper of the people. I think it is better calculated, all circumstances considered, for keeping peace amongst the different sects, and of affording to them a reasonable protection, than any other System. Being something in a middle, it is better disposed to moderate.

I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation - the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.

Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare it is simply disgraceful.

Though the managing ourselves well in this part of our behavior has the name good-breeding, as if a peculiar effect of education; yet... young children should not be much perplexed about it... Teach them humility, and to be good-natur'd, if you can, and this sort of manners will not be wanting; civility being in truth nothing but a care not to shew any slighting or contempt of any one in conversation.

This freedom from absolute, arbitrary power, is so necessary to, and closely joined with a man's preservation, that he cannot part with it, but by what forfeits his preservation and life together: for a man, not having the power of his own life, cannot, by compact, or his own consent, enslave himself to any one, nor put himself under the absolute, arbitrary power of another, to take away his life, when he pleases.

Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

Calvin's theocentric irrationalism eventually revealed itself as the cunning to technocratic reason which had to shape its human material. Misery and the poor laws did not suffice to drive men into the workshops of the early capitalistic era. The new spirit helped to supplement external pressures with a concern for wife and child to which the moral autonomy of the introverted subject in reality was tantamount.

We have nothing to do but to receive, resting absolutely upon the merit, power, and love of our Redeemer.

You are in the same manner surrounded with a small circle of persons... full of desire. They demand of you the benefits of desire... You are therefore properly the king of desire. ...equal in this to the greatest kings of the earth... It is desire that constitutes their power; that is, the possession of things that men covet.

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.

Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continual comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.

We are delighted to find a person who values us as we value ourselves, and distinguishes us from the rest of mankind, with an attention not unlike that with which we distinguish ourselves.

Pure Mathematics is the class of all propositions of the form "p implies q," where p and q are propositions containing one or more variables, the same in the two propositions, and neither p nor q contains any constants except logical constants. And logical constants are all notions definable in terms of the following: Implication, the relation of a term to a class of which it is a member, the notion of such that, the notion of relation, and such further notions as may be involved in the general notion of propositions of the above form. In addition to these, mathematics uses a notion which is not a constituent of the propositions which it considers, namely the notion of truth.

Since the communists cannot enter upon the decisive struggle between themselves and the bourgeoisie until the bourgeoisie is in power, it follows that it is in the interest of the communists to help the bourgeoisie to power as soon as possible in order the sooner to be able to overthrow it.

It is a paralogism to say, that the good of the individual should give way to that of the public; this can never take place, except when the government of the community, or, in other words, the liberty of the subject is concerned; this does not affect such cases as relate to private property, because the public good consists in everyone's having his property, which was given him by the civil laws, invariably preserved.

Humility is the fruit of inner security and wise maturity. To be humble is to be so sure of one's self and one's mission that one can forego calling excessive attention to one's self and status. And, even more pointedly, to be humble is to revel in the accomplishments or potentials of others -- especially those with whom one identifies and to whom one is linked organically.

There is, however, a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue.

It seems to me certain that more people are killed out of righteous stupidity than out of wickedness.

If the slavery of the parents be unjust, much more is their children's; if the parents were justly slaves, yet the children are born free; this is the natural, perfect right of all mankind; they are nothing but a just recompense to those who bring them up: And as much less is commonly spent on them than others, they have a right, in justice, to be proportionably sooner free.

If you want to deserve Hell, you need only stay in bed. The world is iniquity; if you accept it, you are an accomplice, if you change it you are an executioner.

Historians of ideas, however scrupulous and minute they may feel it necessary to be, cannot avoid perceiving their material in terms of some kind of pattern.

A process which led from the amœba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress - though whether the amœba would agree with this opinion is not known.

It suffices to remember how many sorrows he is spared who no longer thinks too many thoughts, how much more "in accordance with reality" a person behaves when he affirms that the real is the right, how much more capacity to use the machinery falls to the person who integrates himself with it uncomplainingly.

India is pre-eminently distinguished for the many traits of original grandeur of thought and of the wonderful remains of immediate knowledge.

Admit it, it is your youth that you regret, more even than your crime; it is my youth you hate, even more than my innocence.

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.

Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.

There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.

One capitalist always kills many.

It has been a long time since philosophers have read men's souls. It is not their task, we are told. Perhaps. But we must not be surprised if they no longer matter much to us.

A book which, above all others in the world, should be forbidden, is a catalogue of forbidden books.

But the Jews are so hardened that they listen to nothing; though overcome by testimonies they yield not an inch. It is a pernicious race, oppressing all men by their usury and rapine. If they give a prince or magistrate a thousand florins, they extort twenty thousand from the subjects in payment. We must ever keep on guard against them.

All that is Life in me urges me to give up God.

Eros, erotic desire, conquers depression. It delivers us from the inferno of the same to the utopia, indeed utopia, of the wholly other.

Violence may capture space, but it does not create space.

Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it.