I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist.

In Mohammedanism the narrow principle of the Jews is expanded into universality and thereby overcome. Here, God is no longer, as in the Far East, regarded as existent in an immediately sensory way but is conceived as the one infinite power elevated above all the multiplicity of the world. Mohammedanism is, therefore, in the strictest sense of the word, the religion of sublimity.

it is absurd ... to hope that maybe another Newton may some day arise, to make intelligible to us even the genesis of but a blade of grass

It's funny the respectable names you can give to superstition.

Many of the actions by which men have become rich are far more harmful to the community than the obscure crimes of poor men, yet they go unpunished because they do not interfere with the existing order.

A penny saved is of more value than a penny paid out.

O pitiable minds of men, O blind intelligences! In what gloom of life, in how great perils is passed all your poor span of time! not to see that all nature barks for is this, that pain be removed away out of the body, and that the mind, kept away from care and fear, enjoy a feeling of delight!

I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.

It is a sign of wisdom to be able to use parrhesia without falling into the garrulousness of athuroglossos... One of the problems... how to distinguish that which must be said from that which should be kept silent.

The principal source of the harm done by the State is the fact that power is its chief end.

Have no fear, little flock, for your Father has approved of giving you the Kingdom. 12:32

The aim of the book is to set a limit to thought, or rather - not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought). It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be set, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense.

As for the commercial business, I can no longer make head or tail of it. At one moment crisis seems imminent and the City prostrated, the next everything is set fair. I know that none of this will have any impact on the catastrophe.

The opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.

Make sure that your religion is a matter between you and God only.

The objective of all human arrangements is through distracting one's thoughts to cease to be aware of life.

If you're certain, you're certainly wrong, because nothing deserves certainty.

Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others, and this is a gift interred only by the self.

I need Christ, not something that resembles Him.

In memory yet green, in joy still felt, The scenes of life rise sharply into view. We triumph; Life's disasters are undealt, And while all else is old, the world is new.

For every one feels to what purpose he can use his own powers. Before the horns of a calf appear and sprout from his forehead, he butts with them when angry, and pushes passionately.

Collectively, the more civilized men are, the more they are actors. They assume the appearance of attachment, of esteem for others, of modesty, and of disinterestedness, without ever deceiving anyone, because everyone understands that nothing sincere is meant. Persons are familiar with this, and it is even a good thing that this is so in this world, for when men play these roles, virtues are gradually established, whose appearance had up until now only been affected. These virtues ultimately will become part of the actor's disposition. To deceive the deceiver in ourselves, or the tendency to deceive, is a fresh return to obedience[.]

Children are nowhere taught, in any systematic way, to distinguish true from false, or meaningful from meaningless, statements. Why is this so? Because their elders, even in the democratic countries, do not want them to be given this kind of education.

The most violent revolutions in an individual's beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one's own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity.

Let us keep to Christ, and cling to Him, and hang on Him, so that no power can remove us.

There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dare not face this thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not rational, he becomes furious when they are disputed.

You can take better care of your secret than another can.

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.

I now myself live, in every detail, striving for wisdom, while I formerly merely worshipped and idolized the wise.

What! the inventors of ancient civilisations, the first makers of tools and tape lines, the first builders of vehicles, ships, and houses, the first observers of the laws of the heavens and the multiplication tables is it contended that they were entirely different from the inventors and observers of our own time, and superior to them? And that the first slow steps forward were of a value which has not been equalled by the discoveries we have made with all our travels and circumnavigations of the earth?

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.

My body and my will are one.

May I really say it! All truths are bloody truths to me, take a look at my previous writings.

Grief and disappointment give rise to anger, anger to envy, envy to malice, and malice to grief again, till the whole circle be completed.

This idea of weapons of mass extermination is utterly horrible and is something which no one with one spark of humanity can tolerate. I will not pretend to obey a government which is organising a mass massacre of mankind.

The way you use the word "God" does not show whom you mean - but, rather, what you mean.

Properly understood, then, the desire to act justly derives in part from the desire to express most fully what we are or can be, namely free and equal rational beings with the liberty to choose.

This world belongs to the energetic.

The value of money is in proportion to the quantity of the necessaries of life which it will purchase.

O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt. 15:28 (KJV)

The worst of my actions or conditions seem not so ugly unto me as I find it both ugly and base not to dare to avouch for them.

The universe is composed of matter, and, as a system, is sustained by motion. Motion is not a property of matter, and without this motion the solar system could not exist. Were motion a property of matter, that undiscovered and undiscoverable thing, called perpetual motion, would establish itself. It is because motion is not a property of matter, that perpetual motion is an impossibility in the hand of every being, but that of the Creator of motion. When the pretenders to Atheism can produce perpetual motion, and not till then, they may expect to be credited.

Pleasure is in itself a good; nay, even setting aside immunity from pain, the only good: pain is in itself an evil; and, indeed, without exception, the only evil; or else the words good and evil have no meaning. And this is alike true of every sort of pain, and of every sort of pleasure.

To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great or rational whether in life or in science. Great achievement is assured, however, of subsequent recognition and grateful acceptance by public opinion, which in due course will make it one of its own prejudices.

A man fits out a ship at a great expense and sends it to the West Indies with a crew of men and boys, and after six months or a year, it comes back with a load of pine-apples; now, if no more gets accomplished than the speculator commonly aims at, if it simply turns out what is called a successful venture, I am less interested in this expedition than in some child's first excursions a-huckleberrying, in which it is introduced into a new world, experiences a new development, though it brings home only a gill of berries in its basket.

Here am I who have written on all sorts of subjects calculated to excite hostility, moral, political, and religious, and yet I have no enemies - except, indeed, all the Whigs, all the Tories, and all the Christians.

Art is the activity that exalts and denies simultaneously. "No artist tolerates reality," says Nietzsche.

False and doubtful positions, relied upon as unquestionable maxims, keep those who build on them in the dark from truth. Such are usually the prejudices imbibed from education, party, reverence, fashion, interest, et cetera.