His Religion is not an easy one: with rigorous fasts, lavations, strict complex formulas, prayers five times a day, and abstinence from wine, it did not "succeed by being an easy religion." As if indeed any religion, or cause holding of religion, could succeed by that! It is a calumny on men to say that they are roused to heroic action by ease, hope of pleasure, recompense, - sugar-plums of any kind, in this world or the next! In the meanest mortal there lies something nobler.

To have committed every crime but that of being a father.

Rules for Definitions. I. Not to undertake to define any of the things so well known of themselves that the clearer terms cannot be had to explain them. II. Not to leave any terms that are at all obscure or ambiguous without definition. III. Not to employ in the definition of terms any words but such as are perfectly known or already explained.

It would be worth the while to look closely into the eye which has been open and seeing at such hours, and in such solitudes, its dull, yellowish, greenish eye. Methinks my own soul must be a bright invisible green.

I like thought which preserves a whiff of flesh and blood, and I prefer a thousand times an idea rising from sexual tension or nervous depression to empty abstraction.

Ancient histories, as one of our wits has said, are but fables that have been agreed upon.

And yet it will be obvious that it is difficult to really know of what sort each thing is.

Imagine a book of unexplained mysteries written by a contemporary of Shakespeare. It might include the mystery of the falling stars that sweep through the sky foretelling disaster; the mystery of the Kraken, the giant sea devil with 50-foot tentacles; the mystery of monster bones, sometimes found in caves or on beaches. Such a book would be a curious mixture of truth and absurdity, fact and legend. We would all feel superior as we turned its pages and murmured: "Of course, they didn't know about comets and giant squids and dinosaurs." If this book should happen to find its way into the hands of our remote descendants, they may smile pityingly and say: "It's incredible to think that they knew nothing about epsilon fields or multiple psychic feedback or cross gravitational energies. They didn't even know about the ineluctability of time." But let us hope that such a descendant is in a charitable mood, and might add: "And yet they managed to ask a few of the right questions."

We are living even now among punishments and ruins.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts!

It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, "mad cow" disease, and many others, but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.

Our "Theories of Taste," as they are called, wherein the deep, infinite, unspeakable Love of Wisdom and Beauty, which dwells in all men, is "explained," made mechanically visible, from "Association" and the like, ...

Philosophy: impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.

Our argument is not flatly circular, but something like it. It has the form, figuratively speaking, of a closed curve in space.

Renaissance Italy became a kind of Hollywood collection of sets of antiquity, and the new visual antiquarianism of the Renaissance provided an avenue to power for men of any class.

On a certain level of generality A which I call the ground level, you have certain theorems that have been proved and certain unsolved problems P of recognised interest. Suppose you discover a generalisation of one of these theorems and thereby rise to a higher level of generality A'. Write it up, but lock it away in a drawer - unless or until it serves to solve one of the problems P on the ground level... But the deeper one drives the spade the harder the digging gets; maybe it has become too hard for us unless we are not given some outside help, be it even by such devilish devices as high-speed computing machines.

I believe that none can "save" his fellow man by making a choice for him. To help him, he can indicate the possible alternatives, with sincerity and love, without being sentimental and without illusion. The knowledge and awareness of the freeing alternatives can reawaken in an individual all his hidden energies and put him on the path to choosing respect for "life" instead of for "death."

Is it conceivable to adhere to a religion founded by someone else?

He would have left a Greek accent slanting the wrong way, and righted up a falling man.

If there is equality, it is in His love, not in us.

That which comes after ever conforms to that which has gone before.

Disturbance comes only from within-from our own perceptions.

The world at present is obsessed by the conflict of rival ideologies, and one of the apparent causes of conflict is the desire for the victory of our own ideology and the defeat of the other. I do not think that the fundamental motive here has much to do with ideologies. I think the ideologies are merely a way of grouping people, and that the passions involved are merely those which always arise between rival groups. Ideologies, in fact, are one of the methods by which herds are created, and the psychology is much the same however the herd may have been generated.

A good reputation is more valuable than money.

The murder of one person is called unrighteous and incurs one death penalty. Following this argument, the murder of ten persons will be ten times as unrighteous and there should be ten death penalties; the murder of a hundred persons will be a hundred times as unrighteous and there should be a hundred death penalties. All the gentlemen of the world know that they should condemn these things, calling them unrighteous. But when it comes to the great unrighteousness of attacking states, they do not know that they should condemn it. On the contrary, they applaud it, calling it righteous.

A man's character is formed by the Odes, developed by the Rites and perfected by music.

All abstract sciences are nothing but the study of relations between signs.

There is one mistake we got to avoid, and that is the mistake of supposing that if you simulate it, you duplicate it. This is a deep mistake embedded in our popular culture - that simulation is equivalent to duplication, but of course it isn't. A perfect simulation of the brain - say, on a computer - would no longer thereby be conscious than a perfect simulation of a rainstorm on a weather-predicting computer will leave us all wet.

It is a want of feeling to talk of priests and bells while so many infants are perishing in the hospitals, and aged and infirm poor in the streets, from the want of necessaries.

Life grants nothing to us mortals without hard work.

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.

For is not a Symbol ever, to him who has eyes for it, some dimmer or clearer revelation of the God-like? B

What is divine is full of Providence. Even chance is not divorced from nature, from the inweaving and enfolding of things governed by Providence. Everything proceeds from it.

Unless some Hero-worship, in its new appropriate form, can return, this world does not promise to be very habitable long.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

It might be plausibly maintained, that in almost every one of the leading controversies, past or present, in social philosophy, both sides were in the right in what they affirmed, though wrong in what they denied.

Is there really someone who, searching for a group of wise and sensitive persons to regulate him for his own good, would choose that group of people that constitute the membership of both houses of Congress?

I believe in intuition and inspiration. ... At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason. When the eclipse of 1919 confirmed my intuition, I was not in the least surprised. In fact I would have been astonished had it turned out otherwise. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.

A created thing is never invented and it is never true: it is always and ever itself.

Ritual practices ensure that we treat not only other people but also things in beautiful ways, that there is an affinity between us and other people as well as things.

From whence it follows, that were the publique and private interest are most closely united, there is the publique most advanced.

This is not for me, I want an entirely rural spot.

I have written a good number of drafts and small reflections. They are not waiting for the last touch but for the sunlight to wake them up.

Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.

Scientific revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense... that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately in the exploration of an aspect of nature to which that paradigm itself had previously led the way. p. 91