The erotic is never free of secrecy.

When a war breaks out, people say: "It's too stupid; it can't last long." But though the war may well be "too stupid," that doesn't prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.

A physician, after he had felt the pulse of Pausanias, and considered his constitution, saying, "He ails nothing," "It is because, sir," he replied, "I use none of your physic."

If God had looked into our minds he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of.

Well, which is the most rational theory about these ten millions of species? Is it most likely that there have been ten millions of special creations? or is it most likely that, by continual modifications due to change of circumstances, ten millions of varieties have been produced, as varieties are being produced still?

Why may not a goose say thus: "All the parts of the universe I have an interest in: the earth serves me to walk upon, the sun to light me; the stars have their influence upon me; I have such an advantage by the winds and such by the waters; there is nothing that yon heavenly roof looks upon so favourably as me. I am the darling of Nature! Is it not man that keeps and serves me?"

Let us not admit discourses by Epicureans or Pyrrhonists - though indeed the gods have already in their wisdom destroyed their works, so that most of their books are no longer available. Nevertheless, there is no reason why I should not, by way of example, mention these works too, to show what sort of discourses priests must especially avoid; and if such discourses, then much more must they avoid such thoughts.

The selfish spirit of commerce knows no country, and feels no passion or principle but that of gain.

The poet presents the imagination with images from life and human characters and situations, sets them all in motion and leaves it to the beholder to let these images take his thoughts as far as his mental powers will permit. This is why he is able to engage men of the most differing capabilities, indeed fools and sages together. The philosopher, on the other hand, presents not life itself but the finished thoughts which he has abstracted from it and then demands that the reader should think precisely as, and precisely as far as, he himself thinks. That is why his public is so small.

The criminal law has, from the point of view of thwarted virtue, the merit of allowing an outlet for those impulses of aggression which cowardice, disguised as morality, restrains in their more spontaneous forms. War has the same merit. You must not kill you neighbor, whom perhaps you genuinely hate, but by a little propaganda this hate can be transferred to some foreign nation, against whom all your murderous impulses become patriotic heroism.

Thus poetry, regarded as a vehicle of thought, is especially impressive partly because it obeys all the laws of effective speech, and partly because in so doing it imitates the natural utterances of excitement.

The will is not fundamentally right, as the practical ones would like very much to assure us; one may not pass over the desire for knowledge in order to stand immediately in the will, but knowledge perfects itself to will when it desensualizes itself and creates itself as a spirit "which builds its own body."

A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all.

There's nothing like deduction. We've determined everything about our problem but the solution.

Schizophrenia is like love: there is no specifically schizophrenic phenomenon or entity; schizophrenia is the universe of productive and reproductive desiring machines, universal primary production as "the essential reality of man and nature".

I too have a growing inner certainty that there is a deposit of pure gold in me which ought to be passed on. The trouble is that I am more and more convinced by my experience and observation of my contemporaries that there is no one to receive it.

The mariner of old said to Neptune in a great tempest, "O God! thou mayest save me if thou wilt, and if thou wilt thou mayest destroy me; but whether or no, I will steer my rudder true."

Though the profusion of Government must undoubtedly have retarded the natural progress of England to wealth and improvement, it has not been able to stop it.

Let's put a limit to the scramble for money. ... Having got what you wanted, you ought to begin to bring that struggle to an end.

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.

Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.

Thee might observe incidentally that if the state paid for child-bearing it might and ought to require a medical certificate that the parents were such as to give a reasonable result of a healthy child - this would afford a very good inducement to some sort of care for the race, and gradually as public opinion became educated by the law, it might react on the law and make that more stringent, until one got to some state of things in which there would be a little genuine care for the race, instead of the present haphazard higgledy-piggledy ways.

The Logic of Induction is the 'Criterion of Truth' inferred from Facts, as the Logic of Deduction is the 'Criterion of Truth' deduced from necessary Principle. In Art, Truth is a means to an end; in Science, it is the only end.

One is immediately struck with the obstinacy and rigid consistency with which Lenin and his comrades stuck to this slogan, a slogan which is in sharp contradiction to their otherwise outspoken centralism in politics as well as to the attitude they have assumed towards other democratic principles. Wile they showed a quite cool contempt for the Constituent Assembly, universal suffrage, freedom of press and assemblage, in short for the whole apparatus of basic democratic liberties of the people which, taken all together, constituted the "right of self-determination" inside Russia, they treated the right of self-determination of peoples as a jewel of democratic policy for the sake of which all practical considerations of real criticism had to be stilled.

From Apollonius, true liberty, and unvariable steadfastness, and not to regard anything at all, though never so little, but right and reason: and always..that it was possible for the same man to be both vehement and remiss: a man not subject to be vexed, and offended with the incapacity of his scholars and auditors in his lectures and expositions.

The greatest of errors therefore would be to believe what the modern sect, which has only worked to obscure all truths, never ceases to advance, which is that what cannot be defined is not known, while on the contrary what is of the essence of what is perfectly known cannot be defined; for the more a thing is known, the more it brings us to intuition, which excludes all equation.

As an eminent pioneer in the realm of high frequency currents... I congratulate you on the great successes of your life's work.

We admire people to the extent that we cannot explain what they do, and the word "admire" then means "marvel at."

There's a Bible on that shelf there. But I keep it next to Voltaire - poison and antidote.

If the thought enunciates an object as a truth, it is only as a challenge to this object's own self-fulfillment.

A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.

We confide in our strength, without boasting of it; we respect that of others, without fearing it.

Clever tyrants are never punished.

...inversion...is an outlet that a child discovers when he is suffocating.

Man's urge for change and his need for stability have always balanced and checked each other, and our current vocabulary, which distinguishes between two factions, the progressives and the conservatives, indicates a state of affairs in which this balance has been thrown out of order. No civilization - the man-made artifact to house successive generations - would ever have been possible without a framework of stability, to provide the wherein for the flux of change. Foremost among the stabilizing factors, more enduring than customs, manners and traditions, are the legal systems that regulate our life in the world and our daily affairs with each other.

The Scientific discourse extracts truths from the errors which surround and oppose it on all sides and in every form; and, by demolition of these opposing views as error, and as impossible to true thought, shows the truth as that which alone remains after their withdrawal, and therefore as the only possible truth:--and in this separation of opposites, and elucidation of the truth from the confused chaos in which truth and error lie mingled together, consists the peculiar and characteristic nature of the Scientific discourse. This method creates and produces truth, before our eyes, out of a world full of error.

Personally, people know themselves very poorly.

Every one excels in something in which another fails.

We live invested in an electric information environment that is quite as imperceptible to us as water is to fish.

When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others. It is much more nearly certain that we are assembled here tonight than it is that this or that political party is in the right. Certainly there are degrees of certainty, and one should be very careful to emphasize that fact, because otherwise one is landed in an utter skepticism, and complete skepticism would, of course, be totally barren and completely useless.

To what purpose, pray, exist all these things that be born? Whence come male and female? Whence the difference in kind of all things that be, amongst visible species, unless there be certain pre-existing and previously established Reasons and Causes subsisting beforehand, in the nature of a pattern? With regard to which, though we are dull of sight, yet let us strive to clear away the mist from the eyes of the soul.

Live among men as if God beheld you; speak with God as if men were listening.

The religion and philosophy of the Hebrews are those of a wilder and ruder tribe, wanting the civility and intellectual refinements and subtlety of Vedic culture.

Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery.

Any institution is only a political structure. In physics and in morals, the laws are the same; you cannot build a large structure on a narrow foundation, nor a durable structure on a moving or transient base. In the political order, therefore, if one wants to build on a large scale and for the centuries, one must rely on an opinion, on a large and profound belief. For if this opinion does not dominate a majority of minds and if it is not deeply rooted, it will furnish only a narrow and transient base.

Civilization, as we know it, is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbour. No known civilization has, ever reached the goal of civilization yet. There has never been a communion of saints on earth. In the least uncivilized society at its least uncivilized moment, the vast majority of its members have remained very near indeed to the primitive human level. And no society has ever been secure of holding such ground as it has managed to gain in its spiritual advance. Ch. 8: Civilization on Trial Variants: Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.

The close-up of a face is as obscene as a sexual organ seen from up close. It is a sexual organ. The promiscuity of the detail, the zoom-in, takes on a sexual value.

The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilized men.