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?"

The whole historic existence of mankind is nothing else than the gradual transition from the personal, animal conception of life to the social conception of life, and from the social conception of life to the divine conception of life.

The Upanishads and the Vedas haunt me. In them I have found eternal compensation, unfathomable power, unbroken peace.

The plague of man is boasting of his knowledge.

I am of course confident that I will fulfil my tasks as a writer in all circumstances - from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death. But may it be that repeated lessons will finally teach us not to stop the writer's pen during his lifetime? At no time has this ennobled our history.

One can say that the author is an ideological product, since we represent him as the opposite of his historically real function. (When a historically given function is represented in a figure that inverts it, one has an ideological production.) The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.

But as I listened to him, I felt a touch of coldness inside of me, as if I had suddenly become aware of the eyes of some dangerous creature. It passed in a moment, but I found myself shuddering.

To the question what wine he found pleasant to drink, he replied, "That for which other people pay."

The chalk is no unimportant element in the masonry of the earth's crust, and it impresses a peculiar stamp, varying with the conditions to which it is exposed, on the scenery of the districts in which it occurs.

Choose not to be harmed-and you won't feel harmed. Don't feel harmed-and you haven't been.

Riches are a good handmaid, but the worst mistress.

The more is given the less the people will work for themselves, and the less they work the more their poverty will increase.

What is called "objectivity," scientific for instance (in which I firmly believe, in a given situation) imposes itself only within a context which is extremely vast, old, firmly established, or rooted in a network of conventions ... and yet which still remains a context.

But genius looks forward: the eyes of men are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates.

Look round at the courses of the stars, as if thou wert going along with them; and constantly consider the changes of the elements into one another; for such thoughts purge away the filth of the terrene life.

The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead.

All styles are good except the boring kind.

Love is a contradiction if there is no God.

Who, then, can be more ignorant of nature than he who classes this cruel and hurtful vice as belonging to her best and most polished work?

It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true Word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him.

What an incitation to hilarity, hearing the word goal while following a funeral procession!

The great event of this period, the great trauma, is this decline of strong referentials, these death pangs of the real and of the rational that open onto an age of simulation. Whereas so many generations, and particularly the last, lived in the march of history, in the euphoric or catastrophic expectation of a revolution-today one has the impression that history has retreated, leaving behind it an indifferent nebula, traversed by currents, but emptied of references. It is into this void that the phantasms of a past history recede, the panoply of events, ideologies, retro fashions-no longer so much because people believe in them or still place some hope in them, but simply to resurrect the period when at least there was history, at least there was violence (albeit fascist), when at least life and death were at stake.

Only the actual participants can correctly recognize, understand, and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict.

It is enough to ask somebody for his weapons without saying 'I want to kill you with them', because when you have his weapons in hand, you can satisfy your desire.

Here and everywhere is the struggle for existence, life inextricably enmeshed with war. All life living at the expense of life, every organism eating other organisms forever.

This actual world of what is knowable, in which we are and which is in us, remains both the material and the limit of our consideration.

The authority of science ... promotes and encourages the activity of observing, comparing, measuring and ordering the physical characteristics of human bodies.... Cartesian epistemology and classical ideals produced forms of rationality, scientificity and objectivity that, though efficacious in the quest for truth and knowledge, prohibited the intelligibility and legitimacy of black equality.... In fact, to "think" such an idea was to be deemed irrational, barbaric or mad.

A totally unmystical world would be a world totally blind and insane.

It was his peculiar doctrine that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave. I agree with him. They who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but no others.

Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.

The free will, the actual motor of reason in society, necessarily creates wrong. The individual must clash with the social order that claims to represent his own will in its objective form. But the wrong and the 'avenging justice' that remedies it not only expresses a 'higher logical necessity,' but also prepare the transition to a higher social form of freedom, the transition from abstract right to morality. For, in committing a wrong, and in accepting punishment for his deed, the individual becomes conscious of the 'infinite subjectivity' of his freedom. He learns that he is free only as a private person.

For several years I have referred to this, hitherto, rare and inaccessible work as the I-told-you-so-book, because it has often been implied that I have invented my explanations of Buddhism out of thin air, thus falsifying its authentic teachings... Yet, despite the occultist flavor of its title, The Secret Oral Teachings in the Tibetan Buddhist Sects is the most direct, no-nonsense, and down-to-earth explanation of Mahayana Buddhism which has thus far been written.

Why in the world shouldn't they have regarded with awe and reverence that act by which the human race is perpetuated. Not every religion has to have St. Augustine's attitude to sex. Why even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn't prevent it being a religious ceremony.

I believe that there is a necessary connection in both directions between the physical and the mental, but that it cannot be discovered a priori. Opinion is strongly divided on the credibility of some kind of functionalist reductionism, and I won't go through my reasons for being on the antireductionist side of that debate. Despite significant attempts by a number of philosophers to describe the functional manifestations of conscious mental states, I continue to believe that no purely functionalist characterization of a system entails - simply in virtue of our mental concepts - that the system is conscious.

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language.

The erotic is never free of secrecy.

Those who were best able to provide themselves with the means of security against their neighbors, being thus in possession of the surest guarantee, passed the most agreeable life in each other's society; and their enjoyment of the fullest intimacy was such that, if one of them died before his time, the survivors did not mourn his death as if it called for sympathy.

If we would regain our freedom, we must shake off the burden of sensation, no longer react to the world by our senses, break our bonds. For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.

At no period of human culture have men understood the psychic mechanism involved in invention and technology.

Certain success evicts one from the paradise of winning against the odds.

The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.