If you use a trick in logic, whom can you be tricking other than yourself?

Philosophy hasn't made any progress?-If someone scratches where it itches, do we have to see progress? Is it not genuine scratching otherwise, or genuine itching?

However many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead.

One should emulate works and deeds of virtue, not arguments about it.

The only profound thinkers are the ones who do not suffer from a sense of the ridiculous.

I do feel visceral revulsion at the burka because for me it is a symbol of the oppression of women.

All the Good of mortals is mortal.

You worry whether the drought will end. It is far better that you pray that God may water your mind lest virtue wither away in it. You are greatly concerned with money that is lost or being wasted, or you worry about the advance of old age. I think it much to be desired that you provide first of all for the needs of your soul.

Arms observe no bounds; nor can the wrath of the sword, once drawn, be easily checked or stayed; war delights in blood.

Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.

Most of the texts... preserved from this period come from writers... either... affiliated with the aristocratic party, or... distrustful of democratic or radically democratic institutions.

What need is there to weep over parts of life?

It is characteristic of the most entire sincerity to be able to foreknow. When a nation or family is about to flourish, there are sure to be happy omens; and when it is about to perish, there are sure to be unlucky omens.

Why not? What is to hinder this Samson from governing? There is in him what far transcends all apprenticeships; in the man himself there exists a model of governing, something to govern by! There exists in him a heart-abhorrence of whatever is incoherent, pusillanimous, unveracious,-that is to say, chaotic, _un_governed; of the Devil, not of God. A man of this kind cannot help governing! He has the living ideal of a governor in him; and the incessant necessity of struggling to unfold the same out of him.

Of course, not everything old is beautiful, any more than everything black, or everything white, or everything young. But the notion that old means ugly is every bit as harmful as the prejudice that black is ugly. In one way it is even more pernicious. The notion that only what is new and young is beautiful poisons our relationship to the past and to our own future. It keeps us from understanding our roots and the greatest works of our culture and other cultures. It also makes us dread what lies ahead of us and leads many to shirk reality.

After logic we must proceed to philosophy proper. Here too we have to learn from our predecessors, just as in mathematics and law. Thus it is wrong to forbid the study of ancient philosophy. Harm from it is accidental, like harm from taking medicine, drinking water, or studying law.

A witty statesman said, you might prove anything by figures.

He who outrages benevolence is called a ruffian: he who outrages righteousness is called a villain. I have heard of the cutting off of the villain Chow, but I have not heard of the putting of a ruler to death.

When people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid.

In these days the angel of topology and the devil of abstract algebra fight for the soul of each individual mathematical domain.

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."

There are people with whom everything they consider a means turns mysteriously into an end.

Gentlemen, there is a sublime and friendly Destiny by which the human race is guided, - the race never dying, the individual never spared, - to results affecting masses and ages. Men are narrow and selfish, but the Genius or Destiny is not narrow, but beneficent. It is not discovered in their calculated and voluntary activity, but in what befalls, with or without their design. Only what is inevitable interests us, and it turns out that love and good are inevitable, and in the course of things. That Genius has infused itself into nature. It indicates itself by a small excess of good, a small balance in brute facts always favorable to the side of reason.

With the conception that the Revolution was only a means of securing political power, it was inevitable that all revolutionary values should be subordinated to the needs of the Socialist State; indeed, exploited to further the security of the newly acquired governmental power.

Love, in spite of the romantics, is not self-sustaining; it endures only when the lovers love many things together, and not merely each other.

What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it heaven.

He that I am reading seems always to have the most force.

Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?

Don't you feel the same way? When I cannot see myself, even though I touch myself, I wonder if I really exist.

The ideal of Morality has no more dangerous rival than the ideal of highest Strength, of most powerful life; which also has been named (very falsely as it was there meant) the ideal of poetic greatness. It is the maximum of the savage; and has, in these times, gained, precisely among the greatest weaklings, very many proselytes. By this ideal, man becomes a Beast-Spirit, a Mixture; whose brutal wit has, for weaklings, a brutal power of attraction.

A good means to discovery is to take away certain parts of a system to find out how the rest behaves.

The speaker with whom I was most struck, though I dissented from nearly every word he said, was Thirlwall, the historian, since Bishop of St. David's, then a Chancery barrister, unknown except by a high reputation for eloquence acquired at the Cambridge Union before the era of Austin and Macaulay. His speech was in answer to one of mine. Before he had uttered ten sentences, I set him down as the best speaker I had ever heard, and I have never since heard any one whom I placed above him.

Let another say. "Perhaps the worst will not happen." You yourself must say. "Well, what if it does happen? Let us see who wins! Perhaps it happens for my best interests; it may be that such a death will shed credit upon my life."

And having looked to Government for bread, on the very first scarcity they will turn and bite the hand that fed them.

As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.

The Outsider cannot accept life as it is, who cannot consider his own existence or anyone else's necessary. He sees 'too deep and too much'. It is still a question of self-expression.

Honor Wisdom; and deny it not to them that would learn; and shew it unto them that dispraise it! Sow not the sea fields!

The worst evil is hardness of heart. Those who do not repent, who deliberately remain in their habits of sin, have the most to fear.

Eloquence, when at its highest pitch, leaves little room for reason or reflection; but addressing itself entirely to the fancy or the affections, captivates the willing hearers, and subdues their understanding. Happily, this pitch it seldom attains. But what a Tully or a Demosthenes could scarcely effect over a Roman or Athenian audience, every Capuchin, every itinerant or stationary teacher can perform over the generality of mankind, and in a higher degree, by touching such gross and vulgar passions.

The real issue is not whether two and two make four or whether two and two make five, but whether life advances by men who love words or men who love living.

Any physical object which by its influence deteriorates its environment, commits suicide.

The world is his, who has money to go over it.

All those to whom I looked up, were of opinion that the pleasure of sympathy with human beings, and the feelings which made the good of others, and especially of mankind on a large scale, the object of existence, were the greatest and surest sources of happiness. Of the truth of this I was convinced, but to know that a feeling would make me happy if I had it, did not give me the feeling.

It is only afterward that a new idea seems reasonable. To begin with, it usually seems unreasonable.

For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed. Whatever years be behind us are in death's hands.

Those who are wise won't be busy, and those who are too busy can't be wise.

The French bourgeois doesn't dislike shit, provided it is served up to him at the right time.

A third illusion haunts us, that a long duration, as a year, a decade, a century, is valuable. But an old French sentence says, "God works in moments," - "En peu d'heure Dieu labeure." We ask for long life, but 't is deep life, or grand moments, that signify. Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical. Life is unnecessarily long. Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance, - what ample borrowers of eternity they are! Life culminates and concentrates; and Homer said, "The Gods ever give to mortals their appointed share of reason only on one day."