There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse. It is precisely as being solemn experiences that I wish to interest you in religious experiences. ... The divine shall mean for us only such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor a jest.

Virtue can only flourish amongst equals.

Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become.

No furniture so charming as books.

Live as on a mountain. ...Let men see, let them know a real man who lives according to nature. If they cannot endure him, let them kill him. For that is better than to live thus.

You need to know enough of the natural sciences so that you are not a stranger in the world.

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man.

Competition for power is of two sorts: between organizations, and between individuals for leadership within an organization.

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.

There is a kind of latent omniscience not only in every man but in every particle.

But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.

The most important subject, and the first problem of philosophy, is the restoration in man of the lost image of God; so far as this relates to science.Should this restoration in the internal consciousness be fully understood, and really brought about, the object of pure philosophy is attained.

But the inner part is the better part; for to it, as both ruler and judge, all these messengers of the senses report the answers of heaven and earth and all the things therein, who said, "We are not God, but he made us." My inner man knew these things through the ministry of the outer man, and I, the inner man, knew all this, I, the soul, through the senses of my body. I asked the whole frame of earth about my God, and it answered, "I am not he, but he made me."

Even the most wretched individual of our present society could not exist and develop without the cumulative social efforts of countless generations. Thus the individual, his freedom and reason, are the products of society, and not vice versa: society is not the product of individuals comprising it; and the higher, the more fully the individual is developed, the greater his freedom - and the more he is the product of society, the more does he receive from society and the greater his debt to it.

Pornography and obscenity...work by specialism and fragmentation. They deal with a figure without a ground -- situations in which the human factor is suppressed in favor of sensations and kicks.

Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.

What I give is the morphology of the use of an expression. I show that it has kinds of uses of which you had not dreamed. In philosophy one feels forced to look at a concept in a certain way. What I do is suggest, or even invent, other ways of looking at it. I suggest possibilities of which you had not previously thought. You thought that there was one possibility, or only two at most. But I made you think of others. Furthermore, I made you see that it was absurd to expect the concept to conform to those narrow possibilities. Thus your mental cramp is relieved, and you are free to look around the field of use of the expression and to describe the different kinds of uses of it.

Heaven knows what seeming nonsense may not to-morrow be demonstrated truth.

Someday the old shack we call the world will fall apart. How, we don't know, and we don't really care either. Since nothing has real substance, and life is a twirl in the void, its beginning and its end are meaningless.

Don't judge the future of a person based on his present conditions, because time has the power to change black coal to shiny diamond.

If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.

The mental operation by which one achieves new concepts and which one denotes generally by the inadequate name of induction is not a simple but rather a very complicated process. Above all, it is not a logical process although such processes can be inserted as intermediary and auxiliary links. The principle effort that leads to the discovery of new knowledge is due to abstraction and imagination.

Our task is not so much discovery as re-discovery. What one needs is not so much thinking as remembering. Sometimes it suffices to sit quietly and listen well, when venerable men have thought before us. Constant forgettings of truths once perceived are the very charm of the human mind; the history of human thought is nothing more than the story of these forgettings and rememberings and forgettings again.

We are beggars: this is true.

The problem of establishing a perfect civic constitution is dependent upon the problem of a lawful external relation among states and cannot be solved without a solution of the latter problem.

Mind is infinite and self-ruled, and is mixed with nothing, but is alone itself by itself.

A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

There is no man so fortunate that there shall not be by him when he is dying some who are pleased with what is going to happen. Suppose that he was a good and a wise man, will there not be at least some one to say to himself, Let us at last breathe freely, being relieved from this schoolmaster? It is true that he was harsh to none of us, but I perceive that he tacitly condemns us.-This is what is said of a good man. But in our own case how many other things are there for which there are many who wish to get rid of us.

No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.

Since the state must necessarily provide subsistence for the criminal poor while undergoing punishment, not to do the same for the poor who have not offended is to give a premium on crime.

The political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our day is not to try to liberate the individual from the state and from the state's institutions but to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization which is linked to the state. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries.

Justice respects man as living in society, and is the common bond without which no society can subsist.

It is certain that nature inclines us toward the amorous orgy, just as much as toward the gastronomic orgy, and that while both are blameworthy in the excess, they would become praiseworthy in an order in which they could be equilibrated.

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

When the husk gets separated from the kernel, almost all men run after the husk and pay their respects to that. It is only the husk of Christianity that is so bruited and wide spread in this world; the kernel is still the very least and rarest of all things. There is not a single church founded on it.

What distinct meaning can attach to saying that an idea in the past in any way affects an idea in the future, from which it is completely detached?

Opposition brings concord. Out of discord comes the fairest harmony.

The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet. Where they overlap, it is in every point of the overlap.

The reward in heaven is the perpetual bait, a bait that has caught man in an iron net, a strait-jacket which does not let him expand or grow. All pioneers of truth have been, and still are, reviled; they have been, and still are, persecuted. But did they ask humanity to pay the price? Did they seek to bribe mankind to accept their ideas? They knew too well that he who accepts a truth because of the bribe, will soon barter it away to a higher bidder...Proud and self-reliant characters prefer hatred to such sickening artificial love. Not because of any reward does a free spirit take his stand for a great truth, nor has such a one ever been deterred because of fear of punishment.

In the ancient notion of love, on the other hand, there is an element of anxiety. The noble fears the descent to the less noble, is afraid of being infected and pulled down. The "sage" of antiquity does not have the same firmness, the same inner certainty of himself and his own value, as the genius and hero of Christian love.

Let men be happy, informed, skillful, well behaved, and productive.

It is precisely in knowing its limits that philosophy consists.